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'Intervene in the field of the imagination' by Lydia Syson

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The idea that the Spanish Civil War was primarily a ‘poets’ war’, as Stephen Spender suggested, has often been questioned in the 75 years since it ended.  In terms of numbers, it was a workers’ war.  Now a remarkable exhibition and book explore for the first time the many different ways in which it was also an artists’ war.  In the process,Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War, powerfully demonstrates that this is because it was, in fact, everybody’s war. 



The juxtaposition of images in the first few pages of Simon Martin’s accompanying book makes this point particularly well. First there’s a semi-abstract Henry Moore lithograph of 1939 called ‘Spanish Prisoner’ - eyes, bars, barbed wire, monumental despair – which was imprisoned itself in Camberwell School of Art when WW2 broke out, so couldn’t be printed to raise funds for Spanish refugees in French detention camps as Moore intended.  Then this eye-catching and anonymous poster in yellow, red and purple with the simple plea: ‘Help Spain’. 

Courtesy of the People's History Museum
Turning the page, I was struck by a 1936 photograph by Edith Tudor-Hart of the ‘Aid for Spain’ fundraiding shop in my own London Borough, Southwark, an image which documents the sheer scale of support for Republic Spain in Britain.  This shop was open till ten at night.  Its windows and door are plastered with exhortatory appeals: ‘Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain’, ‘Buy a milk token’, ‘Please step inside and see what Spain means toyou’, and, in largest letters of all, ‘SPAIN IS FIGHTING FOR YOU’.

‘Unless he is prepared to see all thought pressed into one reactionary mould, by tyrannical dictatorships – to see the beginning of another set of dark ages – the artist is left with no choice but to help in the fight for the real establishment of Democracy against the menace of Dictatorships,’ wrote Moore, expressing the commitment of a generation.

Picasso’s Guernica, painted in the wake of the bombing of the Basque town in April 1937, has undoubtedly overshadowed the efforts of every other artist in this respect, including his own magnificent Weeping Woman, a highlight of this exhibition. But instead of attempting the impossible – unearthing British works of art to compete with Picasso’s – Conscience and Conflict takes a better path.  Both book and exhibition tell an exceptionally moving story of the vast, varied and often collective response both to events in Spain and to the arrival of the painting Guernica in Britain - it was seen by 3,000 people in the New Burlington Galleries and over 15,000 in Whitechapel. One of many sub-plots to this narrative, is the democratising effect Spain had on British art in the 1930s.  
 
Artistic engagement in this war took multiple forms.  Some turned their talents to propaganda images, making banners, hoardings, cartoons, book covers, posters.  Others sold their work to raise money and awareness, largely through the Artists International Association, whose history is particularly well told, and later the Spanish Artists Refugee Committee.  And like writers, artists took sides, in similar proportions. Pro-Francoist and more ambivalent artists are represented here too – works by Edward Burra and Wyndham Lewis stand out.

Edward Burra, The Watcher, 1937,
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
A few British artists chose to go to Spain to fight for the cause. Felicia Browne was the only British woman in combat, and the first British volunteer to die in battle. Her sketchbook, though not her body, was recovered and her work exhibited soon after her death to raise funds for the war effort.  I’ve never seen any work by sculptor Jason Gurney, whose posthumously published memoir Crusade in Spain was a very valuable source for A World Between Us: Gurney was wounded in the hand, and apparently unable to sculpt again.  Clive Branson returned, but only after imprisonment in the notorious Francoist camp of San Pedro de Cardeñ.  Branson’s colourful, realist paintings are well represented in this show, along with sketches he made in Spain of fellow prisoners. I thought of these when I was writing the Ebro scenes in my novel: Nat determines to take his drawings of his dead friend Bernie back to his wife in Mile End if he survives the battle. Branson was killed in action in Burma in 1944, where a disporportionate number of Communists and former International Brigaders seem to have been sent during World War Two. (My grandfather, a friend and comrade of Branson’s, broke his arm very badly in a training exercise the night before he was due to fly there himself, which probably saved his life.)

A photograph in the book from the International Brigade Archive at the Marx Memorial Library shows artist-turned-ambulance-driver Wogan Philips standing in front of the vehicle which inspired the opening of my chapter 10:

‘Felix stood on the dusty road, rereading the writing on the front of the ambulance and wishing she didn’t have to get back into it quite so soon.  She rolled the words round her tongue.
Medicamentos para los obreros de España.’
The letters were hand painted in white capitals, bold against dark green paintwork.  They got bigger and bigger until they reached the huge final ‘A’ of España. . .This was what she’d undertaken.  Medicine for the workers of Spain.’

Walter Nessler, Premonition, 1937
Courtesy of the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon
Looking at Walter Nessler’s dark oil painting of London contorted by bombing, painted three years before the Blitz, I thought of Felix's letter home, defending her departure:

'We’re all involved.  We can’t let the Blackshirts win in England, and we can’t let the Nationalists force their way into power here either.  It’s a fight for the only things really worth fighting for – everything I always used to take for granted, I suppose…like freedom, and elections, and being able to say what you think.  I can’t just close my eyes and pretend it’s not happning.  Fighting here is the only thing we can do right now to stop Fascist bombers flying over Lawrie Park Road next year, or the year after.'

When I started writing A World Between Us, I hadn’t quite realised how heavily involved in the Aid Spain movement my grandparents and other relatives had been.  Soon familiar names cropped up everywhere I looked.  I discovered a portrait of my mother, aged four, by Edith Tudor-Hart, whose genius for photographing children can be seen in this exhibition in images of ‘los niños’ – the young Basque refugee children who came to Britain on the Habaña in 1937.  In her hands, a camera was a political weapon.  According to Tudor-Hart, photography had ‘ceased to be an instrument for recording events and became a means for influencing and stimulating events.’ I have another picture of my mother by Ramsey and Muspratt, who took the extraordinary picture of John Cornford (with Ray Peters), also in Conscience and Conflict, that led so many to describe him as the ‘poster-boy’ of the International Brigades.

For obvious reasons, I loved the posters in this exhibition, many of which I knew already, but even more I loved the surprises: the terrifying Neville Chamberlain mask worn by Roland Penrose and others at the May Day procession to Hyde Park in 1938, and a papier-mâché horse's head from the Surrealist float; the haunting ruins and empty streets painted by John Armstrong, who went on to become an official war artist  – scraps of paper blowing in the wind mimic human beings swept from their homes by war.  Perhaps most startling of all is the astonishing series of pictures of refugees on the road by Ursula McCannell, which she started painting when she was only thirteen.  As the Daily Mail pronounced after her first solo show, they ‘seem to typify all suffering in Spain.’ 

Ursula McCannell (b. 1923)
Family of Beggars, 1939,
Marcus Rees Roberts
Conscience and Conflict, a Pallant House Gallery exhibition which ran in Chichester from 8 November 2014 to 15 February 2015, opens tomorrow at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and runs until 7 June 2015.  Simon Martin’s book, published by Pallant House Gallery in association with Lund Humphries, is equally strongly recommended.

Lydia Syson's Liberty's Fire will be published on May 7th.  From October 2015, she will be an RLF Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  

Ecclesiastical Embroideries at Ely by Adèle Geras

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I spend a lot of time in cathedrals for someone who is both Jewish and an atheist. I was in the choir at school and for eight years I sat  in the school chapel, singing, hearing the words of prayers and collects and didn't see anything strange in that. Just because I don't believe in God, I didn't see any reason to cut myself off from so much that was beautiful. The words of the King James Bible, going into my head on a daily basis, didn't do much to convince me about the truth of religion but it certainly had a profound effect on my views about language, poetry, and how English sounds (because this was mostly the words read aloud) and how things should be framed and expressed. And even though our Chapel wasn't exactly Ely Cathedral, it did get me used to things like stained glass and carved wood and vaulted ceilings.

I also love cathedrals because they represent so much work on the part of so many unnamed people over such a long time. I can't go into one without imagining the literally incredible calculations and efforts that went into building it. I go and visit a cathedral whenever there's one nearby, and when we moved to Cambridge in 2010,  Ely became my 'local' cathedral. I've been to performances there (Hilary Mantel speaking about  Bring up the Bodies...what a marvellous evening that was!) and attended carol services, too. Again, I feel that being a non-believer ought not to prevent me  from singing my heart out. Singing is good for everyone.

Ely Cathedral is magnificent. And one of the best spaces within the Cathedral is the Lady Chapel, (see below.) The blue statue of the Virgin Mary is a bit unexpected but you get used to it and the beauty of the room soon becomes the only thing you notice.










The other day,  I went to see a most unusual exhibition of Ecclesiastical Embroideries by the Royal School of Needlework. This is a fascinating organisation and has its headquarters in Hampton Court Palace.  It both teaches embroidery and spreads the word about this ancient art and also is in charge of keeping embroidered chasubles, stoles, copes, frontals and the like in good order. They are also repairers and conservers of embroideries in the Royal palaces. This exhibition finished at the end of February, alas, so this post is like a kind of souvenir for me. 

We weren't allowed to take photographs but the what was on show ranged from robes worn by the clery, and cloths used to decorate the church in one way and another to diploma pieces by students of ecclesiastical embroidery, and even the St Etheldreda banner from the Cathedral itself, made by someone I thought was called  MISS YARNS  (apt)  but who turns out to be MISS YAMS (faintly comic.) Never mind, it's a beautiful banner. 

What I've chosen to highlight is the Loreto Litany.  There are twelve portraits of the Virgin Mary in her various guises: mother, comforter to the sick, etc. No one knows who made them. They were formerly owned by the convent of the Holy Child in Maybury and they were donated to the RSN on condition that they were properly looked after and preserved. This is the first time all twelve embroideries have been exhibited together.

They are 20th century pieces but it's my bet that they date from quite early in the century. No one knows who designed them, but designed they certainly were, and by someone who was very fond of the work of Aubrey Beardsley, I think. We do not have her name. We do not know if the designer also stitched the hangings  but I'm pretty sure she was, even if others helped her. The portraits of Our Lady are most beautiful and below I've put up photos from the set of postcards I bought. The stitches are so small that you have to bring your eyes very close to the fabric to see how perfectly they've been executed. What appears yellow in these photographs is actually gold thread. The white is lustrous and pearly. The images shine out of their frames.  Whoever designed these; whoever the women were who stitched them, I salute them all.  As many people as possible ought to know about them. My fellow History Girl, Celia Rees, wrote eloquently about quilts the other day, and there too, one of the most touching things about anonymous handiwork is that the beauty remains long after the maker is gone and forgotten and there is something poignant about that. In the case of work for the Church, we're always told that artistic effort is for the greater glory of God, but these embroideries spoke very clearly to me of the wondrous talent of ordinary women.











'Will You Still Feed Me When I'm 64?' by Karen Maitland

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You can’t open a British newspaper at the moment without finding some article about retirement
Old Age Pension Book Postal Order from 1909
pensions – how the newly retired are suddenly going to start blowing their pensions pots on cruises, drinking and gambling, or the pension schemes that are going to collapse. One newspaper recently printed an illustration of pensioners queuing to get what the newspaper called the First Old Age Pension introduced in 1909. (Depressingly, it looked much the same as the Post office queue today) But in fact pensions are not a 20th century invention.

During the Middle Ages abbey, monasteries and nunneries realized there was ready money to be made by selling corrodies. A lay-person would pay a lump sum of money or sign over a parcel of land to a religious house. In return, the monks or nuns would undertake to care for that person when they became aged or infirm, either by housing them in special lodgings within the monastery, or by delivering meals, fuel, clothing and medical treatment to them in their own homes. Just like modern annuities, they tried to calculate how long a person would live and therefore how much it would cost to keep the corrodian, and set the price of the corrody accordingly.

