... will go up late today but should be there this afternoon.
Today's post
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Tall Ships and taller tales
by Antonia Senior
Living history. I have written before about the joy of cooking historical recipes, and how it helps me feel my way into the periods I write about. Before writing my book about twelfth century Scottish Vikings, The Winter Isles, I took a lesson in fighting with medieval broadswords. One Viking author I know is bearded and perpetually wielding an axe. Most of the Roman swords 'n sandals writers seem to spend their time dressed in centurion's kit, complaining about chafing.
The single most important exercise in living history, however, were the two tall ship voyages that I took in my youth - once to the Caribbean and once to the Azores. Those voyages have given me metaphors, and insights into the workings of a battling crew, and a flavour of the lives of sailors in the age of sail - albeit with running water and better food.
In my latest book, The Tyrant's Shadow, one of my characters, Sam Challoner, opens the story sailing as a privateer with Prince Rupert, Charles 1's nephew. My youthful tall ship adventures have proved invaluable in writing about this.
Prince Rupert and a motley band of renegade Royalists turned privateer during the early Commonwealth, to attack its navy and attempt to raise money for the embattled court-in-exile. His fleet sailed to the Azores, then to the African coast and then out to the Caribbean. On the way, they took and lost prizes. They faced vicious local tribes, and their own internal divisions. They battled ferocious storms, one of which sunk his biggest ship, The Constant Reformation, with the loss of 333 lives.
Eventually, in 1653, the fleet limped home, with little to show for the sailors' extreme hardships.
I did not know that I would be writing this story, when I set sail from Barbados on the Stavros S Niarchos. The ship, a 200 ft brig with a modern hull and eighteenth century rigging, belongs to the Tall Ships Youth Trust.
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| The Stavros S Niarchos. Isn't she gorgeous?? |
These are the things I learned that turned out to be useful:
1. When you climb to the top of a 36 foot mast, you will be terrified. Near the top, the cat's cradle of the rigging all seems to become more frail - at the bottom when you are least afraid there are broad, ladders of rope for your feet - further up,you wedge your feet in to small gaps. Your legs will tremble.
2. Up there, near the sky, the pitch and roll of the ship is hugely exaggerated. A sea that seems calm at deck level will seem monstrous at the top of the mast, which will sway from side to side with alarming capriciousness.
3. As you edge out along the yard, your trembling legs are supported by feet which rest on a swinging rope. Below that fragile line, there is nothing. Space. A dizzying gap.
4. Up there, rolling and pitching and swaying, clinging on to the yard with white-knuckled hands, you will feel a rush of total joy. You will sing a song of fear and euphoria to a wide sky and an infinite sea.
5. You will either pray to a God you do not believe in, or thank Him for all the glory and beauty.
6. That the most sublime place in the world is on board a ship at sea, on a calm night with a following wind. During the midnight watch, you can laugh and chat, and look up to see the stars framed by a the roll of the sails and the rigging.
7. The even more sublime place is splayed out across the bowsprit, as it rises and slams into the living sea, spraying you with salt.
8. That Patrick O'Brian is a genuine genius.
Write what you know, they tell you. Mostly, I discard this advice. It is enough to know what it is to be human. But sometimes, knowing about something viscerally, can be a writer's blessing.
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'CRINGING' HISTORICAL NOVELISTS: Elizabeth Fremantle on Mantel at the Oxford Lit Fest
There has been a ruffling of feathers amongst the authors of historical fiction since Claire Armistead's piece in The Guardian suggested that Hilary Mantel, speaking at The Oxford Literary Festival, 'appeared to let slip the dogs of war against her fellow historical novelists'. Armistead's inflammatory article, it turns out, was based on a single comment about bibliographies, in a talk rich with fascinating detail about Mantel's writing, Cromwell, history and the imagination.
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| Mantel |
Armistead's piece had many of my historical novelist friends mounting their own defence of their use of bibliographies in their work and their reasons for doing so: all legitimate. Personally, with regards to my own work, I felt Mantel had hit the nail on the head. My first two novels included vast and unwieldy bibliographies precisely because I felt I needed to prove the depth of my research – was a little ' apologetic' and 'cringing', if you like. As my confidence has grown I have felt more able to allow my fiction to stand alone.
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| MacCullough |
What Armistead didn't mention is that those present were offered a tantalising glimpse of the long awaited third book in Mantel's Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, which she made clear is still very much unfinished. She read the opening passage, which returns to the ending of Bring up the Bodies and the execution of Anne Boleyn but with a different emphasis, looking towards the fallout for Cromwell's part in the downfall of the Queen. It points to a satisfying intention to book-end The Mirror and the Light with execution scenes, as surely it will end with Cromwell's.
I for one am eagerly anticipating part three and will leave you with this line to whet your appetites: 'The blade cut through her neck with a sigh, easier than scissors through silk.'
Elizabeth Fremantle is the author of four Tudor set novels. Her latest, The Girl in the Glass Tower, is published by Penguin. You can find out about her work on elizabethfremantle.com
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Pioneers: The First Japanese in Britain by Lesley Downer
Behind the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in North London there’s a quiet street called Provost Road with at the far end St Saviour’s Church where today they must be celebrating Good Friday. Ever since I came back from my first trip to Japan in the mid 1980s, whenever I’ve passed I always look to see if there’s a blue plaque on number 16 in honour of the Choshu Five, who lived there between 1863 and 1866.
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| The Choshu Five in 1863: Kinsuke Endo, Masaru Inoue, Hirobumi Ito below: Kaoru Inoue, Yozo Yamao |
Here’s their story.
Back in 1863 Japan was in upheaval. Several of the most powerful of the 260 princedoms that made up the country were in open revolt against their overlord, the shogun. Just ten years had passed since the American Commodore Matthew Perry had arrived with gunships to force Japan to agree to a trade treaty and allow foreigners onto its shores, quickly followed by England, France, Holland and Russia.
The most militant of the rebel clans was the Choshu, in the far west of Japan. They were well aware of the overwhelming power of western military might and decided to send five of their most brilliant young students to acquire scientific knowledge for their domain. In those days Britannia ruled the waves and Britain with its vast spreading empire and huge wealth was the obvious place to go.
The snag was that leaving the country was an offence punishable by death.
The five - Hirobumi Ito, Kaoru Inoue, Kinsuke Endō, Masaru Inoue and Yozo Yamao - travelled clandestinely across the country to Yokohama, the first port to be opened to westerners. There they contacted a representative of Jardine Matheson, the first British trading house to open an office. They cut off their samurai topknots, put on western clothes and on June 27th 1863 were smuggled aboard a Jardine’s steamship. They had to hide in the coal bunker till the ship was well out to sea.
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| Alexander William Williamson 1862 |
In Shanghai they changed ships. But then things went wrong. Hirobumi Ito and Kaoru Inoue boarded the SS Pegasus but were mistaken for crew. They were forced to scrub decks, wash dishes and spread sails and were given ship’s biscuits, tea and rainwater to live on. They were horribly seasick and had terrible quarters. But they didn’t speak enough English to be able to explain that they’d paid to travel as passengers. Meanwhile the other three travelled in comfort on another ship.
They were reunited in London after four and a half months at sea. Ito and Inoue ‘looked like hungry crows’, according to Inoue’s account.
In London things looked up. Hugh Matheson introduced them to Alexander William Williamson, the 39-year-old professor of analytical and practical chemistry at University College, London (UCL) on Gower Street. Initially the students had digs at UCL but soon moved into Williamson’s house at 16 Provost Road where they were welcomed by his wife and two small children. The area was a recent development, part of the Chalcot Estate belonging to Eton College. The houses were described in 1848 as ‘highly delightful detached and semi-detached villas’. There was also a new church, St Saviours, just across the road. The spire was added in 1864, the year after the students arrived. The students would have seen the scaffolding and heard the banging of the workers’ hammers.
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| University College, London |
Professor Williamson’s wife, Catherine, settled down to teach them English. After six months they’d learnt enough to be able to skim the paper. One day Ito read in The Times that England, France and Holland were about to send a squadron of nine gunships to attack their domain, Choshu, which refused to allow western ships to pass through the Straits of Shimonoseki, their territorial waters.
They had seen enough of western technology to know that Choshu had no chance against such formidable force and would surely lose. Ito and Inoue packed their bags and rushed back on the first steamship to warn Choshu not to fight. But they were too late. The western powers had already bombarded the domain which was forced to open the Straits.
The other three stayed on in London. They studied chemistry, engineering, maths and physics and visited the Houses of Parliament, the Mint, the British Museum, military facilities and factories. They were particularly interested in the underground railway, which opened the year they arrived.
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| Haiku on monument to the Choshu Five at UCL: 'When distant minds come together, cherries blossom.' |
Today there is an imposing monument to the Choshu Five at UCL, with their names engraved on the polished black granite. There is a haiku carved along the side, reading Haruburu to kokoro tsudoite hana sakaru: ‘When distant minds come together, cherries blossom.’
There is also a letter written by Japan’s current prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in 2013, addressed to Alexander and Catherine Williamson, thanking them for their kindness to his countrymen. It hangs in the entrance lobby of the Department of Chemistry at UCL. In Japan the story of the Choshu Five has been told in books and also in a very dramatic movie.
But there is no blue plaque at 16 Provost Road.
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| 16 Provost Road |
Lesley Downer's new novel, The Shogun's Queen, is published by Bantam. Find more information on her website, www.lesleydowner.com.
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Facing the Future as Someone Else: A History of Face Transplants by Fay Bound Alberti
Faces matter. They tell the world who we are and where we come from. They reveal our individuality, our genetics, emotions and ethnicity. But faces are also 'matter,' a composite of tissues, muscles and nerves that can be changed by cosmetics, art and surgery. Face transplants are no longer science fiction, which they were in 1997 when Face/Off hit the cinemas, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and directed by John Woo. Since 2005, it has been possible to perform face transplants, in which the face of a dead donor is overlaid on the body of a recipient. That recipient will more than likely have undergone some traumatic event or accident, and multiple reconstructive surgeries before receiving a new face. What must it be like to wake up as someone else? To have to learn to speak, eat, smile and inhabit a totally different visage? What would it be like for your family? Or for the family of the donor, constantly looking for and hoping to find (or not to find) an essence of their loved one.
I have been thinking a lot about these kinds of questions. I'm writing a history of face transplants from the 1950s to the present, focusing especially on post 2005, when the 38-year old French woman Isabelle Dinoire became the first face transplant recipient. Hers was a partial transplant; her nose, chin and lips had been lost when she was savaged by her pet dog. Isabelle was unconscious at the time, having argued with her daughter and taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. Whether or not it was a deliberate overdose has proved contentious: could she have given true, informed consent for a face transplant when she was depressed enough to commit suicide? When she couldn't possibly have known what the world had in store for her?
As it turned out, the world was very interested. The hospital that treated her released pre- and post- operative photos. The media immediately picked up the story: they wanted details from her neighbours, her friends. They wanted to know what it was like to have someone else's face; what it was like for her family and the family of the donor. They discussed whether she would be able to kiss, to have a new relationship, to return to her old existence. Life was never the same again for Isabelle. She remained dependent on her doctors and did not return to full time work. She constantly watched her skin for signs of tissue rejection. She lived with a face that she described as half her own and half somebody else's. When Isabelle died of cancer in 2016, her doctors denied it was in any way connected to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs she had been taking - though those drugs are known to increase the risk of cancer. I have written in detail about Dinoire elsewhere. Her case is important - not just because of her own experiences as a female patient undertaking a cutting-edge technique, but also because it draws attention to the limits and obligations of what has been called 'Frankenstein science'. Where do we draw the line in medical experimentation? What can and can't be transplanted? Who decides?
