History Today 04-2015

April 2015
Vol 65 Issue 4
In Ruins
Medieval Europe
and the First
World War
Imperial
Endgame
Anglo-French
rivalries
in southern
Africa
Girl Gods
The last survivors of a
1,000-year-old tradition
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editors Fern Riddell, Kate Wiles
Publishing Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte
Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Where art meets

science: the
School of Athens
by Raphael,
1510-11.
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde
Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge
Professor Richard Bessel University of York
Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter
Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor
of the Open University
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen
Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex
Juliet Gardiner Historian and author
Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South
Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary,
University of London
Professor Geoffrey Parker
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston
London School of Economics
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
University of London
Dr David Starkey
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter
Professor Chris Wrigley
University of Nottingham
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Total Average Net Circulation

18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
2 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015
FROM THE EDITOR

MANY CLAIMS ARE MADE for the study of history. For example, that a knowledge
of the past will help us improve our decision making in the future, though the best
reason I know for studying history was given in these pages by Chris Wickham,
Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford: that it was simply very
interesting. However, it may have a more important role to play.
It has been noted by numerous commentators that many Islamist terrorists
have studied science, engineering in particular. The US magazine Foreign Policy
suggests that this might be because engineering is attractive to individuals seeking
cognitive closure and clear cut answers. Mohammed Atta, ringleader of the 9/11
terrorists, was an architectural engineer. The founders of the Pakistani terrorist
group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, were both professors of engineering. Jihad al-Binaa, a wing
of Hezbollah, could marshal more than 2,000 engineers in its reconstruction efforts
following the 2006 conflict with Israel. More recently, Mohammed Emzawi, the ISIS
executioner raised in Britain and known as Jihadi John, was revealed to be a graduate
in information systems and business management at the University of Westminster.
None of these individuals appear to be or to have been wracked by self-doubt.
History, by contrast, is all doubt and scepticism and questioning and so, arguably,
appealing to a different cast of mind. But it is surely wrong to claim that the world
is divided by a Manichean struggle between those with a bent for humanities and
those preferring the supposed certainities of science. Medicine, mathematics, the
sciences in general are at the core of our modern world. Which is why one of the most
interesting and contentious commentators on this divide is Dominic Cummings,
a former adviser to Michael Gove when he was education secretary, whose erudite,
often blistering assaults on conventional thought can be found at dominiccummings.
wordpress.com; do read him in full, for summaries tend to do him a disservice.
An Oxford history graduate, Cummings champions an Odyssean education, in
which a more demanding and interesting science curricula combines with greater
focus on essay writing and an emphasis on the learning of languages ancient and
modern. His Britain would become a school to the world in the manner of Periclean
Athens, fit to tackle an increasingly complex and uncertain future. Absurdly
ambitious? Maybe. But how wonderful would it be to tackle the kind of course
suggested by Cummings to replace the vagaries of PPE? Ancient and Modern History,
Maths for Presidents, and Coding.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Henry Oldenburg Womens Congress Breast Cancer Irelands War
Innovative
Oldenburg
A German scholar living in

17th-century London
revolutionised the way
scientists shared news of
their latest advances.
Noah Moxham
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY has shaped
the world for four centuries. To make
it happen, scientists needed an effective way to circulate knowledge, share
ideas and establish new paradigms.
One of the most important innovations of early science (natural philosophy to its 17th-century practitioners),
therefore, was the scientific journal.
It owes its existence to an industrious German, Heinrich (Henry)
Oldenburg. Educated in his native
city of Bremen and in Utrecht, he was
intended for a career in the Church or
the academy but, in the early 1640s, he
abandoned his studies in favour of experiencing the religious, political and
intellectual life of Europe at first hand,
seeking employment as tutor and
travelling companion to the son of a
nobleman or some honest merchant.
Oldenburg travelled extensively,
mastered Dutch, French, Italian and
English and made a wide acquaintance among the leading theologians
and philosophers of Europe. His
English contacts included many
future members of the Royal Society,
a like-minded knot of devotees of
the new experimental science, which
began meeting formally in London in
November 1660. This well-travelled
networker with eerily perfect English
the poet John Milton remarked that
he had never heard a foreigner speak
it better was ideally equipped to
address the learned of Europe in their
own languages and made a natural
of scientific communication,
promote the Societys activity,
save him the labour of copying
the same news to dozens of correspondents in half a dozen languages and enable him to earn
a decent living. It was to be a
monthly periodical dedicated to
natural philosophy, published
by Oldenburg and printed with
the Societys authority.
The first issue was dated
March 6th and it inaugurated
a publication that continues
down to the present: Philosophical Transactions, the oldest scientific journal in the world and
the oldest English periodical
of any kind still in production.
Oldenburgs innovation has
been much imitated; estimates
suggest that the number of
scientific journal titles in publication today exceeds 30,000.
The success of the scientific
journal may not have seemed
quite so certain at the time. The
first years of the Transactions
were subject to a Biblical
catalogue of disruptions: pestilence, fire and war.
Plague was the first to
strike, in the summer of 1665.
While much of the senior fellowship retreated to Oxford or
the countryside to escape the disease,
Oldenburg stayed behind and braved
the epidemic. He continued to receive
scientific news from the Continent,
almost single-handedly kept up the
impression through his correspondence that the Society was still active
and arranged for the Transactions to be
printed at Oxford.
Fire came next. The disruption
caused to the print trade by the Great
Fire of September 1666 was little
short of catastrophic. Many printers
lost their stock and workshops and
Oldenburg despaired of getting anyone
to undertake to print the journal in
Publishing
pioneer: Henry
Oldenburg by Jan
van Cleve, 1668.
He proposed a new venture ... which

he hoped would further the cause of
scientific communication
choice for the Societys first secretary.
Oldenburg filled the role with
extraordinary dedication and energy,
writing regularly to his contacts to
inform them of the progress of science
in England and to solicit news of their
research in return. The Royal Society
failed to match this commitment
with a salary, however, and Oldenburg
found himself overworked, unpaid and
scratching out a living as a translator
and publishing agent for the aristocratic pioneer of chemistry, Robert
Boyle. In 1665 he proposed a new
venture to the Royal Society, which
he hoped would further the cause
APRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
its aftermath. To keep it going he was

forced to surrender his stake in the
journals profits for several months,
which, as he wrote anxiously to Boyle,
he was really in no financial position
to do and to sweeten the deal for the
booksellers with gifts of some saleable books from the Continent.
War was last. The second AngloDutch war had broken out within a
few days of the Transactions first publication but had done little to disrupt
Oldenburgs communication with
France and the Low Countries until
the summer of 1667. The Dutch fleets
attack on the Medway in June caused
panic and indignation through all
echelons of society. In the search for
a scapegoat, the authorities ordered
Oldenburgs arrest and imprisonment
in the Tower, apparently for being a
foreigner who had used some unguarded expressions in his letters overseas.
Initially denied writing materials
and allowed few visitors, Oldenburg
was in a miserable situation. Samuel
Pepys, a fellow-member of the Society,
reflected that Oldenburgs imprisonment for writing news to a colleague
in France with whom he constantly
corresponds in philosophical [scientific] matters indicated the danger of the
times. It also, Oldenburg observed bitterly to Boyle, taught him who his real
friends were. Few tried to visit him;
many of those who did left without
seeing him upon learning what he was
imprisoned for. It is not known how
he eventually secured his release. It is
likely that some highly-placed friends
did in fact intercede for him, Boyle
perhaps among them.
He had work to catch up on when
he got out at the end of August.
Someone perhaps an unscrupulous
publisher, more likely a well-meaning
friend published a stop-gap issue
of the Transactions reporting blood
transfusion experiments from France.
Oldenburg repudiated it and disqualified it from the journals sequence, not
because it had not appeared under his
stewardship but because it advanced
French claims to priority in transfusion over English ones. Oldenburg had
learned the value of asserting plainly
whose side he was on and he vowed to
stick to scientific matters in his future
correspondence. (The accused poacher
Philosophical
Transactions never
made Oldenburg a
living; he observed
that it barely covered
his Piccadilly rent
would later turn gamekeeper,

working in the 1670s to translate
intercepted letters and dispatches for
the Secretary of State.)
Philosophical Transactions survived
these disruptions and Oldenburg
himself, who died suddenly in September 1677. It never made him an independent living; he observed in 1668
that it barely covered his Piccadilly rent
and the Society voted him a salary in
recognition of his services. But it had
become a part of the scientific landscape and remains so to this day. The
Society refused to let the journal die,
badgering Oldenburgs successors to
keep it going. Others began to appear,
in Britain and on the Continent, and
by the time the Society took over the
Transactions in 1753 over 150 titles had
been started. The revolution in science
communication was well under way.
Noah Moxham is a Research Fellow at the
University of St Andrews. For details of the Royal
Societys celebrations of the 350th anniversary of
the Philosophical Transactions go to: royalsociety.
org/publishing350
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
Pacifism and
Feminism in
the Great War
A century ago, the Womens

Congress met with the aim
of revolutionising a ravaged
political landscape.
Helen McCarthy
MORE THAN 1,100 women from
warring and neutral states gathered
at The Hague in April 1915 for a special
set of peace negotiations. They were
not diplomats representing states and
they were not present to press national
demands. Most were unable even to
vote in parliamentary elections in their
own countries. They were feminists and
pacifists and it was their commitment
to these twin ideals that drew them together as conflict raged across Europe.
Their vision of a peace founded
on gender equality, social justice and
human rights did not bring the war to
a close. Nor was it embraced by the
male powerbrokers meeting in Paris in
1919 to conclude peace terms. Yet the
Womens Congress of 1915 is important
because it reminds us that the First
World War not only mobilised armies
but nurtured alternative forms of politics, not least the politics of international cooperation and peace.
Who were the women at The
Hague? They were mainly middle-class,
well-travelled and experienced feminist
activists, many with professional backgrounds and all advocates of womens
suffrage. They included the British
lawyer Chrystal Macmillan, Aletta
Jacobs, the pioneering Dutch physician,
the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer and the trade unionist Lida Gustava
Heymann of Germany. The US peace
campaigner Jane Addams agreed to
preside as chair of the Congress.
Many travelled to the Netherlands
at personal cost, encountering hostility from the patriotic publics of the
belligerent nations. In Britain, anti-war
campaigners were placed under official
surveillance. As a result, only 20 of the
180-strong British delegation were
issued with passports and even they
HISTORYMATTERS
found it impossible to cross the North

Sea due to military operations. The three
British women who reached The Hague
had either travelled some weeks earlier
or went by a different route.
Taking a stand against the war was,
furthermore, a difficult experience emotionally for many of the delegates. They
found themselves in conflict with suffragist comrades who chose a different
course, seeing the war as an opportunity
All delegates wishing

to attend were
required from the
outset to pledge their
support for womens
suffrage
to prove themselves loyal citizens and
hence convince their respective governments to grant women the vote.
After four days of discussions and
debates, the Congress agreed a set of
20 resolutions encompassing practical
proposals for immediate negotiations
to end the war, as well as fundamental principles for a permanent peace.
Among the latter were the right of
self-determination for all peoples; the
creation of an international authority
to arbitrate disputes and advance con-
structive cooperation between nations;

and an end to secret diplomacy conducted behind closed doors and without
democratic accountability.
Womens rights were central to
this blueprint. All delegates wishing to
attend were required from the outset
to pledge their support for womens
suffrage, which the Congress organisers
saw as inseparable from the objective of
peace. A just world free of conflict, they
argued, was impossible to achieve unless
women were allowed to take their
place alongside men as equal citizens.
Enfranchisement, they claimed, would
make peace more likely because of the
role that women played as mothers in
creating the life which war extinguished.
Women, in the words of Jane Addams,
who have brought men into the world
and nurtured them until they reach
the age for fighting, must experience a
peculiar revulsion when they see them
destroyed, irrespective of the country in
which these men may have been born.
Despite the efforts of Addams and
others to win support for their proposals after the Congress had closed,
both women and their concerns were
marginal to the negotiations in Paris
in 1919, led by the victorious powers.
Not one woman was appointed as a
formal representative of her nation at
the Peace Conference and while a small
contingent of feminists travelled to Paris
Protesting
for peace: US
delegates,
including Jane
Addams (second
from left, front),
travel to the
Congress.
Women, Peace
and Transnationalism:
A Century On is
a half-day conference taking
place at Queen
Mary University
of London on
March 31st, 2015
and is free and
open to all. For
more details see
http://www.
qmul.ac.uk/
events
to lobby the official delegates, their

demands fell on deaf ears. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, briefly raised
the question of womens political representation with his fellow plenipotentiaries, but few wished to see womens
rights recognised as a legitimate matter
for international agreement. Where the
Hague women saw peace and gender
equality as fundamentally interlinked,
the great powers in Paris were anxious
to keep them separate, with womens
citizenship firmly under the control of
national governments.
Given this failure, why is it worth remembering the 1915 Womens Congress
at The Hague? The history of seemingly
lost causes can tell us a great deal about
how power works and, in this case,
why women remained peripheral to
international politics and diplomacy for
so much of the 20th century. Today, the
United Nations Security Council passes
resolutions about womens inclusion
in conflict resolution; governments
host summits on rape as a weapon of
war; and powerful non-governmental
organisations ensure women are given
a voice in debates about human rights,
development and security. But history
shows us that these achievements have
been hard fought and won. They stand
as testament to the efforts of generations of feminists who worked to make
womens rights an international, and not
just a national, concern.
It would be too simplistic to draw a
line of continuity between the Womens
Congress of 1915 and todays policy
debates. Much took place in the interim
to reconfigure the global womens
rights agenda, from interwar Fascism
and the Cold War to the fall of European empires and the rise of new superpowers at the centurys end. Nonetheless, at this moment when the legacy
of the First World War is uppermost in
the public mind, it is worth reflecting on
how that conflict produced, through the
voices of the women who gathered at
The Hague, an analysis of the modern
world in which gender equality, social
justice and peace were intertwined. It
is an analysis which endures a hundred
years on.
Helen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer in History at

