ht j 2016

SHELL SHOCK

SIKKIM A pawn between India and China

GYPSIES 500 years of fact

and fantasy

TERROR Defeating ISIS with history

The ‘Strange Hell’ of Warfare

January 2016Vol 66 Issue 1

2 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

‘IN THE TESTS designed to identify those of subnormal intelligence, I proved unable to assemble a bicycle pump’, confesses Keith Thomas in ‘Army Life’, an essay published in Resplendent Adventures with Britannia (IB Tauris, 2015). It did not stop this ‘priggish innocent’ from being posted to the Royal Engineers during his National Service, much of which was spent in the Caribbean (he was too young to fight in the Korean War, from which some of his colleagues never returned). Nor did it prevent him from becoming a fellow of All Souls and the author of one of the great historical studies produced during the postwar years, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in 16th- and 17th-century England (1971).

The elegance, irony and erudition on display in Thomas’ essay is typical of the learning lightly worn in Wm. Roger Louis’ enthralling compilations, which began with Adventures With Britannia in 1995, have continued with regularity ever since as More Adventures (1998), Still More Adventures (2003), Penultimate Adventures (2007) and so on and has now reached its 12th volume.

The line up of contributors to the series is a remarkable one and testament to the esteem in which Louis, Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas and Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, is held. The latest volume includes, as do all its predecessors, many names familiar to readers of History Today: in addition to Thomas there are o�erings by Jane Ohlmeyer, Archie Brown, Lawrence Goldman and Bernard Porter.

There are few more pleasurable means to understanding Britain and its long engagement with the world, for good and bad, than these collections, which have contained some of the best history writing of the last two decades. I think especially of Simon Green on the decline of English puritanism (attributed in part to wartime rationing), Avi Shlaim on the Balfour Declaration (judged ‘one of the greatest mistakes in our imperial history’) and Richard Davenport-Hines on the wholly unstable Gordon of Khartoum (whose response to watching a performance of the Paris ballet is priceless).

Louis and IB Tauris are to be congratulated on this series which, along with your copy of History Today, is the perfect accompaniment to those long winter evenings. Long may it run.

Paul Lay

Publisher Andy PattersonEditor Paul LayDigital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel HaseldenReviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate WilesEditorial Assistant Rhys Gri�thsArt Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl DeflorimonteSubscriptions Assistant Ava BushellAccounts Sharon Harris

Board of Directors Simon Biltcli�e (Chairman), Tim Preston

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARDDr Simon Adams University of StrathclydeDr John Adamson Peterhouse, CambridgeProfessor Richard Bessel University of YorkProfessor Jeremy Black University of ExeterLord Briggs Formerly Chancellor of the Open UniversityProfessor Paul Dukes University of AberdeenProfessor Martin Evans University of SussexJuliet Gardiner Historian and authorTom Holland Historian and authorGordon Marsden MP for Blackpool SouthDr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of LondonProfessor Geo�rey Parker Ohio State UniversityProfessor Paul Preston London School of EconomicsProfessor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National UniversityProfessor Ulinka Rublack St John’s College, CambridgeProfessor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of LondonDr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, CambridgeProfessor T.P. Wiseman University of ExeterProfessor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham

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Imperial project: British Empire Throughout the World, engraving, c.1890s.

JANUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3

THE NOVEMBER terrorist attacks in Paris heightened concerns across the Channel. London has already endured its own experience of Islamist terror, in July 2005, though Britain has long faced terrorist threats. In the 1880s the Fenians, precursors of the IRA, bombed several targets in the capital, including the Tower of London and the o�ces of The Times. Around the turn of the century there was a widespread scare about anarchists, who had murdered innocents in Parisian cafés and a Barcelona theatre, as well as judges and heads of state. They were also active in Britain: a bomb-making factory was discovered in the West Midlands town of Walsall

HistoryMattersCounter-terrorism • Citroën DS • St Paul’s in the Blitz • Ravensbrück

of denying entry to any foreigner who arrived, or the capacity to expel any immigrant, certainly any ‘political’ one. Victorian Britain put up with fierce foreign critics, including Marx and Engels, for many years and dozens of Continental anarchists. Added to this ‘free entry’ principle was another: massive public opposition to ‘espio-nage’. This made it di�cult to find out what bombers and other malcontents were doing in Britain (not Ireland and the colonies, though, which were more rigorously policed). The latter principle was sometimes broken: at the beginning of the 19th century, against democrats and Chartists; in the middle of the century, when one man – Sergeant John Sanders – report-ed on French refugees; and from the 1880s, with the help of a new London Police ‘Special Branch’, charged with preventing Fenian attacks. These however were exceptions and usually rather incompetent. (The Special Branch was still keeping a watch on Marx two years after his death.) They also kept themselves hidden from the public, Parliament and even ministers (Gladstone once deliberately absented himself from a Cabinet meeting because he knew the subject of sur-veillance was coming up).

If hints of underhand police activity ever got out, there was usually a public outcry. One government got into serious di�culties in 1844 when it was discovered that the letters of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini were being opened at the Post O�ce; another fell (though this was not the sole reason) in 1858, when Palmerston tried to pass legis-lation enabling foreigners in Britain to be tried in the country – though not expelled, which was out of the question – for terrorist acts commit-ted abroad. That was because foreign governments were increasingly irate at Britain for sheltering these desp- eradoes, almost as if – as one French propagandist claimed – it was

Inept: anarchist Martial Bourdon is blown up by his own bomb at Greenwich Park, illustration from the Chronicle, 1894.

Too Tolerant of Terror?The Victorians were wedded to fundamental tenets of liberalism, even when threatened with terrorism from abroad.

Bernard Porter in 1892 and a device exploded prema-turely near Greenwich Observatory in 1894, killing the bomber himself. That campaign gave rise to a plethora of sensational novels, the best-known of which is Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Another, George Glen-don’s The Emperor of the Air (1910), even anticipated 9/11. That is without going back to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 or forward to more recent IRA bombings. Reactions to these threats, however, have varied. It is worth remembering how and why.

Victorian Britain was wedded to two great principles, which were sup-posed to distinguish her as a nation. The first was that she welcomed – or tolerated – foreign refugees, due to the lack of any e¤ective legal means


HISTORYMATTERS

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

deliberately using them to undermine its European rivals.

Many of Britain’s rulers sympath- ised, though they could not admit this in public. They had a lot in common with their aristocratic cousins overseas – more perhaps than with most of their fellow subjects. The latter viewed espionage as intrin-sically dishonourable and prone to corruption. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police’s earliest plain-clothes branch seemed to bear that out when it was

implicated in a betting fraud that it was supposed to be investigating. In the 20th century, when the secret ser-vices finally emerged, albeit mistily, agents were suspected of plotting against governments they did not like. You could not trust them, nor any government that resorted to such practice. And trust was necessary to keep the populace loyal. ‘Should the practice of spydom become univer-sal’, pronounced The Times in 1859, ‘farewell to all domestic confidence and happiness.’

Indeed, ‘spydom’ was held to be one of the causes of much of the unrest to be seen on the Continent. Terrorism was nurtured by what today we would call ‘police states’. It followed (a) that it was the fault of foreign governments, if terrorists caused them problems; and (b) that they could do little harm in Britain. Palmerston expressed this concept picturesquely in 1852:

A single spark will explode a powder magazine, and a blazing torch will burn out harmless on a turnpike road. If a country be in a state of suppressed internal discontent, a very slight indica-tion may augment that discontent, and produce an explosion; but if the country be well governed, and the people be contented, then letters and proclamations from unhappy refugees will be as harm-less as the torch upon the turnpike road.

This boosted Britons’ amour propre immensely; which was perhaps the

main reason why they neglected the most obvious counter-terrorist meas-ures – secret policing and the power to exclude or expel foreigners – until 1905 (the first modern Aliens Act) and 1911 (when MI5 was born). It showed how superior Britain was.

Happy days. Circumstances are dif-ferent now. If 19th-century anarchists and modern jihadists have much in common – chiefly a bestial disregard for human life – today’s suicide bombers’ disregard for their own lives, encouraged by a perverted form of their religion, makes them more dangerous, as does their access to far more dangerous and e�cient weaponry. (The Greenwich bomber did not intend to blow himself up; the advance of terror is an example of history beginning as farce and ending in tragedy.) So Britain’s ‘surveillance state’ (with its accompanying CCTV cameras, largely absent in Paris) and the new counter-terrorist powers sought by governments may be justi-fied. Even so, Britons should be aware of what they have lost as a nation by embracing such measures: an essential part of their historical identity, no less. They should also ponder the reasons for Victorian objections to secret domestic surveillance, in par-ticular. Some of these may still stand.

Bernard Porter’s latest books are British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t and Empire Ways, a collection of essays (both IB Tauris, 2015).

ANY VISITOR to the London Motor Show on October 19th, 1955 would not have lacked for interesting cars for the price of a ticket. There was the new 2.4 litre compact saloon from Jaguar, the latest MGA sports car and Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, plus a Sunbeam Rapier coupé with its exuberant (or vulgar) whitewall tyres. There was even a Daimler ‘Golden Zebra’ displayed by the famed coachbuilders Hooper for anyone who wanted to spend a vast amount of money on a gold-plated coupé with upholstery from an unfortunate animal. But even this paled in comparison with the vehicle innocuously billed as the ‘2-Litre Six-Seater saloon’ on the Citroën stand.

To the average British motorist of 60 years ago, the DS claimed to be a motor car but was clearly an escapee from Hammer film studios. Some visitors fled to the safe haven of the Standard- Triumph display, where the Vanguard Phase III was as reassuringly sensible as an army vest, but others stayed to marvel at a car that represented a new future. ‘All the joys of restful motoring are yours in the new Citroën “2-Litre”’, claimed the British market brochures, but the French sales slogan was rather more accurate. ‘Quand vous avez dit “Citroën”, vous avez tout dit’ (‘When you have said “Citroën”, there is nothing more to say’) and the DS rendered many Earls Court visitors speechless.

Citroën was not an unfamiliar marque in the UK; between 1926 and 1965 their assembly plant in Slough produced cars for the British and Commonwealth markets in order to circumvent swingeing import duties. For the previous 21 years their staple oªer-ing had been the Traction Avant range, familiar from newsreels and made when front-wheel drive was a novelty to the average Austin driver. This was aug-mented in 1954 by a Berkshire version

French innovations in style and design revolutionised our concept of the car.

60 Years of the Citroën DS

Andrew Roberts

‘Spydom’ was held to be one of the causes of much of the unrest to be seen on the Continent


HISTORYMATTERS

of the 2CV, a favourite of the motoring press but regarded with suspicion by Morris Minor owners, who did not per-ceive the appeal in a car that looked like a mobile greenhouse. Readers of the Motor and Autocar would also have been aware of the DS from coverage of its French debut and they may have seen Gina Lollobrigida with the new Citroën on the cover of October’s Paris Match. But pictures alone could never compare with that encounter at the Earls Court show.

Citroën had been working on their Voiture à Grande Di�usion (VGD) project since the 1930s. Development continued in secret during the Second World War and it was in 1942 that the engineer Paul Magès proposed that hydraulic power could not only level the VGD’s suspension but also power the brakes, steering and transmission. By 1950 the prototype was renamed ‘Projet D’ and five years later, on October 5th, 1955, the DS was launched at the Paris Salon; by the end of that day Citroën had taken

in a perfect fusion and the coachwork of the DS was not merely incredibly aerodynamic but defined its own terms. Beneath his coachwork was the 1.9 litre Traction Avant engine driving the front wheels but that and the double chevron badge were the only familiar reference points. There was hydro-pneumatic suspension that allowed the driver to raise or lower the DS as road conditions demanded and hydraulic power for the semi-automatic transmission, steering and dual circuit brakes. At a time when a Rover or Wolseley would have been virtually naked without its hide trim and timber-decorated fascia, the Citroën delighted in its use of artificial materi-als. In place of a wooden fascia studded with Bakelite switches, the DS featured a one-piece moulding made from plas-tics. Indeed, André Lefebvre, the chief design engineer of Citroën, revelled in the fact that he was one of the first Frenchmen to wear a nylon shirt.

The Citroën DS was a car that set out its own terms from the outset, down to the seemingly minutest detail. The doors were devoid of window frames and there were rear indicators designed to be in the eye line of follow-ing motorists when not a few British cars still used semaphore tra®cators. In 1955 ‘winter motoring’ meant du¯e coats and freezing but the DS sported a comprehensive heating and ventilation system, complete with ducts to the rear seat and dashboard-mounted fresh air vents. The slim pillars meant for excel-lent visibility, unlike peering through the porthole-like window of a UK-built rival, and the roof was constructed of fibreglass in order to lower the centre of gravity. Even the act of starting the engine caused any number of hissing noises and the unforgettable sight of the DS rising on its haunches.

A Slough-built version of the DS was launched in 1956, featuring leather trim and a walnut-veneered dashboard, but these concessions to British tastes only highlighted how diªerent the Citroën was and indeed still is, for the ‘2-Litre’ transcended mere fashion and redefined the idea of what a car could represent.

over 12,000 orders. It was the DS styling that caused

the initial sensation, for even in repose it looked like a basking shark. In the immortal words of Roland Barthes’ 1957 essay ‘The New Citroën’:

It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky in as much as it appears at first sight as a superlative object …The DS – the goddess – has all the features of one of those objects from another universe which have supplied fuel for the neomania of the 18th century and that of our own science fiction.

The Traction Avant’s replacement made its debut at a time when ‘aerodynam-ics’ to the lay person often inferred the use of tail fins, especially on Detroit cars such as Ford’s Thunderbird or the second-generation Chevrolet Bel Air. But the new Citroën was almost entirely lacking in chrome direction, exaggerated wings or any form of adornment per se.

Flaminio Bertoni, the company’s design maestro, wanted to create a car in which form and function coexisted

It was the DS styling that caused the initial sensation, for even in repose it looked like a basking shark

Daring design: Francine Breaud, wife of singer Sacha Distel, and the Citroën DS. France, 1955.

Andrew Roberts writes on the history of cinema and popular culture.


HISTORYMATTERS

Tom Allbeson

Image WarsA great photograph of the Second World War oªers many interpretations.

FROM SEPTEMBER 1940, the Luftwaªe attacked UK cities in what became known as the Blitz. By the end of 1941, 41,987 civilians had been killed. At the height of the bombing of London, Associated Newspapers photographer Herbert Mason was on a City rooftop. He took at least three photographs of the skyline alive with flames and smoke. One of these was a photo-graph of St Paul’s, used ever since as visual shorthand for, not only the Blitz, but Britain’s role in the conflict. It was first published on December 31st, 1940, on the front page of the Daily Mail.

Wren’s cathedral was freighted with symbolism. It evoked the Great Fire of 1666, for one, and the devastation of December 29th, 1940 quickly earned the sobriquet of ‘the Second Great Fire’. The editors of the Daily Mail (the strapline of which, was ‘For King and Empire’) drew on such associations. The photograph was cropped to emphasise the dome of St Paul’s and to minimise the gutted buildings conspicuous in the original. The audience addressed by the photo-graph – despite paper rationing, the Daily Mail had a circulation of around 1,450,000 – was encouraged to ‘cherish’ this picture as a symbol of ‘the steadiness of London’s stand against the enemy: the firmness of Right against Wrong’. Mason’s image was presented as nothing short of a symbol of civilisa-tion itself.

Such allusions were repeated when the photograph was reprinted in the Illustrated London News on January 4th, 1941 as, ‘a symbol of the indestructible faith of the whole civilised world’. In the US (not yet at war with Germany), the photograph appeared in Life magazine that same month.

This frame of reference was turned on its head when, soon after, the photo-graph appeared in the German photo- magazine Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Here it bore the legend, ‘The City of London Burns.’ Rather than wreathing the

Tom Allbeson is Lecturer in Modern History at Swansea University.

London likened to Wren’s unrealised masterplan, sold 134,000 copies.

The building’s symbolic value also made St Paul’s a key element of that renowned postwar spectacle, the Festi-val of Britain, opened by George VI from the steps of the cathedral before a procession made its way to the festival’s South Bank site. Dominated by Tubbs’ Dome of Discovery, an imposing modern structure with a circumference of 365ft, matching exactly the height of St Paul’s, the festival received over eight million visitors before closing in Sept- ember. Thus, while in wartime Mason’s photograph was associated with the Blitz spirit, in the postwar period it was used to promote the ‘Spirit of ’45’: the desire to build a diªerent Britain, ex-pressed in the Labour manifesto of that year (‘Let us Face the Future’) and the establishment of the NHS in 1948.

In subsequent decades Mason’s photograph was uncoupled from any progressive postwar agenda. Opinion turned against the architecture of reconstruction to such an extent that, in his Mansion House speech of December 1987, the Prince of Wales could (without any sense of dissonance) invoke Mason’s photograph as part of an indictment of the postwar rebuilding of London: ‘You have, Ladies and Gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaªe’, he said. ‘When it knocked down our buildings it didn’t replace them with anything more oªensive than rubble. We did that.’

Mason’s photograph has been a vital part of diverse visualisations of the Blitz, which have, in turn, bolstered mes-sages or arguments with contrasting political agendas. The malleability of the photograph accounts in part for its wide circulation. The volume and variety of its uses should compel historians to consider in greater depth the role of the image in shaping collective attitudes and memories of historic events. Images as widely circulated as Mason’s can be formative influences on our under-standing of history, helping to create and promote particular views of the past. They constitute what, alongside cultural and social history, we might term visual history and they demand greater attention.

dome, the caption asserted, the clouds of smoke obscured the extent of the damage. Emphasis was placed on asso-ciations of the City of London with ‘high finance’. The photograph was framed not as a symbol of endurance, but as that of a dangerous enemy.

Such a hostile gloss is almost incon-ceivable in Britain, though little about the photograph, which conveys sparse detail about the Blitz, makes such pos-itive associations inevitable. It is rather the repeated investment in the photo-graph of particular meanings, through the uses to which it has been put and the captions which have accompanied it that has established this seemingly obvious significance.

For a brief moment in the 1940s and early 50s the photograph played a dif-ferent role in British visual culture, when it assumed significance in the debate about postwar reconstruction, which had begun as the bombs fell. Ralph Tubbs used an uncropped version of the image in Living in Cities (1942). Giving equal prominence to the ruins and the dome, Mason’s St Paul’s (captioned ‘The New Opportunity’) helped present the destruction of the Blitz as a chance to improve the public and domestic spaces of Britain through the application of modern architectural and town- planning principles. This campaigning booklet, setting out a bold vision of a

Opposing view: front page of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, January 23rd, 1941.


HISTORYMATTERS

THE QUESTION of how we should commemorate the concentration camps is a live one. On a bitterly cold day in November I took the train from Berlin to Fürstenburg, a village to the north, where women destined for Ravensbrück were let out of their overcrowded cattle trucks to be marched to the camp itself.

Some French resisters, sent there as late as summer 1944, had endured months in other prisons and thought the new camp might at least oªer them a chance to work outside, a hope they grasped on arrival as they smelled the salty Baltic air. But, as Jacqueline d’Alin-court wrote, they were soon disabused of this notion: ‘We were forced to step out amid the yelling of guards accom-panied by their dogs, tugging at their leashes, showing their fangs. Fists rained down upon us.’

The camp location, amid forests and lakes, was chosen by Heinrich Himmler because it was far enough away for people not to know about it, yet within reach of the railway station at Fürsten-burg, which, then as now, had a direct link to Berlin. Built in 1939 as the only all-women camp, Ravensbrück was intended for social outcasts, gypsies, political dissenters, foreign resisters, the disabled and other ‘inferior beings’. Some 130,000 women from 20 diªerent

there was discouraged once the Iron Curtain descended. Today there is a visitor centre and a building known as the Bunker – the prison cells within the camp used for additional punishment and torture – has been refurbished. The crematorium remains untouched.

Overlooking the lake, there is a large sculpture by Will Lammert, Tragende, of an emaciated woman carrying the burden of another human being. Yet, short of forcing all visitors to strip, starve, endure fear and beatings, how can one imagine what it felt like to be here in 1944. On the day I was there the vastness of the empty white Appelplatz was a powerful reminder of just how barren the site is of all signs of human-ity. During my visit to Berlin, random questions to young Germans as to what they knew about Ravensbrück, only an hour away, met with vacant stares.

Berlin has done much to draw atten-tion to its Jewish past, with stolperstein plaques embedded in pavements recording former Jewish inhabitants mur-dered by the Nazis, memorial signposts in the former Jewish quarter and even pictures in some train stations of well-known Jews who once lived in that area. Yet Ravensbrück is little known and not encouraged to be part of any cultural itinerary for tourists. Perhaps that is as it should be, to avoid succumbing to what has been called ‘holocaust tourism’.

In April 2015, to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation, 90 former inmates gathered, probably for the last time. Annette Chalut, arrested as a teenager, now 90 and honorary Chair of the International Ravensbrück Commit-tee, said: ‘Vigilance is our absolute duty. Evil can return at any time, and we are not allowed to forget what happened here.’ With those remarks echoing in my head, I emerged from my hotel to see a group of schoolchildren on hands and knees scrubbing the stolperstein with toothbrushes and cleaning fluid. No, they had not been to Ravensbruck, they told me, but they knew of it. ‘It’s very important to know about your history’, volunteered one of the 14-year-old boys, ‘especially if you are German.’

Anne Sebba‘s next book is Les Parisiennes: How Women Lived, Loved and Died in Paris from 1939-49 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016).

nationalities passed through it. Around 30,000 to 50,000 people were killed there, yet Ravensbrück was not an ex-termination camp – only about 10 per cent of its inmates were Jews – rather it was a place of punishment, which provided slave labour to some of the thousands of sub-camps fuelling the Nazi war machine, the most notorious being the Siemens and Halske plant.

Among its inmates were Genèvieve de Gaulle, niece of the General, the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent Odette Sansom, who later became Odette Churchill, and French ethnographer Germaine Tillion, who composed an opera in the camp based on the story of Orpheus. It was also the scene of horrific medical experi-mentation on young Polish women, known as ‘lapins’ (guinea pigs), some of whom had their legs cut open and infected with bacteria and glass shards to simulate the eªect of shrapnel.

In March 1945, when it was clear the defeat of Nazi Germany was only a matter of time, the Swedish Red Cross sent buses to rescue some prisoners, but Ravensbrück was not liberated by the Red Army until April 30th. After the war the Soviets used the site as an army training camp and, although there is a Soviet-era tank serving as a memorial on the road from Fürsten-burg, investigation of what went on

Anne Sebba

The site of the concentration camp near Berlin remains little known.

Women of Ravensbrück

Together: Zwei Stehende (Two Women Standing), a monument to Ravensbrück.


THE STREET in Fenny Drayton, the Leicestershire village where the founder of the Quakers grew up, is now called George Fox Lane in his honour. He was the son of a prosperous weaver, who was a churchwarden of the solidly puritan local parish. He later recalled that he had been an exceptionally serious boy, ‘of much gravity and staidness of mind and spirit’. He was deeply religious, but he became equally deeply uncertain about Christian doctrines and values.

From the age of 19 in 1643, with the Civil War raging in a period of upheaval and uncertainty, young Fox spent much of his time for several years wandering around the Midlands, keeping to areas under parliamentary control, talking to puritan ministers and others to try to clear his own mind. He had been a cob-bler’s apprentice for a time and so could earn money to support himself. He grew increasingly dubious about the Church of England and su�ered from severe fits of depression, until at last in 1647 he heard a voice that told him: ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condi-tion.’ His heart, he said, ‘did leap for joy’.

The experience finally convinced him that no notice should be taken of established teachers and practices. The believer should rely on the Bible, but even more on his own inner guide, which came direct from God. He re-jected the doctrine of the Trinity and all church rituals and he advanced religious and social opinions more radical and individualistic than even most puritans accepted. He disapproved of swearing oaths and paying clergy and he was a pacifist. He frowned on titles and class distinctions, the theatre and maypoles. It was not necessary to go to a building to worship; it could be done in the open fields because God is everywhere.

were now holding regular meetings, but persecution of them grew worse after the collapse of the Commonwealth regime and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. Fox began to look abroad and over the next decades he trav-elled to Ireland, the Caribbean, North America and the Netherlands to spread his message. William Penn, a close ally, founded the American colony of Pennsylvania in the 1680s as a refuge for Quakers. Persecution eased o� with the Act of Toleration of 1689 after William of Orange had become king.

Meanwhile, in the 1650s Fox had inherited a legacy from his father which made him financially secure and in 1669 he had married Margaret Fell, a Quaker widow with eight children, who, for the rest of his life, was a key missionary, org- aniser and influence on him. She helped to convince him that women should have equal treatment with men and he was a kind stepfather. About 1675 he dic-tated his memoirs, which were published as his Journal after his death.

In his latter years Fox lived in or near London, staying with friends, preaching at meetings and attending committees. The oldest meeting house in London was o� Gracechurch Street, not far from the Guildhall, and on January 11th, 1691 Fox preached at the meeting there. After-wards he said a feeling of cold had struck his heart and he retreated to bed at the nearby house of a Quaker he had stayed with before. To anxious friends at his bedside he said: ‘All is well. The seed of God reigns over all and over death itself.’ He died in the evening two days later of heart failure, aged 66.

Many Quakers and other Non-conformists had been interred in the Bunhill Fields burial ground to the north of the City, because it had never been consecrated and so they did not have to use the Prayer Book. On January 16th thousands accompanied Fox’s co¦n as it was carried there and buried. The sect he had founded would spread to the whole world.

MonthsPast JANUARYBy Richard Cavendish

JANUARY 13th 1691

George Fox dies in London

First Quaker: George Fox in a contemporary engraving.

Believing in simplicity, wearing plain clothes and using straightforward speech and manners, Fox began to go about preaching his message in the Midlands and in the northern counties, in Westmoreland, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Now magnetically self-confident, he began to attract followers, some of whom would travel with him at times to form a varying group of missionaries. From the 1650s there were Quakers in London. His emphasis on following one’s own inner guide inevitably caused disagreements and desertions, but still numbers grew.

Fox several times found himself in prison for blasphemy. He and his followers began to be called Quakers, after a judge in Derby in 1650 mocked his exhortation to ‘tremble at the word of the Lord’. They referred to themselves as Children of the Light or Friends of the Truth (the Society of Friends came much later). Organised Quaker congregations


SINCE THE early 1760s the great Austrian composer, ‘the father of the symphony’, had been master of music to the Esterhazy family, the leading Hungarian aristocrats in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At their palace in Hungary he composed music for them and organised and conduct-ed their orchestra and choir. In 1790, however, a new Prince Esterhazy, with no interest in music, cut spend-ing severely, including Haydn’s salary. At this point the unhappy composer was approached by a concert promot-er called Johann Peter Salomon, who suggested they go to England where he could organise mutually profitable concerts. When his friend Mozart pointed out that Haydn did not speak a word of English, he is said to have replied: ‘My language is understood throughout the world!’