I have not included images of Isabelle Dinoire in this blog post, since some readers might find them upsetting. But they are widely available online. So, too, are images of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard, who also performed the first hand transplant. The hand transplant was not ultimately a success, because Clint Hallam, the recipient, could not bear living with it or dealing with the possibility of tissue rejection that occurred. For transplants to hold, massive amounts of immunosuppressants must be taken. Doctors are experimenting with alternative methods, but to date these have been unsuccessful.
The history of face transplants is a history of experimentation, of trying to master the complexities of the different tissues making up the face.People with transplanted faces do not gain full facial mobility, so in addition to belonging to the realms of both the living and the dead, they are both healed and not healed. Isabelle Dinoire said that she felt like a 'monster' before her operation, when her wounds were visible and like a 'circus freak' afterwards, when everybody knew that she was the first face transplant recipient. Other people's responses to disfigurement and transplantation are hugely important. Face transplant surgery can be traced back to World War I and to the development of plastic and reconstructive techniques as a consequence of soldiers being wounded in ways and numbers never before seen.
Another History Girl, Louisa Young, has written beautifully on questions of facial reconstructive surgery and social rehabilitation in My dear I wanted to tell you and the follow-up novels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion. I first met Louisa in 2006, when we were both contributing to the Wellcome Trust's first public exhibition, which was on hearts. Louisa had written her glorious Book of the Heart and I was working on a history monograph, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion. Eleven years later, by a wonderful serendipity, I find myself working on the history of face transplants soon after the publication of My Dear, I have something to tell you.
Maybe that isn't such a coincidence as it might appear. After all, hearts and faces have a lot in common. I became interested in the history of transplants because of what they tell us about our bodies - and how we feel about them. Heart transplant patients often claim they have received more than a stranger's heart; stories abound of people's personality or even their cravings and abilities changing as a result. Transplants are gifts, from one person to another (at least in the UK where donors are not paid). They provoke a range of emotional responses: fear of having a new organ, disgust that organ is assimilated into their own bodies, gratitude to the donor, guilt that s/he has died while the recipient lives on, and so on. Isabelle expressed both revulsion that her tongue touched the dead lips of her donor as well as gratitude for her new face. There is an added poignancy to the fact that Dinoire's donor was a young woman who committed suicide. In life as in death, the two were linked together forever.
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Norah Lindsay, society gardener: by Sue Purkiss
The National Trust is wonderful on many counts. It's saved hundreds of stately homes, little homes, pieces of countryside, stretches of coastline and more for the nation (that means for us, all of us); it constantly strives to manage its estates in a way that is careful of the environment (take a lesson from that, Mr Trump); it's a source of delectable cakes; it commissions books and sells nice things in its shops; and it educates - you learn while you look.
I recently visited North Norfolk, staying in a cottage on the Blickling Hall estate. Blickling is a Jacobean house, made of mellow russet brick and creamy gold limestone. It has curly gables and towers with turrets, decorative chimneys and leaded windows. It was built on the site of an older house, which belonged to the Boleyn family. It's uncertain whether the unfortunate Ann was actually born here. She's said to appear - headless - in a coach driven by a headless coachman and four headless horses, on the anniversary of her execution, but I prefer to think of her as a child, running along its corridors and playing hide-and-seek in the garden, utterly unaware of the dramas in front of her. There is a wooden relief portrait of her in the hallway, which proudly proclaims that she was indeed Hic Nata - born here; it looks a little odd, because it was done in the 18th century, and the line of her clothes reflects that rea rather than the Tudor one.
But the woman who caught my interest came much later and was far less well known. She was called Norah Lindsay (1873-1948, and she was a gardener. Here she is.
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I recently visited North Norfolk, staying in a cottage on the Blickling Hall estate. Blickling is a Jacobean house, made of mellow russet brick and creamy gold limestone. It has curly gables and towers with turrets, decorative chimneys and leaded windows. It was built on the site of an older house, which belonged to the Boleyn family. It's uncertain whether the unfortunate Ann was actually born here. She's said to appear - headless - in a coach driven by a headless coachman and four headless horses, on the anniversary of her execution, but I prefer to think of her as a child, running along its corridors and playing hide-and-seek in the garden, utterly unaware of the dramas in front of her. There is a wooden relief portrait of her in the hallway, which proudly proclaims that she was indeed Hic Nata - born here; it looks a little odd, because it was done in the 18th century, and the line of her clothes reflects that rea rather than the Tudor one.
But the woman who caught my interest came much later and was far less well known. She was called Norah Lindsay (1873-1948, and she was a gardener. Here she is.
She doesn't look as if she'd be one to get her hands dirty, does she? She was born into an upper-class Anglo-Irish family, and married Sir Harry Lindsay at the age of 22. She went to live at Sutton Courtenay Manor in Oxfordshire, where she became interested in gardening - and this was what saved her when, in 1924, her marriage had collapsed, her divorce went through, and she was facing financial ruin. Her friends rallied round, and commissions to design gardens both at home and abroad soon came pouring in.
So far, so Wikipedia. But I learnt a good deal more from a talk and tour at Blickling, by a volunteer who was such a fan of Norah that she dressed in character, in bright colours and with a scarf would round her head like a turban. (Clearly, her taste in clothes had changed considerably since the time of the portrait.)
In some ways, it must have been a very pleasant way of life. When she came to Blickling to redesign the parterre (the formal garden in front of the house), she lived as a guest. But that wasn't quite what she was, and the servants knew it. Our guide hinted that she was difficult - did she trail in mud from the garden, perhaps? Or was it simply that they knew that she was in that uncomfortable, indeterminate territory somewhere between the servants and their masters? She always had a lady's maid, but she didn't seem to have much money; she travelled on public transport between her prestigious commissions, and she didn't earn enough to maintain her beloved Sutton Courtenay.
But the gardeners thought she was wonderful. She wasn't just a designer, like her predecessors in other parts of Norfolk, Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown; she really knew plants, and she was quite happy to wade in with a trowel herself.
The parterre had last been re-done in 1872, when an elaborate sunken garden was created with a complex arrangement of over 80 flowerbeds radiating out from a central fountain. Now, in 1930, tastes had changed. It all seemed rather fussy. And anyway, it was too expensive to employ the vast numbers of workers who would have been needed to keep it all in order. Norah designed a simpler, more elegant arrangement, with four large, rectangular beds full of herbaceous plants with topiary yew trees at each corner to provide structure, and narrow borders filled with roses.
When we were there, there wasn't much to see in the parterre. Everything was still brown in the main beds, though tulips were in bud. I would love to see those beds later in the season; in pictures, they look glorious - full of colour and texture. There was a consolation prize, though - these primroses, further on in the garden.
In another part of the grounds, the walled garden is being brought back to life. Two years ago, this was all grass. Now it's ready once again to produce the vast quantities of fruit and vegetables which once fed the whole estate; the excess was sent to London to be sold. But again, it was the guide who brought it home to us that in the past, there were no supermarkets to nip out to when you ran out of something: everything had to be produced on the estate.
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| Hyacinths, with walled garden in the background. |
The Trust enables you to see history, almost in action; sometimes to touch it, even to smell it. And then there's the cakes... and at Blickling, a wonderful second-hand bookshop. It's a gift that just keeps on giving.
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Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan
In my junior historical novel, set in Victorian times, the young hero arrives alone in Victorian London. Needing a safe space for the night, he considers climbing over the railings into one of the garden squares. Those green spaces were private gardens for the key-holders, the residents of the big houses nearby, and acted as distinct social spaces where children could play, infants be “aired” in perambulators and a variety of respectable adults could greet each other while strolling about.Most of London’s squares and gardens are open to the public by day, and locked every evening to deter vagrants, although not always successfully. Returning to my hotel in Mecklenburgh Square around 11pm recently, I saw a young man hoist himself up over a set of spiked railings, drop down on the other side and disappear into an overgrown corner of the Coram Fields grounds for the night, just as I had imagined my own Victorian runaway doing in a fictional garden setting.
As cities grew larger and more congested, the private parklands surrounding an industrialist’s mansion or a wealthy landowner’s now-unwanted residence might be converted into a public space, such as the small park created around Bruce Grove Castle, although surely altruism was only one strand in the creation of such places.
These green parkland spaces were seen as a way of refreshing the polluted, miasmic city air and also as a way of improving the health, education and social mores of the urban population. Titus Salt, the Yorkshire textile manufacturer and temperance enthusiast, made sure his model village at Saltaire provided a park for his mill-hands, although he provided them with rules about how to behave within his park too. Gradually, as the middle-classes increased and workers were granted half-days and holidays, parks became even more a social venue. The expected expanse of trees and lawns might include impressive botanical gardens, floral displays, bandstands and room for sporting activities as well as the obligatory swings, slides and see-saws of children’s playground area.
In Harrogate, the old Bogs Field where spa visitors had once walked off the effects of the Spa purges, changed character during Victorian times. As part of town improvements, the area became the genteel Valley Gardens, intended to attract high-class visitors to the town, which it still does.
The open grass acres of The Stray, where horse-races were once held, is still used by many groups and individuals during the week and weekends. They, and others, recently signed a forceful petition against some councillors wish to “improve” The Stray further by increasing the number of paying events planned for the much-valued open spaces. The local newspaper claimed the people's petition had won. It has, so far.
The city of Leeds has generous parklands too and one - Roundhay Park - offers another reason for the tone of my post here today. A private leisure company, providing healthy outdoor activities for children, had been in negotiations with the city council about taking over an area of park and woodland for their own exciting proposal. Local residents pointedly pointed out that at £25.00 per family visit, the new facility would not available to the families who currently use the park daily and weekly. Furthermore, the plans would cause significant damage to a much-loved natural habitat. Fortunately, the council took note and Roundhay Park still remains a public space. Yet the pattern of commercial encroachment seems worrying right now.Moreover - and less noisily – many parks are facing deeper threats. Intense cuts in public funding mean that trained gardeners are often the staff of the past. The gardens in parks are now a facility that can be maintained, like libraries, by groups of keen volunteers. Alongside this pattern comes the additional matter of developers spying out prime land for housing and new planning regulations and I find myself worrying about the role of parks in the future.
Why were the parks created? Surely the increasing density of the urban populations will need open spaces just as much as the urban workforce of the past? Or will public parks, in this continuing age of austerity, be necessarily absorbed into the ticketed-leisure industry and recreated for a different ideology? In fact, will the provision and upkeep of public parks in Britain become, to all intents and purposes, history?
ps. I hope, by my next post, to have my eyes and words more firmly on the past.
Penny Dolan
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Book of the Book - Celia Rees
Every time I plan a new book, one of the first things I do, once the idea has gelled, once I know it will be a book, is to buy the Book of the Book. The one above is the Book of the book I'm writing now.
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| Book of Sovay |
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| Book of The Fool's Girl |
These are two I made earlier...
I have a weakness for notebooks, as many writers do. This is the perfect excuse to indulge my vice. The Book of the Book is special, to me anyway, so it deserves to be handsome and expensive. Once I have the book, the right book (selection is important, too) them I'm ready.