Queen Mary University of London.
HISTORYMATTERS
Culture,
Continuity
and Breast
Cancer
Breastfeeding, corsets and

ageing: the mysterious
dangers of womanhood.
Agnes Arnold-Forster
I CONGRATULATE [my fair countrywomen] on their present easy and
elegant mode of dress, wrote the
surgeon James Nooth, in 1804, free from
the unnatural and dangerous pressure
of stays. Nooths concern was not aesthetic. The danger he saw in restrictive
bodices was cancer: I have extirpated
[removed] a great number of tumours
which originated from that absurdity.
Breast cancer in the 19th century was
a consistent, if mysterious, killer. It preoccupied many doctors, unable to state
with any confidence the diseases causes,
characteristics or cures. While the orthodox medical profession in Britain were
broadly agreed on cancers ultimate incurability, they were less uniform in their
understanding of its origin. The disease
was thought to develop from a range
of harmful tendencies and events acting
together. Both the essential biology of
being female, as well as typically feminine behaviours, were understood as
causes of breast cancer.
Breastfeeding was a contentious
topic at the end of the 18th century. An
image of idealised motherhood emerged
that infiltrated concepts of femininity:
women were by nature loving, maternal
and self-sacrificing. This ideology was
expressed through changing social and
political attitudes to breastfeeding and
an outcry against wet-nursing across
western Europe. In 1789 only 10 per cent
of babies born in Paris were nursed by
their own mothers; by 1801, this number
had increased to half of all Parisian
infants and two thirds of English babies.
Late 18th-century medical men were
explicit about the associations between
breastfeeding and breast cancer. In 1772,
man-midwife William Rowley wrote:
When the vessels of the breasts are
over-filled and the natural discharge
Suffering for
fashion: Minna at
her Toilet by Sir
William Quiller
Orchardson, 19th
century.
through the nipple not encouraged

it lays the foundation of the cancer.
Frances Burney an aristocratic novelist
who underwent a mastectomy in 1811
attributed her disease to her inability to
breastfeed properly: They have made
me wean my Child! ... What that has
cost me!
Menstruation was seen as particularly hazardous. The surgeon Thomas
Denman wrote: Women who menstruate irregularly or with pain are
suspected to be more liable to Cancer
than those who are regular, or who do
not suffer at these times. However, their
risk only increased after menopause.
Denman considered women about the

time of the cessation of the menses
most liable to cancer. Elderly women
were blighted by a dual threat: their
gender and their age. While surgeons
insisted their theories were based on
clinical observation, designating these
various female-specific processes as
causes of cancer supported their broader
thoughts about female biology.
Eighteenth-century theory dictated
that all diseases were explained by
an imbalance in humours: black bile,
yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Into the
19th century the insufficient drainage
of various substances continued to be
invoked as a cause of cancer; womens
coldness and humidity made them particularly prone to disease. Menstruation
was the primary mechanism by which
the female body cleansed the system of
black bile and its regularity was seen as
central to a womans wellbeing. Certain

situations in which the menses were
disrupted or had been terminated were,
therefore, especially dangerous: pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause.
Similarly, when the female body and its
breasts were not used for their correct
purpose childbearing and rearing
the risk of breast cancer increased.
The historian Marjo Kaartinen has
noted that 18th-century theorists considered just being female and having
breasts a threat to a womans health.
This way of thinking about female
biology suggested that women were
more likely to suffer from all cancers, not
just cancer of the breast. Denman wrote:
It can hardly be doubted that women
are more liable to Cancer than men.
This association between womanhood and disease and between breastfeeding, pregnancy, menopause and
cancer is still part of our 21st-century
understanding of breast cancer; that
certain female-specific processes make
you more or less likely to succumb to it.
On its website, the breast cancer charity
Breakthrough lists various ways you
can reduce and increase your chances
of disease. According to contemporary
research, having children early and
breastfeeding them reduces your risk.
The later a woman begins her family the
higher her risk is. The contraceptive pill,
growing older and the menopause also
increases your risk of breast cancer.
Drawing attention to such historical
continuities questions the social and
cultural environments that make certain
medical assumptions possible. The
causes of cancer suggested by Denman,
Nooth and friends were informed by
their understandings of female biology
and female inferiority more generally.
They were working within a school of
thought that suggested any deviation
from appropriate womanhood could
have hazardous consequences for a
womans health. While the role of the
historian might not be to deny the
validity of 21st-century medical research,
it is part of our remit to question cultural
assumptions that continue to have some
effect on both the conclusions of scientists and the way those conclusions are
accepted by the broader public.
Agnes Arnold-Forster is a PhD candidate at Kings

College London.
HISTORYMATTERS
In memoriam: graves of
soldiers from Irish units killed
in the 1916 Easter Rising,
Grangegorman Military
Cemetery, Dublin, 2015.
Ireland: Easter Rising or Great War?

The events that led to the creation of the Irish Free State and reshaped
the United Kingdom were part of two inextricably linked histories.
John Gibney
IN MAY 1916 the young Dubliner Sen
Heuston was sentenced to death for
his participation in the Irish Easter
Rising of that year. The night before
his execution he wrote to his sister
and touched upon how he and his
colleagues might be judged:
Let there be no talk of foolish enterprise.
I have no vain regrets. Think of the thousands of Irishmen who fell fighting under
another flag at the Dardanelles.
Thousands of Heustons contemporaries were killed or wounded when
the 10th (Irish) Division landed at
Gallipoli in 1915; it is a little reminder
that Heuston and the others who
fought in the Easter Rising lived in a
world shaped by the Great War, which
conditioned their own actions.
The centenary of the outbreak of
the First World War generated great
public interest in Ireland. The Irish
involvement in the Gallipoli campaign
is being marked in a variety of ways.
Last November the Irish government
announced its plans for the impending
centenary of the Easter Rising of 1916.
The emphasis on 1916 arises from the
fact that it was the catalyst for the
independence movement Sinn Fin
and the IRA that led to the creation
of the Irish Free State in 1922. With the

foundation of the Free State a substantial portion of the United Kingdom broke
away from the whole in an unprecedented manner; it is of obvious relevance in the light of last years Scottish
referendum.
There is still a tendency to view the
Easter Rising and the First World War
as distinct events, even if someone like
Heuston did not. This is understandable
on one level: the Irish involvement in the
First World War (210,000 volunteers and
35,000 deaths) overwhelmingly took
place in the British armed forces: an unlikely bedfellow for a tradition of resistance to British rule. But the First World
War was fundamental to the growth
and development of the Irish independence movement, especially in relation to
the Easter Rising. The separatist republicans who planned and executed the
rising did so within the context of a war
that gave them both an opportunity and
a prospective ally: Germany. The British
suppressed it in the manner in which
they did precisely because they were at
war and feared the potential for German
involvement in such an insurrection.
Some Irish responses to 1916 were surprisingly hostile, especially on the part of
the families of serving troops. Many Irish
soldiers were involved in suppressing the
rebellion and the Easter Rising cannot be
understood outside the context of the

British war effort. Among the British and
Irish fatalities of the Great War are those
troops who were killed when the Great
War came to Dublin for a week in April
1916. Many of them are still buried there.
The approach to a number of centenaries up to 2022 has seen a greater
recognition on the part of the Irish
government of the experiences of Irishmen who fought in the First World War,
along with a increased, albeit cautious,
British official engagement with the
reality of the Irish independence movement. The spech by Britains Minister for
International Security Strategy, Andrew
Murrison, in Cork on January 24th,
2014, was a natural follow-on from the
symbolism of the state visit to Ireland
of the Queen in 2011. Yet while one can
be respectful of differing viewpoints, it is
also right to caution against the creation
of a contrived historical consensus about
events that might not be compatible in
ideological terms. This was pointed out
by the Irish governments Expert Advisory group on commemorations: the
Irish state can hardly be neutral about
its origins in 1916. Yet there are lives that
straddled a range of experiences to make
one think how the Irish independence
movement and the First World War are
intertwined. Take, for instance, Michael
McCabe, who fought in the Easter Rising
as a member of the Irish Volunteers;
served in the British army from 1917 to
1922; fought against the Irish Free State
as a member of the IRA in the Irish Civil
War; yet, when applying for his IRA
pension in 1938, did so as a member of
the 2nd Battalion, Gold Coast Regiment,
Royal West African Frontier Force. Does
his life point to a shared history, or to
distinct histories, inextricably linked?
Ireland was not the only small European country to gain independence from
a larger one in the era of the First World
War; the difference is that it was a rare
instance of a country gaining independence from a victorious power. The creation of the Irish Free State is the single
most fundamental change to the UK
since it was created. That alone makes
the events that led to it worth looking at
anew from a British perspective.
John Gibney is the editor of www.decadeof

centenaries.com.
MonthsPast
APRIL
By Richard Cavendish
Destructive
legacy: a NASA
photograph of
the huge caldera
formed when
Mount Tambora
erupted in 1815.
APRIL 10TH 1815
The eruption of Mount Tambora

The volcano looms over the Java Sea
from the northern shore of the island
of Sumbawa, which lies towards the
eastern end of the former Dutch East
Indies, now Indonesia. Every now and
again Mount Tambora erupts. Its 1815 explosion was possibly the most destructive ever recorded.
Tambora stood over 14,000 feet
high in 1815, but when it blew its stack
it hurled more than 4,000 feet off the
top of it, leaving a crater more than four
miles across and 2,000 feet deep. On
April 5th a modest eruption occurred, as
if the volcano was practising, followed by
thunderous rumbling noises. Ash began
to fall and on April 10th there were more
rumblings that sounded like cannon.
That evening the eruption moved
into full force with an explosion that was
heard more than 1,200 miles away in
Sumatra. The ground shook as massive
boulders were tossed about like pebbles
and caused havoc in all directions.
Columns of flame shot up from the
mountain and melded together to carry
a plume of gas, dust and smoke miles up
into the sky. Rivers of incandescent ash
poured down the slopes at more than
100 miles an hour, destroying all in their
way before they hissed and boiled into
the sea. Ships in harbours were trapped

in rafts of pumice stone, while tsunamis
were driven across the Java Sea. Volcanic
ash fell as far away as Borneo.
Ash and debris rained down for
weeks and houses for miles around
collapsed. Fresh water sources were
contaminated and crops failed, while
sulphurous gas caused lung infections.
It is thought that 10,000 people had
been killed instantly, but thousands more
died of starvation and disease and the
death toll in Sumbawa and neighbouring
islands has been estimated at anything
from 60,000 to 90,000.
Stamford Raffles, then governor of
Java, which had been taken over by the
British during the Napoleonic Wars,
sent an officer to Sumbawa to report
on what had happened. He found there
were still dead bodies lying around, the
villages were almost entirely deserted
and most of the houses had fallen
down. The few survivors were desperately trying to find food. An epidemic
of violent diarrhoea had broken out,
thought to have been caused by volcanic
ash contaminating the drinking water,
and had caused many deaths.
Tambora is classified by specialists
as Ultraplinian, the most violent of all
categories of volcanic eruption, named in

honour of the Younger Plinys description of the destruction of Pompeii by
Vesuvius in ad 79. Such eruptions propel
quantities of sulphurous gases into the
stratosphere, where they combine with
water vapour to create aerosol clouds
of drops of sulphuric acid. The Tambora
eruption caused unusual phenomena
around the globe. In the north-eastern
United States in the spring and summer
of 1815 the sunlight was dimmed and
reddened by periods of fog, which wind
and rain did not disperse. It was described as a kind of aerosol veil. London
experienced spectacular sunsets at the
turn of June and July, which are thought
to have influenced paintings by Turner.
The following year brought far
more damaging effects, with serious
consequences for climate and the
fertility of the land over much of the
world, as global temperatures dropped.
In mid-June 1816 Mary and Percy Shelley,
Lord Byron and two other friends were
staying at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland
when the weather was so repellently
rainy and foggy that they were trapped
indoors. Byron suggested that they pass
the time by each writing a horror story
and that was when Mary Shelley began
to create Frankenstein.
In June 1816 snow fell in New York
State and in Maine, while frost was
reported from Connecticut. In Canada
the Quebec area had deep snow. Cold
persisted through the summer months
in North America and elsewhere and
quantities of crops failed. The monsoon
seasons in India and China were disrupted, with damaging agricultural effects,
famine and cholera, and 1816 was called
the year without a summer.
Such conditions persisted until
1819 and are believed to have helped
create severe epidemics of typhus in
south-eastern Europe and the eastern
Mediterranean. Harvests failed in Britain
and famine struck Ireland, Germany and
other areas of Europe, sparking outbreaks of rioting and causing starvation.
Mount Tambora is still active. Its
most recent eruption was in 1967.
APRIL 26TH 1865
John Wilkes
Booth meets
his end
Born in 1838 in the state of Maryland,
President Lincolns assassin was
christened in honour of the English
radical John Wilkes. A handsome
young actor, he was a fanatical
supporter of the South in the Civil
War and of the institution of slavery.
Booth had often performed at Fords
Theatre in Washington DC and was
well known there. On April 14th, 1865
he heard that Lincoln would attend a
play there that evening. He promptly
decided to murder the president,
assigning a fellow-conspirator called
George Azerodt to kill the vice-president, Andrew Johnson, and another,
Lewis Powell, to kill William Seward,
the secretary of state.
Booth rode to the theatre armed
with a pistol, went into the presidents box and fired a single shot into
the back of Lincolns head. He leapt
down from the box onto the stage
Lincolns nemesis:
John Wilkes Booth,
c.1864.
Beauty queen:
Helena Rubinstein
emphasises facial
contours, 1935.
APRIL 1ST 1965
Helena Rubinstein dies in