By way of Munich and Bonn the two men reached Calais on New Year’s Eve and next day took ship for Dover and went on to London. Haydn, now 58, was both excited and alarmed by the vast size of the city, the numbers of people, the crush

of tra¡c and the deafening noise, but his music was hugely admired in England and a week or so later he told a friend that his arrival had caused a sensation. It had been in all the newspapers for three days and he had dined out for six days already. He promptly started taking English

lessons, as aristocrats and leading musical and literary figures swarmed to meet him. He was invited to a ball at court and taken up by the Prince of Wales (the future Prince Regent), who became his main royal patron.

Salomon organised Haydn’s

first concert early in March and it reportedly attracted ‘homage and even adulation’. Charles Burney, the music historian, said that the mere sight of the great man presiding from the piano electrified the audience and excited ‘an attention and a pleasure’ superior to any ever before given to instrumental music in England.

Besides handsome profits and all the adulation, Haydn was giving piano lessons to a wealthy and attractive widow called Rebecca Schroeter and a passionate a¤air developed. He went back to the Continent in 1792, but presided over another series of concerts in England in 1794 and 1795. George III o¤ered him accommoda-tion at Windsor Castle if he would stay in England permanently, but the composer declined.

Haydn wrote 12 symphonies and numerous other compositions in England. He eventually died in Vienna in 1809, utterly worn out at the age of 77. In a bizarre sequel, his head was secretly cut o¤ and stolen for a phrenological examination which concluded that his ‘bump of music’ was ‘fully developed’.

JANUARY 27th 1966

JANUARY 1st 1791

Joseph Haydn arrives in England

Hedy Lamarr arrested for shoplifting

The press leapt on the story, which created a sensation. When the trial began in the Los Angeles Municipal Court in April, crowds gathered outside to see Lamarr arrive with her lawyer. The case took six days. Lamarr’s lawyer maintained she had been su�ering from nervous strain and had meant to pay and he accused the prosecution of ‘Gestapo tactics’. Two psychiatrists testified for the defence that Lamarr had been in a confused, jumpy state. Two May Company employees said they had seen her shoplifting in the store twice before in 1965, but the jury were told to disre-gard their statements. In the end the jury of seven women and five men brought in a verdict of not guilty. Lamarr thanked each of them personally. Perhaps they were simply sorry for her. Ruth Barton’s 2010 biography of the actress says that Lamarr’s neighbours in her later years knew she was ‘light-fingered’. She was arrested again years afterwards in 1991 and once again let o�.

THE HOLLYWOOD star was famed more for her looks and her sexy roles than for acting. By 1966, aged 51, with her career in tatters, she was living alone in Los Angeles after the collapse of her fourth marriage and worrying about ageing and money. One day she went shopping in the big May Company department store with a man named Earl Mills and was seen dropping items in her shopping bag, while Mills went to get the car. She then walked out without paying, but a store detective, who thought she had seen her at the same game before, stopped her and took her back in. The clothes and other items in the bag were worth $86 and Lamarr said

‘Light fingered’: Hedy Lamarr (right), with Andy Williams and Corinne Tsopei at the Golden Globes, Los Angeles, 1967.

she would pay at once, but the store manager called the police and she was taken to jail before being released on bail. She afterwards said she had given Mills a blank cheque to pay for her pur-chases, but he did not confirm that.

Father of the symphony: ‘Papa’ Haydn portrayed by Thomas Hardy, 1792.


SHELL SHOCK

‘Shell shock’ is associated in particular with the First World War. Stuart M. Archer recounts the often brutal treatment meted out to su�erers of the condition – including a distinguished composer-poet – and looks at how use of the term fell into disrepute.

A member of the Salvation Army writes a letter on behalf of an injured Allied soldier, c.1915.

The RACKET and the FEAR


SHELL SHOCK

A recruiting poster for nurses, British, c.1915.

‘Strange Hells’There are strange hells within the minds war madeNot so often, not so humiliatingly afraidAs one would have expected – the racket and the fear guns made.Ivor Gurney

IN A RAILWAY STATION near Lyon, in the early morning of February 1st, 1918, sta� found a man wandering alone. They assumed he had arrived on a hospital train bringing prisoners of war from Germany, but when they quest-

ioned him he could only mumble. He was wearing a French uniform without any unit tags and he had no money and no identity papers. Young, with a dark moustache, he was sick and bewildered. Doctors sent him to a mental hospital at Bron, on the outskirts of Lyon. When asked his name he muttered indistinctly something that sounded vaguely like ‘Anthelme Mangin’ and that became his name.

Looked after for many years by a sympathetic doctor, he became a celebrity. The courts and the press constantly pursued his identity for he was one of the living inconnus or disparus. Doctors argued over the causes of his amnesia, some trying to deny that it was due to shell shock, for that would have made him eligible for compensation. Anthelme eventually starved to death in an asylum during the Vichy regime in 1942. Such were the rewards of shell shock and amnesia in France.

Shell shock has become one of the most common phrases used in the description of military experience in the First World War. The Southborough Committee of 1920 attempted to define it as:

An emotional shock, either acute in men with a neuropathic disposition, or developing as a result of prolonged strain or terrifying experience, the final breakdown being sometimes brought about by some relatively trivial cause, or nervous and mental exhaustion, the result of prolonged strain or hardship.

First used in academic circles in an article in the medical journal the Lancet of February 1915, the term ‘shell shock’ was the invention of Charles S. Myers, who had been trained in psychology and was co-opted into the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) to act as consulting psychologist to

the army in France. He distrusted and disliked the military medical men, regarding them as hostile to research and mental breakdown, but he quickly became experienced in the treatment of shell shock. By July 1916 he had seen over 2,000 cases and was soon arguing the case for specialised hospitals. He was quick to admit that shell shock was a misleading term, as soldiers could su�er mental breakdown without any physical proximity to bursting shells, through the stress of battle alone.

Myers introduced class analysis into his diagnoses: o�cers su�ered neurasthenia, while ordinary soldiers experienced hysteria or trauma:

The forces of education, tradition and example make for greater self-control in the case of the O�cer. He, moreover, is busy throughout a bombardment, issuing orders and subject to worry about his responsibilities, whereas his men can do nothing during the shelling, but watch and wait until the order is received for an advance.

Myers believed that neurasthenia in o�cers was a mental and nervous disorder due to exhaustion, creating acute irritability, loss of confidence,

The term ‘shell shock’ was the invention of Charles S. Myers, who was co-opted into the RAMC to act as consulting psychologist to the army in France

Charles S. Myers, 1920s.


depression, headache, giddiness, insomnia, nightmares, loss of appetite, loss of memory, loss of concentration and paranoia. Hysteria in privates was unconscious and led to tics, tremors, sweating, stammering or mutism, deafness, blindness, amnesia, paralyses, muscular contractions, di�culty in walking and inability to perform routine tasks. Men were haunted by a past they could not forget, by mem-ories they did not want to remember but which intruded into both their waking and sleeping hours. Some became impotent. Some soiled themselves. Others had multiple orgasms under shell fire. The age group most vulnerable to shell shock was between 18 and 25. Brooding, self-analys-ing, introspective types, who were always estimating their chances of survival with imaginative power, were the most likely su�erers.

It was easy for medical attitudes to become hostile: there was the constant suspicion of malingering and of the letting down of comrades. While there was sympathy with

the military ordeals creating such symptoms, there was also contempt for the lack of willpower and self-control involved in giving in to them. What these men needed was ‘stoutness of heart’. The most reactionary witness was Lt Col Viscount Gort, who bluntly stated that shell shock ‘must be regarded as a form of disgrace to the soldier’. Those still su�ering from it ‘were probably bordering on lunacy before the war began’.

THE SHEER SCALE of the psychological problems was very disturbing for the brass hats. Mental issues had first been observed during the retreat from Mons in 1914 but then escalated in later cam-

paigns. Sir John Collie, the then accepted English expert on ‘malingering’, made a credible estimate that 200,000 soldiers were discharged from active service due to mental problems. In some areas 40 per cent of all casualties were due to nervous disorders. On the Somme from July to

British troops crossing the River Ancre, Battle of the Somme, 1916.


SHELL SHOCK

December, 1916, 16,000 cases of shell shock occurred in the British army alone; by 1918 the government was providing medical care and pensions for over 400,000 dis-abled soldiers and sailors. Medical provision was revolution-ised: by 1920, 113 hospitals with 18,600 beds, supplemented by 319 special surgical clinics, 36 ear clinics, 24 eye clinics, 19 heart centres and 48 mental hospitals were provided to deal with the most severely disabled. By the end of the war, 80,000 cases of shell shock had been treated in RAMC medical units and 30,000 troops diagnosed with nervous trauma had been evacuated to British hospitals. After the war 200,000 ex-servicemen received pensions for nervous disorders and in 1939 40,000 British ex-servicemen were still receiving pensions for mental disabil-ity stemming from the First World War.

Many factors fused in the concerns for the fitness of the British army in the First World War. Historically, one in six volunteers for the Boer War were reject-ed on grounds of poor physical fitness. In 1904 an Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration had been set up to investigate the health and physique of the people and make recommendations on the education and welfare of child-ren. Fears for the future of an imperial race bred in slums, poverty, disease and hunger resonated. Even the reformer Churchill had warned in 1912 that ‘the multiplication of the Feeble Minded was a terrible danger to the race’.

IN THEIR ANXIETY to suppress the term shell shock, the army’s imagination and its love of acronyms proudly embraced new terminology. Cases must now

be described as NYDN (Not Yet Diag-nosed Nervous) and placed in Casualty Clearing Stations in France. They could not be treated until their Commanding O�cer authorised it, despite the need for speed. A distinction was made between commotional and emotional disturbance: the former, actual physical shock, the latter, psychological strains. Shell shock was stigmatised, as the sceptical RAMC took control in the battle against malin-gerers. They argued that in many cases the patient had not really been buried alive but only thought they had: a distinction not always understood by the victim. More seriously, deserters were still being shot without medical examination. After the Somme, o�cers complained that many of their men were ‘utterly useless … degenerate … a danger to their comrades, their battalion and their brigade’. Lord Moran, later to be Churchill’s doctor, stated that ‘some conscripts were plainly worthless fellows without shame, the worst produce of the towns’. Was he simply aping the contempt of the Duke of Wellington? A sta� o�cer was reported as saying: ‘If a man lets his comrades down he ought to be shot. If he’s a loony so much the better. What’s the good of loonies in the army anyway?’

There are numerous accounts of soldiers’ experience

of the First World War. Some are realistically factual, others gruesome and macabre: powerful poetry and novels flourished. The German expressionist artist, Otto Dix, wrote in 1914:

Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves, corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars, fire, steel: that is what war is. It is the work of the devil.

AFTER THE ONSET of trench warfare and stalemate in November, 1914, Lord Kitchener had told the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey: ‘I don’t know what is to be done. This isn’t war.’ But it was and it led to mental collapse on an unprecedented scale.

Political and social attitudes to shell shock varied greatly, ranging from contempt to compassion. Medical and military attitudes reflected wider con-cerns and were also divided between the tough and the tender. Issues of class and gender soon became intertwined with morale and discipline. The distinction between genuine and spurious cases was not easy to resolve and indeed was never satisfactorily solved. The military estab-lishment proved hostile to the arguments of psychology and psychiatry: only in examples of battle-hardened troops were they sympathetic to breakdown, so great controversy focused on the potential for malingering, scrimshanking, funking, cowardice and desertion. Were those who succumbed to shell shock merely letting their comrades down? How could an army be kept in the field, if high levels of mental breakdown were inevitable? Why did some lose their ‘self-control’ when others did not? Recreation and sport helped some to relax, humour alleviated stress, religion might soothe. Most sol-diers did overcome the stress of battle successfully, but what of those whose morale was shattered?

‘Strange Hells’Where are they now, on State-doles, or showing shop-patterns Or walking town to town sore in borrowed tatterns Or begged. Some civic routine one

never learns. The heart burns – but has to keep out of face how heart burns.

PRIVATE IVOR BERTIE GURNEY (1890-1937) was celebrated by his contemporaries for his musical compositions, but is now well known as a talented poet of the Great War and the Cotswold country-

side. With Isaac Rosenberg, he is one of the few war poets to come from the ranks. His work reveals the mentalité of the privates’ war, a rare glimpse in war records dominated by o�cers and politicians in frock coats. He came from a humble background and must have been a brilliant pupil, for he attended the King’s School, Gloucester as a

How could an army be kept in the field if high levels of mental breakdown were inevitable?

Belgian and British troops retreat during the Battle of Mons, 1914.


Above: Shelling the Duckboards by Paul Nash, from British Artists at the Front, 1918.Left: an unused field postcard issued to British soldiers and one filled in, from March 22nd, 1916.


chorister and won a choral scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music under Sir Charles Stanford.

In London Gurney was regarded as an eccentric with nervous problems. His friend and fellow composer Herbert Howells described him as ‘a strange, erratic, lovable, brilliant, exasperating, unteachable but wholly compelling youth’. He was rejected by the army in 1914 for defective eyesight, surprising because he was good at football and cricket and turned out to be a crack rifle shot. He hoped that an outdoor life would improve his nervous health and he successfully enlisted in February 1915, serving in France from May 1916. He was a chaotic soldier in many ways, rebelling against the tedious drill and the boring bull of army life, of brass cleaning and button polishing, but he was posted to the Signallers’ Corps and later to the Machine Gun Corps. When his slovenliness was criticised at an inspec-tion, he was defended by his sergeant as ‘a good man’ who was extremely cool under shell fire. He hated military rou-tines but felt deep sympathy with his comrades’ stoicism and bravery: ‘only the love of comrades sweetens all’. In the trenches he found it easier to compose poetry than music.

GURNEY HAD AN EXACT, precise vocabulary and a stub-bornly realistic attitude to the war. He was never impressed by tales of glory and even less by vainglory (‘blither written by knaves for fools’). He did find solace in the courage and humour of his companions, simply praising them ‘for paying the price that must be paid’. He also appreciated the people and the landscape of France behind the lines. The titles of his poems and his first lines usually set the exact tone for his themes. A well-read man, his work was ‘mod-ernistic’, with unusual syntax and grammar. His early work is a reaction against the patriotic fervour of Rupert Brooke. The specific concreteness of his style brings the war close with a unique blend of sight, sound and sensibility. He was devastatingly honest, even admitting to disobeying orders which could have led to a court martial.

‘Ballad of the Three Spectres’ As I went up by Ovillers In mud and water cold to the knee, There went three jeering, fleering spectres, That walked abreast and talked of me.

The first said, ‘Here’s a right brave soldier That walks the dark unfearingly; Soon he’ll come back on a fine stretcher, And laughing at a nice Blighty.’

The second, ‘Read his face, old comrade, No kind of lucky chance I see; One day he’ll freeze in mud to the marrow, Then look his last on Picardie.’

Though bitter the word of these first twain Curses the third spat venomously; ‘He’ll stay untouched till the war’s last dawning, Then live one hour of agony.’

Liars the first two were. Behold me At sloping arms by one-two-three; Waiting the time I shall discover Whether the third spoke verity’

Sadly, Gurney had anticipated his own fate.

Twice wounded, in 1917 he spent time in various mil-itary hospitals in England. He fell in love with one of his nurses but the a�air did not last and he began to show signs of recurring depression and instability, making a suicide attempt in June 1918. He was discharged from the army in October 1918. He returned to the Royal College of Music and was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams but could not concentrate and returned to Gloucester with a small disability pension, relying on help from friends and family. He would escape from the house at night and walk miles in the countryside. He composed prolifically, but in September 1922 he was diagnosed as su�ering from para-noid schizophrenia. His brother, Ronald, had little patience with or understanding of his problems and committed him to Barnwood House, an expensive private asylum on the

outskirts of Gloucester. Ivor hated the regime there, feeling that he was virtually in prison. His idealism turned to despair. He was kept in asylums for the rest of his life.

WORRIES about his sanity grew when he revealed that he talked with Beethoven. Gurney felt that his service in the army deserved

reward and he was bitter when his request for a full pension in October 1918 was denied on the grounds that his condition had been ‘aggravated but not caused by’ the war (a familiar strategy of the Ministry of Pensions). He was granted a pension of 12/- a week (a 30 per cent pension), because the doctors who examined him did not think he was su�ciently disabled to justify the full sum. He was denied the material independence to write music and verse because he had claimed, un-truthfully, that his state was due to shell shock. He hated the idea that he had to grovel for his rights. Instead he was subject to electrical treatment. In

March 1925 he wrote from Dartford Mental Hospital: The pain of a twelve hour day in a ward is great. A twelve hour day and eating too much … Imprisonment would be better … A twelve hour day, small exercise and a crowded ward do not make for happiness.

Above: a soldier receives electric treatment for shell shock, c.1916.Below: a British army recruitment poster, c.1915.


SHELL SHOCK

FURTHER READINGPeter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldier of the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-30 (Continuum, 2011).

Edgar Jones, Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (Psychology Press, 2005).

Stuart M. Archer is a former HMC inspector of history teaching, an author of text books and monographs of northern artists and a teacher of history.

In 1917 Myers had been asked to find out how treatment for shell shock in England was progressing; by April 1916 more than half of the 24,000 cases that had been sent back had ended up in general military hospitals with no specialist sta� and with their notes lost. The cure for ‘rankers’ – privates like Gurney – was discipline, punishment and elec-tricity: for o�cers, it was therapy, discussion and hypnosis.

LEWIS R. YEALLAND, a Canadian psychologist who came to England in 1916 to become resident medical o�cer at the National Hospital in London, epito-mised the tough treatment of shell shock and some-

times his methods verged on torture. In one case study, he treated a 24-year-old private for mutism:

The man took part in the Mons retreat, the battle of the Marne, the battle of the Aisne and the first and second battles of Ypres. He also fought at Hill 60, Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Armentiéres. In April 1916 he was sent to Salonica and, three months later, while attending to his horses, fell down unconscious; he says ‘on account of the intense heat’. For five days he remained unconscious and on waking he shook all over and could not speak. When I saw him nine months later he was mute. Many at-tempts have been made to cure him. He had been strapped down in a chair for twenty minutes at a time, when strong electricity was applied to his neck and throat; lighted cigarette ends had been applied to the tip of his tongue and hot plates had been applied to the back of his mouth. But all these methods proved to be unsuccessful in restoring his voice. I talked to him sternly about his duty and his family. In the electri-cal room lights were turned out and doors locked. The patient was told that he would not leave the room until he was cured, and strong currents were applied for long periods of continuous treatment until he was permanently cured.

Yealland cites many other comparable cases, emphasising his frankness and the direct way he talked to his patients: ‘Do you want to be cured?’, he would ask them. He showed little sympathy, for he thought this would only encourage them to cultivate their symptoms. Bullying and browbeating was his style and he would not listen to excuses. Treatment and cure must be rapid.

Yealland did not consider malingering to be a serious problem; Sir John Collie did. Perhaps unfortunately he had too much power and influence in the war and postwar years. Deceit, fraud and exaggeration became his obses-sion. He even interfered in treatment: he disapproved of female nurses treating shell-shocked patients, arguing that: ‘Nothing retards recovery so much as the flying visits of unthinking but kindly intentioned philanthropic lady visitors.’ He was an expert on insurance claims and became the arbiter for claims to pensions for the military in the 1920s. The war – and shell shock – were to provide him

with fertile fields for investigation. He dismissed psycho- analysis as ‘mere quackery’ and argued that only hard work was the panacea for mental problems: ‘It is the salvation for those su�ering from functional nervous disease.’ After the war he remained inflexible, blaming lack of willpower and perverted mentality for any problems and calling for re-education through discipline and hard work.

By 1920 over 20 institutions in England were dedicated to the treatment of patients with mental issues and war neuroses. Hysteria among the rank and file challenged male virility and accepted ideas of masculinity were tainted by suspicions of homosexuality and signs of e�eminacy. Public

school ideals of muscular Christianity, the sti� upper lip, self-control, will power in leadership and self-restraint were weak-ened as ‘female’ hysteria spread to men in a mass retreat from battle. Tradition led to harsh treatment, perfunctory care and eventual release into a civilian life of frustration and futility.

SHELL SHOCK in the Great War occurred on such a massive scale that it appeared to be a new phenomenon. Both medical and

military attitudes were ambiguous and treatment was haphazard. Ine�cient recruiting was blamed. Complex class and gender issues were involved. Psychiatric techniques developed and more enlight-ened, liberal views gained weight. It was hoped that improved training might lessen the rate of breakdown. Yet the hidebound suspicion and condemnation of malingering persisted, especially towards the ordinary soldier. O�cers were treated with greater deference and, in general, received more sympathetic therapy.

The use of the term was eventually abandoned in 1922 by medical experts, but it was too popular to be removed from public use. More neutral terms such as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) were used after 1945 in wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Another variant

is combat stress disorder or reaction (CSR). Whatever the name, it seems that fewer than 20 per cent of the soldiers who were diagnosed during and in the aftermath of the First World War were able to return to normal lives.

Gurney was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was committed to asylums until his death


XXXXXXXXXXX| ISIS

Akil N. Awan and A. Warren Dockter argue that the defeat of Islamic State can only be achieved if we take a long view and question the Jihadists’ simplistic interpretation of the West’s troubled relationship with the Middle East.

THE RAPID RISE of ISIS and the attempted establish-ment of its anachronistic caliphate, along with a seeming omnipresence that has allowed it to wantonly strike out in brutal terrorist attacks abroad, has left many reeling in shock and disbelief. Political commentators have tried to account for the alarming alacrity and sheer audacity of the phenomenon by shining a critical light on the recent history of western intervention in the Middle East. Indeed the emergence of ISIS cannot be understood without taking into account the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003; the wanton destruction of the country’s infrastructure in its wake; the dismantling of its military and security apparatus, which left insecurity and power vacuums; the installing of a divisive, sectarian Shiite political adminis-tration in Baghdad; and the broader context of decades of western support for Middle Eastern despots and dictators at the expense of their people. The ISIS propaganda machine has been busy capitalising on the unintended consequences of disastrous western foreign policy in recent years to legiti-mise not just its goals, but its very existence.

As historians, however, we must be aware of the context of a much deeper history of western intervention in the Middle East than political commentators suggest, in part because ISIS manipulates a much longer historical legacy of western intervention for its own ends in its propaganda and recruitment e�orts. There are numerous examples of ISIS invoking a tendentious reading of history to justify violence and legitimise its world-view, but perhaps the most striking of these can also o�er insights into just how precarious its historical narrative really is.

Conflicts rebrandedThe toxic legacy of the Crusades features prominently in ISIS propaganda. The Crusades have long symbolised the seminal conflict that defined the troubled relationship between western Christendom and the Muslim world. In recent years the Crusades have again become ideologically loaded, employed by Jihadists to validate their claims and actions. Al-Qaeda rejected the idea that the current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were part of a ‘Global War on Terror’, preferring to rebrand these conflicts as ‘renewed aggression’ by the ‘Zionist-Crusader Alliance’ against the Muslim world. The al-Qaeda leadership was keen to portray Jihadist fighters as ‘chivalrous Medieval knights’ serving as the vanguard, heroically resisting these new incursions into the Muslim heartlands. Al-Qaeda was so successful in utilising this narrative that even its ideological opponents have recognised its success in promulgating a historicised reading of contemporary events, with Michael Scheuer, the ex-head of the CIA’s ‘Bin Laden Unit’, referring to Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader killed in May 2011, as a

ISIS and the Abuse of History

Betrayed by the British: King Feisal of Iraq on a visit to London, November 1927.


XXXXXXXXXX

in their lands. The oppressors broke up the Islamic Caliphate and made it into countries like Syria and Iraq, ruled by man-made laws.

This conveniently overlooks the fact Syria and Iraq have often been ruled as separate entities. Syria, Baghdad, Basra, Mosul, Beirut and Jerusalem were all distinct Ottoman vilayets by 1876. The idea that the caliphate automatically represented all Muslims or a homogenous global body of believers (the Ummah) is also highly contentious and refuted by even a cursory reading of Islamic history. After Muhammad’s death in 632, no Islamic polity could claim to represent all of Islam or garner unanimous support as the legitimate heirs to the Prophet’s mantle. Even the reign of the first four ‘rightly-guided’ caliphs (632-61), who are viewed nostalgically as representing a utopian model of Islamic governance, is problematic. Three of the four were assassinated while in o�ce; hardly a model of success. Furthermore, the early caliphs also had to contend with violent rebellions that contested their authority, such as the Apostasy Wars (632-3) under Abu Bakr, or internecine warfare, such as that witnessed at the Battle of the Camel (656), involving no less than Muhammad’s wife Aisha on one side and his son-in-law and later fourth caliph, Ali, on the other.

RealpolitikLater Muslim dynasties were equally antagonistic, often jostling violently with one another and, in some cases, even seeking political alliances with non-Muslim powers against their fellow believers in their pursuit of power. The case of the Fatimid caliphate, which sought alliances with Crusad-ers against the Seljuk Turks, is a good example of this type of realpolitik at play. The very idea of a single caliph holding exclusive o�ce is also belied by the troubled coexistence of multiple adversarial caliphates throughout the ages. Indeed, between 929 and 1031 no fewer than three separate caliphates simultaneously – and incongruously – exercised sovereignty in di�erent spheres of the Muslim world: the Umayyads from their seat of power in Cordoba, the Fatim-ids from their capital in Cairo and the Abbassids, who pro-tested impotently at their waning influence on the empire’s peripheries, from their glorious capital, Baghdad.

These historical facts utterly undermine ISIS’s rose- tinted narrative of sublime Muslim unity fractured by nefarious western intervention. This is not to deny that the West has played a primary role in dictating the contours of the modern Muslim world, particularly through the painful colonial period, a legacy with which we are still contending. The stark reality, however, is that the appeal of ISIS rests largely on convincing audiences to adopt a Manichean world-view, which divides the world into simplistic binaries of Islam and the West, based on a fabricated historical premise. By revealing the contradictions and complexities of these polarising narratives and by exposing just how tendentious and skewed ISIS’s reading of history really is, we can also help to undermine its appeal.