The Book begins with the starting point, first ideas. Something I saw, remembered, a place I visited, even an object which ignited an idea that I knew would be a book. I collect things, postcards, flyers, programmes, photographs, it's part of what I do, so usually, I have some record of that first spark.
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| First page for Sovay |
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| First page for The Fool's Girl (originally titled Illyria) |
From here, the ideas begin to accrue. Not all of them will be used. Some will be discarded but all signify something. To embark on a large project, I need to be excited. Collecting, visiting places, taking photographs, going to museums and art galleries, finding pictures of people who could be reference to characters, images of objects from the period, helps me to tap into the initial rush that having the idea gave me in the first place. It fuels the spark.
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| Initial ideas for Sovay |
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| Fool's Girl - walk along the South Bank |
I may, or may not, have started writing at this point. Maybe I'm working on something else, maybe I just don't feel ready, but once I begin to write, the Book tracks the book's growth and progress. The Book is a record, not just of what the book is about, you can read it for that, but of the writing of the book, with all the wrong directions taken, dead ends and frustrations encountered, as well as the pure joy of making new discoveries, finding the thing that will fire that initial excitement again, help me find the right path.
The Book follows the patterns and rhythms of my writing. Each entry is dated (mostly) so it gives a rough history. It is also a record of the places that I visited, the research I undertook as I went along, so a page might have a coaster from a coffee shop, a restaurant card, a café bill, an entry ticket.
Not everything finds its way onto the page and, if it does, it might just be a line or two. Sometimes, I can't even remember why I found this, or that so fascinating, but the pages work as snapshots of what was going through my mind at the time I was writing; they also work like time capsules, taking me back to a particular stage of the writing. The pages show how I constructed a scene, a setting, a character, out of all sorts of bits and pieces, not just what I needed to know but what I found interesting, the detail needed to breathe life and veracity into a particular passage.
The Book tracks the life of the book from first beginnings to the end of the writing. On the last page is the date the book was finished and sent off and the cover. I could not have imagined either thing when I had that first idea.
www.celiarees.com
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Bath's Secret Leper Hospital by Katherine Webb
I've recently been finding out as much as I can about the Holloway and Beechen Cliff areas of Southern Bath, to use as a setting in my next novel. It's a fascinating part of the city, though much altered by two catastrophes in its recent history. Firstly the Baedeker raids of the Second World War, which I wrote about in a previous blog post. Holloway and other areas in the south of Bath were badly damaged - many houses sat in ruins for decades after the war, and were never rebuilt. And then, in the mid 1960s, came the aggressive redevelopment that has become known as the 'Sack of Bath'. By this time, many of the C17th, C18th and C19th cottages in the area, which had long housed poorer members of Bath's society - small artisans and the working classes - had fallen into disrepair and been categorised as slum dwellings. They were torn down, wholesale, to make way for road improvements and a raft of 'modern' (ugly), cheaply built houses and flats.
The redevelopment was so brutal - and deemed by many as so unnecessary - that it actually led to new, tighter development laws. There are a great many photographs of what was lost, and what was built in its place, available to view (but sadly not to reproduce here) on the bathintime.co.uk website - just search for Holloway. So, not much remains of the district as it would have looked at the time I am setting my book - in 1919, and in 1942 in the aftermath of the bombing raids. But there are still little bits of architectural magic here and there, and one that has particularly caught my eye is Number 90, Holloway; aka Magdalen Cottage; aka the old leper hospital.
Holloway, as it turns out, is a truly ancient bit of road. It was originally built by the Romans as part of the Fosse Way that linked Lincoln to Exeter via Bath, but it's likely that they built along an existing, far older trackway. There's some dispute as to whether the name 'Holloway', which is found all over the UK, means 'holy way', ie leading to a holy site of some kind; or merely 'hollow way' as in a sunken road. Both definitions fit for Bath's Holloway, since not only did it lead to the Roman shrine to the goddess Sulis, and later to a Christian abbey and city associated with St Dunstan, popular with medieval pilgrims, but it is also cut into the steep slope of the hill.
At the bottom end of Holloway, about five hundred metres beyond the remnants of the medieval city walls, sits Magdalen Chapel; and a few metres further down the hill sits No. 90 Holloway: a small, plain Georgian cottage bearing a tantalising stone stating: 'This hospital was rebuilt in 1761 AD.' The cottage's origins, however, like the chapel's, are medieval. Sitting a safe distance outside the city walls, this was Bath's first leper hospital. Mercifully, given that it was in a poor state of repair by the 1960s, it was saved from demolition by belonging (and still belonging) to the St John's Hospital Foundation, who still do excellent work in Bath providing housing and resources for vulnerable people.
In the 1170s, a monk suffering from leprosy travelled from Reading to Bath in search of a cure - Bath's thermal spring waters had been reputed to have healing powers since Roman times. It is likely that this monk, thought to have been named Elias, would have stayed at Magdalen Cottage. The chapel and cottage had been gifted to Bishop John of Tours by one Walter Hussey, upon the foundation of Bishop John's cathedral priory in Bath in 1100. Bishop John was also a physician, and it seems likely that it was he who first decided to use the cottage as a hospital for lepers. Beechen Cliff has many natural springs, so the cottage would have had its own supply of clean drinking water.
The name 'hospital' here is possibly misleading. There was no cure for leprosy. Upon admission to a Lazar House, as they were known, sufferers had to make a will and cut all ties with the world. It was a form of living death, so 'hospital' is meant more in the sense of 'hospitality' - a place to stay - than as we now interpret the word, as a place of treatment and healing. St Mary Magdalen Hospital gets a mention in the 1212 will of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the 'Master and Brethren' were then granted royal protection in 1256. As you can see in the photograph below, the cottage is tiny. Behind it there is a small yard, and then the land drops away steeply again, towards the river. It is unlikely that, when rebuilt in the C15th and then again in 1761, it was built any smaller than the original footprint. So, even sleeping several to a room, it could not have housed many unfortunate residents at a time, and in very cramped conditions. And, of course, no amount of bathing in Bath's waters would have effected a cure for the disease.
By the late medieval period, leprosy had become a far rarer condition in England. However, such was the reputation of Bath's waters, there are records of lepers still visiting to bathe far later than this - into the C16th. The fortunes of the hospital rose and fell over the years. By 1486 it had fallen into a desperate state, and housed only two or three impoverished people. It was restored by Prior John Cantlow in 1491, after being described by Pope Innocent VIII as 'a ruinous hospital'; declined again and was restored, again, thanks to a bequest, in 1560. However, soon after this, in the 1570s, a new hospital for lepers was built inside the city walls, near the baths, with its own separate bathing pool, and it is likely that Magdalen Hospital began another period of decline. By the time it was rebuilt in 1761, it was being used as a refuge for the mentally handicapped; which is a very sad thought.
By the time the cottage was listed Grade II in 1950, the interior was described as being in a very poor state, with no original features remaining. In 1954 a timber lean-to kitchen was added to the rear of the property, and it may have been at this time that the cottage was used as a private dwelling for the first time. It was extended and updated in the 1960s, again in 1997, and most recently in 2011-12. It is now let out to private tenants by the St John's Foundation. It is, not unexpectedly, reputed to be haunted, with a variety of ghost stories relating to its history - a reputation I plan to make the most of in my novel! It's a fascinating little building, in an interesting part of the city, and its history gives an intriguing snapshot of the history of Bath before and after its famous Georgian period.
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| The demolition of Victorian artisan housing at the foot of Beechen Cliff in 1966 |
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| S & N Buck's 1734 drawing looking west over Bath. Beechen Cliff is the high wooded hill on the left; Holloway the steeply descending housing going towards the bridge |
Holloway, as it turns out, is a truly ancient bit of road. It was originally built by the Romans as part of the Fosse Way that linked Lincoln to Exeter via Bath, but it's likely that they built along an existing, far older trackway. There's some dispute as to whether the name 'Holloway', which is found all over the UK, means 'holy way', ie leading to a holy site of some kind; or merely 'hollow way' as in a sunken road. Both definitions fit for Bath's Holloway, since not only did it lead to the Roman shrine to the goddess Sulis, and later to a Christian abbey and city associated with St Dunstan, popular with medieval pilgrims, but it is also cut into the steep slope of the hill.
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| An early C19th map of Bath, showing Holloway curving around Beechen Cliff towards the city |
At the bottom end of Holloway, about five hundred metres beyond the remnants of the medieval city walls, sits Magdalen Chapel; and a few metres further down the hill sits No. 90 Holloway: a small, plain Georgian cottage bearing a tantalising stone stating: 'This hospital was rebuilt in 1761 AD.' The cottage's origins, however, like the chapel's, are medieval. Sitting a safe distance outside the city walls, this was Bath's first leper hospital. Mercifully, given that it was in a poor state of repair by the 1960s, it was saved from demolition by belonging (and still belonging) to the St John's Hospital Foundation, who still do excellent work in Bath providing housing and resources for vulnerable people.
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| The east end of Magdalen Chapel on the left; the small, detached cottage further down the hill is No. 90 |
In the 1170s, a monk suffering from leprosy travelled from Reading to Bath in search of a cure - Bath's thermal spring waters had been reputed to have healing powers since Roman times. It is likely that this monk, thought to have been named Elias, would have stayed at Magdalen Cottage. The chapel and cottage had been gifted to Bishop John of Tours by one Walter Hussey, upon the foundation of Bishop John's cathedral priory in Bath in 1100. Bishop John was also a physician, and it seems likely that it was he who first decided to use the cottage as a hospital for lepers. Beechen Cliff has many natural springs, so the cottage would have had its own supply of clean drinking water.
The name 'hospital' here is possibly misleading. There was no cure for leprosy. Upon admission to a Lazar House, as they were known, sufferers had to make a will and cut all ties with the world. It was a form of living death, so 'hospital' is meant more in the sense of 'hospitality' - a place to stay - than as we now interpret the word, as a place of treatment and healing. St Mary Magdalen Hospital gets a mention in the 1212 will of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the 'Master and Brethren' were then granted royal protection in 1256. As you can see in the photograph below, the cottage is tiny. Behind it there is a small yard, and then the land drops away steeply again, towards the river. It is unlikely that, when rebuilt in the C15th and then again in 1761, it was built any smaller than the original footprint. So, even sleeping several to a room, it could not have housed many unfortunate residents at a time, and in very cramped conditions. And, of course, no amount of bathing in Bath's waters would have effected a cure for the disease.
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| The old leper hospital. I'm no architectural historian, but it looks to me as though parts of the older structure are visible at the feet of the rebuilt C18th walls |
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| Magdalen Chapel, with the hospital visible just down the hill, in a drawing from 1829 |
By the time the cottage was listed Grade II in 1950, the interior was described as being in a very poor state, with no original features remaining. In 1954 a timber lean-to kitchen was added to the rear of the property, and it may have been at this time that the cottage was used as a private dwelling for the first time. It was extended and updated in the 1960s, again in 1997, and most recently in 2011-12. It is now let out to private tenants by the St John's Foundation. It is, not unexpectedly, reputed to be haunted, with a variety of ghost stories relating to its history - a reputation I plan to make the most of in my novel! It's a fascinating little building, in an interesting part of the city, and its history gives an intriguing snapshot of the history of Bath before and after its famous Georgian period.
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After the Black Death
“It is June 1349. In the Hampshire village of Meonbridge, the worst plague in England’s history has wiped out half its population…”
So goes the blurb for my historical novel Fortune’s Wheel.
