bbc history 2013-10

PLUS

THE BLITZ: A NEEDLESS CATASTROPHE?

BRITAIN’S BESTSELLING HISTORY MAGAZINE£4.25 s October 2013 s www.historyextra.com

Victorian murdersLucy Worsley on

a deadly obsession

Who was the best-dressed person in British history?

Burying the princes in the Tower

JAMES VI & I: THE KING WHO

HUNTED WITCHES

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HISTORY

BOOKS

How Richard III and Henry Tudor tried to erase them from history

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OCTOBER 2013

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Kate Strasdin

I’ve recently submitted my

PhD which focuses on the

surviving garments of

Queen Alexandra, a

woman who, I believe,

used fashion to disguise

a physical disability.

P Kate Strasdin reveals

Queen AlexandraÕs attitude

to fashion on page 53

Leanda de Lisle

Understanding why the

princes in the Tower were

‘disappeared’ in 1483,

and stayed disappeared,

was a ‘eureka’ moment.

Researching the Tudor

family, I discovered the

answer was hidden in

plain sight.

P You can read LeandaÕs

theories on the disappear-

ance of the princes in the

Tower on page 20

Tom Holland

Herodotus is the most

entertaining of histori-

ans. He has been my

constant companion

since I was 12, and never

once have I grown tired

of him. To spend as much

time with his great work

as I have done over these

past years has been a

rare privilege: a veritable

labour of love.

P Tom discusses

Herodotus on page 59

It’s one of the great historical mysteries: what became of

the princes in the Tower? Even after more than

500 years, the fate of Edward V and his younger brother

is endlessly argued and speculated over. If you’re looking for a

conclusive answer here, then (spoiler alert) I’m afraid you may be

disappointed. Instead, historian Leanda de Lisle considers a

second mystery of why successive kings were so keen to bury the

princes’ memory after their death. Henry VII and Richard III

certainly didn’t agree on much, but in this regard they were very

much united. Turn to page 20 to find out more.

As part of our recent redesign process we are introducing a new

type of article, The Essay, which debuts this issue. Each month a

leading historian will offer a thought-provoking take on a subject

that he or she has been researching, presented in a simple yet

elegant format. We’re kicking off with Richard Overy, who is

seeking to challenge the traditional narrative of British resistance

to the Blitz. Head to page 28 for that.

Finally, this month we’ve begun our quest to find

the best-dressed person in British history (see

page 51). Our panel of historians and fashion

experts have selected a fascinating range of

sartorial superstars from centuries past to compete

for the title. Now it’s down to you to vote for the

winner. Have a read of the article and then head to

historyextra.com/bestdressed to register your

opinion. History has never looked better.

Rob Attar

Editor


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4

OCTOBER 2013

Features

Georgiana Cavendish is among the nominations for the best-dressed Briton in history on page 51

Every month

20 Burying the princes in the TowerLeanda de Lisle reveals why Richard III

and Henry VII were so reluctant to shed

light on the mysterious deaths of

Edward V and Richard, Duke of York

28 The Blitz: a needless catastrophe?Londoners’ stoicism in the dark days

of 1940 and 41 resulted in thousands of

avoidable deaths, argues Richard Overy

34 Changing Times

Sheldon Hall marks the Radio Times ’

90th birthday by looking at �ve of the

magazine’s most memorable covers

37 The king who hunted witchesHundreds of people lost their lives as a

result of King James VI and I’s obsession

with devilry, says Tracy Borman

45 Murder on the mindLucy Worsley selects a series of macabre

objects that testify to our historic

fascination with violent crime

51 Who was the best-dressed Briton in history?A panel of fashion experts select 10

Britons who, they believe, have shown

more sartorial elegance than any other.

Plus, you can cast your vote in our poll

7 HISTORY NOW 7 The latest history news

10 Backgrounder: Yemen

12 Lessons from history

13 Past notes

14 ANNIVERSARIES

18 LETTERS

27 MICHAEL WOOD’S VIEW

59 BOOKS Experts review the best new releases

and Tom Holland talks to Matt Elton

about his book on Herodotus

73 TV & RADIO 73 The pick of this month’s history

programmes

76 History on �lm: CEM Joad

78 OUT & ABOUT 78 History explorer: Richard Bradley

on Neolithic tombs

82 Ten things to do in October

84 Ye olde travel guide:

Heidelberg 1618

91 MISCELLANY 91 Q&A and quiz

94 Prize crossword

98 MY HISTORY HERO

Lee Child picks Franklin D Roosevelt

USPS Identification Statement BBC HISTORY (ISSN 1469-8552) (USPS 024-177) October 2013 is published 13 times a year under license from BBC Worldwide by Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, 9th Floor, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK. Distributed in the US by Circulation Specialists, Inc., 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 945, Shelton CT 06484-6238. Periodicals postage paid at Seneca, SC and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to BBC HISTORY, PO Box 37495, Boone, IA 50037.

CONTENTS


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Save 27% when you subscribe*

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45

Lucy Worsley probes

our obsession

with murder

34

What can Radio Times

covers tell us about

British popular culture

down the decades?


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5BBC History Magazine

78

Richard Bradley visits a Neolithic

long barrow once thought to be

home to a Saxon god

28

Why the much-vaunted

Blitz spirit cost lives

20 “RICHARD III NEEDED THE PRINCES’ MOTHER, ELIZABETH WOODVILLE, TO KNOW THE BOYS WERE DEAD”

FREE16�PAGE

PULL�OUT MAGAZ I NE

Twelve authors

select their favourite

history books


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Performed by The Bands of the Royal Air ForceConductor: Wing Commander Duncan Stubbs

Vocalists: Flight Lieutenant Matthew Little and introducing Corporal Matt Walker

Ticket prices: £16.50 £19.50 £22.50 London prices: £20.50 £25.50 £30.50

MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: Night and Day, Soul Bossa Nova, Apple Honey, Blue Danube, Taras Bulba, The Dambusters March

Compered by either: Alan Dedicoat, Ken Bruce or Lynn Bowles

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Saturday 2 MANCHESTER Bridgewater Hall 0844 907 9000

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Wednesday 27 BRISTOL Colston Hall 0844 887 1500

Friday 29 HARROGATE Royal Hall 01423 502 116

December

Sunday 1 EASTBOURNE Congress Theatre 01323 412 000

Wednesday 4 GATESHEAD The Sage Gateshead 0191 443 4661

NEW

NEW


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BBC History Magazine 7

The mystery of the ‘transvestite’ warrior priestess

Archaeologists in Russia

are investigating the remains

of a high-status individual

that may offer new insights

into Iron Age gender roles.

David Keys reports

The discovery in Russia of an Iron Age skeleton thought to be male but buried with artefacts

linked to both male and female social roles has led experts to suggest that the individual may have been a transvestite warrior priestess.

Found four metres underground in the Orenburg district of southern Russia, the remains are believed to be those of a member

of the ancient nomadic Sarmatian culture and to date from the late fifth century BC. The shape of the pelvis points to it being that of a man, and the grave goods include horse- riding equipment and a quiver of arrows. However, as well as being a warrior, the individual almost certainly had a religious role: the skeleton was found holding a mirror, a possession often linked to shamanic divination. The culture’s priestly functions

The latest news, plus Backgrounder 10 Lessons from history 12

HISTORY NOW

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Have a story? Please email Matt Elton at [email protected]

Gender identity The skeleton of an Iron Age aristocrat, discovered in Russia, appears to be male but was buried with artefacts linked to a female social role. It is thought that some men may have had a socially female gender in the era


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8 BBC History Magazine

appear to have been overwhelmingly performed by women, a small percentage of whom seem to also have had warrior status. It is therefore possible that some biologically male individuals in the region’s Iron Age culture had a socially female gender, allowing them to perform priestly duties.

If this theory about the sex of the remains is borne out, it would be only the third male burial with female grave goods yet found in the region. The discovery could change how we under-stand the view of gender held by the Iron Age nomads of the Eurasian steppes, a culture that is thought to have originally generated the Amazon legends of classical Greek mythology. Described by writers including Herodotus as a tribe of female warriors – women that occupied what was regarded as a male role – so- called ‘Amazons’ were believed to hail from what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. However, archaeological investigation suggests that small numbers of female warriors existed within mixed-sex tribes rather than in gender-specific groups.

The Orenburg grave and its treasures have been excavated over the past two months in an operation directed by one of Russia’s leading archaeologists,

Professor Leonid Yablonsky of the Institute of Archaeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The richly adorned corpse was the only individual burial within a huge 90-metre diameter funerary mound, thought to have originally stood at nine metres high. The remains were found near the mound’s northern edge, around 40 metres away from its central burial chamber, in which a substantial number of individuals had originally been interred. The reason for this different treatment is not yet known.

As well as garments covered with hundreds of gold rosettes, the priestess was buried wearing 10 large gold rings – one on each finger – gold earrings, gold bracelets and a silver pendant. Other grave goods included bone spoons, three large, highly decorated silver bowls of Persian origin and two mysterious wooden boxes.

Professor Yablonsky said: “One box held pigments and six gold-covered iron needles. Three of the needles were of a type used for tattooing, while the other three were for sewing clothes.” The other box was filled with dozens of large beetles, regarded by some ancient Eurasian traditions as being the souls of the dead.

Further analysis of the remains is set to be carried out in the coming months.

The priestess was buried wearing gold earrings,

gold bracelets and a silver pendant

German PoW chief saved British o�cer

SECOND WORLD WAR

Asenior German army officer saved the life of a key British special forces

operative following a disastrous secret mission in the Aegean in the Second World War, new research suggests.

The investigation, conducted by Gavin Mortimer, a leading authority on British special forces operations, has revealed a rift in German ranks in which the commandant of the country’s largest prisoner of war camp refused to hand over the British officer, Captain Bill Blyth, in defiance of orders from Hitler that such men should be executed.

Mortimer has rediscovered two 1944 telex messages from the Gestapo to the PoW camp commandant, Colonel Otto Burger, instructing him to hand Blyth to them. Burger refused to comply, thus saving Blyth, an officer of the Special Boat Squadron, from probable execu-tion. Blyth’s four colleagues, who had been separated from him, had already been tortured and executed elsewhere. The research features in Mortimer’s new book, The SBS in World War II.

Burger also appears to have protected Blyth by moving him to another PoW camp, almost certainly in order to make it harder for the Gestapo to track him down. Blyth survived the war, and later settled in South Africa. DK

Reflecting social roles A bronze mirror found in a

grave in Tyumen, Russia, which probably had a similar

function to the one unearthed in Orenburg. Such objects are

often linked to shamanic roles

History now / News

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SBS members training in the Aegean Sea. The fate of one of the unit’s officers is explored in a new book


WorldMags.net




WHAT WE’VE

LEARNED

THIS MONTH…

Thames settlements

date back to 7,000 BCArtefacts found on the site of the new Crossrail project in the London district of Woolwich could point to the existence of a settlement on the Thames as early as 9,000 years ago, according to archaeologists. The remains of a Mesolithic tool-making factory, together with 150 pieces of flint, were found in the latest stage of a programme to uncover artefacts along a new rail route linking London to the east of England.

Celibacy was opposed

by 11th-century priestsThe introduction of compulsory clerical celibacy in the 11th and 12th centuries was highly controversial, a new study by academics from the University of Huddersfield suggests. In Religious Men and Masculine

Identity in the Middle Ages, Patricia Cullum and Katherine J Lewis argue that, while advocates saw celibacy as evidence of physical and moral strength, there were fears that it could lead priests to become ‘sodomites’.

Revealed: the earliest

portrait of a guinea pigA painting of three children with their pet guinea pig, set to go on public display for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery in London in October, is thought to be the earliest known portrait of the animal. Believed to have been created by an Anglo-Dutch artist in the 1580s, the work was painted at a time when the animal was still regarded as exotic after being introduced from South America earlier in the century. Stay up to date with the latest

stories via our online news section

at historyextra.com/news

How the humble notebook transformed society

TECHNOLOGY

T he unsung role that notebooks played in society’s evolution in the

early modern period is coming to light thanks to a major new research project.

Drawing on documents created between the 15th and 17th centuries, a team of historians and other experts are starting to examine how note-taking helped spread knowledge that changed the ways in which people perceived, and interacted with, the world around them. The records include field books kept by naturalists, travellers’ memoirs and physicians’ casebooks. Later stages of the research are set to explore how the growing availability of paper in the period led to new developments in the understanding and communication of information.

Among the specific topics set to be covered by the programme, which started at the University of Cambridge this summer, are the increasing levels of knowledge about disease and illness. As well as daily journals of the well-being of patients drawn up by physicians, the records include household medical books which, unusually, were often created by women. One such example, compiled by Johanna St John in the 17th century, advises that “cow piss will cure a dog of the mang washing ther with,”

and also contains suggested ‘remedies’ for cramps, coughs and colds.

Elaine Leong, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and co-organiser of the programme, said: “This in-depth study of the ways in which these materials were organised gives us a rare glimpse into the practices of natural inquiry and knowledge management by both experts and non-professionals.

“During times of plague, for instance, early modern men and women were understandably on edge and keen to seek out possible treatments. Householders were also continually hunting for health- related information as a matter of course, collecting it at occasions such as dinner parties, social visits and in communica-tions with experienced practitioners.”

Dr Lauren Kassell from the University of Cambridge, who also organised the programme, said: “This was the era of the scientific revolution and the rise of experimental knowledge. Notebooks are as important to the history of science and medicine as laboratories. As digital technologies transform how we work and think in the 21st century, we’re reconsidering what it meant to live in a world in which paper technologies were an innovation.” Matt Elton

A man taking notes in a 17th-century illustration. New research is exploring the impor-tance of paper records to social progress

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The rodent star of a mysterious 16th-century portrait


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History now / Backgrounder

REUTERS

Protesters burn an effigy of a US aircraft in Sanaa during protests against western involvement in Yemen, April 2013. Washington has stepped up drone attacks against Al-Qaeda operatives in the country

The hurried closure of British and American embassies in Yemen and the evacuation of personnel

in August was a reminder of how far this Middle Eastern country has risen up the security agenda. Yemen is not only seen as a dangerous place for foreigners to be, but also as a centre of international terrorist activity.

It is a stronghold of ‘Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’ (AQAP), a group said to be considered by the US as the most dangerous threat to the west. Washington has been responding by increasing drone attacks on what it says are leading Al-Qaeda figures based in Yemen. These attacks are, like similar strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, controversial due to the civilian casualties they cause. There have also been reports of AQAP attacking Yemeni forces and oil facilities.

Yemen has suffered for decades from economically destructive internal tensions, including secessionist pressures in the south and conflict between government and rebels in the north linked to a Shia Muslim sect. This is far from the future Britain might have hoped for when it departed its former protectorate at the port of Aden in South Arabia, part of modern Yemen, in 1967.

Britain had had a base there since the 1830s, taking possession of what was seen as a vital strategic point on the route to India. The withdrawal was hailed as a success but rapidly started to work against British interests. And this kind of hasty move with damaging consequences may prey on the minds of those planning the withdrawal of British and international combat forces from Afghanistan over the next year or so.

Such a withdrawal is not just a matter of returning forces home safely. Western leaders promise a transition that leaves Afghanistan more stable and prosperous, not the kind of place that Yemen has become – fractious, impoverished and open to exploitation by the west’s most determined enemies.

Those involved in planning the departure from Aden would have been surprised to learn that, some decades later, Britain would be fighting in Afghanistan. As John Darwin describes in his book Unfinished Empire, leaving Aden was a crucial moment in the Wilson government’s abandonment of British global commitments. Economic pressure was key as unemployment rose and sterling devaluation loomed. London was twisting, Darwin says, “between the twin imperatives of solvency and prestige”. Impatience grew with “a long, futile struggle against rival factions of urban guerillas” in the South Arabian federation around Aden. Defence secretary Denis Healey suggested that “all alternatives would have been worse” than withdrawal.

Prime minister Harold Wilson boasted in his memoirs that the British departure from Aden was “a superb operation”, “in good order and with no loss of life”. In reality,

while the British flag was lowered ceremoni-ally and Royal Navy crews smartly lined the decks of their ships, rival groups of Arab guerrillas battled to take over Aden itself. Months later, in January 1968, Wilson made a speech announcing the end of Britain’s “east of Suez” commitment, marking, argues Darwin, “the final collapse of the postwar campaign to remain a world power”.

And loss of influence over the area around Aden was dramatic. As Andrew Mumford of the University of Nottingham puts it in a recent History and Policy paper, the decision to leave Aden “bucked the… trend in British counter insurgency… that troops are withdrawn only when a politically acceptable post-occupation authority is in place and the military situation is under control”. Power was supposed to pass to the South Arabian military but its troops mutinied and sided with insurgents.

A faction “vehemently opposed to British interests grasped power… Britain’s political-military strategic aims lay in ruins,” says

Yemen continues to pay the price for Britain’s hasty exit As its forces prepare to leave Afghanistan, Chris Bowlby reports

on how Britain’s withdrawal from Yemen in 1967 left a vacuum

that was to be filled by some of the west’s deadliest enemies

Military withdrawals

While the British flag was lowered, rival groups of Arab guer-rillas battled to take over Aden itself


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Dr Mumford. A Marxist ‘People’s Demo-cratic Republic of Yemen’ was established in 1970, with Aden now offering facilities to Soviet and Chinese ships. The republic also became “a haven for Palestinian and extreme Marxist European terrorist groups”.

Since the end of the Cold War, a new larger Yemeni state has emerged. But its central authority has always been weak, and groups based there continue to pose a security threat to the west. While relations with nearby Saudi Arabia have been close, British hopes that they might exercise significant continued influence in Yemen never recovered.

And as the preparation for British and international forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan intensifies, so might a sense that such transitions are fraught with danger. Afghanistan’s history is pitted with a series of ignominious withdrawals by foreign occupiers, ranging from the British in the 19th century to Soviet forces in 1989. Optimists today promise a viable post-occu-

to the withdrawal timetable (combat forces are due to leave Afghanistan by 2015), proclaiming a victory of sorts. But if security threats persist, and the country becomes a base for terrorists, there is one weapon the US will turn to increasingly: the drone. It is a hi-tech addition to modern warfare, but perhaps also a throwback to a much earlier age, when global powers, sensing the hazards of committing and withdrawing forces on the ground, sent gunboats instead to try and enforce their will.

Chris Bowlby is a presenter on BBC

radio, specialising in history

pation state and armed forces ready to take over; pessimists fear a dangerous vacuum.

What governments in this situation have always had to do is decide between compet-ing priorities. Domestic voices question the cost of an operation abroad in human lives and (especially at times of austerity) in public spending. Against that are concerns about what will happen to the country and its people after the foreign troops have left – and what that means more broadly for international security.

Doubts persist about how effective and loyal Afghan security forces will be post-withdrawal, how powerful the Taliban will remain, and how far Afghanistan’s economy can foster political and social stability. Just as in Aden, argues Mumford, the dilemma has to be faced: “Depart too soon and risk allowing an immature political structure to succumb to violent insurgent opposition; remain too long and risk enhancing that violent opposition as resentment multiplies.”

Western political leaders will hope to keep

BOOK AND ARTICLE

E Unfinished Empire: The Global

Expansion of Britain by John Darwin (Penguin, 2013)E Exit Strategies in Counter-Insurgency by Andrew Mumford is available at historyandpolicy.org

DISCOVER MORE

TOP: Kabul, 1879, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Afghani-stan’s history is “pitted with a series of ignominious withdrawals by foreign occupiers” ABOVE: British troops arrest a demonstrator during riots in Aden, ahead of Britain’s exit from South Arabia in 1967


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History now / Backgrounder

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A hospital nursery in the early 1940s, when birth rates unexpectedly started soaring

Pat Thane is co-author,

with Tanya Evans, of

Sinners, Scroungers,

Saints?… Motherhood in

20th-Century England

(OUP, 2012)

Lessons from history: Why are we so hung up about the baby boom?

In August the Office of National Statistics announced that, in 2011–12, UK births

rose faster than in any year since 1972, more rapidly than any country in the EU – and that the population was at a record 63.7 million. This was widely greeted with surprise, some complaining that Britain is already overcrowded, due to immigration. Yet, since the 1980s, others have been voicing fears that the birth rate is too low. At a time when we are living longer, they have pointed out, we are producing too few younger workers to pay for pensions and health care. So why no rejoicing at the news?

It was ever thus. For over 200 years birth rates, whether rising or falling, have triggered prophecies of doom. It began with Thomas Malthus’s First Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). There were then no official statistics but Britain’s population was visibly growing. Malthus argued that, left uncontrolled, growth would outstrip resources, especially food, causing famine. The population carried on growing, but so did the economy as industrialisation expanded. There was no famine.

A positive effect of Malthus’s research was the introduction of official records of births, marriages and deaths from 1837. So, when the birth rate began to fall, in the 1870s, the facts were clear. This time declining births were seen as disastrous, reducing the supply of British workers and soldiers in a world of increasing economic and military competi-tion, implying degeneration and flagging

national virility. The gloom was exacerbated by the fact that the decline was, wrongly, believed to be fastest among the productive middle classes, while the ‘shirkers’ at the bottom of society multiplied – fears fuelled by the emergence of eugenics.

Panic mounted as the decline continued into the 1930s and people began living longer. This created the ‘menace’ of an ageing population, all the worse as the populations of Asia and Africa grew. Keynes, unfashionably, favoured a low birth-rate, lest, if it rose amid the economic Depression, Malthus’s prophecies would at last come true. Beveridge warned of “a stationary white population” leaving “one race at the mercy of another’s growing numbers”. Assuming that the low birth rate was permanent, demographers were soon producing alarming projections, including that by 1971 the UK population would fall to 32.7 million. In fact it was to rise to over 55 million. This was because the birth rate unexpectedly rose during the Second World War and remained high for almost 30 years.

There was no gloom this time, though by

the 1960s there were concerns about the dangers of world population growth. Again, it was assumed that high birth rates were here to stay – until they started to decline from the late 1960s.

Yet that didn’t stop the issue continuing to provoke alarm. Soon, with fewer babies being born, people were once more haunted by the prospect of an ageing population – having, it seems, forgotten the experience of the 1930s. Then, in 2001, the birth rate began to rise again, and has done so ever since.

Birth rates are unpredictable. One lesson from history is not to take predictions too seriously. We do not fully understand why birth rates rise or fall, but we should at least acknowledge that popular responses to their vagaries can tell us a great deal about contemporary fears.

As Britain’s population hits

record levels, Pat Thane says

that our ever-shifting birth

rates have been sparking

moral panics for 200 years

“Demographers predicted that Britain’s population would fall to 32.7 million by 1971. In fact it was to rise to over 55 million”


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PAST NOTESLONDON’S SEWAGE

Why was there a sewage problem?

In the 1850s London’s growing population was producing unman-ageable amounts of excrement. Cesspools leaked and overflowed, contaminating water supplies and, although not realised at the time, causing severe outbreaks of cholera. Matters weren’t helped by the outpourings of the increasingly popular water closet. To deal with the problem, London’s Sewers Commis-sion ordered that cesspools and house drains should be connected to sewers but these fed directly into the Thames, turning it into a stinking conduit of human waste.

What persuaded parliament

to address the problem?

The ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, when a heat wave created such a stench from the river that MPs even considered abandoning Westminster. A bill was rushed through parliament and the Metropolitan Board of Works was tasked with overhauling London’s sewerage system. Civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91) was put in charge of operations.

What did Bazalgette do?

Bazalgette’s 20-year project included embanking parts of the Thames,

constructing 1,100 miles of street sewers, 80 miles of main ‘interceptor’ sewers and building three monumen-tal pumping stations, all designed to take the sewage eastwards to be discharged into the river away from heavily populated areas.

So untreated waste still went into

the Thames?

Yes. However the authorities eventu-ally began separating solids from liquids, releasing chemically treated liquid into the river and dumping solid sludge out at sea. The first sludge barge, aptly named the SS Bazal-gette, went into operation in 1887.

What was Bazalgette’s legacy?

A much cleaner urban river and a healthier population. The last cholera epidemic was in 1866 in an area not yet connected to Bazalgette’s system.

Is more work needed?

Yes. Partly because of population growth and partly because sewers carrying sewage and rainfall were designed to discharge into the river during storms to prevent sewage flooding homes. Nearly 40m tonnes of sewage now end up in the river in a typical year. A new sewer is planned to capture this and take it for treat-

ment at Beckton sewage works.

Julian Humphrys marks the recent discovery of a

huge ‘fatberg’ in Kingston’s sewers with a look at the

sewage crisis of the mid-19th century

Joseph Bazalgette (top right) at the Abbey Mills pumping station in 1862

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“James Forsyth… died from the effects

of a fright, occasioned by another

boy presenting suddenly before him

in mask, or what is generally known

as a ‘false face’”

Dundee Courier / 1845

“Superior education and moral

instruction, which all the lower

classes now receive… are

gradually eradicating these

superstitious customs”

Stirling Observer / 1844

“Nuts, ale, and apples, compose the

chief materials of the entertainment

on this night”

Morning Post / 1846

“When Halloween falls

on Friday charms are

doubly powerful, for

Friday is witch night”Evening Telegraph / 1910

“It is a great pity that Halloween should

have become an anachronism, but it

was bound to follow the stagecoach

and the plough-ox”

Aberdeen Journal / 1934

“Murder incited by ghost?”Bath Chronicle and

Weekly Gazette / 1941

For more past newspaper stories, visit

britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

WHAT THE PAPERS SAIDThe annual celebration of

Halloween will soon be upon

us. We take a look at how the

press has reported on the event


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Dominic Sandbrook highlights events that took place in October in history

ANNIVERSARIES1 October 1938

Nazi troops are welcomed into

the Sudetenland

Move paves the way for full invasion of Czechoslovakia

29 October 1787

Mozart’s Don Giovanni earns a joyous and jubilant reception

The great composer’s new opera sends Prague into raptures

I n autumn 1938, Konrad Henlein, founder of the rightwing Sudeten

German Party, which championed the rights of Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking minority, achieved his dream. In Munich on 29 September, the British and French prime ministers acceded to Hitler’s demands for the Sudetenland to be given to Germany, and on 1 October Nazi troops entered Czechoslovakia.

When Henlein stepped off the train in Berlin that morning he was greeted by his new führer, Hitler, and driven through the streets towards the Reich Chancellery. “Berliners turned out, or were turned out, in their hundreds of thousands,” wrote one British journalist. Little wonder, then, that Henlein seemed ecstatic. “Words cannot express,” he told Hitler, “what we Sudeten Germans feel towards you today.”

Over the next few days, the German army moved smoothly into what had been western Czechoslovakia. The Times’ correspondent wrote that “the troops were in excellent spirits, with roses, dahlias and chrysanthemums – gifts of enthusiastic villagers – stuck in their tunics.”

At the time, the worldwide reaction was one of relief. Twenty years after the end of the First World War, few people welcomed the prospect of another. In Britain, for example, prime minister Neville Chamberlain had returned from Munich to be greeted as a hero. But the mood very quickly soured. Hundreds of thousands of Czechs fled east from the occupied Sudetenland and, just a month later, Hitler forced the Czechoslovakian government to yield southern Slovakia to Hungary. In March 1939 he dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia. A few months later, the world was at war.

A s Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered his thirties, he would have

been forgiven for feeling miserable. His father had died, his early successes were beginning to fade and the days of wine and roses were now a distant memory. Even Vienna, the imperial city, had lost some of its gaiety. With the Austrian army bogged down in a gruelling struggle against the Turks, food prices had risen, concerts had been cancelled and two opera companies had closed. No wonder Mozart was increasingly reliant on loans from friends.

October 1787 found Mozart working on a new production for Prague’s Italian opera house. His previous opera, The Marriage of Figaro, had opened in Prague a year earlier to tumultuous applause. “My Praguers understand me,” the composer remarked. Now he sat down

with the same librettist, the Italian poet Lorenzo Da Ponte, to write a dramma giocoso (‘jocular drama’) about the seducer Don Juan. It was due to open on 29 October. True to form, Mozart finished the score the day before.

Don Giovanni was an immediate hit. “Prague has never heard the like,” gushed one critic, while a Viennese journal reported that Mozart “conducted it personally and was welcomed joyously and jubilantly by the large audience”. It has been regarded ever since as one of his finest productions. For the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, it was a “work without blemish, of uninterrupted perfection”. The novelist Gustave Flaubert went even further. Don Giovanni, he said, was one of the “three finest things God ever made”, along with Hamlet and the sea. M

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A performance of Don Giovanni at London’s Royal Opera House in 2008


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Inhabitants of the Sudetenland – largely German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia – hail German troops on their arrival in October 1938

Dominic Sandbrook’s latest book

is Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for

Britain, 1974–1979 (Allen Lane). His

BBC Two history of Cold War Britain

will be broadcast in the autumn


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Anniversaries

30 October 1501

Cesare Borgia (right) invites 50 prosti-

tutes to a banquet at which his father,

Pope Alexander VI, gives prizes to

guests “who could perform the act

most o�en with the courtesans”.

14 October 1940

When a Luftwaffe bomb

falls on Balham tube station,

one of the tunnels collapses,

killing 66 people who were

sheltering from the air raid.

26 October 1881

In Tombstone, Arizona, the

Earp brothers and Doc Holliday

face the Clanton and McLaury

brothers in a brief shoot-out not

far from the OK Corral.