Akil N. Awan is Associate Professor in Modern History, Political Violence and Terrorism at Royal Holloway, University of London. A. Warren Dockter is Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

| ISIS

‘modern Saladin … [who] makes brilliant use of the intima-cy of Muslims with Islamic history’.

ISIS propaganda has taken this appropriation of the history of the Crusades to a new level. Issue four of its flagship glossy magazine, Dabiq, published in October 2014, was entitled ‘The Failed Crusade’ and framed the campaign against them as the ‘The Final Crusade’. In a striking illus-tration of the anachronism represented by the ISIS world-view, the magazine’s front cover featured a photoshopped ISIS flag fluttering atop the Holy See in the Vatican, with threats against ‘Rome’s Crusaders’. ISIS again invoked the spectre of the Crusades following November’s attacks on Paris, accusing France of participating in a ‘Crusader campaign ... striking Muslims in the land of the caliphate with their aircraft’. By framing the current conflict between western allies and ISIS as an anachronistic struggle against Crusaders, it re-imagines the history of the Crusades to force a comparison with western medieval aggression.

‘Chief crook of our gang’Another glaring example of ISIS’s shrewd manipulation of historical narratives can be seen in its invocation of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret treaty drawn up during the First World War, which ‘carved up’ the remains of the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. This agree-ment was reached despite promises made by the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, to King Hussein that he and his sons would have their own king-doms in exchange for rising against the Ottoman Empire in the Arab Revolt, which began in 1916. T.E. Lawrence, who played a major role in helping organise the revolt, regarded

this as a betrayal and felt that he had become ‘the chief crook of our gang’. Once Prince (later King) Feisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt, entered Damascus on October 3rd, 1918, he expected these pledges to be honoured. Britain, however, was in no place to honour the pledges in Syria, since that territory fell within the French sphere of influence. Feisal and Lawrence went together to the Paris Peace Conference with the goal of overturning Sykes-Picot, but to no avail. The agreement was formalised at the San Remo Conference in 1920 and established the borders of modern Syria and Iraq.

These contradictory agreements planted terrible seeds in Arab relations with the West and the legacy of broken pledges and betrayal continue to haunt us, a fact ISIS has capitalised on. Last year it released a video, The End of Sykes-Picot, in which bulldozers symboli-cally levelled part of the border between eastern Syria and northern Iraq. This was accompanied by a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #Sykespicotover. The agreement has taken on a symbolic nature for ISIS, representing the crucial moment when the West intervened in Arab a�airs and frag-mented Dar al-Islam or the house of Islam. In a video called Breaking the Borders an ISIS militant commented:

Today we are happy to participate in destroying the borders placed by the oppressors to prevent the Muslims from travelling

The Middle East’s legacy of broken pledges and betrayal continues to haunt us, a fact that ISIS has capitalised on


SIKKIM

Above: a US-built Sherman tank of the Pakistani army rumbles through Slalkot in the Pakistani Punjab in September 1965.Right: a view of Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, 1965.

AT THE HEIGHT of the Indo-Pakistan war, in mid-September 1965, Britain’s ITN broadcast a 15-minute report from what they called ‘another potential starting point for a Third World War’.

The images were not of Indian and Pakistani soldiers in disputed Kashmir. Instead, the dramatic footage showed Indian and Chinese soldiers 14,000 feet up on the other side of the Himalayas, on either side of the border between the Kingdom of Sikkim (an Indian protectorate perched between Nepal and Bhutan) and Chinese-occupied Tibet.

The broadcast highlights an often-overlooked international dimension to the 1965 conflict, which caused frantic diplomatic activity involving India, Pakistan, China, the US and the Soviet Union and was, in fact, an important factor in the eventual de-escalation of the crisis.

A Himalayan Chess Game

When India and Pakistan gained independence from Britain in 1947, the region’s Princely States –

including tiny Sikkim – became pawns in South Asia’s great power politics, as Andrew Du� explains.


SIKKIM

Kashmir, the largest of the 600 Princely States of British India, which became the main theatre of the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, had been a running sore between the two countries for nearly two decades. At Partition in 1947 the question of the Princely States’ future loomed large. All ran their own a�airs under individual agreements with the British. O�cial policy was to allow the ruler of each to determine whether the Princely State would join India or Pakistan. For most it was a simple decision. For Kashmir, it was not. The Hindu Maharaja, Hari Singh, ruled a majority Muslim population. India’s leaders presumed Singh would decide to join India. Pakistan’s leaders argued that the Muslim population should join Pakistan. Singh, fearing the socialist Nehru’s India almost as much as he did the prospect of joining Jinnah’s Pakistan, considered a third option: asserting independence, harbour-ing dreams of creating a Switzerland of Asia.

Reality jolted Singh out of his reverie. When Kashmiri Muslims began to flee to Pakistan (principally to avoid puni-tive taxes), Pakistani Pathans crossed back into Kashmir to ‘liberate’ its people from their Hindu ruler. A bloody conflict broke out. Nehru sent military support to Singh – on the condition that he accede to India.

The Indians sought to internationalise the issue, taking it to the newly formed United Nations in early 1948. The UN commission to New Delhi and Karachi advocated a plebiscite in Kashmir. As the fighting continued, relations between Pakistan and India deteriorated. Positions became entrenched. Nehru (whose family originated from Kashmir) reneged on the idea of a plebiscite. The Kashmir operation was vital to prove the subcontinent could rise above com-munalism. It was, he said, ‘a fight for the freedom of India’.

AFRAGILE UN-promoted ceasefire line in 1949 left India in control of the lion’s share of the state, including the vital ‘Vale of Kashmir’. Pakistan settled in to its position as the aggrieved party. As

Pakistan and India found their feet during the 1950s, the Kashmir issue festered in the background.

Meanwhile, to the north, the People’s Republic of China was consolidating its de facto control of Tibet, which it had invaded in 1950. Nehru dreamed of a Pan-Asian entente between China and India. But after the Dalai Lama’s flight

Right: a Chinese soldier gesticulates at Lt Col Raj Singh of the Indian army at Nathu La, 1967.Below: Hope Cooke and Crown Prince Thondup Namgyal of Sikkim, 1963.


to India in 1959, such hopes faded. Worried by such devel-opments, the Indians attempted to assert control in two disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border. The result was the short, sharp 1962 Sino-Indian conflict. The Chinese, who had repulsed Indian advances and moved deep into Indian territory, were regarded as victors.

Pakistan’s new president, Ayub Khan, who had assumed power in a coup in 1959, watched these developments with interest. India’s military had appeared unprepared and blundering during the 1962 war. Khan and his new foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sensed an opportunity to enlist Chinese support in pushing their claims in Kashmir.

THE AGEING NEHRU, desperate to leave a positive legacy for Kashmir, agreed to negotiations with Pakistan; historians have often pondered the coun-terfactual question: what would have happened if

Nehru’s death had not cut short negotiations in June 1964? With the inexperienced Lal Bahadur Shastri at the helm

in India and with the developing relationship between Paki-stan and India as a backdrop, in late 1964 Foreign Minister Bhutto stated that ‘Kashmir is to Pakistan what Berlin is to the West’. It was deliberately provocative. Meanwhile, he prepared plans for Pakistani tanks to roll into the Rann of Kutch, an unremarkable expanse of salt marshes at the southern extremity of the border with India. Pakistan got the better of the tank skirmishes between April and June 1965. Bhutto then put forward plans to Ayub for ‘Operation Gibraltar’, an infiltration of Kashmir in August 1965, with which the serious fighting began.

Curiously, some of the 1965 battles involved US-made

The 14th Dalai Lama (front, in black) flees Tibet for India with his Khamba warrior guards, 1959.


SIKKIM

The coronation as 12th King of Sikkim of Thondup Namgyal at Gangtok, April 4th, 1965.

Sikkim emerged with a treaty with India in 1950 that gave it an international personality of sorts, albeit with highly limited powersPatton tanks (sold to the Pakistanis) firing on American Sherman tanks (sold largely to the Indians). Cold War arms sales to South Asia had grown massively after the Sino- Indian war, which had coincided with the Cuban missile crisis. At the height of the twin 1962 crises, President Kennedy, fearing a two-front global war against Com-munism, had sent the carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal. Further arms sales followed the resolution of the conflict. In November Kennedy stated that ‘all our aid to India is for the purpose of defeating Chinese communist subversion’. Sales to Pakistan also flowed, but more slowly. It was another reason why Ayub, who felt Pakistan had loyally supported the US anti-communist e�ort since the mid-1950s, had tilted his allegiance towards China.

When the main Indo-Pakistan conflict broke out in August 1965, Bhutto, who was increasingly leading the Pakistani decision-making, hoped that Chinese pressure, real or imagined, might squeeze Indian confidence.

Kashmir was not the only Princely State that had sought a di�erent future in 1947. Nepal, Bhutan and, squeezed in between the two, the Kingdom of Sikkim all had specific

Children from the Paljor Namgyal Girls’ School dig trenches against Chinese attack, October 1965.


Hope Cooke and her husband Thondup Namgyal at a party, late 1960s.

agreements with British India and, therefore, put forward arguments for special treatment. While Nepal’s independ-ence was a foregone conclusion, the cases of Bhutan and Sikkim, whose rulers came from related families, were more complicated.

Bhutan, at least, had signed a formal agreement with British India in 1910. A protectorate arrangement signed in 1949 was a formality. Sikkim proved more problematic. The state, one sixth the size of Bhutan, lay along the Chumbi Valley in the Himalayas, which had served as a principal trading route for centuries. Its Buddhist ruling family had migrated from Tibet in the early 17th century. The British, recognising in the 19th century that Sikkim was a key access point for Tibet, slowly brought the state’s ruling family into the fold of Empire. Although various agree-ments were signed, none clarified the exact relationship between British India and Sikkim. Nevertheless, Sikkim emerged with a treaty with India in 1950 that gave it an international personality of sorts, albeit with highly limited powers.

DURING THE 1950s Crown Prince Thondup Namgyal set about reforming the administra-tion in Sikkim. But events in Tibet loomed large. Soon the state became a base for a secretive CIA

operation supporting Tibetan guerillas. Thondup and his glamorous sisters, Coocoola and Kula, became involved, even running messages between the Americans and the young Dalai Lama’s Tibetan leadership. The dramatic 1959 flight of the Dalai Lama highlighted Sikkim’s vulnerability. The Chumbi Valley was now, Nehru claimed, a Chinese-

occupied ‘dagger pointed at the heart of India’. Although Sikkim was never under serious threat during the 1962 Sino-Indian war, Indian troops arrived in numbers.

There had been another critical development in Sikkim in 1959. The Crown Prince, widowed in 1957 at the age of 34 with three young children, fell in love with a willowy 19-year-old US debutante, Hope Cooke. Their 1963 marriage thrust Sikkim onto the international stage. The American press christened Cooke ‘the Grace Kelly of the East’. Both Paris Match and National Geographic tripped over each other to cover the couple’s lavish wedding, which was an extraordinary clash of cultures: ‘Guests in top hats and cutaways mingled with others in fur-flapped caps and knee-length yak-skin boots,’ fawned Time magazine. J.K. Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, was seen doing the twist with Princess Coocoola.

For India, these developments in Sikkim were less welcome. Some questioned why the young American had suddenly appeared in geopolitically sensitive Sikkim. Hope Cooke’s uncle had been US ambassador in Iran during the turbulent 1950s. There were allegations that she had connections to the CIA. It did not help when, at their cor-onation in April 1965, Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke announced that they would be using the ancient Sikkimese titles of Chogyal and Gyalmo. In an Indian republic not yet two decades old, such assertions of separate identity and monarchical rule were bound to raise questions.

In early September 1965, when the fighting in Kashmir was at its fiercest, China moved 5,000 troops into the Chumbi Valley, alleging that the Indians had been violating the border between Sikkim and Chinese-occupied Tibet.


SIKKIM

FURTHER READINGAndrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Politics (Hurst, 2015).

Neville Maxwell, India's China War (Natraj, 2011).

Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2008).

Judith Brown, Nehru: Profiles in Power (Routledge, 2000).

Andrew Du� writes on India and related subjects and is the author of Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (Birlinn, 2015).

The Indians were greatly concerned. The fact that Pakistan had an eastern wing (later to become Bangladesh) already provided dual security challenges. The build-up on the Sikkim border raised the nightmare prospect of a two- (or even three-) front war.

The US was also worried by the thought of a Chinese intervention. President Johnson, ever deeper embroiled in Vietnam, was desperate to avoid an escalation of tensions in another part of Asia. Both Ayub for Pakistan and Shastri for India were in constant contact with US representatives, sometimes directly with Johnson in Washington. Mean-while, the US ambassador in Delhi noted another compli-cation: there were ‘Soviet SAMs protecting Delhi and other cities from attack by Pak MAP-procured B–57s, Soviet tanks fighting US tanks in Punjab and additional MIGs apparently on their way … the Soviets have already made deep inroads.’

THE CHINESE issued a three-day ultimatum to the Indians on September 16th, which raised the prospect of an attack on Sikkim. Ayub was quick to plead innocence of any collusion, claiming it was

Bhutto who was leading the interactions with the Chinese. Shastri meanwhile asked the US to state that it would stand with the Indians in the face of Chinese aggression. L.K. Jha, a leading member of Shastri’s cabinet, even asked the US ambassador if Johnson ‘would be willing on strictly covert basis to authorise US personnel to consult with Indian mil-itary planners on contingency basis’. Johnson refused, but he was concerned at the magnitude of the escalating crisis. On September 18th, he commented to Arthur Goldberg, US ambassador to the UN, that India and Pakistan ‘just can’t a�ord to have this World War III ... They can’t have that kind of crime around their necks’.

That same day the Chinese extended the ultimatum by three days, buying crucial breathing space. In the files

available on the US Department of State website, it is clear that Walter McConaughy, the doughty US ambassador to Pakistan, played a critical role in resolving the crisis. Despite an atmosphere of extreme paranoia in Pakistan, he managed to meet with a senior o�cial on September 19th, without the usual attendant minders. Ayub, the o�cial told him, was ‘strongly averse to entering any Chicom associa-tion and open to a sensible compromise way out’ and ‘grow-ingly aware of Bhutto’s extremism’. Whether this was true or not, McConaughy skilfully conveyed the message that Pakistan would become an international pariah unless it de-escalated and agreed to the UN-proposed unconditional ceasefire (that India had already accepted). At the last pos-sible moment Bhutto announced, at the UN, that it would do so. The climbdown had dire consequences in Pakistan, where the people had been led to believe – wrongly – that they were winning the war.

On the Sikkim-Tibet border, tensions were reduced. For the Sikkimese ruler, Thondup Namgyal and his American wife, however, something fundamental had changed. After Shastri collapsed of a heart attack at the Soviet-sponsored negotiations in January, Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi assumed the mantle of leadership in India. Thondup knew her well and harboured hopes of gaining a more secure future for his tiny kingdom. But clashes between Indian and Chinese troops on the Sikkim-Tibet border in 1967 and another war between India and Pakistan in 1971 – this time resulting in the eventual ‘liberation’ of Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) – further highlighted Sikkim’s vulnerability. Indira Gandhi, facing internal opposition and sceptical of the rapprochement between President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Chinese leadership, moved on the tiny state in 1973. India’s intelli-gence services provided covert support for the democratic forces in Sikkim, forcing Thondup to relinquish much of his power. Cooke, still only 33, left for the US. Thondup clung on for a further two years but, on the eve of declaring an Emergency in June 1975, Indira Gandhi had the tiny palace in Sikkim surrounded, stripped Thondup and his family of any remaining power and annexed the state.

As the ITN broadcast of September 1965 said: ‘Small states are often pawns in the game of power politics and Sikkim … is one of the smallest and weakest states in Asia.’ The events on the Sino-Tibetan border in 1965 had a direct impact on the course of the Indo-Pakistan war. They also set the tone for India’s complex relationship with China in the Himalayas throughout the following decades.

Indira Gandhi had the tiny palace in Sikkim surrounded, stripped Thondup and his family of any remaining power and annexed the state

Cartoon mocking Indira Gandhi at the time of the vote to make Sikkim an 'associate state’ of India, Hindustan Times, 1974.


Out of the MarginsThe Durham Proverbs, a selection of Anglo-Saxon bons mots, show that medieval daily concerns and popular wisdom still have resonance today, says Eleanor Parker.

THERE IS something irresistible about proverbs. In an age when the Internet is flooded with ‘inspirational sayings’, dubiously attributed but widely reproduced, it has never been easier to observe the popular appeal of short, cleverly phrased nuggets of wisdom.

Medieval literature placed a high value on proverbs and many lines of Anglo-Saxon poetry have a vaguely proverbial ring. But our best source of Anglo-Saxon proverbs is a single collection, which survives in a man-uscript now in Durham Cathedral Library. The Durham Proverbs provide a vivid glimpse into the everyday life of Anglo-Saxon England, o�ering sayings on subjects ranging from mead-drinking and hunting to the benefits of friendship, caution and self-control. The manuscript is a collection of hymns and canticles, in Latin with interlinear English translat- ions, probably for the use of the monks at Christ Church, Canterbury in the first half of the 11th century. Not long after the manuscript was made, someone in the monastery took advantage of a blank space between the hymns to write down a group of 46 proverbs. The proverbs each appear in English and Latin versions – perhaps a monk was giving himself a bit of practice translating from English into Latin, or the other way around.

Some of the proverbs collected in this manuscript are recorded else-where, but in most cases we would not know of their existence, if not for that anonymous monk. He made a sporadic e�ort at arranging them, at least at the beginning, where we find several proverbs on the theme of friendship: ‘A friend is useful, far or near; the nearer the better’; ‘In time of need, a man finds out his friends’; ‘No one can have too many friends’. These o�er a rather pragmatic approach to

the theme, focusing on the usefulness of having friends who can help you out when you are in trouble.

Many of the sayings are mildly cynical in tone, as proverbs tend to be, casting a wry glance at fallible human nature. ‘Sometimes people are most thirsty after drinking mead’, says one, commenting on insatiable desires both literal and metaphorical. They conjure up comic images with down-to-earth humour and the quality of sharp observation, which makes for a good proverb: ‘No one can have a mouth full of flour and also blow on a fire’, warns one about the dangers of

doing two things at once. (Apparently this also makes good practical sense; flour and fire together form an explo-sive combination.) A proverb drawn from hunting, ‘He who wants to catch a hart can’t worry about his horse’, is perhaps the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat’s equivalent of ‘you can’t make an ome-lette without breaking eggs’.

Others are more reflective and would not be out of place in the philosophical world of Beowulf: ‘A person acts what he is when he may do what he will’; ‘Truth will make itself known’; ‘He never knows the pleasure of sweetness, who never tastes bit-terness’; ‘He is blind in both eyes who

does not look with the heart’. One proverb, found in a very similar form in the Old English poem ‘The Wander-er’, describes the behaviour of a wise warrior: Ne sceal man to ær forht ne to ær fægen, ‘One should not be too soon fearful, nor too soon joyful’.

Since some of these proverbs are re-corded in other sources, it may be that here we have a glimpse of the kind of sayings which might have been in common use. They make themselves memorable by rhyme, alliteration and wordplay. For instance: ‘Better to be often loaded than overloaded’ (Betere byþ oft feðre þonne oferfeðre) recom-

mends the virtue of doing things step by step. A few of the proverbs are recorded from centuries after the end of the Anglo-Saxon period: ‘The fuller the cup, the more carefully one should carry it’, a saying first recorded in the Durham Proverbs, was still in common use (in the form ‘full cup, steady hand’) as late as the 19th century.

The Proverbs, despite their connections to other texts, are special: for all the great wealth

of surviving Old English literature it is rare to capture something which sounds so much as if it may actually be the everyday speech of Anglo-Saxon England. Proverbs are often the kind of sayings everybody knows but no one bothers to write down. It would be nice to think we could bring some back into use, but the proverbs sound a note of caution for anyone who might want to adorn their speech with words of Anglo-Saxon wisdom: Gyf þu well sprece, wyrc æfter swa, ‘If you speak well, act accordingly’.

It is rare to capture something which sounds so like the everyday speech of Anglo-Saxon England

Speak Well and Act Accordingly

Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog at aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk.

Common concerns: tending the boar. Calendar page, c.1030.


Out of Gaol in GhanaInFocus

FRIENDS AND RELATIONS of a political prisoner just released from gaol in Ghana greet him joyfully. It is February 1966 and the army and police have just staged a coup (codenamed ‘Cold Chop’) toppling

Ghana’s autocratic President-for-Life, Kwame Nkrumah, while he is in the Far East on a vainglorious mission to end the Vietnam War. He has grown increasingly authoritarian and remote since the start of the decade, calling himself successively the Redeemer, Man of Destiny, Star of Africa, High Dedication, while his country’s economy succumbs to the corruption and incompetence of its state agencies.

The British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve inde-pendence from its European master, several years before Harold Macmillan made the ‘Winds of Change’ speech that signalled the wholesale end of Empire. That it was a trail-blazer was due to its valuable cocoa export crop and, much more, to its charismatic leader, with his great organising ability. After time at university in the US and at the London School of Economics, Nkrumah returned in 1947 and campaigned for the ending of British rule. In 1950 he was imprisoned as leader of a wave of civil disobedience but the following year he was released to become the Gold Coast’s first prime minister after his party’s election victory.

The orthodoxy among development economists of the time was that only the state, not markets, could bring economic transformation and Nkrumah thought so, too: ‘Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly inde-pendent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society.’ After independence, marketing boards for cocoa, timber and diamonds were set up as well as many other state bodies. This put a huge measure of control in Nkrumah’s hands, with all the jobs, contracts and licences that could be handed out to cement political support. Cocoa farmers could sell only to the Marketing Board, which kept the price low because its revenues were desperately needed to cover losses elsewhere and to service foreign loans. Predictably, the quantity smuggled out shot up.

Unrest began in 1960 and, after bombs went o� in Accra, there were concerns in the House of Commons about the Queen’s projected visit. Macmillan was desperate not to cancel it for fear of driving Nkrumah into Soviet arms and the Queen took the same view, so it went ahead in 1961, though at the state banquet there were empty places meant for political opponents who had been gaoled as a precau-tion. As political arrests became a regular feature, all the

British o¡cers helping train the army were told to leave. By 1964 Ghana was a one-party state and corruption was out of control, as was Nkrumah’s personality cult. His crowning folly was a palace with 60 luxury suites and a banqueting hall for 2,000 built in 1965.

For most of the ten years following the coup Ghana was run by generals, more corrupt even than their predecessors, the civilian ‘big men’. Then in 1975 junior o¡cers led by half-Scottish Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took control,


The British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from its European master

executing eight senior o¡cers, including three former heads of state, in public and flogging profiteers. From the lowest of bases things gradually got better. Rawlings remained Ghana’s most powerful man until 2000, when his anointed successor lost the election. From then up to 2014 annual GDP growth averaged 7.4 per cent, regular presi-dential elections have continued, while in 2007 there was a major o�shore oil and gas discovery. ROGER HUDSON

GYPSIES


Above: police talk to Gypsies on Epsom Downs, c.1920s.Left: Gypsy Life: The Hop Pickers by Alfred Munnings, 1913,© Estate of Sir Alfred Munnings. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.

Romance and the ROMANYSince their arrival in Britain around 500 years ago, Gypsies have created a rich tapestry of romantic folklore. Yet, argues Jeremy Harte, this aspect of their past has been almost completely ignored by academic historians.

REPRESENTATIONS OF Gypsy culture are often contentious. Even those produced by Gypsies typically show a selective history; there is only so much about the community that the ordinary non-Gypsy wants to know. As long as the conversation

is kept to the safe nostalgia of the past, we can talk about a history of prejudice, eviction, brutality and disenfranchisement. But get too close to the present and the conversation becomes much less comfortable. The majority of the 500 years since Gypsies first arrived in Britain have been spent telling the strangers of the host nation what they want to hear, which is not necessarily the historical truth.

There is a consensus that whatever Gypsy life is like today, the romantic side of the Romany past – its old waggons and coloured horses, music by the fireside – should not be forgotten. In the traders’ stalls

’


GYPSIES

at Appleby, Stowe and Epsom, where goods are laid out to appeal solely to Gypsy taste, the same tropes appear again and again. Everyone agrees that these things help to define the historical identity of the community.

It is ironic, then, that Gypsies, the most genealogically-minded of all groups, in which teenagers routinely carry pictures of great-grand-parents on their phones, are often treated by researchers as a people confined to the ethnographic present. For many Gypsies, communal memory goes back 150 years; the old families – the Boswells, the Stan-leys or the Lees – can trace their lineage back to the 17th century, to within a hundred years of their arrival from the Continent. And the past which is preserved in the Romani language goes back further, through Greece and Persia to the first migration of the Roma from north-west India.

When, in the 1970s, academic historians began to study the Gypsy past, they tended to see it not as it is framed by Gypsies themselves, but through the lens of sociology, with a focus on the economic role fulfilled by nomads of all kinds. Since the 16th century, mainstream society has both needed and despised a mobile, casual workforce and this creates a place for Traveller communities on the outskirts of the settled world. It does not matter which historic group fulfils the role. Some countries, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, have generated their own indigenous travelling people, but throughout Europe, it is mostly the Romany who occupy this niche.

Because of this, social historians have tended to overlook the exotic tradition of Gypsy lineage in favour of more mundane interpretations, emphasising the way in which this outcast group has forged an identity around strategies of subsistence, far removed from the romance of the waggon and the fireside. This marks a sharp break with the earlier tradi-tion of Romani studies or, as its practitioners would have put it, Gypsy lore. For almost a century, this pre-academic tradition was handed down through a succession of scholars, all of whom celebrated the aspects of Romany life which their successors have tended to ignore: lineage, language and a tradition of colourful creativity.

THE GYPSY LORE SOCIETY, founded in 1888, brought together many characters who had been involved in Romany studies over the previous ten years. Most of the activity came from Francis Hindes Groome, the husband of Esmeralda Lock. While

travelling in the Welsh border country he had met the Lock family, descendants of Welsh Boswells. Their daughter, Esmeralda, one of the most famous Gypsies of the age, had married outside the community to the town clerk of Bridgnorth, but now she fell for Groome and they eloped to Germany. There, she made a living for both of them as a singer, while he struggled to get recognition for his writing. Four years later, back in England, Frank wrote In Gypsy Tents (1881), in which he bril-liantly evokes the knowledge and discoveries of a Victorian gypsiologist without ever quite having the courage to confess that he is talking about his in-laws.