Employers would often reward a faithful servant by buying a corrody for them or even promising a corrody in lieu of proper wages. Better-off individuals, such as merchants, would buy one for themselves and their spouses when they were in their prime, as an insurance against their old age. Of course, the corrodian would gamble on living long enough to get back far more than the sum they had originally paid, while the religious houses prayed the corrodians would die quickly, so they could make a profit.

Religious houses often used corrodies to raise money for building work, to buy a new relic or even to replenish the abbey’s wine cellars, only to find themselves crippled by the cost of providing for dozens of elderly people some years later. Since, not all the monks and nuns were quite a saintly as one might have hoped and it is not hard to imagine that this might have led to a few of the infirm and elderly being helped into the next world, before their appointed time, if abbey coffers were running low.

There are many accounts of widows and widowers becoming nuns or monks in their old age ostensibly to prepare their souls for the afterlife, but a welcome bonus would have been the care they would then have received within the religious community. For some this was the start of a whole new career after retirement and they rose to become abbots and abbesses before they died.

Although many people died young in the Middle Ages through disease, accidents and warfare, others lived to a ripe old age especially in the religious orders. Gilbert of Sempringham (1083-1189), who founded the Gilbertine Order, must have been still pretty lively for he was 85 years old when some lay brothers accused him of serious sexual crimes, accusations against which which he robustly and successful defended himself.

Another form of pension open to a lucky few, were the alms houses endowed by the wealthy in which housed and provided for a set number of poor men or women of good character. John Estbury founded one for men in Lambourne, Berkshire before his death in 1507. In return for bed and board, the beadsmen had to undertake not only to recite daily prayers, psalms and the Office for the Dead in the parish church, but also to gather round Estbury’s tomb at noon every day after Mass and say the Paternoster, Ave Maria and pray for his soul – the medieval equivalent of the modern old-folks home sing-along, ‘It’s a long Way to Tipperary.’


Of course, one of the terrible consequences of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII was that not only did many former monks and nuns, lay-sisters and lay-brothers find themselves destitute in the old age when they had always believed they would have life-long care, but those ordinary citizens who had invested in a corrody for their old age, suddenly found their pension pot had vanished. Some monks and nuns, if they renounced their vows and signed over their religious houses to the state, were granted a stipend, but often lay-brothers were dismissed with nothing.

Those who found themselves in this position might well have prayed to St Antony of Padua for help, for despite dying aged only 36, he is the patron saint of the elderly because of his devotion to the starving and needy. By a happy chance, St Anthony is also the saint you pray to in order to ask him to restore lost things, because a novice once borrowed his psalter without permission and was haunted by frightening apparitions until he returned it. So, St Antony might be persuaded to haunt a few pension fund managers for you.
St Antony preaching to the animals

Dressing Your Hero

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Last Thursday I had the privilege of helping to launch Wimbledon Book Festival’s Young Writer’s Competition for 2015. It was World Book Day, the day when many children are encouraged to come as their favourite character in a book (or movie!) When I arrived at Wimbledon Chase Primary School, I was delighted to see two teachers got up as Batman and Superman welcoming children and parents to the school. 

The children were buzzing with excitement. This year David Walliams dominated with his Demon Dentist, Gansta Granny and Boy in a Dress. Harry Potter characters are now a staple. There were several Cats in Hats and even a couple of Sherlock Holmes


I was assisted by literacy coordinator Linda Darlington who came as Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. We posed with children dressed as Pippi Long-stocking and Darth Vadar. As I looked out over a sea of faces, masks, hats and fake glasses, it suddenly occurred to me that many of the best characters from children’s fiction have looks that lend themselves to World Book Day dress up. 

Here are three elements I think the best dress-up-able characters have:

1. An identifiable silhouette. In an interview with Kidzcoolit, one of the directors of Shaun the Sheep the Movie says, “You can recognise most famous characters from their silhouettes. Shaun’s definitely got that.” Think of The Cat in the Hat, Peter Pan, Paddington Bear and Little Red Riding Hood. And look at Pippi with her sticky-out plaits.

2. A fun accessory or talisman. A soft toy animal is always fun, like Pippi Longstocking's monkey (see above). Kids also love swords, wands and replica revolvers, if the school allows such things! Katniss has her bow and arrows; Dorothy Gale her basket.


3. An outfit that's easy and warm. Easy for the parents to assemble and warm for the comfort of the children. World Book Day is usually early March which can be chilly in the UK. 

Some of my fellow History Girls have come up with great characters who boast distinctive silhouettes, fun accessories and warm costumes.
Girl Highwaymen at one of Marie-Louise Jensen's events
Sophia from Marie Louise-Jensen’s The Girl in the Mask is a girl highwayman. You can easily make a mask and tricorn hat. Black cloaks and flintlock pistols can be bought early, around Halloween. This costume would be especially appealing to a tomboy. Here are some year 7 girls from Walton Girls’ High School dressed up for an author visit. 

Louisa Young’s Lionboy, Charlie Ashanti, could have a soft-toy lion as his accessory and dress in circus gear. He's already made it big on stage and the film rights have been optioned.  
Girl pirate at one of Celia Rees' events
Susan Price’s Sterkarms wear doublets (short padded jackets), long woollen stockings and leather thigh-boots. Their accessories are daggers, lances and shaggy hobs (strong ponies).

Celia Rees has created highway women, witches and pirates. It's almost as if she wrote her novels with World Book Day in mind! These archetypal characters are distinctive, dashing, easy to put together and warm... unless you go for bare midriff. 


Joan Lennon has also written a Viking: a small one named Leif Frond. He wears tunic, trousers, furry waistcoat, cloak, boots and a horned helmet. You can accessorise your Viking with bow and (safe) arrows.
 

Flavia Gemina and Lupus
Kids love dressing up as villains. I spotted Darth Vadars, Demon Dentists and Cruella de Villes! Michelle Lovric’s new book The Fate in the Box features a villain called Fogfinger who wears a turban with a ruby in the middle. Simple and brilliant! 

The four detectives in my Roman Mysteries are always popular. Each of the four is colour-coded as one of the four elements. Flavia, the leader, wears a sky-blue tunic and palla. Lupus the mute boy wears a sea-green tunic and has a Roman wax tablet as his accessory. Nubia is fire, so her clothes are yellow, orange or red. Her accessory is a flute. Jonathan, the Jewish boy, is steady and grounded with a nutmeg-coloured tunic and a herb pouch around his neck against asthma. He sometimes carries a sling. His element is earth. 

Threptus and Sherlock
The picture on the right shows a girl fan dressed up as Threptus, the beggar boy in my spin-off series The Roman Mystery Scrolls. She is posing with her brother who is dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a superb example of a character with a distinctive silhouette. His accessories were no doubt bought at the Museum of London's Sherlock Holmes' exhibition, soon about to end.

Another of my characters is P.K. Pinkerton a half-Sioux 12-year-old detective in the Wild West who wears fringed buckskin trowsers (sic), a "faded red (not pink)" flannel shirt, a blue woollen coat, moccasins and a black slouch hat with a hawk’s feather. P.K.'s accessories are a medicine pouch and a five-shooter revolver, a gift from Mark Twain. P.K. can be a boy or a girl as s/he is a master of disguise.

Desperados and detectives at a Caroline Lawrence event
World Book Day has sharpened my focus; for my next series I'm going to create characters that kids will want to dress up as. I'll give give each one a distinctive silhouette, at least one fun accessory... and nice warm garments. Just as well: it will be set in Roman Britain!

Pillar of the Community or,The Strange Case of the Disappearing Gate Pier at Mr Roots’s Horse Hospital – Michelle Lovric

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I seem to be spending the golden years of my life trying to save toppled columns.

But, like Gladstone’s attempts to rescue fallen women, my work has largely been in vain.

For several years, I struggled to rescue a remarkable Column of Infamy from a dusty sepulchre in the Doges Palace in Venice. To this quest, I applied my best efforts and those of Venice’s most vigorous social historian Nelli Elena Vanzan Marchini. We tried to have the column brought out of darkness for the 700th anniversary of the 1310 conspiracy of Baiamonte Tiepolo, who planned to murder the Doge and seize the state. After his failure, Baiamonte’s own palace was razed to the ground. The Column of Infamy erected in its place. The column thereafter suffered a series of adventures, being damaged by a paid vandal, sold, moved, spending some time as a garden ornament by a lake, sitting unloved in a courtyard of the Correr Museum, and finally being ignominiously consigned to the darkness by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

Yet Baiamonte’s Column of Infamy is one of the oldest pieces of inscribed stone in Venice. It is not fragile. And it’s only four feet high. I obtained the support of Venice in Peril to restore it. I sourced sponsorship for the work. Nelli-Elena organised a book and two conferences. I shared a platform at the Ateneo Veneto with the director of Musei Civici, delivering a lecture on the evocative power of the column and the nature of villainy. But I suspect this only strengthened the director’s resolve that no chit of a foreign novelist would ever bring forth a precious item of Venetian history.

And so, Reader, I failed. The column still languishes in the Doges Palace dungeons, and I doubt if the ducal tweeny maid has even given it a dusting in the last hundred years.

And now, in London, I find myself on the trail of a tier gate that has gone missing from  the charming little warehouse complex known as Blows Yard, now overshadowed by a modern development in Stoney Street, by the historic Borough Market in Southwark.



The tier gate or pillar in question is brother to this one, pictured at right.

The two pillars were sturdily built of tough blue engineering bricks, with bull nosed bricks on the corners for most of their height. Each was then topped by a ziggurat of white stone. They defined the northern western edge of the site.

Blows Yard is part of the Borough High Street Conservation Area. The statutory definition of a Conservation Area is an “area of special architectural or historic interest, the character or appearance of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance.”

Note ‘desirable to preserve or enhance’.

Blows Yard stands on land that was once part of the Bishop of Winchester’s domain. Early maps show its site within the kitchen gardens of Winchester Palace. Below is a drawing showing the palace and its gardens in 1660 after Wenceslas Hollar (image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).


Eight hundred years ago, the palace was the most important building on the south bank of the Thames. But after the Civil War the site expropriated by the state. Stoney Street was built through the old palace grounds. A row of little houses was added on the eastern side of the new street – these can be seen on Horwood’s plan of 1799. Otherwise the new buildings were devoted to river-based trades. Warehouses grew where the Bishop’s vegetables once flourished. Winchester Palace was razed by two fires in the early 1800s, (as was my own home).

English Heritage now manages what is left of Winchester Palace, which is classed as Scheduled Ancient Monument. The area is also an Archaeological Priority Zone.

In June 2006 Southwark Council’s appraisal of the Borough High Street Conservation Area explained how the area changed from palatial demesne to small industrial development: In time, much of the area was redeveloped with purpose-built warehouses and, although limited in area, the small quarter of riverside warehousing around Clink Street retains characteristics of 19th century London dockland streets that are so typical of areas east of Borough. The urban form is characterised by very narrow streets hemmed in by tall building elevations and is a response to the practical and economic need to maximise building areas for the business of storing goods coming in off the ships. The streets themselves are reduced to minimal widths and warehouses were linked to one another with catwalks and bridges overhead.

It further observes of Blows Yard: the buildings have a pleasant consistency of detail using parapet gables and arched warehouse windows in a two and three storey composition, and they contain Stoney Street tightly, facing the railway arches … Blows Yard is particularly important as a corner group onto Stoney Street, and is neatly and consistently detailed.

Note the “neatly and consistently detailed”.