“Meonbridge” is broadly somewhere in the upper reaches of the valley of Hampshire’s River Meon. The Meon is not a grand river, only twenty-one miles in length, and for much of that length is a somewhat shallow chalk stream – in summer months, at any rate. The river rises in the South Downs, near the village of East Meon, and winds and meanders through the other villages of the Meon Valley, until it rushes, broader and deeper, out into the sea, the Solent, to the south of Titchfield.
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| Danse macabre by Michael Wolgemut, 1493 |
The plague referred to in the novel’s blurb is what we call the Black Death, the plague that struck England in 1348-50. At the time they referred to it as the Great Death, the mortality or the pestilence. Having spread across the world from Asia and throughout Europe, it arrived in England in June 1348, or thereabouts. Famously, it was once thought to have entered the country at Melcombe in Dorset, although some believe it might have come in closer to Southampton, or Bristol, but it’s also possible that it arrived in several places at about the same time. The disease lasted a matter of months in any one location, although overall, as it spread relentlessly across the country, it persisted for the best part of two years.
In Hampshire, it was in October 1348 that the effects of the plague began to be seen. We know that partly because William Edyngdon, the Bishop of Winchester, issued a letter to the clergy in his diocese…1
“We report with anguish the serious news which has come to our ears: that this cruel plague has now begun a savage attack on the coastal areas of England. We are struck by terrors lest (may God avert it!) this brutal disease should rage in any part of our city or diocese.”
Sadly, the bishop’s prayers were not answered, for the diocese of Winchester suffered gravely, with 48.8% of its clergy dying, the highest proportion for any diocese in England where figures were available.2
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| Extract from a Map of Hampshire, by Robert Morden, 1695, centred on the Meon Valley. Source: Portsmouth University, http://www.geog.port.ac.uk |
In southern Hampshire as a whole, including the Meon Valley, roughly half of the populations of the towns and villages lost their lives.
Titchfield is at the sea end of the Meon Valley. There, in the year January 1349 to January 1350, 423 tenant deaths were recorded on the manor, compared to 56 in the previous year. In all, Titchfield might have lost perhaps as much as 80% of its population. In Corhampton, closer to the part of the Meon Valley where I think that “Meonbridge” is located, 55% of people died. In Bishops Waltham, a market town some five miles south west of Corhampton, it was more like 65%. In Funtley, further down the Meon Valley towards Titchfield, the numbers were not large (21 deaths) but it represented a huge percentage of the tenant population, and in Crofton, closer still to Titchfield, there appear to have been perhaps 92.5% mortality among tenants in the 1349-50 plague year.
But losses were not evenly distributed. Although the places I have mentioned had relatively high losses, the plague apparently skirted some places altogether, while a few communities died out completely for a while. An example of the latter is Quob, a tiny hamlet near Funtley, where a manorial court statement in the plague year indicated that no-one survived in that community. However, as Tom Beaumont James says, in The Black Death in Hampshire, whilst there is a popular belief that many communities in England died out as a result of the Black Death, this is probably not true, but rather that the high mortality caused by the plague started a decline that was completed as much as a century or two later. Quob was tiny, perhaps just a few families, so it was undoubtedly easy enough for the plague to kill them all, but the little community did recover some years later. Whether or not a community recovered was undoubtedly affected by factors other than the Black Death, including the later outbreaks of plague, and perhaps the increasing mobility of working people, driving some away from the countryside and into towns.
It’s not unreasonable to extrapolate from what is recorded for real Hampshire to what might have happened in fictional Meonbridge. There, I have the plague arriving in December and being more or less over in early summer, which accords reasonably well with the evidence. The high levels of mortality among clergy in the Winchester diocese show that the plague was at its worst there during the first half of 1349.Evidence of the devastation in this part of Hampshire comes also from the records of the Bishop of Winchester’s manors, where much higher than normal deaths among tenants meant that many holdings became vacant and large tracts of agricultural land were therefore left uncultivated.
But, whatever the numbers, it is surely very hard to imagine how shattering the plague’s arrival must have been. The disease was of course quite terrible enough in itself, but it followed in the wake of two other appalling disasters: overpopulation and severe poverty in the first decade of the century, ruinous weather, disastrous harvests and devastating famines in the second.
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| Probably not nearly as cute as he looks! |
We know now that this terrifying disease was caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, carried by a flea that lives on the black rat, although exactly how it was transmitted to people remains a matter of some debate.
The particular hideousness of the disease was described by many contemporary chroniclers. One, Gabriele de’ Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza in Italy, in his Historia de Morbo, wrote thus3:
“First, out of the blue, a kind of chilly stiffness…a tingling sensation, as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. [Then]…a fearsome attack which took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil [typically in the armpit or groin]. As it grew more solid, its burning heat caused the patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever, with severe headaches….In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought the vomiting of blood…Some died on the very day the illness took possession of them…the majority between the third and fifth day….Those who fell into a coma, or suffered a swelling or the stink of corruption, very rarely escaped.”
It sounds decidedly grim. The “boils” of course were the black pustules that we call “buboes”, giving the term bubonic plague, though not all victims suffered from this form of the disease. Some caught the pneumonic variety, which attacked the lungs, causing pain and an inability to breathe, then coughing up of blood and sputum. Apparently this form of the disease was invariably fatal, and quickly so, whereas it wasn’t unknown for bubonic plague victims to recover.
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| It seems that they may have been fortunate enough to find a priest to shrive them… Illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible (1411) |
But whichever form of the disease friends and family members suffered, it must have been almost beyond horrifying to witness. And how fearful people must have been when they saw how randomly the plague seem to find its victims – rich and poor, old and young, reprobate and innocent, any and all were taken. Moreover, the very scale of affliction in a community often meant that there was no priest available to give the last rites to a dying victim – the priest being either simply too occupied with others, already dead himself, or perhaps he’d even abandoned his flock to try and save himself – bringing the added terror that your loved one might be about to die in sin, unconfessed, unshriven.
The particular terror of the plague undoubtedly tested relationships and familial bonds to the utmost. With a lack of understanding of how the disease was spread, and the terrifying speed with which it invariably dispatched its victims, some people did abandon loved ones in an attempt to escape their fate. Indeed, when some thought that the disease could be communicated through the gaze or breath or clothes of victims, it is perhaps unsurprising that many were left to die, not only in extreme agony and terror, but entirely alone. However, not everyone abandoned their loved ones to their fate – some stayed to care for them, and it is perhaps one of the mysteries of the disease that, given its apparent virulence, not everyone in a household was necessarily afflicted.
And how much more frightening was it to be told that this disease – like other natural (and perhaps man-made) disasters – was God’s punishment for man’s sin, for your sin? This was presumably what priests would have taught their congregations. In September 1348, at the original behest of the king, Edward III, a letter was sent from the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury to all the bishops in the southern counties, ordering them to arrange urgent prayers to be offered up against the plague. It is clear from the letter that the plague was seen as a punishment for sin.4
“Terrible is God towards the sons of men… Those whom he loves he censures and chastises;…he punishes their shameful deeds in various ways… He…allows plagues, miserable famines, conflicts, wars and other forms of suffering to arise and uses them to terrify and torment men and so drive out their sins.”
Yet people might well have wondered which of their sins could be so great that God would want to punish them so severely.
But it is what happened after the Black Death had moved on that is the underlying premise of Fortune’s Wheel. I didn’t want to write a novel about the Black Death. Rather, I was interested in what happened after it had passed on, leaving communities with fewer neighbours, empty houses, unfarmed land. How on earth did people cope with such calamity? I suppose that medieval society was more hardened to natural and human disasters than many of us are today, and it seems that people in fact rebuilt their lives quite quickly.
Social change had already begun in rural manorial communities, with the feudal system of lords and peasants starting to break down. But the huge demographic shift that resulted from the simultaneous deaths of so many people during the plague accelerated that change. It is an interesting period of social history.
For those who survived, opportunities presented themselves for demanding higher wages and taking on untenanted land, which generally brought benefits to ordinary people and caused problems for the wealthier landowners. The old rules about tenants not being allowed to leave their manor were largely swept away, giving peasants more freedom to choose where to work and for what price. Women too had improved opportunities, which lasted for perhaps the next 150 years or so. On the whole, conditions improved for many ordinary English men and women: with higher wages, and fewer mouths to feed, they ate better, and could afford better homes.
In 1351, the government, worried that the old way of life was being overturned, brought in the Statute of Labourers, which attempted to curb the demands of peasants for higher wages, attacking both the peasants themselves and those employers (manor lords) who were willing to meet their demands. But it didn’t really work. Wages did rise, and some who’d been previously landless were able to become tenant farmers but paying money rent for their land rather than giving feudal service. Indeed, the feudal system eventually broke down completely, giving peasant populations a greater degree of freedom to manage their own lives.
Nonetheless, imagine the heartache that people must have felt, the turmoil they must have faced, in society as a whole, and also at a personal level. Those of us who, today, live in villages or small town communities may know, or at least be acquainted with, a great many of our neighbours. But we in the twenty-first century generally live quite dispersed lives, having our homes in these communities, but probably working elsewhere. But in former centuries, when communities worked together too, the death of half of your neighbours must have been unimaginably devastating.
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| Death surely never looked so jolly! |
Women lost husbands, men lost wives, and both lost children. Young people were orphaned and had to learn to fend for themselves. Workers realised they were now a scarce resource and had some bargaining power, and said so, while their lords and masters tried hard to cling on to the status quoand keep the workers in their place. As the peasants rebelled against the old ways, priests railed against the upsetting of God’s pre-ordained social order, and preyed upon people’s fears of further divine retribution for their sinful lives.
Yet, amidst all this turmoil and undoubted continuing fear, normal life simply had to continue: fields had to be ploughed and sown, crops harvested, meals made, animals nurtured. People would still fall in and out of love. Babies would still be born and children cherished. The wheel of fortune forever turns…
- Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, p.115
- I owe my information about the 1348-50 plague in Hampshire to the excellent pamphlet The Black Death in Hampshire by Tom Beaumont James (Hampshire Papers, No.18, , Hampshire County Council, 1999).
- Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.24-5.
- Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, p.113.
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William Sykes - Connoisseur or Forger? by Imogen Robertson
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| Daily Post (London, England), Tuesday, January 12, 1725 |
On December 31st 1724 Mr. William Sykes died in Bruges. He was a painter and picture dealer, a member of the Virtuosi of St Luke’s, an exclusive club of artistic connoisseurs, one of the close friends who received a mourning ring from Sir Godfrey Kneller and as you can see above 'a Gentleman distinguished and universally known for his extraordinary Performances and uncommon Judgement in that Art'.
He left his business at Two Golden Balls, Portugal Row, Lincoln’s Inn--Fields to his son, and the family continued in the art trade through the rest of the 18th century.
Google him now, however, and you’ll read that he was a forger.
I’m working on a novella in the Westerman and Crowther series that revolves around art fraud in the period, so I stumbled across Sykes in the early stages of my research. I then went down a rabbit hole of art history and am reporting from deep underground.
The internet articles about William Sykes seem to originate in Noah Charney’s book The Art of Forgery. Its a beautiful book, but I’m not convinced by his takedown of Sykes. It's made me realise how careful we need to be, or how careful I feel we should be, when accusing historical figures of crimes. I don't think Charney is careful enough, he's providing snappy prose rather than history in the pages which deal with Sykes and I think that's a shame, particularly because it makes me wary about the rest of the book.