Following an interval in which its unstable finances had crashed completely, the Gypsy Lore Society was refounded in 1907. Its new incarnation was not particularly respectable. Scholarly gravitas was provided by John Sampson, a portly linguist who had some o�cial status as the librarian of the University of Liverpool and had acquired the academic habit of sleeping with his students. But the inner circle of the Society also included Arthur Symons, the poet, and Augustus John, an artist so impossibly Bohemian that his slouch hat, flowing beard and unstoppable anecdotes were beyond parody. To balance things out, Sampson invited the participation of a clergyman, although the Very Reverend George Hall was not perhaps the best choice. His career in the church had faltered, perhaps due to a fondness for drink, and he could often be seen in his tattered clerical coat clutching a short pipe and beer.

With backgrounds like this, it might be doubted what the gypsiolo-gists would be able to accomplish. But in fact they went on to publish, year after year, a journal full of details on genealogy, language, foodways, crafts, marriages and funerals. This information, however, has been mostly ignored by non-Gypsies. Instead, the gypsiologists are famous for their rhetoric about race.

The Smith Family Stopping on Putney Common, engraving, 1870.


WHEN THEY addressed the public, members of the society singled out the pure-blooded Gypsy as the most admi-rable racial type. A true representative of the race was honest, clean and free from the taint of modernity. He

could be easily recognised since he was black as teak, spoke archaic Romani and travelled in the deep countryside where he kept his cher-ished liberty and followed ancestral law. This shadowy figure is a con-struction by non-Gypsies – an exotic English Oriental onto whom was projected all the age’s concerns with race, freedom, nature and nostalgia. For the historian of ideas, anxieties such as these provide unlimited material on the Gypsy as a trope in Victorian literature, art and science, which were avidly consumed in genteel settings.

This is quite a stereotype to live up to. Most Gypsies, struggling to make a living mending chairs in Battersea or telling fortunes in Black-pool, failed to meet the ideal standard; but that just meant they could be dismissed as degenerate half-breeds and left to the mercy of policemen and the local authorities. Some armchair members of the society may have whole-heartedly believed this, but most gypsiologists maintained a double standard, praising the noble pure-blood in principle, while being more realistic about the people they actually knew. Here is John Myers, one of the refounders of the Gypsy Lore Society, in the pub at Caerleon Fair:

From top:Sylvester Boswell, Sam Smith, Augustus John, Arthur Symons. Right: 'Fighting' Jack Cooper, 'The Gypsey', 1824.


GYPSIES

Gypsy children play in Corke's Meadow, Kent, 1951.

‘Come an’ sit along o’ me, my ’Arry’, says a good-looking buxom show-type woman, as she shoved and elbowed su�cient room for two seats. She had the most fluent profanity I’ve yet heard from a woman; but each time she enriched her otherwise complete collection with adjectives of sex derivation, Harry remonstrated in no uncertain fashion ... Natty Smith, who years ago was literally well below the poverty line, but was now quite the best dressed dealing man in the room, commenced the ballad of Lord Bateman. Our navvy friend, finding this long and presumably tedious, tried to sing his song, but at the third attempt, a young Herne, with a hand of twice ordinary size, lifted him bodily from his seat by the face; another turned him smartly and completely round by the shoulders almost within his own stance; other willing hands carried on the process, and he sailed sweetly through the door, down the lobby and into the fair.

Anecdotal accounts like this are as close as we will ever come to direct knowledge of the older generation of Gypsies. It is a pity that so many historians have shied away from studying actual people like these and focussed instead on the Gypsy of cultural studies.

Personal contact was most likely to take place, not in the sylvan greenwood, but around the grubby fringelands of big cities. In London, for example, there were settlements at Notting Dale in the west of the city and the Potteries to the north of the River Thames, while on the south side there was a ring of urban commons where Gypsies had made their homes, from Barnes through Wandsworth and Putney to Dulwich, if they were not lodging in one of the yards – Carter’s, Mill’s, Manley’s or Donovan’s – which hosted rows of a dozen or more waggons. Not many outsiders visited these places and those who did were seldom complimentary about their experiences. Wandsworth Common was described as ‘bare, muddy and sloppy after a little rain, undrained, and almost devoid of trees or seats ... covered with huge gravel-pits, many of them full of stagnant water’.

Yet a handful of devotees came to this dismal spot, picking their way past the stinking puddles in search of one small old lady and hoping for an hour’s Romani conversation by her smouldering fire. For Wand-sworth Common was the home of Charlotte Cooper, once Charlotte the Beautiful, who 50 years earlier had been the favoured daughter of


Non-Gypsy disdain for romantic idealisation might sound like hard facts, but it was just as likely to be covering some other agenda

paper and read a piece by George Smith on the reclamation of Gypsies. Smith was a social reformer who had campaigned for legislation to improve the lot of working children and was now turning his attention to the various Traveller groups. His first and most pressing requirement was to have them registered, then settled. Once they had given up their old lifestyle and traditions, they could be made into useful citizens. ‘The sooner we get the ideal, fanciful, and romantic side of a vagrant’s and vagabond’s life removed from our vision’, he wrote, ‘the better it will be for us ... I cannot see anything romantic in dirt, squalor, ignorance, and misery’. Groome, knowing that Noah and Dilaia Lock were staying in the neighbourhood, tucked the paper under his arm and, after they had met up for tea, read the passage out to his father-in-law. Noah Lock, not being sociologically minded, did not see the essential reasonableness of this view of Gypsies as a marginal and under-achieving community.

He listened through in silence, then picked up a teapot and threw it violently against the nearest stone wall, saying to his wife: ‘There’s your teapot all to atoms, Dilaia, and I wish to God George Smith’s head were in it.’

George Smith went on to write three books and dissemi-nate his view of Gypsies among the reading public, while all that remains of Noah Lock’s riposte is a few colourful shards somewhere on a Welsh hillside. This is the perennial problem for anyone who wants to write a Gypsy history: until the last few generations, o�cial records were all written by non- Gypsies, who were rarely interested in the community for its own sake, but only as an obstacle to the goals and values of settled society. Their disdain for romantic idealisation might sound like the hard facts, but it was just as likely to be covering some other, less attractive agenda.

JOHN SPENCER, the Right Honourable Earl Spencer, gave evidence in 1875 about Wimbledon Common to the Select Committee on Open Spaces (Metropolis) and his views were not favourable. He was well acquainted with

the common and its problems – the swampy ground and en-croachments, the gravel diggers and gorse cutters and, worst of all, the Gypsies. ‘I have had, within the last few years, innu-merable complaints by letters and petitions ... They express,

very strongly, the nuisance which these gipsies and tramps are to the neighbourhood.’ The Rev. Dr Biber of Roehampton went further and accused the Gypsies of ‘things so atrocious that it had been impossible to put them on paper’. As he did not give any testimony to the com-mission, we will never know just what these things were and, since no Gypsies were invited to give evidence, it remains a matter of specula-tion whether there was any truth in them. But John Spencer was by no means a disinterested witness. He had been planning for several years to have Wimbledon Common enclosed, guarded and divided up; one part to be maintained as a public park and the other to be sold o¤ for devel-opment. Naturally, the Gypsies were an obstacle to this and would need to be evicted before the new houses could be sold for their full price.

In fact Wimbledon Common had been a stopping place for gen-erations before the Spencer family ever laid claim to it. It was a day’s journey out from Southwark and the gateway to Molesey Races and the Thames Valley. Every year, as April brought the warm weather, there was an exodus of Gypsies from the cramped yards and vacant plots of London. They left behind the wet and dirt for green-fringed roads and wooded hills. Just how general this migration was can be seen

from census records; a couple might have been stopping in outer London on census night, but the birthplaces of their children will be scat-tered along the migration routes through the south-east.

Thus the image of the nature-loving

the Lees and the wife of ‘Fighting’ Jack Cooper, a man who took on all England in the ring. In the estimation of society member Charles Leland, Charlotte was ‘a living link with all that was wildest in England’.

Visitors reported that Charlotte was a good talker and, although she did not charge for her reminiscences, a small donation was always welcome. While the wildness of the Romany appeared much less glam-orous to other people – such as the judge who eventually sentenced Jack Cooper to transportation – the romantic perspective came from Charlotte herself. She was not the passive recipient of non-Gypsy myth-making but the author of her own life story.

Modern discussions of the Gypsy as a Victorian cultural icon often overlook the facility with which real Gypsies got to know the tropes that were being circulated about them and the speed of their response. In 1879, while staying at a hotel in Wales, Frank Groome opened his news-

Top: Gypsy Encamp-ment, Appleby by John Atkinson 1919. Left: children at a Romany camp site in Beckton, east London, c.1970.


GYPSIES

FURTHER READINGBecky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers (Reaktion, 2014).

Janet Keet-Black, Gypsies of Britain (Shire, 2013).

Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930 (Columbia University Press, 2006).

Patrick Jasper-Lee, We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture (Ravine, 2015).

Angus Fraser, The Gypsies: Peoples of Europe (John Wiley, 1995).

Jeremy Harte is the curator of Bourne Hall Museum, Ewell, Surrey and the keeper of the Surrey Gypsy Archive.

Gypsy, Victorian stereotype though it was, had its roots in the life of the Gypsies themselves. There was a realistic element to all this; the summer saw increased opportunities for farm labour and working the fairgrounds and a chance to meet new customers for handcrafts. But when it came to nature and the call of the outdoor life, realism and romance were not opposites but the same social process.

Here, as with many other characteristics of the community, racial stereotypes were not just invented by the gypsiologists in the privacy of their studies. Rather, they emerged in the field from a dialogue between scholars and the subjects of their study. This is most obvious in the area where dialogue was essential: the Romani language.

By the 1870s, the home language of English Gypsies was a mixed dialect combining an older Romani vocabulary with a predominantly English grammar and word-order. Whatever it might have lost in the way of morphological elegance, Anglo-Romani was a functional language in which Gypsies could express themselves at length and with a speed that left a monoglot English speaker unable to grasp a word that was being said. The first step in Romani studies was to acquire some fluency in this language, which was not easy. Romani had survived precisely because it was a cryptolect, a language in which you could say things that you did not want the farmer or the policeman to understand.

WHETHER AN UNDEFILED HERITAGE actually existed is debatable; but the gypsiologists behaved as if it did, and so, in their own way, did many Gypsies. There was a profound generational regret among Victorian

Gypsies for the loss of the old language. A man talking in the ordinary Anglo-Romani of the day would stop, blush and revert to the earlier inflected forms – ‘what would my old dad think if he could hear me now!’ It was the status ascribed to good Romani speakers which made research so easy for the language scholars. The arrival of scholars on Epsom Downs would see men leaving the beer tent and the racetrack in a competitive linguistic scramble, each asserting that he knew words with which the others were unfamiliar.

Given the prestige associated with the old language, it is not surpris-ing that some began indigenous research into their own traditions. Sam Smith, who travelled in the Thames Valley, was a scholar of this kind. Approaching his tent, Leland was careful to call out an archaic Romani welcome in the style of 50 years earlier: ‘Sam likes to be considered as deep Romany. He tries to learn old gypsy words, and he a¤ects old gypsy ways. He is pleased to be called Petulengro, which means Smith. Therefore, my greeting was a compliment.’

In an exchange like this, there is not much to choose between the imagined Gypsy of Victorian stereotype and the cultural ideal to which a prosperous, well-connected Gypsy might himself aspire. As a basis for social policy, a world view that divides Travellers into a handful of ‘good’ Gypsies (dark, Romani-speaking, traditional-living) and mobs of ‘bad’ mumpers and cross-breeds, is a disaster and it is regrettable that, well into the 20th century, gypsiologists like Brian Vesey-FitzGerald were still framing their advice to government in terms of the protection of racial types and not of human rights. But these views were not conjured out of nothing by the host society. They had their root in values held by Gypsies themselves.

WHERE OUTSIDERS saw race, Gypsies were more likely to talk of lineage. In a community which had no landed property and which placed strong cultural barriers in the way of inherited wealth, status could nevertheless be allowed to those descended from ancestors who had exemplified the Romany way. Genealogies going back over more than a hundred years were not uncommon; Liverpool University still houses a wealth of notes made by George Hall and others which (allowing for some uncertainties in oral transmission) have been shown to match the documentary record.

This pride in ancestry was matched by a continual policing of the boundaries of the community. ‘Never!’ replied a girl in the New Forest after being asked whether she would consider marrying a non-Gypsy. In fact, as the example of Esmeralda Lock shows, marriages did occur across the ethnic boundary. But they were problematic, not so much because they diluted some mythical purity of the race, but because they reduced the scope for family alliances within the community. If someone was, as people used to say, a half-blood, then they had only half as many cousins to draw on for support and co-operation. The more successful they were at the Gypsy life, the more likely they were to marry back within the community and rea�rm the bonds which existed among those of common descent.

A host of relatives, a claim to famous ancestors and a family background in making a profitable living all helped to mark out a pros-perous Gypsy. Other ethnic markers, from old-fashioned Romani to the ornate carving and decoration of waggons, could be added once the economic base was secure. The foremost members of the commu-nity (the ‘pure-blooded’ contacts of the gypsiologists) were well-o¤ by the standards of the Victorian working class; a good waggon, at late 19th-century prices, was worth more than £100. Prosperity gave them confidence in their dealings with the host culture. From Matty Cooper, who taught Romani to Charles Leland in the 1870s, to Ted Scamp, who travelled with Rupert Croft-Cooke in the 1940s, there was a line of Gypsies who took it on themselves to educate scholars in the ways of the community. Instead of seeing these resourceful and creative people as the passive recipients of non-Gypsy stereotypes, it is more useful to ask what role the light of romance played in their own lives, before it was twisted into the fantasies of a hundred images which they never saw and novels which they never read.

Romany Day at Tilford, Surrey.


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The Scientific Revolution put an end to beliefs that were once considered rational but now seem bizarre. If we want to understand why, we need to

look at the increasing importance of the ‘fact’, says David Wootton.

Gathering bulbs: garlic harvested in a Latin version of an Arabic book on health, late 14th century.

PEOPLE IN THE past held all sorts of strange things to be true. The philosopher Descartes believed that a drum made of lamb’s skin would fall silent if it ‘heard’ a drum made from the skin of a wolf. It was generally maintained that lions are frightened of cockerels and that barnacles hatch to produce barnacle geese: Kepler, the astronomer, believed this. It was claimed that diamonds are indestructible, unless smeared with goat’s blood, which softens them. And it was accepted that if you smear a magnet with garlic it will cease to work. By the end of the 18th century nearly all these strange (or so it seems to us) beliefs had disappeared.

Among the last to go was the belief that swallows hibernate at the bottom of ponds; although he knew that other birds migrate, the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778) still believed this. I use the word ‘belief ’, but these beliefs were rather regarded as reliable knowledge: people knew that garlic disempowers magnets; they claimed that there was plenty of experience behind their convictions.

These beliefs, which seemed rational at the time, are now thought bizarre. Something changed which radically altered people’s understanding of what constitutes a well-founded belief, of what counts as knowledge. The

Garlic and Magnets


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case of garlic and magnets is a particularly good example, as it is possible to trace in detail the debate as to whether garlic really does disem-power magnets. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans thought the belief was unproblematic.

The first person to attack this theory systematically in print was Giambattista della Porta in 1589; the last person to defend it was Robert Midgeley in 1687. The near-century that separates the two is that of the Scientific Revolution and this little example of garlic and magnets is a way into the much larger problem of how modern science was invented.

Two things need to be kept in mind. First, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had plenty of garlic but very few magnets; they became widely available with the introduction of the compass for navigation. (The compass was introduced from China and was used in both the Islamic and Christian Mediterranean from the 13th century, so for centuries the compass and the false belief that garlic disempowers magnets coincided.) Second, and more impor-tant, that the introduction of movable type printing (from 1450) brought about a long slow information revolution, comparable to the impact of the Internet in our own world.

Iron in garlic juiceDella Porta claimed to have smeared a compass with garlic juice and found it went on working just fine. He also spoke to fishermen who assured him they ate garlic in their meals and were happy to breathe all over their compass-es; they would, he said, rather die than give up eating garlic and onions. Although della Porta appealed to experience, not everyone was willing to believe him; some reported his claims with considerable scepticism, but others repeated his experiments with care and even improved on them. Thus Thomas Browne, the author of Religio medici, heated up an iron bar and then quenched it in garlic juice, yet found he could still magnetise it. Equally, he took magnets and left them floating in garlic juice until they started to rust and they still pointed north-south. In 1654 Walter Charleton mocked those who continued to believe that a wolf ’s skin drum would silence a lamb’s skin drum; all it took was ‘an easy and cheap experiment’ to prove the contrary. (Wolves were rare in England and even Scotland by the mid-17th century; but presumably wolfskin was imported from Europe.) A few years later Robert Boyle mocked those who believed diamonds were indestructible unless smeared in goat’s blood: he had spoken to a diamond merchant who regularly ground up diamonds to make a fine dust, a diamond polish. Experience and experiment dis-solved these ancient beliefs; but how had they survived for 2,000 years? One answer is that they were interlocking and mutually supporting: diamonds, it was believed, would also disempower magnets and goat’s blood would restore them.

It is easier to explain why these beliefs suddenly disap-peared in the middle years of the 17th century. First, old

authors no longer carried the same authority. The word ‘author’ originally meant authority and you could not be an author until you were dead. (This was true for Shakespeare, who was only called an author after his death.) Suddenly eyewitness experience was being used to trump the reports of authorities such as Plutarch and Ptolemy. The problem with so many writers, Boyle complained, was that they reported things without checking their veracity: things ‘as neither themselves ever took the pains to make tryal of, nor receiv’d from any credible Persons that profess’d them-selves to have try’d them’. Della Porta indeed was one of the authors Boyle distrusted and not without reason. Although it seems he had indeed anointed magnets with garlic juice he reported other experiments with magnets, which he had plagiarised and had never performed, and in the introduc-tion to his book he gives a long list of mysterious natural processes, including that old favourite, that garlic disem-powers magnets, a belief that he was obviously reluctant to abandon even though he had disproved it himself.

Why did old authors lose their authority? Partly because the printing press provided a vast flood of new information.

Attractive: a variety of magnets from a German textbook, c.1850.


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David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. His latest book is The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (Allen Lane, 2015).

Since much of it was contradictory, readers had to pick and choose. In 1543 Vesalius published his De Fabrica, in which he listed errors he had found in Galen’s account of anatomy. How was one to establish who was right? Only by looking for oneself, or turning to another reliable source written by someone who had looked for themselves. The printing revolution thus had a paradoxical e¤ect: it undermined the authority of texts in general and raised the authority of a particular class of texts, those that claimed to be written by reliable eyewitnesses.

It was not just printing that undermined the authority of ancient texts. It was – a word that runs through all the key sources – experience. In the 15th century the governing assumption was that all knowledge was to be found in a

book, if one only located the right book (which might well be hiding on a cobwebbed shelf of an ancient monastic library). This view was destroyed by the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named. Columbus always believed that he had nearly reached China; Vespucci grasped that he had found a vast new landmass. In his account of his voyages Vespucci used an old word in a new sense: he had ‘discovered’ a new land. The word spread as fast as news of Vespucci’s discoveries and it established for the first time the notion that old knowledge could not be trusted, that there could be real progress. From that moment the author-ity of ancient texts was fatally undermined.

Tall storiesThe printing press, the discovery of America: these are pretty obvious events. But something else was at work. We can see it in Galileo. When in 1612 he published an account of why bodies float he was attacking the Aris-totelian view that ice floats, despite being heavier than water, because it is flat. His critics replied that according to Seneca there was a lake in Syria on which bricks would float; Galileo dismissed this as a tall story, much to their dismay as they thought authors such as Seneca deserved to be trusted. A few years later Galileo was involved in a debate as to whether cannonballs get hotter or colder as they fly through the air. His opponent declared they got hotter and pointed out that in ancient Babylonia people had cooked eggs by placing them in slings and whirling them through the air. Galileo’s reply was simple: we have eggs, slings and fit young men. Why do we not give it a try? His assump-tion was that our eggs, our slings, our fit young men are no di¤erent from theirs. Alexander Ross, who defended the ancient texts on garlic and magnets as late as 1652, would not have agreed. He wrote:

I cannot believe that so many famous Writers who have af-firmed this property of the garlick, could be deceived; therefore I think that they had some other kinde of Load-stone, then that

which we have now. For Pliny and others make divers sorts of them, the best whereof is the Ethiopian. Though then in some Load-stones the attraction is not hindred by garlick, it follows not that it is hindred in none; and perhaps our garlick is not so vigorous, as that of the Ancients in hotter Countries.

When it came down to it, you could only conclude that Pliny, Seneca and all the other authorities were wrong if you believed that nature is uniform: that magnets and garlic are everywhere much the same.

By the middle of the 17th century old authorities were no longer accepted without question. What were needed were experts – diamond dealers and sailors – and eyewit-nesses. Deference was dead. Publication had turned the world of learning into a sort of courtroom in which claims to truth were tested by appeals to witnesses. One word perfectly symbolises this new world: ‘fact’. Before the 1660s ‘facts’ in English were deeds (from the Latin facio, ‘I do’) and usually they were criminal acts. The job of a jury in a court of law was to rule on the facts and there was no appeal beyond their decision. (We still use ‘fact’ in this old sense when we talk of ‘an accessory after the fact’.) Suddenly, facts became what they are now, impersonal truths; but at the same time they remained incontestable: you can have a false belief but not a false fact. In 1663 the Royal Society dedicated itself to establishing new facts, which were to be beyond dispute, unlike the explanations o¤ered for them (which were soon to be called ‘theories’) that were up for grabs. The language of the law was being used as a key term in the new science.

In this new world of the fact all sorts of old beliefs came to be dismissed as mere fables and one of the first to go was the belief that garlic disempowers magnets. We tend to think of the Scientific Revolution as the work of great minds – Galileo, Kepler, Newton – but there was, alongside the work of these mathematicians, a much wider cultural shift, a new disrespect for traditional authority, symbolised in a preoccupation with getting the facts right. Scientists played a part in this, but so did people who do not count for us as being scientists at all (della Porta, Browne). This was a new culture and one we still live in today.

There is a recent school of thought that argues that all knowledge is grounded in trust; but the trust that became fashionable in the 17th century was a new, sceptical trust: one for eyewitness accounts, for experiments that could easily be repeated. Compared with the old culture, it was a form of organised distrust. The critics of della Porta and Galileo, when they insisted that Seneca, Pliny and Ptolemy could not possibly be wrong, belonged to the old culture of deference, a culture that is now almost unimaginably distant from our own. Before the invention of the fact, the standard view was that only truths deduced from incontestable premises were reliable; theology, philosophy and mathematics provided the only reliable knowledge and everything else was a form of public opinion or reputation. Now we have all sorts of reliable knowledge and it is an obsession with facts that has made this possible.

In 1663 the Royal Society dedicated itself to establishing new facts, which were to be beyond dispute, unlike the explanations offered for them


BERNAYS

The self-styled ‘father of PR’, Edward L. Bernays’ ability to mould public desire made him one of the 20th century’s most influential – yet invisible – characters, as Iris Mostegel reveals.

Edward L. Bernays with his wife, Doris E. Fleischman, aboard the SS Mauretania, 1923.

EDWARD L. BERNAYS is regarded as one of the fathers of public relations. Although he died more than two decades ago, his influence pervades modern western consumer culture.

‘Group of Girls Pu� at Cigarettes as a Gesture of “Freedom”’, read the front page of the New York Times on April 1st, 1929. It was no April Fools’ joke; rather, this spectacle of liberated, smoking women was one of Bernays’ most celebrated publicity stunts.

Bernays’ client, George W. Hill, president of the Amer-ican Tobacco Company, had asked him: ‘How can we get women to smoke on the street. They’re smoking indoors. But, damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!’

Bernays began to ponder. How best to employ the theories which had already proven so e�ective in his public relations campaigns: Gustave Le Bon’s principles of mass psychology, Wilfred Trotter’s herd instinct theses and, above all, the hidden drives of human beings that Sigmund Freud – Bernays’ ‘Uncle Sigi’ in Vienna – spoke about? Bernays needed advice and consulted the psychiatrist A.A. Brill, who had been one of Freud’s pupils. ‘What’, he asked Brill, ‘is the psychological basis for a woman’s desire to smoke?’ ‘Cigarettes which are equated with men’, came the reply, ‘become torches of freedom.’ That was Bernays’ inspiration. His campaign? To get young feminists to light up cigarettes – torches of freedom – in public as an act of emancipation during New York’s Easter Parade. This, he believed, would make its way into the nation’s newspapers. Before that, however, he still had to take care of a crucial issue: to give instructions to Bertha Hunt. She was Bernays’ secretary, but at his behest she was to forget that for a few days. She had to pass herself o� as a women’s rights advocate and drum up comrades-in-arms for the ‘feminist torches of freedom campaign’; no inference to American Tobacco was to be permitted.

The Great Manipulator

‘In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo I and other young women will light another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday.’ These were the first lines of the telegram – signed by Bertha Hunt – which was sent to selected American debutantes.

March 31st, 1929 was the day Bernays had set aside for his campaign. He himself was not in attendance, but would later be informed of how a group of ten young women, walking up and down Fifth Avenue, contentedly lit up cig-arette after cigarette, while Bertha Hunt fulfilled her role professionally as the purported initiator of the campaign. When a reporter from the New York World approached Hunt to ask how she had arrived at the idea of a women’s smoking march, she answered that ‘she first got the idea

for this campaign when a man with her in the street asked her to extinguish her cigaret [sic] as it embarrassed him. “I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation”.’

In their coverage of New York’s Easter Parade, scores of US newspapers reported the story of the young women and their ‘torches of freedom’. While some correctly suspected a publicity stunt or stated that the smokers had not at-tracted much attention, others presented it as a campaign of emancipated women. Neither Bernays nor American Tobacco were ever mentioned by name in the press reports; their camouflage remained intact.

The ‘Torches of Freedom’ campaign became a legendary milestone in the history of public relations, still cited in marketing textbooks, which claimed that it caused a national debate and prompted emancipated women to smoke in public. These claims, however, stand on shaky ground. Vanessa Murphree from the University of Southern Missis-sippi presented an analysis in September 2015 of the 1929


BERNAYS

media reports and provided substantial evidence that the original reception of the campaign was a Bernays-driven myth: there was significant media coverage, but it was by no means as celebratory or as influential on women’s smoking habits as we have been led to believe.