New York City
and escaped in the

uproar to an alley
outside where his
horse was being
held for him. Booth
and a co-conspirator called David
Herold rode away
together and fled
south into Maryland, hiding in the
woods and presently crossing into
Virginia. Meanwhile,
George Azerodt had
made no attempt
to kill the vice-president, but Lewis
Powell had attacked
and injured William Seward.
By April 24th Booth and Herold
had reached Port Royal in Virginia,
almost 90 miles south of Washington.
The war department had offered a
reward of $100,000 (worth more than
$1.5 million today) for information
leading to the arrest of Booth and his
accomplices and federal troops were
searching for them. The fugitives took
refuge at the farm of a man called
Richard H. Garrett, who apparently

knew nothing of what had happened
and let them sleep in one of his barns.
A band of soldiers arrived at the
farm in the early hours of April 26th
and surrounded the barn. Herold surrendered to them, but Booth defied
them and they set the barn on fire.
One of them saw Booth raise his gun
to shoot or said he did and fired
at him. Mortally wounded, he was
dragged to the farmhouse where he
died, after saying Tell Mother I died
for my country.
The body was taken to Washington and buried. Herold, Azerodt and
Powell were hanged along with Mary
Surratt, a boarding house owner,
while others involved were sentenced
to life imprisonment. Booths corpse
was later returned to his family and
buried in 1869 in an unmarked grave
in a cemetery in Baltimore. For years
there were those who fantasised
that the whole story was a lie and
that Booth had escaped and was still
alive somewhere, but there seems no
doubt whatever that it was Booths
body that was buried in Baltimore. He
was just 26 when he died.
The queen of the modern cosmetics industry built a commercial empire on her
maxim that There are no ugly women,
only lazy ones. Born in 1872 to a poor
Jewish family in Poland, she rejected
her fathers choice of a husband for her
and went to Australia, where in 1903
she opened a shop in Melbourne, selling
face cream. It was so successful that she
moved to London and opened a beauty
salon in Mayfair Margot Asquith, the
prime ministers wife, was a regular
patron and then another in Paris.
In 1908 she married an American
journalist and they had two sons. They
opened up in New York City in 1915 and
Helena started branches all across the
United States. Hollywood movie stars
including Theda Bara and Pola Negri
regularly consulted her and bought her
products. The publicitys effect on sales
was electric.
Pint-sized, dominating and intensely
competitive, Helena knew that women
did not want beauty on the cheap. The
higher the prices, the more they bought.

She and her business rivals she spent
years in a ferocious feud with Elizabeth
Arden sold to women at all social
levels who would never previously have
bought beauty products. In 1928 Helena
sold her American business to Lehman
Brothers for $7.3 million, but then the
stock market crashed and she bought it
back for only $1.5 million.
Business success was not matched
in her private life and she felt deeply
guilty for concentrating so much on her
work. She knew she had neglected her
children and she and her persistently
unfaithful husband divorced in 1937. She
then married an impoverished Russian
prince, who died in 1956. She spent her
last years in her palatial apartment in
New York City. In 1964 robbers broke in
and threatened your money or your life.
She told them that at her age they could
take her life and welcome. She saw the
robbers off, but died the following year
at the age of 92.
FIRST WORLD WAR
War Among the Ruins

James G. Clark investigates the destruction of western
Europes medieval heritage during the First World War,
as churches and cathedrals became targets, and how it
made people think anew about their nations pasts.
T
A British soldier
silhouetted
against the ruins
of Ypres
Cathedral, c.1918.
HROUGH TO 2018 WE WILL SEE a succession of

sombre centenaries marking the many major and
minor tragedies of the First World War. Among
the most poignant datelines are those recalling a
litany of medieval landmarks that fell along the frontline
almost from the opening hours of the war: at first, simply
shattered by the German armys rapid advance and then
steadily eroded by mutually destructive attrition. Treasured
symbols of its commercial and cultural power in the later
Middle Ages, Belgiums heritage churches bore the full
ferocity of the first salvoes. Liges late Gothic cathedral of
St Paul came under enemy bombardment on the second,
sweltering day of the war and, following the fall of the

medieval walled city of Namur on August 23rd, 1914, the
German Third Army took Dinant on the same day. There
they toppled the distinctive Reformation-era pyriform
dome of its collegiate church, an act of destruction that was
eclipsed by the massacre of 600 townspeople. No doubt
in the next four years most of the major milestones in the
conflict will be marked, but, perhaps increasingly, we will
also remember and reflect on those experiences mechanisation, civilian bombardment which, after the passage of
a century, we can see more clearly represent moments of
great cultural transformation.
The first engagements by the German army with French
and British forces Mulhouse (August 7-19th), Charleroi
(August 21st), Mons (August 23rd) and Le Cateau (August
26th) for the most part skirted or spared such landmark
sites, including the baroque cathedral at Belfort. However,
as the Germans reached further into France, other and, in
the scale of medieval artistry, arguably greater townAPRIL 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11
FIRST WORLD WAR

The ruins of
Arras Cathedral
following the
German offensive
of 1917.
at the edge of the Place du Parvis as fire seized

the roof timbers and the scaffold, which, by a
fateful irony, still surrounded the northern tower
of the west front after a stint of restoration work.
The fire reached such intensity in the hours that
followed that it softened the mortared joints of
the statues covering the facade. Suddenly, the
sculpted head of the Smiling Angel le sourire de
Reims broke from its shoulders and fell.
Top: Reims
Cathedral hit
during a German
shell barrage,
September
19th, 1914.
Above: The
Smiling Angel
of Reims
Cathedral.
scapes came under threat. The desperate retreats of late

August drew the line of the emerging Western Front back
as far as Arras, a medieval city rich in classical refinements,
and then to the uncompromisingly gothic St Quentin.
While the miracle of the Marne assured lasting protection
for the le de France and Paris, the cost was to be a nearconstant barrage along a chain of northern cities, each one
celebrated for its medieval architecture and art.
A presage of what was to follow in the four years of war
was offered at Reims, scarcely six weeks after the conflict
began. On Saturday September 19th a shower of German incendiaries set the 13th-century cathedral ablaze. In the stillness of a misty autumn twilight, bystanders paused aghast
FTER REIMS, a further six medieval

cathedrals were laid waste: Meuchlen
(Malines; 1914), Ypres (1914, 1915),
Cambrai (1917), St Quentin (1917),
Arras (1918) and Noyon (1918). The national
cathedral of Ntre Dame also suffered surface
damage following an isolated Zeppelin raid on
Paris in January 1916. In addition, the soaring
abbey church of St Jean de Vignes near Soissons,
a treasure house of later medieval decorative
art including, as archaeological fragments have shown, a
scheme of stained glass to rival Chartres, which had withstood the iconoclasm of the Huguenots and Napoleonic
requisition, lost all but the shell of its west front. After the
allies adopted its twin towers as a reconnaissance post, the
abbey church of Mont St Eloi, near Arras, was projected into
the heart of battle. By 1917 the site of the seventh-century
abbey had been razed, with only the shards of its classical
towers reaching above the rubble. The basilica of St Remi
at Reims, crucible of French Christianity, founded to commemorate the conversion of Clovis, who in 496 became the
first king to unite the Franks, was badly scarred, although
its richly carved Romanesque nave endured.
FIRST WORLD WAR

The sheer scale of these churches, including some of
the longest naves and tallest steeples and towers to survive
from the Middle Ages, made them the most conspicuous of
cultural casualties, yet much secular medieval architecture
was also lost. Consumed by fire in the first days of the war,
the University Library at Leuven (Louvain) was itself a fine,
classical building, but it contained a collection of medieval
manuscripts and incunabula (books printed before 1500)
of great value: all were lost. Ypres Lakenhalle (Cloth Hall)
may have been the grandest, but many other civic, commercial and domestic buildings were obliterated in the densely
developed streets not only of Ypres but also Lige, Mechlen,
Reims, Arras and St Quentin. Given the powerful regional
identities the Duchy of Burgundy on the one hand, the
wealth of the Flemish wool towns on the other which had
defined the design of these buildings and shaped their distinctive, decorative schemes, it might be said that an entire
cultural milieu had been effaced.
Clockwise from
right: Fifth-century
Buddha of Bamiyan,
Afghanistan,
damaged in battle,
May 1999; an aerial
shot of Ypres in
1915; postwar
souvenir bookmark
of Gloucester
Cathedral issued
by Great Western
Railway.
S
Not since the 16thcentury Wars
of Religion had
churches in a whole
chain of regional
capitals suffered in
such a way
UCH WIDESPREAD DESTRUCTION of medieval

heritage was unprecedented in the modern era.
As the French press ruefully observed, even their
Revolution powered by a radical secularism had
not seen the razing of so many ancient sites. Not since the
16th-century Wars of Religion had churches in a whole
chain of regional capitals suffered in such a way. It also represented a new departure in modern warfare because, as the
conflict intensified, these medieval landmarks were made
the deliberate target of offensive action. In this respect,
the attack on Reims represented a turning point. The early
damage wrought by the invasion force had been largely collateral. At Reims, however, the Germans fired on the cathedral. Earlier, on first entering the city, they had established
a temporary encampment in the Place du Parvis but, as the
allied counterattack began, they had withdrawn to a strategic position to the north to concentrate their fire on the
centre of the city. Thereafter, the great cathedrals and other
medieval landmarks were targeted right along the Front.
Shells did not stray towards Ypres, Meuchlen, Cambrai,
St Quentin and Sailly: they were aimed. St Quentin was set

alight in 1917. Noyons interior was stripped and the pipes of
its organ cut down for use as bands for shell cases. Although
it had endured during some of the most intense barrages,
in the autumn of 1918 the retreating Germans filled the
piers and vaults of Arras cathedral with explosive charges. It
would be wrong to regard the defacement and destruction
of landmarks as wholly one-sided. The Allied forces were not
slow to exploit the strategic benefits of these sites and were
equally dispassionate in seizing the offensive advantage in
their destruction: at Mont St Eloi, it was their own shelling
that finally put paid to the remains of the church, so that
what remained of its ridge-top position could not be turned
against them by the enemy.
A postcard issued
postwar of the
ruins of the Abbey
of Mont St Eloi,
near Arras.
The targeting of cultural heritage represented a conscious assault on national identity, marking a growing
recognition that this, just as much as casualties, defeats and
retreats of the men in arms, could directly diminish morale.
The medieval landmarks of Flanders and the industrial
north of France were charged with a particular symbolic
power, as they pointed to the prosperity and determined independence of the region in earlier generations. One of the
key legacies of the conflict was its template for Total War,
carrying the fight from the battlefield into the heart of the
civil community. That such weapons as the aerial bombardment of civilian populations secured a permanent place in
post-1918 armoury is all too familiar. Perhaps less so is the
fact that the targeting of cultural assets became and continues to be a tool favoured by any force on the
offensive. Although in the wake of the war the
use of aerial bombardment was debated by the
recent and future protagonists at the diplomatic
table, notably at the Washington Conference of
November 1921 to February 1922, no watertight
convention has ever emerged.
THE TIT-FOR-TAT ATTACKS on the medieval
cities of central and southern England Bristol
and Coventry in 1941, the Baedeker raids on
Bath and Exeter in 1942 and southern Germany
(Hamburg, Mainz and Dresden) are well
known. Less prominent are the medieval losses
of our own times: the ruin, in 1993-4, of the
ancient Bosnian city of Mostar and its Old
Bridge, for so long the symbol of its prosperous
past; the Talibans blasting of the sixth-century
Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001; the irreparable
damage to many early medieval sites in Iraq,
most notoriously, the Minaret al-Malwiya at
Samarra in 2005, an attack that recalls the fate
of Mont St Eloi, since it was made the target of
insurgents after US forces allegedly used it as a
sniper post; and the losses of the last 12 months
in Syria, which include a tower of the 12th-century crusader castle, Crac de Chevaliers, and the
minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo.
The ruin of ancient landmarks on the
Western Front captured public attention as
much as the lengthening casualty lists. The
jagged remains of towers and frontages conveyed the apocalyptic power of constant bombardment and still photographs in the printed
press and, in time, newsreel footage, carried
them across Europe. Images of the heaped
rubble that lined the nave at Reims were widely
syndicated. In England a public exhibition
was hurried into Londons Leicester Galleries
showing the glory that was Reims. Even in
the heat of its commitments on the Marne, the
Third Republic issued an official response to the
assault on Reims, inviting the wider world to
share in its outrage, a revolting act of vandalism, which robs the whole of humanity of
an irreplaceable piece of its artistic heritage.
Robust justification and counter allegations of
hypocrisy from the German authorities ensured
that another pan-European dispute sparked
FIRST WORLD WAR