10 October AD 732

Franks crush

Arabs at Tours

The Islamic armies’ relentless advance is brought to a halt

In the first decades of the eighth century, the armies of Islam swept like

a storm through the Iberian peninsula. By 716 they had taken the cities of Catalonia and were moving north towards the Pyrenees. Five years later they were besieging Toulouse, and by 725 they had reached Burgundy. In under a century they had conquered the Middle East, B

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north Africa, Spain and Portugal. Now it seemed France was theirs for the taking.

At the beginning of October 732, advancing towards the city of Tours, the invaders were stunned to see tens of thousands of Frankish troops drawn up for battle between Tours and Poitiers. At their head was Charles Martel, duke and prince of the Franks, who had decided to stake everything on a set-piece confrontation.

For seven days the two armies sparred. At last, on 10 October, the Arab commander, Abd-al-Rahman, lost patience and ordered his cavalry to attack the Frankish infantry square. But, as an Arab chronicler later put it, “in the shock of the battle the men of the north seemed like a sea that cannot be moved. Firmly they stood, one close to another,

forming as it were a bulwark of ice; and with great blows of their swords they hewed down the Arabs.”

When Abd-al-Rahman was struck down, the Arabs lost their nerve. The battle was lost and, over the next few years, Charles steadily drove the Arabs back towards the Pyrenees.

Centuries later, historians came to see the battle of Tours as a major turning point. As Edward Gibbon famously put it, had the invaders won, their ships might have sailed unchallenged into the mouth of the Thames. “Perhaps,” he mischievously wrote, “the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet”.

Charles de Steuben’s 1837 painting of the battle of Tours depicts the triumphant Charles Martel, battle axe held high, riding a white horse towards the Arab army as it falls back in disarray


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King John’s demise was one of the most momentous, game changing

deaths of any English king. John died right in the middle of a civil

war that had seen his insurgent barons offer the throne of England to Prince Louis of France. More than half the country was in rebellion against him and it looked as if he was going to lose the war. Indeed, if John had lost the war, the consequences would have been momentous: England and France would have come under the same dynasty, Louis would have become king of England, and the whole political shape of Europe would have changed.

It is also unclear as to what would have

happened to Magna Carta if John hadn’t died when he did. John had conceded Magna Carta in 1215 only to reject it soon after – a decision that had caused his barons to rebel – but we actually don’t know what Prince Louis’ attitude to Magna Carta would have been. He, like John, may have wished to govern without his hands being tied by such a document.

John’s death altered the political situation completely. In place of the deeply unpopular King John came his young, innocent nine-year-old son, and the barons lost the animus that had driven them to rebel in the first place. In short, John’s death enabled the survival of his

dynasty, and also that of Magna Carta. It was Henry’s charter of 1225, not John’s of 1215, which became the definitive version and the law of the land.

COMMENT / David Carpenter

“John’s death enabled the survival of his dynasty, and also that of Magna Carta”

David Carpenter is professor of medieval history at Kings College London. He is currently writing a book on Magna Carta, due for publication in 2014

18 October 1216

An attack of dysentery proves the death of ‘Bad King John’

Monarch’s demise is caused by “violent fever” and “anguish of mind” – exacerbated by a surfeit of peaches and cider

K ing John has never had a good press – and it’s easy to see why. Despite

levying heavy taxes and scutage (a feudal relief paid by barons in place of military service), John failed to defend his lands overseas. He was known for mistreatment of prisoners and the reputed seduction of the wives and daughters of his barons.

By 1216 John had been on the throne for 17 years. Not only had he fallen out with his barons and lost almost all of England’s empire in France, he had also been excommunicated by the pope during a row over the appointment of a new archbishop of Canterbury.

John managed to patch up relations with the Vatican but the problems with his rebellious barons were a different story. Disaster was piled on disaster: that autumn, after relieving a rebel siege of Lincoln, he learned that the Scots had invaded the north of England.

Crossing the great tidal estuary of the Wash, John contrived to lose part of his

baggage train in quicksand – including, some chroniclers claimed, his crown jewels. And by the time he reached Newark he was badly ill with dysentery, a common curse of military campaigns in the Middle Ages.

What happened next has become part of John’s legend, though many historians doubt its veracity. According to the chronicler Roger of Wendover, John now had a “violent fever”, made worse by his “anguish of mind” about the loss of his baggage in the Wash.

Sunk in misery, the king consoled himself by stuffing himself with peaches and sinking vast amounts of new cider – not, perhaps, the ideal diet for somebody suffering from dysentery. His stomach cramps worsened and, on the evening of 18 October, he died. At that time, dysentery was often a death sentence, so the famous “surfeit of peaches” probably had nothing to do with his demise. Still, it makes a good story.

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This 15th-century illumination depicts ‘John Lackland’ – a common nickname for King John


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LETTE R

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The opinions expressed by our commentators are their own and may not represent the views of BBC History Magazine or the Immediate Media Company

Your views on the magazine and the world of history

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In George Goodwin’s article on the battle of Flodden (September), the author relates the ‘horrific’ death of James IV and

describes an arrow to the jaw, a severed hand and a cut throat as the causes of his demise. However, though these injuries were quite nasty, in comparison with the average

medieval/early modern casualty he may actually have got off lightly.As recent studies of battlefield trauma

have demonstrated, in the age of hand-to-hand warfare the head was routinely targeted. When a mass grave from the battle of Towton (1461) was excavated in the 1990s, the true horror of medieval warfare was revealed. Of the 50 individuals in the grave, most suffered head injuries, the worst being ‘Towton 32’ who suffered no fewer than 10 blade and three blunt-force injuries to his skull, as well as defence wounds to his hands and arms.

Though I accept that attitudes might have changed in the 52 years between Towton and Flodden (and that Towton was a ferocious engagement fought under rules of no quarter), it’s hard to believe that at the sharp end of the conflict at Flodden – between the Scots and English infantrymen whose names are unknown and uncelebrated – the savagery would have been any less, particularly given the enormous casualties. With this in mind, James IV might actually be considered one of the lucky ones – he was at least recognisable afterwards.Stephen Leese, Stafford

Disraeli: an early suffragist?I was surprised to read in the August issue that Douglas Hurd, despite having written a new biography of Disraeli, thinks the former prime minister was against votes for women (Books). In fact, as early as 1848 Disraeli said in a Commons debate that, if a woman could be head of state, a landowner and a churchwarden, she could certainly exercise a vote. In the 1870s he voted for or was paired in favour of women’s bills five times, and in 1873 he wrote that, as men obtained the vote through household or property qualifications, to deny it to similarly qualified women was simply an ‘anomaly’.Martin Pugh, Northumberland

A baby of great importanceYour choice of five royal births which you claim in the July edition “rocked a nation” makes, to my mind, one major and surprising omission.

Surely one of the most significant royal births – one that had a profound effect on the future of this country – was that of James Francis Edward Stuart on 10 June 1688. He was the son of our last

Catholic king, James II and VII, and his Catholic queen, Mary of Modena.

The importance of the arrival of a Catholic heir to the throne cannot be overestimated. All of the previous children born to the queen had died. The Protestant opposition largely assumed that they had only to wait for the death of James for the succession to revert to his Protestant daughters, Mary (married to the staunchly Protestant William of Orange) and Anne.

The arrival of James Francis Edward Stuart (later known as the Old Pretender) completely changed this. It could be said to have been the tipping point that persuaded opponents of King James to invite William of Orange to replace him. It led to an invasion, the deposition of a king and the Glorious Revolution, which emphatically reset the balance of power between monarchy and parliament and laid the cornerstone of our parliamentary democracy.JG Phillips, Farnham

Deadly language testsI read the article on immigration in the Middle Ages (August) with great interest, especially – as a Fleming myself – the parts about the Flemish in England. Mark Ormrod writes that in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the technique used by the rebels to identify Flemish immigrants was to make them say ‘bread and cheese’. Interestingly, the people of Bruges had used a similar tactic 79 years earlier.

At that time, France and Flanders were at war. The French king Philip IV took captive the Count of Flanders, and Bruges was occupied by the French. During morning prayers on 18 May 1302, citizens of Bruges attacked the French and their supporters. They killed anyone who couldn’t pronounce with the correct accent the words schild en vriend, roughly translated as ‘shield and friend’ – the Flemish ‘sch’ sound being hard for French-speaking people to pronounce.

Other Flemish cities sent men to join the people’s revolt, provoking the French to send an army of knights to Flanders. On 11 July 1302 these knights met an army of craftsmen and peasants, aided by some noblemen, near Kortrijk (Courtrai). The makeshift Flemish army defeated the French in an encounter that became known as the battle of the Golden Spurs due to the number of spurs collected from the fallen French knights. The anniversary is now the national day of Flanders, Belgium’s Flemish region.Eric Van Goethem, Wuustwezel

The other side of DisneyI was surprised that Gerald Scarfe chose Walt Disney as a history hero (August), and that the article makes little reference to the darker side of his character. Disney has been alleged to be a racist and an anti-Semite – though this view has been refuted by Neal Gabler in his biography.

However, Disney was a supporter of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals and of America First, both of which

contained many anti-Semites. During the Second World War, Disney

opposed American intervention until Pearl Harbor, while he

declined a proposal from the Ministry of Information to

A brutal death among many

P We reward the writer of

the letter of the month with

our ‘History Choice’ book of

the month. This issue it is

Bolivar by Marie Arana.

Read the review on p61

Disney in 1951. His

reputation continues to

be hotly debated today


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SOCIAL MEDIAWhat you’ve been saying

on Twitter and Facebook

WRITE TO US We welcome your letters, while reserving the right to edit them. We may publish your letters on our website. Please include a daytime phone number and, if emailing, a postal address (not for publication). Letters should be no longer than 250 words.

email: [email protected]

Post: Letters, BBC History Magazine, Immediate Media Company Bristol Ltd, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN

@HistoryExtra: Should more be done to keep items of historical significance in the UK?

@yamyamlen I should think so

yes but then shouldn’t all items

of historical significance be

repatriated? Bit hypocritical

to make demands

@RegenerationEX We’re selling

London to foreign owners so why

not a painting?

@Pickle79 Yes but bidders should

be those that care and not those

with too much money to know

what to do with it

Sardine Noir Most definitely.

A place without a history is like

a body without a soul.

@HistoryExtra: How difficult are History A-levels nowadays?

@BeingBryony Very! I was

introduced to the concept of

post-modernist theory of

appeasement at the age of 17.

Quite difficult to understand!

Gill Taylor I think there are far

too many colleges and schools

spoon feeding learning to students

to ensure they reach the grades

@SHSPolitics I teach A2

coursework and the source

analysis is ferociously difficult.

Topics less ‘dry’ but students

overconfident in 20th cent history

Anne Joost-Pagan If you love

history, it comes easy to you

@HistoryExtra: Where should Richard III be buried?

@GibsonRoo Westminster Abbey:

the burial he should have had in the

first place as a King

Carmel Cooper I would like to see

Richard buried in York, the town

that he loved and visited often. But

the British people should decide his

final resting place, and the burial

should be a royal one

Nathan Ellis Wynne Finders

Keepers, leave him in Leicester

Angela Phillips Westminster

Abbey. No matter what people

thought of him he was still a king

and deserves a decent resting place

that befits his status

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make an anti-Nazi cartoon in 1940. He was also a supporter of the Un-American Activities Committee after the war.

Though it can be argued that racial stereotyping in Disney’s cartoons was no worse than that in the American film industry in general, he certainly allied himself with anti-Semites. Disney was also a union buster and employed strongarm tactics. When the Screen Cartoonists Guild gathered petitions to organise a union, he brought in armed guards to intimidate employees – hardly an action to be admired.Andrew Hudson, Cumbria

Christianity didn’t leave with the RomansSt Augustine may have landed in Kent in 597 (History Explorer, August), but the British Isles were not lying in pagan darkness. Roman, as opposed to Roman Catholic, Christianity had found root in the Roman province of Britannia centuries before St Augustine landed in Kent. The fourth-century AD Chi-Rho fresco discovered at Lullingstone Roman villa, Kent, contains the earliest Christian paintings from the Roman era in Britain. Indeed, Christianity was so secure that Pelagius (c390–418), a British – actually, Welsh – monk and Christian teacher, tried to reform the faith through his views on original sin, grace, and predestination. His message spread widely, not only in Britain but throughout the Christian world.

From Britain, missionaries such as Patrick carried Christianity to Ireland and it returned via Iona, where a monastery was founded in 563 – 34 years before Augustine landed. Though it has long been accepted that Christianity

continued in the ‘Celtic fringes’, there is lots of evidence that many British Christians also survived the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and converted many of the latter well before St Augustine’s arrival. John Owen, Caerphilly

Why not give Shakespeare the Richard III treatment?After the success of studies of the remains of Richard III, I find it strange that no effort has been made to glean additional details of Shakespeare from his grave. We know so little about him: for centuries, people have wondered what killed him and how he dressed. Plus he may even have been buried with unknown keepsakes.

I doubt that the church in which he is interred would risk his exhumation, but why has scanning equipment not been used to find out his height or to create a facial model, as was done with Richard? It’s only his talent that puts him off-limits.Matthew Wilson, Wolverhampton

CorrectionsP In Five Royal Births that Rocked a Nation (July), we referred to the Prince of Wales marrying Caroline of Württemberg. In actual fact his bride was Caroline of Brunswick.

The Chi-Rho fresco found at Lullingstone Roman villa is the earliest of its kind


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Listen to Leanda

de Lisle

ON TH E

PODCAST

COVER STORY

A deafening silence surrounded the

disappearance of Edward V and his

brother, Richard, Duke of York. But

why? As Leanda de Lisle writes,

both Richard III and Henry Tudor

had good reasons not to talk

publicly about the princes

THE PRINCES IN THE TOWER WHY WAS THEIR

FATE NEVER EXPLAINED?


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“There was a high risk the dead princes would attract a cult, for

in them the religious qualities

attached to royalty were

combined with the

purity of childhood”

Paul Delaroche’s 19th-century painting shows King Edward V

and the Duke of York in the Tower of London. What

happened to them next has puzzled historians for centuries


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ALAMY

Locked in the Tower in June 1483 with his younger brother, the 12-year-old Edward V was certain “that death was facing him”. Two overthrown kings had died in suspicious circumstances

already that century. Yet it was still possible their uncle, Richard III, would spare them. The princes were so very young, and if it were accepted that they were bastards, as their uncle claimed, they would pose little threat. The innocent Richard, Duke of York, only nine years old, remained “joyous” and full of “frolics”, even as the last of their servants were dismissed. But the boys were spotted behind the Tower windows less and less often, and by the summer’s end they had vanished.

It is the fact of their disappearance that lies at the heart of the many conspiracy

theories over what happened to the princes. Murder was suspected, but without bodies no one could be certain even that they were dead. Many different scenarios have been put forward in the years since. In the nearest surviving contemporary accounts, Richard is accused of ordering their deaths, with the boys either suffocated with their bedding, or drowned, or killed by having their arteries cut. There were also theories that one or both of the princes escaped.

In more modern times, some have come to believe that Richard III was innocent of ordering the children’s deaths and instead spirited his nephews abroad or to a safe place nearer home, only for them to be killed later by Henry VII who feared the boys’ rival claims to the throne. None of these theories, however, has provided a satisfactory answer

to the riddle at the heart of this mystery: the fact the boys simply vanished.

If the princes were alive, why did Richard not say so in October 1483, when the rumours he had ordered them killed were fuelling a rebellion? If they were dead, why had he not followed earlier examples of royal killings? The bodies of deposed kings were displayed and claims made that they had died of natural causes, so that loyalties could be transferred to the new king.

That the answer to these questions lies in the 15th century seems obvious, but it can be hard to stop thinking like 21st-century detectives and start thinking like contempo-raries. To the modern mind, if Richard III was a religious man and a good king, as many believe he was, then he could not have ordered the deaths of two children. But even

Cover story

The monument to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York at Westminster Abbey. The princes’ bones may lie close to those of the king who sought to hide their memory


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good people do bad things if they’re given the right motivation.

In the 15th century it was a primary duty of good kingship to ensure peace and national harmony. After his coronation, Richard III continued to employ many of his brother Edward IV’s former servants, but by the end of July 1483 it was already clear that some did not accept that Edward IV’s sons were illegitimate and judged Richard to be a usurper. The fact the princes remained a focus of opposition gave Richard a strong motive for having them killed – just as his brother had killed the king he deposed.

The childlike, helpless, Lancastrian Henry VI was found dead in the Tower in 1471, after more than a decade of conflict between the rival royal Houses of Lancaster and York. It was said he was killed by grief and rage over the death in battle of his son, but few can have doubted that Edward IV ordered Henry’s murder. Henry VI’s death extirpated the House of Lancaster. Only Henry VI’s half nephew, Henry Tudor, a descendent of John of Gaunt, founder of the Lancastrian House, through his mother’s illegitimate Beaufort line, was left to represent their cause.

Trapped in European exile, Henry Tudor posed a negligible threat to Edward IV. However, Richard was acutely aware of an unexpected sequel to Henry VI’s death. The murdered king was acclaimed as a saint, with rich and poor alike venerating him as an innocent whose troubled life gave him some insight into their own difficulties. Miracles were reported at the site of his modest grave in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey. One man claimed that the dead king had even deigned to help him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, with said bean popping out after he prayed to the deposed king.

Edward IV failed to put a halt to the popular cult and Richard III shared his late brother’s anxieties about its ever-growing power. It had a strong following in his home city of York, where a statue of ‘Henry the saint’ was built on the choir screen at York Minster. In 1484 Richard attempted to take control of the cult with an act of reconciliation, moving Henry VI’s body to St George’s Chapel, Windsor. In the meantime, there was a high risk the dead princes too would attract a cult, for in them the religious qualities attached to royalty were combined with the purity of childhood.

An insecure kingIn England we have no equivalent today to the shrine at Lourdes in France, visited by thousands of pilgrims every year looking for healing or spiritual renewal. But we can recall the vast crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of

Wales. Imagine that feeling and enthusiasm in pilgrims visiting the tombs of two young princes and greatly magnified by the closeness people then felt with the dead. It would have been highly dangerous to the king who had taken their throne. The vanishing of the princes was for Richard a case of least said, soonest mended, for without a grave for them, there could be no focus for a cult. Without a body or items belonging to the dead placed on display, there would be no relics either.

Nevertheless, Richard needed the princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and others who might follow Edward V, to know the boys were dead, in order to forestall plots raised in their name. According to the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, Elizabeth Woodville fainted when she was told her sons had been killed. As she came round, “She wept, she cryed out loud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair.” She also called for vengeance.

Elizabeth Woodville made an agreement with Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, that Henry should marry her daughter, Elizabeth of York, and called on Edwardian loyalists to back their cause. The rebellion that followed in October 1483 proved Richard had failed to restore peace. While he defeated these risings, less than two years later at the battle of Bosworth,

in August 1485, he was betrayed by part of his own army and was killed, sword in hand.

The princes were revenged, but it soon became evident that Henry VII was in no hurry to investigate their fate. It is possible that the new monarch feared such an investigation would draw attention to a role in their fate played by someone close to his cause – most likely Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The duke, who came from a Lancastrian family, was a close ally of Richard in the overthrow of Edward V, but later turned against the king. Known as a “sore and hard dealing man”, it is possible he encour-aged Richard to have the princes murdered, planning then to see Richard killed and the House of York overthrown. Richard executed Buckingham for treason in November 1483, but Buckingham’s name remained associated at home and abroad with the princes’ disappearance.

What is certain, however, is that Henry, like Richard, had good reasons for wishing to forestall a cult of the princes. Henry’s blood claim to the throne was extremely weak and he was fearful of being seen as a mere king consort to Elizabeth of York. To counter this, Henry claimed the throne in his own right, citing divine providence – God’s intervention on earth – as evidence that he was a true king (for only God made kings). A key piece of

“In 1492 there appeared in Ireland, as if

‘raised from the dead one of the sons of King

Edward… a youth by the name of Richard’”

The pretender Perkin Warbeck (1474–99) claimed to be Richard, Duke of York


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Henry VI (1421�71)Lost his life in the Tower

Succeeding his father, Henry V, who died when he was a few months old, Henry VI’s reign was challenged by political and economic crises. It was interrupted by his mental and physical breakdown in 1453 during which time Richard, 3rd Duke of York, was appointed protector of the realm. Both men were direct descendants of Edward III and in 1455 Richard’s own claim to the throne resulted in the first clashes of the Wars of the Roses – fought between supporters of the dynastic houses of Lancaster and York over the succession.

Richard died at the battle of Wakefield in 1460 but his family claim to the throne survived him and his eldest son became king the following year – as Edward IV. Richard’s younger son would also be king, as Richard III. Henry VI was briefly restored to the throne in 1470 but the Lancastrians were finally defeated at Tewkesbury in 1471 and Henry was probably put to death in the Tower of London a few days later.

Edward IV (1442�83)Died before his young sons

Edward succeeded where his father Richard, the third Duke of York failed – in overthrowing Henry VI during the Wars of the Roses. He was declared king in March 1461, securing his throne with a victory at the battle of Towton. Edward’s younger brother Richard became Duke of Gloucester. Later, in Edward’s second reign, Richard played an important role in government. Edward married Elizabeth Woodville in 1463 and they had 10 children: seven daughters and three sons. The eldest, Elizabeth, was born in 1466. Two of the three sons were alive at the time of Edward’s death – Edward, born in 1470, and Richard, born 1473. Edward is credited with being financially astute and restoring law and order. He died unexpectedly of natural causes on 9 April 1483.

Richard III (1452�85)Protector, then usurper

Richard was the youngest surviving son of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and was still a child when his 18-year-old brother became Edward IV after Yorkist victories. Unlike his brother George (executed for treason in the Tower in 1478 – alleg-edly drowned in a butt of malmsey wine), Richard was loyal to Edward during his lifetime. On his brother’s death, he moved swiftly to wrest control of his nephew Edward from the boy’s maternal family, the Woodvilles. At some point in June 1483 his role moved from that of protector to usurper. He arrested several of the previous king’s loyal advisors, postponed the coronation and claimed Edward IV’s children were illegitimate because their father had been pre-contracted to marry another woman at the time of his secret marriage to Elizabeth. Richard was crowned, but he faced rebellion that year and further unrest the next. Support for the king decreased as it grew for Henry Tudor, the rival claimant who returned from exile and triumphed at the battle of Bosworth in 1485.

Edward V (1470�83)

Richard, Duke of York (1473�83)Deposed and disappeared

Edward IV’s heir was his eldest son, also named Edward. When the king died unexpectedly, his will, which has not survived, reportedly named his previously loyal brother, Richard, Duke of Glouces-ter, as lord protector. On hearing of his father’s death, the young Edward and his entourage began a journey from Ludlow to the capital. Gloucester intercepted the party in Buckinghamshire. Glouces-ter, who claimed the Woodvilles were planning to take power by force, seized the prince.

On 4 May 1983, Edward entered London in the charge of Gloucester. Edward’s coronation was scheduled for 22 June. On 16 June, Elizabeth was persuaded to surrender Edward’s younger brother, Richard, apparently to attend the ceremony. With both princes in his hands, Gloucester publicised his claim to the throne. He was crowned as Richard III on 6 July and a conspiracy to rescue the princes

failed that month. By September, rebels were seeing Henry Tudor as a candidate for the throne, suggest-ing the princes were already believed to be dead.

The players in the princes’ downfall


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evidence used in support of this idea was a story that, a few months before his murder, ‘the saint’ Henry VI had prophesised Henry Tudor’s reign.

It would not have been wise to allow Yorkist royal saints to compete with the memory of Henry VI, whose cult Henry VII now wished to encourage. In 1485, therefore, nothing was said of the princes’ disappearance, beyond a vague accusation in parliament during the autumn that Richard III was guilty of “treasons, homicides and murders in shedding of infants’ blood”. No search was made for the boys’ bodies and they were given no rite of burial. Indeed even the fate of their souls was, seemingly, abandoned.

I have not found any evidence of endow-ments set up to pay for prayers for the princes that century. Henry may well have feared the churches where these so-called ‘chantries’ might be established would become centres for the kind of cult he wanted to avoid. But their absence would have struck people as very strange. Praying for the dead was a crucial part of medieval religion. In December 1485 when Henry issued a special charter refounding his favourite religious order, the Observant Friars, at Greenwich, he noted that offering masses for the dead was, “the greatest work of piety and mercy, for through it souls would be purged”. It was unthinkable not to help the souls of your loved ones pass from purgatory to heaven with prayers and masses. On the other hand, it was akin to a curse to say a requiem for a living person – you were effectively praying for their death.

A surviving prince?The obvious question posed by the lack of public prayers for the princes was, were they still alive? And, as Vergil recalled, in 1491 there appeared in Ireland, as if “raised from the dead one of the sons of King Edward… a youth by the name of Richard”. Henry VII said the man claiming to be the younger of the princes was, in fact, a Dutchman called Perkin Warbeck – but who could be sure?

Henry was more anxious than ever that the princes be forgotten and when their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, died in June 1492, she was buried “privily… without any solemn dirge done for her obit”. It has been suggested this may have reflected her dying wishes to be buried “without pomp”. But Henry VII also asked to be buried without pomp. He still expected, and got, one of the most stately funerals of the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Woodville emphatically did not receive the same treatment. Much has been made of this in conspiracy theories concerning the princes (especially on the question of whether she believed them to be alive) but Henry’s

Had to submit to Richard III

Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville, a widow with children, took place in secret in 1464 and met with political disapproval. The king’s brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was among those allegedly hostile to it. The preference the Woodville family received caused resentment at court, and there was friction between Elizabeth’s family and the king’s powerful advisor, Hastings. On Edward IV’s death in 1483, Gloucester’s distrust of the Woodvilles was apparently a factor in his decision to seize control of the heir, his nephew. Elizabeth sought sanctuary in Westmin-ster, from where her younger son, Richard, Duke of York, was later removed. The legitimacy of her marriage and her children was one of Gloucester’s justifications for usurping the throne on 26 June.

Once parliament confirmed his title as Richard III, Elizabeth submitted in exchange for protection for herself and her daughters – an arrange-ment he honoured. After Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth, her children were declared legitimate. Her eldest, Elizabeth of York, was married to Henry VII, strengthening his claim to the throne.

Henry VII (1457�1509)Battled his way to the throne

Henry Tudor was the son of Margaret Beaufort (great-great-granddaughter of Edward III) and Edmund Tudor, half-brother of Henry VI. In 1471, after Edward IV regained the throne, Henry fled to Brittany, where he avoided the king’s attempts to have him returned. As a potential candidate for the throne through his mother’s side, Henry became the focus for opposition to Richard III. After the failed 1483 rebellion against the king, rebels, including relatives of the Woodvilles and loyal former members of Edward IV’s household, joined him in Brittany. In 1485 Henry Tudor invaded, landing first in Wales, and triumphed over Richard III at Bosworth on 22 August.

Henry was crowned on the battlefield with Richard’s crown. The following year he further legitimised his right to rule by marrying Elizabeth of York. When the king died in 1509, his and Elizabeth’s son came to the throne as Henry VIII.

Elizabeth, Queen Consort (c1437�92)


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The forbidding entrance to the Bloody Tower at the Tower of London, the fortress where Richard III imprisoned his brother’s sons

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BOOKS

E Blood and Roses by Helen Castor

(Faber & Faber, 2005)

E The Last Days of Richard III and the

Fate of his DNA by John Ashdown Hill

(History Press, 2013)

E Bosworth: The Birth of the

Tudors by Chris Skidmore

(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013)

WEBSITE

E Princes Poll. Who do you think was

responsible for the death of the princes

in the Tower? Have your say at

historyextra.com/princes

DISCOVER MORE

Leanda de Lisle is a historian and writer. Her book

Tudor: The Family Story (1437–1603) has just been

published by Chatto and Windus. She will be

discussing the fate of the princes in the Tower at

BBC History Magazine’s History Weekend in

Malmesbury: historyweekend.com

motives become clear when recalled in the context of the period.

This was an era of visual symbols and display: kings projected their power and significance in palaces decorated with their badges, in rich clothes and elaborate ceremo-nies. Elizabeth Woodville, like her sons, was being denied the images of a great funeral with its effigies, banners and grand ceremo-nial. This caused negative comment at the time. But with Warbeck’s appearance, Henry wanted to avoid any nostalgia for the past glories of the House of York.

It was 1497 before Perkin Warbeck was captured. Henry then kept him alive because he wanted Warbeck publicly and repeatedly to confess his modest birth. Warbeck was eventually executed in 1499. Yet even then Henry continued to fear the power of the vanished princes. Three years later, it was given out that condemned traitor Sir James Tyrell had, before his execution, confessed to arranging their murder on Richard’s orders. Henry VIII’s chancellor, Thomas More, claimed he was told the murdered boys had been buried at the foot of some stairs in the

Cover story

Tower, but that Richard had asked for their bodies to be reburied with dignity and that those involved had subsequently died so the boys’ final resting place was unknown – a most convenient outcome for Henry.

While the princes’ graves remained unmarked, the tomb of Henry VI came to rival the internationally famous tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury as a site of mass pilgrimage. Henry ran a campaign to have his half-uncle beatified by the pope, which continued even after Henry’s death, ending only with Henry VIII’s break with Rome. The Reformation then brought to a close the cult of saints in England. Our cultural memories of their power faded away, which explains why we overlook the significance of the cult of Henry VI in the fate of the princes.