London County Council published an excellent series of books in the 1950s in conjunction with the London Survey Committee. The Survey of London Volume XXII deals with Bankside, the parishes of St Saviour and Christchurch, Southwark, and was my bible when writing The Remedy, my novel in which a Venetian aristocrat on the run from a murderous state agent hides out in seedy Bankside, as a quack doctor’s assistant. It also helped me through The Mourning Emporium, a story in which Venetian children sail to London in order to deal with a murderous pretender to the British throne. The London section of the book is set around Clink Street, Stoney Street and nearby haunts. Various maps in Volume XXII show Blows Yard surrounded by long-gone streets with picturesque names like Naked Boy Yard, the Whore’s Nest, and Bandy Leg Walk.

Blows Yard has also been in danger over the last decades. But, after various attempts to demolish it, the building was subject to a sensitive and respectful interior reworking and is now our beloved local Pain Quotidien.

The redevelopment of Blows Yard was undertaken in conjunction with the Museum of London Archaeological Survey (MoLAS), and left all the archaeology beneath untouched and safe. The remains of Roman buildings were revealed in addition to medieval structural elements of the scheduled Winchester Palace.

So, a case of good planning, good architecture and good practice.

But even this good practice has not stopped the northernmost of the Blows Yard pillars from disappearing.

Both pillars were still there in May 2011, when SE1 magazine photographed the street to report on a confrontation between local residents and developers who wanted to place a 300 cover restaurant adjacent to Blows Yard. Photograph courtesy of the SE1 website, with thanks.


A compromise of sorts was reached. Thereafter the site was swaddled in layers of boarding and scaffolding for several years. And now that the boarding and scaffolding are gradually coming down – one of the pier pillars has disappeared. I poked a trespassing head around the gates last week, and found … absolutely no northern pillar, as this picture by David Stephens shows.


I even looked under the yellow hoarding and all I found was this: just some rubble and roots.


My distress at the missing pier pillar was channelled, as all good History Girls channel their woes, into research.

My first call was The London Archaeologist Annual London Fieldwork and Publication Round-up of 2009, which recorded that the two extant buildings that now comprise Blows Yard were constructed by as a horse hospital, the works probably taking place between 1872 and 1877.

Now I was more than curious – I was also charmed. A Horse Hospital in Stoney Street! It made perfect sense. Horse transport was still predominant in Victorian London, with at least 300,000 working horses in the city, with around 90 veterinary surgeries no doubt principally devoted to their care. Many, like Blows Yard, would have incorporated smithies or farriers. London Bridge was the transit hub of centuries past, as testified by old coaching inns like The George. I could imagine exhausted horses arriving from Dover or Folkestone, being led between the two pillars into the hospital for a bit of R & R and two nice new pairs of shoes.

Perhaps it was rather like this jolly illustration from George Cruikshank’s My Sketchbook, courtesy of Wellcome Images.


At the Museum of London’s Archaeology department, I spoke to Karen Thomas, who was kind enough to send me the full text of their 2009 study of Blows Yard.

The archaeologists had found the Horse Hospital listed in the Goad insurance plans of 1877. (My theory would be that the word ‘Blows’ referred to the striking of the anvil by the smithy – or it could be an elision of ‘Bellows’, an essential tool of the blacksmith’s works.)

In 1882 Kelly’s Post Office Directory (a kind of Victorian Yellow Pages) recorded the premises as horse hospital run by Mr William Roots, veterinary surgeon. His other address was elegant Trinity Square, so this must have been his professional headquarters. I found him again in The Commercial Gazette of 1890. His complex consisted of a stables with hayloft on the upper floor. There were also two small dwellings, possibly inhabited by stable boys or junior surgeons who tended to the sick horses at night. The archaeologists found traces of tiling, drainage ventilation suitable for the housing of horses, which would also have had space to lie down.

They found few traces, however, of the ‘Smithy and stable’ due to various demolitions. There is now just a blank gable fronting on to Stoney Street and part of the roof, plus two gate piers or posts. The archaeologists noted, ‘These piers are of solid brick, with pyramidal moulded capstones, possibly of white limestone or artificial stone, partly built into the adjoining buildings’.

So in 2009, when the archaeologists finished this work, both piers were still in place.

The archaeologists theorized that Blows Yard operated as a horse hospital until just before or during the First World War, when the current owners, J.O. Sims, took it over for the fruit and vegetable business, probably using the existing stables for the dray horses who transported their goods.

At some point in the twentieth century, Sims stopped using the building for their business. They rented it to a recording studio for a period. And eventually it became Pain Quotidien.

PQ occupies the stable and the hayloft, with its kitchen in the cottages, I believe. The smithy would have been located in a part of the site that is now being pushed for yet more development

The missing pillar would have marked its northernmost point.

It would be nice to think that the pillar was temporarily removed for its own safety, and that perhaps the pieces of the pillar are stored carefully in a warehouse somewhere, awaiting reconstruction. Indeed, I suggested as much to the developer, but received no answer at all.

No answer at all is an answer, I feel.

Nevertheless, I nurture a slender hope that the pillar still exists.

Why do I care? This pillar was no more than 150 years old, a callow youth of a pillar compared to Baiamonte 700 year old column. It has no historic inscription. It was made of engineering bricks and stone. It was not even particularly beautiful. It had a stolid, comforting presence, redolent of a confident industrial past.

And it was a part of the historic fabric of Stoney Street, part of the Borough High Street Conservation Area, in the grounds of Winchester Palace and adjacent to a scheduled Ancient Monument, part of an Archaeological Priority Zone.

And it represents just one more way in which the history of this area is being treated with disrespect. In another recent development a tourist gift shop has inflicted lurid neon lighting on the street.

The residents here are active in their support of the area. We warmly welcome responsible local businesses. We try to stop developments that seem cynical or damaging to our architectural heritage. David Stephens, our local architect, together with English Heritage and residents, conceived a beautiful historic garden in the ruins of the old Winchester Palace, formerly the home of tumbleweeds and cigarette butts. Bankside Open Spaces Trust and Southwark Council agreed to realize the scheme. And now it is in place.


Yet there seems to remain a practically feudal state of affairs here in the Clink, where the rich landowners can, with apparent impunity, exercise droit de seigneur over the vulnerable historic fabric of the area.

This blog represents, therefore, a small ladylike blast of the trumpet against the anonymous wall of non-caring. Should we not celebrate our industrial past here? Mr Roots’s Horse Hospital is but one piece of our history. Also gone – the walkways that used to join the warehouses to the other streets – those went in the late seventies; local lurks like Naked Boy Yard and the Whores Nest – all demolished to make way for profitable high-rise developments.

Pillar by pillar is the way that the fabric of our environment was built.

And pillar by pillar it will be lost – unless someone with authority can be found to care about it enough.



Michelle Lovric’s website

Her most recent novel is The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters, published by Bloomsbury.

She rarely writes about horses as she is rather afraid of them since being attacked by a wild Australian one in her childhood.

The Pretenders

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Yesterday I printed off my boarding card in preparation for travelling to Leicester for the re-interment of Richard III  -  that I lived to see the day!  -  which reminded me it might be a good time to revisit the topic of Lambert Simnel and other  Yorkist claimants to the English throne after Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field.  For anyone interested in the tangled dynastic allegiances of 15th century England I can’t do better than recommend John Ashdown-Hill’s recently published The Dublin King. Dr Ashdown-Hill brooks no lazy assumptions or uncritical recycling of old legends. He goes to original sources and when he can’t he admits as much.

Lambert Simnel, crowned Edward VI (and not, nota bene, Edward V) in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral in 1487 and carried on the shoulders of his courtiers down the hill to Dublin Castle, is the most interesting of the pretenders to the throne. We can trace a very plausible trail to his true identity and we have a colourful story about his eventual fate, sentenced to work as a spit-boy in the Royal kitchens and eventually promoted to the falconry mews. Maybe.  Or did Lambert/Edward flee from his army’s rout at the Battle of Stoke and escape into exile? This period of history is littered with possible imposters and changelings.  Who, apart from his Irish supporters, knew for certain what the boy king looked like? No selfies in those days, no passport photos.

Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be one of the so-called Princes in the Tower, didn’t fare as well as the alleged Dublin King. Henry VII toyed with him for a while and kept him where he could see him under a kind of hospitable house arrest, but Perkin’s eventual destiny, in 1499, was at the end of a rope at Tyburn. 

Then there was Ralph Wilford or Wulford who, had he truly been the Earl of Warwick, as he said, would have had a strong claim to the throne. Perhaps Ralph was a pretender too many for Henry VII. To understand why, it helps to know what else was going on in Henry’s life at the time. Henry VII was conducting delicate negotiations for a marriage between his son, Arthur, and the Infanta Catherine of Aragon. But Catherine’s parents, the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon were aware of Henry’s precarious hold on the English throne and were wary of marrying their daughter to an heir like Arthur who might be ousted by the Yorkists and never become King. The desire to clear the board of all other claimants and make his son’s succession appear more secure may very well have been behind Henry’s decision to have both Wilford and Warbeck executed.  Pour encourager les autres.

Well as we all know, Catherine did marry Arthur but Arthur died and Catherine, as was the way with valuable royal brides, got passed along to his brother Henry. But that’s another story entirely.

For my money Lambert Simnel is undoubtedly the most convincing of the Yorkist Pretenders but unless it becomes possible to compare the DNA of a known scion of the House of York with that of a Simnel descendant we may never get any closer to the truth.  It’s quite an unusual surname so, if you know of anyone called Simnel, do pass the word along to John Ashdown-Hill who would be very interested to hear from them.

The Alfred Jewel comes home: Sue Purkiss

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The Alfred Jewel
There is great excitement in Somerset at the moment (no, it's true; in the hills and on the levels, they speak of little else!) because for just one month, a great treasure has come home. It's the Alfred Jewel, and it must be one of the most exquisite works of art ever to have been found in a field after having been lost for centuries.

It's surprisingly small - a mere 6.4 cm long. It consists of an enamelled picture of a man who holds a flowering plant in each hand. This image is set under a piece of rock crystal, which is encased in the most exquisitely chased gold setting. It's shaped like a tear drop, and the apex of this is 'carved' into an animal's head - maybe a boar or a dragon? - in whose jaws is an empty socket. The gold back plate is engraved  with a stylised plant design, while the reverse of the animal head is patterned with overlapping scales.

And very significantly, there is an inscription, worked into the framework in open letterwork. It says: AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN - 'Alfred ordered me to be made.'

The Alfred in question was almost certainly Alfred the Great - so this jewel is a direct link with him. We know this because it was found on the Somerset Levels in 1693, in a field near North Petherton, only a few miles from Athelney, where Alfred fled in 878 from the Viking leader Guthrum - and from which he emerged to fight a decisive battle at Edington. After this, for the rest of his reign Alfred had the upper hand, and so was able to get on with rebuilding Wessex and making life better for his people. He later founded a monastery at Athelney.

No-one knows for certain what the purpose of the jewel was. But that socket looks as if it was made as an attachment to something. Perhaps it was fixed onto a crown - but the smart money is on the theory that this was an aestel - a pointer: used to follow the writing in a book. It is known that Alfred gave copies of Pope Gregory's 9th century best-seller Pastoral Care to bishoprics throughout his kingdom, and that with each book he sent a precious aestel. Perhaps this was the one he gave to Athelney.

Who was the man in the picture? It has been suggested it's Alfred himself. This doesn't seem likely to me. So far as I know, there wasn't a tradition of portraiture at the time - and if you were going to make a portrait, there would be easier media to use than enamel. Perhaps it's a saint - we don't know. More questions: how and when was it lost? How did it survive, under the surface of a field, without harm, for hundreds of years? If it had been found today, the site would have been minutely investigated for clues - but of course none of that happened in the 17th century.

What did happen was that the jewel was given to the University of Oxford in 1718 by the antiquarian Thomas Palmer, the son of Nathaniel, who had been the owner of the land where the jewel was found. Not long after that, it was given to the Ashmolean Museum, and there it's been ever since.