and stuttered through the wires of the international press.
The ruin of buildings made ideal visual copy for the rapidly
expanding news media. Path presented British picture
houses with a reel showing the shattered remnants of Arras
in 1917, which many billeted Tommies had come to know
well. Before the Armistice, postcard views of devastated
churches were already in circulation. Their effect was not
only awe and shock, but to make these great medieval sites,
always a source of antiquarian fascination and regional pride, a focal point for the national interest. It is not
that they stirred a more immediate or deeper emotional
response than the spectacle of devastated cities and their
dead or displaced citizens on the Franco-Belgian border,
but they fostered a different one, a sharpening sense of the
historic identity that was under attack, which also held
the key to their defence. People civilians and soldiers,
whether resting or returning up the line were drawn
to these sites more than any others where the shells had
rained and they did so while the threat of bombardment
continued and when dislodged statues, pillars and vaulting
must have made their visits perilous. One such was George
Brooker, serving with the Royal Army Service Corps, who
picked his way through the shattered nave at Arras one day
in 1917. He gathered up the shards of Gothic glass beneath
his boots and enclosed them in an improvised frame of
wooden scraps. Fortunately, George survived to the Armistice and his stained-glass entered the collection of the
Imperial War Museum.
HE ATTENTION GIVEN to the great cathedrals and

abbey churches also engendered a level of spirituality, which some had considered lacking in the
early stages of the war. Public worship and private
devotion in these spaces surged, even among the rubble.
Church leaders, roused into guiding the public response,
used the fragility of their most ancient places of worship
to reinvigorate intercession. Cardinal Louis-Henri-Joseph
Luon, Archbishop of Reims, performed the Stations of
the Cross daily, picking his way around the fallen vault of
the nave. In England parallel efforts were carried forward
by Canterbury, York and the senior bishops, in which the
historic resonance of their great churches was self-consciously harnessed to the imperatives of the Home Front.
National Days of Intercession, first tried during the Boer
War, called the public into these ancient places of worship;
at Salisbury and Exeter Cathedrals and Westminster Abbey
local people were reminded of the bishops wish that everyone pause and enter their churches for prayer at noon each
day. At a time when troops from across the Empire were
passing through many cities and towns, it would appear
the antiquity of these places spoke to those with little
first-hand knowledge of the Old Country they served. After
a visit to Exeter Cathedral, Brigadier General Herbert Hart,
commander of New Zealands Second Infantry Brigade,
reflected in a diary entry of May 15th, 1918: All these places
are most closely connected with the historical development of the country during the last nine centuries and are
intensely interesting.
BY THE WARS END, it does seem possible to trace a distinct
turn in public attitudes towards these medieval landmarks.
In Belgium and France there was an almost instinctive
impulse to make the shells of their medieval churches
Syrian government
troops walk though
a corridor of the
Crusader fortress of
Crac des Chevaliers,
March 2014.
The ruin of medieval buildings made

ideal visual copy for the rapidly
expanding news media
public memorials. As such, they

became the priority for reconstruction. In April 1919 the Bloc National
determined that all ancient landmarks were to be returned to their
prewar condition. Work began
within months, funded, at least for
the medium term, by German reparation payments; in the immediate term it was carried forward by
German labour; it was prisoners
of war that began the early work
at Arras. At least in France, in
the first months of the peace,
the work to recover the lost
cathedrals was used explicitly
to advance the case for German
war guilt: the historian Maurice Andrieux published a study of Reims in 1919, which he subtitled un crime
allemand. The priority attached to the work of reconstruction was reinforced by an early (and common) vision among
the republics leaders that the landmarks at the centre
of these cities bearing battle honours should serve as the
nations memorial. In the first postwar months there was
no movement to raise a secular memorial and the dominant
impulse was to (re)invest in the notion of a national church.
The ruins of the 16th-century bridge

at Mostar destroyed in November
1993 during the break up of the
former Yugoslavia.
Reims Cathedral was designated the first among equals, for

its unrivalled links to the nations past. Also, as the first to
fall, for both government and people its fate had focused
the threat to the cultural and historical identity of France.
Restored, the cathedral not only acquired the sacral status
of a shrine to the Republics sacrifice but was also raised as
a symbol of their secular, political agenda for continental
peace. It was the summation of its role since September
1914 that President de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer
conducted their act of Franco-German reconciliation in the
restored, 13th-century crossing on July 8th, 1962.
In England, in the wake of the Armistice, the great
cathedrals, minsters and abbeys, as a continuation of their
recent role in public intercession, were upheld as the
natural focus for national commemoration. It was Wrens
A guide book from the UK series

Cathedrals, Abbeys and Famous Churches,
issued postwar.
masterpiece, St Pauls, that witnessed the

royal service of thanksgiving, but, like
their French and Belgian counterparts, the
prelates and clergy of the senior sees also
harnessed the palpable historical identity of
their medieval churches to the widespread
impulse for mourning. Away from the spirit of
thanksgiving that swept the capital causing
damage to the plinth of Nelsons Column on
the night of the Armistice requiems were
conducted in the provincial cathedrals. Notable
figures were honoured, in special services, with
Westminster Abbey electing to celebrate the
US wartime ambassador, Walter Hines Page.
There was also a response to the publics reaching out for
meaningful commemoration. In a conscious recall of medieval practice, and for the first time since the Reformation,
libri vitae were inscribed. Regimental colours were accepted
into ancient chantry chapels and a number of makeshift
wooden crosses recovered from the battlefields and chapels,
such as that of St Michael, Salisbury, were re-dedicated to
the memory of the fallen.
S THEY channelled public

mourning and public
memory, offering an
historical framework in
which the experience of the war
might, in the fullness of time, be
more comfortably held, it would
seem that the status of these medieval landmarks ineluctably changed.
In England, as much as France, they
were transposed from the focus
of provincial pride to treasures of
national significance. One expression of this change, which did much
to secure their new-won status, was
the postwar explosion in heritage
tourism. Directed towards their
best-known medieval landmarks to
assuage their collective shock and
private grief and to articulate an
impulse to memorialise, the French
and English publics renewed their relationship with their
national past. Those whose business was travel were swift
to recognise a shift in social behaviour. The Chemin de
Fer du Nord did not wait for the new Reims to be finished
before it invested in a romantic poster image of the cathedral to call citizens to see their national war memorial.
Englands largest railway company, Great Western (GWR),
embarked on its own promotion in 1924: recruiting
academic medievalists Montague Rhodes (MR) James,
provost of Eton and Kings College, Cambridge, and Sir
Charles Oman, Oxfords Chichele Professor, and launching
a trio of guidebooks to the cathedrals, abbeys and castles
of the region served by GWR. Announced by a poster campaign to rival the Art Deco imagery of the French railway
companies, the guides called on their customers to
FIRST WORLD WAR

practice a new kind of touring, sober and reflective,
not to be unloaded for ten minutes from a charabanc, as the guide admonished, but to pause amid
these precious monuments of English piety.
HE CONNECTION WITH THE WAR and

the common memory of it was made
explicit. Archbishop Randall Davidson
of Canterbury, architect of the wartime
national days of intercession, was invited by GWR
chairman, Viscount Churchill, to introduce the
guides: You will render a wonderful service to the
English people, he wrote in a letter reproduced as
a frontispiece, if you will help them to realise the
sacred heritage which is ours. The shadow of the war
reached into the account of almost every site, none
more so than in Salisbury, whose surpassing beauty
was a monument to the absence of foreign influence. Cathedrals, the first guide, was an immediate
best-seller: 30,000 copies were sold in just eight
weeks. The companys conviction that it was the
memory of Englands past and, in particular, its medieval past, which was most likely to stir the public
mood became the guiding principle of its marketing.
Even as the Cathedrals guide was in press, ten star
class locomotives were given the names of Englands
medieval abbeys; in 1923 a new cathedrals class
was contemplated: the plan
changed but what became the
kings class still commemorated the succession of monarchy
from the Conquest. Medievalism was especially strong in
their merchandise for children:
a series of jigsaws produced by
the toy company Chad Valley
not only celebrated cathedrals
and castles of the GWR region
but also scenes from the companys growing sense of a grand
narrative of English history:
the Romans at Caerleon, King
Arthur on Dartmoor and the
Vikings landing at St Ives.
THE GWR OUTLOOK spread
quickly and widely. Copycat guides
appeared almost overnight: J.M.
Dents popular Cathedrals, Abbeys
and Famous Churches series was on the same station bookstalls scarcely six months later. Batsford began its colourful
series of guides to architectural and topographical heritage
in 1930. In what was perhaps the ultimate expression of
popular interest, Wills printed their first collectors series
of cigarette cards featuring Englands cathedrals in 1933.
Even academics responded: George Coulton, a controversial
medievalist, embarked on his epic Five Centuries of Religion
in 1923, a five-volume undertaking, which he completed, by
curious symmetry, in the midst of the London Blitz. At the
same time the Office of Works accelerated the programme
of conservation which had been promulgated at the passing
of the Ancient Monuments Act in 1913 but had been arrested for almost a decade.
In an act of reconciliation
between Germany and
France, Chancellor
Adenauer (left) and
President De Gaulle
attend mass at Reims
Cathedral, July 8th, 1962.
The cultural consequences of the Great War will

generate much comment in the coming years of commemoration. As we debate the many modernising trends that
may be traced to the cataclysms of 1914-18, we should also
acknowledge that from that deluge there also flowed a new
outlook on humanitys ancient achievements.
James G. Clark is Professor of History at the University of Exeter.
Randall Davidson,
Archbishop of
Canterbury,
who wrote the
introductions to
the GWR guides.
FURTHER READING
Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The
Destruction of Historic Monuments During the Second World
War (Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
Stephen Parker, Tom Lawson (eds), God and War: The
Church of England and Armed Conflict in the Twentieth
Century (Ashgate, 2012).
Robert Gildea, The Past in French History (Yale, 1996).
David Nicholas, Medieval Flanders (Longman, 1992).
Meredith Parsons Lillich, The Gothic Stained Glass of
Reims Cathedral (Penn State University Press, 2011).
MONET
LAUDE MONET, a 20-year-old art student,

appeared in the sub-prefects office in his home
town, Le Havre, on March 2nd, 1861 along with
227 eligible young men. They arrived to draw a
lottery number for the compulsory army draft; Monet drew
a low number, below 74, and was called into service. His
father, a prosperous ships chandler, could have bought his
sons discharge for 2,500 francs, but he refused to do so
when Claude refused to give up painting. Monets father had
an interest in removing him from the local scene: he did not
want his son to find out about his mistress and the existence
of an illegitimate half-sister. His father also disliked spending money. Most important, he thought military discipline
would improve his sons volatile yet stubborn character and
make him more amenable to his fathers wishes.
Yet Monet refused to abandon his career as an artist. He
thought the picturesque oriental locales painted by his hero
Eugne Delacroix were infinitely more appealing than a
grocery store in Le Havre or an austere barracks in a boring
provincial town. He later recalled:
The seven years of service that appalled so many were full
of attraction for me. A friend, who was in the regiment of
the Chasseurs dAfrique and who adored military life, had
communicated to me his enthusiasm and inspired me with his
love of adventure. Nothing attracted me so much as the endless
cavalcades under the burning sun, the razzias [raids], the crackling of gunpowder, the sabre thrusts, the nights in the desert
under a tent, and I replied to my fathers ultimatum [to give
up art] with a superb gesture of indifference. I drew an unlucky
number. I succeeded, by personal insistence, in being drafted
into an African regiment and started out.
Monets experience in North Africa certainly toughened
him up and prepared him for his future arduous painting
expeditions in intense cold, high wind and severe storms. In
defying his overbearing father, he finally broke away from
emotional and financial domination.
Monet was inducted into the army on April 29th and
swore to serve with honour and fidelity for seven years, a
period that would be dramatically cut short. His military
record reveals that his hair and eyes were brown, his nose
Claude Monet in
uniform, by Charles
Lhuillier, 1861.
The painter Claude Monet spent his

early twenties as a soldier in French
North Africa, yet none of his works
or writings from this period survive.
Jeffrey Meyers pieces together a
portrait of the artist as a young man.
The lower city of