So here's my issue: Charney writes ‘Horace Walpole, the eighteenth century art historian called the con man William Sykes a ‘noted trickster’.’
No he didn’t. George Vertue did. According to A. C. Ducerel.
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| George Vertue by Jonathan Richardson, 1733 |
George Vertue (1684 -1756) was an artist and engraver who around 1713 embarked on a grand project to collect every scrap of information he could about the history of art in England. He died however before he could shape those notes into something fit to be printed. Horace Walpole, who had often corresponded with him, bought the manuscript notes and used them as the basis for his Anecdotes of Painting in England. In the first volume he wrote about a picture he owned at the time which was known as ‘The Marriage of Henry VII’. Now another of Walpole’s correspondents, A. C. Ducerel wrote to him (23/2/1762), and told him that Vertue had said:
'That Lord Pomfret bought this picture of one Old Sykes above 30 years ago, which Sykes dealt in pictures and was a noted tricker—that he (Sykes) gave it that name, well knowing how to give names to pictures to make them sell—that Geo. Vertue had carefully examined that picture ... and that, upon the whole, it was suspected, at the time that Lord Pomfret bought it, that Old Sykes, who was a rogue, had caused the figures and representation of the marriage, to be added to the representation of the inside of a church, Old Sykes having before been guilty of many pranks of that sort.'
So Walpole didn’t use that phrase ‘noted trickster’. It was Vertue who said it to Ducerel, who related it to Walpole who then flew off the handle. Of course he did, Vertue was impugning his picture, of which he was very proud, from beyond the grave. I seem to remember he paid £84 for it.
Now, in one of those gleams of serendipity which seem to come up when researching, it turns out that the picture which Walpole was defending is up for sale next week at Christie’s in New York, and certainly someone messed about with it. A lot. When Walpole owned it it looked like this:
Well, that's an engraving of how it looked. After very careful restoration - it now looks like this:
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| Lot 8 Attributed to Hugo van der Goes (Ghent c. 1440-1482 Rode Klooster, near Brussels), The Virgin and Child with Saints Thomas, John the Baptist, Jerome and Louis, oil on panel, 43 5/8 x 49 ¼ in. (110.8 x 125.2 cm.). Estimate 3,000,000 - USD 5,000,000 © Christie’s Images Limited 2017. |
The estimate is 3-5 million dollars, in case any of you fancy it.
So was this transformation William Sykes’s handiwork? I think there is no way of knowing. This detailed and scholarly article almost convinced me, but a portrait that the author, Alain.R.Truong identifies as by Sykes, and relies on for comparison is now listed on the National Trust site as by an unknown 19th century painter. I’ve emailed to ask about that and will let you know if I hear anything.
Charney’s accusation however in The Art of Forgery is not that Sykes repainted the painting above, but that Sykes forged an inscription on the back of a different painting. The painting, now known as The Enthronement of Saint Romold as Bishop of Dublin, was for a long time thought to be a Van Eyck portrayal of The Enthronement of Thomas a Becket. It did certainly pass through Sykes’s hands, but that doesn't prove the inscription is the work of Sykes.
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| painting by Master of the Youth of Saint Romold (Museum: National Gallery of Ireland) |
Charney implies Sykes attributed the painting to van Eyck because he was ‘the most famous and highest selling artist in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries in England’, which, given Sykes died in 1724, would make him a prophet as well as a forger.
George Vertue gathered information from Sykes about painters the older man had known, so was willing to take his words on some things, but he’s very distrustful of him too. When Vertue decides that a portrait, traditionally called ‘Mary Queen of Scots with her son’, in The Drapers Hall in London is in fact no such thing he writes ‘I fancy Sykes the painter was concerned in it’. Hmm. Well. Assertion is not evidence.
I have noticed that though Vertue was an early student of Godfrey Kneller, he didn't get one of those mourning rings, and Sykes did. Jealousy, perhaps? That could make an interesting novel...
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Through a Glass Darkly: Mirrors, Myths and Magic by Catherine Hokin
I am a bit obsessed with mirrors at the moment. That's not an unusual state for many women as we oscillate between avoiding or checking our appearance depending on how hopeful/fearful we are feeling on any given day especially if, like me, your approach to dressing may be on the 'eclectic' side. An American acquaintance recently commented that she 'was interested in' the way I flaunted the look in the mirror, remove one item adjunct by adding three more. I digress (which may also be my clothing issue): my mirror obsession is currently centred on their mythical properties.
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| Roman lead mirror, faces missing |
The idea of reflection, seeing an image that may otherwise be hidden or differs from what the watcher expects, has always fascinated, whether the source be water, metal or glass. We look for our identity in them, for good or ill: Socrates advised young men to look at their faces and, if the reflection was a handsome one, to focus their life on keeping their souls pure. Some ancient cultures believed the reflection was the true self, 'the shadow soul', hence the myth that vampires and evil spirits have no reflection. In some cultures, the images go beyond the individual: in ancient Chinese mythology, there is the story of the Mirror Kingdom in which creatures who will one day rise up to battle humans are caught in a magic sleep; the flickers we sometimes see in the corners of our eyes as we look into a mirror are the creatures' first stirrings. Other superstitions spanning cultures include not looking into them at candlelight when spirits of the dead might appear and covering mirrors when someone in the house dies so that the soul does not become trapped. The deep-seated hold these superstitions have on the popular imagination is reflected in stories as far apart as Narcissus, Snow White and Candyman. We look but we do not always believe or trust what we see.
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| Ancient Egypt c. 1479 BC |
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| Pictish mirror symbol |
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| 15th century woman and mirror |
The process by which mirrors were made gradually became more sophisticated: the process for making flat glass began in Germany and was perfected in sixteenth century Venice and new coating methods were discovered which improved reflectivity. At the same time, Johannes Kepler was working on a better understanding of the way light is received and focused by the eye. Distorted reflections and magic associations gradually became a thing of the past. Well logically they did but I'm not convinced humans are really that logical when you scratch the surface. For every child who listens to Snow White and then tries the magic mirror refrain out in their bedroom or reads Harry Potter and wants to buy scrying implements in Diagon Alley, there's a teenager giggling with their mates into a candle-lit glass on Halloween and an adult fixing a new mirror on the wall with very great care. Don't believe me? Go drop a mirror, I dare you...
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sourdough; slices from history, by Leslie Wilson
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| The starter, bubbling |
I've been eating and enjoying sourdough bread since I was a toddler, I guess, visiting my grandparents in post-war Germany. I always associated it with Germany alone, till I had it in Poland in the nineties; and realised the bread I was eating was identical to the bread my grandmother used to make. Since she was Silesian, this is hardly surprising. In Germany, post-war, the bread I had was sliced rye and wheat flour mixed, and also whole-grain bread, which British people call pumpernickel, but actually that is only one variety of what is called Vollkornbrot. Later, in the resurgence of artisanal breadmaking in both Germany and France, I had real Vollkornbrot, straight from the baker's rather than in little vinegary plastic packs, and made of spelt as well as rye, and in France, wonderful rye and white wheat flour pain de campagne.
However, two years ago, I was told by a Greek friend that sourdough was commonly used in Greece, and when I had got my own sourdough operation well under way, I opened Antonio Carluccio's 'complete Italian food' looking for a pizza recipe I could adapt to sourdough from yeast and discovered that traditional pizza is always made with fermented bread dough. Revelation! I guess that Indian bread was also leavened with sourdough once?
Then, Christmas before last, we watched Victorian Bakers on the BBC, and learned that British bread was all made from sourdough till the eighteenth century. It took so long for anyone to decide to try if 'yeaste, to make beere' might also raise bread (to the detriment of British digestions, I fear).
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| risen dough in a banneton |
According to Isabella Beeton: 'It is said that somewhere about the beginning of the thirtieth Olympiad, the slave of an archon, at Athens, made leavened bread by accident. He had left some wheaten dough in an earthen pan, and forgotten it; some days afterwards, he lighted upon it again, and found it turning sour. His first thought was the throw it away; but his master coming up, he miced this now acescscent dough with some fresh dough, which he was working at. The bread thus produced, by the introduction of dough in which alcoholic fermentation had begun, was found delicious by the archon and his friends; and the slave, being summoned and catechised, told the secret.'
It may not have happened in Athens, but one can imagine the discovery of leaven happening by accident, like that, perhaps on a warm day. Sourdough functions by catching wild yeasts in a flour and water mix (in my recipe, you use a teaspoon of honey, too).
I assume that the careful elimination of any starchy material that might generate leaven, at the Jewish Passover festival, originally had to do with removing the remnants of the previous year's sourdough cultures. Which makes me think about the practicability of taking your sourdough starter with you when you set out into the wilderness, escaping from the Egyptians. It would be difficult. There is something essentially settled about having a sourdough starter,
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| Easy to hand-knead this much dough.. |
The way I bake my sourdough bread is a modern replication of the old methods. Anyone who watched 'Victorian Bakers' will have seen the participants filling a brick or stone oven with wood, firing it, then removing the wood when the oven was really hot, and putting the bread in onto the hot stones. (It was very hard work, as it was to knead a whole baking trough full of dough. No wonder the advent of mixers was greeted with relief by commercial bakers.)
I use a baking stone in an electric oven; I preheat the stone for half an hour at 'Bottom Heat', then set the fan oven to 245C, put the bread in (it forms a crust almost instantly) and bake it for ten minutes at that temperature. Then I turn the heat down to 180C and give it another 25 minutes, and then turn it down again for the remainder of the baking process, so that my oven cools gradually, and the hot stone is an important part of the whole business. Some people build stone ovens in their back gardens and do the whole archaic thing, but I have a novel to write.
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| In the oven, on a baking stone |
In fact, as we discover that our guts rely on a host of friendly bacteria to help us digest properly, it's becoming apparent that the lactic acid content of sourdough bread makes it pretty digestible, and maybe helps in the development of a healthy gut flora.
In Europe, at times of famine, bread was adulterated with potato (and with quite a few other, more sinister additives, such as alum or bone-dust). Here is another irony; I've had potato bread (made with leaven, not Irish potato bread) offered me in the basket at Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, and I often add it to my own bread, as it gives a very nice texture. Isabella Beeton disapproved because it reduced the protein content; for the same reason, she advocated brown bread over white. People were already discovering that wholemeal was more digestible. 'In many parts of Germany the entire meal is used' (I presume she means the whole grain bread, with visible chunks of grain) 'and in no part of the world are the digestive organs of the people in better condition.' Whole grain bread has a very low GI factor (I think that's the right way round), ie, it's best for people with type 2 diabetes, or even if you want to avoid developing it. Isabella B didn't know that, however.
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| There's potato in this bread |
In the Austrian Tyrol, in some places, bread was only baked twice a year, in a communal bread oven. People would make their own dough and bring it. I think this explains why bread dumplings are so important in Austrian cuisine (yummy). By the end of the six months you could only eat the bread if it was soaked. Isabella Beeton is definite that fresh bread is very unwholesome, and that it's best eaten after three or four days, and I know that in French peasant culture that belief was also prevalent. It does feel as if three or four months might be carrying things too far.
On the other hand, if you made whole-grain bread, that does seem to stay edible almost indefinitely (but I am degenerate enough to like it on the day of baking). I find that sourdough bread does keep longer, and stay moist longer, than beere-yeaste bread.