The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the first university museum in the world, and it was built to house the 'Cabinet of Curiosities' of Elias Ashmole. Philippa Gregory has a very interesting account of its founding in her novel Virgin Earth (which, by the way, along with its predecessor, Earthly Joys, is a really excellent read), which concerns the fortunes pf plant collectors and explorers John Tradescant and his son. She suggests that the core of the collection was that of the Tradescants, which had been tricked out of them by Ashmole. Whatever the truth of that - and the Tradescants' collection was certainly the foundation of Ashmole's - the Ashmolean was and is a treasure trove. I went there to see the Alfred Jewel some years ago, when I was researching my novel about Alfred, Warrior King. It took me ages to find it, and eventually I spotted it tucked a way in a dim corner of a crowded display case.

But since then the Ashmolean has been re-fashioned into a glorious space, and the Alfred Jewel, far from being hidden away, is a striking focal point with a display case that sets it off beautifully.

Only not this month, because we've got it - it's only on loan, but for these few weeks, it's home.

I went to see it the other day, and I marvelled over how tiny it is. How on earth could the maker even see to create such exquisite detail? And just to think, that Alfred (I have to admit, I think of him as 'my Alfred') actually held this in his hand! (Because I'm sure he did. He ordered it to be made, so he would certainly have inspected it when it was done.)

Seeing the Jewel was the purpose of my visit, but I can't finish without a word about the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. Like the Ashmolean, it has been recently remodelled, and it's gorgeous. In fact, it's so gorgeous that it deserves more than a skimpy paragraph. So on second thoughts, I'll give it a post of its own next month. When the Alfred Jewel will have left us again, and we will be bereft...


“Sophia,: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary” by Anita Anand.

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Anita Anand’s “Sophia” tells the story of the youngest Princess of the royal ruling family of the Punjab. Yet this biography opens, not in India, but at a suffragette meeting in Caxton Hall, Westminster, on Friday 18th November 1910. 

On the platform in the crowded hall sit the leading suffragettes: Emmeline Pankhurst, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Christabel Pankhurst and more. At the back of the stage was a small, dark-skinned figure dressed in Parisian couture. That small, fierce face belonged to Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, activist and suffragette.

Who was Sophia, and what was a young Indian woman doing there anyway? 

The meeting ended with a march to the gates of Westminster, the mother of Parliaments. All that the women wanted was the right to vote but many thought that an irrational demand. The marchers – Sophia among them - were brutally attacked, groped and beaten by uniformed and undercover police as well as crowds of jeering onlookers. Sophia, witnessing a vicious beating, took down the constable’s number and wrote so many letters of complaint that Winston Churchill refused to reply any more. That was his only way of stopping the Princess. Sophia, the admirable subject of this book, was never one to step back when someone needed her help.

“Sophia” is a book that covers a span of history as much as it covers a single life. Born in 1876, Sophia had Queen Victoria as a godparent. By the time of Sophia's death, in 1948, King George was on the throne, and the Empire was ending. The subject - no, the heroine of this book lived through so many events that I appreciated the way Anand gave the full story, whether it was what happened to the Koh-I-Noor diamond, or the cold-hearted massacre at Amritsar, or Asquith’s derailment of the women’s suffrage bills, or the story behind Gandhi’s hunger strikes and more. Many of the stories I half-remembered, but the emotional impact was greater for having them fully retold.

Although Sophia lived in the heart of British society, she was in many ways an outsider. Sophia and her siblings were proudly aware of their royal lineage. Their grandfather, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, had been known as “The Lion of the Punjab”. After his death, the British forced his eleven-year old son, Duleep to give his kingdom to the Crown. The young Sikh was re-educated as Christian gentleman and, being a favourite of Queen Victoria, brought to live in London. All too soon the  handsome Indian prince became a society playboy, shooting, hunting and gambling in the company of the Prince of Wales, and decorating his Suffolk home, Elvedon Hall, in extravagant Moghul style. Meanwhile Duleep's neglected Maharani struggled with a succession of squabbling children. All had strong personalities: Victor, imperious; Frederick, obstinate; bad-tempered Bamba and secretive Catherine. Sophia was born after a five year gap, and was such an easy baby that she drew the siblings together, already the family mediator.

Trouble lay ahead. Their father Duleep had ignored warnings about his extravagant spending, even from the Queen herself. His attitude was understandable: had he not handed Britain his valuable kingdom? How could they not give him what he needed? At last, offended by the Government’s refusal to pay his debts, Duleep stripped Elevedon Hall, selling everything. To Queen Victoria’s distress, he renounced Christianity and set off for the Punjab. British officials halted the family when they reached Egypt. Furious at the endless delay, Duleep abandoned his wife and young family, and set off for Paris and his new mistress.

The picture that Anita Anand gives of Sophia’s early life and family background is fascinating, but it is clear that the constant tension must have felt intolerable. She shows the siblings lives were full of contradictions: they had servants to order about but were themselves regularly spied upon and reported to the Government; they could indulge in extravagant fashions but their money was granted by the India Office; their presence in Britain was dependent on the Queen’s goodwill, as well as on matters of national security, and although as rich aristocrats they were welcomed at society occasions, their Indian heritage made them outsiders.

Growing up, Victor embraced his father’s dissolute lifestyle and was eventually sent to America, while Frederick turned into an extremely conservative Anglophile. For a period, the society whirl claimed Duleep’s daughters. They had been offered a grace-and-favour residence at Hampton Court, and “came out” into society. Sophia embraced her new life: she was keen on horse-riding, bicycling, dog-breeding, photography and  Turkish cigarettes, as well as indulging in extravagant fashions and in seasonal European travel. Yet they were still not permitted to travel to India.

The rush of aristocratic guests for the Delhi Durbar gave the sisters their opportunity to travel quietly. (Anand gives a wonderful description of the magnificence of this event – and the fact that much of India was starving at the same time.) The sisters arrived, but were disappointed. The expected “introductions” did not come, nor any offers of seats or tents or views for the princesses. The British in Delhi did not “recognise” the trio of Indian sisters. Only when they travel towards the Punjab did they receive a proper welcome. Afterwards, Bamba stayed on in Lahore, Catherine returned to Germany and her beloved governess, and Sophia returned alone to Hampton Court. There, apart from her dogs, there seemed to be nobody who needed her. Sophia, as she often did at such times, fell into a profound depression.

Anand’s biography shows Sophia constantly searching out new causes. Witnessing the plight of Lascars - the lowliest ship-hands – on a voyage, Sophia arranged better shelter and financial aid. As a Red Cross nurse, Sophia looked after wounded Indian troops in France. On a second visit to India, she attended revolutionary meetings with Bamba.

Then there is the cause that opens the book: Sophia's involvement with women’s suffrage has, until this biography, largely been hidden. Sophia was from aristocratic circles so she was never imprisoned, even when she flung herself across the Prime Minister’s car, waving “Votes For Women” banners. Her name is rarely recorded. Anand shows that even though Sophia may have been shy, she was determined: Sophia even stood outside her grace-and-favour residence, dressed in her best furs, loudly proclaiming the cause and offering the Suffragette paper to passers-by. She so annoyed the neighbours that they sent messages to the palace officials asking for the troublesome Princess to be removed from her home.

Anand depicts Sophia as an intriguing woman, kind and fiercely loyal to her family, proud of her position and heritage yet uncertain of her place in society. Sophia is a determined letter-writer and petitioner; often awkward with strangers yet devoted to her dogs and anyone who needs help.

I found the last part of Sophia’s life sad. As she grew older, and further away from the interest of the “new” royals, she retired to Coldhatch House in Penn, Buckinghamshire where her imperious attitude made her new servants dislike her. On the other hand, there are glimpses of happiness. Anita Anand describes Sophia’s relationship with young evacuees and her affection for her housekeeper’s daughter Drovna. These offer some clue to the life Sophia might have led if it had been possible for her to marry and have children of her own.

My hope is that this review should not make “Sophia” sound daunting. I found this biography as readable as novel and full of many wonderfully described incidents and events. In fact, I often paused, picturing one or another of the scenes again in my own imagination. The book told a very rich story indeed! “Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary” by Anita Anand is a most remarkable biography.

Review by


Penny Dolan

Life Patterns - Celia Rees

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I will admit here, I am no quilter, although I know some of my fellow History Girls are and I'm sure we will number quilters among our followers.

Quilt, Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre, Lampeter

When I was in the Sixth Form there was a craze for quilting. In those days, Liberty's would send swatches of material to anyone who asked for them. I remember being entranced by the beauty of the Liberty patterns, the richness of the William Morris designs, but unlike some of my friends, I never actually made a quilt. One of my friends from those days still has the quilt she made. The Liberty pieces are mixed with humbler fabrics, bits of school shirt and summer dresses. When I see it, it takes me straight back to that time.

I might not have actually done any sewing, but quilts and quilting stayed with me. Like many writers, I'm often asked where my ideas come from. They are often just there in the ragbag of past enthusiasms and passing interests waiting to be plucked out and worked up into something. So it was with quilts and quilting. I've blogged about my visit to the American Museum, Bath and its connection to Witch Child  Witch Child at the American Museum, Bath - Celia Rees . On my original visit, I didn't go there to look at quilts. I went to see the quilts on display because they interested me anyway. If I hadn't had that interest, I might not have bothered and I would not have had the idea that allowed me to write Witch Child.


Stitch and Write American Museum, Bath

Though researching and writing Witch Child, I learnt a great deal about quilts and quilting. Quilts at the time Witch Child is set (17th Century) would have been all of a piece (as the one shown above), not patchwork, with which we are more familiar. There could, however, I reasoned, have been quilts made out of pieces of material. This was mostly because I wanted one in the book, but it made sense to me, woman sense. My mother, my grandmother, her mother before her kept scraps of material and made bed covers, cushion covers, by piecing them together, nothing would be wasted. That was relatively recently, how much more precious would cloth have been in 17th Century America?  The fact that there are none of these kinds of quilts from this period doesn't mean that they never existed. It just means that they were worn out with every day use, not precious enough to be preserved.  

These pieced quilts are my favourites. I can admire and appreciate the beauty and intricacy of patchwork quilt designs: Tumbling Dice, Log Cabin, Rose Wreath, String of Flags (even the names are wonderful); the striking originality of the Amish and Mennonite quilts; the ancient symbolism contained in recurring motifs of flowers, fruits, cups, the tree of life. Above all, I can celebrate and admire the women's work, the artistic creativity expressed through the designs. Even so, the quilts I love best are those that are made from every day materials, from clothes that have been worn and worn again: shirts, waistcoats, even pyjamas. Stiff flannel softened by wear and washing to the smoothness of heavy silk, the colours faded, one pastel shade blending into another.

Jen Jones  “Early to Bed” Exhibition, Welsh Quilt Centre, Lampeter 
This example is from the 2014 "Early to Bed" Exhibition of Folk Art and “Make-do and Mend” in the work of the rural quilters of 19th century Wales at Jen Jones wonderful Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter, West Wales: http://www.jen-jones.com . Quilts like these provide not only a palimpsest of rural economy and thrift but a record of working people's lives.

Shirts provide many of the patches in these kinds of quilts. The shirt is personal to the wearer, carrying his scent, retaining his shape.  In the past, to sew and launder a shirt was an act of love.

As I did the washing one day

Under the bridge at Aberteifi,

And a golden stick to drub it,

And my sweetheart's shirt beneath it--

A knight came by upon a charger,

Proud and swift and broad of shoulder,

And he asked if I would sell

The shirt of the lad that I loved well.

