New Historical Drama for 2017 by Katherine Clements

January 10, 2017, 5:00 pm

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With the proliferation of historical drama now available on our small screens, you might think we’d be suffering from costume overload. But dramatists and filmmakers are still turning to the past for inspiration and viewers continue to lap it up (good news for us History Girls!). In 2017 we can expect the return of several lavish TV productions, The Last Kingdom, Peaky Blinders, The Crown, Versailles and Poldark to name a few, plus several promising offerings from across the pond that will doubtless make their way onto Netflix and Amazon. Here are a few that I’ll be adding to my watch list this year.

Taboo
Stephen Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, has made quite a name for himself as the go-to man for period pieces with an alternative slant. This new series is the brainchild and long-cherished project of Tom Hardy and his dad, Chips. After previous successful collaborations, Knight must have seemed an obvious choice to pen Hardy’s creative vision. Set in London in 1814, Taboo centres on James Delaney, played by Hardy, who returns to England from Africa following his father’s mysterious death, only to find himself mired in conspiracy and intrigue. It’s a dark, visceral take on the 18th century, the machinations of the East India Company and the burgeoning British Empire. This one is right up my street. Currently airing on FX in the US and BBC1 in the UK.

The Halcyon
Described as ‘Downton in a hotel’ this is ITV’s latest attempt to fill the gap left by the departure of Julian Fellowes and the Crawley family. The Halcyon is set in a glamorous five star hotel at the centre of London society during the Second World War. Beginning in 1940, we’re promised intrigue, politics, romance, gorgeous sets and a period soundtrack (with original songs supplied by Jamie Callum). There’s some excellent acting talent to prop it up too. Olivia Williams and Steven Mackintosh usually raise the bar of anything they’re in. I haven’t watched yet but early reviews are good and I’m sure I’ll drool over the costumes.

Harlots
Harlots follows the fortunes of two rival brothel owners in 18th century London. With a great cast (Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville play the madams in question) this show promises a female perspective on the oldest trade, and boasts an all-female writing and producing team. The series takes its inspiration from 'Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies,' the popular Georgian directory of prostitutes published from 1757-95, with the drama apparently based on the stories of real women. It’s a great premise and I hope it’ll deliver, though judging by the trailer, I have my doubts. It’ll be streaming on Hulu and airing on ITV Encore in the UK from 29 March.

Alias Grace
Based on the Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, this show dramatises the real life case of Grace Marks, an Irish immigrant in Canada who, along with stable hand James McDermott, was convicted of the brutal murder of their employer, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery, in 1843. James was hanged while Grace was sentenced to life imprisonment, becoming one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s. With such great material, some big names involved, and a Netflix budget, this one should be good. Broadcasting in Canada on CBC and streaming globally on Netflix sometime later this year.

Jamestown
Set in 1619, Jamestown follows the first English settlers as they establish a community in the New World. As with Harlots above, the tale will be told, at least in part, from a female perspective, by 'three spirited women from England'. Written by Bill Gallagher and produced by the people behind Downton Abbey, the teaser trailer doesn’t give much away, but I’m predicting a smattering of ripped bodices and some accusations of witchcraft, along the lines of the ill-fated Jimmy McGovern show Banished. I hope I’m wrong. It’ll premier on Sky 1 but there’s no release date yet.

The White Princess
The BBC chose not to option this follow up to Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, but US channel Starz went ahead anyway, with some of the same production team and Gregory on board as Executive Producer. The White Princess concludes the story of the Wars of the Roses and charts the rise of the House of Tudor through the marriage between Princess Elizabeth of York and King Henry Tudor. The reception to The White Queen was lukewarm and it’s unclear right now when this’ll come to air, or which service might pick it up outside the US, but it was filmed in the UK in 2016 so we can expect it at some point this year.

Britannia
Penned by Jez Butterworth, Britannia charts the Roman invasion of what would become Great Britain in 43 A.D. and the rise of iconic female warrior Boudicca. According to the Radio Times, ‘in this dramatisation, the Celtic lands the Romans invade are ruled by warrior women and powerful druids who claim to channel the forces of the underworld.’ With a great cast – David Morrissey, Zoe Wanamaker and Kelly Reilly all feature – and an unusual period setting, this one will be worth a look. It’s unconfirmed when or where this Sky/Amazon co-production will air but it’s slated for some time in 2017.

www.katherineclements.co.uk
www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks
@KL_Clements

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January 11, 2017, 11:00 pm

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Perspective, by Antonia Senior

Sometimes, when I am ill, I play a game with myself, to curb excessive moping. How many times would I have died, had I live in ye olde days?

My current count is twice. Once when I had a blood clot in pregnancy which, if left untreated by blood thinners, would have broken up and whistled through my veins to my lungs, making me cough blood, breath thinly, and eventually die.

And now. Laid up in bed with my leg - my purple, sausagey, goosebumped travesty of a leg - in the air. I have cellulitis, a relatively common and treatable infection of the deep tissues of the skin and the subcutaneous fat layers. It's agonising, debilitating and bloody annoying. But I'm quaffing antibiotics and ibuprofen and the worst side effect is missing this fabulous book launch:

But the side-effect of cellulitis in the olden days was more serious than missing a bookish, boozy party. Left untreated, it can cause gangrene. Yes, I take my art as a historical novelist so seriously that I am flirting with gangrene. (Next, I'll pick up some tuberculosis, and possibly a light bout of plague).

Perspective is a tricky beast. We are all the centre of our own universe and the notion that other people have it tougher is too often met with a shrug.

Hence my game, as the antidote to moping. IT is a miracle that anyone survived the olden days. At least half of my Mum friends would have died in a violent and miserable childbirth without - sterile - medical help. Dead from the pre-eclampsias and the detached placentas and the infections picked up from the dirty, horrifying instruments shoved up inside agonised women. God help the women of St Kilda, who watched 80 per cent of their newborns shrivel and die - perhaps from thepractice of smearing sea bird oil on their cut umbilical cords.

And the pain our forebears suffered! I was weeping with pain from my small bout of cellulitis. Think of Samuel Pepys, and the level of pain from a bladder stone that made him choose possible death and the unimaginable, unanesthetized agony of cutting it out. 

The instruments used on poor Pepys

If in doubt about the power of fiction to recreate the past and inject some perspective, read David Mitchell's brilliant novel: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Groet. His hero, Jacob, assists at a lithotomy - the operation suffered by Pepys. The writing is so gory, so exquisitely detailed that I hesitate to reproduce it here, in case you are eating. 

This is one of the less gruesome bits: "Marinus asks Dr Maeno to hold the lamp close to the patient's groin and take up his scalpel. His face becomes the face of a swordsman.

Marinus sinks the scalpel into Gerritszoon's perinaeum.

The patient's entire body tenses like a single muscle."

Less gruesome, but equally memorable is Dr Maturin's operation on the gunner, Mr Day on the deck of the brig Sophie. He cements his reputation among the sailors for ever, when, as his Captain Jack Aubrey tells it, he "opened our gunner's skull, roused out the brains, set them to rights, stuffed them back in again..."

Lying here with my pet sausage leg, I've been searching for pre-drug remedies for inflamed joints. Some mention of heat and ice, which is all to the good. The Romans were fond of ivy poultices. I reach for the ibuprofen again - and thank whatever Gods may be that I live now. And near a chemist.

A short blog this month, as I am in pain and grumpy. But I'll end with this thought: how many times, dear readers, would you have died in ye olde days?

LA LA IN THE RAIN – Elizabeth Fremantle has some thoughts on Hollywood old and new.

January 12, 2017, 10:00 pm

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I’ve been happy to learn about the haul of Golden Globes for La La Land. I thought it a delight of a film, echoing old-style Hollywood, with two phenomenal central performances. It’s not particularly profound or thought-provoking film but nonetheless carries serious themes beneath its enchanting surface.

Its undisguised relationship to a film I love, Singin’ in the Rain– watched at least once a year for many decades – may well be the reason why I found it so touching. In a strange, sad synchronicity it was the morning after I watched La La Land that I discovered Debbie Reynolds had sadly died bringing the earlier musical, to which it is in many way a homage, back to the fore.

Reynolds’ death was perhaps more of a sting for me than that of her daughter. Though I am very much from the Fisher generation I have never seen Star Wars, so Princess Leia is an unknown to me. But Reynolds’ perky, all singing, all dancing Kathy Selden, who finds her voice Hollywood style, feels like an old friend and seeing all those clips on social media of her hoofing alongside Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor brought a bitter-sweet sensation.

The period of filmmaking in which Singin’ in the Rain is set, the advent of the talkies, and its immediate aftermath, produced some of my favourite films. The kind of films I discovered on television as a child, marvelling at their fast talking heroines filled to the brim with smarts. They have remained favourites because they mark the moment when women had top billing and the best lines. Think of Mae West, in I’m No Angel, ‘When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better,’ or Irene Dunne in my absolute favourite screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, ‘Yes, tell her I’d love to meet her. Tell her to wear boxing gloves.’ 

The 1930s was a time when women in film were on top and Singin’ in the Rain for all its light-hearted silliness and slapstick was, at twenty years’ distance, articulating that moment when the voiceless siren, whose power lay merely in the reflection of the male gaze, came off her pedestal to become a real flesh and blood heroine whose wit, charisma and comic timing became box-office gold. 

It was a short-lived moment, by the advent of WW2 the screwball comedy was on its way out. Now, eighty years on, we are in an era in which most films don’t even pass the Bedchel Test. (This is a test that requires a film to have three things: Two female characters – preferably named; Who talk to each other; about something other than a man.) It is also sadly the case that there are few actresses now who earn as much, or hold equal billing with, their male counterparts. Indeed Singin’ in the Rain itself, though its subject matter was about a young ingénue finding power with her voice, typically for 1952, put Gene Kelly firmly at centre stage.

But I saw a glimpse, in La La Land, of a refreshing spirit of Hollywood gender equality. The two protagonists, each pursuing their dream, come to understand the sacrifices required for personal fulfilment. Stone’s Mia is every bit as intrinsic to the message of the film as Gosling’s Sebastian. She’s not simply the ‘love interest’ or the ‘sidekick’ there to give him a plot and make him look good.

Additionally an important difference between this film and the Screwball comedies that I love so much, is that the punch line of the narrative has a divergent gender message: her fulfilment isn’t ultimately dependent on him. This equality is reflected in the fact that unusually both Stone and Gosling won Golden Globes for best actor/actress. More commonly the actress would be the regarded as supporting his starring role. It’s hardly a seismic change but perhaps it is a tremor that indicates Hollywood’s tectonic plates are making a gradual and welcome shift.

Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel, The Girl in the Glass Tower, is published by Penguin.  Find more information on her website: elizabethfremantle.com

Stories from Japan by Lesley Downer

January 13, 2017, 4:01 pm

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‘Please allow me to introduce myself ...’ as the Devil said in the Rolling Stones’ song ...
There’s a phrase in Japanese: jiko shokai. It means ‘self introduction’ and it’s what you do when you meet a person or a group for the first time.
You step forward, bow and present your business card, holding it with both hands with thumb and forefinger at the top two corners, turned so that your new acquaintance can conveniently read it, and say, ‘My name is Lesley Downer (or whatever). How do you do?’ You then take your new acquaintance’s business card with both hands with suitable respect and read it carefully (as opposed to stuffing it in your pocket).
Opposing armies of samurai used to introduce themselves before they went into battle. It was called nanori - ‘name announcing.’ The warriors would step forward and yell out their name, lineage, exploits and the exploits of their ancestors to make sure that they were only fighting adversaries of suitable reputation and stature.
In 1274 when Kublai Khan sent an Armada of 4000 ships to Hakata Bay in the southern island of Kyushu, determined to conquer the country, the samurai who confronted the army of Mongols on the beach did exactly that. But they soon discovered that the invaders didn’t have such exquisite manners when they cut them down mid-speech. The Mongols might have overrun Japan when they arrived again in 1281 to finish off the job if it hadn’t been for the Japanese gods who sent a divine wind - kami kaze - that dashed the Mongol ships on the rocks and destroyed their entire fleet.

The kami kaze strikes during the second Mongol invasion of Japan

This is my first regular post for The History Girls blog so I shall introduce myself. A lot of my posts - though not all - will have to do with Japan and I’d like to explain why.
For me the seed was planted more than thirty years ago when I read Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book. In it he wrote of the Japanese aesthetic approach to life. In Britain, identical-sized pots by a particular craft potter all cost the same. In Japan you can have ten very similar pots, all of exactly the same size. Nine will be priced at - say - Y5,000 (just under £35). One will be just a tiny bit different - often not obvious to the untrained eye. Perhaps it’s a little uneven, a little off centre. Or perhaps something will have happened in the firing. The glaze will be a little different, maybe there’ll be an unexpected flash of colour, what looks like a flaw that to the Japanese eye gives it beauty. That pot will be priced at Y50,000 or even Y500,000.
The western potter, conversely, strives to make all pots perfectly centred and perfectly round with no variation. As a famous senryu (satirical short poem) puts it:
‘Western food -
Every damn plate
Is round!’