In 1674, long after the passing of the Tudors, two skeletons were recovered in the Tower, in a place that resembled More’s description of the princes’ first burial place. They were interred at Westminster Abbey, not far from where Henry VII lies. In 1933, they were removed and examined by two doctors. Broken and incomplete, the skeletons

“In 1674, two skeletons were recovered in

the Tower, in a place that resembled More’s

description of the princes’ �rst burial place”

were judged to be two children, one aged between seven and 11 and the other between 11 and 13. The little bones were returned to the abbey, and whoever they were, remain a testament to the failure of Richard and Henry to bury the princes in eternal obscurity.

Leanda de Lisle discusses the princes in

the Tower on our weekly podcast

E historyextra.com/podcasts

THE PODCAST


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Comment

Michael Wood on… the history of religions

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I was intrigued recently by a debate in a literary magazine on proofs of God, in which philosophers and theologians cited religious texts as evidence for a transcen-

dental reality. For me as a mere historian it was all rather perplexing. To my mind all texts are created in history, determined only by culture and context.

When we made our Story of India television series we had lots of letters about the origins of Hinduism, some of which spoke of sacred texts created literally aeons ago, in Sanskrit, the speech of the gods, which our correspondents fervently believed originated in India. Now, it has long been thought that Sanskrit, an eastern branch of the Indo-European family tree, most likely came into India only in the late Bronze Age. Fascinating new linguistic research has used phylogenetic analyses to map the stages by which these branches spread. These show the family originated in Anatolia roughly 9,000 years ago, just as Professor Colin Renfrew predicted in the 1980s. Of course, there are many aspects of Indian religion and culture that are far older even than this (as we know from archaeology) but the historian can be sure the sacred texts themselves, though much the oldest still in use in the world, were composed for elite newcomers in northern India in the late Bronze Age.

A much younger faith, Christianity has long been subject to textual analysis, and Christians have got used to the huge fissure between the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history. Not that the Jesus of history isn’t a compelling figure: a Jewish exorcist, faith healer and teacher swimming in the soup of Hellenistic mystery religions and millennial cults of first-century Palestine, an altogether more believable and human character. It was the pivotal role of Paul in the construction of the narrative, and the appropriation of that narrative by the Roman empire under Constantine in the 330s, that turned him into the Jesus of faith.

On Islam too, revisionist work in the last few decades, though still controversial, suggests that Islam, as the world religion we know, may have been created like

Christianity in an imperial context, during the Arab wars with the Christian Byzantine empire in the late seventh century. Behind it again was a bubbling ferment of ideas, monotheistic salvationist groups, the religious twitterati, if you will, of the early seventh century. And there lies the historical Muhammad, involved in urgent contemporary debates about the nature of God and the end of time. The Jewish and Christian monotheisms were central to all these discourses. It was the early Muslims’ desire to get back to the pure religion of Abraham that led Arab leaders to seek out the Temple Mount when they took Jerusalem in 637. The latest research suggests that they initially came as friends, to be greeted by the Jews as liberators, and to pray at first not to Mecca, but to Jerusalem.

Fragments of these early exchanges survive in the text of the Qur’an. Sura 18, for example, which famously mentions the “two-horned one” – Alexander the Great –we now know was directly inspired by a Syriac Alexander legend in an apocalyptic prophecy composed in 629–30 in Edessa, Syria, which spoke of the imminence of God’s judgment and the coming messiah. Where and how did the Prophet (or his followers) encounter that? In Arabia? Or in Syria, where an early Christian text says he travelled as a merchant and was drawn to monotheism?

Such hints offer the possibility of placing Muhammad as a real person in a world wider than just western Arabia, shaped by history as well as shaping history. And perhaps too, one may see the Qur’an as the product of debates with a wider spectrum of near-eastern religious groups. That’s what this new scholarship is reaching for, but where it will lead is as yet unclear. It may, after all, still be that the orthodox Muslim historical tradition, as worked out in the century after the Prophet’s death, and codified in his eighth-century biography and later commentaries, does describe what really happened. And there are western scholars, such as Professor Hugh Kennedy, who think that that is the case. Either way, what is important is that historians must continue to ask the questions. That, after all, is the nature of the job.

Michael Wood is

professor of public

history at the

University of

Manchester. He

will be discussing

Æthelstan at

BBC History

Magazine’s

History Weekend

– details at history

weekend.com

“Historians must ask questions, even of sacred texts”

ILLUSTRATION BY FEMKE DE JONG


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Second World War

THE HISTORY ESSAY

THE DANGERS OF THE BLITZ SPIRIT

The stoicism of the British people in response to the Lu�wa�e raids of

1940�41 is seen as heroic, but their de�ance resulted in needless deaths

By Richard Overy

A casualty of the Blitz is carried to an ambulance. Between September 1940 and May 1941, the bombing left 41,480 Britons dead

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towards Bethnal Green, with the approval of his two charges. He told them that he slept every night on the top floor of a block of flats, that had no shelter, listening to the bombs falling around him. “Unless it has me name on it, it won’t git me,” was his conclusion. Brittain thought this was typical of the fatalism expressed by Londoners in the Blitz, firm in the belief that “destiny remains unaffected by caution”. She too on occasion, at the end of a tiring day, chose to sleep in her bed oblivious to the thudding noise of the bombs and guns around her. Brittain survived, but thousands of Londoners who defied the rational impulse to shelter did not.

Bombing deaths in Britain during the nine-month German aerial Blitz on Britain were remarkably high compared with the casualties imposed by most bombing during the Second World War. Between September 1940 and May 1941, 41,480 people were killed, 16,755 of them women and 5,184 of them children. The peak month was September 1940, when 6,968 were killed; the lowest number of deaths occurred in February 1941, with 859 dead, thanks to the poor flying weather. German bombers dropped 58,000 tonnes of bombs in 1940 and 1941. British bombing of Germany in 1940 cost just 950 deaths and in 1941 a further 4,000, inflicted by 50,000 tonnes of bombs dropped by the RAF on European, principally German, targets. It took 10 tonnes of bombs to kill one German but only 1.3 tonnes to kill a Briton.

The popular explanation for this disparity relies on two surviving myths of the bombing war. First, that German bombing was deliberately terroristic, targeted at civilian populations to force British surrender; second, that RAF bombers only hit military targets, including factories, and spared the civil population as far as possible. Neither of these arguments stands up to scrutiny. The German air force targets were the docks with their associated storehouses and transport facilities, the aircraft engineering industry in the Midlands, and the administrative and financial centre of London. Hitler explicitly rejected the idea of terror-bombing for its own sake, partly from fear of retaliation on German cities, partly from the fact that it made greater strategic sense to bomb Britain’s ports and food stocks in order to force Britain to negotiate rather than suffer the damaging effects of blockade. The RAF, on the other hand, gave up bombing only military-economic targets in 1940 and by July 1941 was formally directed to target working-

class residential areas. British bombing, however, was so inaccurate that a high proportion of bombs fell on the countryside, not always harmlessly, but in districts that were sparsely populated.

Why then did German bombing exact such a heavy toll? Part of the answer lies in simple facts of geography. German bombers on the coast of north-west Europe were close to British targets, most of which were at or near the coast and as a result much easier to find and hit because of the coastal or estuary outline. The main ports, including London, had easily identifiable dock areas where a high concentration of bombs was dropped. Around the docks clustered poorly constructed working-class housing, crowded with the families of dockworkers and labourers, which were regularly hit because of their proximity to the chief targets. In the raids on Birmingham and Coventry, heavy damage was sustained by the engineering industries, but here too low-cost, crowded housing abutted the factories and suffered extensive damage, chiefly from fire. Bombing at night, even for the German air force, assisted by electronic navigation aids and high levels of training, inevitably hit the areas around the docks or factories. German airmen were not shy about killing workers and their families, but it was not their principal aim.

Yet geography is only part of the explanation. The high level of casualty was a product of British circumstances more than German ‘frightfulness’. The only way to protect the vulnerable populations was to ensure that they had adequate shelter, and to insist on a high standard of shelter discipline. Neither was the case in Britain. Shelter was most inadequate in precisely those areas where the bombing was at its heaviest. Shelter discipline, despite years of publicity on effective civil defence precautions and sensible air-raid behaviour, was surprisingly lax. Every night of the bombing thousands of people chose to defy the threat by remaining out in the open, or in bed, or in their front parlours, and every night a fraction of them were killed. The shelter programme began well before the onset of the Blitz but it was a patchy achievement, made worse by the wide differences dictated by the British class system. Middle-class householders were much more likely to have a house with a cellar or basement to convert into a makeshift bunker, or a garden where one of the metal Anderson shelters, made available in their millions during 1940, could be dug

into the earth. Better-off residents found it easier to move to the country, staying in

IN NOVEMBER 1940 NOVELIST VERA BRITTAIN AND A FRIEND

took a taxi through the ruined areas of the East End of London. On

the way an air-raid alarm sounded, and a policeman stopped the taxi

and warned the driver and passengers to take shelter. The taxi-man

glared at the policeman with “unutterable contempt” and carried on

A Junkers Ju 88A-1, one of the bombers the Luftwaffe sent against Britain in the Blitz


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gave no protection from a direct hit or from a bomb falling nearby or from the collapse of a nearby building. Some had thick concrete roofs which collapsed and crushed the occupants when the weaker brick walls gave way. In some boroughs there was no proper cement for low-priority building and poor-quality mortar had to be used. The result was the collapse of some of the shelters after just a heavy shower of rain. The trench and brick shelters soon had a reputation for tragedy and the local population avoided them. By spring 1941 a survey found that during raids only seven per cent of the places in trenches and eight per cent in brick shelters were actually occupied. In a survey carried out by the government scientist Solly Zuckerman it was found that 51 per cent of families that stayed in cities during the Blitz either did not or could not take shelter.

Both the national and local authorities knew they should try to protect the population, and millions were assisted through formal evacuation schemes, though millions chose not to leave, since it was not compulsory. There were public shelter spaces for just one tenth of the vulnerable populations, domestic shelters (which could be anything from a

broom cupboard under the stairs to a well-proportioned basement) for another 40 per cent. In the districts where shelter was most likely to be needed, however, the effort to get the population to comply with basic protection was often difficult. In Hull, for example, officials found a poor response to the offer of Anderson or brick surface shelters. In one street of 26 properties, five agreed to have a shelter, nine refused, seven failed to respond, three had nowhere to put one and two were shops. Following the city-wide survey of Hull, 1,279 households cancelled their request for a shelter. This was regarded as a free choice, but those who refused found it difficult to get a shelter when they changed their mind.

Citizens were not always free to choose whether to have a shelter or not, nor were they always free to choose to shelter if there was nowhere safe for them to go. The shelter system was rough-and-ready, though it improved substantially in the year following the Blitz. There were nevertheless many people who actively chose not to shelter since it was not compulsory (as it was in Germany). To a modern audience this seems a crazy decision to make. People could also fluctuate in their sheltering habits, choosing to shelter for a few days or a week and then deciding to run the risk of sleeping in their own beds. Solly Zuckerman was so puzzled by this phenomenon that he set up an investigation in 1941 based on interviews with civil defence personnel to discover whether the bombed population was unnaturally fatalistic or else “apathetic or careless of life”, but he could find no answer that satisfied him.

Fatalism was certainly one of the explanations. The popular slogan that the bomb that killed you ‘had your name on it’ is not just a Blitz myth, but is recorded in wartime diaries and eyewitness accounts. After a flurry of sheltering in the first weeks of the Blitz in

“It was found that 51 per cent of families

that stayed in cities during the Blitz

either did not or could not take shelter”

Londoners emerge safely from underground bomb shelters following a raid. There were public shelter spaces for just

a tenth of those civilians at most risk of being bombed

hotels or lodgings or with friends, and in many cases already lived in the suburban outskirts rather than the crowded city centres. In poorer districts the local residents who had no access to a secure public shelter, and no cellar, crowded where they could – under bridges, in tunnels, warehouse basements or caves. In London, thousands of them sheltered in the Underground system, though even at the peak the stations housed only a tiny fraction of the Londoners threatened each night by the bombs.

The local authorities responded to the prospect of bombing by building a large number of the cheapest and most easily constructed shelters. These consisted of trenches and pavement shelters made of brick and concrete. The trenches were often waterlogged and in many cases without the internal construction necessary to prevent the sides from collapsing or to avoid the effects of bomb blast, which in simple trenches could kill all the occupants huddled inside. The pavement shelters, jerry-built in their thousands all over Britain, C

ORBIS


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THE HISTORY ESSAY

September 1940, Londoners developed a growing insouciance. A government survey found that by the end of the month the number claiming to get no sleep had fallen from 31 per cent to just three per cent, suggesting that many now chose to spend their nights in bed rather than propped up in shelters where there were still no proper bunks. Among civil defence recollections published during the Blitz, or shortly after, there are numerous stories of bodies dug out of the rubble of their bedrooms, or of pedestrians out on the streets after the sirens had sounded, or onlookers watching a distant raid until suddenly caught out by a random bomb.

One journalist returning to her block of flats during a raid found the caretaker and his wife sitting calmly eating their supper as bombs fell outside. When she asked them why they were not afraid, the wife replied: “If we were, what good would it do us?” They carried on eating and the journalist went upstairs to bed, determined to risk the bombs as well, if the caretaker’s wife could do it.

But alongside the fatalism could be found examples of exhilaration, bravado and deliberate risk-taking. The writer Vera Brittain observed London’s wealthy bright young things “Playing No Man’s Land”, dodging the bombs during a raid to go from party to party. Others confessed that they were fascinated by the spectacle, and stood and watched from unsafe roofs and balconies rather than seek shelter. There was even a patriotic refusal to shelter, on the (certainly questionable) grounds that Hitler would have won if everyone were forced underground when the bombs started falling. One woman near Coventry decorated her home with Union Jacks and sat under them during a raid, defiantly British. Many stories of the Blitz have highlighted the bloody-mindedness of the population, so much so that British stoicism and defiance have become embedded in popular memory of the bombing. This was not a myth. British civilians died not just because of poor housing and shelter, but because they took the risk of defying the bombs rather than kowtow to Hitler.

“British civilians died not just because of poor housing

and shelter, but because they took the risk of

defying the bombs rather than kowtow to Hitler”

Even in wartime, life went on. Here a group of Londoners in the East End sit down for a cup of tea in September 1940GE

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time on I gambled on my luck and never darkened the door of a shelter again.”

Daniell’s account, written in 1941 as the bombing was going on, reveals a variety of motives for running risks, not least the widespread distrust of the clearly inadequate shelter provision. The risks were considerable, though statistically supportable. In the end only 0.23 per cent of the London population was killed. Ordinary people, of course, did not make this arithmetical calculation but they nevertheless had a sense that the gamble was not entirely irrational. Raymond Daniell recalled that “the odds on a miss were strongly in our favour”. In areas with smaller populations and limited urban amenities, the damage was proportionally greater, and the response in places such as Plymouth, Hull or Southampton was a mass exodus into the surrounding countryside that continued in some cases for months after the bombing was ended. Here the chance of death was higher.

The high number of dead and seriously injured during the Blitz resulted from a combination of factors – the accuracy and high concentration of German bombing, the poor level of shelter provision in the dense residential areas around docks and factories, and the poor level of shelter discipline. Choosing not to shelter had many possible causes, whether from defiance, or fatalism, or ignorance, or daring. One of the costs of the stubborn and phlegmatic British character at the heart of the Blitz story, even if it is now considered to be exaggerated or romanticised, was a higher register of dead than there would have been if the state had been more alive to the social realities facing the threatened population by providing a better shelter system or insisting on evacuation, and if the people themselves had been more willing to do what they were told.

Richard Overy is professor of history at the University of Exeter.

His latest book The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 has just been

published by Allen Lane

“The o�ce boys gave up sheltering a�er a night

or so because they lost too much money playing

cards with others escaping the bombing”

Next month’s essay: Max Hastings explains why Britain was compelled to go to war in 1914

There was no single or simple explanation, either material or psychological, for why so many chose not to shelter automatically when the sirens sounded. An illuminating example of the variety of responses can be found in the story of another London-based journalist, the New York Times reporter Raymond Daniell. After the first raids in September 1940, he found that the office boys gave up sheltering after a night or so because they lost too much money playing cards with others escaping the bombing. Daniell and his colleagues stayed above ground during raids, impervious to the request of the local air-raid warden to go down to the shelter. “Go home you German pig!” could be heard every now and again shouted out by one of the office staff.

Daniell stayed in his apartment during air raids, reading and drinking. He had a driver and car at his disposal, but during raids the driver refused to shelter and instead slept in the car in case someone should try to steal the tyres. After a few weeks of sleeping uncomfortably, Daniell had made the decision to abandon safety altogether: “It occurred to me that instead of being marked for destruction I enjoyed a special immunity from bombs. From that

BOOKS

E England’s Hour by Vera Brittain (Continuum, 2005)E London Was Ours: Diaries and Memoirs of the London

Blitz by Amy Helen Bell (IB Tauris, 2008) E At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain

from the Great War to the Blitz by Susan R Grayzel (Cambridge University Press, 2012) E Blood, Sweat and Toil: Remaking the British Working

Class, 1939-1945 by Geoffrey G Field (Oxford University

Press, 2011)

WEBSITE

E To see BBC clips about the Blitz, including first-hand accounts, go to: bbc.co.uk/history/events/the_blitz

DISCOVER MORE

A woman is pulled from a collapsed house in the capital, 1940. This was a time of widespread fatalism over the

prospect of being hit by a bomb that ‘had your name on it’

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UK

France

Guernsey

Alderney

Herm

Sark

GUERNSEY HISTORY LIVES HEREA NEVER ENDING EXHIBITION - OPEN DAILY

visitguernsey.com/heritage

Birmingham, Bristol, East Midlands, Exeter, Gatwick, Glasgow*, Manchester,

Norwich*, Southampton and Stansted. *Weekly service in peak season only.

Poole, Weymouth and Portsmouth.

FLY FROM

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Rousse Tower is one of 15 similar structures built in the 18th century to defend Guernsey against a

French invasion. It’s been faithfully restored and today you’re free to explore it, to experience what life

was like for soldiers stationed there. It’s just one of the many exhibits that make up the world-class,

living museum that is Guernsey. An island that’s brimming with prehistoric sites, ancient forts and

abandoned World War Two relics which can all be explored as part of four self-guided Heritage trails

(available at visitguernsey.com/heritage). And when you’ve fi nished with the exhibits, Guernsey has

plenty of great shops, cafes and restaurants that are also ready and waiting to be explored.

Discover Guer�sey’s u�ique history a�d heritage. Order your free Guernsey brochure today. Freephone 0800 028 5353

quoting ref: 1358/10 or go to visitguernsey.com

Getti�g to Guer�sey is easy. Flights take as little as 30 �i�utesa�d fast ferries arou�d 2½ hours.


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Radio Times at 90

Changing TimesCelebrating 90 years since the BBC published the �rst issue of our sister title,

the Radio Times, Sheldon Hall explores what �ve of the magazine’s covers tell

us about both the history of British broadcasting and popular culture

34

In his spoken foreword to the 1942 Crown Film Unit documentary Listen to Britain, Leonard Brockington describes “the BBC, sending truth on its journey around the world”. A modern commentator might speak more cautiously, but in the context of total war against fascism the phrase has real resonance. So too does this

Embracing modernity23 October 1936

If truth be told, most prewar Radio

Times covers were a little dull, as if a magazine covering a sound medium scarcely needed a visual component. But, for what the BBC’s deputy director-general called “this fascinat-ing new development by which sights as well as sounds can be broadcast”, something novel was needed. The world’s first regular high-definition (compared to earlier systems) TV service was heralded with a special edition featuring a strikingly abstract cover design by Eric Fraser. It shrieks modernity. What matter that early broadcasts were for two hours a day, with a rest on Sundays? So what if the service was limited to a 25-mile radius around Alexandra Palace? A “new art” had to start somewhere and transmis-sions began on 2 November 1936.

Counter-claims that the German post office got there first have been convincingly quashed – the Beeb boldly went where no broadcasters had gone before and Fraser’s avant-garde graphic pointed the way.

1940 Christmas cover, among the most topically charged of any festive edition.

The message of keeping calm and carrying on could scarcely be more economically conveyed than by having Santa wear a steel helmet while dispensing reassurance – or perhaps sending truth on its journey.

Christmas under �ire20 December 1940


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Lugubrious funnyman26 February 1960

The lad ’imself embodies the synthesis of media that is the BBC. Born of radio, Anthony Aloysius Hancock (Tony Hancock’s fictional alter ego) and his Half Hour later transferred to television, thereby providing the model for virtually every TV situation comedy that followed. It is said that streets and pubs emptied when Hancock’s Half Hour came on, and that is easy to believe. Not every episode of the television series has survived, but those that have were among the few pre-colour programmes that could be successfully revived at peak time in later decades.

This cover portrait, one of the most prized among collectors of the magazine, was itself revived by the Radio Times in 1985 to mark a profile of the star on the arts documentary Omnibus. Its first appearance in 1960 announced the start of what was to be the last series of Hancock’s show in its original format, after which he had his co-star and rival for laughter, the Carry On mainstay Sid James (inset picture), excised from the scripts.

Green and pleasant land14 July 1977

The annual promenade concerts – the BBC Proms – have perhaps received more Radio Times covers than any other single programme. Iconographic repetition has inevitably crept in over the years, but this 1977 image condenses three distinctive symbols of British life and culture. One is of course the Royal Albert Hall, with all its connotations of the artistic establishment, heritage traditions and patriotic deference. Another is the rolling rural landscape, unsullied by signs of industry or modern living.

But the third is the Radio Times itself, in what is for me its definitive incarnation, with the italicised masthead, elegant white border and thin inset frame lines characteristic of the magazine in the 1970s and early 1980s. The cover template for this period is a design classic – in its refinement, simplicity, order and balance. At a time when Radio Times was the official organ of the BBC, and TV Times that of the brash commercial competitor ITV, there was no mistaking which was which.

Exterminate!11 November 1999

In selecting these cover images, I set myself three restrictions: no soaps, no sport, no royals. I might have added no Doctor Who, but the resurgence of what was formerly a children’s teatime show with residual cult appeal is impossible to ignore. It is the BBC’s success story of the millennium, its new flagship for Saturday night and Christmas Day, and a Radio Times feature subject of great regularity. This 1999 cover actually preceded that revival, marking a BBC Two theme night devoted to the memory of a series that then seemed to have run its course. But in popular culture there is no such thing as a dead concept, only a dormant one, and the Doctor’s reincarnation(s) will surely remain with us for the foreseeable future. The Daleks too refuse to lie down: they stand for Doctor Who’s idiosyncratic, peculiarly British, blend of fantasy, horror and adventure.

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Dr Sheldon Hall is a senior lecturer in film

studies at Sheffield Hallam University

EXHIBITION

E Cover Story: Radio Times at 90, with archive clips, artefacts and original artwork, is on at the Museum of London, 2 August–3 November, museumoflondon.org.uk

ONLINE SLIDESHOW

E historyextra.com/radiotimes

DISCOVER MORE


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37

Tracy Borman reveals how James VI and I’s obsession with devilry consigned

hundreds of unfortunates to the �ames

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This 16th-century woodcut depicts King James VI at the North Berwick witch

trials, the case that first sparked his obsession

The king who hunted witches

King James VI and I, witch hunter


Listen to Tracy

BormanON TH E

PODCAST


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and her head thrawn [wrenched] with a rope according to the custom of that country, being a pain most grievous”. All of this continued for an hour, while the king looked on with “great delight”.

There followed the most dramatic moment of the interrogation when James, responding to something that Agnes had said, leapt up in fury and declared her a liar. But she calmly took him to one side and convinced him of her magical powers by telling him certain “secret matters” that had passed between him and his new wife on their wedding night.

James was astounded at her revelation. “The king’s majesty wondered greatly, and swore by the living God, that he believed all the devils in hell could not have discovered the same, acknowledging her words to be most true, and therefore gave the more credit to the rest that is before declared.” From that moment, his interest in witchcraft deepened into a dangerous obsession.

Mesmerised by magicKnown as the ‘cradle king’, James had become the nominal ruler of Scotland at the age of just 13 months, following the enforced abdication of his mother – Mary, Queen of Scots – in 1567. She had subsequently fled to England, where she remained the captive of Elizabeth I for some 20 years, until her execution in 1587.

His mother’s violent death seems to have inspired in James a dark fascination with magic. “His Highnesse tolde me her deathe was visible in Scotlande before it did really happen,” related Sir John Harington, years later, “being, as he said, ‘spoken of in secrete by those whose power of sighte presentede to them a bloodie heade dancinge in the aire’.”

As soon as the North Berwick trials ended, James commissioned Newes from Scotland, a pamphlet that relayed the whole saga in scandalised language aimed at intensifying popular fear of witches. But he did not stop

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as ‘high treason against God’ –

so all manner of horrors were justi�ed in wringing confessions from

the accused”

The witch-hunts that swept across Europe from 1450 to 1750 were among the most controversial and terrifying phenomena in history – holocausts of their times.

Historians have long attempted to explain why and how they took such rapid and enduring hold in communities as disparate and distant from one another as Navarre and Copenhagen. They resulted in the trial of around 100,000 people (most of them women), a little under half of whom were put to death.

One of the most active centres of witch-hunting was Scotland, where perhaps

4,000 people were consigned to the flames – a striking number for such a small country, and more than double the execution rate in England. The ferocity of these persecutions can be attributed to the most notorious royal witch-hunter: King James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 became James I of England.

The year 1590 witnessed the largest and most high-profile witch trials in Scottish history. No fewer than 70 suspects were rounded up in North Berwick, on suspicion of raising a storm to destroy King James’s fleet as he conveyed his new bride, Anne of Denmark, across the North Sea. Convinced the tempest that had almost cost his life had been summoned by witchcraft, James was intent upon bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Most of the suspects soon confessed – under torture – to concocting a host of bizarre and gruesome spells and rituals in order to whip up the storm. These included binding the severed genitalia and limbs of a dead man to the legs of a cat, then tossing the bundle into the waves, whereupon “there did arise such a tempest in the sea, as a greater hath not been seen”. On another occasion, Satan himself was said to have appeared to the witches and “promised to raise a mist,

and cast the king into England, for which purpose he threw into the sea a thing like a foot-ball”.

James was so appalled when he heard such tales that he decided

to personally superintend the interrogations. He had one of the main suspects, Agnes Sampson, brought to Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh so that he could question her himself. When she “stood stiffly in denial” of the charges against her, she

“had all her hair shaved off, in each part of her body,

King James VI and I, shown in a contemporary portrait by John de Critz the Elder, developed a

fascination with magic – perhaps as a result of the violent death of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots


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“Ordinary people everywhere believed in devils, imps, fairies, goblins and ghosts, as

well as other legendary creatures”

extent, pushing on an open door. Such beliefs had been an integral part of society for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Until the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and even beyond, the Kingdom of Darkness seemed as real as the Kingdom of Heaven, and ordinary people everywhere believed in devils, imps, fairies, goblins and ghosts, as well as other legendary creatures such as vampires, werewolves and unicorns.

Everyone feared evil portents – a hare crossing one’s path, for example, or a picture falling from the wall. A pregnant woman would avoid gazing at the moon for fear that

there. With all the passion of a religious zealot, he set about convincing his subjects of the evil that stirred in their midst. In 1597 he became the only monarch in history to publish a treatise on witchcraft. Daemonologie (literally, the science of demons) was the result of painstaking and meticulous work on James’s part, and must have taken years to complete.

The purpose of Daemonologie wasn’t only to convince the doubters of the existence of witchcraft – it was also to inspire those who persecuted witches to do so with new vigour and determination. James described witchcraft as “high treason against God”, which meant that all manner of horrors were justified in wringing confessions from the accused. Though lacking in original or profound ideas, the fact that it had been written by a king made it enormously influential. It is no coincidence that cases of witchcraft in his kingdom multiplied at an alarming rate thereafter.

James’s subjects were not unusually credulous, however. In persuading them of the evils of witchcraft he was, to a large

it could render her baby insane. In one of his tracts on witchcraft, Puritan preacher George Gifford described a number of signs that were believed to augur evil – from salt spilt at a banquet to the sudden onset of a nosebleed.

James’s beliefs had a dangerously misogynistic core. He grew up to scorn – even revile – women. Though he was by no means alone in his view of the natural weakness and inferiority of women, his aversion towards them was unusually intense. He took every opportunity to propound the view that they were far more likely than men to succumb to witchcraft. “As that sex is frailer than man

The conspirators in North Berwick were, this 16th-century woodcut suggests,

told by the devil to summon the storm that nearly wrecked James’s ship


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is, so is it easier to be entrapped in these gross snares of the Devil,” he argued in Daemonologie, “as was overwell proved to be true by the Serpent’s deceiving of Eve at the beginning which makes him the friendlier with that sex since then.” He would later commission a new version of the Bible in which all references to witches were rewritten in the female gender. In�aming England’s ire James was soon to have an entirely new outlet for his obsession. Elizabeth I died in 1603 without any direct heirs, so the Scottish king was named her successor, becoming James I of England. James found his new subjects a good deal more ambivalent than their northern neighbours (and, indeed, the rest of Europe) on the subject of witchcraft.

Though there had been periods of intense witch-hunting during Elizabeth’s reign, the laws were less stringent and punishments less severe. In contrast to Scotland, the use of torture was outlawed, and convicted witches were hanged rather than burned. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the number of witchcraft trials and executions had declined significantly. There was also a growing scepticism about the existence of witches. James was determined to change all of that.