No, I said, I will not trade--

Not if a hundred pounds were paid;

Not if two hillsides I could keep

Full with wethers and white sheep;

Not if two fields full of oxen

Under yoke were in the bargain;

Not if the herbs of all Llanddewi,

Trodden and pressed, were offered to me--

Not for the likes of that,
I'd sell 
the shirt of the lad that I love well.....

The Shirt of a Lad - Anonymous (tr. Tony Conran)

Artist and friend Julia Griffiths-Jones chose this poem to include in her body of work, Unwinding the Thread, translating words into the images that might be embroidered on such a shirt,  re-producing the designs in aluminium wire, pewter and enamelled copper wire.


Shirt of a Lad - Julia Griffiths-Jones

In the folk song, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, the making of a shirt without no seams nor needlework is one of the true love tasks impossible to achieve. So shirts gain significance, personal and sentimental. Shirts are so much a part of what a person is, or was. Another friend, Barbara Crowther, describes in a Guardian article how she has found a way to use the shirts left by her husband, Dick, who died suddenly and tragically three years ago. Dick was a man who loved his shirts, especially striped shirts, stripes of all kinds and colours: thick, thin, bright, dark and pastel.  Instead of leaving his shirts shut away in the dark, in a suitcase in the attic, Barbara brought them out into the light again and took them to her friend Louise Charters, an upholsterer and soft furnisher, who has turned them into something beautiful for Dick's daughters, Eleanor and Georgia, to remember their father by. 

Barbara Crowther and her daughter, Georgia Leith
David Sillitoe for the Guardian

David Sillitoe for the Guardian




This blog seems to have turned into a bit of a patchwork itself. I'll finish with an odd piece of serendipity. The day after I wrote  this blog, I went to Modern Art Oxford to see an exhibition: Love is Enough, William Morris and Andy Warhol. A young woman artist, Diana Taylor, had just finished a textile workshop. 

Now here's the odd thing - my maiden name was Taylor and the beautiful hangings filling the foyer were made, in part at least, from William Morris designs. 

Celia Rees


www.celiarees.com






Down among the archives: the joys of research (part 2) by Christina Koning

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One of the joys of doing research is the incidental stuff one comes across while doing it: snippets of information; details of the ‘way they lived then’ which, thought inconsequential in themselves, can make the past come alive. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the archives at the London Library, reading through copies of The Times for the period I’m working on - the late 1920s to the early 1930s - and enjoying myself very much in the process. What I’m looking for I’m not quite sure - but I know it when I see it.

It might be the following headline which has caught my eye: ‘Big Game Hunter Sent For Trial’, and the following account of a case in which the accused, Thomas Henry Sarl, ‘described as a big game hunter, of Vivian-road, Wembley,’ was charged, on January 3rd, 1929, with ‘attempting to inflict grievous bodily harm on his brothers-in-law, Basil and Cecil Smith, of Litchfield-grove, Finchley, and further with damaging windows to the extent of £50’. Or this one, from the same month: ‘Willesden Communist Summoned for Desertion’, in which one Hubert Huggins, ‘Communist leader and Secretary of the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid Society’, was summoned for deserting his wife, and moving his private secretary, a Miss Sarah Ball, into the family home at Princess-road, Kilburn. Then there’s this, from August 1929: ‘Authoress Attempts Suicide’, and its subsequent account of what was then regarded as a crime: ’Stephanie Gray, 43, authoress and journalist, and the widow of a naval commander, living in a top back room in Molyneux-street, off Edgware-road, who was in despair because her novel, The Idol, had been rejected by a firm of publishers, attempted suicide by taking a large dose of a popular German sleeping draught, and has appeared before Mr Hay Hackett, of Marylebone Police Court.’

As I’m writing a series of detective stories, my fascination with such material may be readily understood; but I also take a great delight in less obvious minutiae of the period: the advertisements, for example. Since newspapers at the time had very few photographs, most of these ads - for cigarettes, cars, wireless sets, refrigerators, gramophones, and of course clothes - are illustrated with delightful black-and-white line drawings, and described in the most florid of prose. Take this ad from Peter Robinson, for June 1929: ‘Dainty gowns of figured georgette with accordion-pleated panels (6 guineas)’. Or this ‘exquisite gown of crepe de Chine, finished at the waist with a buckle of diamante (8 guineas)’. ‘Harrods,’ we are sternly told in an article from April of the same year, ‘cannot stress the importance of the Little Jacket with Evening Gowns enough… The sleeves of the “coatee” are cut in a new manner. Scarlet and Oyster are particularly smart in this season of colour contrasts…’ At Marshall & Snelgrove, later that month, they are advertising ‘attractive two-piece dresses of floral crepe de Chine with cuffs and vest of pleated Georgette, in black and a few good colours…’ To set off your new dress, why not buy a pair of ‘kid shoes in black suede, with a smart Spanish heel’ at 55 shillings, or a Smart Hat of black Panamalaque straw’, for 65 shillings?Suitably attired in your evening gown of ‘rich satin beaute… cleverly cut to give a slimming line’ at 10 gns, and with your ‘coatlet in a range of colours from Cornflower Blue to Charteuse Green’ at a mere 49/6, you might take yourself to the theatre to see ‘On Approval’ (then packing them in at the Fortune), ‘Lady Luck’ at the Carlton, or ‘The Desert Song’ at Drury Lane. 

If these seemed too tame, you might down a couple of cocktails before taking in the latest Charles Cochrane review, with the racy title of ‘One Damn Thing After Another’. While sitting back to enjoy the show, you might light up a Craven ‘A’ (‘made specially to prevent sore throats’), or a De Reszke, since ‘wherever the right people meet, there also will you meet the right cigarette…’ Or, wearing a ‘dressing-gown of pure silk foulard’ (him) or a ‘rich printed chiffon Tea-frock’ (her), you could relax at home with the papers, keeping up with the details of the latest crime story (the Charing Cross Trunk Murder was enthralling the public that year) or the goings-on of the ‘Smart Set’ in St Tropez (‘Countess Buxton distributed the prizes at the fancy-dress dance at the Grand Hotel. The prize-winners included Lady Alethea Buxton and the Hon. Daisy Dixon…’). You could listen to music on your newly acquired radiogram: ‘Touch a Switch, and Bring the Gayest Dance Bands to Your Home!’ Or you could reach for the latest bestseller, by Ethel M Dell or Elinor Glyn.

Of course, it didn’t do to overdo things. ‘Nerve strain’ seems to have been an ever-present ailment - at least if one believes the ads. ‘Busy Streets Demand Strong Nerves’, asserts one such, adding darkly: ‘the rush and hurry of our town and city life make heavy demands upon the nerves. Tone and vitality is lost…’ Fortunately, help is at hand: ‘Take “Ovaltine” daily.’ Still more alarming is the tone of another: ‘Does the sound of a motorcar backfiring in the street make you jump out of your skin? A nightly dose of Doctor Fuller’s Powders will set you right…’ Given that this was a time of high unemployment and worrying fluctuations in the Stock Market, it seems hardly surprising that a lot of people were feeling jumpy. And of course what was then described as ‘nerve trouble’ might now be called ‘post-traumatic stress’ - a condition with which many of those who had been through the horrors of the First World War would have been all too familiar. 

Interspersed with the more lighthearted stuff - the articles on ‘The Modern Girl and the Cocktail-Drinking Habit’, or reviews of the latest novel by Galsworthy, are those which offer more sombre insights. The front pages of The Times in the late 1920s had no photographs (those were confined to a single page inside the paper) but displayed columns of small ads. A decade after the Armistice, these still included lengthy lists of those who had died ‘On Active Service’, commemorated by their grieving relatives, as well as ads for those seeking work - or in search of domestic servants. Amongst the advertisements for ‘Housemaids’ (‘must be good-tempered’) ‘Cook-Generals’ (‘good references essential’), and ‘Between-maids’ (‘titled family; four servants kept’), one might find poignant items such as the following: ‘Work urgently required by married ex-officer (Indian cavalry) with two children; held position of trust, used to outdoor life; physically fit; excellent references; adaptable.’ Almost a short story in itself.

Sir Francis Walsingham and the Marranos - by Ann Swinfen

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Sir Francis Walsingham

The first well organised secret service in England was the lifelong achievement of Sir Francis Walsingham. During the early part of his career, he worked for William Cecil – Lord Burghley – Queen Elizabeth’s chief advisor, undertaking a number of roles in the service of the state, including the post of ambassador to Parisat the time of the notorious St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Walsingham, his pregnant wife and small daughter, together with young Philip Sidney, who was staying with them, were caught up in a series of terrifying and horrific events in that August of 1572 which would mark them for life.

 
The St Bartholomew's Day Massacre

Burghley had developed an embryonic secret service, but when Walsingham took it in hand it became a sophisticated and highly skilled organisation which spread out from his Londonhome in Seething Laneto cover the whole of Europe and even reached into the Ottoman Empire. Its purpose was to safeguard the queen and the English nation from treason and foreign invasion. After the death of Catholic Queen Mary and the accession of her Protestant sister Elizabeth to the throne, the Pope had judged that England was likely to fall back into the heretical beliefs which had been promoted under Henry VIII and (even more vehemently) under his young son Edward VI. He declared Elizabetha bastard and an excommunicate heretic. (Henry VIII’s run-in with the papacy still rankled.) Moreover, he gave a pardon in advance to any man who succeeded in assassinating Elizabeth.


The papacy thus fostered, encouraged, and sometimes financed repeated assaults on England for the whole of Elizabeth’s reign, including those undertaken by the Duke of Guise, cousin of the half-French Mary Queen of Scots, and by King Philip of Spain, widower of the half-Spanish Queen Mary, who still claimed that he had a right to the English throne. Having seen the violence and bloodshed in Paris, Walsingham knew exactly what a Catholic seizure of England would mean, not only for the queen but for her Protestant subjects, by this time the majority of the population.



King Philip II of Spain

There was another community living in London at the time which had as much to fear from the threats of a Catholic invasion as Walsingham. Indeed, its members frequently had had even more terrifying personal experiences than he had. These were the so-called ‘Marranos’. It is an unfortunate term, though now the best known, for it is a Spanish insult, meaning ‘pig’, a sneer at those who do not eat the meat of that animal. Their own name for themselves was ‘Anusim’ meaning ‘the Forced Ones’. They were the Jews living in the Iberian peninsula, forced by the rulers of Spain, and later by the rulers of Portugal (under Spanish pressure) to convert to Christianity, becoming the conversos, or novos cristãos, or New Christians.


 There had been a slow drift from Spain and Portugalof those New Christians who could afford to move to the more tolerant countries of northern Europe, primarily Englandand the Low Countries. As the Inquisition grew in power, so this drift became a flood. Spain had already driven out most of its Jewish citizens who, like the Christians, had, in the past, lived fairly peacefully in those parts which had been under the rule of the Moors, though without full citizenship. Ironically, once the Christian Spanish monarchs had driven out the Moors, they turned on the Jews, many of whom fled to Portugal, where at first they were more or less tolerated, until Spanish influence increased. In 1580, Spain seized Portugal, bringing with it the Inquisition and its elaborately staged autos-da-fé for the burning of heretics and the scourging of ‘penitents’.

 
An auto-da-fé

Those who saw the writing on the wall escaped ahead of the Inquisition. Those who survived its tortures followed them. Many of these Marrano refugees came from well-to-do professional classes – doctors, lawyers, merchants, university professors. They were tacitly welcomed in England, where most settled in London, and provided they kept their heads down, not too many awkward questions were asked. Probably some continued secretly in their Jewish faith, meeting to worship in each other’s houses, but the evidence seems to suggest that their forms of worship in this foreign land began to lose any strict orthodoxy. Others seem to have kept to the new faith into which they had been baptised. This is certainly true of Aemilia Bassano, English poet and perhaps Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. The Bassanos were a family of Italian Jewish musicians brought to Englandby Henry VIII, and Aemilia was one of the next generation, who was certainly Christian.