During the war, British bakers were forbidden to sell fresh-baked bread because people would eat too much of it, and I wonder if this is what was behind the idea that it was unwholesome. Economy.
The bread of the Austrian valley of the Lesachtal, in Carinthia, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage item. It is very delicious.
These are just a few bits of information that I have picked up over the last years, and if anyone else has more to add, that would be extremely interesting! One thing I would like to know is; what was Irish bread leavened with before bicarbonate of soda became readily available?
All photos were taken in my own kitchen, by me or by David Wilson.
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TURNING ON THE LIGHTS : How I write a historical novel by Elizabeth Chadwick.
I have known for a while that it is going to be about Aoife (pronounced Eefa) daughter of Diarmit MacMurchada, king of Leinster, her marriage to Norman adventurer Richard de Clare and how Aoife held her own during some incredibly difficult political, social and emotional storms.
I was saying to my agent the other day that an analogy for coming to a new historical project is rather like being given the keys to a mansion. I arrive at night and all I can see is a darkened silhouette. Unlocking the door and entering the house, I stand for a moment, tuning in to the atmosphere. Listening, feeling the electricity raise the fine hairs on my arms.
I know I have to explore the mansion thoroughly to understand its layout, its quirks and foibles - and traps. I need to turn on the lights and go from cellar to attic, studying the dimensions and familiarising myself with every nook and cranny because this is going to be my place of work for the next eighteen months. This house is someone's story and it is my job to furbish it with their truth. To remove the dust sheets and the detritus. To polish and illuminate until that mansion glows with light.
For the moment many rooms remain in darkness and behind locked doors. It is for me to find the lights and the keys as I write. That part of the journey is as yet unknown. I have to decide what to showcase and what to leave as background ambience.
I go into the kitchen, the hub of the home, I make myself a large mug of tea (I'm not a wine fan). I sit down at the scrubbed wooden table, and I begin to make plans.
The first thing I do is discover more about my chosen subject. I have already obtained the necessary research books concerned with my protagonists and their hinterland and I also have my web browser open. I set about familiarising myself in a general way with my subject, their life and times, and then I go into more depth.
I am looking for angles that while absolutely true to the characters also highlight information that has never been looked at before, or not in quite the same way. For example, in my Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy, I discovered from reading around that new research shows she was 13 when she married,not 15. As far as I know, I am the only historical novelist to have written the story of that relationship from that age perspective - and it makes a huge difference to how the politics and relationships are played out.
I began researching the 12th century in the early 1970's and have never stopped, so I do have a reasonable base line knowledge to help bring me up to speed. I am not starting from scratch. At this stage I will also use psychic snapshots and compare them against the known history. I find this utterly invaluable and I use conventional history and the psychic in tandem. (I wrote a post about using the latter in an earlier History Girls post here):Alternative Research
Once I have the broad outline of the story, I write a highly detailed synopsis. It's not so much a selling document as a ground plan of the mansion for me, and information for my editor and agent as to what I'm going to be up to for the next year and a half. If I was approaching an agent or editor for the first time, it would be a tight one pager. As it is, the working synopsis is more likely to be around 12 pages of single-spaced text.
The synopsis completed, I then write a short 'blurb'. The sort of thing you see on dust jackets or on the back of books. It will give the reader a brief gist of the contents, and be written in an economic but emotive way that will make them eager to read the work. I
I write character studies of the main players -who they are in their world, how old they are, what they look like, their personality traits etc.
The preparation work completed, which has probably taken me around two weeks (not including background reading at mealtimes and in the bath!) I begin writing, continuing the research and deepening it as I go. It's the equivalent of going into that first room, switching on the lights, removing the dust sheets and arranging the furniture.
I write the first three chapters in depth and polish them. That first room becomes a showpiece for my agent and editor and also the readers. I send the synopsis, blurb, character studies and chapters to my agent and editor, and then continue to write the first draft. I don't look back on that first draft now. I go into rooms, pulling back curtains, shaking off more dust sheets, cleaning the chandeliers and adjusting the lighting. Sometimes I will try out fabrics and colour schemes and then, not satisfied, change my mind and discard. All the time I am writing that first draft, I am researching on the side and discovering more about my characters.) An author should never dump historical information into their novel in chunks just for the sake of it. Research exists to inform the story and enable the author to walk with confidence in the world he or she has created. It allows that author to see the world through the eyes of the protagonists. I cannot know my characters without knowing their world as intimately as I know my own. That intimate knowledge underpins the story and makes it flow organically and avoids those 'info-dump' moments. It's vital to do the research because without it, the characters may show a tendency to come over as modern people in fancy dress. The rooms in the mansion must have the furniture that reflects their occupants.
Once the sketch draft is complete, I return to the beginning and start editing.familiarity and deeper research. It's a time to begin the finesse of fine tuning and looking at all the room as a whole. Do they work together? What needs adding? What needs taking away? Are there more rooms to be unlocked and discovered? Others that are better left closed with the dust sheets put back? Once I have made those decisions I print out the next draft and read as a paper copy and make alterations with a biro. I then key the alterations into the PC while giving the manuscript another read through.
After that, I print out out again and read aloud. This is like hoovering the floor and polishing the tables before the guests arrive. It's like chilling the wine and polishing the crystal.
And finally (and after some preliminary viewings by a select few such as my agent and editor) I throw the mansion open to the public, the door widening on a path of sunlight leading into the hall. And beyond that, more subtle light and shade, illuminating and draping people who are eager to tell their story and are so much more than names in a book.
Elizabeth Chadwick is a best selling author of more than twenty historical novels, including New York Times bestseller The Greatest Knight, and a trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine - The Summer Queen, The Winter Crown and the Autumn Throne. She has just handed in Templar Silks, a novel about William Marshal's pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1183-1186. Due for publication in Autumn 2017.
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Mary Anning by Miranda Miller
Just before Easter I spent two very enjoyable days in Lyme Regis, on the Jurassic Coast , a World Heritage Site that stretches from Exmouth to Studland Bay. The layers of sedimentary rock along that coast reveal the history of Earth across 185 million years of the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The beaches around there are still crowded with fossil hunters particularly in ‘fossiling weather’ – when it is wet and stormy with a strong tide and a choppy sea. This section of the coast is one of the most active landslip sites in Europe and as the cliffs fall into the sea they reveal their secrets.
I became interested in Mary Anning, the self-educated fossil hunter and collector, and read Tracy Chevlier’s vividly imagined novel about her, Remarkable Creatures, as well as Shelley Emling’s biography, The Fossil Hunter. Anning was the daughter of a cabinetmaker and amateur fossil hunter in Lyme Regis and when she was a baby she survived being struck by lightning which, people said, accounted for her unusual mind. Her father died in debt in 1810 and a year later, when Mary was twelve, she and her older brother Joseph thought they had found the skull of a crocodile. Anning then spent a year extracting the rest of the fossil from the 205 million-year-old Blue Lias cliffs on the beach. She sold the six foot long skeleton to a private collector for £23. It was not a crocodile but an Ichthyosaurus, a “fish-lizard.”
Fossil collecting was dangerous because the cliffs could collapse at any moment and in one of these landslides Mary’s beloved dog, Tray, was killed. She taught herself an immense amount about fossils and found her first complete Plesiosaurus skeleton in 1823. She also found various Pterosaurs and a Squaloraja skeleton.
Here she is selling her fossils in Lyme Regis. Museums and collectors all over the world bought them and her knowledge was respected. She became friends with distinguished geologists, including Henry De la Beche, William Buckland,Richard Owen andAdam Sedgwick, one of Charles Darwin’s tutors. The famous French anatomist, Georges Cuvier, doubted the validity of the Plsiosaurus she
found, with a neck that contained 35 vertebrae, when he first examined a detailed drawing. Cuvier probably suspected it was a forgery but the geologist William Conybeare defended Anning’s find and Cuvier eventually wrote that her fossil was genuine, and a major discovery.
This amazing woman taught herself geology, paleontology, anatomy and scientific illustration. But because she was working class, and a woman, she was never completely accepted by the 19th century British scientific community and admiration was always tempered with condescension. In 1824 Lady Harriet Sivester, the widow of the former Recorder of the City of London, wrote in her diary after visiting Mary Anning:
". . . the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. . . It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour - that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom."
Mary never published a scientific paper of her own—men wrote up her finds. She wrote sadly, "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." She never married, and was poor until a friend convinced the British Association for the Advancement of Science to provide her with an annuity of £25 per year shortly before she died of breast cancer.![]()
Although the Geological Society marked her death in a president’s address, they didn’t admit the first female member until 1904. In 1865 Charles Dickens, with his wonderful eye for snobbery, wrote an article about her, Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder:
“She met with little sympathy in her own town, and the highest tribute which that magniloquent guide-book, The Beauties of Lyme Regis, can offer her, is to assure us that "her death was, in a pecuniary point, a great loss to the place, as her presence attracted a large number of distinguished visitors." Quick returns are the thing at Lyme. We need not wonder that Miss Anning was chiefly valued as bait for tourists, when we find that the museum is now entirely broken up, and the
specimens returned to those who had lent them.”
Many of her finds will never be associated with her name because the records were lost long ago. Now, however, The Lyme Regis Museum stands on the site of the house where she was born and there is an annual Fossil Festival at Lyme Regis. The Geological Society has placed one of her ichthyosaur skulls and a portrait of her and her dog in their front reception hall and The Natural History Museum in London has made her and her finds the main attraction of their Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery. In 2010, a hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.
Fossils, of course, played a vital role in the gradual birth of the earth sciences and in the investigation of such theories as continental drift, plate tectonics and evolution. Studying fossils helps palaeoclimatologists discover how life forms reacted to climate changes in the past so that we can begin to predict how the oceans might react to climate change today. Mary Anning’s discoveries were the beginning of a revolution in our knowledge of the history of life. Many of the early collectors were clergymen who were forced to question the Old Testament's account of creation a generation before Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is still relevant at a time when Donald Trump has just appointed the creationist, Jerry Falwell Jr, the president of Liberty, the largest Christian university in the world, Liberty, to lead his higher education reform taskforce.![]()
". . . the extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved. . . It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour - that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom."
Mary never published a scientific paper of her own—men wrote up her finds. She wrote sadly, "The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone." She never married, and was poor until a friend convinced the British Association for the Advancement of Science to provide her with an annuity of £25 per year shortly before she died of breast cancer.
Although the Geological Society marked her death in a president’s address, they didn’t admit the first female member until 1904. In 1865 Charles Dickens, with his wonderful eye for snobbery, wrote an article about her, Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder:
“She met with little sympathy in her own town, and the highest tribute which that magniloquent guide-book, The Beauties of Lyme Regis, can offer her, is to assure us that "her death was, in a pecuniary point, a great loss to the place, as her presence attracted a large number of distinguished visitors." Quick returns are the thing at Lyme. We need not wonder that Miss Anning was chiefly valued as bait for tourists, when we find that the museum is now entirely broken up, and the
specimens returned to those who had lent them.”
Many of her finds will never be associated with her name because the records were lost long ago. Now, however, The Lyme Regis Museum stands on the site of the house where she was born and there is an annual Fossil Festival at Lyme Regis. The Geological Society has placed one of her ichthyosaur skulls and a portrait of her and her dog in their front reception hall and The Natural History Museum in London has made her and her finds the main attraction of their Fossil Marine Reptiles gallery. In 2010, a hundred and sixty-three years after her death, the Royal Society included Anning in a list of the ten British women who have most influenced the history of science.