Barely a year after his accession, the new king ordered that the Elizabethan statute on

witchcraft be replaced by a much harsher version. Until that time, those who practised witchcraft were severely punished only if they were found to have committed murder or other injuries through their devilish arts. In short, it was the crimes caused by witchcraft, not the practice of witchcraft itself, that had been the object of concern.

James, though, wanted the practice of any form of magic to be severely punished, regardless of whether it had caused harm to others. His new statute made hanging mandatory for a first offence of witchcraft, even if the accused had not committed murder. And if the accused was found to have the ‘Devil’s mark’ on their body (a mole or teat-like mark believed to have been made when the Devil sucked on a part of the witch’s body to seal their satanic pact), that was enough to condemn them to death.

James’s new act was quick to take effect. A rash of witchcraft cases were brought before the courts in every part of his new kingdom. Among the most notorious was the Pendle witch trial of 1612. The 12 suspects brought before the court of assizes, all from the area around Pendle Hill in Lancashire, were charged with the murders of 10 people by witchcraft. In total, 10 were found guilty and hanged, one was found not guilty and another died in prison. The account of their trial, written by Thomas Potts, was one of the most

Shakespeare’s witch play

Testament to the eagerness of James’s English subjects to curry favour with their new king was the appearance of a host of plays on the theme of witchcraft. The most famous of them, winning widespread acclaim in its day and ever since, was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is significant that the occasion of its inaugural performance was probably the visit in 1606 of the queen’s brother, the King of Denmark – after all, it was the (allegedly witch-summoned) storm on James’s return voyage from his wife’s native land that had fired his obsession with witchcraft.

Shakespeare wove several references to that voyage into the play – for example, when the First Witch claims that she set sail in a sieve, an accusa-tion levelled at one of the North Berwick witches. The line “Though his bark cannot be lost,/Yet it shall be tempest-tossed” almost certainly alluded to James’s near-death experience.Macbeth instilled fear that

witchcraft was not just a satanic confederacy but also a conspiracy against the state. The latter notion was readily accepted at that time because the play was performed just a few months after one of the most notori-ous conspiracies in history: the Gunpowder Plot.

Witches for the kingThe inclusion of witches in Macbeth – shown here being performed at Shakespeare’s Globe this year – was an attempt by the playwright to ingratiate himself with King James VI and I, who was known for his fascination with witchcraft


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popular works of the day and helped secure the Pendle witches’ place in history.

Potts’s account was one of many similar pamphlets aimed at stoking the flames of the witch hunts. James’s Daemonologie had been reprinted twice during the year of his accession, and this had prompted a huge resurgence of pamphlets about witchcraft in England. Filled with hell-fire preaching and gruesome, scandalous and lurid details of the cases in question, these small works were devastatingly effective in whipping up popular fear, anger and hatred towards those accused of witchcraft.

As part of a state-controlled printing industry they became among the most valuable means by which the government could manipulate public opinion. Usually written after the accused had been found guilty and executed, they were a way of convincing the wider public that justice had been done. If the actual facts of a case were unsatisfactory, or did not teach a clear enough moral lesson, then they were enhanced, added to or simply changed. Miscarriages of justiceA case in point was The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, Daughters of Joan Flower, neere Bever Castle. Written in the shocked and sententious style typical of many demonological works, it told the story of another controversial witchcraft trial – and one in which the king was personally involved.

In 1613, the Earl of Rutland’s two young sons were stricken by a mysterious illness at Belvoir Castle. The elder of the two died shortly afterwards; the other lingered for a further six and a half years before following his brother to the grave. By the time of the younger’s death, three local women, Joan Flower and her daughters Margaret and Philippa, had been convicted of bewitching the boys. Joan had died in custody and her daughters had been found guilty and hanged at Lincoln Castle in 1619.

The king was, naturally, interested in a case involving one of the most prominent members of his court, but there was another connection. His closest favourite – George

constituted grave miscarriages of justice, but this was one of the most shocking of all.

By the time of the Belvoir witch trial there was growing scepticism about witchcraft, not just in England but throughout

Europe. Even James, the great witch-hunter king, was beginning to have doubts. As one historian put it, he was by this time “more passionate about deer-hunting than ever he had been about witch-hunting”.

During the last nine years of his reign just five people were hanged for witchcraft in England. The growing scepticism was reflected by the almost complete absence of any pamphlets on the subject during the 1620s. Publishers were more reticent about propounding beliefs that were increasingly controversial and had lost a great deal of popularity among the educated and ruling elite. The absence of such publications, therefore, both reflected and helped to accelerate the decline of interest in the subject.

By the time of James’s death in 1625, witchcraft looked set to be consigned to the history books. However, it had not yet run its course. As events in the Civil War and later in North America would show, the late king had unleashed a deadly, unstoppable force that would blight society for decades to come.

Tracy Borman is a historian and

author. She will be discussing

17th-century witchcraft at BBC

History Magazine’s History Weekend

historyweekend.com

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BOOKS

E Witches: A Tale of Sorcery, Scandal

and Seduction by Tracy Borman

(Jonathan Cape, 2013)

WEBSITE

E Would you have been accused of

witchcraft in the 17th century?

To find out, take our test at

historyextra.com/witchtest

Tracy Borman discusses 17th-century

witchcraft on our weekly podcast

E historyextra.com/podcasts

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ON THE PODCAST

“Filled with hell-�re preaching and gruesome, scandalous and

lurid details, witchcra� pamphlets

were devastatingly e�ective in

whipping up popular anger”

Villiers, future Duke of Buckingham – had married Rutland’s daughter, Katherine, shortly after her second brother’s death. As the only surviving child, Katherine stood to inherit one of the richest estates in the kingdom. Her new husband therefore had a vested interest in the health of her sickly brother, and there is evidence to suggest that he may have had the boy murdered. He almost certainly commissioned the pamphlet that was published shortly after the Flower sisters’ trial as a means of quelling any doubts as to their guilt. Most witchcraft trials

James took the witch threat so seriously that he researched and published his own treatise

on the subject, Daemonologie


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Britons’ obsession with murderC

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As Britain’s cities expanded in the early 19th century, so too did

the nation’s obsession with murder. Lucy Worsley selects a

series of objects that testify to Britons’ fascination with this most

grisly of crimes – from the Regency to the Second World War

Accompanies the BBC Four series A Very British Murder

“More blood! Much more blood!”

Eric the Skull was the macabre ÔmascotÕ of the Detection Club, founded

c1930 by Dorothy L Sayers and fellow thriller writers.

New members would swear an oath on the

skull, its eyes lit a ghastly red Listen to

Lucy WorsleyON TH E

PODCAST


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Britons’ obsession with murder

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Many people would have regarded John Thurtell as a hero, as this mug attests

A mug hailing a ‘gentlemanlike’ killerThis ceramic mug commemorates murderer John Thurtell who, in 1823, killed a friend during a dispute about money. Thurtell and his victim – William Weare, a fellow dodgy dealer – were denizens of a murky underworld known as ‘The Fancy’, inhabited by professional boxers, promoters and gamblers. The murderer and his somewhat inept accomplices killed Weare in Radlett, Hertfordshire, and threw his corpse into a pond. On discovering that the water was too shallow to hide the body, they pulled it out and tried another pond in Elstree. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Thurtell was easily caught.

There’s a whiff of the 18th century about his career as a murderer. The public took to him because of his good humour and charisma. They also had a more positive image of violent crime than we might expect. In Georgian times, capital punishment was meted out for all sorts of crimes against property as well as for murder, so a captured criminal was often considered unlucky rather than evil – hence the Georgian public’s fondness for dashing highwaymen or a ‘gentlemanlike’ murderer such as Thurtell. Many of the crowd of 40,000 who gathered to watch him hang saw him as a heroic character rather than an evil one.

The editor’s instructions were clear. “More blood!” he demanded. “Much more blood!” Edward

Lloyd was, after all, in the business of publishing ‘penny bloods’, a cheap and lurid form of fiction aimed primarily at a working-class readership. He and his authors were making money out of a new obsession with murder and crime that came to dominate the entertainment industry in the early 19th cen-tury. It’s an obsession that remains with us to this day, when detective stories and dead bodies dominate the TV schedules.

Why did the British become, in the words of the late Georgian writer Thomas De Quincey, a nation of “murder-fanciers”? It was a development linked to urbanisation, industrialisation and, indeed, everything that we might call ‘civilisation’. In the crowded cities of Regency Britain, people no longer knew their neighbours. Until this point, war, famine or disease had been their greatest fears – but now, community ties weakened, strangers represented danger.

In 1811, one particularly horrific set of crimes proved a turning point. The slaughter of a family in the East End, shortly followed by a further triple killing, became known as the Ratcliffe Highway Murders. In the previous year, there had been only 15 convictions for murder in the whole of Britain. A new terror had entered modern life.

The Ratcliffe Highway Murders inspired an essay, published in 1827 by the opium-addicted De Quincey, called On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. He identified a new phenomenon: the consumption, even enjoyment, of murder. Hearing about or reading about a murder satisfied a ghoulish, slightly guilty appetite for tales of slaughter and suffering that people had now developed.

This craze also took a physical form. Many a living room would have contained the often macabre, sometimes funny but always gruesomely intriguing products created by the murder industry.

I’ve selected just a few of the objects that bear witness to a national obsession with the dark side of human nature…


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“In Georgian times, a captured criminal was considered unlucky rather than evil – hence the public’s fondness for dashing highwaymen or a ‘gentleman’ murderer”

Lucy Worsley enjoys a glass of wine in Spitalfields, London. “In the

crowded cities of Regency Britain, people no longer knew their

neighbours,” she says. Suddenly “strangers represented danger”

Marionettes depicting the ‘Red Barn Murder’The ‘Red Barn’ in the sleepy village of Polstead, Suffolk, was the scene of a crime that became one of the most potent stories of the 19th century. In 1827 William Corder tricked his lover, Maria Marten, into believing that he would elope with her. Instead, he killed her and buried her beneath the floor of the barn. The ceramic depiction of the crime scene pictured below shows William beckoning his victim into the barn. Probably produced in 1828, it became a popular ornament. Though meaningless to those unfamiliar with the story, this item, placed on your mantelpiece, would certainly provide a talking point.

The real-life events of the ‘Red Barn Murder’ were very quickly translated into ballads and broadsides, and inspired melodramas staged in the London theatres. Even country folk could enjoy the story in the form of a travelling puppet show. Performed with the utmost seriousness, these puppet performances were shocking and tragic.

The marionettes of Maria and her murderer shown here belonged to a company that toured East Anglia. They demonstrate how the protagonists conform to the stock characters of melodrama, with its black-and-white tales of passion and revenge. Maria has been turned into a rosy-cheeked virginal maid in white (she had in fact borne three children), while William Corder sports a villainous moustache.

This ceramic depiction of the ‘Red Barn Murder’ crime scene

shows William beckoning his lover, Maria, into a barn

Puppets of William Corder, complete with “villainous” moustache, and his victim, Maria Marten


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Britons’ obsession with murder

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A novel charting the exploits of a racy ‘Lady Detective’

A ‘murder dossier’ that’s short on derring-doThe First World War transformed crime fiction. Late Victorian and Edwardian readers had loved an active, gallant, patriotic detective. In one story, for example, Sherlock Holmes uncovers a German spy, and has no hesitation in using a gun. However, after four traumatic years of war, tales of violent derring-do felt out of place in a nation where, it seemed, nearly every home had lost a son. Detective writers erased the violence from their stories, and turned detection into a peaceful, genteel affair that was rather like solving a crossword puzzle.

Indeed, in the interwar period, murder came to be reconceived as a game. ‘Murder dossiers’ such as this one came with clues such as a bloodstained piece of wallpaper, crime scene photos or a matchstick. The

solution was provided in a sealed envelope at the back.

A middle-class poisoner’s medicine chestIn the 1840s and 1850s the British began to suffer from a new fear of being poisoned. The growing industry of life insurance meant that the relatives of middle-class people now had a pecuniary motive for bumping them off. Dr William Palmer of Staffordshire (hanged 1856), whose medicine chest this reputedly is, was the classic murderer for this newly paranoid age.

A physician who got into debt, he took out various life insurance policies and poisoned several friends and relatives for their money and to benefit from insurance pay-outs. He was particularly frightening to the middle classes, because it now seemed that a murderer might penetrate even a respectable drawing room.

“Our heroine is rather ‘fast’ – she is revealing an ankle, and unafraid to be seen smoking in public”

Working-class people of the 19th century had a taste for blood in their broadsides and ballads, and writers such as Charles Dickens (Bleak House, The Mystery

of Edwin Drood) made stories of crime and detection respectable for middle-class readers, too. A new wellspring of fiction was created in 1842 with the founding of the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan Police Force, but the private detective business remained in good health.

A fresh novelty arrived in the 1860s: a rash of novels about female private eyes, including Revelations of a

Lady Detective by WS Hayward, published in 1864. The cover art suggests that our heroine is rather ‘fast’ – she is revealing an ankle, and unafraid to be seen smoking in public. But the ‘Lady Detective’ is also admirably free-spirited. At one point, while chasing a villain, she finds it necessary to drop down through a hatch into a cellar. Her fashionable crinoline won’t fit through the hole, so she simply takes it off and abandons it. It’s a wonderful moment of female emancipation: freed from the “obnoxious garment”, as she calls it, she is able to get on with her work.

These cigarette ends were key to tracking the killer down

Did the contents of this chest help Dr William Palmer poison his relatives?

Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) joined a rash of novels about female private eyes


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Lucy Worsley discusses Britons’ fascination with murder in the 19th and 20th centuries in our weekly podcast E historyextra.com/podcasts

ON THE PODCAST

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TELEVISION

E A Very British Murder will be broadcast during September on BBC Four

BOOKS

E A Very British Murder by Lucy Worsley (BBC Books, 2013)E Decline of the English Murder (in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays) by George Orwell (Penguin Classics, 2009)

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Lucy Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal

Palaces. She is also an author and broadcaster who

has presented several historical series for the BBCAbout one-eighth of all books published in 1934 were detective novels. It was big business, and the most successful of the authors behind this literary crime wave were women, who excelled at the social observation, the intricate plotting and introducing the large numbers of female characters readers now demanded.

Dorothy L Sayers was the best of these, combining humour and insight into the female condition with crime-solving. She was among the founders of the Detection Club in around 1930, a mutual admiration society for detective novelists. The club developed its own arcane initiation ritual that involved swearing an oath upon Eric the Skull, his eye sockets illuminated with red bulbs. Aspirant members had to promise in their novels “to observe a seemly moderation in the use of Gangs, Conspiracies, Death-Rays, Ghosts,

Hypnotism, Trap-Doors, Chinamen, Super-Criminals and Lunatics, and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science”.

It was all very cosy and enjoyable but eventually interwar detective fiction began to seem a little sterile and repetitive. “Snobbery with violence” was Alan Bennett’s disparaging assessment of the narrow world of the 1930s detective story, where murderous vicars, retired colonels and dowager duchesses abounded, and where the Great Depression and the rise of fascism made no impact. The late 1930s saw a new, morally ambivalent and more violent strand of British crime fiction arrive from America. The works of writers such as Graham Greene edged towards the style of the detective story’s modern successor, the thriller – and something of the ‘fun’ went out of murder.

Eric the Skull, ghoulish creation of the Detection Club

Crime writer Dorothy L Sayers pictured in 1939 with Eric the Skull at a meeting of the Detection Club in London

Some of Britain’s most popular crime writers would have sworn an oath on Eric the Skull


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Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, wearing the

so-called ‘picture hat’ of her own creation. Georgiana is one

of 10 nominees for the title of the best-dressed Briton in history


Ten fashion experts select the men and women

they believe have set the fashion world

alight over the centuries.

Vote for your favourite at historyextra.com/bestdressed

Who’s the best-dressed

Briton in history?

Interviews by Charlotte Hodgman

Fashion

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Fashion

I saw David Bowie (1947–) for the first time on the 1973 Aladdin Sane tour. I was nearly 13 and it was the first time I’d been allowed to go to a gig by myself. The instant Bowie came on stage, with his shock of red hair and sporting a huge pair of platforms, it was as if an alien had landed. I left the gig utterly blown away by Bowie’s music and style (and already planning a change of hair colour): that gig marked the start of a lifelong obsession with music and fashion.

There’s no doubt that Bowie changed youth culture, and he certainly had the sort of rare gift for predicting and anticipat-ing fashion trends that could have made him a designer in his own right. Northern soul, punk, post-punk, new romantic… he was always on the cusp of changing fashions.

One of Bowie’s most iconic outfits was the huge-legged striped bodysuit, designed by Kansai Yamamoto, worn on the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane tours of the 1970s, which helped bring Japanese clothes design to the forefront of fashion. Bowie’s clothes were works of art that were the result of his vision and creativity, and as memorable as his music.

Wayne Hemingway is an English designer. His

Vintage by the Sea event takes place at the Midland

Hotel, Morecambe, on 14 September.

hemingwaydesign.co.uk

David Bowie “A cultural icon always on the cusp of changing fashions” Nominated by Wayne Hemingway

Henry III, pictured wearing one of his many richly coloured cloaks

Anne Messel photographed by Cecil Beaton in c1935. Clothing and items belonging to six generations of the Messel family are represented in the Messel Dress Collection held at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion and Museums

The fifth-longest reigning monarch in British history, Henry III (1207–72) used art and fashion to enhance his authority, and is the first English king for whom we have detailed household records describing the purchase of clothes and jewellery. As well as containing detailed descriptions of the king’s coronation and burial garments – fashioned from red samite, a heavy gold-embroidered cloth – they also reveal Henry III had a keen eye for detail. For Easter 1235, Henry III had three

Henry III“A king who used clothes to enhance his reputation”Nominated by Dr Benjamin Wild

sets of garments made: the first was of burnet, an expensive and dark (blue) fabric, trimmed with miniver (white fur); the second set was made of murray, a brown cloth, trimmed with vair; the third set was made of green cloth and trimmed with the grey and red spring fur of the northern squirrel.

Henry was one of the first kings to really acknowledge the significance of sartorial style in politics. When he was trying to persuade his barons to cough up funds to support his second son’s planned conquest of Sicily, Henry dressed the boy in a set of Sicilian coronation garments. The spectacle would have been doubly impressive as the meeting occurred in Westminster Abbey, which Henry was in the process of transforming.

Dr Benjamin Wild is a historian of men’s fashion

and guest lecturer at the Condé Nast College of

Fashion & Design. linleywild.com


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As a prominent royal, Edward VII’s wife Alexandra (1844–1925) was acutely aware of her duty to dress appropriately, yet managed to influence British fashion, often without meaning to do so.

Alexandra was tall and slim in an age when a fuller figure was in vogue – the bodice of her wedding dress measured just 21.5 inches – but she dressed to suit her body type, eschewing bustles and fishtail trains and adopting a feminised version of the male suit, consisting of a tailored jacket and skirt. She brought this look into everyday fashion.

Another unintended look made popular by Alexandra was that of the choker necklace – usually worn with evening dresses – and high-necked blouses. Striking to look at, the queen’s choice of jewellery was, in fact, designed

to disguise a scar on her neck, the result of a childhood illness.

Having examined a number of Alexandra’s dresses, I believe she may have suffered from a curvature of the spine – probably an indirect result of the rheumatic fever she suffered in 1867. Yet she avoided speculation about her health by making structural changes to her clothing. To have lived in the public eye for 60 years and successfully kept this disability from an increasingly sophisticated press demonstrates Alexandra’s sartorial eye. She may not have been a fashion leader, but she set trends that survive today.

Kate Strasdin is assistant curator at Totnes

Fashion and Textile Museum, Devon, and

associate lecturer at Falmouth University

Queen Alexandra

“A dutiful queen who used fashion to conceal a disability” Nominated by Kate Strasdin

Born in an era when women’s fashions were somewhat rigid, Anne (1902–92), who became the 6th Countess of Rosse in 1935, defied the prevailing norm, choosing to take her inspiration from history, and from the clothing of her ancestors.

Even as a young woman, Anne possessed an incredible awareness of history and narrative, preserving and wearing items of clothing that had been worn or collected by three generations of women before her. There was little financial value in many of the pieces of clothing she chose to preserve – many were past repair – but to Anne they held a poignant beauty of their own, evoking memories of family and providing tangible examples of lives lived. Each piece was carefully packed and stored in tissue, often with an accompanying note. One dress – by Jacqmar of London, decorated with purple glass beads – was stored with a handwritten note that read: “Had a wonderful time in this am ashamed to say. 1941!!” Anne was also proactive in creating her own look, using her needlework skills to embellish her clothing: virtually unheard of in the 1920s and 1930s.

Anne came from a family of famed collectors and gardeners, and this rich heritage provided inspiration for her clothes, with flowers – both fabric and real –featuring heavily in her designs. But Anne is more than just a fashion icon: she was an extraordinary woman, in any era, who regarded clothes as holders of memory and history, curating them for future generations in a very personal way.

Amy de la Haye is professor of dress history and

curatorship at London College of Fashion. She is curator of

a new exhibition on Coco Chanel – see page 83 for details

Anne Messel “A society beauty who regarded clothes as the holders of memory” Nominated by Amy de la Haye

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David Bowie in his iconic striped bodysuit, 1973. “His clothes were works of art,” says designer Wayne Hemingway

The then Princess Alexandra pictured in 1884 wearing the high-necked, feminised version of the male suit that became associated with her

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Thanks to late 18th-century caricatures that portray him as fat, hirsute and unkempt, Whig politician Charles James Fox (1749–1806), known as ‘The Eyebrow’ to his friends, might seem like an unlikely fashion hero. However, he used clothes successfully and strategically to political ends, clearly understanding the power of clothing as a brand. As a young man he was a leader of the ‘macaronis’ – elegant young men identified by their adoption of flamboyant continental court fashions that included red-heeled shoes, expensive silk suits and elaborate lace frills.

But for Fox and his set, macaroni dress was more than a personal style. It was also a purposeful political statement intended to broadcast opposition to the government and English court through overtly European sartorial references, and the selection of foreign over home-made fabrics.

Fox continued to use fashion to further his political cause throughout his career. He left his wigs unpowdered to protest against William Pitt’s taxation policies (which included a tax on hair powder) and adopted the blue and buff colours of George Washington’s army as the colours of the opposition Whigs. His dishevelled appearance in later life was, it’s been argued, a premeditated statement of his claim to be a ‘Man of the People’, and his distance from the clean-cut William Pitt.

Long before Boris Johnson left his shirt untucked, or Tony Blair took off his tie, Charles James Fox understood, crafted and promoted fashion as a political tool.

Dr Hannah Greig is a lecturer in early modern history at the

University of York. Her most recent book is The Beau Monde:

Fashionable Society in Georgian London (OUP, 2013)

Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), was the most stylish British woman of the late 18th century and a fashion innovator in her own right. Dubbed the ‘Empress of Fashion’, Georgiana demonstrated her creativity and eye for style with many innovative creations. One of her most recognisable pieces was the ‘picture hat’ – a wide-brimmed, medium-crowned black hat not unlike the cavalier hats of the early 17th century (see page 51). The hat sent the millinery world into a frenzy and women scrambled to have their own versions made.

But Georgiana was not afraid to shock. Indeed, she was probably the first English woman to wear the chemise a la reine, a dress of thin muslin, loosely draped around the body and belted around the waist with a sash. Resembling an undergarment, the style caused initial outrage in England and France, but soon became popular.

In much of her personal life Georgiana was powerless, trapped in an unhappy marriage, but in fashion she definitely reigned supreme.

Katy Werlin is a fashion

and textile historian

specialising in the

early modern period.

katywerlin.com

Charles James Fox “A shrewd statesman who employed fashion as a political tool” Nominated by Dr Hannah Greig

Georgiana Cavendish“Empress of Fashion” Nominated by Katy Werlin

Fashion

Charles James Fox in the blue and buff colours of George Washington’s army – “just one of many politically driven fashion statements he employed,” says Hannah Greig

Georgiana Cavendish sporting her favourite ‘pouf’ hairstyle in a portrait from c1775/76. Her hairstyles could reach three feet in height

This near life-size c1592 portrait of Elizabeth I hangs in Hardwick Hall’s Long Gallery. She wears a dress embroidered with serpents, sea monsters and flowers


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55

Tall, good-looking and immaculately groomed, George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778–1840) revolutionised men’s fashion in Regency England, rejecting the lavish fabrics, ruffles and general fussiness of the early 18th century, in favour of elegant restraint. Labelled the first true dandy for his obsession with his personal appearance, Brummell favoured short-fronted, swallow-tailed coats in dark colours, fitted pantaloon trousers, starched linen shirts and pale waistcoats. His one nod to flamboyance was a ‘showily tied’ linen neckcloth or cravat, tied and retied until the creases fell perfectly. This move away from knee breeches to a more modest trouser, jacket and neckwear combination is seen as a forerunner to the modern suit and tie.

To the casual eye, Brummell’s style was one of nonchalance – a simple look that appeared effortless. The reality, however, was quite the opposite: Brummell is said to have taken six hours a day to get ready, had his boots polished with champagne, and went through dozens of neckcloths before the creases were deemed perfect. As sartorial advisor to the Prince Regent, Brummell’s influence spread widely in England and France. Brummell allegedly said of himself: “I have no talents other than to dress; my genius is in the wearing of clothes.”

Rachel Dickens is deputy art editor

of BBC History Magazine

Elizabeth I (1533–1603) stands out for the perfection with which she dressed through-out her long reign. A unique virgin ruler, she was not afraid of fashion and fantasy, but ingeniously drove its connection on. Hers was not a world of predictable cuts and monochromes, but of invention and allusion: one of her lace scarves was mischievously embroidered with a “hideous large black spider” on it, which frightened a foreigner “as if it were natural”.

Elizabeth’s attention to detail was both intricate and playful. She endlessly drew attention to her fine white hands by repeatedly pulling her gloves on and off.

ÔBeauÕ Brummell “The founder of the modern suit” Nominated by Rachel Dickens

Elizabeth I “A queen of pearls and �ne satins” Nominated by Ulinka Rublack

Her whole attire was a perfect performance of gravity: even in her 60s, with an ageing face and rotten teeth, Elizabeth managed to mostly defy the misogynist conventions of the time, which dwelt so insistently on women’s physical decline. She would still look “gorgeously apparelled”, dignified and, in that sense, youthful in spirit.

Elizabeth was a queen of fine satins, emblematic embroidery, and loved to decorate her gowns with jewels and pearls (symbols of virginity). Novel features in her dress included ‘masculine’ jerkins, worn over doublets. But she was not wildly extravagant in her expenditure: in 1603, her entire wardrobe numbered 1,900 items. This might seem huge, yet it included every dress-related item she owned, down to single buttons.

Ulinka Rublack is author of Dressing Up:

Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe

(OUP, 2010)

Original dandy Beau Brummell dressed in a

forerunner to the modern suit, 1805. Looking this

good took Brummell six hours a day to accomplish

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Fashion

WEBSITE

E See what you would look like as Napoleon, Queen Victoria and others in our interactive

fashion gallery.

Simply upload a picture of yourself at historyextra.com/fashion and choose your outfit

POLL

E Vote for the man or woman you think deserves the title of the best-dressed

Briton in history. We’ll announce the results of the poll on our website on 15 October. To vote, go to: historyextra.com/bestdressed

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The decade following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 saw luxurious and novel fashions become a key feature of life at court. For me, diarist Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) exemplifies the Restoration courtier who valued fashion and spent large amounts of money on looking good.

We don’t automatically see Pepys as a fashion icon because we don’t have many paintings of him, but anyone reading his diary comes away with the sense that Pepys was, nonetheless, an avid follower of fashion, recording in detail the clothes that both he and his wife wear, as well as his fashion dilemmas: “…put on a summer suit this year; but it was not my fine one of flowered tabby vest, and coloured camelotte tunique, because it was too fine with the gold lace at the hands…”

Keeping up with social superiors was also important to Pepys. When he heard that the Duke of York was to adopt the 1660s fashion for periwigs (a decision that involved shaving off your natural hair), the dithering Pepys finally decided to take the plunge. At times he even hired clothing to appear more fashionable: the brown ‘banyan’ gown (worn for receiving visitors) seen in the portrait that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery was bor-rowed for the occasion as it looked more expensive than his own version.

Anna Reynolds is curator of paintings for

Royal Collection Trust. She is also curator of

the current exhibition, In Fine Style: The Art of

Tudor and Stuart Fashion, at the Queen’s

Gallery, London. royalcollection.org.uk

An English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ellen Terry (1847–1928) brought the drama of the stage to her everyday apparel, favouring the rich colours, heavy fabrics and loose cuts that characterised the aesthetic movement of the late 19th century. Dubbed ‘The Cult of Beauty’, this was a movement that shaped the dress and decor of a certain set within society – by 1879, Terry was being hailed as its symbol.

But she was more than a fashion icon. Terry understood the powerful role that dress can play as a means of communicating the identity of the character she was impersonating on stage, yet recognised and exploited the fact that it was also possible to use dress as a vehicle through which to fashion her personal and public identity off stage.