 

Englishmen of the time – and particularly Londoners – were suspicious of all immigrants, labelling them ‘Strangers’. These immigrants were constrained by certain restrictions on their rights and the running of their businesses, but when times were prosperous they fared well. In periods of starvation and unemployment they fared less well, but that is another story.


 The three best-known Marranos contemporary with Sir Francis Walsingham were Dr Hector Nuñez, Dr Roderigo Lopez, and Dunstan Añez, who were the leaders of the Marrano community in London. All three were wealthy men. The first two were graduates in medicine from the universityof Coimbra, which had one of the finest medical schools in Europe at the time, where the advanced practices of Arabic medicine were studied. In London they continued to work as physicians, rising to the top of their profession, fellows of the College of Physicians. Dr Nuñez’s most distinguished patient was Lord Burghley. Dr Lopez rose even higher. He was chief physician to the queen herself. Dunstan Añez was first and foremost a merchant, and his daughter was married to Dr Lopez.

 

But what has this to do with Sir Francis Walsingham?

 

All three men were merchants with an international network of trading routes. The two physicians were involved in trade as well as medicine, Dr Nuñez in particular owning ships and trading in silks, spices and other exotic goods throughout the Mediterranean and as far away as the East Indies. Dunstan Añez was exceedingly prosperous, also trading throughout the known world, and so distinguished in the merchant community of London that he became the Queen’s Purveyor of Groceries and Spices. These men had family members and close colleagues placed in the major trading centres worldwide. And it was along the trading routes and through the great merchant houses that news mostly flowed.

 

Sir Francis Walsingham recognised the potential of this information network and seized upon it. The Marrano merchants were happy to oblige, having their own compelling reasons for defending England against invasion by Spain or France. Thus it was that these trading networks came to serve a second purpose, as a route for intelligence pouring into Walsingham’s Londonoffice. Walsingham employed a large body of agents – some reliable, some less so, some even double agents – and these agents passed information along the trade routes. Coded messages could be hidden in bundles of cloth or barrels of spices, or slipped between innocent ship’s manifests. The agents also ‘diverted’ messages being passed by enemy agents, above all by the agents of Philip of Spain.

 

In his Seething Lane office, Walsingham maintained a group of code-breakers, headed by Thomas Phelippes, who deciphered and translated coded despatches. When an enemy message had been decoded, it would be resealed by the skilled forger of seals, Arthur Gregory, and slipped back into the enemy network to go on its way. The work had to be done quickly, to avoid suspicion arising from any delay.

 

I decided that it would be appropriate for a young Marrano physician with a gift for code-breaking, also from Coimbra, to be recruited into Walsingham’s service, and this was the starting point for my series of novels about late sixteenth century espionage. The first book is The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez.

 

It has now reached the fourth book, Bartholomew Fair, and we are nearing the end of Walsingham’s life. Suffering for years from ill health and unflagging overwork, he was to die early in 1590 and the secret service would become the centre of a struggle between two factions at court, one led by the Cecils (Burghley and his younger son Robert) and the other by the ambitious but wayward Earl of Essex.

 
Lord Burghley

And what would happen to the Marranos, with Walsingham gone? Ah, well, that too is another story.


Ann Swinfen


http://www.annswinfen.com


Hearing Voices by Tanya Landman

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I’ve always been fascinated by different accents and verbal mannerisms.  I find them so interesting that on occasion I slip into mimicking the person I’m talking to in an attempt to literally capture their voice in my head.  Before I can stop myself, I find I’m turning a Kiwi or a Texan;  a Scouser or a Glaswegian. (It’s amazing I’ve never been thumped!)

I love writing in the first person - for me, it’s the best way of climbing inside the story - so getting a character’s sound right in my head is essential.  

Hearing voices all started with 100% Pig(A&C Black).  It wasn’t the first book I wrote, but it was the first one to appear in print.  I’d already decided the hero was a Tamworth pig on the run from the sausage factory.  My plot was sorted. But how to tell it?  How did he speak?

The answer came in the middle of the night.  Terence – a custard swilling egomaniac with a fine Australian accent – rootled his way into my dreams and started talking about his impeccable pedigree.

Once I had his Aussie accent, there was no stopping him.  I wrote the first draft in a matter of hours, talking ‘Australian’ out loud as I typed so I could capture Terence’s voice.

(I should point out that I’ve never been to Australia.  I learned the accent off the TV as a student, watching The Young Doctors when I should have been writing essays.  Which just goes to prove that, in the life of a writer, nothing is ever wasted!)

As well as comic and adventure books for 8 – 11 year olds  I write serious historical fiction for Young Adults.  Obviously voice is no less important, but with these books it is much more complex. 

With Apache I was writing in the voice of a girl for whom English was not her native language.  While I was researching, reading the first person accounts of Native Americans who had lived through terrible times, I was struck by their eloquence.  Their rhetoric had a grace and dignity - a kind of Shakespearean quality that I tried hard to capture.  The same was true of The Goldsmith’s Daughter:  the Aztec accounts of the conquest have a beauty and power that I wanted to mimic.

I could hear both girls’ voices in my head all the time I was writing, but speaking their words out loud was a different matter. The Goldsmith’s Daughter was nominated for the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and at very short notice I had to dash to Hay on Wye for an appearance at the festival. I was delighted until I was asked to read an extract from the book. Looking at the page I realised that not only did I not really know how to pronounce the Aztec names properly, but that the voice I had in my head was a world away from the south-east accent that comes out of my mouth! I was tempted to keep the reading very brief but I discovered that actually my own accent didn’t matter:  people could hear Itacate’s voice through mine.

 As for Charley O’Hara and Buffalo Soldier:  her rich, warm speech flowed inside my head like molasses while she told her story.  (Think of comedian Reginald D.Hunter’s accent  and you’ll more or less have it.)  Listening to it while I was writing was the most wonderful experience.  I hope reading it is the same.




AN ENCHANTED CASTLE – Elizabeth Fremantle visits Bolsover

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I visit many historic houses when researching my novels but occasionally a place seduces me completely. One of these was Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire.



I had been on a research trip to Hardwick Hall as I’m writing about Arbella Stuart who spent much of her youth there. Hardwick creates an impression, its vast windows, its symmetry, its gallery stretching endlessly, all combine to for instant impact. I knew that Bolsover Castle was nearby and had been in the same family but didn’t fall in the compass of my research so had intended to give it a miss, particularly as I felt nothing could compete with the glamour of Hardwick, but I had a spare morning and so drove the short distance to Bolsover in the October drizzle.

It was deserted and I wandered about alone entirely captivated. Like Hardwick Bolsover is perched on a promontory looking out over the Derbyshire countryside and Smythson, the architect of Hardwick was involved in its creation, as was his son, but there the similarities end. Bolsover has nothing of the grandeur and size of Hardwick but what it lacks in splendour is made up for in its abundance of charm.

The older parts of the house, set in a long rambling curve of golden stone, blackened with age in places, have fallen into ruin, but the sense of how the spaces might have been lived in is easy to see. The riding house, built around 1660, with its viewing gallery, timber beams and sand floor, still stands. It was the pride of William Duke of Cavendish, whose dedication to the equestrian arts was unprecedented for an English nobleman of the period, making him the epitome of the cavalier. I plan to return for one of the costumed equestrian events that are held in the spring, to see the riding school in all its glory and used as it was intended.


The jewel in the crown of Bolsover though, is the Little Castle, built by Charles Cavendish (father of William) between 1612 and 1617 is a castle in miniature and is entirely intact. It is surrounded by a circular wall with a walkway that offers a view of the both buildings and the rolling landscape beyond. The Little Castle’s interiors, even sparsely furnished as they are, have a feeling of luxury that makes up for their diminutive proportions. The intricate fireplaces, vivid murals and painted panelling have all been carefully preserved and restored and lend the place an air of frivolity that is quite beguiling and at times a little decadent. The Marble Closet, a room lined in rich marble and adorned with risqué depictions of Venus, is clearly designed with a gentleman in mind.

On walking through the rooms, the Heaven Closet, the Elysium Closet, the Star Chamber, each with its own particular character, Bolsover worked its enchantment on me, making me search for ways to put it in my fiction. Perhaps in my proposed novel about Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, I will be able to work in the 1634 royal visit to Bolsover for a feast and performance of Ben Jonson’s ‘Love’s Welcome.’ Otherwise it will have to be a book about Margaret Cavendish the wonderfully eccentric author and thinker who was the second wife of the William the cavalier duke.



Visit the English Heritage Bolsover Castle page to find out more.

Go to elizabethfremantle.com to discover more about Elizabeth Fremantle’s novels.

Thanks to English Heritage for the images.

Hijacking History or the Alarming Burglar Alarm of Ye Olde Cornwall Catherine Johnson

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OK I'm starting with Poldark. Yes the new one. Calm down ladies this isn't Aidan Turner topless. This was in the paper. It's a screen grab. Cast your eye up to the house in the background. No, not Aidan Turner, the house. There between the down pipe and the shiny shiny modern glass window a boxy, twenty first century, burglar alarm.

BBC's new Poldark rescuing Demelza
No I didn't notice it ether, but I did read an article about the fabulous teeth of the lead characters and how the screenwriter  - congratulations Debbie Horsfield - argued that at least the peasantry should have some visible decay. I think we're all used to the glaring teeth on TV and I can forget most things if the story is good. (Although I was wondering about the bridles). And I thought Poldark with it's galloping and frocks and more galloping and tricorns was actually pretty enjoyable Sunday night fare.

So that got me thinking about the liberties I take with history. I expect most of you know my I am crap story by now, but yes, history lessons and me? Not a good mix. My report for History, aged 14 said;

'Catherine's written work is completely inadequate and disorganised...'

I did so poorly in what is now Year 9, I was barred from taking the O level. In fact, my mark for the end of year exam was the worst in the year. I am not a historian. So I can be excused if I don't get everything absolutely spot on, can't I? 

Well, let me say loud and clear I'm not talking about the big stuff, it's a matter of pride that mostly, nearly, almost, everything is as it should be, is as near to how it was as I can possibly make it. It irks when reviewers argue you got your facts wrong when you didn't. 

But I cannot lie. There are times when I have bent historical facts to my will. 

In The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, out in July (I am sorry but you'll get a lot of this from me over the next few months) I took a real story and sort of riffed on it. Mary Willcox was real, but the story I've told has meant messing about with her age, shifting the time line around, in order to reference Frankenstein since you ask, and making up people who did not exist. I wanted so to tell her story as a novel but I ended up reshaping (crafting?) and embroidering and downright inventing so much that it is almost complete fiction. There is a disclaimer in the book, so that's OK, isn't it?


And the script I'm working on at the moment set in the latter half of the eighteenth century. I've stuck to the truth of the background facts. My characters are all inventions, but it could have happened. I'm worried about boats and sailings and desperately making sure it really could have actually worked.

I think that's all I aim for. Could have been. I wouldn't stick Queen Victoria on the mobile phone in the background or put someone in a regency frock with platform heels. I like to do the right thing.

But I have to admit in Sawbones there was one anachronism I couldn't get round. It wasn't revolvers rather than pistols, it wasn't any of the medical science. It was that most unremarkable piece of door furniture the letter box. Paris had them in 1790 but they weren't commonplace (note common place it could be argued that a modern man like William McAdam - my hero's master would have had one fitted) in London until the start of the nineteenth century. I tried to get around the letter box but couldn't. I needed one. So I kept it in.


Are there any things in your books that shouldn't be there? Have you noticed anything in your reading that's bought you up short?

Go on, tell all....