Fossils, of course, played a vital role in the gradual birth of the earth sciences and in the investigation of such theories as continental drift, plate tectonics and evolution. Studying fossils helps palaeoclimatologists discover how life forms reacted to climate changes in the past so that we can begin to predict how the oceans might react to climate change today. Mary Anning’s discoveries were the beginning of a revolution in our knowledge of the history of life. Many of the early collectors were clergymen who were forced to question the Old Testament's account of creation a generation before Darwin’s theory of evolution. This is still relevant at a time when Donald Trump has just appointed the creationist, Jerry Falwell Jr, the president of Liberty, the largest Christian university in the world, Liberty, to lead his higher education reform taskforce.
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Liberty, I Write Your Name, Carol Drinkwater
Recently, when I was in Paris, I visited the Bon Marché store, which is a regular haunt of mine. I usually head directly to the top floor where they have a very excellent librarie/bookshop. I love to browse there and to see what is being published in French and also who has been translated into French. During my last visit, I chanced upon this title, LIBERTY, which is not a book as such but an illustrated poem. The poem was written by Paul Éluard, published clandenstinely in 1942 - during the German occupation of France - and, later, illustrated by the artist Fernand Léger. I was intrigued and bought it instantly. My plan is to frame it and hang it on the wall. When I took it from its box and it opened like a concertina, I found alongside it, an excellent history of the poem's destiny which is a tale in itself.
The poem, Liberty, was taught in schools. It was adapted to a song and recited in cinemas. It symbolised La Résistance and indeed the fight against all forms of oppression. It was passed on, hand to hand, across America and Europe, recited on the radio and learnt by heart by many of the RAF parachutists. It brought hope to a country and a people living under the oppression of Vichy and the German occupation.
In 1952 when Paul Éluard died, his editor friend, publisher and fellow resistance fighter, Pierre Seghers, wanted to honour his lost friend. It was then that Seghers approached Éluard very good friend, Leger, and asked him to illustrated the poem to be printed as a homage to a man who always used his poetry to fight for Liberty, Freedom.
After the attacks in Paris of 13th November 2015, which caused the deaths of many more than 100 people, this poem was posted outside the Pompidou Centre. My new novel THE LOST GIRL takes place in Paris over that horrendous weekend and also in post WWII Provence. So, finding this poem at this time is particularly poignant to me.
Here is the poem:
LIBERTY - Paul Éluard.
On my notebooks from school
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name
On every page read
On all the white sheets
Stone blood paper or ash
I write your name
On the golden images
On the soldier’s weapons
On the crowns of kings
I write your name
On the jungle the desert
The nests and the bushes
On the echo of childhood
I write your name
On the wonder of nights
On the white bread of days
On the seasons engaged
I write your name
On all my blue rags
On the pond mildewed sun
On the lake living moon
I write your name
On the fields the horizon
The wings of the birds
On the windmill of shadows
I write your name
On each breath of the dawn
On the ships on the sea
On the mountain demented
I write your name
On the foam of the clouds
On the sweat of the storm
On dark insipid rain
I write your name
On the glittering forms
On the bells of colour
On physical truth
I write your name
On the wakened paths
On the opened ways
On the scattered places
I write your name
On the lamp that is drowned
On my house reunited
I write your name
On the bisected fruit
Of my mirror and room
On my bed’s empty shell
I write your name
On my dog greedy tender
On his listening ears
On his awkward paws
I write your name
On the sill of my door
On familiar things
On the fire’s sacred stream
I write your name
On all flesh that’s in tune
On the brows of my friends
On each hand that extends
I write your name
On the glass of surprises
On lips that attend
High over the silence
I write your name
On my ravaged refuges
On my fallen lighthouses
On the walls of my boredom
I write your name
On passionless absence
On naked solitude
On the marches of death
I write your name
On health that’s regained
On danger that’s past
On hope without memories
I write your name
By the power of the word
I regain my life
I was born to know you
And to name you
Men have died for the rights that are being threatened by the FN. It is our duty to speak out against them and honour those who gave their energy for our Liberty.
www.caroldrinkwater.com
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Cowslips or Concrete in Cowley? by Janie Hampton
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| Cowley Marsh Park, near Oxford, April 2017 |
The park is hidden from the main road by a single row of houses, because – and the name is in the clue – it’s too marshy to build on. In the days when Cowley was more important than Oxford, there was no road between them, only a marshy causeway. In one corner of the park are tennis and volleyball courts next to a grassy patch, overlooked by a blackberry hedge. I have seen a deer sipping from the brook behind the hedge and I once saw a kingfisher flash up it from the River Thames a mile away.
This week the patch is full of cowslips (primular veris), one of Britain’s loveliest native species. The flowers are deep yellow and grow in nodding clusters on stalks about 6 inches high. The leaves are oval, crinkled and less downy than those of its cousin, the primrose. The cowslip probably gets its name from the Anglo-Saxon cu-sloppe, or cow pats, also in the meadows where they grew. The scent of the flowers has the warm milky aroma of cow’s breath or a young baby. Other common names include peggle, key flower, key of heaven, fairy cups, petty mulleins, palsywort, plumrocks, tittypines and my favourite, tisty-tosties.
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| Britain's native flower, the Cowslip or primula veris |
Celtic druids used the plant in their magical potions. Shakespeare mentioned cowslips in eight of his plays: Ariel in The Tempest sings to Prospero, ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I. In a cowslip’s bell I lie.’ In the first scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the fairy that meets Puck says that she is off to ‘hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear...' The English botanist Nicholas Culpeper ( 1616-1654) wrote in his Complete Herbal that drinking the distilled water from an infusion of cowslip would make anyone more beautiful. Infusions of flowers were used to treat headaches, feverish chills, or head colds. Tinctures helped insomnia, anxiety, or over-excitement. Ointment was used on sunburn and skin blemishes. Massage oil treated nerve pain, migraine headaches and arthritis. The root was anti-inflammatory and helped to clear stubborn phlegm, especially during chronic bronchitis. Cowslip flowers and leaves have traditionally been used in salads, country wine and vinegars. British writer Alison Uttley (1884 – 1976) described her childhood when cowslips were made into 'sparkling yellow wine' which was ‘more precious than elderberry wine’ and then offered to important 'morning visitors' such as the curate and the local squire.
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| These Cowley schoolchildren in 1912 would have picked cowslips |
In the early 20th century, on ‘Cowslip Sunday’ country children sold bunches of cowslips to day trippers from cities. Fifty years later Susan Telfer recalled a family picnic to Chingford Plain in Epping Forest, on the edge of London. ‘There was a dense mass of holidaymakers like ourselves escaping the dirt and grime of East London. We found a solitary cowslip. We encamped and my grandmother sat by the flower all day with it covered by a paper bag to prevent anyone else noticing it. We left that evening with that one flower still intact, hoping it would survive at least until the next weekend.’ There are still a few in Epping Forest, now carefully protected.
According to the Wildlife Trust 'Formerly a common plant of traditional meadows, ancient woodlands and hedgerows ...the loss of these habitats to the advancement of agriculture caused a serious decline in cowslip populations and now fields coloured bright yellow with the nodding heads of Cowslips are a rare sight. As a result of agricultural intensification, more than 95% of our wildflower meadows have been lost.' Urban development and the habit of ‘tidying up’ grassland with herbicides, fertilizers and mowing have not helped either.
Next to the cowslips of Cowley Marsh Park and screened by a row of leylandii cypress trees, is the Oxford City Council depot where concrete paving slabs, gritting lorries, and rubbish trucks are kept. Now the council are planning to extend their depot to smother the cowslip meadow. The application, number 17/00617/CT3, claims that the area is ' vacant', that it has ' little amenity value' and has been left 'untended'. Apparently there are no 'protected or priority species' of plants or animals or 'important habitats' on the land or nearby; even though only two years ago 27 species of flowering plants and 37 species of insects were identified in this area. According to the council’s ‘Arboricultural Assessment’, a council depot surrounded by a wire fence topped with barbed wire is 'more aesthetically pleasing' than a vital recreation area of biodiversity. Under the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act it is illegal to uproot any wild plant without permission from the landowner or occupier. Who owns a public park? Who occupies it? This is a question that goes right back to 'the commotion times' of Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 and the Oxfordshire Rising in 1596, which were both against land enclosures.
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| Children playing in Cowley Marsh brook, by Henry Taunt 1914. Copyright: Oxfordshire County Council Ref:HT11830 |
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| Marsh Road Council Depot this week - the cowslip meadow could look like this soon. |
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| Robert Kett and his rebels try to negotiate land enclosures outside Norwich in 1549 |
It is ironic that the Cowley Marsh application is pending just when the cowslips are in full glorious flower. Cowslips were once as abundant as buttercups. But like sparrows and dandelions, without care and attention from all of us, they may all disappear. You don’t have to live in Oxford to comment on plans to destroy this little patch of nature. Go to Oxford City Council Planning Applications before 18 May.
Don’t let cowslips become history.
www.janiehampton.co.uk
Don’t let cowslips become history.
www.janiehampton.co.uk
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Odette by Julie Summers
There are very few characters from the Second World War who are known by their first names but Odette is one of them. Probably the most famous female Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent to survive was born this day in 1912. She was christened Odette Marie Celine Brailly in Amiens and remarkably was blind for nearly two years of her young life following a serious illness. In 1926 she moved to Boulogne and met an Englishman, Roy Sansom, who she married in 1931. The couple moved to London after the birth of their first daughter. Two more little girls followed in 1934 and 1946.
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Despite her physical frailty early in life Odette grew up to be headstrong with an irrepressible enthusiasm for life. In 1939 she and her family were evacuated to Devon and three years later she sent a postcard that changed her life. The Admiralty were asking for photographs of the west coast of France so she sent a selection of pictures of Boulogne, adding that she was French by birth and knew the area well. Her 'mistake' was to send the letter to the War Office, not the Admiralty, and soon afterwards she was invited to an interview in London. She had no idea what she was being interviewed for but the interviewer immediately spotted her potential as an agent.
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Leaving her children behind with great reluctance she joined SOE as one of the first women to be recruited by them, joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or FANY as a cover should she be captured in France. She was trained in Northern Scotland and at the SOE finishing school in Beaulieu, Hampshire where she was given the following assessment: 'She is impulsive and hasty in her judgments and has not quite the clarity of mind which is desirable in subversive activity. She seems to have little experience of the outside world. She is excitable, temperamental, although she has a certain determination.' But no one could doubt her patriotism and determination to do something for her country where her mother and brother were living under Nazi occupation.
She landed in France in November 1942 and made contact with Captain Peter Churchill who was running an SOE network based in Cannes. He obtained permission from London to use her as his courier and she worked in Marseilles for a few months until an Abwehr counterintelligence officer, Hugo Bleicher, infiltrated Churchill's operation and arrested Odette and Peter Churchill.
Odette was interrogated by the Gestapo fourteen times and tortured but she refused to disclose the information she held about two agents they were after. She fabricated the story that Peter was a nephew of Winston Churchill. She also told them that she was married to Peter and that he knew nothing of her activities. This diverted attention from Captain Churchill but she was condemned to death on two counts in June 1943 to which she replied: 'Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed because I can only die once.' This so infuriated Bleicher that he ordered her to be sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where she was kept in a dark, horribly overheated cell with no food. Eventually that regime was relaxed and she was moved to a cell next to the crematorium where she witnessed an instance of cannibalism of a dead inmate by starving prisoners. Her cell was frequently full of burned hair from the cremations.