Algiers, including
the Marine
quarter, late
19th century.
Monet in Algeria
MONET
Clockwise from
top: Odalisque,
a painting by
Pierre-Auguste
Renoir of an
Algerian concubine, 1870;
a water carrier
and his family
in the Algiers
casbah, late 19th
century; Claude
Monet, 1860s;
a wool spinner,
Algiers, c.1860.
well made, his chin clean-shaven and round, his face oval
and his height 1.65 metres (5 ft 5 ins). A bachelor without
children, he was physically fit and had never been convicted
of theft, swindling, fraud or immoral behaviour. Monet
joined the first regiment of the Chasseurs dAfrique, an elite
light cavalry corps that had fought victoriously in Morocco
in 1844, in the Crimean War of 1853-6 and in Solferino in
northern Italy, where the French had defeated the Austrians in 1859. The Chasseurs, the mounted equivalent of
the French Zouave infantry, were first raised in 1832 from
cavalry posted to Algeria and from French volunteers in
North Africa.
No works of art have survived

from this turning point in
Monets life (Algerian Scene, a
landscape, was later destroyed)
BEFORE THE TWO-DAY VOYAGE from Marseilles to exotic,
mysterious, dangerous Algiers, Monets friend from Le
Havre, Charles Lhuillier, painted his full-length portrait.
Monets new uniform combines European dress and oriental
costume. He wears a red and blue kpi with a black brim
shading his forehead and eyes; a long blue tunic with epaulettes, gold buttons and a hanging yellow lanyard fastened
at the collar and opening into a wide pyramid along his legs;
billowing red Turkish trousers; and high black boots with
spurs. Facing forward with one foot placed in front of the
other, Monet assumes a swaggering stance with his rakishly
tilted cap, right fist on his hip, left arm holding a long white
burnous and hand tucked inside his wide red sash. His dark,
thin, idealised figure looks very different from the bearded,
stocky, stolid Monet in a photograph of 1860.
No letters or works of art have survived from this major
turning point in Monets life. (Algerian Scene, a landscape
with camels painted in the style of Eugne Fromentin, was
later destroyed by the artist.) The books about him give only
a brief account of his year in Algeria, but by describing the
recent events, the contemporary state of Algeria, the North
African ambience and his military duties, it is possible to
evoke some of Monets experience during this little known
yet influential period.
ONET ARRIVED in Algiers on June 10th, 1861,

during the Second Empire (1852-70) of Napoleon III. Algeria had until recently been part of
the Ottoman Empire, but the weak and corrupt
Bey had control only of the cities on the coastal plain. Marauding Barbary pirates dominated the southern Mediterranean, preyed on ships and carried away booty. After a minor
diplomatic insult and using the flimsiest excuse for invasion, the French had moved into this power vacuum, capturing Algiers in 1830 and Constantine in 1837. Four years
later France had established the Foreign Legion, in which
French officers commanded foreigners who volunteered to
serve overseas. France had fought a long guerrilla war in the
desert with Emir Abd el-Kader, who led the Arab struggle
against the colonial invaders until he finally surrendered in
1847. The following year the French officially abolished, but

did not extinguish, the widespread practice of slavery. From
1859 to 1861 the French explorer Henri Duveyrier, braving
the hostility of the nomadic Tuaregs, penetrated deep into
the desert and published his influential LExploration du
Sahara in 1864. By 1870 French soldiers would reach the
edge of the Sahara, which stretched south to Lake Chad and
almost to the River Niger.
BLOODY EPISODE, which took place only two

months before Monet arrived, revealed how
vulnerable the French still were. On the night of
April 14th, 1861, about 50 Arabs (without guns)
attacked Djelfa, 260 miles south of Algiers, one of the
last military outposts in the south and the site of a small
settlement of European colonists. In A Desert Named Peace
(2009), Benjamin Brower wrote:
Armed with staffs, stones and knives, the group slipped past the
garrison and descended upon the village, where they raided five
houses and a caf maure, a local Arabic-style coffeehouse. They
attacked with deadly intent, killing three Europeans (two men
and a five-year-old girl) and critically wounded three settlers,
two labourers and three soldiers. The settlers, belatedly joined
by French soldiers, killed four of their attackers, while the leader
himself escaped.
This attack was followed by harsh military retribution.
In Monets time Algiers was populated by Berbers (the
original inhabitants), Arabs (who had converted them to
Islam) and a remnant of Turks. In The Conquest of the Sahara
(1984) Douglas Porch described the physical setting of the
city, which rose from the sea to the mountains and the contrast between the modern town and the ancient Casbah:
The Boulevard du Front de Mer, supported by vaulted arches,
connected the harbour with the Place du Gouvernement on
the bluff above. From there, one could look out over the almost
perfect semicircle of the Bay of Algiers filled with small wooden
boats and larger steamers Behind the seafront a multitude
of terraces, minarets and houses of startling whiteness climbed
the hill until they disappeared into the sombre greenery of the
summit. In the narrow, twisting streets of the Arab quarter,
merchants sat before pyramids of oranges, sacks of herbs and
spices, pieces of raw, dripping meat The air was permeated
with the soft, indefinable odour of an Arab souk, or marketplace. The outline of the Kabylia Mountains, some snowcapped,
stood like sentinels above the town. The air seemed to vibrate
with sunlight.
In 1860 the traveller Ernest Feydeau emphasised how easily
the stranger got lost in the labyrinthine and disorienting
Arab section of Algiers, whose houses were crammed together to keep out the harsh sunlight:
Located on the hillside above the French city, or Marine quarter,
the Casbah was in reality a multi-ethnic quarter, housing both
Jews and West Africans as well as Muslim city dwellers known
as Moors. It could be reached from the Marine quarter by
climbing a steep hill. Inside the Casbah, narrow streets followed
curving paths, guiding the traveller through whitewashed
buildings with few openings to the exterior.
Algiers had a high crime rate and loose morals and both
civilians and soldiers spent a lot of time in the towns bars
MONET
to a half-mad, fever-inspired breakdown and a wild attempt
to escape. He later recalled:
The hours of training seemed so tiresome. It seemed so wearisome to be confined to barracks or camp. [So he mounted a
mule and galloped away, but] eventually ran out of breath and
fell fainting to the ground. Unburdened of my weight, the mule
stopped of its own accord and wandered lazily back to the barracks. A search party found me that evening, unconscious and
in a most pitiful state. My uniform was in shreds and my entire
body was covered with cuts and bruises. I awoke confined to a
cell by orders of the military police and accused of desertion and
destruction of military property. The next day, I was taken to
prison and I again lost consciousness. I was spared the military
tribunal and taken to the hospital, where I was diagnosed as
having typhoid fever.
Right: The Zouave

by Vincent van
Gogh, 1888.
Bottom right:
A scene from the
Rue Boulabah,
Algiers casbah,
c.1912.
and cafs and in the Arab brothels of the Casbah. The louche
allure of the Casbah lasted well into the 20th century and
was portrayed in many popular films: Morocco (1930); Pp
le Moko (1937); Algiers (1938), with its memorable line:
Come with me to the casbah; and Beau Geste (1939).
ARELY HALF THE RECRUITS to the colonial administration before 1914 had even a secondary education, wrote Porch, and 22 per cent were judged
incompetent by their immediate superiors. Nevertheless, they managed with a well-trained and well-armed
military force to conquer and control the vast land. Monet,
at the very bottom of the military pyramid, was posted to
the barracks in the Mustapha quarter at the eastern gate of
Algiers and was housed in a one-storey, mud-brick building. He had never mounted a horse and needed extensive
training in the riding school, but he finally learned to control
a horse and perhaps, with considerably more difficulty, a
restive camel.
The soldiers led a strict life during campaigns, but
were not subject to severe discipline when they were not
fighting. Monet remained on the comparatively safe and
temperate coast and there is no evidence that he ever
engaged in combat or suffered sandstorms and thirst by
penetrating the vast and hostile desert. Monets friend,
Count Thophile Beguin-Billecocq, quoting letters now
lost, later recorded that:
He wrote to us often and detailed the harshness of the soldiers
life, listing the endless guard duties and fierce instructors he
endured, and the veritable nags he was required to ride.
Before the sudden and dramatic conclusion of his military
service, Monet had the opportunity to do some drawings
and watercolours (also lost) of the old Spanish gate in the
casbah of Oran. His officers, bored by garrison duty and eager
for immortality, asked Monet to draw their portraits, and
his burgeoning and obvious talent gained a few favours and
earned some leave.
The monotonous, arduous routine finally drove Monet
The symptoms of typhoid, a bacterial disease that originates

in contaminated food or water, are a pink rash, high temperature, head and muscle aches, stomach pains and constipation. Sick for three weeks, Monet was granted two months
rest in Algiers and six months convalescence in Paris.
Rescued from an additional five-and-a-half years in the army,
he was bought out by his wealthy aunt for 3,000 francs, 500
more than his father could have originally paid.
Many prominent French authors travelled to and wrote
about North Africa: Thophile Gautier, Eugne Fromentin,
Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Alphonse Daudet
and Guy de Maupassant. Writing in his journal from Tangier
in 1832, Delacroix, like many 19th- and 20th-century
writers, emphasised the palette of colour and light (even in
the dark shadows) that would also influence Monet:
As we were coming home, superb landscapes on the right, the
Spanish mountains in the softest possible tones; the sea, a dark
blue-green, the colour of a fig. The hedges, yellow on top because
The Steps, Algiers

by Pierre-Auguste
Renoir, c.1882.
of the bamboos, green at the bottom because of the aloes

Shadows full of reflections; white in the shadows.
In his novel The Immoralist (1902) Andr Gide (who met
Oscar Wilde in Algiers in 1895) echoed Delacroix and
seemed to be describing an Impressionist painting:
The quality of the light here is not strength but abundance. The
shade is still full of it. The air itself is like a luminous fluid in
which everything is steeped; one bathes, one swims in it.
Forty years later, Albert Camus Meursault, about to murder
an Arab in The Outsider, describes the effect of the trembling
Algerian sun, heat and light that had driven Monet half-mad
when he had tried to escape:

There was the same red glare as far as the eye could reach, and
small waves were lapping the hot sand in little, flurried gasps
I could feel my temples swelling under the impact of the light I
keyed up every nerve to fend off the sun A blade of vivid light
shot upward from a bit of shell or broken glass lying on the sand.
Monets accounts of his crucial year in Algeria were recorded
in two interviews with him, published nearly 40 and 65
years after the events had taken place. Filtered through time
and depending on his mood of the moment, the memories
of the now old and successful artist revealed the contrast
between his expectations and reality, and gave both
MONET
Africa taught Monet to see

into shadow and follow the
brilliant decomposition of light
Right: Claude
Monet, c.1915.
Far right:
his San Giorgio
Maggiore by
Twilight, 1908.
exaggerated and contradictory recollections of the adventurous and finally disastrous military experiences of his youth.
IDE, LIKE MONET himself, also explained how

his imagination, stimulated in North Africa,
had awakened dormant powers that would later
enhance his work: At the touch of new sensations,
certain portions of me awoke certain sleeping faculties,
which, from not having as yet been used, had kept all their
mysterious freshness. Monet, in a nostalgic 1900 Le Temps
interview with Franois Thibault-Sisson, recalled
the delayed but significant benefits of his experience:
In Algeria, I spent two [sic] really charming years. I incessantly
saw something new; in my moments of leisure I attempted
to render what I saw. You cannot imagine to what extent I
increased my knowledge, and how much my vision gained
thereby. I did not quite realise it at first. The impressions of light
and colour that I received were not to classify themselves until
later; but they contained the germ of my future researches.
Twenty-six years later, the same interviewer in the same
journal recorded the youthful idealistic enthusiasm that had
propelled Monet into the Chasseurs dAfrique, which was
clearly superior to the infantry:
[Algeria] appealed to my sense of adventure. In any case, the
uniform was elegant, which appealed to me even more, and
the thought of trotting along on a lively little horse beneath the
African sun, with foot soldiers kicking the pebbles along the
road as they laboured to carry their packs, did not seem at all
disagreeable to me.
Beguin-Billecocq recalled that Monet described Algeria as:
a splendid country with constant sunshine, with hot, seductive
colours, an eternally blue sky accentuated by the greens of palms
and exotic plants, Arabs and their veiled wives, the Arab language, guttural but beautiful, camels, donkeys and horses.
But in the same 1926 interview Monet also described his
fever-driven attempt to escape from these beautiful horses.