Cup by a famous Okinawan potter. You can see the master’s hand in the strength of the line in the fish design.

	Flagon by the Okinawan potter’s son, also highly accomplished, using his father’s trademark fish design.  The flagon is larger and more complex than the cup but was much cheaper.

At the time that I read Leach’s book I was teaching English to foreign students in Oxford. One, Yoshi, was Japanese. As a first step I asked him to teach me the language.
I also bought the Penguin Anthology of Japanese Literature. I’d recommend it to this day to anyone who has the smallest interest in Japan and its culture.
I began at page 1 and read through to the end. It took me on a wild journey, introduced me to people on the other side of the planet who had lived life to the hilt, some more than a thousand years ago.
I read of Ono no Komachi, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Like Helen of Troy or Cleopatra she became the emblem of beauty. Men were willing to die for her. One commander of the imperial guard was desperate to have her as his own. To prove his love she ordered him to come to her house for a hundred nights and sleep outside on the bench used to support the shafts of her chariot before she would even consider his suit. All through that freezing winter he did so. When the morning of the hundredth day came round she went out to offer herself to him as his reward. But he was dead. He had died in the night.
For her hardheartedness she suffered the most terrible punishment of all - the loss of her beauty. She lived to be a hundred years old and in Noh plays is portrayed not as a beauty but a crone, forever bewailing her fate.
Komachi really lived and wrote passionate, complex poems. Just as the monks of Wessex were beginning to set down the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as the Vikings were sacking Paris in 845, 100 years before Beowulf was written, she was composing poems like this (in Donald Keene’s wonderful translation in the Penguin Anthology):
‘This night of no moon
There is no way to meet him.
I rise in longing -
My breath pounds, a leaping flame,
My heart is consumed in fire.’

Ono no Komachi by Kanō Tan’yū - http://www.konpira.or.jp/museum/houmotsu/houmotsu_2009.html

Ariwara no Narihira, famous as a great lover and poet, lived around the same time. A nobleman of - naturally - peerless beauty, he was banished from the capital, Kyoto, because he had violated the Vestal Virgin. He travelled through the wilds of eastern Japan, past Mount Fuji and the uninhabited plains around what is now Tokyo, breaking hearts and writing sublime poetry. It was said that while other men are picky, he slept with everyone.
The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, came a little later. It was written by a court lady around 1008, before the Battle of Hastings. I’d expected such a famous classic to be a tough read but, at least in translation, it was utterly enthralling. I fell in love with Genji, the central characters, a handsome, roguish, charismatic, badly-behaved prince. Genji was not in the slightest like Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales (written 300 years later). It was all about relationships and feelings, closer to Jane Austen, the Brontes or George Eliot.
And so I read on through the centuries - of samurai armies battling, of a hero who led his band of warriors straight down a vertical cliff face to attack the enemy camped on the beach and how that enemy - including the baby emperor - fled into the water and were drowned, which is why the crabs’ shells there look like samurai helmets to this day. I wept at the fate of doomed lovers, was gripped by tales of love suicide, laughed at the outrageous Tristram Shandy-like antics of a pair of ne’er-do-well nineteenth century vagabonds, and found Basho’s profound and pithy haiku resonating in my mind.

Matsuo Basho with his straw hat and his companion, Sora.

I simply had to go there - see the beach where Atsumori played his flute, the hillside where Basho sat down on his straw hat and wept. Yoshi, my Japanese teacher, warned me that behind every temple there was a factory but I paid no attention. I found myself a job in Japan and off I went.
Over the years I’ve visited all these places and many more. My reading of Japan’s wonderful literature colours everything I see there. Of course Yoshi was right. There are lots of factories, industrial zones and cities of skyscrapers. But even though the country has changed you can still visit the place where the samurai warriors encountered the Mongols on the beach. (In fact underwater archaeologists have found a couple of sunken Mongol ships). You can still imagine how it was back in the days when the commander of the guard spent his last fateful night on the bench outside Ono no Komachi’s house.
I also began to write. While I’m not in Japan so much these days, I spend much of my time imagining myself back there - not in the glamorous Tokyo of skyscrapers and neon (which I also know and love) but in the nineteenth century, as Japan was on the cusp of enormous change. This is what I write about in my latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen. I hope I’ll have the chance to take you with me.

Why the (Western) World loves an Extrovert, by Fay Bound Alberti

January 14, 2017, 4:00 pm

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On New Year's Eve my friend and I sat in a busy venue, gently grumbling at all the bonhomie involved in the celebrations: strangers hugging, singing and optimistically making predictions for 2017. We were the obligatory introverts - the spectres at the feast, commenting on the party that was erupting around us, rather like Statler and Waldorf, those grumpy old men from the Muppets. 

I thought a lot about introversion and extroversion over the festive period, and its social history. The overwhelming narrative of the season is the good humour and geniality of friends and family, and yes, strangers, in the spirit of man's humanity to man - though it always seems to be women who are landed with the practicalities. Those who are not swept up in the spirit are the Scrooges and the Grinches of the world, preferring their own company to that of others. The pressure on all of us to grab the hands of strangers for a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne is considerable. 

So where does it come from, this association of introversion with hostility and unfriendliness? What got me thinking about this is the history of loneliness, a subject that I am researching for a forthcoming book. Today, loneliness seems to be an ever growing concern, variously linked to adolescent depression, middle-age suicide and elderly dementia. To be separated from society, the story goes, is to fail to function in it. Loneliness has become shorthand for a pathological isolation from the outside world, made all the more challenging by the rise of social media. Sites like FaceBook are said to encourage isolation at the same time as they make us more 'social' - lurking on social media websites and seeing everyone else leading apparently 'perfect' lives, leads to introspection and depression. 

It is introverts who most commonly report, or are more willing to report being lonely, but the term introvert is itself a modern one,coined by the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (pictured below) in 1921. At the time of Jung's research, many of our current working ideas about the self and society, emotions, the mind and the role of the individual were being formulated with the rise of the mind sciences. Scientific explanations for human personality and behaviour were being discussed, especially in relation to the structuring and working of the brain. 



In the new mind sciences, extroversion was characteristic of talkative, outward-facing personalities who were energetic and enlivened by being around other people. By contrast, introversion was associated with isolation and reserve, and by the need to spend time alone. Most personality models in history since Jung have worked with this basic understanding of differences between extroverts and introverts. In 1962 Myers-Briggs created a workable model of Jung's theories (the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or MBTI) which is still in common usage. Curious? There is even a free online test, adapted from Myers-Briggs that you can take at home. 

The MBTI 'personality inventory' uses Extroversion and Introversion as one of its main categories of analysis. Despite changing models of psychology since the 1960s, concepts of introversion and extroversion continue to dominate, and have acquired a moral loading. Extroverts are generally seen to be open and agreeable, and introverts thoughtful as well as neurotic. The basic idea of personality (or temperament) types is not new; it has been around since the classical period. Following Galen, men and women were divided into melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric or sanguine individuals, depending on how much of a particular humour they possessed within their bodies. These differences are represented rather nicely below by the seventeenth-century painter Charles Le Brun's allegorical depiction of different personality types. 

Today, there is more moral loading about different personalities, and the value of introversion and extroversion. In the Western world we place higher stock on being extroverted, as identified by Susan Cain in Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking  Many organisations and institutions (I have worked for at least one) celebrate noise and activity over quietness and consideration. Introversion, despite its necessity in many of the creative arts, has acquired something of a pathology; shyness a failing. Why is this? 

Part of this association (extroversion = good and introversion = bad) can be rooted in the social context of the psychological models that emerged after Jung. In the early twentieth century, European and American models of the self valued self-help, self-reliance, hard work and the rise of the individual. Being able to stand out, being willing to be vocal and outward-facing, being able to demonstrably lead others was a measure of success in presenting the self, as in business. On 21st century social media, vloggers like Zoella sell not only books and make up but a particularly modern form of aspirational extroversion that would have been unthinkable in an earlier time. 

Above: Zoe Sugg (Zoella) speaking at the 2014 VidCon, 28 June 2014. Credit: Gage Skidmore.

There are global differences in the desirability of extroversion. While it is taken as the norm in the UK and US, it has been argued, extroversion is less acceptable in traditionally social-orientated traditions of Japan and Buddhist cultures. Of course these are stereotypes, and differences are often surface, rather than core. But part of the reason for introversion in Buddhist cultures is the emphasis on looking inwards, in stillness and mindfulness, characteristics that arguably retain a different value in the West.  

In the real world, of course, we need introverts just as much as extroverts. And most of us are neither entirely one thing or the other. It is common for each of us to feel introverted or extroverted at different times depending on our mood, company and environment. Extroversion is just one of the 'big five' that psychologists now use to measure personality and aptitudes. In addition to extroversion, the characteristics that matter are neuroticism (emotional stability); conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness. The vast majority of people fit somewhere in the middle on most of these rankings. There are always exceptions. In a recent study, The Atlantic magazine found that Donald Trump, America's new President, scored extremely low on agreeableness and unusually high on extroversion: a 'combustible' combination whose effects have yet to be seen. 

A do-it-yourself wassailing kit - by Sue Purkiss

January 15, 2017, 6:00 pm

≫ Next: ON READING "THE WICKED BOY". By Penny Dolan

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I wasn't particularly aware of the ancient custom of wassailing until recently. Okay, about this time of year you tend to see pictures in the local paper of people with green faces cavorting among apple trees - but hey, I live a mere stone's throw from Glastonbury, where the streets are paved with crystals and littered with spell books, and where every year they have a Goddess Conference at which the place is FILLED with people with green faces - not to mention magical wells, a conflux of ley lines and a 2000 year-old thorn tree. (Well, that was actually vandalised a few years ago, but I hear there are a few cuttings in the care of the fairy kingdom under Wearyall Hill - or possibly at Worthy Farm under the care of Michael Eavis.) So green faces don't raise an eyebrow in these parts.

Goddesses at Chalice Well in Glastonbury.

But, as I've mentioned before in this place, I fairly recently joined a choir. We sing a lot of folk songs, and at this time of year, when Christmas has come and gone, we sing a Wassail Song. I don't know the words off by heart - our leader, Issy, sings it first and we follow her - but they are very similar to these, which I found on the web.

'Old apple tree, we wassail thee and hope that thou shalt bear,
For the Lord doth know where we shall be come apples another year.
For to bloom well and to bear well, so merry let us be,
Let every man take off his hat and shout out to the old apple tree.
   Three cheers for the apple tree: hip hip...'

Well, it's a very jolly tune and we like singing it, so we make quite a racket, and I only hope it's loud enough for the apple trees of Cheddar to hear and be enthused. Because the purpose of wassailing is to encourage them, as the song says, 'to bloom well and to bear well'. It's entirely logical. I often talk to plants. I had quite a chat with a Christmas rose the other day, congratulating it on flowering so beautifully when all its predecessors have singularly failed to thrive; and I always apologise to shrubs before I give them a severe pruning, and explain to them that it's for their own good. I find these little courtesies make all the difference, and I'm sure they do to the apple trees as well.

There used to be lots of apple orchards in Cheddar when we first moved here thirty or so years ago. But over the years, most of them have been grubbed up in favour of more houses, and in Somerset generally, the orchards for many years seemed to be dwindling. But since the growth in popularity of cider over the last few years (Thatchers is just down the road), orchards are back in favour, and so is wassailing.

So I thought I'd look into the history of it.

Wassailing in the olden days.

Apparently 'wassail' comes from 'Waes hael!', the Anglo-Saxon greeting and toast which means 'Good Health!' Its purpose is to wake the trees up and scare away any evil spirits, thus ensuring a good harvest of fruit in the autumn. This happens on Twelfth Night - but usually, it being such an old and historical custom, it takes place not on the 6th January, but on the 17th, because this would have been Twelfth Night (or Old Twelvey, as we country folk apparently call it) before the introduction of the new-fangled and totally unnecessary Gregorian calendar in 1582.

The correct procedure is to choose a Wassail King and Queen, who lead a procession of interested parties round the local orchards. At each one, the Queen is lifted up into one of the trees, and she presents it with a piece of toast soaked in the wassail drink, which seems to be a kind of cider punch. This is a gift to the tree spirits. (Here's a recipe - I can't vouch for its authenticity, but it sounds rather nice.)

Then everybody sings the song, after which they shout and bang pots and pans and drums and generally make as much noise as they can to drive the evil spirits out. (Presumably the good spirits put their hands over their ears after eating up their toast.) Then I think they probably finish off the cider punch, and dance round the fire a bit.

Below is a video from YouTube of a wassail in Gloucestershire. I'd personally like to see a bit more attention to wearing appropriate clothing (see picture above, of a wassail at Brent Knoll, just down the A38 from here) and I'm really not happy about the plastic bags, but it's a good and lusty rendition of the song.