Bernays’ methods, however, opened a new chapter in public relations, a profession that he and others pioneered in the 1920s. Bernays was not the first man in the field. There were a handful of others before and beside him, notably his great rival Ivy Lee. Bernays, however, may have had the greatest impact. He bolstered the new profes-sion with theory, gave it a philosophical framework and processed the findings of the blossoming psychological disciplines by coming up with new methods of manipulat-ing the public. Although practically invisible to the outside world, Bernays became an influential architect of modern mass persuasion techniques, which continue to inspire the PR industry. Harold Burson, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the world’s largest PR enterprises, was quoted in the 1990s as saying: ‘We’re still singing o� the hymn book that Bernays gave us.’

Bernays was related to Sigmund Freud on two sides: Freud’s sister Anna was Bernays’ mother and his father Ely, a grain merchant, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha. Bernays was born in Vienna in

1891 and emigrated to the US with his parents a year later. He was to die on March 9th, 1995 at the age of 103 in Mas-sachusetts. Another member of the Freud family followed in his footsteps: Matthew Freud, who is considered one of Britain’s most successful PR men.

Influenced by his famous uncle, with whom he corre-sponded regularly, Bernays got to understand the power

of the unconscious, of universal longings, of emotions and instinct. He exploited them for whatever he had to sell: artificial flowers, racehorses, gramophones, politicians, ide-ologies. No matter what it was, he often worked according to a certain dramaturgy, which his biographer Larry Tye described thus: ‘He generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he happened to be selling.’ In Bernays’ eyes, generating events was one of if not the most important task of a PR adviser. He himself labelled it as the ‘creation of circumstances’, the staging of apparently spontaneous events to influence people’s behaviour, according to the wishes of the clients.

‘Bernays generated events, the events generated news and the news generated a demand for whatever he was selling’

Below: Bernays, second right, with other delegates of the Committee on Public Informa-tion, 1917.Below right: A.A. Brill, top left, with Sigmund Freud and other psychiatrists at Clark College, Massachusetts, 1908.

in 1927 in the Harvard Business Review. ‘People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.’ Bernays claimed to under-stand how such methods worked. He had been experi-menting with the human psyche since the 1910s, while working as a press agent on Broadway, where he persuaded US citizens to become enthusiastic about acts from Europe that had earlier left them cold, such as Russian ballet or opera performances with Enrico Caruso. However, his shift from simple publicity to strategic PR had taken place during the First World War. At that time, in his mid-20s, Bernays was working in a lowly position for the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the US war propaganda agency.


Above: an advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, 1930s.Right: one for General Electric, 1926.

This was genuinely innovative, because until then business advertising was relatively straightforward: extolling the product and its functional advantages. Bernays, by contrast, aimed at the unconscious and trusted in the indirect method. ‘It’s like shooting billiards’, he once pointed out, ‘where you bounce the ball o� cushions, as opposed to pool, where you aim directly for the pockets.’

INFLUENCED BY THE principles of Gustave Le Bon’s mass psychology, Bernays believed that human behaviour could be e�ectively manipulated, if purportedly independent symbolic figures were manipulated to play upon

unconscious aspirations and fears: in the name of health, a hearty breakfast recommended by Dr. A.L. Goldwater or, in the name of equality, cigarettes smoked by feminists. Soon Bernays would expand this ‘third-party technique’ (employ-ing a third, opinion-leading party as the mouthpiece for the client’s interests) using a PR tactic which at that time was novel but has since become common. He began to field ‘front groups’, that is, seemingly independent organisations which profess to support concerns of the common good: the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Foods and Drink; the Radio Institute of the Audible Arts; the Temperature Research Foundation; the Middle America Information Bureau – all seemingly innoc-uous associations that were, in reality, set up by Bernays solely for PR purposes.

The bosses of big corporations, such as the United Fruit Company, Proctor and Gamble or General Electric, were fascinated by Bernays’ new methods and flocked to his Manhattan-based PR company, forking out huge sums for his advice. People like him were needed. The First World War was over and a sharp recession began in 1920. One of the numerous problems for America’s magnates was the consumption of the average citizen. Many only purchased what they really needed, a behaviour which moguls wanted to change. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur summarised this in a particularly straightforward manner: ‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture’, he wrote


BERNAYS

He was fascinated by how the CPI succeeded in gearing up Americans to take part in the war. Within a short time their initial rejection had turned into an irrational enthusiasm for war. Bernays realised, as he recalled decades later: ‘If this [propaganda] can be used for war, it can be used for peace.’

SHORT OF STATURE, with a thick black moustache, Bernays was one of the fledgling PR industry’s most controversial figures. He was considered vain, obtrusive and arrogant. It was said that he referred

to his secretaries as ‘Little Miss Nitwits’ and that the word ‘failure’ was missing from his vocabulary (despite numerous setbacks). Above all, he was someone who never lost an op-portunity to beat his own drum and who presented himself all too readily as ‘the father of public relations’. Just as Bernays avoided his colleagues, so he too was avoided. The PR historian Scott M. Cutlip, for instance, in his book The Unseen Power: Public Relations, tells of a group of influential PR men in the 1930s who imposed a golden rule for their meetings: that nobody was allowed to mention the name Edward L. Bernays. If it happened, a 25-cent penalty had to be paid; at the end of the year they bought a round of drinks with the money.

Bernays cared little about all of this. He devoted himself to his life’s work: the planning of campaigns. He never made any secret about his passion for propaganda, charac-terising himself as a ‘propagandist for propaganda’, even attempting to rehabilitate the word after the First World War gave it a negative connotation. The only compromise he had been willing to make was to omit ‘propaganda’ from his job title and to simply call himself Counsel on Public Relations. But when writing his book, he could not help calling a spade a spade. ‘Propaganda will never die out’, wrote the then-37-year-old Bernays. ‘Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.’ This was the last sentence of his book that he titled, to nobody’s surprise, Propaganda. Sigmund Freud would later congratulate him on his ‘clear, clever and comprehensible book’. Freud could not have anticipated that his nephew – a Jew like him – may have also inspired Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels some years later. According to Bernays’ own account he was informed by Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspa-pers, that in 1933 Goebbels was using his PR classic Crystal-lizing Public Opinion ‘as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany’. Bernays commented on this in his 1965 autobiography: ‘This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.’ Bernays frequently produced campaigns for charities free of charge, for example, that of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Bernays’ first piece of advice to Sylvia Lawry, the then chairperson was that:

‘The name Multiple Sclerosis is too di®cult for the public. Shorten it to the initials MS.’ It was a recommendation the wisdom of which remains true to this day.

Yet Bernays had an even larger vision of public relations, one that extended beyond the narrow bounds of marketing campaigns. For him, PR was the instrument to guarantee a smoothly functioning society. Since ‘the masses’ – accord-ing to Bernays – are incapable of making rational decis- ions, ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society’. His daughter, the novelist Anne Bernays, speaking in a 2002 BBC documentary, recalled: ‘Democracy to my father was a wonderful concept, but I don’t think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment.’

This stance was typical of the sentiment of America’s elite of the 1920s: they believed, because of the propaganda experiences of the First World War, that the public was pro-foundly irrational and, ergo, dangerous and had to be con-trolled. Without violence, decision-makers were dependent

Edith Lee smokes a cigarette on the 'Torches for Freedom' march, New York, 1929.

Bernays was considered vain, obtrusive and arrogant. It was said that he referred to his secretaries as ‘Little Miss Nitwits’


on the public and its approval and this now seemed controllable. If cigarettes, bacon and gramophones could be sold to the people, so could opinions, ideologies or poli-ticians. To Bernays, one was like the other: goods without inner value that had to be sold. He called this selling tech-nique the ‘engineering of consent’, that is, the manufactur-ing of public approval: in Bernays’ words, ‘the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest’. Harold Lasswell, one of the leading US political scientists of his day, wrote in 1927 of ‘the collapse of the tra-ditional species of democratic romanticism’ and described the increasingly powerful public opinion-moulding appara-tus: ‘If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept its chains of silver.’

These were the years of the birth of modern political PR. Bernays’ methodology would soon be part of its stock equipment and inspire future generations, resulting in the events of a campaign which went down as a dark chapter in the more recent history of the industry. In October 1990 on Capitol Hill, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named ‘Nayirah’ stated in a public hearing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that, while volunteering in a Kuwaiti hospi-tal, she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies out of their incubators, leaving them ‘on the cold floor to die’. More than 700 TV stations broadcast the appearance of ‘Nurse Nayirah’, which shocked the US public and finally convinced it to take mil-itary action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Three months

later Operation Desert Storm began. There was only one problem: the incubator story was not true and the 15-year-old ‘nurse’ turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. This, however, did not come out until after the war was over when, in January 1992, it became known that the New York PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, was behind the story. Hill and Knowlton’s client was the front group Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an organisation funded by the Kuwaiti government in exile. It wanted to convince the US public to strike against Iraq and did so. This was what was meant by the ‘engineering of consent’.

BERNAYS – aged 100 and still active at this point – was not involved in this PR campaign, but he would have recognised it as such, since it was very much a replica of his own campaigns: exploiting an emotion

(in this case fear) by means of a credible symbolic figure (the 15-year-old nurse) and placing it in an apparently natural event (her appearance in Congress), because ‘it is the overt act that makes news, and news in turn shapes the attitudes and actions of people’.

Bernays’ career spanned a period of more than 80 years, eight decades in which his ideas changed the texture of modern western societies. The essence of reality itself had begun to alter: what is an authentic event and what is merely an apparently authentic one? What is information and what is manipulation disguised as information? Suc-cessive generations of public relations practitioners have extended Bernays’ legacy. Authentic posts on the Internet are indistinguishable from those subverted by companies and independent political blogs are intermingled with those that are paid for. Allegedly, scientific studies are passed on to journalists via news agencies, but they represent both real science and commercial interest. ‘If anything, the 21st century has witnessed the encroachment of Bernays’ ideas into every crevice of our lives’, concludes the historian Stuart Ewen in his introduction to Bernays’ classic text Crystallizing Public Opinion. Though still virtually unknown by the public, Bernays was in 1990 chosen by the US mag-azine LIFE as one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th century.

Some have claimed that his wife and business partner, Doris E. Fleischman, played a decisive role in his success, a fact that Bernays downplayed. Meanwhile, the controversy that surrounded him did not abate until he had outlived all of his competitors. In his later years he was revered as the master of his craft. Bernays regarded himself as a member of an ‘intelligent minority’, who could steer ‘the masses’ at the push of a button. What he conveniently forgot was that it was always his clients who decided to what end the buttons were to be pushed.

FURTHER READINGVance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (IG, 2007).

Danny Rogers, Campaigns That Shook the World (Kogan Page, 2015).

Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (Holt, 1998).

Iris Mostegel is a writer based in Vienna. She is a regular contributor to the Wiener Zeitung, the Stuttgarter Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau.

Top: Joseph Goebbels, Berlin, 1936.Above: Edward Bernays aged 89, 1981.


MakingHistoryWe live in an era sceptical of singularity and authority, yet attracted to narrow certainties. Might a more self-consciously subjective approach to history o�er solutions, asks Mathew Lyons?

What does it mean to write history today? What claims can historians make about their work? These are just two of the questions that sprang to mind after listening to Niall Ferguson tussle with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley on Radio 4’s Start the Week in October.

Ferguson was attempting to clarify the distinction between historians and writers of historical fiction. ‘What happened and how it felt are not sepa-rate things’, he said:

Historians are as much concerned with how it felt – the dierence is, we are ac-tually basing it on research rather than our imaginations. People who write historical fiction are telling you what it must have felt like. But that’s not what it felt like, because essentially they’re projecting back, in [Jane’s] case early 21st century ideas.

Ferguson, Harvard’s Laurence A. Tisch professor of history, has long been a proponent of the counterfactual, which – whatever its virtues and vices – is at heart an imaginative project. Indeed, Ferguson edited one of the leading books on the subject, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactu-als (1997).

Yet how do historians justify what they do? Certainly they can no longer pretend to Olympian distance and uninterested authority. We are all a product of the times we live in, fed by the oxygen of our experiences, and it is disingenuous to claim otherwise. We live in a multi-channel, multi- vocal era, which is sceptical of singu-larity and authority, but paradoxically attracted to narrow certainties and averse to self-doubt. How should his-torians adapt their practice to reflect these competing tensions? Doubt is

central to intellectual enquiry, but by the time a work arrives in print, doubts have usually been e�aced. The goal of historical research is to work our way out of doubt towards authority; perhaps work that articulates explicitly that process would better represent to the wider public what historians actually do.

Likewise, do historians challenge themselves enough to find an appro-priate form for their ideas? They strive for originality of research and analy-sis, but how often do they strive for originality or inventiveness of form? The book or long-form essay may still be the best format historians have for sustained and rigorous argument. But do they default to it out of admiration,

laziness, or cultural deference? After all, today’s cultural and technological fragmentation and diversity o�ers enormous opportunities for generi-cally – and therefore intellectually – satisfying creativity to those with the requisite talent, ambition and desire.

To take two examples in di�er-ent media: Ruth Scurr’s My Own Life (2015) might best be described as an autobiographical biography of John Aubrey, piecing the great antiquarian’s life together out of the voluminous chaos of his published and unpublished writings. Elsewhere, and largely unmarked in the press, BBC television’s Footballers United, an innovative historical drama, recently won a Prix Italia for Best Digital Storytelling. It used its medium to create a touching and thoughtful nar-rative illuminated by archive materials actually embedded in it. Rather than a drama-documentary, it was a new thing: a documented drama.

To write history is to fill our glass with water from the Thames and claim we have captured the river. This is as true of Jane Smiley as it is of Niall Ferguson, but the author of fiction makes no claim to objective truth or authority and so may be more true to our times.

Certainly, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is more porous than we like to think. Perhaps an approach to non-fiction historical writing that was more comfortable in acknowledging its subjectivity, its contingency and its intellectual frailties would challenge readers to think more deeply about the nature of history and its place in our culture.

To write history is to fill our glass with water from the Thames and claim we have captured the river

Between fact and fiction

Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).

'Voluminous chaos': Portrait of John Aubrey by William Faithorne, 1666.


XXXXXXXXXXX| SEXUAL HEALTH

Men’s awkwardness when talking about their bodies, especially as regards their sexual health, has changed little since the 17th century. Jennifer Evans looks into the private worries of men and their doctors.

MEN DO NOT talk about their bodies. We often hear this objection today when talking about attitudes to prostate and testicular cancer. This reticence has led to high-profile events such as ‘Movember’ and ‘Go Dad Run’, which raise money to combat these serious illnesses and encourage men to open up about their bodies. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is purely a modern issue, but it is not. Men in the 17th and 18th centuries were similarly described as being less than forthright about their bodily a�ictions. Medical and surgical writers lamented that they hid their diseases because they were embarrassed, neglected them through misguided notions of their own body’s invincibility or wilfully ignored illness, because it would interfere with their daily lives. As today, this was particularly true of men’s sexual health conditions.

At the time manhood and manliness were qualities that men earned and displayed to reinforce their status. Simply being male was not enough to be granted status automati-cally. Men shaped their reputation through being the head of a household and by being a father, which confirmed their virility, and also by practising philanthropy, spirituality and social paternity. To support this, a man’s body was expected to be strong and well-formed, but equally important were self-control and mastery over the body and self. Sexual health and genito-urinary conditions could thus under-mine a man’s apparent masculinity. Those su�ering from disorders such as incontinence or ‘nocturnal pollutions’ (involuntary loss of semen during sleep), for example, were seen as lacking self-control, while those who were sexually incapable were emasculated by their inability to satisfy their wives, who might then commit adultery, making them a cuckold. Likewise impotent and infertile men were in a precarious situation as they struggled to fulfil their role as head of a household: childlessness meant their honour, reputation and credit were open to question.

Vilification and virilityJohn Muys’ 1686 treatise on surgery included the story of a bold young virgin who vilified her bridegroom on their wedding night when his hernia was revealed. She com-plained ‘such a distempered Body [could not] satisfie a Maid in the flower of her Age’ and argued that she would rather die than live with her new spouse. Muys noted that the husband had to ‘prove’ himself ‘a Man su�cient’ by impreg-nating her with twins. This man’s hernia had allowed his wife to complain and scold, inverting the gender hierarchy of the household. The bridegroom’s manhood was placed in a precarious position and had to be visibly displayed to regain his position as head of the household. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré urged those treating male sexual health pa-tients to be particularly diligent for precisely these reasons. He claimed: ‘But for the wounds of the Testicles, and genitall parts, because they are necessary instruments for the

Shameful Secrets

Private pain: draining fluid from a hydrocele of the scrotum. Engraving by Frederik Dekkers. Dutch, 1694.


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The yong man flourishing as it were in the Aprill of his age, cockereth in himselfe a foolis[h] imagination of his own lustinesse, & reputeth it as a discredit to him to seeme to feare the approache of any disease … if at any time they be overtaken with anie infirmitie (which often happeneth) as unwilling to be beholding to the science of Physicke, they leave it to be worne away by the strength of their bodie.

Similarly several case notes suggest that men downplayed the severity of their conditions to avoid the doctor. Gayns-ford wrote of Samuell Curde, who ‘by getting over a pair of Barrs Hurt his Scrotum’ that, ‘he thinking [it] to be not very much neglected himself for Sometime’, causing his condition to worsen.

Passing pridePerhaps surprisingly, there were some conditions that men openly and freely discussed. In particular they seemingly discussed bladder stones and their associated symptoms without concern. Some men even showed o� the stones they had managed to pass. Mathew Purmann noted that in the late 17th century ‘Baron Van Horst Lieutenant Colonel of the Hannover Troops’ had kept his bladder stones and ‘in the year [of ] 1687 shewed me a great Box full of Angular, Oval and Round Stones which came from him in Six Weeks Time, the largest whereof was about the bigness of a great Pea’. The historian Ulinka Rublack has also revealed that in 1574 the ambassador Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq discussed a bloody discharge in reports he sent to Emperor Maximilian II while on his travels. He explained that while travelling from Vienna ‘blood began to flow from me in large quantities along with urine, but without any sensation of pain or greater inconvenience of any sort’. The ambassador recounted this a�iction without any apparent shame and, although he halted his trip for health reasons, there is no suggestion that he saw the condition as problematic.

The key factor that tended to prompt men to discuss their conditions was pain. Conditions of the male genitals, as they are today, were known to be particularly painful: a British surgeon John Banester noted that: ‘Wounds of the gendring parts are most perillous for paine.’ Men in this era were expected to bear pain with stoicism. It is clear, however, that when it became severe enough to interfere with daily activities men sought help from friends, family and physicians, albeit without giving in to their emotions, which might suggest a lack of restraint. In September 1629 Sir Francis Harris wrote to Lady Joan Barrington that his kidney/bladder stones were causing him severe pain, which ‘forceth mee to bee bould to send unto yow for your accos-tomed [sic] charity’.

Far from being a modern issue, men’s complex relation-ship to their sexual, reproductive and genito-urinary health has a long history. Medical practitioners then, as now, sought ways to make men more comfortable with their bodies and tried to encourage them to voice their concerns and seek medical help in good time despite their enduring refusal to admit to the need.

Jennifer Evans is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire, where she researches early modern medicine.

| SEXUAL HEALTH

preserving the species by generation … and to keepe all things quiet at home, therefore the Chirurgion ought to be very diligent and carefull for their preservation.’

Yet some medical writers did their best to argue that sexual health issues were not always that serious. Alexander Read, a surgeon and anatomist, argued that because wounds of the male genitals were not deadly and men could evidently live if their testicles were removed it was unnecessary to discuss their treatment in any detail. Others framed their descriptions of sexual health and genito-urinary conditions in a way that implied men would be returned to full health; they would not be left with any lasting symptoms that

would damage their reputation or daily life. Frequently surgeons and physicians wrote that men were ‘perfectly cured’. Nicholas Gaynsford, apprentice to Dr George Willet in Groombridge on the Sussex/Kent border in the early 18th century, recorded that Samuell Curde, who hurt his scrotum while climbing over some bars, was ‘perfectly cured’ without elaborating on what this meant.

These descriptions sometimes stretched plausibility. Theodore Mayerne, royal physician to James I, recorded the story of a man who su�ered from a range

of genito-urinary a�ictions, including ulcers and fistulas. He noted that following treatment ‘this Gentleman enjoys a perfect health, nor doth perceive any inconveniency of these great Griefs’, even though the patient still su�ered from a painful itching when urinating and the loss of matter, possibly seminal, each time he urinated. It seems that surgeons and physicians not only emphasised their own abilities as healers, but also encouraged men to seek medical help.

EmbarrassmentIt is clear though that not all men believed that these conditions were ‘harmless’, either to their reputations or to their long-term health. In particular, venereal disease caused shame and embarrassment and medical writers repeatedly noted that men hid the condition from those around them. John Marten wrote in the early 18th century that ‘most Men blush to own [the disease], because it carries with it Disgrace, and seems to reproach them with Frailties and Ir-regularities’. Indeed, Richard Wiseman, surgeon to the Roy-alist army during the Civil War, recorded that several of his patients were deeply ashamed of their condition. One, when Wiseman interrogated him on the nature of his disease, ‘grew passionate, and denied it to be Venereal; and a day or two after removed out of his lodgings two or three miles into the Country’ to avoid the discovery of his a�iction. Moving two miles away evidently did not help, as the patient even-tually had to undergo treatment for the pox.

It was not only patients’ embarrassment that prevented men from seeking appropriate help. Medical practitioners also moaned that men, particularly young men, seemed to think that their bodies were invulnerable and did not require help. Philip Barrough explained that young men’s sense of invincibility and bravado about their health endangered them:

Because men could evidently live if their testicles were removed, it was unnecessary to discuss their treatment

MARIGNANO


GIANTSSo bloody was Francis I’s defeat of the Swiss at the Battle of Marignano in 1515 that it made previous battles resemble ‘children’s games’. Robert J. Knecht traces the French king’s route across the Alps towards war in Italy.

WITHIN A FEW MONTHS of becoming king of France on January 1st, 1515, Francis I invaded Italy at the head of a large army. His actions opened a new chapter in the history of the so-called ‘Italian Wars’, which his pre-

decessor, Charles VIII, had launched in 1494. Italy at that time was tempting prey for a powerful neighbour, as it was divided into many more or less independent states, the most important being Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papal States. French intervention had a long history, reaching back to Charlemagne. More recently, Charles VIII had conquered Naples only to be driven out of the peninsula by a coalition of Italian states. His successor, Louis XII, led a new invasion in 1499. He conquered Milan and Genoa, but inadvisably chose to share the Kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand, King of Aragon, who soon collared the lot. Four years later, Louis allied with Pope Julius II against Venice, but after its defeat the pope expelled the French from Italy with the help of the Swiss cantons, then reputed to be the leading military power in Europe. After defeating the French at Novara in 1513, the Swiss invaded Burgundy and laid siege to Dijon. The local French commander bought them o� with a treaty, which the king then refused to honour. These events formed the background to Francis I’s invasion. He claimed the Duchy of Milan by virtue of his descent from his great-grandmother, Valentina Visconti.

Before invading Italy, Francis needed to secure his rear. He signed two treaties: one with Charles of Habsburg, who ruled the Netherlands and Franche-Comté, and the other with Henry VIII of England. The Swiss, however, refused to sign. They resented the way they had been cheated over the treaty of Dijon and were unwilling to give up territo-ries in Italy given to them by Massimiliano Sforza, the then Duke

A Battle of

Relief from the Basilica of St Denis, tomb of Francis I depicting the Battle of Marignano, 16th century.


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of Milan. He, for his part, could count on the support of Ferdinand of Aragon and Pope Leo X. On July 17th they and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, formed a league for the defence of Italy. Twelve days later Francis left Amboise on the first stage of his journey south to join the army he was going to lead across the Alps. Twenty years old, he was tall and strong. Only a few days before, he had shown great bravery when facing alone and killing with his sword a wild boar, which, having escaped from its cage, was terrifying courtiers who had gathered in the château’s courtyard. Like all young noblemen of his time, he had been trained to fight; but his military experience had been limited to two unsuccessful campaigns in Guyenne and Navarre. He now had to face the real test as a military leader.

Francis reached Lyon on July 12th, but before entering the city he was invited to watch a nautical pageant on the River Saône. This took the form of a white winged stag pulling a ship. Riding the stag was a man dressed in the colours of the Duke of Bourbon, the region’s principal landowner, who was also Constable of France, the overall commander of the army under the king. Legend had it that a winged stag had assisted Clovis, King of the Franks, to fight the ‘Almains’ by guiding him to a ford across a river. Standing at the prow of the ship was a man imper-sonating Francis. He wore a suit of armour but no helm and beside him a winged child blew wind into the ship’s sails from bellows. On a flag attached to the mast an embroidered salamander vomited flames. The nautical pageant was soon followed by the king’s entry into the city of Lyon, when he was again able to watch all sorts of theatrical displays in which he was portrayed as the ‘noble champion’. In one of them a Swiss bear could be seen tending its bleeding claws and Sforza expressing his shame and despair.

ON JULY 15TH Francis appointed his mother, Louise of Savoy, to be regent of France in his absence. He then travelled to Grenoble, where his army had assembled. The standing army consisted of cavalry units known as compagnies d’ordonnance

or collectively as the gendarmerie. They comprised volunteers recruit-ed from the nobility grouped into lances, each comprising a man at arms, two archers and a number of auxiliaries. A man-at-arms wore a heavy suit of armour while the archers were more lightly clad. Both categories fought with lances. By this time, however, some had a bow or crossbow. Each lance had eight horses: four for the man-at-arms and two for each archer. A company comprised 50 or 60 lances, each commanded by a captain or lieutenant. For infantry, the king relied on

Like all young noblemen of his time, Francis had been trained to fight. He now had to face the real test as a military leader

Top: portrait of Francis I, c.1515-20.Below: medal depicting Francis I with the Battle of Marignano on the reverse, Matteo del Nassaro, 16th century.


volunteers known as aventuriers, recruited mainly in Gascony or Picardy. Grouped in companies of 500 men each under a captain, they wore leather jerkins and light helmets. They fought with pikes, halberds, crossbows or arquebuses. Francis also employed foreign mercenaries. He recruited 23,000 landsknechts in Germany, who copied Swiss tactics without being as disciplined. As for the French artillery – reputedly the best in Europe – it consisted of 60 cannon of divers calibres. Made of bronze, they were pulled by horses trained to keep up with an army on the march.