Unlike his friend Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was inspired
by his two visits to Algeria in the early 1880s, Monet never
returned to North Africa. He ended his ambivalent interview
of 1926 by unequivocally stating that he was glad at never
again having to see a country that had left me with so many
awful memories. He contradicted himself yet again by
adding: I had not even thought of painting for an instant.
Hugues Le Roux, a French critic writing in Gil Blas in
1889, concluded that for Monet, as for Delacroix:
Africa put the finishing touches to his mastery of colour. It
taught him to see into shadow, and follow the brilliant decomposition of light to be found there, to set afloat an atmosphere
around objects that trembles and encircles them like a halo.
Though Monet escaped his full term of military service,
his year in Algeria was sufficient to absorb the spirit of the
place. His experience helped him to mature and confirmed
his artistic ambitions; it focused his mind and vision, and
inspired the light and colour of his Impressionist work.
Jeffrey Meyers is the author of Painting and the Novel (1975), a biography of
Wyndham Lewis (1980), Impressionist Quartet (2005) and Modigliani (2006).
FURTHER READING
Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of
Frances Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (Columbia
University Press, 2009).
Douglas Porch, The Conquest of the Sahara (Fromm, 1986).
Patricia Lorcin (ed), Algeria and France: Identity, Memory,
Nostalgia (Syracuse University Press, 2006).
Charles Stuckey (ed), Monet: A Retrospective (Beaux Arts
Editions, 1985).
Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, or the Triumph of Impressionism
(Taschen, 1999).
KUMARIS
The
Living
Goddess
Isabella Tree explores the Kumaris, young
girls chosen to be worshipped in Nepal by
both Hindus and Buddhists as symbols of
purity and makers of kings.
N A MEDIEVAL BUILDING in the heart of old Kathmandu lives a

young girl known to Nepalis as Kumari. To foreigners she is the Living
Goddess. Her face features on the cover of guide books, postcards and
souvenirs. Beneath a bejewelled crown and bedecked with gold snake
necklaces and sacred amulets, she gazes at the world enigmatically,
never smiling. If she smiles at you so her worshippers believe it is
an invitation to heaven and you die. From the centre of her forehead,
painted red and edged in gold, stares a third, all-seeing eye, a black
pupil set in bronze.
Her 18th-century residence a traditional red-brick building with
carved windows and dragon-scale roof tiles known as the Kumari Chen
or Kumari Ghar, just yards from the old royal palace and surrounded by
exquisite pagoda-temples, is one of the must-sees on the Himalayan
tourist trail. Though foreigners are not allowed inside, anyone can enter
her courtyard, an intimate space frequented by pigeons and surrounded
by carvings of multi-armed goddesses. A glimpse of the child goddess at
her window here, if she deigns to appear, is a highlight of a visit to this
ancient capital.
The Kumari provokes fascination and admiration, as well as controversy. Myths abound about her origins and the reason for her existence.
The Living Goddess is the survivor of a tradition, dating back ten centuries or more, that once prevailed throughout South-East Asia. She is
evidence of a cult that focuses on the divine feminine as the source of
infinite power. This is, perhaps, the last place on earth where the omnipotent deity is regarded as female, where god is a young girl.
Before delving back in time to the origins of the tradition, it is worth
explaining who this child is in the present day and where she comes
from. Uniquely, the Kumari is worshipped by both Buddhists as the
embodiment of the goddess Vajradevi and by Hindus as the goddess
Taleju, or Durga. The child herself is Buddhist, from the high religious
caste of Shakyas, goldsmiths of the Newar community, who live in traditional Buddhist temple courtyards, or bahals, in the old centres of the
Kathmandu Valley and who trace their descent from Shakyamuni
The Kumari Samita

Bajracharya with
offerings from
worshippers, Patan,
Nepal, 2011.
KUMARIS
Left: the royal Kumari

of Kathmandu, Preeti
Shakya, crosses
Durbar Square in
her palanquin, 2005.
Below: Preeti Shakya
looks back at her
Kumari house while
crossing Basantpur
Square, Kathmandu,
c.2005. Opposite:
Hanuman Dhoka
temple complex
in Durbar Square
at the start of the
Indra Jatra Festival,
Kathmandu, 2012.
Buddha. The Newars are the indigenous inhabitants of the Kathmandu

Valley, whose culture has dominated this remote Himalayan fastness
for millennia. Originally in the majority and predominantly Buddhist,
Newars are now almost evenly Buddhist and Hindu and number less
than 30 per cent of the total valley population. They still speak their
own Tibeto-Burman language, alongside Nepali. It is one of the strict
criteria of the Kumaris selection that she comes from a family of pure
lineage attached to one of the 18 Shakya bahals in Kathmandu.
SUALLY SEVERAL girls are put forward for selection by their

parents when a new Living Goddess is called for. The role is
considered a deep honour among the Shakyas. The sacrifice
involved in parting with a beloved child for what is likely to be
seven or eight years is conceived of as a matter of dharma, or religious
duty, done for the good of all sentient beings. Once the horoscope of
each candidate is checked for inauspicious or contrary signs, the girls
are examined by the wife of the royal Hindu tantric priest. The Kumari
should have no physical blemishes, such as scars or birthmarks, and
should be glowing with health. The final selection is carried out by
tantric priests behind closed doors at the Kumari Chen. According to
tradition the Kumari should exhibit the 32 lakshina, the physical perfections of a bodhisattva, or enlightened being. She should have the
chest of a lion; a neck like a conch shell; eyelashes like a cow; a body
like a banyan tree; the thighs of a deer; a voice clear and soft as a ducks;
magical attributes that are intuited by the priests in deep meditation.
From the moment the Living Goddess is installed at around the age
of two or three, until she is dismissed at puberty, she is confined to the
Kumari Chen on Kathmandus Durbar Square. She leaves the building
only to attend important religious functions a dozen times or so a year,
during which she is either carried or transported in a palanquin, a vast
golden chariot. Her feet must never touch the ground.
She is looked after by a family of hereditary caretakers, ritual specialists who act as her surrogate family until she returns to her own.
Since the caretakers are also Shakya, which is not a large community,
they are often closely related to the elected child. They tend to her every
need, treating her with all the deference of a goddess, providing her
with her favourite dishes (which she eats before everyone else in the
household), entertaining her with games and toys (often provided by
devotees), indulging her whims. There is no chastisement, only gentle
appeals to the childs divine nature to behave as befits a goddess. Until
recently it was assumed a Living Goddess, being omniscient, was in no
need of education but now, more pragmatically, the Kumari receives
private tuition for several hours a day so she can enter school at her age
level when she leaves.
Great care is taken that the Kumari does not bleed. If she cuts or
grazes herself it is believed the spirit of the Goddess will leave her. Blood
is the Mother Goddesss medium, the essence of life and death, and
for this reason the Kumari dresses exclusively in red, the rajas colour
of creative energy, from her fingernails to her vermilion-stained feet.
Devotees come to her, especially if suffering from a blood disorder.
When she shows the first signs of reaching puberty, before she can experience the blood loss of her first menstruation, the Kumari is dismissed,
whereupon she returns home and another takes her place.
If the Kumari has an accident or illness, if she cries or wakes up in
a temper, this is believed to predict disaster for the country: a flood,
perhaps, an earthquake, or civil unrest. Reparations to restore her equanimity must be made as quickly as possible for the sake of national
harmony and security.
Her influence extends onto the political stage. Every year the president of Nepals fledgling republic kneels at her feet, like generations of
Nepali kings before him, in order to receive her authority to rule. Her
blessing a vermilion tika, a religious mark, placed with her forefinger
on the politicians forehead gives him legitimacy. This is believed to
instil in him the energy and rightmindedness required for good governance. For his part, kneeling before the feet of a girl, touching the most
sacred part of his body his forehead to her feet, is a submission of
ego, a counterbalance to the potential abuse of power.
Even today, this simple act is regarded by Newars and other devotees
as being vital to the countrys stability. In the past, when the goddess
has failed to bestow her blessing, kings have died or some accident has
befallen them. The killing of Nepals king and queen by the crown prince
in June 2001 took place when the Kumari was suffering from a disqualifying skin disease; there was no Living Goddess on the throne to protect
the king. It was a tragedy that heralded the end of the Shah dynasty,
the worlds last Hindu monarchy. In the republican era, post-2008, the
understanding still applies. If the goddess fails to bless the president,
this not only spells disaster for him; his government could be regarded
as illegitimate and doomed to fail.
The prominence of Kathmandus Kumari, however, and particularly
the political focus on her, masks the older, deeper, broader tradition
of Living Goddess worship; one that, incredibly, survives elsewhere
The Kumari dresses exclusively in red, the rajas colour of creative energy,
from her fingernails to her vermillion-stained feet
KUMARIS
Many Hindu
cities including
Kathmandu,
Bhaktapur and
Patan were founded
on the principles of
sacred space
The palace of Kumari

Ghar, home of the
Living Goddess.
Kathmandu, 2003.
in the Kathmandu Valley to this day. There are still royal Kumaris in
Bhaktapur and Patan, cities that were once, like Kathmandu, ruled
by competitive dynasties of Malla kings, Hindu rajas originally from
India. Then there are local Kumaris still worshipped in the towns of
Nuwakot, Sankhu, Tokha and Bungamati. There are even Kumaris in
different neighbourhoods of Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and Patan. These
lesser-known Kumaris stem from a belief system that once thrived
in the rest of the subcontinent but was, over time, squeezed out by
orthodox Hinduism and Islam. In the remote mountain fastness of the
Valley of Nepal, far from the influence of competing empires and the
rising tide of patriarchal religions, belief in Shakti the doctrine of the
supreme Goddess, and, in particular, Living Goddess worship found
a place of refuge.
The roots of virgin worship in the subcontinent can be traced back to
pre-Vedic times, tapping into ancient primeval fertility rites and mother
goddess cults of the kind that predominated in places like Mohenjo-daro
and Harappa in the third millennium bc. Unlike male gods, who tend to
be conceived of as single deities with separate identities, the concept of
the goddess Devi has evolved in the Indian tradition, as in many other
parts of the world, as an all-pervasive figure: the universal mother. Her
different aspects, from nurturing child-bearer to warrior-saviour to aged
crone, are all manifestations of the same creative and regenerative force.
The moment the aspect of the goddess known as Kumari the word for
a pre-menstrual, unmarried girl came into being seems to have been

towards the late Vedic period (c.1000-500 bc). The word Kumari is
listed in the Mahabharata and other early texts as an epithet of Durga,
the great warrior goddess who vanquished the demon Mahisasura.
HE VIRGIN ASPECT of Devi is also included in the class of

eight mother goddesses the Astamatrika arising around
this time as the sexual partners of leading male deities, who
together took on a protective role as the guardians of the eight
directions. Many Hindu cities including Kathmandu, Bhaktapur and
Patan were founded on the principles of sacred space, with the king at
the centre, the castes radiating out from him in hierarchical priority and
the Astamatrika ranged outside the city walls, protecting civilisation
from the forces of chaos and destruction.
The earliest reference to Kumari worship through a living human,
however, appears in an eighth-century Indian Buddhist text known
as the Manjushrimulakalpa, or Garland of Manjushri, the ritual of
using a Kumari to spin thread for making a patah, or cloth, on which
images of the Buddha could be painted. The text is emphatic about
the girls purity in terms of being both free from sin and free from
polluting substances like menstrual blood: attributes that, in a sense,
rendered her semi-divine. The Kumaris role in this kind of ritual was
only temporary, however, and brief. Once the canvas was finished and
consecrated, the girl would return home

and resume normal life.
By the end of the 10th century, according to the literature of the Kalachakra, both
Kumaris and Kumaras young boys were
performing in Hindu and Buddhist rituals
as agents for divination. In ritual context,
these texts imply, a child of either sex was
believed capable of providing an open
channel to the divine and could be invested with the powers of prophecy. There are
references to a Kumari seeing, for example,
the image of pratisena an Opposing
Army reflected in a mirror, an indication
that Kumaris were being used by kings for
military intelligence, as psychic spies. The
texts generally indicate a preference for
young girls, especially in the longer rituals.
This is presumably because girls tend to be
more placid, better behaved and interested
in ritual performance at a younger age.
Above: the tantric goddess Taleju.