So there you are. I've given you a day's notice, and with a bit of practice you'll soon master the song - so if you have apple trees, prepare to wassail them. Unfortunately, they really don't grow well in our garden...

ON READING "THE WICKED BOY". By Penny Dolan

January 16, 2017, 10:00 pm

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The Wicked Boy arrived as a Christmas gift. I was very glad to see him there by my armchair. I had noticed the tall “publicity piles” in Waterstones - and other outlets - and seen various reviews and articles published when Kate Summerscale’s title first appeared, and yet I was a little anxious.

My worries about how this “Mystery of A Victorian Child Murderer”would end was there from the earliest pages. Besieged by a dreary cold, I even put the book down for a while, fearing that bad events would only end worse.

A week later, I went back to the beginning and stared reading again. The Wicked Boy opens in July 1895, when thirteen-year-old Robert Coombes and his year-younger brother Nattie jaunt off to The Oval to watch a cricket match - after murdering their mother. With their father away at sea, the boys live a fantasy life for a week, aided by deceit and theft and a simple-minded family friend. How can this end in any way well, I thought?

The subject matter may be sensational but the account does not nip along. The amount of research demands patience reading, and a willingness to pause in one moment, whilst events or histories seemingly less relevant are expanded.  

“Listen,” I imagined Kate Summerscale saying, “you need to know all this to appreciate just how it was in those times. You need to know more than just the boy.”

The Wicked Boy's world expands and unfolds far beyond the grisly events and the eventual trial. Summerscale’s research takes one through the geography and population of Plaistow and East London to where, beyond the rows of houses, open land still stretches down to the Thames. She guides us through the stench of the area, from the small local industries to the mighty London docks, where live cattle are loaded on to ships bound for America. 

Summerscale brings is the brief testimonies of many involved in the awful event: the boy’s teachers, the pawnbroker, the family friends and Liverpool aunt, and we are introduced to the schools & institutions the boys occasionally attended. We half-meet the father, who hears of his sons arrests when he is docked in America but who cannot afford to abandon his work-passage back, and half-imagine what life the brothers led in the shadow of their excitable but apparently violent mother.

The press and public were particularly strident about the stack of a type of sensational magazine, known asPenny Bloods or Penny Dreadfuls, found in the house. 

The Bloods fascinated Robert, and his indulgence in tales of vicious crimes and bold and often lawless adventure proved, for some, further evidence of the dangers of encouraging literacy in the working classes.

Later in the book, there is a closer analysis of such narratives, comparing these rough tales with the type of boy's adventure stories told in more respected books. In many way, the traits admired in the heroic protagonists are similar, except perhaps for their class in society - and the cost of the books themselves. 

The two brothers certainly seem strange boys, but Nattie is judged too young to be guilty and called to give witness to his older brother’s crime. Robert’s behaviour in the dock is noted as odd – laughing, grimacing, unaware – and there are comments about the navy blazer edged with gold cord that he wears. The Coombes were a family that wanted to look respectable to other eyes.

What punishment would fit Robert's crime? Gradually light seeped through this grim situation, confounding my preconceptions. Robert is eventually judged too young to hang; he becomes the youngest inmate in an institution that can make press headlines even to this day. In September 1895, Robert entered Broadmoor, a fortified criminal metal asylum in Berkshire.

However, the asylum, especially Block 2 where Robert is placed after his admission period, is humane, built in "a pastoral setting . . that recalled "a lost innocence. . . both gaol and sanctuary". There is an orderly, kindly regime. Robert is taught tailoring, but reading books, playing musical instruments and work in the gardens are part of the experience and too. This calm but strict benevolence was totally at odds with what my ignorance was expecting and were a highlight - in many ways - of the book.

After seventeen years, in March 1912, Robert was released to the care of the Salvation Army colony at Hadleigh in Essex, and then sent to Australia. The era of transportation is over, but the young country still needs to be populated, even by persons advised to make a new life. 

By this point in The Wicked Boy, I was reading hopefully. Many of the changes that marked the end of the 19th century had won through: universal education as a right, the formation of the NSPCC and banning of cruelty to children, a growth in understanding of madness, the treatment of prisoners and a belief in rehabilitation. Even if never perfectly practiced, some aspects of society had changed: the book was more than Robert’s story. It felt as if the Victorian’s better belief in “good works” had won through.

However, if one believes crime calls for karmic punishment, it arrives when Australia’s men sign up to fight for the mother country. Robert, an able musician, becomes a military bandsman, a role that sounds almost safe until one knows that bandsmen acted as the army’s unarmed stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded and the dying through the field of battle. Robert Coombes survives the heat and disaster of the retreat at Gallipolli and goes on to endure the dreadful mud of Paschendale. 

Although WWI seems familiar history, this section had a particular poignancy. Robert, the child who relished the bold and bloody yarns of those “Penny Dreadfuls” and imagined the drama of a childhood adventure, became, in a sorrowful way, the brave and stalwart hero he had once admired. 

By now, I felt the book well worth a patient reading.

Then, just as the long account seems to be settling into a calm ending, Summerscale uncovers more: an unexpected ending which I will not spoil here, other than to say that, in a quiet way, it seems to vindicate the wisdom of those who treated the child Robert Coombes with kindness. Despite my earlier anxiety, THE WICKED BOY became a largely positive story, even though many of the arguments and complaints are still easily raised to this day. 

It feels a book I need to return to, but right now, with the book closed, I keep thinking about a moment from the trial. 

Was it the gold braid around young Robert Coombe’s neat navy blazer that swayed judgement at the trial? 

If the Wicked Boy had not looked so noticeably keen to be clean and respectable, would his story have been different? And his life shorter? 

And are such prejudices still there in public perceptions of young offenders now?

Penny Dolan

Providing they miss... Clare Hollingsworth: 1911 - 2017 - Celia Rees

January 17, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Clare Hollingworth 1911 - 2017

Last Wednesday, it was announced that Clare Hollingworth, doyenne of foreign correspondents, had died in Hong Kong at the age of 105. During her long life she reported on conflicts around the globe, thriving on the thrill and the danger, maintaining with typical bravura that there was 'a certain attraction in being shot at - providing they miss.' 

Clare Hollingworth in 1932

Born to upper middle class parents in Leicestershire, she quickly escaped the life of marriage and motherhood that had been mapped out for her. She took a secretarial course and went to work for the League of Nations in Geneva and then in Poland for the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.   She helped many refugees to escape from Germany. Too many. She was asked to leave Poland. She returned to Britain and in August 1939, she got a job as a reporter with the Daily Telegraph, working with Hugh Carleton Greene in Warsaw. Her career in journalism began in spectacular fashion. As a novice stringer stationed in Katowice, she managed the scoop of the century: the outbreak of the Second World War. The day after her arrival, she borrowed the British consul's official car 'for a day's shopping' over the border in Germany. The first town she came to was deserted. Then, as she drove on the the next town, she was passed by 65 dispatch riders. She stopped for lunch before driving back to Poland. On her return journey, she noticed that the sides of the roads were obscured with hessian screens. As one blew back, she saw rows and rows of German tanks. They belonged to von Rundstedt's Army Group South. Her story appeared on the front page of the Telegraph on 29th August, 1939, with the headline: '1,000 tanks massed on Polish frontier'. The next day, she woke to the sound of German bombers overhead. She rang in her story. The war had begun. At first she wasn't believed, until she put the telephone receiver out of the window and shouted, "Listen!" 

She escaped from Poland, going first to Hungary then to Rumania where she was nearly arrested by the ultranationalist Iron Guard. From Rumania, she went to Bulgaria, then to Greece, always just a step ahead of the German forces. Eventually, she escaped to Egypt in an open boat. Once there, she went on bombing missions with the RAF and joined patrols behind enemy lines.

Most of her Second World War reporting was done from the Middle East. She reported from Persia on the Anglo Russian invasion and conducted the first interview with the Shah when he ascended the Peacock Throne. He remembered her and, decades later, she was the only reporter granted an interview when he abdicated in 1979.

She went on to cover conflicts in Algeria during the '50s, Malaya, Borneo and Aden (Yemen) in the '60s and the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965. She was in Israel during the struggle for independence and again to cover the Six Day War in 1967. She was in Vietnam and Communist China, always at the centre of the action, tough, fearless and relentless in pursuit of a story. She continued to obtain notable scoops, reporting Kim Philby's escape from Beirut on a Soviet ship in 1963 (a story suppressed by her paper for fear of libel), Chairman Mao's severe stroke in 1974 and tipping Deng Xiaoping as China's eventual leader. Although her stories were often initially greeted with scepticism, her reporter's instinct remained unerring.       

She continued to work as a Far East correspondent with the Sunday Telegraph. Based in Hong Kong, she covered the handover of the colony in 1997. When failing eyesight and hearing made it impossible for her to continue her work, she still had the papers read to her everyday and held court at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club over a gin and tonic. Kate Adie recalls being told of her presence with the words: 'There's a legend upstairs.' 

She was a role model for generations of female reporters and correspondents and, to the end, she slept with shoes and passport by her bed, ready to go anywhere should the call come. In a career that spanned over fifty years, she covered every major conflict from the Second World War onwards and is rightly regarded by many of her peers as one of the finest journalists of the 20th Century.   

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Cowboys and Indians by Katherine Webb

January 18, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Yesterday, I finished reading Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, one of the books I was given for Christmas. It is simply breathtaking. The book recently won the Costa Novel of the Year award, and I hope it goes on to win the overall Book of the Year prize too. Every now and then, a historical novel comes along that picks you up and drops you down right in the past, like a perfect magic spell, so that reading it is like being there. Hilary Mantel did it with Wolf Hall; Andrew Miller did it with Pure, and Sebastian Barry does it with this book.

By chance, Barry's setting is one I've long been interested in: The American frontier in the nineteenth century - the 'Wild West', as myth would have it. And what a culture of myth and legend there is, surrounding that extraordinary period. The relentless pursuit of land and better fortune by early European settlers on that continent provides a truly astonishing chapter in the book of human history - but of course it came at immense cost to the indigenous population. I find it hard to read about the shoddy treatment of the American Indians by the settlers without my blood boiling at the injustice of it all. But more of that in a moment.

I heartily recommend Barry's new novel to you all, whether you're interested in the history of the USA or not. Whilst his magic trick of sending the reader back in time is one I wish I could emulate with my own fiction, the book is a treasure trove for readers, regardless. There are jewels of prose on every page. To prove it, I am going to open the book at random now, and quote a sentence or two:

'Third day a big thunder storm and it only a huge song singing of our distress. Hard to get the darkness out of your head. Full ten thousand acres of dark blue and black clouds and lightning flinging its sharp yellow paint across the woods and the violent shout and clamour of the thunder. Then a thick deluge to speak of coming death.'

Stunning. Our narrator is Tom McNulty, a young Irish man driven to emigrate by the famine in Ireland, and his narrative describes his life as soldier and settler in the Indian Wars and the American Civil War in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been easy for me, when reading about the actions of soldiers and officials in the Indian Wars, to condemn their brutality as a symptom of the racism and greed of a previous generation. Barry's book, however, says important things about what can happen, and what a man will do, if he is made worthless to society, if he has no stake, and no chance of betterment. It says important things about the human heart -  its capacity for love and tenderness as well as the damage done to it by violence and fear. It is an astonishing feat of fiction writing, and brilliant bit of myth-busting for anybody whose mental image of American history comes from Hollywood films.

As I mentioned, I have been interested in early American history for quite some time. I even had a stab at writing about it myself, in my first novel The Legacy, which featured a greenhorn New York girl getting married to a rancher and moving to Oklahoma Territory in the early years of the twentieth century - and all the many and lastingly devastating ways in which she does not cope in her new life. I acquired a number of very good books on the subject of the 'Wild West' as I did my research, and hear are four of the best, in my opinion:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Written in 1970, this book perhaps marks the start of the revision of American history. The subtitle, An Indian History of the American West says it all. Brown has written here a damning, heart-breaking history of every bloody battle, every broken promise, every casual cruelty and ignored treaty of the Indian Wars. The terrible inevitability with which an entire race and culture was near eradicated is documented here - whether the Indians were beaten in battle by the sheer numbers of white settlers and soldiers, or were starved, or were herded by treaty to lands they did not know and could not thrive upon. This book exploded the myth of the plucky cowboy protecting his family against the marauding savages. A harrowing but important read. Dee also wrote Wondrous Times on the Frontier, a fascinating collection of anecdotes about life in the early West, told first-hand by the men who were there.