Beyond the Alps between 12,000 and 15,000 Swiss troops were waiting along with 1,500 papal cavalry commanded by Prospero Colonna. Anticipating that the French would use either the Mont Genèvre pass or that of the Mont Cenis, they stationed themselves

in the Val Chisone or Val di Susa. But, taking the advice of Marshal Trivulzio, Francis chose the col de Larche, a much less accessible pass normally used only by local peasants. More than a thousand pioneers were sent ahead to clear the pass of obstacles and to throw pontoons across torrents. The French van under Charles, Duke of Bourbon began to cross the mountains on August 11th. As they emerged into the plain of Piedmont, they learnt that Colonna’s cavalry was stationed close by at Villafranca. Three companies of French gendarmes set o� to take them by surprise. Colonna was having a meal when he was captured along with 300 of his men. Thus the Swiss lost their cavalry support.

Francis, meanwhile, set o� from Guillestre with the rest of his army. Despite the e�orts of his pioneers, he found the Alpine crossing di¬cult. Writing to his mother, he said:

Francis I at the Battle of Marignano, 14th September 1515, 16th century.


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The descent was so precipitous that horses slipped and fell into ravines and cannon had to be dismantled, their parts lowered by rope

We are in the strangest country ever seen by any man of this company. Yet tomorrow we hope to be in the plain of Piedmont with the force I am leading which will please us very much as we are finding it di�cult to cross the mountains wearing armour. We have to walk leading our horses by the bridle. It would be impossible for anyone who has not witnessed the scene to believe that cavalry and heavy guns can be transported as we are doing.

On the Italian side the descent was so precipitous that horses slipped and fell into ravines and cannon had to be dismantled, their parts lowered by rope. Once in Piedmont, Francis marched rapidly eastward after a brief stop in Turin, the capital of Savoy. Hoping to win the trust of the local people, he imposed a strict discipline on his troops, even forbidding the infantry to enter towns that had opened their gates. Meanwhile, the Swiss, finding themselves bypassed by the French, retreated eastward towards Lake Maggiore.

THOUGH WILLING ENOUGH to fight the enemy, Francis was not ruling out a negotiated settlement, as long as the Swiss were prepared to cede Milan. He sent his uncle, René of Savoy, to negotiate with them at Vercelli. In return, he o�ered them

subsidies and future military aid. Meanwhile, he continued his eastward march. He crossed the River Ticino on August 31st and at Bufalora re-ceived delegates from Milan who promised him victuals and a friendly reception in their city. Even so, the king sent Marshal Trivulzio to spy out its approaches. His caution was justified as the Milanese were split into factions: while the Ghibellines were ready to treat, the Guelfs were intent on fighting. As Trivulzio withdrew, Francis carried out a semi-cir-cular movement south of Milan in order to contact a Venetian army, commanded by Bartolomeo d’Alviano, which was stationed at Lodi. On September 9th, Francis received the terms of a treaty negotiated with the Swiss at Gallarate. They were ready to give up all the territories they held in the duchy of Milan, except Bellinzona, in return for 1,000 gold crowns. Massimiliano Sforza was to receive the duchy of Nemours by way of compensation for that of Milan, as well as the hand of a French princess. Francis was to be allowed to raise troops in Switzerland. Satis-fied by these terms, he collected the huge sum demanded by the Swiss from his entourage and sent it to Gallarate.

The Swiss, however, were sharply divided. While the men of Bern, Fribourg and Solothurn were willing to go home, those from other cantons refused to accept the treaty. Matthias Schiner, cardinal-bishop of Sion, who hated the French,

urged the Swiss to continue the fight. He harangued a large gathering in the main square of Milan. The content of his speech is not precisely known, but he seems to have promised his audience an easy victory, if they took advantage of a recent dispersal of the French army. While 6,000 troops had escorted Marshal Lautrec to Gallarate, others had gone to Pavia with Louis d’Ars. Francis, meanwhile, had pitched his camp at Marignano (today Melegnano), a small town ten kilometres south of Milan. He now had only about 30,000 men. About noon on September 13th the Swiss came out of the city. So rapid had been their departure that many had not had time to prepare themselves; many were without shoes, helmets or armour. Marching rapidly, elbow to elbow and in silence, they carried wooden pikes, three to five metres long, each ending with an iron blade. They had only eight small cannon by way of artillery. Schiner, wearing his cardinal’s robes, followed them riding a Spanish jennet. He was escorted by 500 Milanese horsemen and preceded by a processional cross.

The French camp was situated near the village of San Giuliano, five kilometres north of Marignano. It was flanked on the west by the road from Milan to Lodi and on the east by the River Lambro. The land in between was marshy and intersected by ditches and irrigation channels. The camp was divided into three parts. The vanguard nearest Milan was commanded by the Duke of Bourbon. It comprised all the artillery, a square of 6,000 landsknechts and 950 men-at-arms. The centre or ‘battle’ was located at Santa Brigida, one kilometre to the south. Commanded by Francis, it comprised 9,000 landsknechts and the flower of the gendarmerie. The rearguard, five kilometres further south, consisted only of cavalry commanded by Charles d’Alençon, the king’s brother-in-law.

ABOUT NOON on September 13th some pioneers working beyond the French camp on the way to Milan noticed a huge cloud of dust rising into the sky. Realising that it was thrown up by the advancing Swiss, they immediately informed

Bourbon, who, in turn, warned the king. He was with Alviano, who left at once to rejoin his troops at Lodi. The Swiss attack soon followed. As usual, it consisted of three huge blocks, each of 7,000 pikemen,

advancing one behind the other. Around 4pm the first broke through the line of sharpshooters guarding the French guns. The French cavalry withdrew leaving the gunners defenceless. The landsknechts, who, like the Swiss, were armed with pikes, then engaged the enemy. Two enormous squares of pikemen

collided. The Swiss broke through and repulsed a charge by the French cavalry. As the first Swiss square began to falter, the second moved forward to lend support. By now, it was night, but fighting continued till the moon vanished around midnight. The two armies then separated, the French responding to trumpet calls and the Swiss to the great horns of Uri and Unterwalden. But many soldiers got lost in the dark, some even sleeping along-side the enemy by mistake. Bodies were strewn across the plain and the groans of the wounded filled the air.

Thinking that the battle was already won, Schiner informed Basel. The news

spread across Europe much to the delight of Henry VIII. Meanwhile, in the French camp,

Francis ordered his chancellor to send three letters urgently: the first ordered Lautrec, who

was at Gallarate, to end talks with the Swiss and, if possible, recover the money that had been paid

The equestrian armour of Francis I, 16th century.


Clockwise from left: portrait of Galiot de Genouillac d'Assier, army o�cer during the reign of Francis I, Clouet, 16th century; portrait of Matthias Schiner, 16th century; manuscript showing La Bataille, a chanson by Clément Janequin, 1542.


MARIGNANO

FURTHER READINGAmable Sablon du Corail, 1515 Marignan (Tallandier, 2015).

Didier Le Fur, Marignan, 13-14 Septembre 1515 (Perrin, 2015).

Robert J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars, 1494-1559 (Pearson, 2012).

Robert J. Knecht is Emeritus Professor of French History at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Hero or Tyrant? Henry III, King of France 1574-89 (Ashgate, 2014).

to them; the second urged Alviano to bring his army from Lodi at once; the third asked Louis d’Ars to reinforce Pavia in the event of Francis needing to shelter there. Having taken these steps, the king spent the rest of the night, as he wrote to his mother, ‘bottom on saddle, lance in hand and helmeted’. He took a brief nap leaning on a gun barrel. Taking advantage of the interval in the fighting, Francis also reorganised his army: he brought the three sections together in a single line with himself and the ‘battle’ in the centre, Bourbon’s van on the right and Alençon’s rearguard on the left.

BATTLE WAS RESUMED AT DAWN. The Swiss, now also formed as a single line, engaged the French along their entire line. On the right, Bourbon managed to repel them, but in the centre the Swiss managed to cross a ditch under heavy fire from the

French guns, scattering the infantry. Francis, charging at the head of his gendarmerie, threw them back, but on the left the Swiss captured the artillery, dispersed the infantry and cut through the landsknechts, who fought heroically. At this juncture, Alviano’s Venetian horse arrived shouting ‘San Marco! San Marco!’ Galvanised by their arrival, the French mounted a counter-attack which carried the day. By 11am Francis could claim victory. The rump of the Swiss army retreated towards Milan as a disorderly rabble. Some carried the wounded on their backs, while others dragged their blood-soaked cantonal banners. Some sought shelter in Bourbon’s headquarters, but this was set on fire by the French. Those who threw themselves out of the windows were impaled by pikemen.

Marshal Trivulzio, a veteran of 13 battles, called Marignano ‘a battle of giants’, compared with which all the rest were but ‘children’s games’. Gravediggers reported burying 16,500 bodies.

Of the 21,000 Swiss who had come out of Milan on September 13th, fewer than 13,000 returned. More than 1,500 wounded were cared for in Milan’s hospitals and convents. French losses were fewer. Nearly 8,000 perished, mainly among the vanguard. Among them were many noblemen whose bodies were embalmed and carried back to France in leaden co¬ns for burial on their estates. ‘Never again’, Francis said, ‘would anyone call the gendarmerie hares in armour.’ One of the day’s heroes was Galiot de Genouillac, master of the artillery. Another may have been Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard. Legend has it that the king asked to be dubbed by him after the battle as a tribute to his bravery. Although almost certainly apocryphal, the story, which has inspired paintings by Fragonard and Ducis, has become an essential part of the popular remembrance of Marignano.

FRANCIS I ENTERED MILAN in triumph on October 1st, 1515. Soon afterwards Pope Leo X agreed to meet him in Bologna. The outcome of that meeting was the signing of a Concordat which satisfied a long-standing papal demand for the annulment of the

Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. In addition to strengthening his authority over the French church, Francis hoped that the Concordat would ensure papal support for his future conquests in Italy. During the three weeks he spent in Milan following his return from Bologna, Francis reduced a fine he had imposed on its citizens. He also freed hostages and allowed exiles to return home. Sforza, meanwhile, settled in Paris where he died in 1530. After another crossing of the Alps, this time in the reverse direction, Francis arrived at Sisteron on January 13th, 1516 to be greeted by his mother and wife. ‘God knows’, wrote Louise in her diary, ‘how relieved I was to see my son fit and well after all the violence he had su�ered in the public interest.’ The battle of Marignano was celebrated in music and in literature, not only in France but also in Italy. Francis was praised for his looks, which stood in sharp contrast to the ugliness of Charles VIII, his predecessor in the peninsula. Italians celebrated the battle as the victory of virtu over fortuna. In France it was followed by propaganda designed to glorify the king and justify the heavy loss of life he had inflicted on the Swiss. Accused of avarice and pride, they were portrayed as lice-ridden cowherds. The seigneur de Bayard was said to have called to them: ‘Go and eat cheese in your wretched mountains!’ While the Swiss were ridiculed, Francis was ac-claimed as worthy to stand alongside such ancient heroes as Hannibal (because of his crossing of the Alps) and Julius Caesar (who had also defeated the Swiss). François Demoulins, in a book published in 1519, described imaginary meetings between Francis and Caesar, one of them in the forest of Fontainebleau. Addressing Francis, the author wrote: ‘Let it be noted that two drops of water cannot be more similar than your fortune and Caesar’s.’

A crowned lion symbolises Francis' victory, Orus Apollo, 16th century.


REVIEWSMihir Bose thinks about the French

Rachel Pope praises the Celts • Peter Burke on the past as a foreign country

Keith Laybourn traces the emergence of the Labour Party, its highs and lows and wonders if its forward march is now halted.

The History of the Labour PartySIGNPOSTS

EVER SINCE the Labour Party was formed as the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 it has been at the centre of intellectual and political debate. Writings on the Labour Party have been driven by two central questions: first, why did the Labour Party emerge in the early 20th century to replace the Liberal Party as the progressive party in British politics? Second, has the forward march of Labour been halted? The second of these

has particular relevance since the recent election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s leader, which has rekindled divisive conflicts between Old and New Labour.

As the Labour Party emerged to replace the Liberal Party in the 1920s, G.D.H. Cole suggested that its success was the inevitable consequence of the emergence of class politics. This was espoused in George Dangerfield’s amorphous study The Strange Death of Liberal England (1934)

and by Henry Pelling’s more factually based The Origins of the Labour Party (1954). Their view was rejected by Trevor Wilson’s book, The Decline of the Liberal Party (1966), which proposed that Labour’s growth had less to do with working-class enfranch- isement than with the impact of the First World War, when the Liberal Party found itself divided between the contrasting premierships and values of Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George.

In the 1970s, there was intense debate between the rival inter-pretations of class politics and the First World War, fuelled by P.F. Clarke’s Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971), which argued that the Liberal Party was in rude health on the eve of war, buoyed up by Lloyd George’s New Liberal policies and the Liberal reforms of 1905-14, which encouraged social harmony and largely retained the working- class male voter.

This view was countered by Ross McKibbin in his The Evolu-tion of the Labour Party 1910-1924 (1974) and in my own book, The Rise of Labour (1988), arguing that the trade union base of Labour, when faced with industrial conflict, was more interested in winning support than estab-lishing social harmony during strikes. Since then, the debate has widened to incorporate the views of David Howell, Bill Lancaster and Duncan Tanner, all of whom have raised the issues of regional and local variations in the growth of Labour and suggested that its success was not inevitable.

Labour’s victories since 1900 have been fitful. Two minority governments in 1924 and 1929-31, under Ramsay MacDonald, brought barely the most modest of social and political changes and much venom from those who considered him a traitor. However, David Marquand’s biography, Ramsay MacDonald (1977), represented him as an honest socialist driven by his commitment to the 19th-century values of statesmanship and na-tional responsibility in the face of the horrific economic crisis that

Tug-of-War: Ramsay MacDonald is the first man on the rope at a Labour Party rally, 1923.


IVAN MAISKY’s extensive diaries have been unearthed from the Russian archives and edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, an expert on Soviet relations with the West. This abbreviated, one-volume edition of the diaries will be followed by a full three-volume one and is intended presumably for the general reader. They will be attracted by the colourful character sketches and the excellent range of photographs and cartoons that illuminate both the book and the era, even if some of the diplomatic dis-course is rather too detailed and repetitive.

Maisky was a protégé of Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister in the 1930s, and his standing in the Soviet hierarchy waxed and waned with that of his patron. Although a loyal communist, Maisky was a pragmatist rather than an ideo-logue and was an Anglophile. He was thus an ideal choice as the new Soviet ambassador to Britain, for, in the wake of Hit-ler’s rise to power in Germany,

Maisky cultivated a wide range of

contacts ... from the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, to Churchill, and to Lloyd George

emerged after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The complexity and permeability of Labour politics at this time has been developed further by John Shep-herd’s monumental biography of George Lansbury (2002) and by David Howell’s commanding MacDonald’s Party: Labour Iden-tities and Crisis 1922-1931 (2002), which examines Labour politics as it varyingly operated in the Independent Labour Party, the trade unions and other sections of Labour. This multi-layered reappraisal of Labour politics is also particularly evident in Brit-ain’s Second Labour Government (2011) edited by John Shepherd, Jonathan Davies and Chris Wrigley. Through these works we have begun to understand the immense di£culties of minority Labour governments that were

fractured by disagreement, over-whelming economic di£culties and unemployment costs.

Labour achieved success with the Clem Attlee governments of 1945 to 1951, creating the modern welfare state and the National Health Service; further success in the Harold Wilson and James Callaghan era of 1964 to 1970 and 1974 to 1979 and once again under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between 1997 and 2010.

However, the nature of British politics has changed and, apart from the recent erosion of the welfare state and the NHS, there has been a retreat by Labour from the commitment to the Old Labour policies of public owner-ship to the embracing of capital-ism within a wider framework, which increasingly eschews public control and is represented by New Labour. This may have

been driven by Labour’s lengthy periods in opposition between 1951 and 1964, 1979 and 1997 and since 2010. In these wilder-ness years there were a flurry of books and articles published on the theme of ‘Must Labour Lose?’ and ‘The Future of Labour’, fol-lowing Eric Hobsbawm’s Marxism Today article ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’ (1978). One dominating theme has been the declining role of the trade unions, whose control of the Labour Party, as secured by the 1918 Constitution, was eroded in the 1980s to a third of the vote in the leadership election to one that was indirectly successful in the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015. The broader reaction against trade union domination has been captured in the extensive writings of Chris Wrigley and John Shepherd in Crisis? What Crisis?: The Callaghan Government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’ (2013), which deals with the industrial conflict of 1978-9 that saw un-collected rubbish accumulate in the streets and corpses unburied as roughly one and a half million workers went on strike. It still resonates in British politics and public rhetoric.

As class politics appears to be less relevant in British society now – with the structural decline of the large industries and their blue-collar workers along with the waning of trade union power – we have recently been reminded in Martin Pugh’s icon-oclastic Speak for Britain: A New History of the Labour Party (2010) that Labour never truly became the party of the working class; it skilfully adapted its message to the established local and regional cultures of the Liberal and Tory traditions and became emascu-lated by Blair. Pugh’s suggestion that Labour has a tendency to choose the wrong leader and to hang on to him too long is an interesting reflection in the light of the result of Labour’s recent leadership election.

Only time will tell whether or not this means that Labour’s forward march has been halted.

Keith Laybourn

Why did the Labour Party emerge in the early 20th century

to replace the Liberal Party? Has Labour’s forward

march been halted?

The Maisky Diaries Red Ambassador to the Court

of St James’s 1932-1943 Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky

Yale University Press 632pp £25

Stalin wanted to create an anti- Nazi front in partnership with the western democracies. Thus Maisky set out not to engage in subversion or class war, but to hobnob with the British estab-lishment, including royalty. He cultivated a wide range of con-tacts, from intellectual socialists, such as the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, to senior Tories, such as Churchill and Eden, and the elder statesman, Lloyd George. His pen portraits of these and other leading figures are often vivid and sometimes insightful. The diaries also shed light on the social milieu of informal diplomacy; a world in which, although men were dominant, women were often present and sometimes vocal.

The value of the diaries with respect to Anglo-Soviet relations is more di�cult to assess. The entries sometimes conflict with the account Maisky gave in his own memoirs, though that may be partly explained by his precarious political position during the Cold War era. Even in the 1930s Maisky’s influence on Soviet policymaking was limited and the failure to e�ect an Anglo-Soviet alliance led to the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, which took Maisky completely by sur-prise. The German invasion of Russia in 1941 gave a new warmth to Anglo-Russian relations, but that was soon undermined by Britain’s failure to launch a second front against Hitler. Maisky was recalled to Moscow in 1943 and then side-lined. The importance of his con-tacts with British politicians and diplomats is also questionable. He was never close to Neville Chamberlain but the confidant of dissidents such as Churchill, Eden and Lloyd George.

Maisky was also never close to Stalin and he probably sur-vived the purges – unlike some of his embassy sta� – because of his personal links with the British elite. In his diaries he predictably praised Stalin and the Communist regime yet he was more at home in the gentler world of British politics.

Roland Quinault


REVIEWS

HISTORICAL REPUTATIONS rise and fall, but King John has had more of a rollercoaster ride than most across the centuries. Reviled in his own day and throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, he was unexpectedly rehabilitated during the Tudor period because, like Henry VIII, he had defied the pope. Protestant propagandists blamed John’s problems on papal machinations against him and dismissed his evil reputation as a fabrication of biased monastic chroniclers. Since then historians have veered between these two poles, some condemning John’s moral turpitude, others praising his administrative ingenuity and so on.

Igor Djordjevic is concerned with the evolution of the king’s reputation in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, following the publication of John Stow’s The Chronicles of England in 1580. Stow included in his book a fragment of an early 14th-century chronicle written at Dunmow Priory in Essex, which attributed the conflict between John and his barons to the king’s lust for Matilda, the daughter of Robert fitz Walter, the leader of the Magna Carta rebels. According to the Dunmow Chronicle, when Matilda rejected the king’s advances, he had her poisoned with ‘a boyled or potched egge’. This story was quickly taken

up by playwrights and players (including the Lord Admiral’s Men of the subtitle) and became the basis for a cluster of dramas about King John in the late Tudor and early Stuart period. The Dunmow account is far from a new dis-covery, but Djordjevic explores its impact in detail and charts the way it was fused with the tales of Robin Hood.

There are two main problems with this book. The first is the author’s style, which makes it a heavy slog from the outset: for example, ‘I studied the various early modern interpretive commu-nities that derived from the texts they read about their national past meanings relevant to them in their present – to explain to themselves what made them who they were and what it meant to be “English” – but modern scholars are an even more distinct interpretative community of readers of the same texts because they overtly and unabashedly inscribe meanings on them’.

The second is that Djordjevic’s book suggests he essentially shares the opinion of Tudor writers for whom John was a king who simply received a bad write-up, as well as their disdain for the contempo-rary chroniclers of the king’s reign. Djordjevic’s analysis suggests that he may not have read the original sources in su¦cient detail. For example, at the start of chapter one, ‘Reclaiming John from the Monks’, we are told there is no need to revisit the works of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris. However, later writers, such as Sir Richard Baker, whom he suggests was inventing scurrilous material about John in the 17th century, were actually copying Wendover and other chroniclers more or less verbatim.

Djordjevic may feel justified in this attitude towards John because he finds it in the work of ‘modern historians’, but the authors he cites are almost exclusively historians who wrote in the mid 20th century and who preferred royal adminis-trative records to the testimony of chroniclers. The actual consensus among scholars writing in the past 20 years is that John was indeed a terrible king, who failed precisely

because of his cowardice, cruelty and sexual predation. The story told by the Dunmow Chronicler, while clearly much improved, echoes a well-informed contem-porary writer, the Anonymous of Béthune, who says that Robert fitz Walter fell out with John because the king tried to force himself on his daughter. Since fitz Walter, far from being a ‘perennial rebel’, had little or no quarrel with John before 1210 and only minor material grievances, the possibility of a real personal animus against the king cannot be dismissed as ‘medie-val drivel’. Here, however, stories about John’s sexual harassment are dismissed as fabrications and even well-attested examples of in-dividuals being starved to death on the king’s orders become ‘alleged atrocities’.

The repeated assertion that John was a ‘much-maligned’ monarch detracts from what might otherwise have been an interesting work of scholarship. Pace Djordjevic, it was not the 17th-century playwright Anthony Munday who damaged John’s reputation ‘by forever branding him as an attempted rapist and tyrannical homicide’. That damage had been done by the king himself.

Marc Morris

King John (Mis)Remembered

The Dunmow Chronicle, the Lord Admiral’s Men, and

the Formation of Cultural Memory

Igor Djordjevic Ashgate 216pp £60

‘WHAT IS WOMAN? – Man’s undoing’ is the unequivocal, opening expression of the Life of Secundus, translated from Greek into Latin by Willelmus, at the Abbey of St Denis in 1167 and much reproduced throughout the Middle Ages. Through her analysis of manuscript books

Medieval Women Deirdre Jackson

The British Library 200pp £20

associated with women (as commissioners, readers, authors, inspiration for and subject matter of written works), Deirdre Jackson provides yet further evidence that the lives led by medieval women were more positive and more interesting than Willelmus would have us believe.

Ever since Eileen Power’s pioneering study, Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275-1535 (1922) and her series of lectures on medieval women (not brought together and edited by M.M. Postan until 1975), scholars have sought to provide insight into the reality of medi-eval women’s lives. Following in this tradition, Jackson’s book rea�rms that most medieval women did not simply balance, precariously, between pit and pedestal, hostage to their inheritance from Eve (lascivi-ous, deceitful, garrulous) and the unattainable standard of the Virgin Mary (forever chaste, silent and obedient).

Medieval Women examines women’s sexuality, marriage, motherhood, learning, spirituality, literary patronage and work, illustrated by texts and images in manuscript books that date from the 12th to the 15th centuries.

The chapter devoted to work includes portraits of women performing a variety of occupations: in addition to the ubiquitous spinning, women

Most medieval women did not simply balance,

precariously, between pit and

pedestal, hostage to their inheritance

from Eve and the unattainable standard of the

Virgin Mary


REVIEWS

THE NAME CELTS, OR KELTOI, was left to us by the ancient Greeks, who, along with the Romans, used it to refer to various people in non-Mediterranean Europe; a catch-all for groups who were di§erent. It remains a catch-all term for the people of pre-Roman Iron Age Europe (800 bc-ad 43). More specifically for their La Tène art style, surviving as an insular British form down to c. ad 200.

Celtic is also a series of languages; an early form of Christianity and related art-style; and a modern political identity. Celtic is all of these things; unravelling the various strands of the Celtic knot is no easy task.

The first hall of this exhibition is a wonderful experience: finding the animals and faces in early La Tène art; discovering the astonishing skill of the gold work; the beauty of the Thames shields; the full range of the torcs (neck-rings) from the

Snettisham hoard, all beautifully displayed. We also learn of warrior identity and of the ‘powerful woman’ of Waldalgesheim. We are awed by the Gundestrup cauldron (inset); before a neat study of late Iron Age British art: its horses, boars, bulls and the culture clash of Rome. There is a sense of tangible di§erence as we move through into the art of the early Christian period.

The second hall is about discovery. We learn that the British Renaissance involved a redis-covery of the Celts; a romantic Celtic revival is beautifully evoked by J.H. Foley’s marble statue of the very noble Caratacus.

In the 18th century we find the time depth of our prehistoric past to be rather confused; at this time it was believed that the world began in 4004 bc. In the 1740s William Stukeley had Caesar’s Iron Age druids at Stonehenge, with a Bronze Age palstave and Roman sandals – pieces of history separated by 2,300 years. We find the modern Arch Druid’s breastplate modelled on a

Stukeley illustration: an Iron Age druid wearing a Late Bronze Age gorget – a people and an object 800 years out of sync.

In 18th-century scholarship, Celtic essen-tially meant not-Roman, so all prehistory was Celtic and so, too, was early Medieval Ireland. In 1707, as England annexed Scotland, the linguist Edward Lhuyd employed the term Celtic to convey the deeper ancestry of the Atlantic western languages, as opposed to the impact of Roman/Saxon/Norman on English to the east.

By the 19th century, Celtic Studies grew, con-flating prehistory and early histories, to produce a pan-European culture of some 2,000 years; a Celtic mixing-pot. This has become a problem for archaeologists, who increasingly see time in generations and prehistoric social groups cover-ing roughly the size of our counties; a scale also found in the linguistics of the Atlantic coast.

As an Iron Age archaeologist, I teach the Celts as a series of layers through which to excavate. A colleague, John Collis, uses ‘lenses’ to show how each era has skewed our understanding. So we peel o§ the Enlightenment’s re-imagining, the anachronism of early Medieval Irish laws and the hearsay of later Roman political histories.