Unusual Recipes

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

When I talk to school groups about my Georgian books, I occasionally recount tales of Georgian food. It's guaranteed to liven up any group. There's something about food from different cultures and times that is an endless source of fascination for most of us.

So I talk about how gelatine for jelly was made by boiling pigs' trotters in a pan and red food colouring obtained from beetles (both still true, of course, we just don't do it ourselves in the home kitchen any more) and how pulled chicken was made - though bizarrely pulled meat has started coming back into fashion, so it's no longer as interesting.

But one of the most weird and unappealing dishes I've found to date is still the one I came across researching my first book Between Two Seas. The novel is set in Skagen, which is the isolated tip of Jutland, Denmark, and where in the 1880s they had rich seas and poor land. As a result, the Skagen dwellers' diet consisted almost entirely of fish, with some rye bread to bulk it up. And yes, they suffered from all kinds of digestive disorders as a result.
One way of ringing the changes was to eat the occasional fried seagull.

That's right. Fried Seagull.

The recipe is as follows (just in case anyone's hungry):
Pluck the bird, wash it and soak it in cold water with some herbs overnight. Then soak it in milk. Tear the skin off, wash it again and boil it in water and herbs until it's half done. Finally, drain it and fry it.

The bird was served stuffed with slices of raw potato. To quote the locals of the 19th century 'Det smagte dejligt' - it tasted delicious.

I've always rather doubted this, suspecting it's probably an extremely acquired taste. So I googled whether anyone else around the world eats seagull, and apparently the Maori people of Southern New Zealand do - fried muttonbird. According to the American food blogger who tried it, it's incredibly greasy and tastes like a tidepool. I thought as much. You can read the account here: http://cookrookery.com/?p=2449
I think the fact that fried seagull was eaten at all is probably a mark of how desperate the Skagen community sometimes was for food, especially in the winter when the sea froze over. It makes me very grateful for my local Sainsbury's.

Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml









Stonehenge: by Sue Purkiss

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I meant to do this month's post on the Museum of Somerset, but yesterday I went to the the new visitor centre at Stonehenge, so that's what's in my head at the moment. It's also kind of the period that I'm interested in writing about at the moment - though not quite: more of that later.


Stonehenge must be one of the best-known neolithic sites in the world. Certainly, the majority of the visitors there yesterday were from other countries, so its fame has certainly spread. The dark stones stand out against the sky, enigmatic and imposing, surrounded by the wide green spaces of the Wiltshire downs. On the ridges overlooking it are barrows; one, now known as Bush Barrow, was excavated in 1808 and found to contain a skeleton, together with several objects finely worked in gold (a breast plate, a smaller, lozenge-shaped object, and a belt-hook), bronze daggers, a bronze axe, and what may have been a stone-headed sceptre. Very Lord of the Rings!

But until recently, the site was contained in a right angle formed by the A344 and the A303. The A303 is still there (it was mooted at one time that it might be put into a tunnel, but that was deemed to be prohibitively expensive) but the A344 has gone, as has the disfiguring car park and the old visitor centre, which used to be just on the other side of the road from the stones.

There is now a new visitor centre at some distance from the site, with a cafe, a shop, an exhibition, and a reconstruction of some of the neolithic houses whose foundations were found at a site near the henge, called Durrington Walls. So, although the busy A303 and the masses of visitors taking selfies against the stones don't exactly add to the atmosphere, still, the setting is now much more in tune with the brooding grandeur of the stones.

The beginning of the exhibition

Back at the visitor centre, the exhibition starts with two semi-circular walls on which changing views of the stone circle are projected; so you can see at in the different seasons, at different times of the day, and as it might have looked at different stages in its long history. It's a very beautiful display. Then, in the main part of the exhibition are objects that have been found on the site, a timeline, and a video display with different archaeologists talking about what is known about Stonehenge, what is not known, and what is conjectured. Interestingly, some of the things that used to be most commonly thought to be true turn out to be completely wrong. Although present-day druids flock to the site at the solstices, it was not built by druids; that was a mistake made by some of the earliest observers of the site in the 17th century - they didn't know about prehistory, and so, realising the site was ancient, they attributed its construction to the earliest inhabitants of Britain they knew about. And the Slaughter Stone - a horizontal stone whose hollows turn rainwater rusty because the stone contains iron - was never, to the best of current knowledge, used for human sacrifice. In fact there's no evidence that human sacrifice took place anywhere on the site (which rather mucks up the symbolism at the end of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, where Tess sleeps on the stone, watched over by the priggish Angel Clare, before being arrested for the murder of the dastardly Alec).

What was it for?

Why was it built? There was a popular theory that the site was a vast astronomical clock - and it's certainly aligned according to the winter and summer solstices, as are many other ancient sites. But most archaeologists are sceptical - for one thing, the positions of the stones on which the theory was mapped turned out to be wrong; the stones were not all in position at the same time - Stonehenge eveolved over centuries. In fact, no-one knows for sure why Stonehenge was built - or why some of the stones were brought all the way from Wales. What was so special about them, that it was worth the immense effort of transporting them from such a distance?

One thing's for certain, though: the society which transported, worked, and erected these stones was not a simple one. The horizontal stones are fitted to the vertical ones by means of a ball and socket joint: hard enough to do in carpentry, but far harder on such immense blocks of stone, and it must have taken the biggest of team efforts to manoeuvre the stones into place.

Inside one of the houses.

The reconstructions of the Durrington houses bring that society to life. They are small, circular houses, probably made of wattle and daub with thatched rooves.. There's a shallow pit for a fire in the centre, and furniture made out of wood: sleeping platforms, shelves and benches. It would have been dark and smokey, but it would also have been warm and cosy. A young archaeologist showed us replicas of household objects found on the site: a bone needle, a  rather beautifully made shoe, a piece of quite finely woven material, a decorated pot, a long-handled hammer. And they had music: there was a flute made from bone. Some of those objects found in the barrows were made of materials from far away - gold, and amber: people travelled long distances to come to Stonehenge - perhaps pilgrims, perhaps traders: whoever they were, this was not a world in which small groups of people lived in total isolation.

Horses at Peche-Merle

But here's the thing that fascinates me. It's estimated that Stonehenge was begun 5000 years ago. But humankind had been around for a very long time before that. Last year, I visited a cave in the south-west of France called Peche-Merle. It had beautiful paintings - and they were in the region of 25 000 years old. So 20 000 years before people sat around a campfire in Wiltshire and someone had a bit too much mead and came up with the crazy idea of building a circle of massive stones - 20 000 years before that, human beings had the creative impulse, the skill and the desire, to create pictures which would stand up against anything in galleries today.

What were they like, those people? If we shared a language, would we communicate similar feelings, similar thoughts? When you follow the exquisite lines of some of those pictures, it's difficult to imagine that the artists' sensibilities would have been so very different to our own.

The past - what a mysterious and fascinating country it is!


And Today's Saint is . . . By Penny Dolan

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I've spent the last five days in bed, struck down by some kind of World Book Day induced bug, and don't think I've felt so bad since. . . when?  No matter, because this morning, I'm beginning to feel better. I woke with that wonderful sense of health pleasantly returning. I know it's not a holy miracle - witness the meds by the bed - but I certainly feel very blessed in my body, and glad to be able to make it downstairs.

Nevertheless, my head's not a sharp as it should be for wrangling a half finished article, so here, as they say is, a post I made somewhat earlier about today's saintly miracle.worker, St Patrick. Please note that Michelle Lovric has many more books out by now! 

Imagine living at a time when the whole year was decorated with different feasts and bright with various holy stories, even if many were a little odd and possibly slightly painful? Once the old church calendar offered a religious tale for almost every day of the year so that - regardless of many less beneficial aspects of the past - there was a rich public pattern that seven-day shopping & the return of the Apprentice may not quite replicate.


Today, the 17th March, is the Feast Day of St Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland. The web offered images of shamrocked Guinness, stylised leprechauns, fancy dress parades and even – may the man himself help us! - bright green dye for ponds and city pools and waterways. The horror!

To greet Bishop Pat in proper style, one should surely climb up the great hill of Croagh Patrick, barefoot or upon one’s knees. 

However, having just read Michelle Lovric’s The Book of Human Skin, I have met this year’s share of penitents. Today's post comes from a warm, comfortable chair. (Do read that wonderful novel, by the way!)



Briefly, Patrick was captured as a boy in Wales, taken as a slave to Ireland, escaped back home, trained as a priest and then, in his dreams, heard Irish voices begging him to return. 

So he did, standing up to the druids who opposed his new faith, baptising many with the extreme vigour of an upstart and ignoring complaints from other clergy that he was enticing too many rich young maidens into his convents, and presumably not theirs. 

Patrick had such mystic powers that he cleared Ireland of all wicked snakes, even removing all biological evidence that serpents had ever existed there too. Amazing! Christianity with strong, added magic. But what was he like?

St Patrick appears in a story that I had partly heard before, one of the great legends of Ireland and this, again briefly, is it:

Oisin, the son of the great ruler Finn MaCumhail, fell in love with the beautiful Niamh of the Golden Hair and rode away with her to the Land of the Ever Young. After years of great happiness, Oisin remembered his family and friends, and longed to visit his old home, just once. At last Niamh set Oisin off on a white horse, tearfully warning him never to set his foot on the ground during his travels.

Alas! Hundreds of years had passed. Oisin found grass growing where the walls of the royal palace once stood and nothing was left in the land to show what had once been. Turning his horse, he saw three men struggling to lift a large and heavy rock. Beneath this stone, they told him, lay the Three Treasures of the Kingdom.

Without thinking, Oisin dismounted to help. As his foot touched the ground, all his strength and beauty faded, the years fell on him and he became an old, old man.

Well, the version I’d originally read, or heard, ended there. I’d imagined a quick  crumbling into sorrowful dust with a funeral to see the story off. But no - there was someone who would not leave the weak, wrinkled old man in peace.

As recorded by Lady Gregory - who sadly was not there at the exact time - along comes St Patrick, insisting on taking Oisin into his house and hearing the whole of Oisin’s story, maybe as a holy version of a reminiscence workshop, although Patrick doesn’t seem to treat him very kindly.

Our pagan hero is unable to withstand the holy fellow but he does not give in gracefully.  Oisin laments the glories of the past and is unimpressed by Patrick’s continual questioning, debating and chiding.

Here's Oisin’s almost final comment on the mighty man in the big green frock:

Oisin:“O Patrick, it is a pity the way I am now, a spent old man without sway, without quickness, without strength, going to Mass at the altar.

Without the great deer of Slieve Luchra; without the hares of Slieve Cuilinn; without going into fights with Finn; without listening to the poets.

Without battles, without taking of spoils; without playing at nimble feats; without going courting or hunting, two trades that were my delight." 

Patrick."Leave off, old man, leave your foolishness; let what you have done be enough for you from this out. Think on the pains that are before you; the Fianna are gone, and you yourself will be going." 

Oisin."If I go, may yourself not be left after me, Patrick of the hindering heart; if Conan, the least of the Fianna, were living, your buzzing would not be left long to you.” 

Too much care in the community, eh?

All of you, Irish or not, enjoy the day, and may St Patrick and all the saints preserve you from any tiresome buzzing!

 www.pennydolan.com



 



Tears of the Gods by Kate Lord Brown

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Driving along the Corniche the other day, it struck me that it is one of the few places left in the city where you can still see history living side by side with the towering skyscrapers springing up from the desert. The pale turquoise waters still shelter old dhows as they have for centuries, and among them the pearling boats. Pearls from the oyster beds of the Persian Gulf have graced the crowns and tiaras of monarchs to the east and west. These mysterious jewels that the ancient Greeks believed were the tears of the gods formed an important part of the Qatari economy before the discovery of oil in the region.