One of Terry’s most iconic and memorable outfits was the ‘beetlewing dress’, which she wore as Lady Macbeth in 1888. It was crocheted from a bohemian yarn with strands of blue tinsel running through it, and covered with irides-cent green beetlewings. Artist John Singer Sargent, who was in the audience for the play’s first night, apparently exclaimed, “My God!” when Terry first strode on stage in the dress, declaring that he had to paint her. More of a fashion rebel than a leader, Terry was an individual who appreciated and understood the art of dress.

Veronica Isaac is assistant curator

in the Department of Theatre and

Performance at the V&A, London.

vam.ac.uk

Samuel Pepys “An avid follower

of fashion” Nominated by Anna Reynolds

Ellen Terry “A fashion

rebel who

understood

the art of dress” Nominated by

Veronica Isaac

Samuel Pepys in his hired banyan

gown, 1666

John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Ellen Terry in her ‘beetlewing dress’. The artist first painted Terry in 1889 after seeing her perform as Lady Macbeth


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historyextra.com

/podcasts

New history titles, reviewed by experts in their field

BOOKS

INTERVIEW / TOM HOLLAND

“Herodotus gives us access to someone’s speech, their opinion, 2,500 years ago”

Tom Holland has spent almost nine years producing a new translation of Herodotus’s The Histories, widely credited as the founding work of non-fiction in the western world. He talks

to Matt Elton about its importance, and the insights it can offer us into the classical age

Tom Holland outside his London home with a bust of Herodotus, July 2013. “The revolutionary quality of his work cannot be overestimated,” he argues

Photograph by Helen Atkinson


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Books

TOM HOLLAND

Born in Oxford in 1968, Holland graduated from Queens’ College, Cambridge with

a double first in English. His books include In the Shadow of the Sword (2012) and

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom (2008), as well as

several works of historical fiction. He has adapted authors including Herodotus and

Homer for dramatisations on BBC Radio 4, where he also presents Making History

Are we right to see Herodotus’s work

as genuinely revolutionary?

Yes. Not only is it the first work of history, it’s also the first work of non-fiction, so it’s the first attempt to portray the reality of the world. And so, in that sense, it’s the start of the process that has culminated in the enormous array of information that we now have on the internet. Wikipedia’s ambition to contain all the knowledge of the world begins with Herodotus.

What is moving about it is that we are so habituated to the presumption that we can understand the world in terms of non-fiction that it takes an enormous leap to understand that what Herodotus was doing had never been done before, and so the revolutionary quality of his work cannot be overestimated.

What was Herodotus’s ambition

when he started writing?

In the very first sentence of the very first work of history ever written, Herodotus says that his ambition is to explain what it was that led the Greeks and the barbarians to go to war. But ultimately what he demonstrates is his understanding that he lives in a world in which something like that requires an explanation, essentially, of the entire world. He sees it as a world war: a world in which Asia and Europe, barbarians and Greeks, and the imperatives that drive them into conflict, cannot be summed up without reference to the entire sweep of world history.

Do we get a sense of how he went

about writing the work?

We do. He is at pains to demonstrate how it was that he came by his evidence, and in the course of his history alludes to the different types of evidence. For instance, he tells us that he had spoken to someone who had sat next to a Persian just before the battle of Plataea, the last great battle in which the Persians were defeated. And with that he gives us a sense of what the state of Persian morale was on the eve of this battle, and it sends a shiver down the spine. Because what you have there is access to someone’s speech, someone’s opinion, 2,500 years ago.

Herodotus’s history is also ethnographic. He’s the first travel writer: he gives us detailed accounts of Egypt, of Scythia, of Babylonia. There has been much debate, and some scepticism, as to whether he actually went to these places. It seems to me indisputable

that he was indeed a widely travelled man. He must have gone to Egypt, and probably to Babylonia. That he sometimes gets things wrong is proof to me, not that he was a liar, but of the authenticity of his experience as a traveller in foreign and bewildering lands.

You’ve said that the work shows

how alien Greek culture was

Herodotus is amazingly alert to the relative quality of custom. He has this famous story in which he describes Darius, the king of the Persians, summoning people, Greeks and Indians, from the margins of his empire. Darius says to the Greeks, who burn their dead: “What would it take for you to eat your parents when they’re dead?” And the Greeks throw their hands up in horror and say nothing. Then he turns to the Indians, who eat their dead as a matter of custom – so Herodotus says – and asks: “What would it take for you to burn your dead?” and they also throw their hands up in horror.

Now there’s a further dimension to that: Herodotus is taking as his standard not a Greek, but a Persian, which is amazing. It’s really important to emphasise that he is amazingly alert to how various human culture is: far more so, I would suggest, than many a columnist writing now.

Such tales occur throughout the work.

Are there any similar diversions that

you think are particularly instructive? I first read Herodotus when I was very young, because I got obsessed with the Persian wars. I got the two volumes from the library, and read that opening sentence and thought, “Brilliant, it’s going to tell me all about Marathon, and Thermopylae, and this is what I want.” And I was slightly gobsmacked that he was veering off all over the place, like a huge shaggy dog story. He does say within his narrative that digressions are part of his plan, however he makes no apologies for it.

When I was young, I was frustrated: I wanted to cut to the chase, to get to Marathon

and Thermopylae. Now, I just wish that there had been more digression, because there’s not one that isn’t interesting. And put together, the effect is to give us an absolutely unri-valled portrait of a world that has been dead and gone for 2,500 years. We would just know infinitely less about that period without Herodotus and his digressions.

How much of a surprise was it that

the Persians lost in 479 BC?

Well, on the one hand, Herodotus gives a sense that the whole of Asia is coming against Greece. The figures he gives for the invasion are astronomical, running into the millions. So in that context, the fact that the Persians do not conquer comes as a remarkable fact, and Herodotus essentially attributes it to Xerxes’ pride: the gods have been angered, and his defeat really is willed by them.

There’s an alternative perspective, which Herodotus is honest enough to acknowledge, which is that, man for man, the Persians are just as brave as the Greeks. So it’s not as if Herodotus is chauvinist in any way. He’s not saying that the Persians are feeble, or soft, effeminate: he says they’re just as tough as the Greeks, but that they lack the equipment. So in the account of the battle of Plataea he says that essentially it’s not just Spartan courage, it’s military equipment that enables them to win. And I think that there you have the sense of a different tradition in which you can see that what is against the Persians is essentially the physical conditions: the fact the landscape is hard, that there are storms, that these things combine to whittle down what would otherwise be an overwhelming numerical superiority.

Do you hope that readers come away

with a new impression of Herodotus?

I just hope that I can persuade people that it’s worth picking up a book that might seem off- putting. I mean, it’s very big, and was written 2,500 years ago by a bloke with a long white beard. But I can’t emphasise enough, this is a hugely readable book: so entertaining,

and inexhaustible, with surprising and unexpected things on every page.

Herodotus: The Histories –

A New Translation by Tom

Holland (Penguin Classics,

880 pages)

“We would just

know in�nitely less

about the period

without Herodotus” HE

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historyextra.com

/podcasts


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A 19th-century portrait of Simón Bolívar. Marie Arana’s study of the Venezuelan leader is, says Paulo Drinot, “compellingly written”

Bolívar: The Epic Life of the Man

who Liberated South America

by Marie AranaWeidenfeld and Nicolson, 624 pages, £25

Half-a-dozen English-language biographies or detailed studies of Simón Bolívar have been published in the past decade or so. Moreover, one can still find copies of now- classic biographies

by Salvador de Madariaga and Gerhard Masur. Marie Arana’s Bolívar therefore joins a crowded market.

Prior to turning her attention to Bolívar, Arana worked as a literary editor for the Washington Post and wrote novels. Other biographies, particularly John Lynch’s Bolívar: A Life (2007), provide a more scholarly account of Bolívar’s life. But Arana’s biography is nonetheless a highly accomplished study, compellingly written and assiduously researched.

The story Arana tells is familiar to the historian of Latin America. Across 18 chapters, Arana recounts what by any measure is an extraordinary life. Bolívar was born fabulously wealthy in Caracas (in what became Venezuela) in 1783 and died virtually destitute 47 years later in Santa Marta (in modern-day Colombia).

Over several decades, he liberated northern South America from Spanish rule, a territory larger than western Europe or the United States of George Washing-ton. He created Gran Colombia, which later divided into Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador, and established – and briefly ruled – the modern states of Peru and Bolivia. Although he was physically small, Arana leaves us in no doubt that Bolívar was a giant of man.

Typically, biographies are a mode of writing that focuses on ‘great’ men and (less often) ‘great’ women. However, most historians are, rightly, sceptical of the ‘great man theory’ of history. And yet as works such as Ian Kershaw’s magisterial study of Hitler show, biographies can contribute much to our understanding of the past. It is likely that northern South America still would have gained its independence from Spain if Bolívar had died of yellow fever or dysentery at an early age. But it is clear that Bolívar’s beliefs and actions shaped the course of South American independence decisively. It is therefore important to understand what, in turn, shaped those beliefs and actions. This is what biographies such as Arana’s can help us to do.

As the author shows, but perhaps does not reflect sufficiently upon, Bolívar’s trajectory as a warrior and as a statesman was as much a product of his

own individual experience as of the society into which he was born. Arana pays a lot of attention to the former: she paints a very rich picture of Bolívar’s childhood, his

sojourn in Europe, his many lovers, his relationships with his fellow revolutionaries, his subordinates, his enemies, and so on. Arana pays less attention to South American society in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Although Arana does occasionally foreground issues such as the racial

A warrior and statesmanPAULO DRINOT assesses a biography of Simón Bolívar that finds new things to say in an already crowded field of study

Although he was

physically small,

Arana leaves us in

no doubt that Bolívar

was a giant of manBR

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For reviews of hundreds of recent

history books, go to our online archive

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Books

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Continental driftJEREMY BLACK considers an accessible exploration of the causes – and consequences – of the Hundred Years’ War

A Great and Glorious Adventure:

A Military History of the

Hundred Years’ War

by Gordon CorriganAtlantic Books, 320 pages, £30

Full of the fascinating might-have-beens of history, the Hundred Years’ War serves as a reminder of the conflicts and contin-gencies that have shaped nations and states. The Treaty of

Bretigny saw John II of France promise to renounce his claim to sovereignty to Edward III’s extensive continental dominions. Yet, by the time of the Truce of Bruges in 1375, Edward held little more than Calais, Bayonne and Bor-deaux. At the 1420 Treaty of Troyes Charles VI recognised Henry V as his heir and as regent during his reign. However Henry’s son Henry VI was left controlling just Calais after defeats at Formigny and Castillon.

Gordon Corrigan provides an effective narrative of these wars. As he points out, war was important to the development of

nationhood, in France as in England, and also left a lasting enmity (particularly on the French side). The war affected the politics and society of each power. For example, in England, a poll tax designed to fund the war with France pressed hard on the depressed rural economy, leading to high rates of evasion and unrest that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. More generally, the frequent need to raise taxation to pay for warfare led to parliament becoming more important. War could not pay for itself, not least because the government relied on paid troops, rather than a feudal host. Instead, as it became clear that parliamentary consent to taxation was necessary, representatives of the counties and boroughs were given a key role in consenting to taxation.

It is not Corrigan’s goal to locate his subject in the wider context of what led to success in this period, but there are instructive comparisons with the English failure to conquer Scotland and Ireland in the 14th century. Repeatedly, political factors emerge in explaining the failure to translate victory into perma-nent success in France. Aside from the determination of sufficient numbers of the French elite to fight on, there was also the crucial shift in the support of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy. At the same time, home support for the English forces waned. The surprising thing is that the English presence then lasted as long as it did, but the collapse in 1449–51 was swift, and was aided by an effective use of siege cannon by Charles VII.

Defeat helped discredit Henry VI and his ministers, while a crucial precondition of the modern history of the British Isles was the more insular character of England after 1453. It was to be one of the keys to its subsequent domestic and international development.

Jeremy Black is the author of War in the

World: A Comparative History 1450–1600

(Palgrave, 2011)

hierarchies that dominated colonial society to frame her discussion, what drives her narrative is primarily the emergence of Bolívar as a great military leader but a flawed politician.

In building this narrative, Arana gives vivid accounts of the many men and women who interacted with, and influenced, Bolívar throughout his peripatetic existence (for ‘the liberator’ spent his life in constant movement across the north of South America and beyond). These include well-known characters including Francisco de Miranda, José Antonio Páez, Francisco de Paula Santander and, indeed, Manuela Sáenz, Bolívar’s formidable mistress. The book also explores the lives of many less well-known but equally elaborately crafted characters, and these portrayals are matched by equally well-written descriptions of the varied climates and landscapes that Bolívar encountered during his military campaigns, and of the many battles that won him his fame.

Arana’s study is no hagiography. She pays as much attention to Bolívar’s errors of judgment as to his achievements. But she is broadly sympathetic: Bolívar, the book suggests, had noble ideals, foremost among them granting freedom to slaves and the idea of creating a united South America, but circumstance rather than fault of character meant that he was not always able to uphold those ideals. This, Arana argues, accounts for his increasing authoritarianism and, ultimately, his profound disillusionment with the countries and people he helped to free from Spanish domination.

Whether or not we agree with this overall assessment, this biography remains an engaging account of Bolívar’s life.

Paulo Drinot is the editor of Che’s Travels:

The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin

America (Duke University Press, 2010)

Arana gives vivid

accounts of the many

men and women who

interacted with, and

influenced, Bolívar

COMING SOON…

“Next issue, our experts will be reviewing Simon Schama’s

study of Jewish history and Peter Snow’s look at the Burning of

Washington. I’ll also be talking to Michael Jones and Philippa

Langley about The King’s Grave, their take on the discovery

of Richard III’s remains.” Matt Elton, books editor

The maillotin uprising of 1382. Such revolts were a direct result of war, argues Gordon Corrigan


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Saints and sinnersCHRISTOPHER KELLY on a new biography of St Augustine, whose ideas were central to the development of Christianity




WANT MORE ?

Saint Augustine of Hippo:

An Intellectual Biography

by Miles HollingsworthBloomsbury Continuum, 336 pages, £20

Whatever the intentions of its founder, Jesus Christ, Christianity owes much of its success as an institutional religion with a sophisticated theology to two other men:

Saint Paul (and his correspondence with fledgling faith communities in Asia Minor in the first century AD) and Saint Augustine of Hippo (bishop of a thriving seaport on the north African coast in the late fourth century). It was Augustine who crystallised Christian

thought on sin, sexuality and human imperfection. For him, to be human was to sin: it was to repeat a pattern established by Adam and Eve (and the apple and the serpent) in the Garden of Eden, a pattern imprinted indelibly – like a genetic code – on all humanity. This ‘original sin’ was most visible in the temptations of sexual desire. It was a mark of holiness to resist. But no human could go it alone without the help of God: only then could the righteous hope to complete a course of lifelong spiritual rehabilitation.

The delight of Miles Hollingsworth’s new intellectual biography of St Augustine

is to make this often complex theology accessible, and to use it to interrogate one of the Christian Roman empire’s most sophisticated and innovative minds. Thanks to diligent copyists in medieval monasteries, more of Augustine survives than any other writer from the ancient world (and his output is staggering: in modern terms, roughly two substantial academic books a year for 40 years). Not only is Augustine – rightly – credited with developing key Christian ideas, he also wrote a revolutionary autobiography (The Confessions) that might fairly claim to be the first introspective account by an individual of his psychological and spiritual development. Its interior monologue makes it a strikingly modern book, and quite unlike anything else to have survived from antiquity.

Hollingsworth’s strength lies in his presentation of Augustine’s ideas, imaginatively explored from infancy to old age. This is a rewarding book, to be most enjoyed by those interested in intellectual history. Hollingsworth takes the time to explain Augustine’s debt to classical philosophy (especially to Plato, whose insights were then already nearly a millennium old) and to Christian teaching. Most interestingly of all, he frequently pushes further to link these lines of thought to modern philosophical discussions of language, reality and experience.

What’s missing is any equally pressing sense of the history of the Roman empire in the late fourth century AD. To be sure, there are significant gains in concentrating on understanding Augustine as a thinker, but there is also a risk of discounting too quickly the impact on Augustine’s thought of an empire in decline and fall, fracturing under the heavy pressure of barbarian invasions. Too often the reader has the impression of overhearing Augustine and Hollingsworth in their own interior dialogue. In that sense, reading this intellectual biography is like admiring the best of Chinese watercolours: a detailed and beautifully delineated figure stands out sharply against an indistinct and misty landscape.

Christopher Kelly is a fellow of Corpus

Christi College, Cambridge

Hollingsworth frequently

links Augustine to modern

philosophical discussions

St Augustine preaching to his disciples, as seen in a 12th-century depiction. The fourth-century bishop Òcrystallised Christian thought on sin, sexuality and human imperfectionÓ


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Books

MACMILLAN

After the fallPETER JONE S on a study exploring attempts to revive the Roman empire – and how they unwittingly proved successful

Inside the Victorian homeALISON KAY enjoys an entertaining overview of Victorian domestic life, from farming to fashion

The Restoration of Rome

by Peter HeatherMacmillan, 470 pages, £30

The demise of the Roman empire in the west is traditionally dated to AD 476, when Odovacar, a follower of Attila the Hun, deposed the last Roman emperor, Augustulus, and made

himself king of Italy. Anglo-Saxons now ruled much of Britain, the Franks north- eastern and eastern Gaul, Visigoths south- western Gaul and Spain, Burgundians the Rhone valley and Vandals north Africa. Shortly after this, Slavic groups moved into central and eastern Europe.

But Christianity survived and, with it, much of the Roman way of doing things – and with that the temptation to try to restore that lost world. In this brilliant account of what happened next, Peter Heather explains how and why efforts to

How to Be a Victorian

by Ruth GoodmanViking, 464 pages, £20

Ruth Goodman’s intimacy with the tiny detail of domestic life brings the Victorian household alive. Reading How to Be a Victorian is like having a tour guide who has personally

experimented with brushing her teeth with charcoal and has dispensed with

reconstruct the Roman empire ultimately failed, and how they unwittingly laid the foundations for a new sort of Roman empire that lasts to this day.

Theodoric ‘the Great’, leader of the Pannonian Ostrogoths, was the first to try. He made his peace with the eastern Roman emperor in Constantinople, personally murdered Odovacar and established an Ostrogothic kingdom based in Ravenna. He forged alliances with many of the new kingdoms, but it all quickly fell apart at his death. Heather argues that Theodoric was not able to lay foundations for the sort of all-absorbing military base that Rome’s superb armies had provided for its 500-year empire.

The eastern emperor, Justinian, was next up. His brilliant general, Belisarius, conquered the Vandals in north Africa and Ostrogoths in Dalmatia, Italy, Sicily and Rome, and southern Spain was taken. Again, it did not last. Heather argues that this was not so much Justinian’s fault as the result of debilitating conflict against Persia on Rome’s eastern borders and the

washing in water for months on end. Indeed, readers may remember Goodman from the successful BBC television series Victorian Farm, and it is this deep re-enactment experience from which she draws, combined with histories of the period, memoirs, advice manuals and adverts.

The historical narrative is woven very neatly, for the most part, around the rhythm of the day. I found the middle section on schools, laundry and leisure not quite as lively as the early chapters – covering getting up, getting dressed and personal grooming – probably because

these middle chapters offer a fairly standard historical telling. They are, nonetheless, full of meaty detail. Interesting historical characters are also used well throughout, such as domestic servant Hannah Culwick’s negotiation of the lunch-dinner divide and William Arnold’s memories of hunger and isolation when, at the age of six, he was tasked with scaring the crows from dawn to dusk to protect his family’s planted field. Indeed, more of these voices would have been welcome.

The chapter entitled ‘Back at the House’, meanwhile, is an excellent example of how well Goodman binds together exhaustive domestic history – on, say, the complexities of baby dressing – to important wider economic trends, such as the rise of the ready-made clothing market and the growth of

rising threat of Islam after his

death, with Constanti-nople never fully recovering from the consequent loss of vital tax revenue in the near and Middle East.

Enter Charlemagne, the first ‘Holy Roman Emperor’, crowned as such in 800 and by then controlling most of western Europe. Again, Heather argues, it was finances that brought it all down.

These fifth-century brooches, found in

Romania in 1969, formed part of Attila the

Hun’s vast wealth. Finances played a key

role in the period, says Peter Heather


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advertising. Goodman has also worked hard to avoid a homogenous picture of a ‘Victorian’, highlighting differences not only between classes but between town and country. This is most successful in discussions of dressing and fashion.

How to Be a Victorian manages to be both highly entertaining and extremely useful for readers requiring a broad overview of Victorian life. It does not include a bibliography or endnotes, although it is well indexed. Goodman describes her book as “a personal exploration”, aiming to “peer into the everyday corners”, which is something that she achieves extremely well.

Alison Kay is the author of The Foundations

of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise,

Home and Household in London, 1800–1870

(Routledge, 2009)

Since the small medieval state did not have the tax base

or bureaucracy to maintain revenue flow, the only way to increase revenue was to expand.

But doing so cost money, and the cost came to

outweigh the benefits.However, as Heather goes

on to say, Charlemagne had in fact achieved something of

far greater significance than his own empire. His educa-

tional and religious reforms had created a powerfully reinvigo-

rated Latin church with a strong enough identity and institutional base to survive whatever was happening politically, which

turned to a new source of authority: the pope, with a

mandate to serve not just toffs (as the Roman empire had done) but the whole

laity. Rome, in other words, restored – an ‘empire’ that lasts to this day.

This is a beautifully written book that combines sprightly narrative with detailed analysis, but never loses the big picture.

Peter Jones is the author of Veni, Vidi, Vici

(Atlantic Books, 2013)

Paralysed with Fear:

The Story of Polio

by Gareth Williams Palgrave Macmillan, 336 pages, £20

Polio is only in the news these days as a problem in remote countries, where programmes aimed at the final elimination of the disease have stalled due to attacks on health workers.

Yet in the middle decades of the 20th century, polio was the highest-profile disease in western nations. It was feared by the public because of its typically random occurrence and devastating effects on sufferers, most of whom were children. Many died, and those who survived often had to endure weeks in an iron lung, weakened limbs and a lifetime of disability.

In Paralysed with Fear, Gareth Williams demonstrates, with an engaging narrative and critical commentary, that polio was very much a 20th-century disease. It was absent, or at least not recognised, before 1900, coming to prominence in epidemics in the US and then Europe. Its rise was, paradoxically, due to improved sanita-tion: children were no longer being exposed to the virus at low levels in the environment and, as a result, were not acquiring immunity.

The number of epidemics peaked in the early 1950s, by which time how to prevent and control the infection was exercising many of the best minds in science and medicine. Williams details controversies, fuelled by institutional politics and personal ambition, over the nature of the polio germ and how it was communicated, before a consensus built

that it was a virus, spread principally by the faecal-oral route. A great strength of the book is that all of the competing ideas are covered, giving the reader a wonderfully rich picture of 20th-century medicine in all its forms.

At one level, this is a history of a medical triumph, a disease on the verge of extinction, yet Williams shows that there was no single pathway to this outcome. He throws new light on the well-known story of the competing polio vaccines developed by Albert Sabin and Jonas Salk, but this is set in the wider context of responses to a disease that attracted medical and public attention above what might have been expected from its actual prevalence. The title, Paralysed by Fear, highlights how agencies, such as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) in the US, created alarm about polio. They were aided by the support of FD Roosevelt, who suffered paralysis after catching polio in his late 30s, and the fact that a lack of medical agreement on how the infection was spread often led to public health authorities giving conflicting advice.

Paralysed by Fear can be recommended both as a wonderful biography of polio and a revealing story of the development of 20th-century medicine, warts and all.

Michael Worboys,

University of Manchester

A 20th-century diseaseMICHAEL WORBOYS praises a look at the spread of polio – and what it says about recent medical development

By the mid-20th century,

polio was the highest profile

disease in western nations

Children wait for polio injections in

Wandsworth, 1956. Williams’s book

explores the huge impact of the

disease


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TOPFOTO

Spies and SovietsNIGEL JONE S is gripped by a vivid account of the efforts by members of the Secret Intelligence Service to infiltrate Russia

Russian Roulette:

How British Spies Thwarted

Lenin’s Global Plot

by Giles MiltonSceptre, 377 pages, £20

The unhappy history of Britain’s failed bid to prevent the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, and its equally disastrous attempt to turn the tables once they had done so by backing

the ‘whites’ against the ‘reds’ in Russia’s civil war, is well known. Indeed, it should stand as a warning from history to the current government as it contem-plates intervening in Syria’s civil conflict.

Here, popular historian Giles Milton has turned the story on its head by focusing on the daring deeds of a dirty

dozen British secret agents who, though they did not manage to stop the Bolshe-viks, did foil Lenin’s plan to export his revolution to British-ruled India.

Because Milton’s team of spies – with one notable exception – survived their missions, his chronicle of their secret war reads not only like a nail-biting thriller, but a success story, rather than the often farcical fiasco that it was. He’s helped by a cast of colourful characters whose real-life exploits are a Bond novel beyond Ian Fleming’s wildest dreams.

There’s Paul Dukes, the only Briton ever knighted for spying, whose proficiency in disguise – he was known as ‘the man with a hundred faces’ –

The founding father of MI6,

Mansfield Cumming, would

skate along office corridors

enabled him to penetrate the Soviet Politburo itself. There’s Augustus Agar, who won a VC for skimming over mines in a revolutionary craft and torpedoing the cruiser Oleg. There’s Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome, a Guardian journalist whose radical sympathies literally got him into bed with the Bolsheviks – he married Trotsky’s secretary – yet who doubled as MI6 agent S76. And there’s Sidney Reilly, the ‘ace of spies’ himself.

The only member of Milton’s team eventually caught and shot by the Bolsheviks, Odessa-born Reilly, outdid even Dukes in his ability to inhabit multiple identities – all equally convincingly. His downfall came when he tried to take over the reins of power in Russia himself. His coup, coinciding with a nearly successful attempt to assassinate Lenin, provides Milton with a suitably gripping climax.

Pulling the spies’ strings back in London was the original ‘C’, MI6’s founding father Mansfield Cumming. Delightfully eccentric, the one-legged Cumming would skate along his office corridors and idly plunge a paper knife into his false leg in interviews to test recruits’ nerves. Beneath the bonhomie, however, Cumming was a deadly serious operator with an uncanny knack of picking brilliant agents.

The failure to roll back the revolution was not due to any lack of ruthlessness on Britain’s behalf. It has only recently emerged, for example, that a British agent, Oswald Rayner, fired the fatal bullet into Rasputin’s brain to eliminate the sinister influence of the ‘mad monk’ over the Russian imperial court. This gives the lie to those who piously protest that British spies never carry out ‘wet jobs’ – spy slang for assassinations.

Milton has pulled together memoirs by these spies, recent studies by other authors, and newly released files from the National Archives and the India Office to present a coherent, readable narrative from the glory days when spies did a lot more than hack into computers.

Nigel Jones is the author of Peace and

War: Britain in 1914, set to be published

by Head of Zeus early in 2014

Sidney Reilly, ‘ace of spies’, 1925. Milton explores the role of such “colourful characters”

Books


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The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor ConquestTaught by Professor Jennifer Paxton��

�� 1. From Britannia to Britain

2. Roman Britain and the Origins of King Arthur

3. The Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms

4. The Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons

5. Work and Faith in Anglo-Saxon England

6. The Viking Invasions

7. Alfred the Great

8. The Government of Anglo-Saxon England

9. The Golden Age of the Anglo-Saxons

10. The Second Viking Conquest

11. The Norman Conquest

12. The Reign of William the Conqueror

13. Confl ict and Assimilation

14. Henry I—The Lion of Justice

15. The Anarchy of Stephen’s Reign

16. Henry II—Law and Order

17. Henry II—The Expansion of Empire

18. Courtly Love

19 Richard the Lionheart and the Third Crusade

20. King John and the Magna Carta

21. Daily Life in the 13th Century

22. The Disastrous Reign of Henry III

23. The Conquests of Edward I

24. Edward II—Defeat and Deposition

25. Edward III and the Hundred Years’ War

26. The Flowering of Chivalry

27. The Black Death

28. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381

29. Chaucer and the Rise of English

30. The Deposition of Richard II

31. Daily Life in the 15th Century

32. Henry V and the Victory at Agincourt

33. Henry VI—Defeat and Division

34. The Wars of the Roses

35. Richard III—Betrayal and Defeat

36. England in 1485Discover the True Story of Medieval EnglandWhile many of us search for the roots of our world in the contributions of modern England, it’s the medieval history of this country where our search must begin. Understanding this era is key to understanding many of the social, political, and cultural legacies that enrich the 21st century.

The Story of Medieval England: From King Arthur to the Tudor Conquest tells the remarkable drama of a tumultuous thousand-year period in English history; one dominated by war, conquest, and the struggle to balance the stability of royal power with the rights of the governed. Delivered by distinguished scholar and award-winning Professor Jennifer Paxton, these 36 lectures feature a level of detail and attention that offers fresh insights into medieval England: its rulers and subjects, its times of war and peace, its literature and legends, and much more.

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Books / Paperbacks

PAPERBACKS

Prairie Fever: How British

Aristocrats Staked a Claim

to the American West

by Peter PagnamentaDuckworth, 338 pages, £9.99

Although the 19th-century American west supplied a land of opportunity for Britons of all stripes, the

most eye-catching of those who went west were a motley crew of aristocrats. Primed by James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction and George Catlin’s paintings, they wanted to start over, hunt big game or cash in on the beef bonanza. ‘Prairie fever’ generally refers to the malaise afflicting settlers driven crazy by the isolation and privations of the Great Plains. But the prairie fever of Pagnamenta’s title denotes the feeling of exhilara-tion that the oceanic grasslands engendered: the “maddening enjoyment of the present”, to quote a young Briton.