Below: Seven-year-old Unika
Bajracharya, the new Kumari,
with friends, Nepal, 2014.
BY THE 10TH AND 11TH centuries, the preference for Kumaris over
Kumaras in rituals of divination was boosted by a growing interest in
goddess worship and tantric possession, key aspects of the subversive
religions that had become popular in places on the periphery of the
subcontinent, such as Kashmir, Assam, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Nepal.
The first known text recording actual tantric Buddhist worship of a
Kumari is the 11th-century Samvarodaya Tantra, which seems to have
been composed in Nepal. It refers to Kumaris, dressed as goddesses,
being invited to sit in the centre of a mandala, a Buddhist geometric
diagram symbolising the universe, where they were worshipped as Vajradevis goddesses in the flesh.
A couple of centuries later, but probably no later than the 13th
century, a Buddhist master based in Nepal called Jagaddarpana wrote a
vast digest of tantric ritual called the Kriyasamuccaya, or Compendium of Ritual. Here the account of a Kumari ritual is more detailed and
recognisable as the forerunner of the practice that has endured in the
Kathmandu Valley to the present day. The text describes in

detail how Kumaris should be dressed in red, their foreheads
painted with vermilion and colyrium applied to their eyes;
that sacred jewellery should be placed around their necks;
and how the officiating Buddhist priest should, through meditation and the utterance of mantras (utterances with special
power), transform the Kumaris into divine beings. It urges
worship of the Kumaris with offerings of the taboo substances
of alcohol and meat, stating that the sponsor of such a ritual
who must, crucially, have deep and genuine faith in tantric
Buddhism will thereby receive material blessings from the
girls in their possessed state.
This tantric form of Kumari worship found a natural home
in the Kathmandu Valley, where it was bolstered by shamanic
traditions of spirit possession and the inherently matrifocal
society of the Newars; but in India, as Buddhism began to
wane and, finally, under Muslim occupation, to wither away
completely, Kumari worship survived only in those peripheral
areas where Hindu Tantra continued to exist.
Y THE TIME the Malla kings arrived in the Kathmandu Valley

around the 12th century from the neighbouring Hindu kingdom
of Tirhut (in the present-day Terai in southern Nepal), Kumari
worship was clearly a central part of the Newar belief system.
The powerful, complex and allegedly dangerous process of installing a
goddess inside a human child had become the preserve of the Newar,
Buddhist professionals, categorised eventually under the caste system
imposed on them by the Hindu kings as the priestly caste of Shakyas and
Vajracharyas. Kumari worship in its tantric form the form that was
thought to confer the invincible powers of a siddha (a tantric master)
on a worshipper was confined, in all but exceptional circumstances,
to Newars born into tantric Buddhist bahals.
QUITE WHEN Hindu kings began to worship Buddhist Kumaris in the
Kathmandu Valley is impossible to tell, though late Nepali chronicles
assert that Shivadeva I, a king who ruled in the valley from ad 590 to
604, placed four Kumaris at the crossroads of Navatol present-day
Deopatan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu when he established the
city. Wrights chronicle also tells of a king,
Gunakamadeva, in the 10th century, attaining enormous wealth and conquering vast
tracts of land four quarters of the world
through worshipping a Kumari living in
the city of Patan.
Whichever king was responsible for creating the precedent, it seems likely to have
happened at a time of crisis. Hard-pressed
and with his own gods failing to deliver, the
Hindu king would have found himself compelled to approach the Buddhist priests and
ask them to allow him to consult a Kumari.
Such were the kings rewards for this imaginative departure that subsequent monarchs, finding themselves in a similar tight
spot, followed suit and a tradition was born.
From the Newar side, tantric initiation
was not normally given to non-Newars, let
alone non-Buddhists, but Newar religious
experts would have been prepared, if circumstances were favourable, to make an
exception in the case of a king in return
for his protection and patronage, something Buddhist monastic institutions
KUMARIS
Samita Bajracharya, Kumari
of Patan, plays the sarod in a
performance at her home in
Lalitpur, Nepal, 2014.
everywhere, not just in Nepal, were always eager to secure.

As Kumari worship became not only customary but essential for the
Hindu kings, the Mallas began to look for a way to establish permanent
Kumaris, exclusively for their own use, whose services for divination
and empowerment they could call upon at short notice as the need
arose. According to a copy of a ritual text known as the Pancharaksha, on
October 12th, 1491 a renowned tantric Buddhist priest from Kathmandu
was invited by the three joint Malla kings of Bhaktapur to establish a
Living Goddess for their own personal use, one that, for the first time,
would be invested with its own Hindu lineage goddess, Taleju, as well
as the conventional Buddhist goddess. A special residence was provided
for this new royal Kumari in a bahal on the eastern side of Bhaktapurs
royal palace. Here she could continue to receive the administrations of
the Buddhist tantric priest, while at the same time being available for
Hindu tantric worship by the king and his Brahmin priest, for which
she would be carried the short distance to the palace in a palanquin.
HE MALLA DYNASTIES in the cities of Kathmandu and Patan

were swift to copy this innovation. By 1528 Surya Malla, King
of Kathmandu, was worshipping Taleju in the form of his own
royal Kumari in order to empower himself against an attack
by King Mukunda Sen of Palpa. Although these royal Kumaris were
established to meet the specific requirements of the king and the Hindu
court, the tradition remained for over two and a half centuries of Malla
patronage in the domain of Newar Buddhism. Like the Kumaris elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley, the royal Kumaris continued to live
with their own families in their own Shakya lineage bahals under the
umbrella of Buddhist worship.
In 1757 all that changed, at least for the royal Kumari of Kathmandu. The valley was facing an unprecedented crisis. For over a decade it
had been blockaded by an ambitious king called Prithivi Narayan Shah
from the hill-town of Gorkha, 80 miles to the west. All-out conquest
was imminent. Of the three Malla kings only Jaya Prakasha Mall, King
of Kathmandu, seemed capable of action. Try as he might, though, and
whatever offerings he made to the Kumari and his lineage goddess, his
efforts to push back the Gorkha warlord continued to fail. In desperation,
he conceived of an offering that, he hoped, would harness the goddesss
powers like no other had before. He constructed a Kumari residence on
the south side of Kathmandus Durbar Square, grander and more elaborate than any had been before, with a golden window framed by dancing
goddesses and an audience chamber, where she could receive him on her
golden throne surrounded by paintings of himself,
Taleju and the protective Astamatrika. The building
itself was designed as a mandala, symbolising the
Kathmandu Valley, into which the beleaguered
king could invoke all the most powerful aspects of
the goddess. By summoning their collective energy
at the centre of Kathmandu through the medium
of the living Kumari he hoped to throw a protective
force-field around the valley and repel the invader.
HOWEVER, IN ORDER TO create this mandalic
valley microcosm Jaya Prakasha Malla set a controversial precedent. The Kumari Chen, as we
see it today, occupies a large area of ground, with
entrances in the four directions, a central courtyard and three storeys on all four sides. It could
never have fitted within an existing Shakya bahal.
A public worship room was incorporated, too. It
seems Jaya Prakasha Mallas intention was to make
her more accessible to the citizens at large and, by
setting her up as the citys central goddess, involve
his subjects in his fervent attempts to secure the
protection of Kathmandu.
But Jaya Prakashas focus, too, was primarily on Hindu worship and
this alone required him to break with tradition. For the first time a
Buddhist child goddess was called upon to live outside her own lineage
bahal. It is at this juncture, it seems, that a Kumari is first separated from
her parents and placed entirely in the hands of the royally appointed
female Kumari caretaker and her family. We do not know if there was
previously a royal Kumari caretaker in the Kathmandu system, as there
was in Bhaktapur (there seems never to have been one in Patan), but
from now on the role of a specialist Kumari caretaker (and, indeed,
the caretakers entire family) would be vital in sustaining the highly
complex, highly public and super-charged practice of Kumari worship at
Kathmandus new Kumari Chen, something for which normal Shakya
parents would be completely unprepared.
Ironically, Jaya Prakasha Mallas new omnipotent Kumari sealed his
own fate. The story of how, in September 1768, the Gorkha conqueror stormed Kathmandu on the very day of the royal Kumaris chariot
festival when she was due to give her blessing to the king is one of
the most famous in Nepal. The inhabitants were propitiously drunk
and Prithivi Narayan Shahs army took the city with barely a struggle.
Jaya Prakasha Malla was forced to flee and, as the Kumari waited on her
throne, Prithivi Narayan Shah stepped up and, to the amazement of the
crowds, neatly received the vermilion blessing on his forehead in the
Malla kings place. The reign of the Shah dynasty had begun.
Isabella Trees latest book is The Living Goddess: A Journey into the Heart of Kathmandu
(Eland, 2015).
FURTHER READING
Rashmila Shakya, From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life Story of a
Former Royal Kumari (Vajra, 2007).
Jonathan Gregson, Blood Against the Snows (Fourth Estate, 2002).
Thomas Bell, Kathmandu (Random House India, 2014).
Michael Hutt, Nepal: A Guide to the Art and Architecture of the
Kathmandu Valley (Kiscadale Publications, 1994).
InFocus
Anzac Cove, Gallipoli 1915
T WOULD BE hard to imagine a less suitable place to

land troops than the strip of beach soon to be christened
Anzac Cove. The Australians and New Zealanders were
meant to have been put ashore further down the Gallipoli
peninsula, but the strength of the current had been underestimated, while those in charge of the pinnaces towing
the boats got disoriented. The Turks were ready, under the
command of Mustafa Kemal, one of the outstanding
figures to emerge from the First World War. Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) attempts to move
inland and seize the higher ground were repulsed. General
Birdwood, the Anzac commander, was only stopped from
ordering an immediate re-embarkation by the prospect
of it degenerating into a complete rout. By the following
evening the hospital ships were full; after five days 136
officers and 3,313 men had been killed or wounded and
the rest were confined to a beachhead perimeter only a
few hundred yards inland and three or four miles long. The
beach itself, a mile-and-a-half long, was hidden from the
Turks but vulnerable to shrapnel, its flimsy piers were regularly broken up by high seas and it was 1,400 miles away
from the nearest railhead at Marseilles. There was soon a
network of trenches sometimes only ten yards from the
Gallipoli was meant to break

the stalemate of the Western
Front, but only succeeded in
replicating it
Turkish line dugouts, dumps and mule tracks. Gallipoli
was meant to break the stalemate of the Western Front, but
only succeeded in replicating it, here and at Cape Helles a
little to the south, where the British landings had taken
place on the same day, April 25th.
The Turkish record in recent years and in the first
months of the war had not been good. They had lost Libya
to Italy in 1911-12 and most of their European territory
in the first Balkan War of 1912-13. An attack on the Suez
Canal had been repulsed by the British and the Russians
had defeated them in the Caucasus, triggering the Turkish
genocide of the Armenians. All this helped Churchill to
persuade Asquiths Cabinet that it should answer the Grand
Duke Nicholass call for the Allies to remove the distraction of Turkey so Russia could concentrate on attacking
the Central Powers. But what seemed a simple matter of
a squadron of the Royal Navys obsolete pre-Dreadnought

battleships steaming through the Dardanelles and pounding the Turks into a swift surrender by a bombardment of
Constantinople was soon shown to be far from that. Battleships were sunk and shore batteries were not subdued,
while the Turks and their German advisers were prompted
to strengthen the defences of the Gallipoli peninsula ready
for the landings which they rightly anticipated.
As the weeks went by, the temptation to break off the
offensive was resisted for fear of its effect on the millions
of Muslims within the British Empire and on still-neutral
Balkan countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, whom the
Allies hoped to bring in on their side. As the temperature

rose and the number of unburied grew, so the Gallipoli
flies bred, the stench increased and dysentery spread. In an
attempt to get rid of dead mules, they were towed out to
sea but the tide brought them back. A suicidal frontal attack
by the Turks on May 18-19th produced 10,000 casualties
and 3,000 dead lying unburied. The Turkish-speaking
Aubrey Herbert, inspiration for John Buchans character,
Greenmantle, managed to negotiate a truce as remarkable
as that of Christmas 1914 so that the dead could be buried.
He persuaded each side that the other had requested it.
In August failure was reinforced one more time with the
grossly incompetent aftermath of the landing at Suvla Bay,

while the Australian attack on Lone Pine produced seven
VCs and 1,700 casualties. Herbert recorded in his diary that:
The lines of wounded are creeping up to the cemetery like
a tide, and the cemetery is coming to meet the wounded.
In October the overall commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, was
recalled and his replacement set about planning for withdrawal. By the end, half the 410,000 British Empire troops
engaged at Gallipoli were casualties. Turkish losses were put
at 251,000 but were probably higher. Australias tally was
8,700 dead, New Zealands, 2,700; a brutal coming of age.
ROGER HUDSON
RHODESIA
Ian Smith, prime
minister of Rhodesia,
signs his countrys
Unilateral Declaration
of Independence,
November 11th, 1965.
Rhodesias white minority

government declared
unilateral independence
from the UK in 1965,
gaining covert support
from France, Britains
colonial rival in Africa, as
Joanna Warson explains.
A secret history
of African decolonisation
F RECENT REVELATIONS surrounding the secret archive of Foreign

and Commonwealth Office (FCO) documents have done anything, it
is to underline how much is still unknown about the history of the
British Empire. With over a million documents alleged to be hidden
from the public and historians alike by the British government, it is
apparent that the history of Britains colonial exploits may require
substantial revision.
When one moves beyond a UK-centred approach to examine
connections between colonial empires, the number of gaps in the
existing picture of Britains imperial past increases still further. Little
is known, for example, about the part played by France in the decolonisation of Anglophone Africa and its aftermath. Yet, as a re-examination of the history of Southern Rhodesias Unilateral Declaration
of Independence (UDI) reveals, France played a significant
and frequently overlooked role in the end of British rule
on the African continent.
At 11am GMT on November 11th, 1965 Ian Smith, prime
minister of Rhodesia and leader of its white minority government, announced the colonys UDI from Britain. This move,
deliberately timed to coincide with the precise moment that
Armistice Day was commemorated in the UK, was conceived
by Rhodesian-born Smith and his supporters as a way of preserving Christian civilisation in Africa in the face of a perceived moral decline of the West, the encroachment of communism and the spread of corruption across the continent.
The desire to maintain the privileged Rhodesian way of
France played
a significant
and frequently
overlooked role in
the end of British
rule on the African
continent
Ian Smith at home

in the Rhodesian
capital, Salisbury,
November 1964.
MARCH
RHODESIA
A supporter of the Smith

government delivers election
campaign posters, 1964.
life also underpinned this act of rebellion by a small, but influential,