Sand in My Eyes by Seigniora Russell Laune. Something easier to read but just as interesting. This memoir, first published in 1956, tells of Laune's early life in the rural town of Woodward at the turn of the twentieth century. The back of the book praises its exuberant representation of 'the pioneering spirit that civilized the West'... But, of course, Laune is blameless in living her life at the time and in the place she was dealt, as we all generally must. Her memoir moves away from the very early days of settlement to the beginnings of the modern era in what was still very much a spit-and-sawdust town, and gives an engaging portrayal of the trials of domestic life for women back then. Tellingly, it makes almost no mention of the Indians at all, though Woodward was in Oklahoma Territory, which lagged behind the rest of the States, developmentally, because it had remained set aside 'Indian Territory' for several decades - until the pressure of white settlement grew too much.

The Virginian, by Owen Wister. The novel that spawned an entire genre, The Virginian was written in 1902, by which time the West was more or less tamed, no longer a frontier, and the myth of the heroic, gun-toting, ranch-building cowboy had been born. Here we have the strong, silent man, carving his own destiny out of the wilderness; the virtuous, brave woman he loves; the romance of the sweeping landscape, and what I believe to be the first ever depiction of a quick-draw gun duel in the main street of a Western town. Very interesting to see how stories begin to be told, and how they can then grow and spread.

The Real Wild West by Michael Wallis. Published in 1999. This book combines a fascinating history of the vast 101 Ranch in Oklahoma - which at its height covered 110,000 acres, operated its own trains and had its own oil refinery, schools, churches and postal service - with a history of the birth and perpetuation of the myth of the American frontier. The 101 Ranch created the first ever touring 'Wild West Show', which became world famous, and featured real life figures like Geronimo and Buffalo Bill in what must surely, to them, have felt like surreal theatrical representations of their own lives. The book is packed with detail and anecdote, is hugely informative on early settler and farming life, and can be read for sheer enjoyment as well for an insight into the way in which the bloody, difficult history of a nation can have its heartbreak and suffering sanitised, repackaged and sold to the masses.

Admiral Duncan: Forgotten Hero - by Ann Swinfen

January 19, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Danloux' painting of Duncan on Venerable

Admiral Adam Duncan was once a celebrated hero for his great victory over the Dutch fleet under De Winter off Camperdown in October 1797 – a victory which has been compared, in its strategic importance, with the Battle of Britain in the early years of the Second World War, or the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. And yet over the years it has become a commonplace to claim that Duncanhad been insufficiently recognised by government at the time, and unfairly forgotten since, even by his native city - Dundee - itself.

That Duncan was not forgotten in Dundeeis illustrated by this stained glass window from the old Town House, a building since demolished.

Much more recently, writing in the volume of essays published to mark the bicentenary of the Battle of Camperdown, Councillor Andrew Lynch complained that the battle ‘has largely and unjustly sunk from public view, just as Adam Duncan, the hero of the hour, had been eclipsed by the memory of the heroically deceased Horatio Nelson’. And it is the case, of course, that there is no Camperdown Square in London, nor a Duncan’s Column.

All this is true, but fortunately only partly true. Duncan’s great victory was by no means overlooked by the government of the day, or the people of the nation. He was ennobled to a Viscountcy. His pension of £2000 a year was the largest pension ever awarded up to that time. Towns like Edinburgh and Dundeeoffered him the freedom of their city. A substantial range of souvenirs was produced for the people of Great Britain to commemorate their national hero. The fact is, of course, that there is a wealth of material, and especially images and artefacts, to inform the modern student of Duncan’s life, career and achievements.

Adam Duncan was born in the Seagate, Dundee, not far from where his statue now stands, the third son of Alexander Duncan, Provost of Dundee, the third member of his family to hold that office. Adam’s mother was Helen Haldane of Gleneagles, and he had two older brothers – John, who joined the East India Company, and died in their employ, and Alexander, a soldier, who served on the continent and in Canada, before himself dying in1796 – the year before Camperdown.

Adam was born in 1731, and in 1746 he joined the Navy as a midshipman – his first ship being a sloop called Tryal, under the command of his cousin, Robert Haldane, one of their first tasks being to try to capture Bonnie Prince Charlie after Culloden. The following year both Duncan and Haldane transferred to a frigate, the Shoreham, in action against the French in one of the many wars between Britain and France– this time the War of Austrian Succession which lasted from 1740-48. Indeed most of Duncan’s naval career seemed to have been directed by French wars. But war was also an opportunity. During the Seven Years War (again against France), Duncan gained promotion to 3^rd Lieutenant in 1755, 2^nd Lieutenant in 1756, and 1^st Lieutenant in 1759. It was in that year that he was involved in an attack on the island of Goree off Senegal, and was wounded in the leg by a musket ball – the first and only wound he ever received in a career of more than 50 naval actions. In the same year he was promoted to Commander, and soon after that to Captain – appointed as Flag Captain on board Valiant – the flagship of Commodore Keppel.

Painting of Duncan by Reynolds

And that could have been the end of his naval career. If war provided opportunities for employment and advancement, the end of the war by the Peace of Paris in 1763 marked the end of both employment and advancement – at least until next time. For the next 13 years Captain Duncan twiddled his thumbs on half pay – the only compensation being that he met and married Henrietta Dundas, daughter of Robert Dundas, President of the Court of Session in Edinburgh.  Adam had not only gained a wife, but also had married into one of the most powerful families in Scotland.

In 1776 the American War of Independence again offered new opportunities. Appointed first to the Suffolk, with 74 guns, he was transferred to the Monarch,and in 1780 was involved in a fierce action against the Spanish fleet off Cadiz. He should then have gone with the Monarch to the West Indies, but was forced to withdraw for health reasons. In 1787 he finally achieved Flag rank as a Rear Admiral, but was then again on half pay until 1795.

Danloux' painting of Duncan as Rear Admiral

Battle of Camperdown

And so at last to the great battle that was to make his reputation and set the seal on his naval career – Camperdown. Once again Britainwas at war with the French – the French Revolutionary Wars. At the end of 1794 the French armies invaded Holland, and in May of 1795 an alliance was concluded between Franceand the BatavianRepublics, whereby Holland would support France with 12 ships of the line and 18 frigates, the plan being to use Holland as the spring board for the invasion of England. Duncanwas appointed as Admiral of the Blue to command the North Sea Fleet – its purpose to prevent military expeditions from being dispatched from the TexelIsland. The strategy was to blockade the Texel and if possible to destroy the Dutch fleet. This involved having the North Sea Fleet on constant patrol in the area.

To keep the Dutch penned in, Duncan deployed his ships in three ranks – the small cutters close to the coast, frigates next, and then two lines of battle ships further out – making it difficult for the Dutch to see just how many shops there were ranged against them.

            Then came the additional complication of the Mutiny, which gave rise to one of the great stories of Duncan’s career. There was growing unrest throughout the British Navy - mainly over rates of pay. The trouble started on Duncan’s flagship Venerable in April 1797, but he was able to deal with it and good order was re-established. He then visited every ship in the squadron, listening to their grievances, and demanding to know whether anyone dared to dispute his authority or that of their officers. On the 13^th May, on the Adamant, one brave or foolhardy sailor did just that, giving rise to the famous incident when Duncan (he was a large man, 6 ft 4 inches in height) held the miscreant over the side with the words ‘ My lads, look at this fellow, he who dares to deprive me of the command of the fleet.’ This was of course by no means the end of unrest within the Navy – later that month the much more serious mutinies at Sheerness and the Nore broke out, and were not suppressed until well into June.

            The outbreak of mutinies in the British fleet was a distraction but not a fatal one. Duncan’s combination of personal courage combined with a willingness to listen had quieted unrest in his squadron. Duncan and the Venerable, with Vice Admiral Onslow in the Adamant,were able to sail to the Texelwhere they stationed themselves opposite to the main Dutch naval base. With an inspired deception, involving sending signals to an imaginary fleet out of sight of the Dutch, they succeeded in persuading the enemy to stay in port.

As it happened, when the Dutch did eventually attempt a breakout, most of Duncan’s ships were anchored off Great Yarmouth, taking on stores. Early in the morning of 9^th October 1797, the lugger Speculator was sighted coming towards the fleet. It raised the signal ‘The Dutch Fleet is out’.

            By the morning of the 11^th October, Duncan’s ships were off the Dutch coast, and they could see the Dutch making their way north-west back to their base, sailing near the village of Camperduintowards the shallower coastal waters. Duncangave the order ‘to give battle’.

The two fleets immediately before the battle

Formed into two groups, the one under Duncanhimself and the other under Onslow, the British ships concentrated on breaking the enemy’s line.

De Louthenbourg painting of the battle

In this they eventually succeeded. During the course of the battle the colours of the Venerablewere shot away, giving rise to the famous incident when seaman John Crawford climbed up the mast and nailed the flag back up again. The battle was certainly no walk over, as the Dutch were experienced seamen and fought back with determination. After about three hours of intensive fighting, nine Dutch ships of the line had surrendered, and the rest had fled back to the Texel. Casualties on both sides were huge, but eventually the Dutch admiral, De Winter was forced to surrender.

Surrender by De Winter

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this victory. Up until now, the war with France had gone badly for Britain and her allies. The battles of Valmy in 1792, and Tourcoingin 1794, had been notable French victories. The Netherlandsand Spain turned from being Britain’s allies to being its enemies. Only the occasional naval victory, as at Cape St Vincent in February 1797, offered some hope.

            Camperdown was a turning point. This was a stunning victory. At the ‘Glorious First of June’ in 1794, Admiral Howe had captured six French ships and sunk one, out of a fleet of twenty-six. It was hailed as a triumph. At Cape St Vincent in February 1797 Admiral Jervis, with the aid of the young Horatio Nelson, had taken four Spanish ships out of twenty-seven, and the news caused great celebrations. Duncanhad surpassed them both, capturing nine ships out of sixteen plus two frigates

            Camperdown undoubtedly had a significant impact on British strategy. Prime Minister William Pitt now adopted a more aggressive policy involving a return to the Mediterranean, leading to Nelson’s great victory at the Nilenine months later. Duncan’s ‘victory at Camperdown was as dramatic and complete as anything Nelson ever achieved, and it is difficult to see how he could have done anything better’.

            An editorial in the Times later in the month stated: ‘The consequences resulting from Admiral Duncan’s victory must be of the highest importance to the interests of this country….to destroy such a fleet at such a time, when an invasion is dreaded, is the more singularly fortunate, as besides ensuring our domestic tranquility we shall no longer be under the necessity of keeping up a large naval establishment to watch the motions of the enemy in the North Sea. But what we consider to be the most interesting consideration is the perfect establishment of our naval superiority for a long time to come, which must induce us to treat every attempt on the part of France to make a descent on our coast as a ridiculous chimera.’

The Public response to Camperdown.

Both government and the public at large were quick to appreciate the implications of Duncan’s great victory – the removal, at least for the time being, of the threat of French invasion, and the prospect of lower taxes if it was no longer necessary to support such a large naval establishment. In the eighteenth century there were well established rituals to signal the nation’s approval of the victor’s conduct – both in terms of ceremonies and in ritual gifts – many of the latter have survived to the present day.

            First there was the conferment of the Viscountcy. Then there was a brief visit to Venerable of the King on his way to the opening of Parliament, while Lord Spencer in the Lords and Henry Dundas in the Commons moved votes of thanks. When Duncan himself was introduced to the Lords in November, he was told that the House had ordered all the peers to attend – an unprecedented distinction – but one ‘called for by the general admiration your conduct has inspired, and strongly expressive of that peculiar satisfaction which the peers must feel upon your Lordship’s promotion to a distinguished seat in this House’.

            Then came a grand service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral on November 10^thplanned by the King himself to commemorate not only Duncan’s victory on the Texel, but also the defeat of the Spaniards by Earl St Vincent, and of the French by Lord Howe. It was a magnificent affair, the procession led by a division of Marines complete with music, followed by two hundred seamen. The captured colours of defeated French, Dutch and Spanish navies were carried in three great artillery wagons, followed by Duncan himself in his own carriage. It set off along Charing Cross and the Strand, with the streets lined with men of the Foot Guards and the Horse Guards. Arriving at St Paul’s, the flags were taken down from the wagons, and ‘under the loudest shout of applause and grand martial music’, were carried in procession into the Cathedral, where they were placed in a circle at the centre of the dome.

            There is plenty of evidence, then, to show that government at the time pulled out all the stops to honour the victor of Camperdown – the grant of a Viscountcy, a very substantial pension to be paid to himself and his two succeeding heirs, tax free and backdated to the date of the battle, the grandest public ceremonies. These were followed by all kinds of lesser honours, presentations, and gifts. Fourteen civic authorities presented him with the freedom of their cities.

Freedom casket from Edinburgh

The Common Council of London presented him with this ceremonial sword: The gold, enameled and diamond-set hilt has Camperdown motifs and the Duncancoat of arms on the pommel.

The County of Forfargave him a silver-gilt soup tureen and commissioned his portrait by John Hoppner.

Silver-gilt tureen

Duncan was elected to honorary membership of numerous societies, from the Marine Society of Merchants to the Royal College of Surgeons. The Directors of the East India Company (the employers of older brother John) gave a dinner in his honour at the London Tavern, with between 90 and 100 guests, including Prime Minister William Pitt and members of his Cabinet.