We acknowledge contemporary Classical texts as ‘anthropologies’ of pre-Roman Iron Age people. Ultimate-ly, we turn to the archaeology, the science of it. We study their art, their architecture and agriculture, their burial traditions, piecing together a modern understanding of the many communities that dwelt in Europe before Rome.

This exhibition enables us to experience Iron Age art, revealing the visceral shift of early Christian forms, and the impact of Renaissance and Enlightenment thinking on modern Celtic identities, establishing that Celts were, and have become, di§erent things in di§erent places, at di§erent times.

We find hints at a time depth for modern Celtic identities: the language survival; the genetic map, with England so separate from the small clusters on the western peninsulas; the survival of La Tène art styles in the bits of Britain least influenced by Rome, beyond England. The past is hugely relevant.

We are so familiar with large-scale history and identity, nation state-sized grand narratives; yet this exhibition begins successfully to un-tangle the detail of Celtic art styles and British identities. It is academic communication at its very best. Book your ticket.

Rachel Pope

EXHIBITION

Celts: Art and Identity British Museum, London. Runs until January 31st, 2016

are seen gathering the harvest, selling meat, performing acro- batics and making the very books in which these portraits have been preserved. Clemence of Barking, Christine de Pizan and Eleanor of Castile, Queen of England (1241-90), who employed two scribes and an illum- inator to make manuscripts for her, are three of the many named women who feature in Jackson’s book. Her examples of women as commissioners, owners and readers of books are drawn largely from the upper echelons of society and this is perhaps inevitable con-sidering access to literacy and the high cost of bespoke book production in the Middle Ages.

As with Jackson’s earlier work, Marvellous to Behold: Mir-acles in Illuminated Manuscripts (2007), Medieval Women is lav-ishly illustrated with 120 colour plates taken from manuscripts, the majority of which are held by the British Library and whose beautiful illumination attests to their being high-status artefacts.

As Deirdre Jackson reveals, a book was a treasured posses-sion, into the fabric of which a woman might have an image of herself depicted. In times of crisis, such as childbirth, medieval women turned to saints and the Virgin, sometimes recording the births of their children in their books. Women taught their daughters to read, often from the very books of hours that they had com-missioned, using these books to instil not only love of God and the Virgin but also that of the written word. Jackson concludes: ‘Among the most personal possessions, manu-scripts are also among the most eloquent.’

By turning the leaves of Jackson’s beautiful volume, readers today can gain access to a range of medieval books that still speak to the lives of the medieval women who commis-sioned, owned, read and, in a number of cases, are portrayed within them.

Sue Niebrzydowski


REVIEWS

THE MEDITERRANEAN, as a world in itself or as a gateway to other worlds, old and new, has been much studied. For the period covered by the book under review, the 16th century, the ‘classic’ study was contributed by Fernand Braudel. This was written from prison and his treatment of the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II is – consequently – rather impressionistic. By contrast, and from di¬erent circumstances, Noel Malcolm’s study, Agents of Empire, is anchored in a wide range of specific source materials, primary and published, and reveals a consid-erable knowledge of areas of the Mediterranean not often frequent-ed by Anglophone historians.

Malcolm’s starting point may appear rather unusual, from two families originating from ‘Venetian Albania’, the Bruni and the Bruti. In his introduction, the author apologises for a ‘micro-historical’ approach and it is true that some ‘micro-histories’ have emerged from raids on little known archives resulting in ‘challenging’ worldviews usually compiled from atypical Inquisition records. However, the Bruni and the Bruti lead the reader into a much wider world and Malcolm handles its – and their – stories extremely well. Throughout, their careers and family circumstances are woven into the greater narrative.In the 16th century, Albania existed

– then, as now – on a frontier between Islamic and Christian states and between Islamic and Christian (Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic) religions. But the frontier was a porous one; espionage, negotiation, trade, the exchange of prisoners, regional politics between the ‘divides’ of East and West could flourish.

The Bruni and the Bruti, like other families from marginal-ised areas of Europe, made their way into a wider world and here Malcolm takes his treatment onto the wider stage of the Mediterr- anean. Each chapter encloses a clear and compelling narrative of such great events as the Siege of Malta (1565) and the Battle of Lepanto (1571), while alert to other issues, for example the Ottoman threat to south-eastern Italy and Spanish ambitions in North Africa.

The coverage of key figures and courts is well researched and clear. But the author is always ready to shift focus from a wider to a more specific stage: the arming of a Venetian galley, how completely – or incompletely – did the Ottoman Empire recover from Lepanto, the nature of Venetian holdings in Albania and Istria in terms of strategy, population, government and resources. He also discusses the concept and aims of sea power in the period, arguing that the Mediterranean naval powers did not seek ‘Jutland’-style confronta-tions, but rather used their fleets to raid, acquire coastal cities and strong points and to transport armies. This may be to downplay the contemporary appreciation of sea power. Malcolm’s study draws repeatedly on information on the construction, arming, readiness and movement of vessels and navies.

Throughout, this study, or series of studies, is informative and thought-provoking, from discussions of ‘armchair’ strategic thinking in the Vatican, to divisions and unrest in the Balkans, to the Venetian Republic’s ability to keep ‘punching (or rowing) above its weight’ and whether the weakness of some of its Balkan possessions helped to prolong their place in the Venetian stato di mar.

Agents of Empire includes a

useful and necessary ‘Note on Names, Conventions and Pronun-ciations’, covering, for example, the many changes over time to place names. It also includes some e¬ective maps, though given the geopolitical situation in the Balkans Malcolm discusses, a relief map would have been useful. In all, this book greatly enriches our understanding of Mediterranean history on both international and local levels. It should also be recommended reading for the Foreign and Com-monwealth O¦ce and its more thoughtful representatives in the Balkans and Middle East. Finally, it should spur scholars to consult the sadly neglected archives of Koper (Capodistria) in the Biblio-teca Nazionale della Marciana in Venice.

John Easton Law

Agents of Empire Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and

Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World

Noel Malcolm Allen Lane 604pp £30

Following Auguste Comte’s call at the end of the 19th century for a ‘history without names’, the Annales school started in Stras-bourg, just after the First World War, under the auspices of two exceptional historians, Lucien Febvre (an authority on the 16th century) and Marc Bloch (a spe-cialist of the Middle Ages). Both men aimed at substituting what the economist Francois Simiand called ‘the idols of the tribe of historians’ (the political, the individual and the chronological

idols), concentrating instead on the synthesising of historical patterns identified from social, economic and cultural history. Peter Burke retraces the history of this révolution intel-lectuelle, which saw the estab-lishment of a problem-oriented analytical history in the place of a narrative of events that had hitherto dominated the discipline, and the introduction of cross-disciplinary research and practices aimed at covering a wide range of human activi-ties. Burke expertly explores the history of the Annales conquest of French academia, from the founders who, surrounding themselves with a group of talented young scholars, attempted to fight the Spirit of Specialisation, to the Age of Braudel, the Cultural Turn in the 1970s and the New Direc-tions taken by the movement today before closing on its worldwide impact. Throughout this extremely engaging book, Burke, who is Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge, follows the histori-ans and their important works, weighing with lucidity their contribution to this ‘historical revolution’ against national and international contexts. In the French context, the develop-ment of the movement was both the result of favourable circum-stances and of a genuine stra-tegic endeavour: indeed, Febvre and Bloch met in Strasbourg at a time when the university, only reclaimed by France after the First World War, favoured intellectual innovation and was open to the exchange of ideas across disciplinary frontiers. This allowed them to explore their common interest in historical geography, a feature that was to be the hallmark of the Annales school and economic history, which was reflected in the inter- disciplinarity of the editorial committee of the Revue des Annales, created by Febvre in 1929. Once the movement was established, academic recog-nition came in the form of a chair for Febvre (1993) at the

The French Historical Revolution

The Annales School, 1929-2014 Peter Burke Polity 198pp £20


REVIEWS

‘FRANCE’, said Charles de Gaulle, ‘cannot be France without gran-deur.’ The country’s recent history suggests the great man was nearer the mark when he moaned how impossible it was to manage a country ‘of 246 di¬erent kinds of cheese’. André Malraux famously observed: ‘When the French fight for mankind, they are wonderful, when they fight for themselves, they are nothing.’ November’s horrific Paris attacks by Islamic terrorists, rightly, generated much sympathy for the country. However, will France’s current President, François Hollande,

be able to follow in the great traditions of France and show the world how to deal with one of the foulest scourges of our time? Against this background, these two books could not be better timed. Jonathan Fenby knows the country well and argues that the French have become ‘prisoners of their past’. It can no longer prosper because the country that bequeathed the world exceptional ideas such as Liberté, Égalité, Frater-nité has been outpaced by the rest of the world. Fenby’s history starts with the restoration of the monarchy after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and ends with the murder of the editor and sta¬ of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Such a huge accumulation of facts can often be indigestible but Fenby, skilfully, avoids this trap with a narrative which has page-length biographies of major figures and important events, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, in a diary form plus a selection of choice sayings of the last 200 years. This includes the words used by the actress Arletty, who lived with a German o¦cer in the Ritz during the occupation, to defend her collaboration: ‘Mon Coeur est à la France, mais mon cul est à moi.’ Wartime collaboration is an issue which the French are only now, 70 years later, beginning to examine, with the evidence indicating that de Gaulle, who led the resistance, was an artful spin-doctor when presenting all Frenchmen as having followed his lead. Many, including Jean-Paul Sartre, did nothing; Francois Mitterrand, France’s first socialist president, served the Vichy regime,

The History of Modern France

Jonathan Fenby Simon & Schuster 536 pages £25

How the French Think Sudhir Hazareesingh

Allen Lane 426 pages £20

prestigious Collège de France, and for Bloch (1936) at the Sor-bonne, where the real strategic enterprise started. Undeniably, given the importance of Paris to French intellectual life, this move to the centre of French academic life by the Annales ‘school’ was in itself a clear sign of the movement’s success. After the Second World War, Braudel, with the publication of his classic book, The Mediter-ranean, combining as it did the study of the longue durée with that of the complex interaction between the environment, the economy, society, politics, culture and events (or ‘geohis-tory’, as he called it), established him as the intellectual and institutional leader of the move-ment. Thus started the Age of Braudel, which saw the Annales establish itself at the very heart of the French academic institution, as Braudel became the president of the Jury of the agrégation in History – a compet-itive examination to qualify for academic posts – allowing him to influence deeply the disci-pline. His presence and authority remained ‘extremely influential’, even beyond his retirement in 1972. Despite Braudel’s achieve-ments and charismatic leader-ship, the development of the Annales movement in his day cannot be explained solely in terms of his ideas, interests and influence. Post-1968, the movement became fragmented and, at the same time, too rich to allow Burke to dedicate much time to each individual historian and their works, though he still identifies a number of strong developments, such as those of quantitative history and histor-ical anthropology. Neverthe-less, this is an excellent survey of a ‘school’ that dominated historical studies in France for half a century, providing a fertile ground for some of the most innovative works, truly shaping history as a discipline, as the last chapter, dedicated to the Annales in a ‘global perspective’, amply demonstrates.

Nathalie Aubert

and some even helped send Jews to their death. Such contradictions should come as no surprise, for even as French thinkers at the close of the 19th century expounded ideas of universal idealism, France was hugely expanding its colonial empire on the grounds of ‘the right of superior races over inferior races’. These contradictions are also the theme of Hazareesingh’s book, but he deals with French ideas from Descartes – the first chapter is called ‘The Skull of Descartes’ – to Derrida. Rousseau also figures prominently and the book is a marvellous primer for students eager to learn about French thought over the last four centuries. It can, at times, be dense. One sentence runs to 24 lines combining discussion of the Académie Française with that of the rock star Johnny Halliday. However, Hazareesingh does raise the question as to whether the 21st century has seen ‘the closing of the French mind’. His most potent illustration of this retreat from universalist concerns is that in 2014 the French book that grabbed world attention was Thomas Piketty’s study of global capitalism, a book on economics, rather than grand ideas. Like Fenby, Hazareesingh has an eye for detail. He reproduces the issue of the monthly satirical magazine, L’Hebdo Hara-Kiri, published just after de Gaulle’s death in his village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in November 1970. The headline on the front cover read: ‘Tragic Ball at Colombey: 1 Dead.’ This was con-sidered so objectionable that the magazine was banned and turned itself into Charlie Hebdo, ‘another impertinent reference to de Gaulle’. In many ways de Gaulle emerges as the last great leader able to mask the country’s contradictions. But while Fenby ends on a note of deep pessimism about where France is headed, Hazareesingh, despite starting his conclusion by talking of France’s ‘loss of self-confidence’, concludes that ‘the French will remain the most intellectual of peoples’ and continue to produce ideas that enthrall the world.

Mihir Bose

Malraux observed, ‘When the French

fight for mankind, they are wonderful, when they fight for

themselves, they are nothing’ ... will President Hollande be able to show the world how to deal

with one of the foulest scourges of

our time?


REVIEWS

PARIS! OUTRAGED PARIS! Broken Paris! Martyred Paris, but

liberated Paris, Liberated by the people of Paris with help from the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, of France which is fighting, of the only France, the real

France, eternal France.Charles de Gaulle’s pronounce-ment at 5pm on August 25th, 1944 in the Hôtel de Ville, Paris is one of most famous in French history. With these words, spoken with force and passion, he wished to underline that Par- isians had liberated themselves. This is why he was so insistent that French forces were the first into Paris, even though as General Bradley commented wryly: ‘Any number of American divisions could more easily have spearheaded our march into Paris. But to help the French recapture pride, I chose a French force with the tricolour on their Shermans.’

De Gaulle’s speech was bril-liant politics and instant myth- making. After the humiliation of four years of Nazi Occupation, he knew that he had to project a sense of national power and unity through an image of self-liberation, albeit one that carefully avoided any sense of revolutionary insurrection.

This mythology quickly took root post-1945, leading to a highly selective interpretation of the Occupation period. In the

early 1950s, primary school text-books made no mention of the pro-Nazi regime led by Marshal Pétain, based in the spa town of Vichy, let alone how this regime participated in the Holocaust. Instead, the story was a simple one. France fell in 1940 and then the Resistance began, leading to the Liberation in 1944; a seam-less, heroic narrative that was military, masculine and French. The contribution of foreigners within the Resistance or colonial troops was ignored, while the role of the Allied forces was downplayed.

However, myth-making and selective memory were not just the preserve of the Gaullists. Post-1945, the Communist Party became the most powerful political movement on the Left, in large part because of its claim to be the anti-Nazi Resistance force par excellence. Yet, while the crucial role of Communists was undeniable, this image conve-niently forgot how the Nazi- Soviet Pact of August 1939 meant that the Communist

leadership was initially ambig-uous about the Occupation, not entering fully into anti-Nazi Resistance until the German in-vasion of the USSR on June 22nd, 1941. Similarly, although the Communist Party maintained that Communist resisters suf-fered the most from repression – hence the slogan the ‘party of 75,000 martyrs’ – this figure was condemned as an outrageous exaggeration by opponents.

One of the many strengths of Robert Gildea’s gripping new history of the French Resistance, Fighters in the Shadows, is the way that he has cut through this myth-making. He has gone

back to the historical sources, drawing upon oral testimony, memoirs and diaries to create a bottom-up view that tells us how the Resistance felt from the inside. So we learn how resisters coped with cold, hunger and fear. We learn, too, about how resistance activity produced a spectrum of emotions, ranging from joy and exhilaration through to confusion and frus-tration.

Gildea is excellent on women. Outlining why their participa-tion was marginalised at the Liberation, he puts them at the centre of the story, explaining how women of all backgrounds became involved in intelligence, propaganda, sabotage and armed action. He is excellent, too, on the role of foreigners, such as Spanish Republicans, Italian anti-Fascists and German anti-Nazis, thereby placing the French Resistance within the wider international ideological conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, in one telling phrase, Gildea ponders whether it is ‘more accurate to talk less about the French Resistance than about resistance in France’. He is also strong on the political in-fighting within the Resis-tance. He clearly outlines how de Gaulle won out over his rivals despite the opposition of Pres-ident Roosevelt, who thought him a dictator in waiting.

This, though, is very much a political and military history. There is little on culture. There is no real engagement with the role of underground poetry and literature or the clandes-tine press, all of which were crucial in creating alternative, Resistance identities. Equally, more needs to be said about the Resistance as a reassertion of imperial power, which led to the clampdown on Moroccan nationalists in early 1944, as well the incredibly violent repression of Algerian nationalism in May and June 1945. However, this is still a major contribution to the historiography of the French Resistance in particular and Resistance studies in general.

Martin Evans

Fighters in the Shadows A New History of the

French Resistance Robert Gildea

Faber & Faber 608pp £20

IN 1902 the Reverend Henry Smith went to Aurangabad in the princely state of Hyderabad on behalf of the Church Missionary Society of Birmingham and the souls of Aurangabad’s Muslims. In five years of street preaching and distributing Urdu pamphlets, Smith failed to win a single convert. Instead, he stimulated a Muslim revival in the city by attracting competition from the Ahmadiyya Jama’at. As Nile Green explains in his enthusiastic and enlightening Ter-rains of Exchange, what happened next is a case study in the ‘reli-gious economy’ whose currency is not salvation but ‘social power’.

The Jama’at, founded in 1889 by the ‘entrepreneurial’ Punjabi messiah Mirza Gullam Ahmad, adopted the print technology, organisational methods and outreach strategies of its Christian competitors. Supported by Hy-derabad’s Muslim rulers and busi-nessmen, the Jama’at pushed the Reverend Smith out of the market. By 1920 the Jama’at’s ‘franchis-es’, riding the waves of a global economy, were propagating its mishan (mission) to auto-workers in Detroit.

Meanwhile, back in Hyderabad, the Christian missionaries targeted a new market: low-caste Hindus. Religions may insist on the sepa-ration of the holy and the profane, but the modern history of religion, Green shows, cannot be separated

Terrains of Exchange Religious Economies of

Global Islam Nile Green

Oxford University Press 288pp £25

Gildea places the French Resistance within the wider

international ideological conflicts

of the 1930s and 1940s


REVIEWS

DAVID LOWENTHAL published a pioneering study of attitudes to the past in 1985, under the title, borrowed from L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, The Past is a Foreign Country. Lowenthal’s study, which dealt in turn with ‘Wanting the Past’, ‘Knowing the Past’ and ‘Changing the Past’, defined its subject in broad terms, viewed it from a dizzying variety of angles and drew on a wide range of sources, among them novels, films, newspapers and car-toons, as well as books and articles by historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers and psychologists. The author, a former professor of geography, was revealed as a polymath, perhaps one of the last of this endangered species, his omnivorous curiosity making a splendid exception to the ‘growing specialisation’ that he continues to lament. The book was a cornucopia, but the information did not simply spill out, it was sub-jected to a tight organisation. Readers were enticed by the author’s crisp, witty writing, the rhetorical power of his lists and of the accumulation of quotations. (One imagi-nes Lowenthal shu±ing his record cards in order to place these quotations in the most e§ective order.)

The Past Is a Foreign Country has become a classic. All the same, Lowenthal has decided to revise it. The new version is much more than a normal second edition, though something less than a com-pletely new book. The new version is half as long again, its 610 pages of text replacing 412 in the first edition, while the original three parts and seven chapters have been increased to four parts and 12 chapters. The footnotes are stu§ed with new

references from an extraordinary variety of sources, from academic journals, such as Ecological Economics, to the Horrible Histories TV tie-in pack. The topic is defined in still broader terms than before and moves with ease from the psychology of memory to school textbooks, science fiction, museums, forgeries,

CLASSIC BOOKre-enactments, ephemera, apologies for actions taken long ago, the e§ects of ageing (on both artefacts and people) and, of course, heritage, on which the author has written extensively elsewhere.

The text has been expanded to include discus-sions of events, objects and institutions that did not yet exist in 1985, from Downton Abbey, cited four times, to the World Wide Web. The academ-ic world has also changed in the last 30 years. Since the first edition appeared, historians have been taking much more interest in memory and in changing attitudes to the past: witness studies such as Raphael Samuel’s Theatres of Memory (oddly enough, absent from Lowenthal’s bibli-ography), François Hartog’s study of ‘regimes of historicity’, Mark Phillips on historical distance

and the massive seven-vol-ume enterprise directed by Pierre Nora, Lieux de mémoire (1984-93). More important, the wider world has changed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of anxiety about the environment, terrorism, immigration and so on. Indeed 1985 may now be viewed as a foreign country, at least by younger generations. One might have expected this revisit to have more to say about the e§ects of the digital revolution, both in bringing us closer to the past and in alienating us from it. One might also have expected a discussion of the di§er-ent ways in which the past becomes foreign, sometimes gradually and sometimes with

unnerving speed, after 1789, for instance, or after 1918. However, even a book of more than 600 pages has to leave something out.

Despite its size and the variety of its themes, The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited remains a reader-friendly book. The volume may be heavy but the author has a light touch. Whatever the theme, it is discussed with a sharp sense of irony and paradox. Lowenthal writes about traditions of revolution and about preservation as a form of destruction. As he wryly notes: ‘Tom Keating’s forged Constables are themselves forged as Keating originals.’ The new final chapter on ‘im-proving the past’ reveals the author in his best form. It gives ample scope for his sardonic humour and for his critique of the foibles, fashions and follies not only in the past but also in our time.

Peter Burke

Lowenthal gives a not only a critique of the foibles,

fashions and follies of the past but also in our time

The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited

David Lowenthal Cambridge University Press 676pp £22.99

ume enterprise directed by Pierre Nora, (1984-93). More important, the wider world has changed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of anxiety about the environment, terrorism, immigration and so on. Indeed 1985 may now be viewed as a foreign country, at least by younger generations. One might have expected this revisit to have more to say about the e§ects of the digital revolution, both in bringing us closer to the past

from the impure workings of industrialisation and empires.

Green traces a three-phase cycle, from the 18th to the 20th centuries. In the first phase, British missionaries exploited the pres-ence of the East India Company to launch ‘evangelical imperialism’ in Bombay and other communicat- ions ‘hubs’. This created a ‘middle- man’ class of upwardly mobile Indian converts. The number of converts was low, but its ‘catalytic e¬ects’ and ‘social repercussions’ were immense. The Christian ‘onslaught’ triggered the creation of ‘local markets’. In this second phase, ‘self-strengthening’ groups like the Jama’at internalised the Christian critique of Islam, adapted the Christian missionaries’ marketing techniques and promoted its brand as the ‘true Islam’. In the third, post-imperial phase, ‘im-presarios of Islam’ exported these ‘adaptive hybridizations’ west-wards as authentic traditions. Yet the ‘reform’ programme, whether sectarian or liberal, was an inher-ently modern ‘market product’.

Economics is the ‘dismal science’, Carlyle said, because it excludes the unpredictable inner life and emphasises a fiction of rational choice. The religion-as- market model possesses explicat- ory power: all history is written in the shadow of the present and our present of firms and markets can certainly comprehend a past in those terms.

Sometimes, though, Green’s model works too well and we lose a sense of the living reality he seeks to describe: when ‘farmers of faith’ cultivate good harvests from their ‘rich terroirs’, the manure is laid on a little too thickly. Yet Green does not claim to describe the changes in the inner lives of believers, only the creation and functioning of religious institutions and their integration into the world system. Green’s speciality is Islam in South Asia, but similarly complex processes can be seen among Hindus, Zoroastrians and Muslim Middle Easterners. Integrating religion with social and political history, Terrains of Exchange digs deeply into the meetings of East and West.

Dominic Green


REVIEWS

THE SECOND WORLD WAR still looms large in Britain’s national consciousness and rightly so. The defining catastrophe of a 20th century that was not short of horrors, it was truly global in scale and cost over 60 million lives.

The British view of the conflict can still be remarkably parochial, however, often barely raising its

gaze beyond Dunkirk, the Blitz and D-Day. In part, it is this myopia that the new Oxford Illustrated History of World War II is seeking to combat; as the editor’s introduction puts it, ‘to introduce a range of themes that are less commonly found in general histories’.

The book succeeds rather well in achieving this aim. Fourteen chapters from a line-up of expert academic contributors give it the global scope that it requires and each contributor is permitted the space to provide a narrative framework, develop themes and challenge erroneous assumptions. Importantly, too, given the book’s populist ambitions, the majority of essays are well-written and accessible.

The breadth of the book is impressive. One chapter, for instance, sheds a welcome light on the military pretensions and shortcomings of Mussolini’s Italy; another engages in some timely myth-busting in addressing the war at sea. Richard Bessel, meanwhile, looks at the vast and largely un-explored category of non-combat deaths; the countless millions of civilian lives lost, which are some-times in danger of falling into the background noise to the convent- ional narrative of the war.

Many contributors display im-pressive mastery of their subjects. David Welch, for example, demon-strates his customary expertise in analysing the huge field of wartime art and propaganda, bringing together British, Soviet, German and American cultural output into a concise, coherent whole. David Edgerton, meanwhile, shows similar breadth in analysing the role of technological innovation in the war; the influence of which – he suggests – has been exaggerated. Brilliant as ever, Richard Overy anchors the book, somewhat greedily, with three excellent essays as well as an introductory chapter. There are very few du¬ notes.

On the whole, then, the Oxford Illustrated History is a thoughtful and thought-provoking volume, which succeeds very well in bringing at least a taste of the wealth of current Second World War scholarship to a wider audience. There is much here to admire; not least the

The Oxford Illustrated History of World War II

Richard Overy (ed.) Oxford University Press 492pp £30

WHY ARE RUINS so attractive? Vandals destroy beautiful build-ings, yet aesthetes haunt the remains with sighs of pleasure. In the 18th century some roman-tics put up purpose-built ruins in the grounds of their country houses, even artfully construct-ing imitation stone grottoes which housed ornamental hermits clad in robes and long white beards, real, living relics of what had never been. Crawford cites Sir Christo-pher Wren, who redesigned and rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral in London after the Great Fire: ‘Architecture aims at Eternity’.