At the end of the war she was handed over to the Americans and gave evidence at the Hamburg Ravensbruck Trials of the war crimes she had witnessed. In 1946 her first marriage was dissolved and the following year she married Peter Churchill. The story of their lives as SOE agents was celebrated in a best selling biography of Odette and a film. She became the most famous British female agent on either side of the channel and the only woman to receive the George Cross, the highest civilian honour, while alive. All the other women were awarded their George Crosses posthumously.
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When asked how she coped with the torture and the solitary confinement she pointed back to her childhood when she was blind and paralysed and by the inspiration of her grandfather 'who did not accept weakness very easily.' Odette and Peter Churchill divorced in 1955 and she married for a third time that year. What I honour about this remarkable woman is the way she fought for recognition for her fellow agents and the respect with which she treated their memories even decades after the war. Every year she laid a wreath beneath the FANY memorial at St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge in remembrance of her colleagues who did not return. After her death in 1995 a plaque commemorating her life was added to the memorial.
Despite her physical frailty early in life Odette grew up to be headstrong with an irrepressible enthusiasm for life. In 1939 she and her family were evacuated to Devon and three years later she sent a postcard that changed her life. The Admiralty were asking for photographs of the west coast of France so she sent a selection of pictures of Boulogne, adding that she was French by birth and knew the area well. Her 'mistake' was to send the letter to the War Office, not the Admiralty, and soon afterwards she was invited to an interview in London. She had no idea what she was being interviewed for but the interviewer immediately spotted her potential as an agent.
Leaving her children behind with great reluctance she joined SOE as one of the first women to be recruited by them, joining the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry or FANY as a cover should she be captured in France. She was trained in Northern Scotland and at the SOE finishing school in Beaulieu, Hampshire where she was given the following assessment: 'She is impulsive and hasty in her judgments and has not quite the clarity of mind which is desirable in subversive activity. She seems to have little experience of the outside world. She is excitable, temperamental, although she has a certain determination.' But no one could doubt her patriotism and determination to do something for her country where her mother and brother were living under Nazi occupation.
She landed in France in November 1942 and made contact with Captain Peter Churchill who was running an SOE network based in Cannes. He obtained permission from London to use her as his courier and she worked in Marseilles for a few months until an Abwehr counterintelligence officer, Hugo Bleicher, infiltrated Churchill's operation and arrested Odette and Peter Churchill.
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| Captain Peter Churchill |
Odette was interrogated by the Gestapo fourteen times and tortured but she refused to disclose the information she held about two agents they were after. She fabricated the story that Peter was a nephew of Winston Churchill. She also told them that she was married to Peter and that he knew nothing of her activities. This diverted attention from Captain Churchill but she was condemned to death on two counts in June 1943 to which she replied: 'Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed because I can only die once.' This so infuriated Bleicher that he ordered her to be sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where she was kept in a dark, horribly overheated cell with no food. Eventually that regime was relaxed and she was moved to a cell next to the crematorium where she witnessed an instance of cannibalism of a dead inmate by starving prisoners. Her cell was frequently full of burned hair from the cremations.
At the end of the war she was handed over to the Americans and gave evidence at the Hamburg Ravensbruck Trials of the war crimes she had witnessed. In 1946 her first marriage was dissolved and the following year she married Peter Churchill. The story of their lives as SOE agents was celebrated in a best selling biography of Odette and a film. She became the most famous British female agent on either side of the channel and the only woman to receive the George Cross, the highest civilian honour, while alive. All the other women were awarded their George Crosses posthumously.
When asked how she coped with the torture and the solitary confinement she pointed back to her childhood when she was blind and paralysed and by the inspiration of her grandfather 'who did not accept weakness very easily.' Odette and Peter Churchill divorced in 1955 and she married for a third time that year. What I honour about this remarkable woman is the way she fought for recognition for her fellow agents and the respect with which she treated their memories even decades after the war. Every year she laid a wreath beneath the FANY memorial at St Paul's Church, Knightsbridge in remembrance of her colleagues who did not return. After her death in 1995 a plaque commemorating her life was added to the memorial.
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Her own worst Enemy: Caroline of Brunswick (1768-1821) by Charlotte Betts
Our April guest s Charlotte Betts:
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| Photo credit: James Greed |
Charlotte Betts is a multi-award-winning author of six historical novels with a dash of adventure and romance. A daydreamer and a bookworm, Charlotte has enjoyed careers in fashion, interior design and property. She is currently working on her seventh novel, set in India. Charlotte lives on the Berkshire/Hampshire border in a seventeenth century cottage in the woods.
I didn’t enjoy history at school, finding all those lists of dates repeated by rote stultifyingly dull. How people used to live, however, was an entirely different matter and I loved the weekends when my parents would pile us into the old Wolseley and drive us to a National Trust property for a day out. I’d wander through cavernous kitchens imagining a dog turning the spit, pretend I was a housemaid cleaning out the fires or, better still, Lady Someone-or-other sitting up in the four poster sipping my chocolate. Strangely, it never occurred to me this was a history lesson, too.
I have a very visual imagination and most of my working life has been involved with design. When I started to write historical novels I discovered that the writing happened more easily if I’d read everything I could about the period and, if possible, visited the settings for the book. Once I was able to close my eyes and picture the details while walking around my heroine’s imaginary home or setting off with her on a journey, then the story flowed just as if it were a film taking place in my mind.
Learning about history is as important to me as writing the novel. The process of self-educating is fascinating because I choose to research something that really interests me. It was in this way that I came across Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of the Prince Regent. The more I read about her extraordinary and tragic life, the more I knew I had to write about her.
Whilst Caroline isn’t the main character in The Dressmaker’s Secret, the factual events of her life frame the plot for my heroine, Emilia. She becomes a member of Caroline’s household in Italy, before travelling to England to find her lost family and unravel the mystery of priceless stolen paintings.
In 1794 Princess Caroline of Brunswick was twenty-six years old and longing for marriage and children. In London, the Prince of Wales’s extravagant lifestyle had plunged him into severe debt but Parliament promise to increase his allowance if he would marry his cousin, Caroline.
Lord Malmesbury was sent to Brunswick as the Prince’s envoy to arrange the marriage treaty. He reported that blonde and blue-eyed Caroline had ‘a pretty face, tolerable teeth’ and a ‘good bust’. He was, however, perturbed by her free and easy manner. The lively Princess was impulsive, indiscreet and careless about her toilette and he took on the challenging task of preparing her for the cool formality of the English court.
The Prince of Wales appointed his mistress, Lady Jersey, as Caroline’s Lady-in-Waiting. She met Caroline on her arrival at Greenwich but, in the first of many snubs, kept her waiting. The Prince and Princess met for the first time three days before their wedding. Caroline, wearing an unflattering dress that Lady Jersey provided for her, kneeled to the Prince, who formally embraced her. He recoiled, called for his equerry to bring him brandy and left the room. Affronted, Caroline commented that he was fatter and not as handsome as his picture. Later, it transpired that Lord Malmesbury’s efforts to teach the Princess to be particular about her personal hygiene had failed.
The wedding was equally disastrous. The Prince of Wales was agitated and by the evening had consumed so much brandy he collapsed by the fireplace in the bridal chamber. Despite this, nine months later Caroline gave birth to Princess Charlotte.
The unhappy marriage was made worse by the malicious gossip spread by Lady Jersey. Regardless of his own infidelities, the Prince was desperate to divorce his wife but the government wouldn’t sanction it without proof of Caroline’s adultery. Three days after Princess Charlotte’s birth the Prince drew up a will leaving all his property to Roman Catholic commoner Maria Fitzherbert, whom he had married illegally and without royal permission ten years before. He referred to Maria as ‘the wife of my heart and soul’ and to ‘the womanwho is call’d the Princess of Wales’, he bequeathed one shilling.
The humiliations continued and, deeply hurt, Caroline reacted with increasingly reckless behaviour. In 1796 the papers carried reports that Lady Jersey had intercepted and opened letters written by Caroline to her mother, in which she made rude comments about the royal family and referred to the Queen as ‘Old Stuffy’. The press took Caroline’s side against the already unpopular Prince of Wales and called for Lady Jersey’s dismissal as Lady-in-Waiting. The couple separated but the cruelties continued. Caroline was denied proper access to her daughter and a suitable allowance and home.
The Princess rented a house in middle-class Blackheath, where she held some kind of a court, encouraging politicians and society figures to visit. She hosted eccentric and sometimes wild parties, entertaining visitors while she sat on the ground eating raw onions or romped on her knees on the carpet with Princess Charlotte. She indulged in flirtations with a number of her guests and she formed intense, but often short-lived, friendships without regard as to whether they were appropriate.
Caroline became the protector of seven or eight orphan children, supervising their education. Her fondness for children and for irresponsible jokes lead to a national scandal. She adopted a baby and teased her friend, Lady Douglas, by pretending that she had given birth to the boy herself. Later, following a quarrel between them, Lady Douglas spread vindictive rumours about the purportedly illegitimate baby. At once a secret committee was set up by the King, called The Delicate Investigation but, to the Prince of Wales’s chagrin, it was proved the child was not Caroline’s natural child. Caroline, however, was left with a stain upon her character.
In 1814, the Napoleonic wars ended. The Prince Regent hosted celebrations attended by royalty, peers of the realm and ministers of state. Caroline was incensed at not being invited and the press considered her treatment was shameful. The populace cheered her in the streets but, exhausted by her continuing humiliations, Caroline, now forty-six years old, left the country.
In Milan she hired a courier, thirty-year old Bartolomeo Pergami, who became indispensable to her. Following a sojourn at Villa d’Este by Lake Como, they set off on extensive travels abroad. Caroline elevated Pergami to chamberlain and purchased land and a title for him before they travelled back to Italy, eventually arriving in Pesaro in 1818. The events of her life from 1819 to her death in 1821 are outlined in The Dressmaker’s Secret.
Caroline was her own worst enemy and impossibly unsuited to life as a Princess. Although her common touch was popular with the people, her sometimes outrageous behaviour made her a painful burr in the side of the Royal Family. Despite that, she was courageous and loving. She tried to live for the moment, squeezing as much joy as possible into a life lived under difficult and often extremely unfair circumstances.
Last June, I travelled to Pesaro, a small town on the Adriatic coast. I walked on the Monte San Bartolo looking for the Villa Caprile and the Villa Vittoria where she lived, ambled around what was left of the town walls, dipped my fingers in the fountain in the Piazza del Poppolo and swam in the Baia Flaminia where she liked to bathe. All the while I had the feeling that Caroline was looking over my shoulder and smiling at the places where she had been happy.
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| Baia Flaminia, Pesaro, Italy |
The Dressmaker’s Secret will be published by Piatkus on 26th May 2017 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
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April Competition
To win a copy of Charlotte Betts' The Dressmaker's Secret, answer the following question in the Comments below:
"Can you think of any other historical character whose downfall was the result of their own impulsive actions and their refusal to conform to what polite society expected of them?"
Then copy your answer to :
maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk
Closing date 7th May
We regret our competitions are open only to UK Followers.
Good luck!
"Can you think of any other historical character whose downfall was the result of their own impulsive actions and their refusal to conform to what polite society expected of them?"
Then copy your answer to :
maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk
Closing date 7th May
We regret our competitions are open only to UK Followers.
Good luck!
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