Fortunately for historians, these blue-bloods frequently published details of their escapades – materials that Robert Athearn’s Westward the Briton (1953) and John Merritt’s

Bankside: London’s

Original District of Sin

by David Brandon and Alan BrookeAmberley Publishing, 288 pages, £12.99

Located on the southern riverside of the Thames, Bankside has long held an allure: the darker mirror image of

the trading and political capital across the water. It was a place of pleasure, beyond civic control, made famous by its Tudor reputation as home to theatre, crime, bear-baiting and more.

This is the story that David Brandon and Alan Brooke want to tell. Sadly they do so without much sense of drama, danger or colour. As the bibliography of Bankside shows, this brief digest is over-reliant on secondary sources, including at least four other general histories of the same region and six looking at specific eras.

Covering the moments that define Southwark from the Romans to the present day, the book is strongest – as to be expected – on the Tudor and Stuart city, without trying to define anything more than what was once there. The work grows weaker as it approaches the present day, with the final chapter being little more than an impatient wander through the various tourist sites to be found in the area.

It is also strange to come across the sentence “when completed in 2012, [the Shard] will be the tallest building in the UK, nearly twice the height of the Gherkin, and one of the tallest buildings in Europe”. None of the elements of this observation are particularly accurate, and all in all this

slightly banal book adds little to our understanding of the area.

Leo Hollis is the author of Cities are

Good for You (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Stonehenge:

Exploring the Greatest

Stone Age Mystery

by Mike Parker PearsonSimon and Schuster, 406 pages, £9.99

Stonehenge has inspired more books than any other prehistoric building, and still it requires new work.

The project described by Parker Pearson is different because it shows how the monument was related to other structures in the vicinity. He suggests that it was paired with a monument at Durrington Walls and that they were linked by an earthwork ‘avenue’ and the river Avon.

Durrington was associated with the living, who held feasts there at midwinter. Stonehenge, on the other hand, was dedicated to the dead. People travelled between these places in order to perform their ceremonies.

Nobody can predict the past, but a good archaeologist can predict the future pattern of discovery. This well-written book illustrates that process and compellingly describes the results of a series of excavations and laboratory analyses. They provide good reasons for accepting Parker Pearson’s theory. At last, it would appear that we have genuinely come closer to solving a Stone Age mystery.

Richard Bradley, University

of Reading

See p78 for Richard Bradley’s

view on Neolithic burials

Baronets and Buffalo (1985) also drew on (though Pagnamenta’s notes omit reference to previous studies). Yet Pagnamenta has scoured archives from Montana to Northamptonshire to produce an account based on an unrivalled collection of primary sources that represents the most comprehensive discussion to date of ‘toffs in the wilderness’ (the splendid title of a Wall Street Journal review of the 2012 hardback edition).

Pagnamenta provides a deeply satisfying and smoothly written account of madcap lives that is not just rich in anecdote (who doesn’t want to read about a Scottish lord who hunted in a white leather jacket and tartan trews?) but also analysis. Among the intriguing insights is the Etonian/Oxonian frame of reference that shaped responses to the Indians’ love of hunting and horses. And, as Pagnamenta usefully reminds us, this merry band of Brits abroad inscribed a record in the landscape too: ploughed-up shards of glass from the beer bottles of the ‘British boys’ who colonised the long-gone Kansas community of Runnymede, for instance, and the Douglas firs that now line estates in Scotland.

Peter Coates, University of Bristol

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Hunting buffalo as depicted in an 1830s engraving.

Peter Pagnamenta’s book explores life on the

American plains


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Books / Fiction

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Life in the mean streetsNICK RENNISON enjoys an evocative detective novel that takes in corruption and slave-catchers in 1840s New York

Seven for a Secret

by Lyndsay FayeHeadline, £19.99, 416 pages

New York in the 1840s is a city of violence and deprivation. Timothy Wilde is a member of a police force that has only recently been established in the hopes of making the streets just a little safer

for the ordinary citizen. On a freezing February day, he is sitting in an office in police headquarters, ominously nicknamed ‘The Tombs’, when a beautiful young black woman bursts through the door. There has been a robbery. Wilde asks what has been stolen. My family, the woman says.

This woman, Lucy Adams, had returned home from her work in a florist’s shop to find that slave-catchers have visited it in her absence and seized her sister and her son. She may be a free woman in a city where there is no such thing as slavery but, 15 years before the start of the American Civil War, the slave-catchers (also known as ‘blackbird-ers’) are legally entitled to round up escaped slaves from the south who have fled to New York. And, very often, the

blackbirders are not too particular about whether or not the people they kidnap have ever been enslaved. If they are black they are considered fair game, and Lucy’s son and sister seem to have been unlucky.

With the help of his older brother Valentine, a morphine-addicted reprobate who is a significant cog in the corrupt political machinery of the city, Timothy rescues Lucy’s family from their immediate danger. He has, however, stumbled into a more compli-cated web of deceit and villainy than he first suspected. In Lyndsay Faye’s brilliantly written evocation of 19th-century New York, he has to face venal fellow cops out to kill him, Tammany Hall politicians out to silence him and an old enemy out for revenge as he struggles to keep the Adams family safe.

Told in the character Timothy Wilde’s own offbeat, distinctive voice, Seven for a Secret is a memorable crime novel. Faye vividly recreates the old city, a melting pot for a dizzying variety of people struggling to survive and thrive in its mean streets, and sets within it this twisting tale of an increasingly desperate search for justice.

The Gods of Gotham

by Lyndsay Faye (2012)

In the first of Faye’s series of novels featuring Timothy Wilde, the tyro policeman is on the track of a serial killer after he meets a child prostitute, covered in blood, who is

escaping from a local brothel. Light is thrown on the dark secrets of old New York’s underworld as Timothy persists in asking questions to which no one else seems to want answers.

The Scent of Death

by Andrew Taylor (2012)

Set at the time of the American War of Independence, Andrew Taylor’s clever, complicated novel follows the fortunes of Edward Savill, a Londoner who arrives in New

York in 1778 to find the city an island of loyalty to Britain amid a sea of revolutionaries. Pitched into a murder investigation when a body is recovered from the river, Savill is forced to navigate his way through an assortment of dangers and difficulties.

Dreamland

by Kevin Baker (1999)

The ‘Dreamland’ of the title, an amuse-ment park that stood in Brooklyn’s Coney Island from 1904 to 1911, is at the heart of a novel that brings New York at the turn of the 20th century

to vibrant life. With a cast of charac-ters that ranges from sideshow freaks and corrupt politicians to famous figures including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung – depicted visiting the United States to lecture on psychoanalysis – Kevin Baker’s book is a noisy, boisterous tribute to the city’s energy and diversity.

THREE MORE

NOVELS ABOUT

OLD NEW YORK

Tammany Hall, a centre of

New York politics from the

late 18th century, pictured

c1914. Faye’s novel delves

into the “corrupt political

machinery” of the city

LI STE N

TO NIC K

RE NNI SON

historyextra.com

/podcasts

Nick Rennison is the author of Carver’s Quest

(Corvus, 2013)


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Have you ever had anything published?

A book perhaps, or an article in a magazine like this one.

If you have then the Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society Ltd (ALCS)

could be holding money owed to you.

ALCS collects secondary royalties earned from a number of sources

including the photocopying and scanning of books.

Unlock information about ways of benefi tting by visiting

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After my sudden hearing loss, as a mother, wife and

cookery teacher, hearing became a complex business.

I spend a lot of my time in noisy situations including

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This case-study is a typical scenario based on real client experiences collected by the IHP network


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TV&RADIO

Ideas that Make Us

Radio Radio 4, scheduled for weekdays

from Monday 16 September

Socrates, says his biographer Bettany Hughes, didn’t just think of philosophy

as an abstract pursuit, he was interested in how it affects our everyday lives and how ideas “play out for ordinary men and women on the street”. It’s a notion that underpins the historian’s new series, “an archaeology of philosophy” that looks at how “big, fundamental ideas about what it is to be human… change and develop” over the years, and “how they’ve been changed by history and how they’ve changed the course of history itself”.

The starting point for each of the shows (initially to be transmitted in two tranches) is an ancient Greek iteration of an idea. Homer uses the word ‘agwn’, for example, which gives us the concept of agony, in the context of a gathering place. “It’s that idea that as soon as we come together we want to compete with one another, we struggle,” explains Hughes. “So what it then comes to mean is a struggle or contest or competition.”

The Greeks, keen on competition, saw this as a good thing. So how did agony develop negative connotations? It’s in part because, in the early Christian worlds, it came to mean “an internal struggle to reach God”. Agony became increasingly

synonymous with martyrdom and denial.The word ‘idea’ itself goes through an

equally fascinating journey. It initially referred to a beautiful competitor in the Olympics. “Then Plato does something very interesting with it,” says Hughes, “[He] says, ‘Okay, if it’s a perfect form, what happens if we have an abstract idea of a perfect form?’ So he turns it from something physical into something metaphysical. ‘Idea’ as a word starts off describing something real and then it becomes an abstract version of reality, and then it becomes a thing that can change reality itself.”

In keeping with Socrates’s notions about engaging with the wider world, Hughes doesn’t restrict herself to talking to fellow historians. The programme on the word idea, for example, finds her chatting with an expert in intellectual property and patents as a way to ask: “Is an idea still an idea when somebody, a corporation or an individual, owns it?”

Hughes also undergoes an MRI scan in a bid to see what ideas look like as electrical impulses firing in her brain. “There’s a bit of pressure because you’re lying there thinking, ‘I hope I can manage to squeeze out some interesting thoughts’. I hope there’s not just a dull glow,” she laughs.

As well as coming forward in time from the Greek era, Hughes also goes back in time, even to prehistory. Take the word ‘xenia’, meaning guest/friendship. “What’s really interesting is that it’s an incredibly potent idea at the birth of civilisation, this notion that we accept strangers across our threshold, that’s how you build a civilisa-tion – it’s not by being xenophobic, it’s by welcoming people in,” Hughes says.

Not that we necessarily should get too fuzzy about our ancestors’ behaviour. They didn’t welcome in outsiders simply out of curiosity or a sense of shared humanity – filthy lucre played a part here too. As Hughes goes on to point out, read Greek ‘Linear B’ tablets from the late Bronze Age and you discover xenia was a form of cloth traded between people.

First thoughtsBettany Hughes tells us about a new series on the roots of such fundamental ideas as liberty, peace and justice

Jonathan Wright previews the pick of this month’s programmes

The word ‘idea’ itself

referred to a beautiful

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This detail from a fourth-century BC Greek amphora depicts a boxing contest. The modern concept of ‘agony’ can trace its roots to the ancient Greeks’ love of competition


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TV & Radio

Knowing the scoreComposer Neil Brand’s series tells the story of music in film

Sound of Cinema: The Music

that Made the Movies TV BBC Four, scheduled for September

Our experience of cinema is often shaped as much by a film’s

soundscapes as by its imagery. It’s a point brought alive by composer Neil Brand as he kicks off a three-part series on the history of film music by looking at the development of the classic orchestral film score.

His starting point is John Barry’s music for the 1965 thriller The Ipcress File, which introduced cinema-goers to bespectacled agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). In contrast to the brash tunes Barry wrote for another spy, man of action James Bond, here he incorpo-rates eastern European instruments and even a coffee grinder as he crafts music that brings to mind the underlying tensions of the Cold War era.

From here, Brand goes back in time, arguing that Max Steiner’s music for King Kong (1933) represents the first truly modern film score, before looking at the work of such composers as Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, Psycho) and John Williams (Star Wars).

The second of three documentaries turns the focus to jazz, pop and rock – for example, the way Alex North used

Railway splendourGrand CentralTV PBS America, scheduled for

Tuesday 17 September

On the morning of 8 January 1902, disaster struck in a smoky and congested tunnel outside New York’s Grand Central depot. A commuter service missed its signals and slammed into the back of another train, killing 17 people. The accident caused a public outcry.

More happily, it resulted in a radical upgrade of the city’s railway infrastruc-ture, initially overseen by engineer William Wilgus (1865–1949). This documentary in the American Experi-ence strand also follows the construction of the Grand Central terminal’s main concourse, a magnificent gateway to 44 platforms housed over two levels.

Brand argues that

King Kong boasted

the first truly mod-

ern film score

jazz to signpost the sexual undercurrents in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Brand also meets up with Richard Lester, director of A Hard Day’s Night, to discuss the difficulties inherent in trying to construct a story around a pre-existing set of songs written by the Beatles.

The final show considers how technology has affected soundtracks. In 1945, Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa used a theremin, the early Russian electronic instrument, to get across the idea of psychological disturbance in both Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend.

Brand’s series forms part of a wider season across the BBC devoted to soundtracks, with the shows on Radio 3 looking particularly strong. In Tune will be live from the BFI with a gothic-tinged show featuring some of cinema’s spooky music. The transmission date? Friday 13 September, of course.

The Essay strand focuses on homegrown movies, with He�er on

British Film (Monday 16–Friday 20 September) finding journalist Simon Heffer considering films made in the aftermath of the Second World War, including It Always Rains on Sunday (1947). Praising Powell and Press-

burger (Monday 23–Friday 27 Septem-ber) offers five essays about the director-writer duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, whose extraordinary work in the 1940s included A Matter of Life and Death and Black Narcissus.

There will also be shows on Radio 6 Music, Radio 1 and

1Xtra, Radio 2 and the BBC Asian Network.

Buried treasureAmerican PickersTV History, series starts on

Wednesday 11 September

Mike Wolfe and business partner Frank Fritz spend their time scouring the back roads of the US in search of items others might overlook – collect-ibles and objects with historical or pop culture resonance.

The upside is finding objects that can be sold on, objects often long forgotten by their owners. A series which works in great part because the hosts seem genuinely interested in the people they meet as they hunt for hidden gems.

Grand Central was radically upgraded in the early 20th century

Vintage cars in the Oregon settle-ment of Shaniko, population c36

FI ND WE E KLY

TV & RADIO UPDATE S AT

historyextra.com

/tv-radio

BBC/REX/C

ORBIS/DREAMSTIM

E.C

OM

DON’T MISS

Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands

(September, BBC One Scotland)

Paul Murton (left) takes a history-rich

journey in the north. The show will be

available throughout the UK on iPlayer

King Kong goes on the rampage in New York to the strains of a trailblaz-ing score by Max Steiner


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WANT MORE ?

A cutting historyArchive on 4:

A Brief History of IronyRadio Radio 4, scheduled for

Saturday 29 September

In the aftermath of 9/11, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter proclaimed the

death of the age of irony. But American journalist and satirist Joe Queenan certainly doesn’t think we live in a post-irony age. “A post-ironic world would be like a post-dental world,” he tells BBC History Magazine. “Irony

doesn’t vanish just because of tragedy. Otherwise, there would have been no irony after the Black Death or the Holocaust.”

Considering Queenan’s show takes in the Roman poet Juvenal, Jane Austen, Alf Garnett, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop and the American parody news organ-isation the Onion, it certainly doesn’t seem we’ve lacked for those using irony down the years. Tracing its story in part through their voices, Queenan explores such questions as whether we need irony and whether it has any socially redeem-ing features (yes, on both counts).

Brits, of course, pride themselves on their use of irony, and Queenan doesn’t disagree, although he adds a caveat. “I was once at a pub in Millwall where the irony was in short supply,” he says. “Man U fans lack a sense of irony.”

And a favourite historical irony? “Berlin was flattened by American planes carrying Ford Motor Company engines,” he says. “Henry Ford was a notorious anti-Semite. That’s irony for you.”

“Irony doesn’t

vanish just because of

tragedy,” says Joe Queenan

In A Very British Murder (Wednes-day 25 September, BBC Four), Lucy Worsley charts a nation’s obsession with unnatural death. See Lucy’s feature on page 45 for more.

Over on Radio 4, Our Dreams: Our

Selves (weekdays from Monday 23 September) finds Lucy Powell marking the centenary of the first publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in English by exploring how the way we interpret dreams has changed down the years. Terror Through Time (weekdays from Monday 7 October, Radio 4), presented by Fergal Keane, tells the history of terrorism.

Treasure Detectives (series starts Tuesday 3 September, Yesterday) follows Curtis Dowling, an expert in determining whether objects of art might be fakes and forgeries. The objects he’s asked to authenticate range from a cape James Brown is reputed to have worn on stage through to a baseball card that, if it’s genuine, will be worth $3m.

On satellite, Caligula: 1400 Days

of Terror (Sunday 29 September, H2) looks at the reign of an emperor whose name has become a byword for cruelty, sadism and perversity. Isabel (September, Sky Arts 1) is a Spanish-produced drama based on the life of Queen Isabella I of Castile. Makers: Women Who Make

America (Friday 4 October, PBS America) looks back at key events in the history of the women’s movement, including Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas before the Senate Judiciary Commit-tee in 1991. Meryl Streep narrates, and interviewees include Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey.

DVD REVIEW

Genius and outcast

CodebreakerSpirit Entertainment Limited, £12

There are those who emerge from history only gradually. Alan Turing (1912–54) is one such figure. Math-ematician, cryptanalyst and computer pioneer, much of his work during his own lifetime was surrounded by secrecy, especially his work at Bletchley Park, where his role in decoding secret German communica-tions earned him the OBE.

Latterly, as material has been declassified and his role in the development of computers – in the aftermath of the conflict, he worked on the design of the ground-breaking ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) – has been recognised, so too has Turing’s genius.

Yet, as this Channel 4 docudrama explores, his was a troubled life. Gay, he was convicted of gross indecency – the ‘crime’ for which it’s recently

been mooted he might be pardoned – in an era when homosexual acts were illegal. He had to agree to chemical ‘castration’ to avoid jail.

Codebreaker, which stars Ed Stoppard, focuses in great part on his therapy sessions with a psychiatrist, Dr Franz Greenbaum, conducted in the months leading up to Turing’s suicide. Gordon Brown once said that Turing “deserved so much more” than the frankly lousy treatment he received at the hands of the British authorities. This admirable film goes a long way to explaining why.

ALSO LOOK OUT FOR…

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Alan Turing (in the foreground) led a troubled life

Isabella of Castile goes

under the spotlight in September


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TV & Radio

D ons are notoriously flawed creatures. This Pathé film of 1944–45 depicts

one such: Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad. He was the caricatured image of a philosopher: he smoked a pipe, sported a bristly beard, and was generally shabbily dressed. He was also brilliant and a mesmerising lecturer. Wherever he went he courted controversy.

Academically, Joad was an outsider. Appointed head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, in 1930, he was never promoted to professor. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that Joad should be “put out of business” as a “slum landlord”, and accusations of plagiarism – by Bertrand Russell, no less – did not help his reputation.

Joad himself mocked his marginal status. In 1942 he published an auto-obituary that claimed he “might have been taken seriously as a philosopher if it had not been that his feet, refusing to rest content with

the floors of the philosophy lecture rooms [insisted] on sticking themselves in the mire of politics”. But even in that sphere he was restless, embracing in turn guild socialism, Fabianism and Mosley’s New Party.

On 9 February 1933, Joad was one of five speakers involved in the ‘King and Country’ debate in the Oxford Union. In a brilliant oration, Joad argued for the motion that “This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The motion was carried by 275 votes to 153.

It caused uproar. The Daily Telegraph attacked this “outrage upon the memory of those who gave their lives in the Great

War”. In his memoirs, Winston Churchill lamented the “foolish boys who passed the resolution” who, only a few years later, were “destined… to conquer or fall gloriously” during the Second World War. At least these “boys”, Churchill continued, were able to “prove themselves the finest generation ever bred in Britain”, unlike their elders (Joad) who had “no chance of self-redemption in action”. In fact, when faced with Nazism, Joad repented of his pacifist principles.

But Joad found real fame when, in January 1941, he joined Julian Huxley and retired naval officer AB Campbell on the radio programme The Brains Trust. At its height, 29 per cent of people in the UK tuned in to hear these men answer listeners’ questions. As this Pathé footage reveals, Joad possessed a high-pitched, squeaky voice (“It is as well for a men [sic] not to be hendicapped by a bed eccent,” he argued) but still became the show’s star, popularising the catchphrase “It all depends what you mean by…”

His views on women were rather less enlightened. He was notorious for his affairs with women whom he typically introduced as “Mrs Joad”. In 1947 he admitted that one of the best things about growing old was his “emancipation from dependence upon women arising out of my servitude to my senses”. He confessed that, when he was young, “sex was like a mosquito buzzing in a room in which one was trying to write”: it was impossible to get any work done until that mosquito was “swatted”. Women, he insisted, were “capricious, self-important, touchy, egotistical and, above all, boring”.

In this Pathé film, Joad can be heard discussing “how far one ought to try and obey the rules of the laws of one’s community [when] one disapproves of them… and how far one ought to break them”. Three years later, Joad was caught on the Waterloo–Exeter train without a ticket. His court appearances hit the headlines and he was dismissed from the BBC. His star had fallen.

Joanna Bourke is professor of history at

Birkbeck, University of London, and author

of What it Means to Be Human (Virago, 2011)

The ‘celebrity philosopher’ revels in national exposureJOANNA BOURKE examines footage introducing the renowned (and reviled) philosopher CEM Joad

CEM Joad at his desk. Joad drew criticism from everyone from Bertrand Russell to Winston Churchill but almost one in three people in the UK tuned in to The Brains

Trust to hear his views

To watch the British Pathé film

featuring CEM Joad, go to: britishpathe.

com/video/c-e-m-joad-aka-cem-joad

Wittgenstein famously

said that Joad should

be “put out of business”

as a “slum landlord”

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

To explore British Pathé’s

archive of over 90,000 films

from the 1890s to the 1970s

go to britishpathe.comHISTORY ON FILM

BR

ITIS

H P

AT

HÉ


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In a lush tree plantation along the Ridgeway National Trail lie the remains of a great Neolithic stone tomb, known for centuries as Wayland’s Smithy. The monument has long attracted speculation, not least because it takes its name

from the Saxon god Wayland who forged the mail shirt worn by Beowulf in the epic poem of the same name. Legend has it that if you tether your horse at the site overnight, leaving with it a sixpence, the animal will have been re-shod by the morning.

But the prehistoric monument is much older than Beowulf (written between the 8th and 11th centuries) and was used between about 3600 and 3450 BC. Built out of sarsen – a kind of sandstone that littered the local chalk, similar to that used at Stonehenge – it was one of Britain’s first works of architecture: a place where a group of selected people were celebrated as ancestors.

What can we see today? There is a long trapezoidal mound that was originally flanked by ditches. At its southern end stands a row of four upright stones (originally six), the largest of which rises at least twice as tall as a modern adult. The tallest of the stones flank the opening to a narrow-roofed passage that leads to three small chambers, each covered by a slab. The upright stones look rather like statues and may well have been selected for their resemblance to the human form.

But this was not the earliest monument at Wayland’s Smithy. Beneath the mound a smaller monument lies buried. Evidence shows that a tree trunk was split in half, and

the two resulting parts set upright in the ground like a pair of brackets. Between those posts, 14 bodies – 11 males, two females and a child – were interred at intervals over a period of about 15 years.

The bodies – which were housed in some kind of container, apparently made of wood – were originally complete but had been reduced to mere bones over the course of a single generation. The remains were then covered by a mound, effectively cutting off the dead from the living. The circumstances surrounding the deaths are unknown, as are the reasons why these people warranted a tomb at the site, though the discovery of a broken arrowhead tip embedded in one of the pelvic bones suggests that several may have been killed during one or more conflicts.

After less than a century, that structure was replaced by a more elaborate building constructed out of stone that, though sourced locally, would have taken an enormous effort to move. This is the tomb that we can visit today.

It is much larger than its predecessor, and bounded by a stone wall. But like the earlier wooden structure, its entrance faced south; when newly built, the monument’s covering of white chalk would have gleamed in the sun. All three burial chambers would once have contained human bones, but few have escaped the ravages of early excavators.

Rebuilding Wayland’s Smithy in stone ensured that it would survive and be recognised for many years – indeed, centuries – to come. Large stone monuments of this kind are known as megaliths, and are

Professor Richard Bradley investigates the Neolithic tomb of Wayland’s Smithy. The stone monument we see today hides an earlier wooden structure that held the remains of 14 people

Photography by Oliver Edwards

HISTORY EXPLORER

Neolithic treatment of the deadAs part of our series in which experts nominate

British locations to illustrate historical topics, Richard

Bradley visits Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic long

barrow once believed to be the home of a Saxon god

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Listen to Richard BradleyON TH E

PODCAST


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“It was a place where a group of selected people were celebrated

as ancestors”RICHARD BRADLEY


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Out & about / History Explorer

found throughout Britain and Ireland. The closest counterpart to Wayland’s Smithy is West Kennet long barrow near Avebury; at both sites the entrance was closed after the last bodies were introduced to the chambers.

It may seem odd that the first farmers in the British Isles are known from their tombs – but little remains of their settlements. Where traces of their houses do survive, most were built within a few centuries of the arrival of settlers from the continent. Dwellings dating from after that time are more difficult for archaeologists to recognise. This could be because they were more lightly built and occupied over

shorter periods, perhaps by people who were moving around the landscape with their livestock. The change happened around 3700 BC and may have taken place as fertile land became scarce and conflicts developed between different communities. There was an increased emphasis on raising stock, and it was at this time that people first engaged in monument building on a large scale.

Unlike hunter-gatherers, each farmer made a long-term investment in the land, from clearing native woodland to protecting livestock from predators. Farmers, therefore, emphasised the importance of ancestry as a way of demonstrating that particular places had been occupied over a considerable period – possibly one reason why tombs became so important.

Wayland’s Smithy illustrates this point in several ways. It was associated with a series of human burials, and the tomb itself became more elaborate over time. It remained so conspicuous, in fact, that Bronze Age burial mounds were erected nearby 1,000 years later in recognition of its significance.

Neolithic treatment of the dead varied from place to place. Tombs similar to Wayland’s Smithy have revealed incomplete skeletons, suggesting that bones may have been removed as relics. This theory is supported by evidence from excavations at earthwork enclosures of the same period, which often included isolated human bones as well as the bones of people who were originally buried elsewhere.

In other places, especially in Ireland, corpses were burned; excavated burial chambers revealed cremated remains. There are also instances in which only one person, most likely of a high rank in the community, was associated with a burial mound. But, in contrast to monuments such as Wayland’s Smithy where funeral offerings were rare or absent, those bodies were accompanied by weapons and ornaments. Such practices lapsed by about 3000 BC, but appeared again with the adoption of metalwork 1,000 years later.

Evidence relating to the treatment of the dead during that period (between about

THE UPRIGHT STONES LOOK RATHER LIKE

STATUES � AND MAY HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR

THEIR RESEMBLANCE TO THE HUMAN FORM

3000 and 2000 BC) is sparse, though burnt and unburnt bones have been found at stone circles and at enclosures known as henges. Such places fulfilled many roles: some include rings of posts, which may sometimes have been roofed, providing venues for feasts. Others contain the settings of upright pillars and have been found exclusively with the remains of the dead.

Stone structures often replaced those made of wood, recalling the development of Wayland’s Smithy hundreds of years before. Here, the earliest structure was built of wood and permitted to decay. The stone tomb that took its place may well have been intended to last forever – equally true of the memories of those who were buried there.

VISIT

Wayland’s Smithy

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Wayland’s Smithy, nr Ashbury,

Oxfordshire SN6

P english-heritage.org.uk

The narrow stone entrance to the later stone tomb at Wayland’s Smithy

Four of the original six towering sarsen stones now guard the tomb’s entrance

Richard Bradley is professor of archaeology at

the University of Reading and author of a number

of works on prehistoric archaeology

Wayland’s Smithy was once believed to be the home of the Saxon god Wayland, who forged Beowulf’s mail shirt


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1 Grey Cairns of Camster, Caithness

P historic-scotland.gov.uk

The three circular burial cairns, established here around 3700 BC, are among the oldest stone monuments in Scotland. There is evidence of later rebuilding; at some point two of the monuments were encased in a longer cairn, seen today. Little is known about who was buried here, but the structures are well preserved and can be entered: the long cairn – the larger of the structures – is 4m high and nearly 60m long.

5 Arbor Low, Derbyshire


Arbor Low is a stone circle in the Peak District, consisting of a large bank and internal ditch surrounding a central area with stone settings. All of the monoliths – large stones – are now lying flat, but they would once have stood upright, with between 41 and 43 stones making up the stone ring. A central part of the henge was associated with human bones. The site also boasts a Bronze Age burial mound built on top of the enclosure bank, while another Bronze Age barrow known as Gib Hill can be found a short distance outside the enclosure: this was superimposed on an older long barrow. Both of these structures may have been attempts to forge links with the past.

4 Loughcrew Cairns, County Meath

P loughcrew.com/wp/cairns

The megalithic tombs on the Loughcrew Hills – built between 3500 and 3000 BC – fall into three principal cemeteries, of which the central group is open to the public. Cairn T is the most famous of these tombs; its passage is lit by a beam of light on the equinoctial sunrise, during which the symbols on the chamber’s decorated backstone are illuminated. The meaning and relevance of the stone’s symbols is still debated.