Perhaps, in part, it is this hubris that we like to see tumbled down – in decay buildings are like us – merely mortal. In this subtle, ambitious, well-researched study, the author considers the concept of ‘building’ in the widest possible terms: moving chronologically from the Tower of Babel (which never actually existed ) to the internet ‘city’ on the World Wide

Fallen Glory The Lives and Deaths of Twenty Lost Buildings

From The Tower Of Babel To The Twin Towers

James Crawford Old Street Publishing 576pp £25

Web called ‘Geocities’ which was created in cyberspace only in 1994 and closed in 2009; he also allows in as ‘buildings’ the Berlin Wall and the tent city of Ghengis Khan at Karakorum. This is in no sense an anthology of archi-tecture but rather a series of essays in cultural history, using structures to explore social and historical milieux from a humanist perspective. It is the people who built, lived in, de-stroyed, rediscovered, excavated and rebuilt the buildings he has chosen which stimulate – and sometimes infuriate – Crawford. This is certainly an ambitious, wide-ranging enterprise and has involved a great deal of research. Some of the buildings have vanished entirely – the Bastille in Paris, Kowloon Old Town (demolished and now a park); some are famous and have been studied for years – the Roman Forum, the Temple in Jerusalem, Mycenae in Greece; some are very obscure – the ruins of the city of Madinat al-Zahra outside present-day Córdoba or the St Petersburg Panopticon prison. Some I had never even heard of, such as the Pruitt-Igloe public housing development (1951-76) – a folly of over-ambitious civic modernism – in St Louis, Missouri. Crawford manages the di�cult feat of engaging each of his chosen buildings with an equal degree of passion and en-gagement: he does not seem to have any favourites or dislikes, though some of the personalities come in for severe criticism. Sir Arthur Evans who excavated and rebuilt Knossos in Crete comes in for censure. This is a very personal study, bearing the taste, judgement and sensibility of the author on every page. I found the essays on buildings that I knew nothing about more stimulating than those about which much more is known. Industrial ruins are under-represented, as are the religious. A gold-mining town in the US or Australia and the abandoned monastery at Skara Brae in the Hebrides, for example, would have given

Crawford much on which to ponder. Distance is no object with Crawford, though, as he takes in Vilcabamba, the Inca city in Peru, and Golconda, the diamond emporium in India. Sometimes Crawford gets carried away. More on Knossos itself and less on Evans for being what he could not help being – a Victorian Englishman – would have made for a more balanced read. At times the author rambles and the book does often feel over-long and under-edited. A less indulgent publisher might have reined him in to advantage: sometimes less is more.

Robert Carver

In this ambitious, well-researched

study ... the concept of ‘building’ ranges

from the Tower of Babel to the

World Wide Web’s ‘Geocities’

Vandals destroy beautiful buildings, yet aesthetes haunt

the remains with sighs of pleasure


CONTRIBUTORSNatalie Aubert is Professor of French Literature at Oxford Brookes University.

Mihir Bose is an award-winning broadcaster, author, and journalist.

Peter Burke is Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University of Cambridge.

Robert Carver is the author of Paradise with Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay (Harper Collins, 2009).

Clive Emsley is author of The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (Quercus, 2009).

Martin Evans is the co-author (with Emmanuel Godin) of France since 1815 (Routledge, 2014).

Dominic Green is the author of The Double Life of Dr. Lopez (Century, 2003) and Armies of God (Random House, 2008).

John Easton Law is Reader in History and Classics at the University of Swansea and former editor of Renaissance Studies.

Keith Laybourn is the Diamond Jubilee Professor of History at the University of Huddersfield.

Marc Morris’ latest book is King John: Treachery, Tyranny, and the Road to Magna Carta (Hutchinson, 2015).

Roger Moorhouse’s book The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941 (Bodley’s Head, 2014) has just been published in paperback by Vintage.

Sue Niebrzydowski is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Bangor University.

Rachel Pope is Senior Lecturer in European Prehistory at the University of Liverpool.

Roland Quinault is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and the author of British Prime Ministers and Democracy: From Disraeli to Blair (Continuum, 2011).

REVIEWS

erudition of the contributors and the eclectic and original selection of photographs.

Nonetheless, there are a few blind spots. Most egregiously, Poland is strangely peripheral to proceedings, not qualifying for a chapter of its own and mentioned only in passing elsewhere. Shamefully excluded from Britain’s VE-Day celebrations in 1945, it is perplexing to see that the country for which London and Paris went to war, the country divided by Hitler and Stalin, the country whose troops fought in every European theatre in the Allied cause and whose people su¬ered one of the highest per capita death rates is still being relegated to a ‘minor’ role.

The Soviet Union is also rather short-changed. Of course, Stalin’s USSR is covered by a number of the book’s contributors, analysing such topics as Soviet propaganda, or the Red Army, or the economy, within a comparative, multi-per-spective framework. Yet it is still surprising that the Soviet Union was not given a dedicated chapter, particularly when one considers its central importance to the wider European war – a war in which four out of every five German soldiers died fighting the Soviets – as well as other controversial aspects, such as Stalin’s aborted collaboration with Hitler or his country’s brutal treatment of its own fractious minorities and liber-ated POWs.

Readers of this publication will also be frustrated, one suspects, by the lack of notes. If one has the ambition of introducing serious scholarship to a wider reading au-dience, it seems rather nonsensical to omit any system of referencing by which readers can follow up quotes, statistics or points of interest. Having gone to the trouble of assembling a cast of luminaries, OUP should at least let them show their sources.

There are a few shortcomings to this new illustrated history, therefore, but it is still an excellent, concise and enlightening volume. As such, it is a worthy addition to the library of every student and every scholar of the conflict.

Roger Moorhouse

TOWARDS the end of the 1950 film, The Blue Lamp, PC Andy Mitchell, grieving for the death of his mentor PC George Dixon, stops a wealthy woman who has almost knocked down a man on a pedestrian crossing. With her cut-glass accent she brushes aside his gentle criticism and challenges him: ‘Haven’t you anything better to do? One of your own men shot down in cold blood and all you do is pester the life out of innocent and respectable people. I’m not surprised all these murderers get away with it.’ This was a cliché, no doubt, but one that is often found in di�erent sections of the media, as well as in the recollections of police o�cers. It also lurks in the background of Keith Laybourn’s new book.

Laybourn sets out to trace the history of the policing of motor tra�c in Britain from the first appearance of the motor vehicle at the end of the 19th century, when it was essentially a rich-man’s toy, to the final third of the 20th century, by which time it had become the favoured means of transport. The motor vehicle led to the virtual disappearance of ped- estrians in many areas of the highway and to a significant shift in the relations between police and public in Britain.

Policemen rarely had much to do with the respectable classes in the Victorian and Edwardian years and certainly not much concern with confronting and disciplining respectable people. This was changed with the advent of the private car. It was all very well for the police to pursue bumptious young men like Mr Toad but, early on, motoring organisations were formed to highlight the sorry situation wherein the motorist became a victim and to send out scouts whose duty was to warn association members of police speed traps.

Laybourn describes the police developing a policy of three Es: Enforcement, Engineering and Education. The three Es are, presumably, Laybourn’s own framework since he does not quote any contemporary reference to them and, while prosaic, a short statement that this is his way of giving form to police policy over 70 or so years might have clarified the situa-tion (especially given the way that students can misconstrue things in print). Unfortunately, there are several places where a good E (for editor) might have improved his text. Moreover, he provides a singularly benign version of Vic Gatrell’s concept of ‘the Policeman State’; and calling the Commissioner of the City of London Police ‘the Chief Constable’ could raise a smile more sorrowful than benign.

Such criticism is, perhaps, churlish, since Laybourn has drawn our attention to an important issue, has chronicled it over a lengthy period and provided an argument with which others can engage or will, at least, be required to consider when approaching the thorny issue of policing the roads. No doubt, however, for generations to come people will continue to demand tough policing and ferocious sentences for those who drive carelessly and dangerously, but will not consider their own speeding, cutting tra�c lights or other foibles as either careless or dangerous.

Clive Emsley

The Battle for the Roads of Britain

Police, Motorists and the Law, c.1890 to 1970

Keith Laybourn with David Taylor

Palgrave Macmillan 256pp £60


Letters Email [email protected] Post to History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH

Culture of Secrecy I was interested to read Andrew Lownie’s complaints about the barriers to the release to researchers of documents by the Foreign and Commonwealth O�ce and other UK government departments (History Matters, December). I have found similar impediments here in the US. I wrote to the Social Security department of the US Government asking for a copy of the Applica-tion for Social Security Account Number by an immigrant from 1948. When I received a copy, the names of both parents were deleted. This was distressing because my subject’s name was not the same as the one he was known by here in America. When I appealed to the Social Security Department to release his parents’ names, I was told that I would have to provide proof of death for the parents. It is my belief that they died in the Holocaust but, since my subject was born in 1917, the parents, obviously, would be dead by now. Using this argument, I appealed again for the release of the names. I was told that: We have deleted the names of the parents, however, as they may still be living ... If you can provide proof of death for both parents, and if there is enough information for us to determine that the proof of death refers to the same individuals shown on this document, we can disclose this information. My request was refused for the second time and I was told that I would have to wait until my subject has been dead for 100 years. Shelby MorrisonOrlando, Florida, USA

Clapham Boys Catherine Fletcher’s illuminat-ing article, ‘A Society Built on Slavery’ (September 2015), states

that most of the African children at Zachary Macaulay’s school in Clapham died there and are buried in its churchyard. This is the generally accepted view and for this reason it is usually claimed that the school was a failure. The facts, however, do not bear this out.

The African Academy oper-ated between 1799 and 1806. The view that it was abandoned because of high mortality result-ing from the British climate first appears in the 1870s, in writings by Henry Venn (born 1799) and by the second Lord Teignmouth (born 1796). Drawing on Teign-mouth, in her 1900 biography of Zachary Macaulay, Lady Knutsford wrote that ‘by the end of 1805 only six of the poor children remained alive’. But while Teignmouth did write that the climate was ‘fatal to many’, he did not write that the six remaining in 1806 were all who remained alive.

Macaulay had brought 20 boys from Sierra Leone to be educated in Clapham and four girls housed in neighbouring Battersea. The Clapham burial registers, which the Rector John Venn kept in meticulous detail, record burials of four of the African boys, three in 1802 and one in 1804. A young Sierra Leone woman aged 20 died in 1805. It has been suggested that the winter of 1805-6 was unusually severe. But in Clapham, burials between November 1805 and March 1806 were actually fewer than in the corresponding periods a year before and a year after – and included no Africans.

Eighteen of the boys from Sierra Leone were baptised, ten of them in 1805. Bruce Mouser, in his comprehensive study of the Academy (‘African Academy: Clapham 1799-1806’, published in History of Educa-tion, January 2004) states that a group returned to Sierra Leone

in November and December 1805. He identified four of those baptised by Venn as later playing prominent roles in or near Sierra Leone. Four others not named in the baptism register returned to work within the settlement. He concluded that nearly half the boys returned. On his findings, taken with the evidence of the few burials in Clapham, I would suggest that a majority of the boys returned. ‘By any measure’, Mouser wrote, ‘the African Academy was not a failure.’

The Academy is an interest-ing case study in the relation-ship between British Christian philanthropists and the Africans they sought to benefit. There are issues of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ to be assessed, whether by the standards of those who set up the Academy or by the hopefully less Eurocentric standards of today. Dismissing the Academy on grounds of high mortality, which the records do not support, is an unwelcome diversion.Peter Je�erson SmithClapham, London Indus Answers Andrew Robinson’s feature (‘Lost and Found’, December) brought the Indus civilisation to the attention of the UK public, as it deserves to be. Robinson has raised many unanswered questions about the nature of the Indus civilisation and its intriguing contrasts with the likes of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Such questions, the history of discoveries since the 1920s and their re-interpretations, make this civilisation fascinating. Yet while politicised claims of the origins of Indian culture, race and religion have falsified or distorted evidence in India, the article underplays painstaking fieldwork, surveys, excavations and significant new discoveries since 1947 in Pakistan and India, by archaeologists such as A.H.

Dani, Rafique Mughal, Kuldeep Bhan, J.P. Joshi, R.S. Bisht and many others. Two examples are: Dholavira, in the Rann of Kutch, discovered in 1967, which had a sophisticated system of water reservoirs for its inhospitable environment, and Gola Dhora, unearthed in 2009 in Gujarat, an abandoned industrial site with a stash of shell bangles ready for transport. Since the 1990s, excavations at Harappa, in Pakistan, have discovered a sequence of development that confirms the civilisation was unique to South Asia, with its integrated, long-distance trade network. Shereen Ratnagar has put forward fascinating theories about government and economy in the Bronze Age, based on the scarcity of copper and other metals. She suggests only an elite could have organised the pro-curement of bronze, but that the state at this period, before full market economies developed, had inherent weaknesses, which may have led to internal collapse. This is discussed in two books, one a series of lectures on the decline of the civilisation that critiques theories of environ-mental disaster.

Dilip Chakrabarti’s comment on the state of Indus archaeology, quoted in the article, is unfair. It survives and thrives. Harappa.com is a website where readers of History Today can find papers and slideshows by scholars cited in Robinson’s article, as well as in this letter. Meanwhile, back in the UK it is high time that the British Museum put on a major exhibition devoted to the Indus civilisation (it never has); that television produced a whole series on it; and that University College London, which holds a fine collection of Indus artefacts in its store rooms, made them accessible to the public.Ilona AronovskyLondon

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Learning Lessons in the Middle EastThe end of Empire in the Middle East signalled neither permanent withdrawal nor the end of Britain’s involvement in the region, where, writes Peter Mangold, fear and emotion often run higher than in other parts of the world. Spanning the Battle of the Nile in 1798 to the Iraq War, Mangold catalogues a history of British foreign policy remarkable for its number of failures and considers what lessons historians can o�er those charged with forming policy today.

A Cure Without a Disease Published in 1957, the Wolfenden Report was the culmination of a three-year Home O�ce investigation into the ‘twin problem’ of homo-sexuality and prostitution. The report concluded that homosexuals ‘cannot reasonably be regarded as quite separate from the rest of mankind’ and damned those doctors who claimed to be able to ‘cure’ homosexuality. Despite this, throughout the 1960s gay men still sought to change their sexual orientation. John-Pierre Joyce o�ers a history of dubious treatments.

Triumph or Terror?Was the French Revolution one of the greatest epochs in the history of the modern West, or an example of ugly and unnecessary carnage? The answer, says David Andress, depends on which facts you choose to believe and the historical moment at which you consider them. Every generation has imposed its own concerns onto the basic fabric of the revolution argues Andress, as he attempts to trace its constantly developing historiography, as reflected in the History Today archive.

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the Archive, Pastimes and much more.

The February issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on January 21st. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

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PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSEDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Alamy; 5 © Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; 6 © John Frost Newspapers/Alamy; 7 © Alamy. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Alamy; 9 top © akg-images; bottom © AP/Press Association Images. THE RACKET AND THE FEAR: 11 background photograph © Getty Images; inset © Topfoto; 12 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom from LSE Library’s collections, ImageLibrary/1369; 13 and 14 © Getty Images; 15 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 16 photograph by Albert Norman, courtesy Trustees of the Army Medical Services Museum/Wellcome Images; 17 top © Science Photo Library; bottom © Getty Images; 18 © LF/Lebrecht Music & Arts, courtesy of The Gurney Estate. ISIS AND THE ABUSE OF HISTORY: 19 © Getty Images. A HIMALAYAN CHESS GAME: 21 top © Topfoto; bottom © Getty Images; 22 top Collection of Brig. Rai Singh, courtesy of Squadron Leader Rana T.S. Chhina (Retd); bottom Collection of late Martha Steedman/Patrick Hamilton; 23 top map © Tim Aspden; bottom © Popperfoto/Getty Images; 24 top © Getty Images; bottom Collection of late Martha Steedman/Patrick Hamilton; 25 Collection of Sem T.O. Tashi; 26 Courtesy of Hindustan Times. OUT OF THE MARGINS: 27 Cott Tib B V Part I f.7 © Bridgeman Images; INFOCUS: 28-29 © Harry Dempster/Express/Getty Images. ROMANCE AND THE ROMANY: 30-31 © Estate of Sir Alfred Munnings. All rights reserved, DACS 2015. Photograph © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images; 31 top Mary Evans Picture Library; 32 © Bridgeman Images; 33 Sylvester Boswell courtesy Jeremy Harte; Sam Smith © Special Collections and Archives/University of Liverpool Library; Augustus John and Arthur Symons © Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Jack Cooper © Museum of London; 34 © Bert Hardy/Getty Images; 35 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom © Steve Lewis/Getty Images; 36 © Jeremy Harte. GARLIC AND MAGNETS: 37 and 38 © akg-images. THE GREAT MANIPULATOR: 41 © Bettmann/Corbis; 42 left © Bridgeman Images; right © Bettmann/Corbis; 43 top © Bettmann/Corbis; bottom © Mary Evans Picture Library; 44 Courtesy Library of Congress; 45 top © Alamy; bottom © Bettmann/Corbis. BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION: 46 © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/Bridgeman Images. SHAMEFUL SECRETS: © Bridgeman Images. A BATTLE OF GIANTS: 49 © Bridgeman Images; 50 top © Bridgeman Images; Medal © Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; 51 © Bridgeman Images/Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; 52 © Musée de l’Armée/RMN Grand Palais/Pascal Segrette; 53 top left © Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images; top right © Château de Beauregard/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Lebrecht Music and Arts; 54 © Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images. REVIEWS: 56 © The Granger Collection/Topfoto; 59 © The National Museum of Denmark. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 © Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 The Love of Helen and Paris by Jaques-Louis David; Kurt Vonnegut, 1972; Danté’s Inferno by Gustave Doré. Images Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 © Alamy. We have made every e�ort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

October’s Prize Crossword

The winner for November is Richard Selby, London.

Furniture


PastimesAmusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz1 What did Adolf Hitler call ‘the first völkisch state’?

2 Whose face launched a thousand ships?

3 Used from the 13th to the 17th centuries, King’s Evil was a term for a form of which disease?

4 What, from the fall of the Roman Empire until 1820, was only a geographical abstraction?

5 Which legendary figure travelled to Athens dressed as a man and was elected as Pope John VIII in c.855?

6 Who were the Cornovii?

7 Which 20th century writer opined that ‘History is merely a list of surprises’?

8 What did Parliament call the most ‘horrible and detestable vice’ in 1562?

9 Where was devastated by a fire on Black Thursday, February 6th 1857?

10 Which American city was founded by Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac as a fur trading post in 1701?

11 Elm Farm Ollie was the first cow to do what, in 1930?

12 Which late 18th-century fashion fad shares its name with a shape of Italian pasta?

13 What existed in England until 1580, Scotland until 1743 and Ireland until 1770?

14 Where does the term ‘yahoo’ originate?

15 According to the Ingimund Saga, what did Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians use to repel Vikings?

16 Considered by some to be the richest man who ever lived, Mansa Mousa reined over which empire?

17 The name of which Roman

ANSWERS1. Sparta2. Helen of Troy3. Tuberculosis 4. Italy5. Pope Joan6. An Iron Age Celtic people7. Kurt Vonnegut8. Buggery9. Victoria, Australia 10. Detroit 11. Fly in an airplane 12. Macaroni 13. Wolves14. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels15. Bees16. Mali, c.1312–3717. Cicero 18. New Holland19. Celia Fiennes 20. King Minos of Crete21. Arabella Stuart for James I22. The Pig War23. Culture, thoughts, customs, habits24. Heroisch (heroic) 25. May, the month in which cows would be milked three times a day

statesman derives from the word for chickpea?

18 What name did Abel Tasman give to Australia in 1644?

19 Which English travel writer is thought to have first drawn attention to the Lake District’s beauty in 1698?

20 The Minoan civilisation was so named by archaeologist Arthur Evans after which mythical figure?

21 The ‘Main Plot’ of 1603 was

Lord Cobham and Walter Ralegh’s plan to substitute who for who?

22 Which Anglo-American conflict began with the shooting of an animal in 1859?

23 What were the ‘four olds’ that Mao Zedong encouraged the youth of China to destroy during the Cultural Revolution?

24 After which German adjective is heroin named?

25 Used in the Anglo-Saxon period, to what does ‘þrimilce’ refer?


Prize Crossword Set by Richard Smyth

Six degrees of Separation

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Anglo-American actress, who played Elizabeth Bennett in the first movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by …

English physician and surgeon, who was the first person to give a clinical

description of poliomyelitis, a vaccine for which was developed by …

Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales

(1796-1817) whose birth was supervised by …

Michael Underwood (1736-1820)

American medical researcher and virologist, married Françoise Gilot, the former lover of …

By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Jonas Salk (1914-95)

JONAS SALK

Spanish painter and sculptor who owned a Dalmatian, as did …

Greer Garson (1904-96)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books

Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by January 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

ACROSS1 Sport in which Akashi Shiganosuke was declared champion in 1632 (4)3 1920 novel by Sinclair Lewis (4,6)10 Oxford village, home of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (7)11 Sir Edward ___ (d.1673), English naval o©cer (7)12 James Pettit ___ (d.1797), historian, author of A History of Great Britain from Caesar’s Invasion to the Accession of Edward VI (1794-5) (7)13 West Yorkshire town, site of the 1460 Battle of Wakefield (6)15 ___ Aren’t Gentlemen, 1974 novel by P.G. Wodehouse (5)16 Dutch port chartered in 1328 (9)18 William ___ (b.1965), historian, author of The Last Mughal (2006) (9)21 ‘We have used the ___ as if it was a constable’s handbook’ – Charles Kingsley (5)23 Indian kingdom seized by the East India Company in 1849 (6)25 Sir George ___ (1790-1866), Greenwich-born engineer (7)27 Donald ___ (1908–81), editor of the Economist 1956-65 (7)28 City declared the capital of French Cameroun in 1922 (7)29 ‘And even I can remember/ A day when the ___ left blanks in their writings’ – Ezra Pound, 1930 (10)30 Mitsuye ___, subject of a 1944 US Supreme Court ruling regarding the treatment of Japanese-Americans (4)

DOWN1 Huseyn Shaheed ___ (1892-1963), prime minister of Pakistan (10)2 Midlands village, site of memorial to cyclists killed in the Great War (7)4 Village in Gloucestershire (and a 1917 poem by Edward Thomas) (9)5 ‘They haven’t got no ___,/ The fallen sons of Eve’ – G.K. Chesterton, 1914 (5)6 Playwright of the Roman Republic (c.195-159) (7)7 ‘O ___! Full of sin, but most of sloth’ – George Herbert, 1633 (7)8 ‘The Pobble Who Has No ___’, 1871 work by Edward Lear (4)9 Mythical son of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises (6)14 Italian writer, author of The Name of the Rose (1980) (7,3)17 George Macaulay ___ (1876-1972), English historian (9)19 Henry ___ (1724-92), American statesman imprisoned in 1780 (7)20 1961 film by Akira Kurosawa (7)21 Antony ___ (b.1946), author of Stalingrad (1998) (6)22 Jack ___ (b.1937), Marine Corps aide to Richard Nixon (7)24 Sir Hermann ___ (1919-2005), mathematician and cosmologist (5)26 Codename for the westernmost landing beach in the 1944 D-Day invasion (4)

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

English novelist, whose works were championed by …


FromtheArchiveEnlightenment ideas have always faced resistance, but they continue to be relevant and are vital to our understanding of the modern world, argue Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot.

DEFINING the Enlightenment, in time, space and substance, has proven challenging. Yet agreement does exist about certain ideas that originated or matured during this period, about political and economic freedom, social equality and the value of science, as was outlined by Avi Lifschitz in the September 2013 issue of History Today. Such ideas have shaped history in many ways, as potent forces, making the Enlightenment not merely ‘a work in progress’ but a source for the modern world.

Adam Smith laid out the founda-tions for modern economics and in so

doing stressed the need to expand a freedom mostly lacking in his time. He demonstrated how individuals able to choose freely could create greater prosperity than under the rule of selfish, elite interests. Smith argued that industry, not agriculture, brought real wealth and that governments should provide education for their people, restrain the greed of the rich and build infrastructure to advance economic activity. Prosperity would wither if individuals were shackled to an autocratic system, ruled by a single church or encrusted traditions.

That Smith sided with those who built the first modern democracy is no surprise. In turn, America’s founders had to invent a lot that was new and they used Enlightenment philosophy as a guide. Two exceptional thinkers, Thomas Je�erson and Alexander Ham-ilton, were responsible for visions of America that helped establish princi-ples of democratic government, which have remained in conflict ever since. Je�erson favoured distrust of power,

the globe or the extermination of in-digenous societies by Europeans. The misuse of Darwin’s ideas to promote eugenics, appropriated by the Nazis to horrific e�ect, was another egregious example. We must recognise, there-fore, the historical complexity and dark quarters of the Enlightenment’s legacy, even as we acknowledge its incalculable importance.

Fortunately, the more positive side of this legacy has proven strong enough to survive and expand in a global sense. Yet it is also true that this side remains under attack at present from an array of forces, including radical jihadist movements, and the fearful rejection of migrants and an open society in many western nations.

The Enlightenment must be viewed as far more than an academic subject. There are powerful reasons to teach and study its development and ideas, for they are necessary to any un-derstanding of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. What matters most to the history of the Enlightenment today is not its definition but its survival.

a weak central government, small military and ‘entangling alliances with none’. Hamilton embraced state power as a means to protect liberty and foster a modern, industrial nation, because ‘liberty without prosperity is merely a word’.

In the immediate aftermath of the Enlightenment, Charles Darwin’s sci-entific ideas began to alter, indeed to form, modern concepts of life and its history, concepts that then expanded into nearly every conceivable domain of intellectual activity. Through his theory of evolution, which gave a deep, secular history to all life, Darwin redefined the organic universe and the place of human beings in it, while radically weakening the explanatory authority of religion, in doing so setting up a conflict that is now more ferocious than ever.

Enlightenment ideas faced resist-ance from the beginning. For a time, this was primarily religious and it remains the case among conservative Christians and Muslims, particularly over Darwinian evolution. Rejection of democracy originally came from hereditary aristocracies and monar-chies, but later reaction took the form of extreme, populist nationalism that denied individual rights, free thought and markets in favour of charismatic autocracy (fascism). We must acknowledge that this type of reaction, too, has continued to the present, as is apparent in Putin’s Russia, modern China and a number of authoritarian regimes in Central Asia, Africa and elsewhere. Attacks upon liberalism as a system that produces only feeble, alienated societies are not hard to find in today’s world.

But the Enlightenment was itself the source of fervid reaction. Partly this came from western hypocrisy, such as slavery in America, colonialism and its denial of rights to large parts of

ENLIGHTENMENT

Why We Should Defend the Enlightenment

VOLUME 63 ISSUE 9 SEPT 2013Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta

Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, are the authors of The Shape of the New (Princeton UP, 2015).

What matters most to the history of the Enlightenment is its survival

From top: Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot.

ht j 2016

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