            With his combination of bravery, professional skill, and personal modesty, Duncan was a popular hero, and not just in government circles. When he went to dine with the Lord Mayor of London, we are told that his ‘chariot was drawn by the mob down Fleet Street and all the way down to the Guildhall. The Ladies greeted him with huzzas and the waving of handkerchiefs.’ When he went out to dine with friends in Covent Garden, he was recognised, and the assembled company stood to drink his health. ‘The uproar was tremendous; the Admiral got up upon his legs and in a stentorian voice said: “Gentlemen, I thank you.” Not another word. They all cheered louder than ever. The people outside heard who they were, took their horses out of the coach, and drew it round Covent Garden, and it was with difficulty that they were allowed home.’

            As you might expect, Duncan’s achievement was nowhere more deeply appreciated than in Scotland. The Town Council of Dundee, at its first meeting after the battle, adopted the following resolution: ‘The Council unanimously Resolve to present Admiral Viscount Lord Duncan with a piece of Plate, value One Hundred Guineas, with a suitable inscription as a mark of their esteem for his Lordship, and of their high sense of the signal and splendid Victory obtained by his Lordship over the Dutch Fleet on the eleventh day of October last of so much consequence to the prosperity of Great Britain.’

Silver tea urn

Finally, as was the tradition, Duncanwas presented with the spoils of war in the shape of the ship’s bell and figurehead from De Winter’s flagship, the Vryheid. The latter stood for many years in the grounds of the Camperdown estate.

Then as now the widespread esteem in which Duncan was held provided a golden opportunity for the purveyors of memorabilia and souvenirs. Camperdown muslins, Duncan caps, a Duncan plaid, Camperdown Clubs, prints, china figures, commemorative tokens, cameos, porcelain mugs, and many portraits all bore witness to the immense popularity of this famous admiral.

While it is certainly true that the name of Duncanas a great naval hero of the period has since been overshadowed by that of Horatio Nelson, we cannot fairly blame his contemporaries for that. Duncan’s victory was celebrated at every level of society. He was rewarded, feted, and even exploited by artists and makers of memorabilia. If his name is no longer commemorated alongside that of Nelson, it is a failure of the present day.

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Goat Glands by Imogen Robertson

January 20, 2017, 4:30 pm

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No idea why it would occur to me to recommend a documentary about an American charlatan to you fine people today. Just one of those things, I guess.

The documentary in question is 'Man of The People', an episode of the excellent podcast Reply All and is the very funny, shocking and rather disquieting story of John R. Brinkley (1885 - 1942) who claimed to be able to cure all sort of male maladies by a.... let us say 'intimate' operation, involving goat gonads.

His practice flourished, but he really hit the big time when he discovered a technology which allowed him to communicate, direct and unfiltered, with a huge number of people. Radio. I should also add that he achieved remarkable political success. He built a mansion with a two-story organ (as in the musical instrument) and apparently it's filled with special hiding places in which to stow your furs and jewels if the ravening hordes attack.

The episode is a great piece of storytelling, beginning as it does with an elderly lady in a decaying mansion and ending by returning there, the lady gone, the house restored and the man himself largely forgotten despite his desperate urge to write his name over everything in town.

A glance at Brinkley's wikipedia page shows that the programme makers aren't exaggerating when they say they didn't have the time to cover many of Brinkley's exploits, so I'll be watching the documentary and reading the book and pondering how easy it is to find oneself buying snakeoil.

You know, as one does.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons: Hollywood's Killer Queens by Catherine Hokin

January 22, 2017, 1:00 am

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Christmas may be over but for movie buffs, fashion lovers and celebrity spotters, the tinsel is still well and truly sparkling. The Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, the Oscars: awards season is upon us. Actresses badly in need of pies are praying their chosen designer doesn't suddenly decide to go 'edgy' (aka mad, see poor Sophie Turner at the Globes); everyone's 'of course I'm happy I lost' smile clashing beautifully with their crazed eyes and reporters stalking their victims for that one illicit look or drunken mishap which will write their mortgage off.

It may not be one of our more attractive traits but human beings love gossip. The word itself was first used in a tattling context by Chaucer when the Wife of Bath refers to a 'gossib dame' and the National Archives provide a rich source of libel cases such as Ellen Bowden's in 1574 when she took Ann Venables to court for calling her a "whore, arrant whore, wedded mans whore and William Colsolls whore" and won 8 shillings for her pains. We gossip and we write it down. Pity the poor Mesopotamian mayor only now remembered because his affair with a married woman in 1500 BC coincided with the time and place of the development of Cuneiform, one of the world's earliest writing systems.

Scandal Sheets at Mrs Humphrey's Print Shop

Scandal sheets as a source of gossip came into their own in London in the eighteenth century. They were poured over in coffee houses and tea shops by men and women alike who thrilled to snippets about the fabulously named Madame Slendersense and her French dancing master, "Mrs. Manlove, who generally searches into the bottom of such an affair, solemnly protests she saw them go up one pair of stairs together. What they did there, she can't tell, but the lady has been ailing ever since" (The Female Tatler) and comments on fashion as bitchy as anything Joan Rivers used to litter the Oscars' red carpet with, "Mrs. Tawny alias Tawdry, is desired not to be so fantastically whimsical in her dress...nothing is more disagreeable and ridiculous than to see a woman of her years affect the gay, youthful airs of their daughters."

Once the floodgate was opened, there was no stopping it. The circulation battle in the USA between publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer was an excuse to see who could print the most scandalous news items. Penny papers in the nineteenth century thrived on lurid gossip and the author Roger Wilkes, in his book Scandal, credits the 1886 divorce case of Lady Colin Campbell with inflaming public demand for society scandals and giving birth to the first newspaper gossip column. Society tittle-tattle is one thing but it was the birth of the film industry that really saw the explosion in the demand for the 'celebrity' gossip machine and created some of its biggest monsters.

Hedda Hopper & Louella Parsons, Vanity Fair

Wielding a cleverly catty pen is an art. Historian Gary Wills has identified some of our best known classical authors as also being the earliest gossip columnists, including Catullus for this snappy epigram on the subject of an invitation from Julius Caesar: “Join your party?/I might, mighty Czar,/Could I remember/quite who you are.” Step forward a couple of centuries and the pen was being wielded by two of the most dangerous star-makers and star-breakers Hollywood would ever see: Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.

It was fan magazines that helped create the idea of "movie stars". Motion Picture Story Magazine was launched in 1911 during the era of silent films and the appetite was insatiable: this magazine was the first of what would become nearly 300 titles in the genre. At the height of their power in the 1940s, Hopper and Parsons' rival columns had a combined readership of 75 million people (half the population of the USA) and the industry was just as much in thrall to them, if not more so, than the public, as Bob Hope said: “Their columns were the first thing we looked at every morning to see what was going on.” Both women had a long association with Hollywood and powerful connections which they exploited ruthlessly, against the stars and each other. Hopper began as a bit-part actress. She appeared in around 120 films, hit hard times (probably because she refused to entertain LB Mayer on his casting coach) but retained enough industry friends to eventually be hired by MGM as a journalist to offset the power of Parsons, her one time friend. Parsons, by contrast, was a journalist from the start whose career went stellar after she forged a friendship with publisher William Randolph Hearst's film actress mistress Marion Davies.

Time satirising Hopper's trademark hats

Both women were highly skilled at blurring both their own pasts (editing their marriages and their birth dates) and their colourful lives. When it came to their quarry, however, nothing was off limits. Louella’s columns were sprinkled with racist terms such as“swarthy Mexicans” and she once cited Mussolini as her favourite hero. Hedda was viciously vocal about racial intermixing, hated and hunted Communists (she led the attack that drove Chaplin out of the States and destroyed Donald Trumbo) and had no mercy for anyone who gave a story to Parsons rather than her. Louella had informants everywhere, from studios to hairdressers’ salons and doctors’ offices. When Louella received a tip that Clark Gable and his second wife, Ria, were going to divorce, she“kidnapped” Mrs. Gable and held her hostage at her home until she was sure the story was hers first. Hopper ruined Ingrid Bergman's career after she had an affair with Roberto Rossellini and became pregnant - not because of the affair but because she gave the story to Louella. Hopper's attacks on Marilyn Monroe were so vicious, fans wrote letters after Monroe's death blaming Hopper for the suicide - apparently she didn't give a damn about that or about the skunk Joan Bennett sent her as a Valentine's gift. When she was asked by actress Merle Oberon “What inspired all the vicious things you’ve been writing about me?”, her response was simple and really rather chilling: “Bitchery, dear. Sheer bitchery.”

The end of the studio system in the 1950s, the spread of television and the rise of tabloid magazines such as Confidential which was notorious for making up stories with no basis in fact at all (I'm resisting all references to Trump here) changed the relationships between Hollywood, its stars and the public. Parsons and Hopper faded away and, while gossip and some of its perpetrators seem to find continuously new lows in this 24/7 internet world, no other individual writers since have held such long-lasting and dangerous power over other people's lives. I can highly recommend the film Trumbo if anyone wants to know more, Helen Mirren's portrayal of Hopper captures her awfulness to perfection. The Golden Age of Hollywood, or so this period is so often called: proof that layers of gilt and polish and pretence can't hide the poison under the surface. Avoiding a Trump reference really was too much to hope for.

A woman, a dog, and a walnut tree.. by Leslie Wilson

January 22, 2017, 5:30 pm

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This advertisement appeared in 1903, and I hope that to all my readers it will seem as shocking as to myself. What is equally shocking is that in fact it contains the essence of the abuser's mind-set; the attempt to clear his (less often) her conscience (it won't stop the abuse recurring), and that Pat's equivalent is alive and well and maybe living just down the road from any of us, or even next door.
But here, it's a joke. It's even considered a good way to sell butter.

 What has often struck me, in reading the fiction of the quite recent past, is the extent to which domestic violence is normalised or trivialised. 'Your tantrums may do very well at home,' says the Earl of Worth to Judith Taverner in Georgette Heyer's 'Regency Buck,''but they arouse in me nothing more than a desire to beat you soundly. And that, Miss Taverner, if ever I do marry you, is precisely what I shall do.' And how can we believe that he won't? Since he starts his acquaintance with the heroine by forcing a kiss on her, it's quite clear that he hasn't much sense of her boundaries.
Of course, domestic violence wasn't frowned on in the Regency period, but Heyer wrote the novel in 1935, when one would like to think it was regarded with more loathing. But maybe not. And it's odd how the examples I'm thinking of all come in 'feel-good' novels, that one would read for amusement, possibly while eating chocolates.
Take 'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day,' Winifred Watson's charming mille-feuille of a novel. Here Miss La Fosse's Michael appears on the scene and begins by shaking his adored soundly. Oh, yes, Miss Pettigrew persuades herself that Michael 'would never really hurt Miss La Fosse,' and that 'Miss La Fosse had done to the young man something meriting anger, for which she had no excuse..The punishment then was only just.' Miss Pettigrew then goes on to justify the assault by comparing it to smacking children. Clearly in those days attitudes to smacking children were very different, but: an adult woman is not a child. 'Do I look like a wife-beater?' Michael later demands of Miss Pettigrew, who, already infatuated, gasps: 'Certainly not.' And of course, she's right. Wife-beaters don't have it tattooed round their foreheads. It'd make it easier for the rest of us if they did.

Martin van Maele: Histoire comique de Francion

Just to drive the point home, Michael later says of his love: 'obviously she needs a little physical correction, but I'm the only right man to do it.' It makes me think of Max Frisch's fire-raisers, stacking up paraffin and kindling round the house while the householder refuses to believe there's anything dangerous going on.
Then there's the attitude to rape. 'A nice rape,' is what Albert Campion once suggests would be therapeutic for a woman. At least his wife protests, but almost casually; one wonders if it's really rape he's talking about, but I do think of Freud's belief that 'penis normalis' was the cure for all ills.
In 'The Pursuit of Love,' when Fanny bids Linda farewell on her journey to the South of France, Linda says: 'I do feel so terrified - think of sleeping in the train, all alone.'
'Perhaps you won't be alone,' I said. 'Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.'
To which Linda replies: 'Yes, that would be nice.'
And thus rape, like Worth's desire to beat Judith, is presented to us as something exotic, something a woman really wants, and really enjoys.
This is not to say that all authors of the past trivialise abuse.In 'The Making of a Marchioness', Frances Hodgson Burnett has one of her characters say of Mrs Osborne: 'That little woman.. lives every day through twenty-four hours of hell. One can see it in her eyes even when she professes to smile at the brute for decency's sake. The awfulness of a woman's forced smile at the devil she is tied to, loathing him..'
And then, of course, there's Morel's beating of his wife in 'Sons and Lovers,' where Lawrence eloquently describes the mother's psychological processes. Or are they hers? In the end, the story is about the effect on Paul of his father's violence. Paul is later described as incapable of violence towards his own women, and yet he himself does a nice job of emotional abuse on his first love, Miriam. And oddly, Lawrence seems to feel that Morel and his wife had a vital, nourishing relationship in spite of the violence, and blames Mrs Morel for it. As the abuser always does.
It's estimated that one in four women will experience violence in a relationship in her life. That's not the same as saying that one in four men is violent, but it's a terrifying statistic. The police receive about two calls a minute about domestic violence. Most of these will never lead to prosecution, still less successful prosecution, because the crime is committed far away from witnesses, and even if there's injury, it's only one person's word against another's.
It's now thought that abusers are not men who themselves have been abused, but who have seen their mothers abused in childhood, have had it role-modelled for them, in fact (though some people will decide that abuse ends with them). But there is a direct line between the people who in 1903 thought two black eyes was a good way to sell butter, and the man who assaults his wife 114 years later. Like the anti-Semitism which also lurks in 'Miss Pettigrew', we need to be aware of these things, though. They are past a joke.