3 Knap Hill, Wiltshire

P discover-wiltshire.com/knap-hill

The first Neolithic causewayed enclosure to be recognised in Britain, Knap Hill was built between 3530 and 3375 BC and, like Wayland’s Smithy, saw a brief period of use. The hill on which the enclosure sits has been the focus of activity over many periods and may have been sited on the steep bank for defensive purposes. Excavations in the early 20th century included the remains of a human infant, pottery and animal bones. Knap Hill forms part of a nature reserve and parking is provided.

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Wayland’s Smithy, Oxfordshire

Listen to Richard Bradley discuss Neolithic treatment of the dead at Wayland’s Smithy E historyextra.com/podcasts

ON THE PODCAST

NEOLITHIC TREATMENT OF THE DEAD:FIVE MORE PLACES TO EXPLORE

The decorated backstone in Cairn T at Loughcrew Cairns. Its meaning remains a mystery

Three sarsen stones at the front of West

Kennet Long Barrow

2 West Kennet Long Barrow, Wiltshire


Built c3650 BC, West Kennet bears many similarities to nearby Wayland’s Smithy, just over 20 miles away. The long barrow

is impressive: five chambers open off a central passage, fronted by three huge sarsen stones. At least 31 people were interred

here but, as at Wayland’s Smithy, the tomb was later closed and blocked with sarsen stones – probably around 2000 BC.


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Out & about

TEN THINGS TO DO IN OCTOBER

Destroying British art

EXHIBITION

Art under Attack:

Histories of British Iconoclasm

Tate Britain, London

2 October–5 January 2014

S 020 7887 8888

P tate.org.uk

Tate Britain will be launching a unique exhibition this month,

exploring the history of physical attacks on art in Britain from the 16th century to the present day. Visitors will not only be able to see the level of damage that has been done to works of art for religious, political or aesthetic reasons, but can also examine the motivations for these assaults, through objects, paintings, sculpture and archival material.

Tabitha Barber, curator of the exhibition, says: “When putting the exhibition together, we wanted to find out what it is that compels people to carry out attacks on art and whether these motives have changed over the

course of the past 500 years.“To help visitors to understand

more about the topic, we’ve divided the exhibition into three parts: religion, politics, and aesthetics.

The section on religion looks at the

“We wanted to find out

what compels people to

carry out attacks on art”

16th and 17th centuries, during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the Reformation and Puritan iconoclasm in the Civil War. Meanwhile, our approach to political iconoclasm has been to focus on attacks on public sculpture: we actually have fragments of a statue of George III that once stood in New York, which was pulled down after the reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”

The exhibition’s final section looks at works of art that have been attacked at the Tate because of the way they look. One piece in this section is Carl Andre’s 1966 work Equivalent VIII, which had food dye thrown over it.

A number of pieces in the exhibition have never been displayed to the public before, including the Statue of the Dead Christ (c1500–20), which is widely recognised as one of the most important examples of sculpture to survive the violent destruction of religious reformers in the 16th century. The piece was discovered in 1954 and it’s a graphic portrayal of Christ removed from the cross: the crown of thorns, arms and lower legs of the sculpture are missing, probably at the hands of Protestant iconoclasts. “I think many people will be shocked at the extent of the damage to some of the pieces and the strength of feeling behind the attacks,” concludes Barber.

EXHIBITION / FREE ENTRY

Masters of the Moor: William and FJ Widgery

Royal Albert Memorial

Museum, Exeter

Until 27 October

S 01392 265858

P rammuseum.org.uk

Explore the scenery of Dartmoor and south Devon as depicted by father-and-son landscape painters, William and FJ Widgery.

TALK / FREE ENTRY

Joseph Cowen, the Irish and the Newcastle Chronicle, 1850�1866

Discovery Museum,

Newcastle upon Tyne

30 October

P twmuseums.org.uk/discovery

Dr Joan Allen of Newcastle University explores the life and politics of the English radical politician and journalist, Joseph Cowen.


Four Four Jew: Football, Fans and Faith

Jewish Museum, London

10 October–23 February

2014

S 020 7284 7384

P jewishmuseum.org.uk/football

Examine the story of ‘the beautiful game’ and British Jews through memorabilia, rare objects and old and

new film footage.

EXHIBITION

The Devil’s in the Detail

Enginuity, near

Ironbridge, Shropshire

1 October–30 April 2014

S 01952 433424

P ironbridge.org.uk

An exhibition celebrating the craftsmanship of the trade catalogue engraver from the late medieval period up to the 20th century.

ONLI NE

SLI DE SHOW

historyextra.com

/iconoclasm

Joseph Cowen, newspaperman and MP

CHOICE


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Charlotte Hodgman previews some of the

latest events and exhibitions

PERMANENT GALLERY

Nelson, Navy, Nation: The Story of the Royal Navy and the British People, 1688�1815

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

From 21 October

S 020 8858 4422

P rmg.co.uk/national-maritime-museum

A new permanent gallery at the National Maritime Museum

brings some 250 objects from the museum’s collections together. The

aim is to explore how the Royal Navy impacted the lives of ordinary people and changed British history between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Visitors will be able to examine virtually all aspects of naval life – from bustling dockyards and ferocious sea battles, to what motivated young men to join the navy, the work they did and the punishments they received. A seven-barrelled volley gun, as well as an amputation knife and the last letter Nelson wrote to his daughter Horatia are just some of the pieces on display. Look out for our feature on Nelson in next month’s issue.

EXHIBITION

Catalyst: Contemporary Art and War

IWM North, Manchester

12 October–23 February 2014

S 0161 836 4000 P iwm.org.uk

This autumn sees the IWM’s collection of contemporary art –produced since the First Gulf War – go on display to the public for the first time, in an exhibition exploring artistic responses to conflict. Pieces by Langlands and Bell, Miroslaw Balka, Willie Doherty and Paul Seawright will be among the more-than 70 works on show. The exhibition encompasses installa-tions, photography and film, sculpture, oil paintings, prints and book works.

EXHIBITION

Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia

British Museum, London

17 October–23 March 2014

S 020 7323 8299 P britishmuseum.org

More than 300 objects from Museo del Oro, Bogotá and the British Museum’s collections will go on display at the British Museum this

month, exploring the legend of a lost city of gold in South America: El Dorado. The exhibition focuses on the craftsmanship of peoples such as the Muisca and Quimbaya, revealing a network of

distinct and vibrant cultures spanning 1600 BC to AD 1700.


Coco Chanel: A New Portrait by Marion Pike, Paris 1967�1971

Fashion Space Gallery,

London College of Fashion

Until 16 November

S 020 7514 9781

P fashionspacegallery.com

An exhibition exploring the friendship between the renowned fashion designer Coco Chanel and Californian artist Marion Pike.

EVENT

Glamorgan FHS Family History Fair

Merthyr Tydfil Leisure Centre

12 October

P glamfhs.org

More than 60 exhibitors will be in Merthyr Tydfil to help people trace their family histories. Exhibitors include Welsh and English family history societies, local history societies and national and local archives.

ONLINE

SLIDESHOW

historyextra.com

/nation

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Christ Before Pilate c1400–25. The damage to this piece may

have been a by-product of cutting the whole work into equal-size pieces that were then reused as table tops or

cupboard doors. Such objects were defaced before sale so

as to prevent a return to their former use

ONLINE

SLIDESHOW

historyextra.com

/colombia

Nelson’s victory at the battle of the Nile is celebrated in this 1798 image by James Gillray

Bird pectoral made of gold alloy,

AD 100–1600


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YE OLDE TRAVEL GUIDE

Out & about

ILLUSTRATION BY JONTY CLARK

Heidelberg 1618In the latest instalment of our historical holidays series,

in which experts imagine they’re writing a travel

guide in the past, Cassandra Clark introduces the

charms of Heidelberg, seat of Prince Palatine Frederick V

“THE PLEASURE GARDEN, EIGHTH

WONDER OF THE WORLD, FEATURES

FOUNTAINS AND EXOTIC PLANTS”

WHEN TO GO

There’s no bad time to visit. Heidelberg enjoys mild winters and warm, often rainy summers – be prepared for showers at any time – so spring and autumn are often considered the most congenial seasons. But the sooner you go, the better: the royal couple are rumoured to be preparing to decamp to Prague, where the crown of Bohemia awaits Frederick.

WHAT TO TAKE

WITH YOU

Your best garments if you’re staying up at the town’s castle,

your brains if you’re staying down below at the university.

COSTS

You’ll need plenty of bills to exchange for thaler, schillinge, pfennige or mark – prices have soared since the glamorous royal couple took up residence.

SIGHTS AND ACTIVITIES

Heidelberg Castle, on the slopes of the crag known as Königstuhl (King’s Throne), is a must-see. Rebuilt in 1537 after a gunpowder explosion destroyed an earlier fortification, its famous Fountain Hall

incorporates columns brought from Charlemagne’s imperial palace at Ingelheim. Frederick has added an English wing for his bride, with impressive views over the town. In one of the towers he has installed a theatre modelled on the recently destroyed Globe in London. Masques featuring the royals and plays by Shakespeare, performed by professional actors, are all the rage.

For his wife’s 19th birthday Frederick ordered the construction of an ornate triumphal arch, completed in just one night, as the entrance to the Stückgarten (pleasure garden) he is creating for Elizabeth. The Hortus Palatinus, as it’s called, is already considered the eighth wonder of the world, and features terraces, exotic plants, fountains and grottoes.

The court rides daily into the town – a sight not to be missed, with outrageous new fashions and glorious jewels on display. If you want to join in, town stables hire horses by the day.

At the university you can rub shoulders with the lawyers and theologians who flock to these halls of learning. Founded in 1386, it was here in April 1518 that Martin Luther defended his

95 theses, provoking a religious debate that rages to this day.

In the town itself you can while away the time with gambling, cockfighting or bear baiting. The main street stretches for almost a mile, a continuous ribbon of shops, taverns and churches. Don’t be tempted to light a candle in the latter, lest you find yourself atop the next public bonfire – Catholics are not popular in this staunchly Protestant region.

Stretch your legs on a stroll across the wooden bridge and up the Heiligenberg mountain to the ruins of the 11th-century Monastery of St Michael.

DANGERS AND

ANNOYANCES

Spanish troops are currently causing problems with shows of strength in the disputed lands outside the town, hoping

IT’S A LONG journey through Europe to

Heidelberg, in the heart of the Holy Roman

Empire. It’s here that Princess Elizabeth,

daughter of James I of England and VI of

Scotland, holds court with her husband Prince

Palatine Frederick V, and there is plenty to keep

pleasure-loving visitors entertained

WWW.JONTYCLARK.C

OM


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“YOU CAN WHILE AWAY THE TIME

WITH GAMBLING, COCKFIGHTING

AND BEAR BAITING”

to expand their Catholic territories, though most people believe their threats are unlikely to amount to anything. Otherwise, the only real dangers in Heidelberg are the usual urban perils of pickpockets, and the inconvenient chaos caused by nobles with unruly retinues thrusting along the streets.

SLEEPING AND

ACCOMMODATION

The town is blessed with plenty of inns, the most expensive at the top of the Hauptstraße (Main Street). Rates become progressively cheaper as you descend through the town. The impecunious might find themselves sleeping on the riverbank alongside threadbare students, whores and victims of the rooks, wolves and cardsharps of the gambling dens.

EATING AND DRINKING

Heidelberg is heaven for meat-eaters. The daily hunt in the nearby woods supplies the town with ample meat – venison, wild boar, rabbit and hare. Every part of these beasts is used in Wursts (that’s sausages to you and me) in styles ranging from black blood sausage to the palest pork Bratwurst.

Bread is mainly baked with rye, dark and chewy; wheat is used to make pretzels in the shape of love knots.

This is a good wine region, and ale, brewed in every tavern, is drunk in copious amounts from tall clay pots or decorated pewter tankards.

GETTING AROUND

Electress Elizabeth generally rides through the town in her own Paris-built open chariot, but the average Johann either walks or rides a hired nag. Most ladies of wealth are conveyed in litters carried by a retinue of brawny servants. Litters will soon be as common in Heidelberg as they are on the streets of London, where they can be hailed by anybody with the cash to pay for them.

Cassandra Clark’s fifth medieval

crime novel, The Dragon of Handale,

was published in May 2013 as an

E-book. cassandraclark.co.uk

Given the chaos that enveloped the Palatinate lands following Frederick V’s ill-fated assumption of the throne of Bohemia in 1619, the city has fared wonderfully well even if it is not quite the same place it was until then.

One of the few buildings to survive the conflicts of the 17th century is the beautiful pink-stone Church of the

Holy Spirit. The castle still looks out over the Old Town and the Neckar river, a romantic ruin that draws millions of visitors every year. The city’s Old

Town is considerably more recent, but features some marvellous baroque

buildings and another famous city landmark, the late 18th-century Old Bridge.

Heidelberg is usually visited on a day trip by tourists exploring central Europe’s big hitters or following the popular Burgenstraße (Castle Route) through southern Germany. More active types follow the Philosophers’ Walk, a scenic and historic trail on the southern side of the Heiligenberg, a hill offering fine views across the city.

IF YOU LIKE THIS…

For another historic town with an academic bent visit Santiago de Compostela,

Spain. If you like your German attractions a little less crowded, try the quirky city of Ulm on the Danube.

Tom Hall, editor,

lonelyplanet.com.

You can read more of

Tom’s articles at the website

HEIDELBERG

TODAY

The ruins of the grand castle loom above the Neckar river

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Cover Story:Radio Times at 90

is at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2Y 5HN from Friday 2 August to Sunday 3 November 2013,

and is free to visitors. Visit www.museumofl ondon.org.uk for more information.

1923 First edition of Radio Times 1937 Coronation of George VI

1967 Launching Radio 1 1988 Over 11 million copies sold

2005 An award-winning cover 2009 Corrie’s Becky is true art

Celebrate the birthday of Britain’s bestselling quality magazine at a FREE exhibition at the Museum of London Friday 2 August to Sunday

3 November 2013

Radio Times has taken pride of place on

coffee tables across the nation since it was

fi rst published in 1923 and this free

exhibition at the Museum of London tells

the story of Britain and broadcasting through the

pages of the magazine.

Alongside audio of landmark broadcasts,

archive clips and never-before-seen artefacts, the

exhibition will include original Radio Times

photography and artwork. It will showcase some

of our iconic covers, from the Queen’s coronation

to The Goon Show and Call the Midwife.

You can even become a “cover star” with

a life-size Dalek against the backdrop of London’s

Westminster Bridge — re-creating the award-

winning 2005 “Vote Dalek” cover.

Other highlights include an original 1941

Luftwaffe Stadtplan von London map that reveals

RT’s Waterlows printing plant in Park Royal was a

Nazi air-raid target!

To fi nd out more about RT’s celebrations, visit:

radiotimes.com/90th

Cover Story: Radio Times at

90

Cover Story: Radio Times at

90

HISTORIC VENUE hosts our exhibition


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Here’s a great opportunity to sample an issue of the fantastic and

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The latest gear All the new technology

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Q&A

Q What was the Bava-

Beccaris massacre?

A Fiorenzo Bava-Beccaris (pictured) was an Italian general who fought in the wars of independence that unified his country. In May 1898, he was in command of troops in Milan when the city was threatened by rioters protesting against rising food prices. After the rioters erected barricades, Bava-Beccaris ordered his men to open fire on the unarmed protesters. Many were killed (118 according to the government; 400 according to opposition claims).

The king, Umberto I, rewarded him with the Great Cross of the Order of Savoy, but the general became a hate figure to many Italians. However, although Umberto was assassinated in 1900 by an anarchist who explicitly stated he had acted to revenge those who died in the massacre, Bava-Beccaris himself lived another 26 years and died at the age of 93.

Nick Rennison

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Q Is it true that the pulverised bones of soldiers

and horses who died at the battle of Waterloo

were later sold on as soil fertiliser? Alan Jones, by email

Q Where is Stotham,

Massachusetts?

A The obvious answer would be ‘Massachusetts’ but the truth is that, although it was the subject of a learned article in a 1920 architectural journal, Stotham does not exist. The town was invented by a New England architect named Hubert Ripley who wrote a history of the place – he said it had been founded in 1689 by one Zabdiel Podbury, an English emigrant from the equally fictitious town of Stoke-on-Tritham – and published a series of photographs to show how picturesque it was. Only in the 1940s, by which time Ripley’s article had been quoted in several other architectural works and guidebooks, did staff in the Library of Congress, finding it impossible to track down more material about Stotham, realise that it was a hoax.

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ABy the early 19th century it was widely realised that bones, rich in

calcium, were a valuable fertiliser, and within a few years of Napoleon’s defeat, agents of fertiliser manufacturers were scouring battlefields. The bones of men and horses were removed from places such as Austerlitz, Leipzig and Waterloo and shipped, usually to Hull, and on to bone-grinders, many in Doncaster.

This was not a well-documented business, but it was reported on and became part of popular folklore. In 1822, a correspondent wrote in The Observer: “It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment on an extensive scale, that a dead soldier is a most valuable article of commerce; and, for aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure,

indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread.”

It seems a shocking disrespect to us, but times were different. For centuries, corpses on battlefields had been stripped of valuables by other soldiers, camp followers and local peasants, and the Napoleonic Wars were no different.

Long before the bone merchants moved in, many bodies at Waterloo were stripped of their teeth. This was such a bonanza for Britain’s denture industry that all false sets made from human teeth were known as ‘Waterloo teeth’ for years after. The corpses of the poor were a commodity, whether as a source of fertiliser, teeth, or anatomical instruction for medical students.

Eugene Byrne, author and journalist


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Miscellany

STRANGE BUT TRUE…

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Q Were there any signi�cant cultural

di�erences between the Angles, the Saxons

and the Jutes in the early medieval period? Patricia Wilson, Powys

The ancient

Egyptians used mice

to cure toothache In ancient Egypt, mice were considered to be protected by the

sun and thought to be able to restore vitality. A common remedy to relieve toothache was to apply half of the still-warm body of a dead mouse to the aching tooth.

ONLI NE QUIZ EVE RY

FRI DAYhistoryextra.com

/quiz

In 16th-century Russia,

a church bell was tried

for sedition, found

guilty and then exiled

to SiberiaDmitri, the young son of Ivan the Terrible, was killed in the historic town of Uglich in 1591, and the bell (pictured below) was rung to mark his death and to call for the boy to be revenged. The tsar’s adviser, Boris Godunov, who was probably responsible for Dmitri’s murder, was angered by this. He removed the bell’s clapper, put it on public trial and formally sentenced it to perpetu-al banishment in Siberia. It was originally placed in solitary confine-ment but was then hung in the church tower of the Siberian town of Tobolsk for many years. Three centuries later, in 1892, it was ‘pardoned’ and returned to the people of Uglich. Nick Rennison

AThe answer here is still hotly disputed. It was the Venerable Bede

(who died in 735), writing 250 years after the events he describes, who first claimed that Roman Britain fell to invasion by Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the North Sea coastlines of Germany and Denmark. Victorian writers considered it perfectly acceptable to trace physical or ‘racial’ distinctions between those of ‘Jutish’ descent still living in Kent set against the Saxon or Angle peasantry of the west and north. Even today, some modern authorities claim to confirm Bede’s tripartite scheme using archaeological evidence, in particular the minor variations in the types of brooches and cremation urns found in early Anglo-Saxon burial sites.

Others argue that Bede was imposing fictitious order upon a far more chaotic

ethnographic reality. The strange legal customs of medieval Kent, for example, might denote Jutish influence. They might just as easily be Roman survivals or suggest the influence of northern France. Like the ‘tribes’ of North American ‘Indians’, the Germanic peoples were not ‘racially’ homogenous. Status and success in war were far more significant than race, with the Angles apparently commanding the highest status of all. In the 590s, the supposedly Jutish king Æthelbert of Kent was addressed by the pope as ‘King of the Angles’. But for this ‘keeping up with the Angles’, England today might be known not as England but as Saxland or Jutland.

Nick Vincent, professor of history at the

University of East Anglia

A sixth-century Saxon brooch found in Surrey. Was the Venerable Bede correct in asserting that Roman Britain was invaded by three distinct Germanic peoples: the Jutes, Angles and Saxons?


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http://historyextra.com/quiz




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1 . What are Capa’s

‘Magnificent Eleven’?

2. How did Capa meet

his death?

3. Which famous French

photographer escaped

from a German prison

camp in 1943, worked for

the resistance and

photographed the

liberation of Paris?

4 . Who was the subject

of Alberto Korda’s

iconic photograph,

Guerrillero heroico?

5. The photographer son

of one of the world’s most

famous actors, he was

captured in Cambodia in

April 1970 and never seen

again. Who was he?

6. Which former model

photographed the Nazi

concentration camps of

Dachau and Buchenwald,

and was herself photo-

graphed in Hitler’s bathtub?

7. With which war would

you associate the work

of Mathew Brady and

Alexander Gardner?

8. Which explosive event

was filmed by Geoffrey

QuizTo mark the centenary of the

birth of photojournalist Robert

Capa on 22 October 1913, a quiz

on war photographers

Write to BBC History Magazine, Tower House, Fairfax Street,

Bristol BS1 3BN, email: [email protected]

or submit via our website: historyextra.com

GOT A QUESTION?

SOLUTIONS

SOLUTION TO OUR AUGUST CROSSWORD

Across: 1 Piltdown Man 8 Guilds 9 Atheling 10 Bushido 11 Maine

12 Actium 14 Nicaea 18 Treaty 21 Lille 23 Blantyre 25 Crockett

26 Israel 27 Neanderthal

Down: 1 Palestine 2 Laski 3 Dragoon 4 Wehrmacht 5 My Lai 6 Nansen

7 Quebec 13 Moorehead 15/16 Electoral reform 17 Mobster 19 Tories

20 Florin 22 Lucca 24 Amish

FOUR WINNERS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

R Beckett, London; V Benjamin, East Sussex; W Mash, Staffordshire;

A Brown, Northumberland

QUIZ ANSWERS 1. His 11 surviving photographs of the American landings on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944 2. He trod on a landmine in Vietnam in 1954 while photographing the first Indochina war 3. Henri Cartier-Bresson 4. Che Guevara 5. Sean Flynn 6. Lee Miller 7. The American Civil War 8. The detonation of the mine under Hawthorn Ridge on the Somme 9. The US Marine Corps Memorial, Arlington. Raising the flag on Iwo Jima 10. Roger Fenton, the Crimean War

As this map shows, the purchase of Louisiana from the French more than doubled the size of the United States

Q Why did Britain welcome the 1803 Louisiana Purchase?Paul Standring, Bolton

AIn 1803 the United States negotiated the biggest

real estate deal in its history when it more than doubled in size with the Louisiana Purchase from France for $15m. One can understand this momentous event only within the long-standing Anglo-French rivalry over North America.

Britain welcomed the transfer of the Louisiana Territory to the United States because it prevented the French from occupying this huge area and seizing control over both New Orleans and the Mississippi river. Far better from the British perspective that the deal replaced the powerful French with a much weaker United States. The irony was that each power – Britain and France – considered the American acquisition of

Louisiana to be a barrier to the other’s expansion in North America, when it now is clear that the territorial transfer facilitated US control over this vast area.

Although Napoleon counted on the purchase money to finance his renewal of war with Britain later that same year, the British government was so anxious to keep the French out of North America that the treasury department permitted the banking firm of Baring Brothers and Company of London (with a nice profit) to work with Amsterdam bankers in converting American bonds into the cash needed to complete the purchase.

Howard Jones, university

research professor of history,

University of Alabama

Malins at 7.20am on

1 July 1916?

9. Where is this and which

photograph, taken by Joe

Rosenthal on 23 February

1945, is it based on?

10. See below. Name the

photographer and the war.

Answers below

Compiled by

Julian Humphrys

9

10


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94

Miscellany

PRIZE CROSSWORD

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You may photocopy this crossword

CROSSWORD PRIZE

The Anglo- Saxon World By Nicholas J Higham and Martin J Ryan

This definitive introduction to the

Anglo-Saxon period – which

stretched from the fifth to the late

11th century AD – re-examines

Anglo-Saxon England in the light

of new research in disciplines

such as archaeology, art history,

paleobotany and historical

genetics. Photographs, maps,

genealogies and other

illustrations help explore current

debates on the period.

Published in hardback by Yale,

£30. Available to buy from all

good bookstores and online

HOW TO ENTER Open to residents of the UK,

(inc. Channel Islands). Post entries to BBC History

Magazine, October 2013 Crossword,

PO Box 501, Leicester LE94 0AA or email them

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Book worth

£30 for 4 winners

Across4 Town of Virginia,

where, in the

courthouse, Robert

E Lee surrendered

to General Grant in

1865 (10)

7 See 6 down

9 A prehistoric

standing stone (6)

10 Ugandan airport,

the scene of an Israeli

commando raid to

free hostages

in 1976 (7)

11 See 7 down

13 13th–17th-centu-

ry raider belonging to

one of the gangs on

the Anglo-Scottish

border (6)

14 A Royal London

Borough, prominently

associated with

maritime history (9)

18 John Boyd___,

the Scottish inventor

of the pneumatic

tyre (6)

20 A wooden or

metal cover to hold

and protect a sword (8)

22 Africa’s first national park,

established in 1925, (present

name) in what was then the

Belgian Congo (7)

24 Renowned Greek mathematician

and teacher of geometry, around

300 BC (6)

25 Legendary (though it existed

historically) ancient Greek city in

what is now Turkey (4)

26 Term applied to the period of

European history between the

fall of the Roman empire and the

Renaissance (6,4)

Down1 Electress of Hanover whose son

went on to be George I of Great

Britain (6)

2 Famed for his First World War

military exploits in Arabia, he later

sought anonymity as ‘aircraftman

Ross’ (8)

3 The Roman Fosse Way ran from

this city to Lincoln (6)

5 Nickname for a member of the

world’s first modern police force

created 1829 (6)

6/7 across Name given to an area

between Dublin and Dundalk where,

from the 12th century, English law

prevailed (3,4)

7/23/11 across Famous retort

made by the Duke of Wellington to a

blackmail letter from the publisher of

courtesan Harriette Wilson’s memoirs

(7,3,2,6)

8 In feudal society, vassals in the

service of a lord (6)

12 Invaders restricted to

northern and eastern parts of

England by Alfred the Great (5)

14 George III was the most

famous target of this English

political caricaturist (7)

15 Queen of Castile, married to

Ferdinand II of Aragon (8)

16 Political activist and guerrilla

warfare leader, prominent in the

Cuban revolution in 1950s (7)

17 Street of Roman origin between

London and York (6)

19 Central American republic which,

in the conquest era, was the major

marketplace and trans-shipment area

of Spain’s New World empire (6)

21 John ___ , a governor-general

of Canada, but best known as the

novelist creator of action hero

Richard Hannay (6)

23 See 7 down

Compiled by Eddie James

Harriette Wilson, whose memoirs provoked a famous remark

see 11 across– 7/23 down

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A baby gorilla pictured in Africa’s first national parksee 22 across


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97

Vol 14 No 10 – October 2013

BBC History Magazine is published by

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NOVEMBER ISSUE ON SALE 10 OCTOBER 2013

A people’s history of Elizabethan EnglandAway from the Tudor

court, what was life like

for ordinary people in the

16th century? Tarnya

Cooper investigates


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75,193

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June 2012

280,000

EDITORIAL

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Deputy art editors Sarah Lambert and Rachel Dickens

Picture researcher Katherine Hallett

Website editor Emma McFarnon [email protected]

The Greek theatre of life áMichael Scott explains

how ancient dramatists

drew on political and

social concerns

Why Britain had to fight ÜMax Hastings

challenges

the view

that the

First World

War was

simply futile

slaughter

Nelson: Ten days that made a heroQuintin Colville explores the admiral’s path to national icon


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My history hero

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd president of the United States of America. Elected in 1932, at the height of the Depression, FDR introduced the New Deal in a bid to tackle the economic crisis. He would go on to be re-elected for an unprecedented three more terms, and

to lead the USA during the Second World War. In 1921 he contracted polio and was paralysed from the waist down, but always sought to play down his disability.

When did you first hear about Franklin D Roosevelt?

As a teenager, reading 20th-century history for my own pleasure. My school in Birmingham was bizarre in that the history teaching was very classically orientated – anything that happened after 1485 was thought to be dangerously modern and of little interest. However, growing up in the postwar years, I had an avid interest in the Second World War, and that led me to discover FDR.

What kind of person was he?

He came from a long-established, well-respected family and was as Establishment as you could get. Patrician in outlook, he was bred for command and took it for granted that his voice would be heard. However, as a politician his instincts were populist – and he understood that the pyramid had to be built from the bottom.

As president, he took radical action to deal with the economic crisis facing America. He was totally pragmatic in his approach and was willing to try anything if he thought it might work.

On the other hand, he never attempted to introduce any sort of civil rights for black people. It was just too big a problem – so he left it alone, aware that politics is very much the art of the possible.

What made him a hero?

He was a hugely important figure in the history of the 20th century, elected US president four times – an achievement that has never been equalled before or since. He won in 1932 and again in 1936; by 1940, the Second World War had started, and FDR believed that America needed him – so he again stood for president, and his actions subsequently proved him right. Whether facing up to the Depression or confronting the Axis powers during the war years, he rose to the challenge.

What was his finest hour?

For a colossal historical figure such as FDR who was on the scene for so long, it’s hard to single out just one episode. But at the beginning of his presidential tenure he was presented with the immense problem of the Depression; that was scary in a way we can’t understand today, and was considerably worse in America than in Britain.