When Qatar was settled in the 1700s, the pearling industry thrived, and local pearls were particularly prized in India. The 'chow' of a pearl is still calculated based on a system devised by Indian merchants in the sixth century, which considers size, weight and lustre. While cultured pearls still impart glamour and status, the quality of natural pearls is beyond compare - a cultured pearl may have five concentric layers of nacre around a bead, whereas a natural pearl has hundreds.


Men like 73 year old Saad Ismail Al Jassim, one of the oldest surviving pearl divers in Qatar, spent months at sea during the summer, living a perilous life in search of these elusive gems. It was hard work: 'We dived from dawn til dusk,' Al Jassim told me, when I met him in Souq Waqif recently. There were shorter diving seasons, but the boats would go out for the main 'big dive' from June to September. The divers risked malnourishment and dehydration, the effects of pressure from quick, deep dives up to a hundred times a day, and the ever present threat of sharks and sea snakes.


Each boat would have up to twenty divers, and twenty helpers to assist them. The divers would gather oysters using a leather glove, the 'khabt', and a 'dayyeen' oyster basket suspended from their neck. Wearing a simple nose clip, and with their feet weighted by heavy stones they could stay down for up to two minutes at a time, holding their breath, before signalling for their assistant to haul them to the surface. In winter it was too cold for the divers to hold their breath, so the summer season was intense. As Al Jassim says: 'if you want a pearl, take many oysters.' He explained that a lot depends on luck - you may open thousands of oysters and find nothing, then open a dozen and find six pearls. Any gems found were kept with the captain of the boat, until the trader visited to buy what had been found.

'God helps those who help themselves,' Al Jassim says. He became a captain in his twenties, and then a 'tawwash' or trader. He is known as the Pahlwan, or strong man, a testament to his years as a champion body builder (that is a photograph of him in his prime, hung behind the till in his store). His years in the pearling industry were followed by twenty eight years with the Qatari police, where he was a major. Al Jassim still likes nothing more than to go to the sea and dive, but now he uses scuba gear.

Natural pearls had their heyday in the nineteenth century as the great jewellery houses of Europe sought the rare gems. As affordable cultured pearls found favour, the industry declined, and Qatari pearls are now rarer and more valuable than ever. Al Jassim showed a delicate bracelet of natural pearls worth thousands of riyals. But perhaps the old pearl diver is as much of a national treasure as the pearls themselves.


A Pearl Museum is planned for Doha, and a recent exhibition curated by Qatar's Museum Authority and the V&A, London, highlighted the finest natural and cultured pearl jewellery. The exhibition toured Japan, London and Brazil, and a beautifully illustrated book 'Pearls' by Hubert Bari and David Lam explores the culture and value of the pearl. 

(HOW) DARE WE WRITE HISTORICAL NOVELS? by Leslie Wilson

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David Starkey has announced in various media that Wolf Hall is a 'deliberate perversion of history', (though he has neither read the books nor seen the television adaptation so I do wonder how he can assert this). Someone, however, has told him that Mark Rylance, playing Thomas Cromwell, is portrayed as showing grief when his wife and daughters are carried off in a day by the sweating sickness. 'I gather Hilary Mantel has imagined this wonderful tender experience of Thomas Cromwell losing wife and children,' he says, and 'there is not a scrap of evidence for it at all.'


Not all historians hate historical fiction, and many of them are hugely generous towards fiction writers  - I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Professor Michael Biddiss, for one, who referred me to several useful texts on Nazi Germany and particularly to the invaluable documentary history of Nazism by J Noakes and G Pridham - so helpful, particularly when I was writing Saving Rafael. However, much as I respect and value historians, I do not need their permission to write my fictions.
The thing is (Doctor Starkey), that a novel set in the past is not an easy-read alternative to a history book (however carefully we do our research, and some of us, notably Dame Hilary, do it very carefully indeed. Indeed Hilary Mantel's work is widely respected by historians). The term historical fiction may perhaps be a tripwire here. We are writers of fiction, and some of us choose to write about historical subjects.That means that we apply our imagination to those subjects, which is what writers do, and of course we go to places (like someone's probable response to a bereavement) that historians must in honesty hold back from.
In exactly the same way, I might write a story about someone, say, who is a teacher in a North of England town. There is no evidence that such a character exists or that any given human being ever behaved exactly as this character did. If I cannot find it, it is not incumbent in me to leave it out, because the job of a writer is to say: 'What if? Supposing?' It is to write a story.
My grandmother in the '30s

Actually, I researched the novels I set in Nazi Germany very carefully, but this was because my enterprise was to understand what it was like to be a person who had to live in Nazi Germany. That is - as readers of my blogs here will readily understand - something very important to me. The enormous amount of reading I have done about the period, as well as watching videos, talking to people who remembered those times, reflecting on the things that came to me from my own family, was not directed at making my works good textbooks for Year 9s. Some people have found them so, but what drove me was that need to open a window for myself on twelve dreadful years that marked and scarred my immediate family as well as damaging and bereaving millions of others.
In the end, though, it came down to 'What if? Supposing?' Supposing one of the boy soldiers who were drafted into the German Home Guard in 1945 was the sole survivor of his unit; supposing he met a girl on the run from Berlin, who had a very different background; supposing the interaction and relationship between them changed both of them as they trod the refugee road with the fighting going on round them? Supposing  the girl was jazz-crazy, and could play the harmonica, and supposing a fantasy grew legs and desperate people started to believe it? Then you get Last Train from Kummersdorf.
There's another idea about historical fiction that is popular among the chattering classes, even post Wolf Hall. It is that it is somehow tacky, chocolate-boxy, that the proper enterprise of novelists is to describe the present day (preferably grittily). Now I have no objection to grit, but there was just as much of it around in the past - and indeed there is a whole generation of excellent novels that deal with the undersides of history, some written by fellow-contributors to this blog. 
One of my history teachers at school took this line: she said we should avoid historical fictions, which were always misleading and trashy, and concentrate on fiction written at the time we were studying. Maybe she would have liked to have a go at the English literature syllabus and excise such trashy works as Henry IV Part One, (which I studied for A Level). Also, she must have despised such trivial works as War and Peace, Schiller's Maria Stuart, Vanity Fair, all of Shakespeare's History plays, Büchner's Danton's Death, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (which I first saw, incidentally, at Kendal Grammar School with my brother as one of the Women of Canterbury and David Starkey in the star role. The poetry blew me away.)

If the past is another country, it's one that is part of our present. Humans have many means of visiting it and trying to inhabit it; through histories, biography, visiting historical sites, and drama, in which I include the novel. To talk about, mythologise, and speculate on the past is part of what it means to be human, and that makes it a valid subject for literature.

LOST LETTERS OF MEDIEVAL LIFE: Some thoughts from Elizabeth Chadwick

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LOST LETTERS OF MEDIEVAL LIFE: English Society 1200-1250. Edited and translated by Martha Carlin and David Crouch: University of Pennysylvania Press ISBN 9 780812 223361



I love historical reference works that involve Martha Carlin* and David Crouch** and have several on my keeper shelves.  This is because their style, while academic is readable, and I know that I can trust the depth of their research and their attention to detail.  Which is the long way round of saying that whenever I am looking for reference works to add to my personal bookshelf,  theirs are names that I automatically type into my search engine.

A few months ago on one of my periodic searches, I came across Lost Letters of Medieval Life and ordered it.  However, even though I expected to receive a strong addition to my reference shelves, I hadn't been quite prepared for the full extent of the content and to put it colloquially, I was 'blown away.' This is an absolutely fantastic work for anyone who wants to know about the material culture of the late 12th and early 13th century. 

So, what are these lost letters?  What's the story?
The first line of the introduction tells us that "This is a book about everyday life in thirteenth century England, as revealed in the correspondence of people from all classes of society, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops and earls."

While letters of the great and good are known from the late 12th and early thirteenth century, regular and business correspondence from the average Joe has been generally thought not to survive, or not to have existed. However Martha Carlin and David Crouch have discovered all kinds of examples of such letters by trawling what are called formularies.  These are documents used to teach the art of letter writing and account keeping to scribes, and to act as sample correspondence.  While many examples concern the movers and shakers of the time,  hidden among them are letters concerned with the business of ordinary, daily lives.  Two of these formularies are still in existence - one at the Bodleian Library, and one at the British Library and it's these which Carlin and Crouch have used as illustrative examples in this marvellous book.

The selected letters, a hundred in all, are set out in the original Latin, followed by an English translation. and are divided into subject headings.  Following a detailed introduction to the texts to help guide the reader through the book and a handy map of the British Isles in the early thirteenth centure,  the subject headings begin with Money and a sub-text of Credit, Debt and Commerce. Among the letters in this sample section is one from an earl ordering wine from his vintner and then the vintner's reply. The vintner's reply is written in a couple of different forms which are to be used depending on the earl's credit rating. The first is warm and compliant, the second is compliant but a little less effusive and contains a polite demand for payment. "I shall accomodate you with the five tuns of wine you have requested, beseeching your earnestly that you pay me in full your old debt, which is in arrears, equally with this new debt, on the said day.  Farewell." 
Included in the earl's request letter, is information on the sort of wine he wants (Gascon and Angevin), how many tuns, and how much he is prepared to pay for it.

What adds an extra layer to this exchange of letters is that Carlin and Crouch then give detailed explanations and examples of the wine trade at the time, so the reader receives a concise but thorough grounding into the background details informing the letter. To add even more icing to the cake, there are highly detailed end notes to each section, giving references, sources, and further reading.

Other letters in the 'Credit, Debt and Commerce' section include orders similar to the above, but to a draper for cloth (which means plenty of excellent detail on the medieval textile industry)  and to a skinner for furs for the earl's Easter garments. (ditto information on the early 13th century fur trade. I was fascinated as to how the skins were rated and sold).

Further sub-texts in this chapter include The Jews, Household provisioning and Hospitality, and Accounts.  We move on then to chapter 2: War and Politics, Chapter 3:  Lordship and Administration:  One such sample letter from this section is "The King orders the shcriff to find and hang the thieves who have been burgling village homes by night." Which then leads on to an enlightening discussion on 13th century law enforcement.  There is a chapter on Family and Community and among the letters in that section are examples for students sending begging letters to their parents for cash (nothing changes!) and from a man who warns his friend he's seen his wife naked in bed with another man and sends her girdle as proof of adultery!  Chapter 5 is an exchange of correspondence concerning the building of a windmill - very new fangled for the early 13th century.

There is a detailed bibliography for further reading at the end of the book, and the endnotes to the chapters themselves as aforementioned are rich in bibliographical detail. There are a few useful maps and some enlivenment provided by black and white photographs, such as this one (in colour here) of Gilbert Marshal coming a cropper at a tournament (there are letters about tournaments) in 1241.
Gilbert Marshal, son of William Marshal, comes a cropper at a tournament.
Wikipedia.  Matthew Paris 13thc

I wrote to David Crouch with whom I occasionally correspond to say how much I'd enjoyed the book. He was delighted - it has been a labour of love for him and Martha Carlin. They had visualised it as seminar source for undergraduate medieval courses, and a book for the dedicated amateur of medieval studies.  It is certainly that - and more. Reference books like this restore my faith in historical scholarship.  Not only are they thoroughly researched and annotated with meticulous attention to detail, they are also highly readable to non scholars and fascinating.  This is going to be a frequent 'Go to' book on my shelf and will join my 'Desert Island' keeper section in my study library.

If you have an interest in the Middle Ages, if you are a teacher, student, re-enactor,  historical novelist or just plain want to know more, either rush out and buy this book or ask your library to buy a copy.

 *Martha Carlin is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

**David Crouch is professor of Medieval History at the University of Hull.

Elizabeth Chadwick owns most of their books and with good reason!









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