Richard the Lionheart - what we think we know by Elizabeth Chadwick

January 23, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Statue of Richard Coeur de Lion outside the Houses of Parliament, Westminster| Carlo Marochetti  1856. Modern audiences are frequently critical of the work and consider it does not deserve its position.

I belong to several historical forums where Richard the Lionheart often crops up as a subject of discussion. A question such as 'What do we know about Richard the Lionheart?' will elicit a slew of responses, frequently negative, and when asked for sources or elaboration the response is usually without provenance beyond 'I read it somewhere.' Further clarification is not usually forthcoming or turns out to be from text books or teaching of a certain era.  There is also a strong tendency to view Richard through the filter of modern mindset and not engage with him on the terms by which he lived his life in the late 12th century.

Generally the same comments keep repeating in a never ending circle, so I thought I'd set out to explore them in more detail.

1. He hated/ didn't care about England: (and I have had this said to me at Dover Castle by a costumed interpreter responsible for 'informing' the general public).

Why?

 a) Because he didn't even speak English.

My findings:  He probably had at least a smattering of words.  He was born in England, at Oxford, in September 1157 and although his family was peripatetic, he spent several years of his childhood in England.  His wet nurse was an English woman from St Albans called Hodierna and he remembered her with fondness and gave her lands on which to live in her retirement.  Her name, however, suggests she was Norman, so although he had an English-born wet nurse, she may well have spoken to him in French. The fact remains though, that with English servants around the nursery court, he would have picked up a certain amount of the language.

However he would not have used it in his dealings as an adult, but then neither would any of the nobility with whom he associated where  the language of the court was either Anglo-Norman or Latin.

Sometimes you will hear it said that his first language was Occitan - the language of the south of France and parts of Aquitaine, but the main language of the Dukes of Aquitaine was Poitevan French which was closer to the French of the north.  Richard's famous song Ja Nus On Pri is not written in Occitan but in French.

Other English kings surrounding the time of his rule did not speak English as a matter of course either. Henry I may have done so to a greater degree, having an English wife and the court poked fun at him for his Englishness, but his own father William the Conqueror had never learned the language and there is no indication that King Stephen, Empress Matilda or Henry II, Richard's father were fluent. Again, Henry II would likely have had a smattering.  King John the same and Henry III. But Richard is no different to any of his close ancestors and inheritors so it's rather odd to single him out.

Face of Richard the Lionheart.  A Victorian plaster cast tomb effigy in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

b) Because he was never there and only spent 6 months of his reign in England.  

True.  But... and there's always a but.

He was born in England and spent several years of his childhood in the country.  When he became king he was preparing to go on crusade - something set in motion before the death of his father.  Henry II himself had pledged to go on crusade. In early 1185 he had been begged face to face by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem to leave his empire and take up the throne of Jerusalem.  Henry II's grandfather Fulke of Anjou had been King of Jerusalem and Henry and his sons were close kin to the current, dying king Baldwin IV.  So Richard's involvement with Jerusalem was political as well as religious and an ongoing family thing.

The 'Angevin Empire' spanned an area from the borders of Scotland as far as the Pyrenees and that meant any ruler had to delegate and spread himself thinly.  Henry II himself spent more time across the Channel than he did in England.  Before the death of his brother Henry the Young King, Richard's inheritance portion had been designated as Aquitaine and in his teen years he was groomed for this role and indeed spent a considerable amount of time in the region. However, once he was king, he was mostly dealing with problems further north on the French border, caused by Philip of France's expansionism following his own brother John's earlier inept and treacherous mischief making. While Richard had been in prison John had been trying to negotiate keep him there and had also made a treaty with Philip of France whereby he surrendered the whole of Normandy east of the Seine except for the city of Rouen, and that included surrendering all the major fortresses. Richard spent the rest of his life following his return from imprisonment trying to put that right.

England itself was ruled by Richard by delegation.  Rven despite often being long distances aweay or behind bars so to speak, Richard still had a vision for England.  He left - as he deemed - suitable custodians during his absence.  When some of those custodians proved to be problematic, he changed them under advice.  Even when imprisoned in Germany, he was able to hold court and govern by messenger.  By and large England remained stable under the management of a capable civil service headed by the Richard-appointed wonder-man of his day Hubert Walter Archbishop of Canterbury who overhauled what was already a highly efficient civil service into something even more cutting edge.

Bottom line:  Richard was forced to be an absentee landlord, but that didn't mean he was a neglectful or disinterested one.

c) Because he bankrupted England. He used England as a cash cow and didn't care about it.

This is one that when you ask for sources, there are never any forthcoming.  It sort of gets pushed under the rug...

Money had to be raised for the crusade that had been agreed in his father's day and for which plans were afoot when Richard came to the throne. He did this by using the money in his father's treasury. Taxing the people who had already been forced to cough up a tax known as the Saladin tithe in his father's reign was a non starter, so he turned to the relatively small pool of the rich, both secular and clergy and sought means of wresting money from them. When the Bishop of Ely died intestate, Richard was able to seize  the Bishop's movable wealth which included 3000 marks in cash, gold, silver, precious gems, cloth, horses and grain.  At the start of his reign ambitious men were willing to pay large sums of money in order to gain positions of authority and Richard put these up for sale. However, not willy nilly. The men appointed for their cash, were also men of experience and reliability, and Richard was very careful in his selection, personally appointing all the sheriffs.

England was indeed a wealthy country and yes, he used it as a cash cow, but a good farmer looks after his livestock and doesn't neglect something as important as his cash cow in case it runs dry and Richard even during his absence was diligent.

He is sometimes accused of costing England a massive amount of money because of the ransom that had to be raised to free him from prison in Germany. But what else could he do? He had not expected to be taken prisoner but a series of unfortunate events including a shipwreck and then having to travel without a guide through difficult territory led to his capture and incarceration  by his enemy Leopold of Austria while probably trying to reach the lands of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion of Brunswick.  Leopold then handed him over to Emperor Heinrich of Germany.

The ransom demanded for Richard's release totalled 150,000 marks, a phenomenal sum. 100,000 was to be paid for Richard 's release and another 50,000 for which the German emperor would hold hostages until the sum was paid.

Richard's mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the justiciars and nobility of England and the other territories did their utmost to gather in the ransom. a 25% tax on income was raised, and on the value of moveable goods.  The entire wool clip of the Cistercian monasteries was taken and gold and silver from the Church.  England had a particularly strong civil service and this enabled the ransom to be gathered efficiently.  Indeed, Richard found English civil servants very useful throughout all of his dominions and utilised their expertise.

Returning to the business of the 'cash cow' John Gillingham observes that a problem with this statement is that 'England is the only part of the Angevin Empire for which we can compile a series of figures for the king's annual revenue.' We have the pipe rolls which detail England's balance sheets in essence from 1156 right through the reigns of Henry, Richard and John.  In contrast we don't have that full information for anywhere else although a few documents exist - for example the Norman exchequer rolls of 1180, 1195 and 1198. These three rolls show that by 1198, the Norman exchequer was bringing in £25,000 - compared with £6,750  in 1180 under Henry II. At that same time in 1180, England was bringing in £14,300.  Professor John Gillingham suggests that Normandy in the reign of Richard may have become even more of a cash cow than England, as its population was smaller. In 1198 in terms of payments to Richard, both Rouen and Caen had to find more than London.

On average English revenue brought in around £22,000 a year.  The preparation for the crusade upped the ante to £31,089. While Richard was away the revenue dropped to £11,000.  Once returned and excluding the ransom demand, the revenue climbed again to between £22,000 and £25,000, the latter sum toward the end of Richard's reign to fund his war in Normandy (cause by John's mischief making while Richard was on crusade).  John's revenue once he came to the throne fluctuated between £22,000 and £25,000 at the start of his reign, but in 1210 and 1212 came in  at £50,000 and in 1211 a staggering £83,291  as he went on the warpath to try and recover Normandy.  Once the non routine exchequer audit sums are added in, the amount rises to £145,000.

Bottom line.  There may have been a momentary cash flow shortage but the cow kept on producting and it was John, not Richard who milked it so much that it led him into a field named Runnymede and a document that came to be known as Magna Carta.

d) Because he said he would sell London if he could find a buyer.

This is often taken as evidence of disparagement. Fancy saying that about your country.  He mustn't have thought much of it.

 Richard was reknown for his dry sense of humour - even remarked upon by an Arab historian. Today we might say we'd sell our soul for a Gucci handbag (or whatever floats one's personal boat) but it doesn't mean one is going to pop along to the nearest black mass and do a deal with the devil!  Leeway has to be given for humour, rather than taking everything literally.

2. He was gay.

Why?

a) Because he shared a bed with King Philip of France.

King Arthur and his knights are nakedly asleep together when they are attacked.  Guiron le Courtois mid 14thc British Library

Chronicler Roger of Howden tells us about the friendship between Richard and Philip of France in the summer of 1187.  Howden says that Philip honoured Richard so highly that every day they ate at the same table and shared the same dishes, and at night the bed did not separate them.  The King of France loved him as his own soul and their love was so great that the lord king of England was stupefied.

One has to enter the medieval mindset to understand this one.  Men shared beds all the time.  It was indeed a sign of honour and trust and there is plentiful pictorial evidence of this in medieval society. Henry II would only have been 'stupefied' because it was a demonstration that Richard had turned his back on him and was looking to Philip of France as liege lord and ally.  Henry II himself shared beds with other men - William Marshal for example on one occasion. It was an accepted norm, used to demonstrate trust and prestige.  The talk of loving as much as his own soul, is again a typical medieval literary conceit and implies nothing beyond loyalty.  It's a non starter in a cultural context of homosexuality.  Cross it off the list.

The three wise men sharing a bed. I hesitate to call it a menage a trois!

b) Because he was accused of committing sodomy by the clergy and did penance for it.

Roger of Howden reported in 1195 that a hermit came to King Richard and rebuked him for his sins, telling him to remember the destruction of Sodom and abstain from ilicit acts.  Richard dismissed the warnings, but later, struck down by illness, did penance and took to staying in church until the service was over and distributing alms to the poor.  He was also to avoid illicit intercourse and keep his attentions solely on his wife who remained childless.

Again, it's a case of that pesky modern mindset.  Everyone today assumes that 'Sodom' is purely connected to homosexual behaviour and that tells us that most modern people don't read their Old Testament. Biblical references to Sodom are more about the terrible punishment meted out to sinners rather than being explicit about the sort of sin.  It was all about the fall of cities, not homosexuality and anyone hearing such sermons in the Middle Ages would not automatically think that Richard was homosexual because he had been accused of the sins of Sodom.  Rather it would be the notion of general debauchery, which accords with him having an illegitimate son called Philip of Cognac, and of being accused to meddling with the wives and daughters of his vassals in Aquitaine.  Roger of  Howden accuses him of  carrying off his vassals''wives, daughters and kinswomen by force and making them his concubines; when he had sated his own lust on them, he handed them down for his own men to enjoy.' One chronicler accuses Richard of consorting with whores on his deathbed.

c) Because he and his wife Berengaria of Navarre didn't have any children

No one knows the reason for this - although if he was warned to keep to her bed, perhaps a political marriage was not one of personal attraction. It is no proof either way.

3. He was a war monger.

Why?

Because he was always fighting and went on crusade where he slaughtered 3,000 Muslim hostages.  He lived for war.

There is no denying that Richard excelled in the arena of war and that it was his particular skill.

 The slaughter of hostages is always terrible and reprehensible on the human scale, and that particular massacre at the siege of Acre has gone down as a red stain against Richard's reputation in history. Whatever the military circumstances, and even acknowledging medieval mindset, it is hard not to judge here.  The most neutral that can be said was that Richard needed to move on, Saladin was pretending to negotiate for the hostages while procrastinating, and Richard took a commander's decision to remove the obstacle from the field rather than let Saladin get the better of him.  It appears to have been an act of cold, political and military neutrality rather than done in hate. Today it would certainly be a war crime.  Back then, it was greeted by the Christian chroniclers with either approval or a shrugged neutrality. Saladin got the blame for being intractable. It was his fault for not doing a deal.  What else was Richard supposed to do?  The Muslims reacted to the slaughter of their people with anger and swore revenge and to do similar in retaliation.