Once the chaos started, it resulted in mass unemployment, banks failing and crop prices plunging – and he tackled it all. Then he went on to forge a wartime alliance with Britain (which was a lot harder to achieve than is often realised because American sentiment at the time was largely isolationist), invent ‘lend-lease’ to show his support for us, and help lead the Allies to victory.

Is there anything you don’t particularly admire about him?

Well, in certain respects he had feet of clay. He was frequently unfaithful to his wife, Eleanor. Furthermore, in a way I think he was rather weak in not trying to tackle America’s civil rights issue. Being pragmatic is one thing, but there are times when that can veer close to cowardice.

Can you see any parallels between his life and your own?

No. FDR lived his life under such unimaginable pressure compared with ours – and on top of all that he had to live with his disability caused by polio. My problems – for instance, being out of work – just pale into insignificance beside the challenge he faced when he became president: saving a country that was falling apart under the impact of the Depression.

If you could meet FDR, what would you ask him?

I think that when people elsewhere in the world speak of ‘America’, they’re instinctively thinking of that amazing half century of ‘can-do’ US dominance, from the 1930s to the 1980s – which was FDR’s America, really. So I’d ask him if he’s surprised that it endured so long – or surprised that it eventually came to an end. Lee Child was talking to York Membery

“When people speak of

‘America’, they’re instinctively

thinking of that amazing half

century of ‘can-do’ US

dominance, from the 1930s to

the 1980s – which was FDR’s

America, really”

Bestselling author Lee Child chooses

Franklin D Roosevelt

1882–1945 Franklin D Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the USA, and “a hugely important figure in the history of the 20th century”

Lee Child is the author of the bestselling Jack Reacher novels. His latest

book, Never Go Back, was published by Bantam Press in August BR

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BOOKS SPECIALMY FAVOURITE HISTORY BOOKS 2013by Paul Cartledge, Saul David, Hannah Greig, Peter Heather, Peter Jones, Margaret MacMillan, Simon Thurley, Alison Weir, Kate Williams, Glyn Williams, Ben Wilson and Lucy Worsley

PLUS

OUR PICK

OF 2013’S

BEST

DVDs


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Books special

Favourite history book of 2013 Favourite history book of all time Most anticipated history title

KEY TO THE SYMBOLS USED ON THE FOLLOWING PAGES

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WELCOMEWe receive hundreds of new history books

every month in the BBC History Magazine

office, covering a huge range of topics and

a vast sweep of time. With autumn fast approaching,

and with it the deluge of titles released to capture the

Christmas market, it seemed a good opportunity to take

stock of the year so far. So we got in touch with some of

our regular contributors to find out which books have

captured their imaginations in 2013. We also asked

them about the history books that they’re most looking

forward to in the coming months and – in what often

proved to be the most contentious aspect of the

discussions – their favourite history title of all time.

Our reviewer Jonathan Wright also explores his DVD

highlights of the year so far, starting on page 13.

The results make for interesting

reading, and I hope that you find

inspiration in the following pages.

For the choices of more authors,

including Richard Barber and Ashley

Jackson, visit historyextra.com/

autumnbooks.

Matt Elton

Books editor

Listen to leading authors on our podcast

You will be able to hear some

of the authors featured in the

coming pages discuss their

choices in upcoming episodes

of the BBC History Magazine

podcast, which is free to down-

load every week. The podcast

also features in-depth interviews

with a range of leading authors,

with recent highlights including

Tom Holland, Linda Porter

and Charles Moore. For full

details and to explore the

archive dating back to 2007,

visit historyextra.com/podcasts

Explore our full reviews archive

Whether you’re looking to learn

more about a particular subject

or period of history, or just

looking for something new to

read, BBC History Magazine’s

online reviews archive is a

great place to start. Featuring

hundreds of in-depth reviews

dating back as far as 2006, it’s

available to explore for free by

categories including author,

topic, keyword and the histori-

cal period that the title explores.

Our experts’ thoughts on the

latest releases are also added

to the collection every week.

To find out more, visit history

extra.com/books

The White Queen

features in our

pick of 2013’s DVD

highlights so far,

starting on page 13


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Books special / My favourite history books


Glyn Williams

2013Outstanding among this year’s

crop of history reference books is the fifth and final volume of Raymond Howgego’s magisterial Encyclopedia of

Exploration (Hordern). It covers the notoriously difficult subject of imaginary journeys and fictitious narratives – more than a thou-sand in all. They include apocryphal and invented narratives, plagiarised accounts, utopian and satirical discourses, and extraterrestrial voyages. The author’s wide reading among the sources reveals that some works generally regarded as fictitious were in fact authentic; others, which fascinated the credulous for centuries, are shown to be spurious. To scholars puzzled by accounts of distant voyages that seem to have only a tenuous link with reality, Howgego’s volume with its comprehensive bibliographies will be an invaluable tool.

As a young scholar, I was fortunate to know a distinguished Australian art

historian who wrote a book that radically changed academic approaches to Pacific exploration, and influenced my own research. At first sight, Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Paci�c (1960) appeared to be a straightforward description of how artists accompanying Cook and other explorers depicted the Pacific and its inhabitants. Closer reading showed that his work expanded the conventional treatment of contact between Europeans and the Pacific, until this time dominated by biographies of the naviga-tors. For Smith, scientists and artists on the Pacific voyages were essential contributors to an intellectual enterprise that aimed to complete Europe’s picture of the universe.

I look forward to Roger Knight’s Britain Against Napoleon (Allen

Lane, Aug). Amid all the attention devoted to Trafalgar and Waterloo, the industrial, financial and agricultural dimensions of Britain’s war effort rarely receive adequate treatment. Knight, with a firm knowledge of the administrative history of the period (as well as an authoritative biography of Nelson to his name), seems the ideal author to correct this fault.

Glyn Williams’s latest book, Naturalists at Sea,

will be published by Yale later this autumn

Margaret MacMillan

2013Rana Mitter’s China’s War

with Japan 1937�1945 (Allen Lane) is excellent. He’s very good at taking a big picture, and he knows China very well. He’s also dealing with a subject that has been surprisingly neglected, so it’s a really important book.

One book that had a huge influence on me when I was an undergraduate

at the University of Toronto was The Guns

of August by Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (1962). It’s about the outbreak of the First World War, and Tuchman is the most wonderful narrative historian: she does these vivid portraits of people. She’s always been one of my great heroes.

There’ll be a lot on the First World War, and I suppose I’m looking

forward to that. There’s one coming up by Max Hastings, Catastrophe: Europe

Goes to War 1914 (William Collins, Sept), which I’m eager to read because he and I will, I suspect, disagree on the origins of the conflict. But he’s doing the first months of the war, which I didn’t do, and he’s a very, very good historian. I like the way he writes about military things: he makes them comprehensible.

Margaret MacMillan is the author of The War

That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace

for the First World War, set to be published by

Profile Books later this year. The author will be

talking about the book in our December issue

Peter Jones

2013Roman Disasters by Jerry Toner

(Polity) does exactly what it says on the cover. Combining modern disaster-theory with what our sources say about, for example, the great fire of Rome, he draws out how Romans responded to and tried to make sense of a life so vulnerable at so many points.

The book I turn to more than any other is Sir Kenneth Dover’s Greek

Popular Morality in the Time of Plato

and Aristotle (1974). It is a devilish task to excavate what the ancient Greek on the equivalent of the Athens omnibus made of his world. Dover saw that the place to start was speeches made by Athenians pleading their own cases at the city’s law court. It is an extraordinary book: everything you ever wanted to know about Greek attitudes to marriage, sex, religion, poverty and more.

Roman Phrygia, edited by Peter Thonemann (Cambridge, Aug), may

sound off the beaten track, but that is the point. It is. Against all expectations this upland area has yielded a large number of inscriptions that open up a detailed picture of a distant rural society in Rome’s imperial period. You’ll be able to read about Dainty and Squinty, members of a female group involved with town administration, the church that forbade marriage and much else.

Peter Jones’s Veni, Vidi, Vici is out now,

published by Atlantic Books

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Raising funds for Sino-Japanese war victims, 1937. Rana Mitter’s new book explores “a neglected subject”


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Paul Cartledge

2013My favourite history title of the

year so far? No contest: Kostas Vlassopoulos’s Greeks and Barbarians (Cambridge University Press). It’s the latest gauntlet from the iconoclastic associate professor in Greek history at Nottingham University, thrown down as a challenge to the profession to reimagine itself from the bottom up. In it, he responds to the ancient Greeks’ own binary polarisation of Themselves and (all) Others – or, as he puts it, “Greeks and Barbarians”.

In the very first sentence of Herodotus’s The Histories, the world’s first historian announces a ground-breaking work that will expose the results of his ‘research’ into Greek-Barbarian relations, and especially his own personal explanation of the ‘Graeco- Persian Wars’ – including the battle of Marathon. Like Herodotus, Vlassopoulos includes this famous, and in many respects decisive, east-west encounter on his first page. But also like Herodotus, he casts the net of his cultural history far wider than merely warfare. Globalisation, overseas settlement, intercultural communication and more are given their place in the sun. This book sets a new agenda in the field.

I agree with Ben on this: it’s The

History of the Decline and Fall

of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon is the first truly modern ancient historian – not only a brilliant stylist, and one of the best Latinists of his or any day, but also one of the sharpest analysts of the human condition. His deadly deconstruction of the ancient Roman imperial system remains matchless.

Lucretius – or at least, as argued by Stephen Greenblatt in The Swerve

(2012), his rediscovery in the early 16th century – helped spark the Renaissance. David Butterfield, in The Early Textual

History of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Cambridge University Press, Oct), looks set to relocate him in his original, ancient Roman contexts.

Paul Cartledge is the author of After Thermopylae,

set to be published by Oxford University Press.

Read an interview with Tom Holland about

his new translation of The Histories, for which

Cartledge provided an introduction and notes,

starting on page 59 of this issue

Alison Weir

2013My favourite history title of the

year so far is Edward III

and the Triumph of

England (Allen Lane) by the award-winning Richard Barber, one of our finest medieval historians. This is no dry overview of the Hundred Years’ War. It is a sound, lively and engagingly detailed book about the individuals who fought in that war, of knights, chivalry, fashion, literature and the enduringly fascinating private lives of everyone from queens to freebooters. It will satisfy academics and history buffs alike, and I cannot praise it highly enough.

It’s a huge challenge choosing my favourite history book of all time,

as I have shelves full of favourites. Yet I have to opt for The Complete Peerage, a veritable treasure trove of information that is a must for every historian – and anyone who (like me) is captivated by royal and aristocratic genealogy. I first discov-ered The Complete Peerage when I was just 15 years old – and I’ve been discovering wonderful things in it ever since.

The history book I’m most looking forward to in the coming months is

Tracy Borman’s Witches: A Tale of

Sorcery, Scandal and Seduction (Jonathan Cape, Aug). Having always been intrigued by witchcraft and the supernatu-ral, this is a must for me, and all the more so because the story it relates is a historical one – that of the notorious witches of Belvoir. Tracy Borman is a fine historian, and in her capable hands this grim tale will be told well.

Alison Weir’s Elizabeth

of York: The First Tudor

Queen will be published

by Jonathan Cape in

November. Read Tracy

Borman’s feature on

witches starting on page

37 of this issue

Ben Wilson

2013This year has been a vintage

one for readers of history. However, I was especially impressed by Joel F Harrington’s The

Faithful Executioner (Bodley Head). Harrington takes us into the world of Frantz Schmidt, the public executioner of Nuremberg, who dispatched 394 victims and, remarkably, kept a journal. Harrington does a wonderful job at interrogating the sources, and telling a story that’s at once grimly fascinating and compassionate. This book is a gem, full of surprises, and it deserves a wide readership.

My choice of favourite history book of all time is Edward Gibbon’s The

History of the Decline and Fall of the

Roman Empire (1776–1788). This might sound terribly pompous, but Gibbon is a joy to read. There is so much of the Enlightenment in the book, and Gibbon’s cool wit – often buried in the footnotes – and character assassinations implant themselves in the mind. If you don’t think you have time for all six volumes, pick up the Penguin abridged edition. It might inspire you to clear your diary.

My most anticipated read of 2013 is NAM Rodger’s The Price of

Victory (Allen Lane, Sept). It will bring to a conclusion his magisterial trilogy of British naval history and, no doubt, seal his reputation as not just the pre-eminent historian of the sea but as one of our leading historians full stop.

Ben Wilson is the author of Empire of the Deep,

published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

2013

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/podcasts

Sixteenth- century justice, as explored by

Joel F Harrington


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WellingtonThe Path to Victory, 1769–1814Rory MuirThis masterly new biography provides an authoritative re-evaluation of Wellington’s career, both as a soldier andpolitician, while giving new and unexpected insights intothis talented, complex and often difficult man.

‘This deeply researched and brilliantly written booksupersedes all previous work on the subject. A masterpiece.’ – Tim Blanning, author of The Pursuit of Glory: Europe, 1648–1815

Visit the website: www.lifeofwellington.co.uk

32 pages of illus., maps & plans Hardback £30.00book available

Life, Death and GrowingUp on the Western FrontAnthony FletcherA powerful account of life and loss in the GreatWar, as told by British soldiers in their letters home.Drawing on the correspondence of British soldiers onthe Western Front, this book provides a vivid accountof their experiences and reveals the comradeship,humour and strong morale that sustained them in theface of the horrors of war.

16 pages of b/w illus. Hardback £20.00book available

A Little History of LiteratureJohn SutherlandA much-loved author and teacher brings the world ofliterature alive, guiding young readers on anentertaining journey across centuries and cultures,from The Canterbury Tales to Harry Potter, RobinsonCrusoe to 1984 and revealing how literature hasreflected – and sometimes affected – the cultures inwhich it has appeared.

Visit the website: www.littlehistory.org

40 b/w illus. Hardback £14.99

book available

MagnificentEntertainmentsTemporary Architecture for Georgian FestivalsMelanie Doderer-WinklerA pioneering study of the Georgian era’sspectacular temporary displays, this booksurveys the elaborate floral creations, fireworksand architecture erected for royal marriages,battle victories and other public celebrations.

Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art133 colour + 100 b/w illus. Hardback £40.00

The Anglo-Saxon WorldNicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan‘Provides a thorough introduction to thecomplexities of the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’ at alevel that will challenge and stimulate informedreaders while introducing those new to thesubject to what makes it so fascinating.’– Ryan Lavelle, BBC History Magazine

‘Whether you want an accessible introduction toall things Anglo-Saxon, a thorough refresher ofkey points, or a reliably comprehensive referencetool to dip into, this is a wonderful book.’ – Current Archaeology

100 colour illus., 40 line drawings, 60 maps Hardback £30.00book available

Monty’s MenThe British Army and the Liberation of EuropeJohn BuckleyFrom D-Day to VE-Day, historian John Buckley offersa radical reexamination of Great Britain’s militaryprowess in the last years of World War Two,suggesting that the oft-maligned British Army was, infact, more than a match for the Nazi war machine.

20 b/w illus. Hardback £20.00book available

Naturalists at SeaScientific Travellers from Dampier to DarwinGlyn WilliamsThis enthralling book is the first to describe theadventures and misadventures, discoveries anddangers of the naturalists who joined greateighteenth-century voyages of discovery in thePacific and documented a natural world filled withnew wonders.

24 colour illus. Hardback £25.00

book available

The Memoirs of Walter BagehotFrank ProchaskaIn this imaginative reconstruction of the memoir theeminent Victorian editor Walter Bagehot might havewritten, the author captures the spirit and brilliance ofhis subject and scrupulously avoids what Bagehotconsidered an unpardonable fault: dullness.

‘[Prochaska] has done a remarkable job’– Roger Kimball, Literary Review

Hardback £18.99book available

YaleBookstel: 020 7079 4900

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Peter Heather

2013Hyun Jin Kim’s The Huns,

Rome and the Birth

of Europe (Cambridge University Press) gets my vote for the freshness of its worldview. The book rightly insists that what we call the continent of Europe is only a peninsula at the western end of Eurasia, and goes on to argue that what was really important between c400 and 1400 was neither the Chinese nor western European states that generally get airtime, but the populations and cultures of the Great Eurasian Steppe that flowed between the two. I’m not saying I buy all of it, but there’s a huge element of truth here.

Braudel’s The Mediterranean

in the Ancient World (1949) is beautifully written and brilliantly com-parative. It continues to challenge me to think ever harder about historical causa-tion, and above all about how to write about the intersection between the longue durée that so fascinated Braudel and the more human and short-term motivations that drove all the people I meet in my sources.

I’m a great lover of the landscape and the less than usual, so Trees and

Timber in the Anglo-Saxon World, edited by Michael DJ Bintley and Michael G Shapland (OUP, Oct), catches my eye. We’re now so cut off from nature that you really have to crank your mind back into the framework of assumptions that governed the past.

Peter Heather’s latest

book, The Restoration

of Rome, is reviewed

on page 64 of this issue

Hannah Greig

2013One text that really excited me this year

was not a history book at all, but a script. As historical adviser, I had the privilege of reading Juliette Towhidi’s screenplay for a forth-coming BBC drama, Death Comes to Pemberley (adapted from PD James’s novel) set in 1803. I was compelled from the first few pages. Towhidi’s prose is inspirational: witty and with a sharp eye for period detail, she ensures characters remain believably located in Regency England.

I’ve learnt most, though, from Giorgio Riello’s wide-ranging and engaging Cotton: The Fabric That Made the

Modern World (Cambridge). A leading scholar in global history, Riello’s epic study of cotton’s historical importance spans such an adventurous geographical and chronological range that all other histori-ans look boringly parochial. He writes in one book what you’d think it would take a whole history department to produce, or a lone scholar throughout their entire career.

Like so many historians, I have been inspired by the work of EP Thompson,

particularly The Making of the English

Working Class (1963) and Customs in

Common (1991). A pioneer of histories from below, Thompson might seem an unlikely touchstone for my own work on the 18th-century aristocracy. However, his emphasis on the performance of elite power (what he termed the “theatre of the great”) has helped me to understand why London’s ostentatious 18th-century beau monde exercised such authority. Moreover, his passionate, novelistic style makes weighty history a gloriously light read.

Finally, Nicola Phillips’s forthcoming The Pro�igate Son (OUP, Oct) has

long been on my radar. I recall her describ-ing a story she had stumbled across, and this book is the result of that fortuitous archival discovery. A real rake’s progress, it looks set to examine an East India Company merchant’s son who ended up a fraudster and felon. It is a reminder that we never know what an ordinary day’s research might reveal.

Hannah Greig is a lecturer in history at the

University of York and the author of The Beau

Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London,

published by OUP in September

Kate Williams

2013This year I loved Antonia Fraser’s

Perilous Question (Weidenfeld and Nicolson). The Reform Bill generated incredible controversy, and its passing five years before Victoria’s ascent to the throne created a new class of voters whom she strived above all to please. Fraser exposes the power struggles and the people behind the politics with superb colour, and her incisive analysis lets nobody off the hook. She has researched deep in the archives, giving a new picture of the Reform Bill that proves invaluable. This is the brilliant history and storytelling we always expect from Fraser – impossible to put down.

I am deep in research into witchcraft at the moment so am constantly

referring to one of my favourite history books of all time, Religion and the

Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas (1971). Rightly highly praised and never bettered, it is great scholarship and a very engaging read.

In the same spirit of discovering the truth behind 15th-century myths,

I’m looking forward to Alison Weir’s Eliza-

beth of York (Jonathan Cape, Nov). The daughter of Edward IV, whose marriage to

Henry VII symbolised the union between Lancastrians and Yorkists and a new era

of peace, was a woman of strength and character,

and she deserves this full examination.

Kate Williams’s

Josephine: Desire,

Ambition, Napoleon

is set to be

published in

November

by Hutchinson

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Elizabeth of York,

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Favourite history book of 2013 Favourite history book of all time Most anticipated history title 2013

Simon Thurley

2013My highlight has been Kevin

Sharpe’s Rebranding

Rule (Yale). This is the culmination of a brilliantly interdisci-plinary trilogy that uses music, ceremonies, architecture and politics to deepen our understanding of the Tudor and Stuart monarchy. That Sharpe died before it was published is a tragedy.

The art of writing great history is to unite readability with originality of

insight. The first book that I read that did this brilliantly was Mark Girouard’s Life

in the English Country House (1978). As a teenager it influenced my whole outlook on history and, subsequently, writing. He showed us that understanding architecture requires an understanding of how people lived – at the time, a rather radical point.

Elizabeth McKellar is one of the most perceptive and sensible of architectural

historians, and she understands London like few others. Her new book, Landscapes

of London: The Metropolitan Environs,

1660�1830 (Yale, Dec) will be important because we now know so much architec-tural innovation stemmed from cities and the mercantile classes that lived in them.

Simon Thurley’s The Building of England will

be published by William Collins in October

Lucy Worsley

2013I enjoyed Elizabeth’s

Bedfellows by Anna Whitelock (Bloomsbury), a refreshing way of approaching the life of Elizabeth I. The bed and bedchamber lay at the heart of Tudor court life: places not so much for sleep and sex as politics, intrigue, alliances and scandal. The story of the women who served the queen in this most intimate space makes for fascinating reading.

The reason I became an architectural historian was Mark Girouard’s

Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan

Country House, which I read when I was 21. This masterful work on the houses designed by Robert Smythson, the best known of the shadowy mason/designers of the Elizabethan age, was first published in 1983. It describes Girouard’s treasure hunt to find the remains of his lost buildings, using as clues the sketches by Smythson that still survive in the Royal Institute of British Architects. It’s a wonderful voyage into what was then the unknown territory of 16th-century design history.

I shall be ordering Lucy Inglis’s Georgian London: Into the

Streets (Viking, Sept), as will the many followers of her blog (georgianlondon.com). A bustling streetscape is promised, bristling with characters including foundlings, bodysnatchers, people wearing hernia corsets, hot air balloonists, and even the African woman known as the ‘Hottentot Venus’.

Lucy Worsley is the author of

A Very British Murder, published

by BBC Books in September. Read

more about the accompanying TV

series in our feature starting on

page 45 of this issue

Saul David

2013The Guns at Last

Light (Little, Brown) is the third of Rick Atkinson’s sweeping trilogy of the US army’s contribution to Allied victory in north Africa, Italy and now, with this final volume, north- west Europe. No one writes vivid and deeply researched narrative history like this former journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness (1974) is a superbly nuanced study of

how Franz Stangl, an ‘ordinary’ Austrian policeman, became the commandant of Treblinka, the largest death camp of the Third Reich. Based on more than 70 hours of interviews with Stangl, it concludes that most people can become evil, but are rarely born that way. I wept as I read Sereny’s masterpiece and blame it for my fascination with how people behave during conflicts.

Max Hastings’s Catastrophe: Europe

Goes to War 1914 (William Collins, Sept) promises to be a magisterial survey of the first year of the Great War. If 1914 is anything like as good as his last book on the Second World War, All Hell Let Loose, it will be well worth its £30 cover price.

Saul David’s 100 Days to Victory: How the

Great War was Fought and Won is published

in September by Hodder and Stoughton

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AQUILA children’s magazineis perfect for lively 8-12 year olds whoare always asking questions. Using a funmix of science, arts and generalknowledge this unique publication willcapture children’s interest and offerfriendly companionship as they learnabout the world and how things work.

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13

Books special / History DVDs

Local dramaThe Village

Entertainment One

In the era of Downton Abbey and the rebooted (and impeccably suited) Upstairs, Downstairs, it’d be easy to conclude that only glossy, escapist historical dramas can connect with a mainstream audience. In which case, The Village should have been doomed. Created by Peter Moffat, more often associated with legal dramas, here was a series showing Peak District life in the raw between 1914 and 1920.

Told in flashback, it shows us the era through the eyes of young Bert Middleton, son of alcoholic, embittered, pathetic John

(John Simm) and tough-as-nails Grace (Maxine Peake). While we never see any scenes of battle, the couple’s life is changed forever when their oldest son, Joe, goes off to serve on the western front.

With future series to be set in different eras through the 20th century, Moffat has compared the series to Heimat, a hugely acclaimed German TV epic that told the story of a single extended family from 1919– 82. The comparison doesn’t seem fanciful because, for all its frequent concentration on the domestic, The Village is also a rich, multilayered, hugely ambitious drama.

Hard going? In truth, yes, but the series certainly repays the effort for those who stay the course.

In tune with the nationDavid Starkey’s

Music & Monarchy

Acorn Media

The programme’s presenter, David Starkey, fully expected Music & Monarchy to begin with one of our most musical kings, Henry VIII. That the series actually begins with Henry V, who took a choir with him when he went campaigning and saw music as “holy ammunition” in his battles against the French, came as some-thing of a surprise to the historian.

Which may be a big part of what makes the series, exploring the interplay between Britain’s royal history and its musical history, so entertaining because throughout there’s a sense of a presenter sharing his discoveries almost as soon he’s making them himself. Good tunes, too.

Secret statesThe Untold History

of the United States

FremantleMedia International

Having made big-screen dramas about the US involvement in Vietnam and two very different presidents, Nixon and JFK, the reinterpretation of American history has long fascinated Oliver Stone. It’s a theme he pursues in a series first shown in the UK on Sky Atlantic, by looking at what he perceives to be under-reported and under-discussed events in US history over the past 110 years. Polemical but thought-provoking.

Jonathan Wright’s pick of the top releases of 2013 so far

DVDs

(Re)construction eraThe Men Who Built America

Go Entertain

“America wasn’t discovered, it was built,” runs the tagline to this History Channel series. More specifi-cally, it was built, in this reading at least, by entrepreneurs whose names still have resonance, including Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. A glossy docudrama that traces

the development of the oil, rail, steel, shipping, automobile and finance industries in the 50 formative years that followed the American Civil War.

Royal powerThe White Queen

Anchor Bay Entertainment

Auntie’s big-budget adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War sequence doesn’t always hit the mark. However, it’s at least worth a second look, because when it was good, as in the genuinely menacing, penultimate episode centred on the princes in the Tower, it was very, very good indeed. Amid a strong cast, Amanda Hale (pictured right) excels as scheming Margaret Beaufort.

Maxine Peake and John Simm star in this “rich, hugely ambitious drama”

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Decaying dreamsThe Great Gatsby

Warner Home Video, due out in November

With its themes of decadence and money not necessarily acquired by honest means, F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece is going through one of those moments in which it has real contemporary resonance. Director Baz Luhrmann’s lavish cinematic version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire, arguably misses too many of the novel’s subtleties, but it looks magnificent.

At home with FDRHyde Park on Hudson

Universal Pictures

In 1939, George VI (Samuel West) and Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Williams) visited the United States. As part of the trip, the couple stayed with president Franklin D Roosevelt at his family’s country home in New York State. At a time when Britain desper-ately wanted help in the impending fight against Hitler, what might have passed between them?

Director Roger Michell’s comedy-drama isn’t a patch on another evocation of this era, the Colin Firth-starring The King’s Speech, but there’s plenty to entertain, including a fine turn by Bill Murray as Roosevelt. The series is based on diaries kept by one of FDR’s confidantes, Daisy Suckley (Laura Linney).

Exploring the warNational Geographic Classic

Collection: World War II

FremantleMedia International

If you’re looking for great value, this two-disc set can’t be faulted. Featuring six documentaries first shown on National Geographic, it includes Search for Battleship Bismarck, which charts how Dr Robert D Ballard located the wreck of the Second World War vessel at a depth of more than 4,700 metres on the floor of the Atlantic.

After the pioneersThe Last Explorers

Spirit Entertainment

Perhaps because it was broadcast first in Scotland rather than networked, Neil Oliver’s series on the golden age of exploration didn’t get the attention it deserved when it was first shown in 2011/12. The format is deceptively simple: Oliver follows in the footsteps of four Scottish adventurers, along the way learning more about what motivated each of his subjects.

Aside from David Livingstone (1813–73), Oliver’s choices aren’t household names. The second film in the series, for example, focuses on William Speirs Bruce (1867–1921), polar scientist and leader of the

Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, a man who would probably be far better known if he hadn’t clashed with Royal Geographical Society (RGS) president Sir Clements Markham and, by extension, the largely London-centric British geo-graphical establishment. And yet, as Oliver discovers when he sails queasily into the Southern Ocean, Bruce was a superb researcher, who set up a weather station on Laurie Island in the South Orkney Islands that’s still in use today.

Rounding out the series are documenta-ries about John Muir (1838–1914), increas-ingly seen as the father of the modern conservation movement, and Thomas Blake Glover (1838–1911), rogue trader and a key figure in the invention of modern Japan.

Finding RichardRichard III: The King in the Car Park

& The Unseen Story

Spirit Entertainment

Get past the excess-charges gags and it’s a story that even now seems fantastical. In February this year, DNA evidence proved that archaeologists had located the grave of Richard III, lost for 500 years in Leicester, latterly beneath a car park.

A documentary first shown on Channel 4 tells the story of the dig, offering an insider’s guide to the painstaking work involved in recovering the bones, as well as showing the results of a facial recon-struction made from the skull. The Unseen

Story adds footage, and offers gruesome insights into the major

injuries Richard suffered at (and even after) his death. We’ll be talking to contributor

Philippa Langley in our November issue.

Books special / History DVDs

Neil Oliver follows in the footsteps

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The wreck of the Bismarck,

located off Brest in France in 1989

Maguire, DiCaprio and

Mulligan in a new take on a classic


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