Being a good warrior was an excellent defining trait for a medieval king.  A medieval monarch was  expected to be able to fight and to command successfully and this was Richard's particular skill.   A perceived lack of such skills might lead to one being called 'Softsword' as in the case of King John. As an aside,  Richard was given the Sobriquet 'Lionheart' when he was just 19 years old.

4. He was a traitor to his father

Why?

Henry II: A contemporary portrait by Gerald of Wales

Because he was influenced by his mother and her jealousy (over Rosamund de Clifford)  and dissatisfaction and went to war against his father because of that, basically stabbing him in the back.

Henry II was a micro-manager who had his hands firmly gripping the reins of power, so firmly that he found it very difficult to delegate.  To ensure the succession was secure he had his eldest surviving son, also named Henry, anointed and crowned when he was 15 years old. Richard, the next son was to have his mother's lands of Aquitaine and Geoffrey the third son was to have Brittany.  John, happening along 9 years after Richard was born, was a problem when it came to finding him land unless he married a wealthy heiress or had estates carved out of his brothers' inheritances.  His father's first effort to do this and give John castles (belonging to Henry the Young King)  as part of a marriage negotiation with the father of little Alice de Maurienne, resulted in the first rebellion of Henry's sons against him - that and going over Eleanor's head by having the Count of Toulouse swear for Aquitaine to him, not to Eleanor and Richard. Since Henry did not have sovereignty over Aquitaine, this was an act of gross provocation to Eleanor its Duchess, and Richard her successor. There is no evidence whatsoever that Eleanor was in a jealous fluff over Henry's mistress Rosamund (who doesn't get mentioned in the chronicles until after Eleanor's imprisonment). An astute, political queen, Eleanor would not have been concerned over one of her husband's many affairs, and this one with a teenage girl from the Welsh Marches).

Later, during a second rebellion by Henry the Young King over his father's refusal to give him any sort of power, and more squabbles over castle tenures, the Young King died from dysentry in the field. Redistributing the inheritance, Henry II then tried to remove Aquitaine from  Richard and give it to his youngest son John.  Aquitaine, which Richard had been ruling and controlling for 10 years and in which Henry's only concern was as the husband of its Duchess. For Richard to hand it over to the teenage John (with Henry manipulating the puppet strings) was a step too far.  He was bound to rebel - and climb into bed with Philip of France - see point 2!

So there you have it. As always people will make up their own minds - hopefully taking into account medieval mindset,  but I hope I have given at least some food for thought in the above post.  All history is a form of archaeology and the more one digs, the more layers one discovers and the more one can evaluate the story. How much you know, will always influence your understanding.

Sources:
Richard I by John Gillingham - Yale English Monarchs Series  Yale University Press

Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth edited by Janet L. Nelson - King's College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies

The Angevin Empire second edition by John Gillingham published by Arnold

The History of William Marshal - Holden, Gregory and Crouch published by the Anglo Norman Text Society

Online - British Library online catalogue of illuminated manuscripts http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/welcome.htm

The Annals of Roger de Hovedon 

 https://archive.org/stream/annalsofrogerde02hove#page/64/mode/2up

Elizabeth Chadwick is a bestselling historical novelist.  Her most recent novels are a trilogy about Eleanor of Aquitaine and she is currently writing about the great William Marshal's missing years in the Holy Land. 

Highgate Cemetery by Miranda Miller

January 24, 2017, 4:30 pm

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    At the very end of 2016, when the year itself seemed exhausted by its own historical weight, I visited Highgate cemetery with Britta, a friend who grew up in East Berlin. On a frosty sunny morning it was a beautiful hillside park as well as place to contemplate. Those great Victorian cemeteries were inspired by Pere La Chaise in Paris.The first part to open, in 1839, was the West Cemetery, which is on your right as you walk down Swain’s Lane from Highgate. You have to make an appointment to go there but it’s well worth visiting with its Egyptian Avenue, Lebanon Circle, Terrace Catacombs and remarkable plants and wild life. Volunteers cut back the vegetation so that it is romantic but still passable and they also study the foxes, hedgehogs butterflies and other rare insects.

    Further down Swain's Lane on the right you come to the East cemetery, which costs £4 to enter and still attracts people from all over the world. Since 1975 both cemeteries have been run by a charity, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery. John Betjeman described it as a ‘Victorian Valhalla’ .These grand Victorian necropoli were built with high walls and locked gates to keep out the Resurrection Men but they were always intended to be parks as well. Once it was beautifully manicured but now it is its wildness that makes it charming and romantic. Douglas Adams, George Eliot, several of Charles Dickens’ children and his wife Catherine, Paul Foot, Eric Hobsbawn, Anna Mahler, Sidney Nolan, Peter Porter, Ralph Richardson Alan Sillitoe, Herbert Spencer Leslie Stephen and Max Wall are all buried here. Many of the less famous graves are very touching; there is an area dedicated to London firemen and some of the epitaphs on the graves of forgotten people read like short stories. For instance: “Emma Wallace Gray Died in October 1854 in the 19th year of her age...From the effects of fire, her dress having accidentally ignited ten days previously. In bloom of youth, when others fondly cling to life, I prayed, mid agonies of death.”

    Karl Marx (1818-1883) upstages all his subterranean neighbours. The morning we were there a constant flow of international visitors surrounded his monument. He had been expelled from both Cologne and Paris because of his political activities before settling in London in 1849. "From this time on he was one of the leaders of the socialist party in Europe, and in 1865 he became its acknowledged chief" ( to quote from his obituary).  He was laid to rest in the same grave as his wife Jenny, who had died less than a year and a half before him. Eleven people attended his funeral, including his friend Engels. Other members of his family were later buried in the same grave, including his daughter Eleanor, known as Tussy. She was a courageous supporter of the early Trades Unions who poisoned herself in 1898 after discovering that her partner, Edward Aveling, had secretly married a young actress.

   As the years passed so many people came to visit Marx’s grave that it was moved to a more accessible spot, on the main path. The present grandiose marble monument was unveiled 73 years after his death, in 1956, in a ceremony attended by about 200 people, “ to honour the memory of a man whose spirit - if that is the right word - now dominates approximately half the world.” (as reported in The Guardian the following day). One of his most famous quotations is carved on it: ”The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways - the point however is to change it.” Laurence Bradshaw, the sculptor, said he aimed to express the"dynamic force of his intellect" and wanted the sculptured likeness to be at eye-level rather than "towering over the people."

    Everybody who lived through the mid -20th century has their own Marx. At 15 I was a Young Communist for a few months and attended earnest discussion groups about his writings in West Kensington. A few years later I was taught history by academics who saw the world in terms of a Marxist interpretation. For some he was a demon, for others an omniscient prophet. Britta, my companion the day I visited the cemetery, is nostalgic for the GDR she lived in until she was in her late thirties. After the wall came down in 1989 there was a long public debate in Germany about what to do with the monuments and place names of Communism. There’s a striking scene in the 2003 film 'Good Bye, Lenin!' where the huge Lenin statue is lifted up by helicopter and flies off over the city, pointing as it goes. Finally, Marx was accepted as a philosopher and the grand boulevard round the corner from her flat is still called Karl - Marx - Allee. She tells me sadly that her grandchildren are taught at school that he was worse than Hitler.

   At the moment, with socialism in crisis, you don’t hear much about Marx in England. Above the gigantic hairy bronze head hovers a large (if invisible) question mark. What does Marx mean to us now? He would not necessarily have recognised his own ideas in the uses that were made of them after he died. In 1882 he wrote in a letter of the form of'Marxism' which arose in France: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” 

   Last year there was a three-part Open University /BBC co-production for BBC Four called Genius of the Modern World. Bettany Hughes explored the life and works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. “We might not realise it, but we all live with a 19th-century male philosopher in our lives. Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud are towering thinkers, men with the wit and the will to question the status quo.” Nobel laurate Paul Krugman wrote recently that when thinking about automation and the future of labor, he worries that "it has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism – which shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is."

   At his best Marx was such a powerful writer that it seems likely that people will always be influenced by him. He wrote that “ Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Another quotation that has great resonance for me at this time of crisis in our democracy is: “The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

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Marching for Women's Rights, Carol Drinkwater

January 25, 2017, 4:01 pm

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Last Saturday, the 21st January 2017, I met up with a couple of friends alongside the Apollo Fountain  in the impressive Place Massena in Nice. We, along with about seventy others, were gathering to march. We were marching - each of us perhaps for slightly different reasons - against Donald Trump and Mike Pence's position on women's rights. At least, that was my principal reason for being there. Denial of climate change was another concern that fired me.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. The world of the Côte d'Azur was going about its business. Yachts out on the water, bobbing in the warm afternoon.
All over the world crowds were gathering to voice their concerns. From Washington D.C the call was echoing.

Ours was a very tiny group because no permit for a demonstration had been granted due to the atrocities that had occurred on Bastille Day last year, 14th July 2016, when a lone truck driver had ploughed his vehicle through the heart of  a crowd of people out in the streets celebrating our national  holiday and murdered more than eighty people including women and children.  France remains on high alert and a country in mourning. Joining demonstrations is perhaps not the wisest act at this time. Still, I believe, that we must continue as normal. We cannot allow ourselves to be restricted by fear or groups such as Daesh win.
A few friends advised me against joining the crowd last Saturday but I was determined and I am very glad that I made the effort. How many have since asked: 'But what was the point?''What were you marching for?''No democratic rights have been threatened.'

On Monday of this week, his first day in office, President Trump along with seven other MEN gathered together in the Oval Office. Those seven men watched on as Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the Global gag rule, which severely restricts funding for organisations that support or offer advice on pregnancy terminations no matter the circumstances.
This post is not about whether abortion is right or wrong. Each of us has our own conscience and opinions on this subject. But from my point of view, this signature on his first day, overlooked by his male colleagues, is an insult to all women. And I was even more certain that my Saturday afternoon walking in the sunshine with friends and strangers was not a waste of time.

I have penned several books in a very successful series published by Scholastic entitled My Story. Each is a diary written at a chosen point in history that recounts 'live' events through the eyes of an adolescent. Boys and girls are the witnesses, but in my case, I have chosen to tell each of these diary stories through the experience of a young girl. Two of the books - Twentieth Century Girl and Suffragette - published now as two stories of Edwardian England and titled Cadogan Square - are stories set at different stages of the women's suffrage movement: 1900 and 1909.

Women have been marching for their rights for over one hundred and fifty years. Women have endured imprisonment and force-feeding while standing up for what we believe is our place in this world.  We have marched for the right to vote, to qualify as medical or legal advisors, to gain degrees, to handle our own finances, to have the right to apply for a mortgage, to earn an equal wage alongside our male colleagues, to choose to take on the role of motherhood or not ...

I marched last Saturday because I cannot stand by silently and see any of what we have achieved be eroded. I live in a democracy, and thank heavens for that. Not all of us do. Our democracy gives me the right to raise my voice, to sound the alarm. To voice my opinion and to let all politicians know that we are paying attention. It is another form of a vote.  To remain silent, in my opinion, is a complicity.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

The Queen of Tonga by Janie Hampton

January 26, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Here’s a story to cheer you up on a miserable cold day at the end of January. On a June afternoon in 1953, a golden coach was pulled through the crowded streets of London in the pouring rain by eight grey horses.

The pouring rain did not dampen coronation spirits

A procession of soldiers, military bands, generals on horseback, bagpipers and foreign monarchs in horse-drawn carriages wound through central London on a five-mile route from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. Hundreds of thousands of people had been waiting all night and most of the day in the rain. Considering it was June, with the trees in full leaf and the days so long, the weather was cold and miserable. When it wasn’t damp, it was drizzling; and when not drizzling, it poured. But the crowds remained upbeat and excited. After the dark years of the Second World War and the austerity that followed it, at last there was a reason to celebrate. They had been waiting for this day for over a year: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. ‘It was all organised by the Duke of Norfolk,’ said 12 year old Jane Roberts. ‘He had a face like a miserable dog.' The route was lined with policemen in capes, naval cadets, and soldiers from around the world, wearing the medals they had won in the war. As the procession made its stately way towards the palace, the roar of applause cascaded down the streets like a Mexican wave at a sports ground. The children cheered the Canadian Mounties in their red uniforms on their sleek dark horses. Scottish people cheered the bagpipers, with their swinging kilts. Older people cheered Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, stately and courageous, sitting in a glass coach with her glamorous daughter Princess Margaret. Others cheered the Life Guards in their pointed helmets with white plumes and shining brass breastplates. They all marched in unison to the thumping beat of the military bands playing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and the Victorian marching song, ‘We’re the soldiers of the Queen, m’lud’. But the strongest image that remains with everybody who was there that day is not of the beautiful young woman in the golden coach. The loudest and longest applause was for a monarch nobody had seen before, a woman of over six feet in height and 300 pounds in weight. Waving and smiling enthusiastically from her open carriage, her dark skin glistening in the rain, was the large and joyful Queen of Tonga, 
‘We heard the roar of the crowds from a mile away,’ said Enid Brown, who had come down from Birmingham with her sister Joyce. ‘We thought it must be for our new queen. The sound like the roar of a storm, it made my spine tingle. When the black carriage appeared we could see why. There was the usual pair of lovely black horses pulling. All the other carriages had their hoods up and you couldn’t really see who was inside. But this one was different alright. The top was down and there was this big lady. When we saw her, oh how we cheered! It was her joyful disdain of the pelting rain. You could see she wasn’t going to let a small thing like that ruin the day. We didn’t know who she was, but we still loved her.’

Queen Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tupou III  of Tonga

Word went round the crowd that she was the Queen of Tonga. 'Who’d ever heard of Tonga? Some said it was in Africa, others said it was in the Pacific Ocean,'said Enid Brown, 'Some said she had come in a canoe. Well wherever it was, it was her spirit, her style, that won us all over,'
  Queen Salote of Tonga was one of 129 heads of state who had come to London to witness the coronation of Elizabeth II. Her landau carriage, with facing seats over a dropped footwell and hinged soft folding top, was driven by two old coachmen in top hats and velvet coats. Bringing up the rear was an escort of four mounted military police. She had insisted on keeping the hood of her carriage down, so that she could see the crowds, and they could see her. The 53-year-old Queen was dressed in gold and crimson robes, topped off by a golden tiara with a tall, red feather. She laughed and waved, and the people laughed and waved back, and she became the star of the day.
   The Kingdom of Tonga is an archipelago of nearly two hundred islands between New Zealand and Hawaii, scattered over five hundred miles in the Southern Pacific Ocean, with only fifty-five thousand inhabitants. First settled in 800 BC, with the same royal family since 1600, it was named the ‘Friendly Islands’ by Captain James Cook after his first visit in 1773. In 1900 Tonga became a British Protectorate but remained a monarchy. As well as ruling, Queen Salote Mafile‘o Pilolevu Tupou III wrote songs, love poems and lakalaka – the traditional Tongan dance performed en masse with synchronised arm movements.

Queen Salote was six foot two inches tall, part of a royal dynasty far older than the British monarchy.

     John Douglas was an army officer on duty on The Mall. ‘I had a splendid view of all the procession. The loudest cheer was not for Queen Elizabeth but for the Queen of Tonga. This very large lady was in an open carriage despite the torrential rain and waving furiously at the crowds, who admired her fortitude.’ For many people it was the first time they had seen foreigners other than American GIs in the war. Cross-cultural tolerance was required in all directions. The Sheiks from the British Protectorate of Qatar thought it perfectly proper to bring their personal African slaves. Nobody had thought to tell them that slavery had been abolished in Britain a hundred and fifty years earlier.
       On his small black and white television at home, the playwright Noel Coward and his companion were watching the procession. Perched opposite the Queen of Tonga in her carriage was the diminutive Sultan of Kelantan in Malaysia, husband to three wives and father of twenty-three children. Coward’s friend asked him, ‘And who is that sitting in Queen Salote’s carriage?’ ‘Luncheon,’ he replied.

When singing The Queen of Tonga, the author of this blog drinks coffee from this coronation mug

 Jack Fishman, editor of the Sunday newspaper The Empire News, wrote a popular song about that rainy day in June, with a lilting ‘calypso’ rhythm and catchy tune. Sung by Edmundo Ros, ‘The Queen of Tonga’, soon caught on and was being whistled all over the country.
In the pacific Islands of Tonga,
They make their people stronger,
Oh it can rain or storm or squall,
But they don’t feel nothin’ at all.
Chorus: Oh! The Queen of Tonga Cross’d the ocean from far away.
Oh! The Queen of Tonga Came to Britain for Co-ro-nat-ion Day.
And when the people saw her on that torrential morn,
She captured all before her, took ev’ryone by storm.
 In every heart will always live longer,
That reign-in’ Queen of Tonga.

Baby, it's cold outside by Julie Summers

January 27, 2017, 4:01 pm

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Seventy seven years ago today Great Britain was paralysed by the most dramatic cold snap of the twentieth century. Winter 1947 was cold. Very cold indeed and there was a lot of snow for a very long time and people who lived through it will assure you it was the worst on record. But the end of January 1940 saw weather of such severity that even at the time the forecasters predicted it would be considered, in the future, the weather event of the century.

London, 28 January 1940

On 28 January 1940 there was an ice storm which Virginia Woolf described in her diary: ‘Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles and gates have a shiny, green varnish of ice.’ The cause of the weather was a warm Atlantic front meeting continental high pressure over England. The rain fell on ground already frozen and covered with drifting snow and was engulfed by the freezing air. 

Bolton under feet of snow, January 1940

Antony Woodward and Robert Penn published a book in 2007 called The Wrong Kind of Snow. As a keen weather-watcher I cannot recommend this delightful book highly enough. It charts the extremes of British weather day by day over the last 350 years. Of that fearful ice storm they wrote:

On impact, the rain turns instantly to ice: plants turn to glass rods, machines become ice sculptures, trees are split in two, wild ponies in the mountains of Wales are entombed in ice. In Kent, birds die in flight when their wings lock solid. Roads are like skating rinks, railway points cannot be change, thousands of telegraph poles collapse. The country is paralysed.

Birds on the Thames at Oxford, December 2016 I could not bring myself to show frozen birds or ponies!

What a sight it must have been and how miserable to wake up to towels frozen solid in bathrooms, no running water anywhere, ice on the inside of bedroom windows and a complete lack of any transport for essentials such as bread, milk, coal. The ice storm lasted for five days and left a deep impression on those who lived through it.

My friends in the USA or continental Europe raise their eyes to the (weather bringing) heavens when I talk about the weather. 'You British are fixated by it!' they laugh. It is true. When I lived in Germany in the 1980s we had snow on the ground in my village south of Munich from December to April and I was once caught in a full-blown ice storm in Philadelphia which made a strong impression on me but those were both weather events that occur quite regularly and in countries that are used to dealing with them.

Enjoying the British weather at an outdoor concert, Summer 2016

Watching the weather is a national pastime. I have never been able satisfactorily to explain to people living on vast continents why we talk about it incessantly. In The Wrong Kind of Snow I think you might find the answer. It is the lack of extremes and the minute variability which we cherish. Woodward and Penn point out that London gets less rain that many places in the USA, and Paris for that matter. But it gets it in drizzle form. Britain is, on the whole, damp, mild and benign. They point out that overcast skies and persistent drizzle have given Britain the best grass in the world and helped us to become one of the most advanced economies in the world from wool.

The 'perfect lawn', Trinity College Oxford

It has given us perfect turf for cricket, lawn tennis, hockey and bowls and it nurtures the English Garden to be the envy of the world. Dr Johnson once said: 'In our island every man goes to bed unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere.' With modern weather-forecasting we do a little better than that but I still like to think that the unpredictability of our weather brings us something worth talking about. One extreme weather event such as that of 77 years ago is a blip, something stupendous and unimaginable. Well worth remembering but as for tomorrow... I'm expecting light rain all day, winds of 11 miles per hour, north veering north westerly and a temperature of around 9 Celsius. Hm. Might even get out into my garden...

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January 28, 2017, 12:09 pm

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Love and Ambition in the Arctic by Stef Penney

January 28, 2017, 4:02 pm

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Continuing our cold theme, our guest for January is Stef Penney.

Photo credit: Ian Plillips-McLaren

 Stef Penney grew up in Edinburgh. She is a screenwriter and the author of three novels: The Tenderness of Wolves (2006), The Invisible Ones (2011), and Under a Pole Star (2016). She has also written extensively for radio, including adaptations of Moby-Dick, The Worst Journey in the World, and, mostly recently, a third instalment of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise series.

The Tenderness of Wolves won Costa Book of the Year, Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year, and was translated into thirty languages. It has just been re-issued in a 10th anniversary edition. http://www.stefpenney.co.uk

Here Stef is talking about her new book with Charlotte Wightwick

Charlotte Wightwick: Tell us about your new novel, Under A Pole Star.

Stef Penney: Flora Mackie first crosses the Arctic Circle at the age of twelve. As a young scientist in the 1890s, she confounds expectations to become leader of an expedition to North-West Greenland, where she encounters rival American explorers Lester Armitage and Jakob de Beyn. All three become obsessed with the north: for Flora it is her real home; for Armitage it is a theatre for his ambition; for de Beyn, a place of escape. Their paths cross many times over the next decade, changing their lives for ever. It began as a book about ambition, but I think it’s ended up as a love story.

CW: Were you inspired by any real-life explorers or incidents when developing her character? What about the other characters in the book?

SP: There were no women arctic explorers at the time (the first was in the late 1920s), but there were a few female mountaineers, and a handful of women, like Isabella Bird, who made extraordinary solo journeys. But the High Arctic was (and still is) a very hard place to get to, logistically; an expedition there involved massive expenditure, specially chartered ships, tons of equipment, and a lot of time. Unless you were fantastically wealthy, you had to be able to sell yourself as the right man for the job. So Flora has to overcome many obstacles – some through her choices, some by fate – before she becomes the leader of an expedition. She has to be quite unusual to surmount all those difficulties, but once I decided she was the daughter of a Dundee whaling captain who had spent much of her childhood in Greenland, this almost impossible thing began to work...

With the other characters, I was inspired by historical explorers, although neither is closely based on any one figure. The accounts of Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, and the controversy about who reached the North Pole first, or at all, got me thinking about what sort of people explorers are, and why they might lie. At first, I was overwhelmed by that story. They were extraordinary personalities – not just the unfathomable Cook and the incredibly dislikeable Peary, but Peary’s wife Jo (also dislikable) who joined him on a couple of expeditions as a non-active member, and Matthew Henson, his African-American servant, who went everywhere he went, but who was ignored by Peary, and the public, after their final trip. Theirs was a story you couldn’t make up – except they did.

CW: ​Love and ambition are two of the key emotional themes in the book - how do these play out in your characters and what were the key issues you wanted to explore here?

SP: I’m fascinated by the idea of ambition – particularly the point where it tips over from driving a person to achieve a goal, to driving them to lie – or worse – to reap the rewards that goal brings. The love story evolved later, but it became, perhaps, more important in the end. I don’t really think in terms of issues, so I don’t know that I intended to explore anything in particular, other than the collision of those particular characters, in that particular place.

I suppose one thing that emerges is the way Flora holds onto her self and her autonomy under the onslaughts of the time – society, cultural expectations, biology, and indeed, love. Another thing that came to concern me very much is the way that sex is portrayed in fiction. I didn’t set out to write an explicit love story, but as writing progressed, I came to feel that not to precisely describe the affair between the two main characters would be a cop-out (no pun intended!). I’m a pedant; I get annoyed by love scenes where you’re left with questions like, Sorry, did she have an orgasm? How? What were they using for contraception? (Particularly pertinent, perhaps, in historical fiction.) And if you’re writing about the difference between good, bad and indifferent sex – well, it seems to me you have to be specific.

CW: The book tackles a number of serious subjects, including for example the impacts of colonisation and what that meant for the lives of indigenous people - can you say a little about these?

SP: It’s hard to avoid such things in writing about Arctic exploration. It’s also what makes it, for me, more fascinating than the Antarctic, where explorers could continue to behave in their own cultural bubble without anyone challenging them. The parts of the book most closely modeled on history are the various trials the Inuit characters suffer at the hands of explorers. Although there was nothing in Greenland to compare with the genocide in, for example, Tasmania, (because the land was commercially unexploitable), horrific things occurred: some accidental, like the fatality of unfamiliar diseases, and some that sprang from the explorers’ sense of white supremacy. Though some explorers in the book, as in history, are more insensitive than others, no one comes out of it with completely clean hands.

CW: This isn't the first time you've written about northern, unforgiving settings ( your first book, The Tenderness of Wolves was set in Canada) - what is it do you think that draws you to write about such landscapes?

SP: I don’t seem to be able to stay away from them for long. Some people are drawn to deserts – for me, it’s the north. Perhaps because it’s close to the Scottish landscapes of my childhood. We spent all our holidays in the Highlands or on the North-West coast, and there’s something about bleak, rugged landscape that gets into your bones. And that’s even before you get to the ice and snow – it’s beautiful yet deadly; it’s ephemeral and transformative, it both conceals and reveals... Such hostile surroundings force people to reveal themselves, too. Two of the things I most enjoyed writing were my vision of Eden, which had to be a northern place; and being inside a glacier: something truly extraordinary.