settler minority, many of whom had only migrated to southern Africa
in the 20 years following the Second World War and maintained close
ties with family and friends in the UK.
DI SET RHODESIA on a collision course, not only with its colonial rulers, but also with an international community increasingly committed to the eradication of colonial rule across the
globe. It also significantly delayed the introduction of majority
rule to this landlocked territory, with Zimbabwe not gaining official
independence from Britain until April 18th, 1980, more than 23 years
after Britain formally began decolonising its African empire by granting
independence to the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1957.
On the surface, the official French response to UDI appears far from
extraordinary. The French government immediately condemned the
actions of Smith and his supporters and refused to acknowledge the validity of a white-ruled Rhodesia, independent from Britain. The French
consul and commercial attach stationed in the Rhodesian capital,
Salisbury (now Harare), were promptly recalled and the French ministry of foreign affairs openly affirmed its support for the programme of
economic sanctions introduced by the UK government in an attempt
to bring the rebellious Rhodesians to heel.
Yet behind this public position of opposition to UDI and the state38 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015
ments of cooperation with the UK authorities, there is a more complex

picture of French reaction to this monumental crisis as Britain attempted to draw a line under its colonial ventures on the African
continent. In contrast to Britains difficulties in Rhodesia, France had,
by 1965, decolonised all of its sub-Saharan colonies with the exception
of Djibouti. Moreover, in spite of the violence that had characterised
Frances eight-year long, ultimately unsuccessful struggle to retain
hold of the North African territory of Algeria, France fostered a much
better reputation in Africa than Britain, frequently presenting itself as
the champion of black Africans and the Third World more widely. The
divergence of Britain and Frances African fates only grew as the UK
government came increasingly under fire, at home and on the world
stage, for its failure to introduce majority rule to Rhodesia, as well as
its perceived intransigence over the persistence of apartheid in another
of its former colonies, South Africa.
These contrasting experiences, combined with the long-standing Anglo-French rivalry in Africa, which can be traced back to the
French humiliation at the hands of the British at Fashoda in 1898,
mean that it is unsurprising that, behind official indignation at UDI,
a hint of glee characterised the French response to Britains troubles
in southern Africa. Reports housed in the archives of Jacques Foccart,
the chief adviser to French governments on African policy after 1960,
described the UK governments policy in Rhodesia as incoherent and
The Rhodesians
identified France
as an important
partner in their
efforts to break
free of British
dominance
Above: a 1968
demonstration in
London against
minority-rule
Rhodesia.
Right: a marriage
between a white
farmer and a black
woman is poorly
attended, May
1963.
characterised by multiple errors. Furthermore, from a French perspective, Britains mistakes in Rhodesia were not an isolated malfunction
in the British decolonisation process, but part of an ever-lengthening
list of British failures on the African continent, which also included
South Africa, Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana.
VEN MORE satisfying for the French was the way in which the
cruel failings of Britains decolonisation created new opportunities for France in regions of the African continent formerly
dominated by the British. This included South Africa, where disagreements between London and Pretoria over apartheid, epitomised by
South Africas departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, created new
openings for France, particularly in the economic sphere. French smugness about this shift in their favour is apparent in one French source
that describes British worry and bitterness about its declining stature
in South Africa, in contrast to Frances growing position of strength.
The decline of British fortunes in southern Africa and the parallel
rise for France was equally apparent in the Rhodesian setting. Even
before UDI was declared, Rhodesians identified France as an important
partner in their efforts to break free of British dominance, particularly
as it offered potential new markets for their exports and alternative

sources of investment. After 1965 many white Rhodesians continued
to view France as an important ally in their struggle to go it alone.
Ian Smith wrote to French presidents Charles de Gaulle (1958-1969)
and Georges Pompidou (1969-1974) on at least six occasions after UDI,
openly expressing white Rhodesias fraternal feelings towards France,
as well as its hopes for further French support. Moreover, in a letter to
de Gaulle from July 1968, Smith explicitly stated his belief that France
was poised to fill the vacuum left by Britain in Rhodesia.
Across Rhodesian settler society there was a perception that France
was sympathetic to their plight and might, in the future, offer more
formal support. P.K. van der Byl, the South African-born politician and
one of Ian Smiths closest supporters, believed that France would be
prepared to do whatever she can to further trade and harmonious relations and sustained hopes throughout the UDI period that France might
accord Rhodesia formal diplomatic recognition. The Rhodesian press
contained optimistic accounts of Frances position towards UDI, such
as reports alleging French opposition to the UK governments foreign
policy and equating this opposition with sympathy for the white cause.
Rhodesian confidence was also recorded in British newspapers: a
RHODESIA
French President Georges Pompidou

meets Felix Houphouet-Boigny,
president of Ivory Coast, Abidjan, 1971.
Below: Prince Charles, visits a military
camp during Zimbabwes independence
ceremonies, April 1980.
feature on Rhodesia at war, published in the Guardian in 1966, included

a discussion of how many white Rhodesians believed France would offer
support to Smiths regime.
T IS TEMPTING to dismiss the Rhodesian representation of France as

an ally as the delusions of an isolated and inward-looking population,
influenced by a highly censored press. Certainly the UK government
did not take these reports particularly seriously, with Downing Street
dismissing them as Rhodesians whistling to keep their spirits up and
Whitehall claiming that the idea that France might offer diplomatic
support to Rhodesia was wishful thinking on the part of the Rhodesians. Yet French backing of Rhodesia was not entirely imagined, with
both individuals and groups, some of whom had ties to the French state,
providing Rhodesia with real assistance.
The principal means by which the UK government sought to bring
the Rhodesian rebels to heel was through economic sanctions. However,
the trade embargo largely failed to achieve its objective due to the numerous external actors who were willing to defy legislation by continuing to trade with Rhodesia. Apartheid South Africa and, until its
independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique, were at the forefront of this illegal trade. Yet, businesses based in other western countries, including the UK, the US, Japan, West Germany and France, also
breached the international trade embargo.
After UDI, French businessmen remained a common sight in Salisbury and French companies continued to buy Rhodesian goods, including tobacco, sugar and metals. French purchases from Rhodesia
actually increased in the years immediately following UDI, with France
importing 200 per cent more Rhodesian merchandise in the first three
months of 1967 than it had done in the same period in 1966, including
a 106 per cent rise in purchases of unembargoed commodities such as
diamonds and precious stones.
French companies also remained important suppliers of goods to
Smiths illegal regime. A visible French presence in Rhodesia after 1965
was to be found on the roads, with French estimates suggesting that 50
per cent of all cars driven in Rhodesia during the UDI period were made
by one of two French manufacturers: Renault and Peugeot. Moreover,
at least some of the petrol needed to fuel these automobiles came from
French suppliers, with the Compagnie Franaise de Petrole (CFP) and
A party at
Government
House, Salisbury,
with Clifford
Dupont, president
of the illegal
republic, second
from right.
its subsidiary, Total, providing oil that was transported overland to

Rhodesia from Mozambique and South Africa.
As well as helping to maintain the high standard of living for
ordinary white Rhodesians, French companies also aided the physical
defence of white rule. A guerrilla insurgency was launched in 1972
by the military wings of the two competing factions of the Zimbabwean nationalist movement: the Zimbabwe African National Union
(ZANU), led by Ndabaningi Sithole and Robert Mugabe; and the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo. From
the outset, French arms were vital to counterinsurgency efforts led by
the Rhodesian Security Forces, with at least 50 French-manufactured
Alouettes in the service of the Rhodesian Air Force (RhAF) between
1965 and 1980. The Rhodesians also had access to Mirage FI planes
and Maxtra rocket launchers, leading one Zambian press report from
1977 to conclude that 22 per cent of all military material used by the
RhAF was of French origin. Numerous French companies evaded the
international trade embargo, therefore and, in doing so, contributed
directly to efforts to maintain white rule in Rhodesia.
WHAT IS distinctive about French sanctions busting in Rhodesia is not
its extent British and US companies were probably more prolific but
the degree and nature of French government involvement. Although
powerful business lobbies did influence the UK and US governments to
turn a blind eye to illegal Rhodesian commerce carried out by British and
American companies, French state complicity went deeper than this, to
the heart of French involvement in Africa in the post-independence era.
After the formal handover of power to the majority in Francophone
Africa in 1960, French relations with the continent were pursued

not by the foreign ministry, but through complex networks
(known in French as rseaux) of state and non-state actors. At
the heart of these rseaux was the French Presidential Palace,
where a dedicated African cell (cellule africaine), led by Foccart,
advised the president on African affairs and conducted covert
operations in Africa. Private French companies as well as private
and public interests in Francophone Africa also played an important
role in this opaque network, which is often described as la Franafrique. This system, in turn, enabled France to continue to extract
profit and exert considerable influence over its
former African colonies.
THERE WAS EXTENSIVE overlap between the
Franco-African rseaux and the illegal French
support given to white Rhodesia after UDI.
Many of the private French companies who participated in these networks were also engaged in
illegal Rhodesian commerce. Sucres et Denres
(SUCDEN), a Paris-registered company with
strong ties to the cellule africaine, operated not
only in Francophone Africa, but also in Rhodesia,
purchasing considerable quantities of Rhodesian
sugar throughout the UDI period. Another striking example of a company close to the heart of
French African policy is the airline Union des
Transports Ariens (UTA), which participated
in Rhodesian affairs. Although UTA suspended
its commercial flights to Rhodesia in 1966, the
airline maintained offices in Salisbury and Bulawayo (Rhodesias second city) and was at the
forefront of various initiatives to promote Rhodesian trade and tourism after UDI. There were,
therefore, various private French companies,
that not only had links to the apparatus through
which French African policy was conducted, but
also participated in illegal Rhodesian trade. This, alongside the notoriously blurred lines between French state and non-state action in
Africa, makes it possible to suggest state complicity in French sanctions
busting in Rhodesia.
Damning evidence concerning the existence of relations between
some key members of the cellule africaine and high-ranking white Rhodesians strengthens this argument. These contacts can be traced back
to the early 1960s, when Jean Mauricheau-Beaupr, Foccarts principal
deputy in Brazzaville, along with Daniel Richon, UTAs director of external affairs, who frequently acted on behalf of the African cell, attempted
to form an organisation comprised of African leaders friendly to France
and white rulers of southern Africa, to oppose Anglophone dominance
of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), ahead of its first summit
in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, in May 1963.
LTHOUGH THIS GROUP never fully materialised, it was important in establishing a pattern for covert relations between
key players in the Franco-African rseaux and the settler government in Salisbury, permitting Franco-Rhodesian contacts
to continue, in secret, after UDI. Mauricheau-Beaupr, for example, met
with van der Byl in Paris on at least two occasions that are documented,
in 1969 and 1971, and may also have corresponded directly with Smith.
Another of Foccarts agents, Philip Ltteron, maintained direct personal
contact with van der Byl, as well as Geoffrey Follows, a long-serving
adviser to the Rhodesian government. In addition, Pierre de la Houssaye,
an informant from the Service de Documentation Extrieure et de
Contre-Espionnage (SDECE) Frances external intelligence agency
RHODESIA
met members of Rhodesias white settler government, including on
a trip to Salisbury in 1970.
These covert channels served an important purpose in facilitating
illegal Franco-Rhodesian trade after UDI. French purchases of Rhodesian tobacco, for example, were made possible largely through the existence of a Rhodesian Information Office in Paris. The origins of this office
can be traced back to contacts between members of the cellule africaine
and certain Rhodesian representatives. Rhodesian sources claim that
authorisation to establish a commercial representation in the French
capital was given during a meeting between Ltteron and van der Byl in
Paris in 1966. A similar series of events appears in a SDECE report from
1970. Although this has not so far been verified by archival evidence, the
French investigative journalist, Pierre Pan, also asserted in his 1983
study of Affaires Africaines that, until its closure in 1977, the bureau had
the support of the Renseignements Gnraux (the intelligence service
of the French police) and the SDECE. Rhodesian sanctions busting
by French individuals and groups appears to have been contingent,
therefore, upon the relations that existed between key protagonists of
Frances African policy and high-ranking Rhodesian settlers.
Furthermore, the extension of Franco-African networks to south-
Ian Smith conducts a press conference, 1975, with PK van der Byl, the
principal contact between France and Rhodesia, behind him (in white).
France provided
white Rhodesians
with an economic
lifeline at a time
of British and
international
sanctions
ern Africa enabled the establishment of
commercial relations between Gabon,
a former French colony in Equatorial
Africa, and Rhodesia. In the late 1960s
Robert Mugabe, future
Mauricheau-Beaupr, Letteron and de la
president of Zimbabwe,
Houssaye introduced the rulers of white
pushes his claims for the
Rhodesia to their best Francophone African
leadership of ZANU on his
arrival at Geneva airport,
friends, namely Flix Houphouet-Boigny,
October 1976, for talks on
President of the Ivory Coast (1960-94) and
the future of Rhodesia.
Omar Bongo, President of Gabon (19672009), and promoted Gabon as a potential
market for Rhodesian beef. In turn, this
endorsement led to the development of an enduring trade enterprise,
1960, actively participated in Rhodesian affairs throughout the 14-year
involving the French state and private individuals and groups, Francoperiod of UDI. The impact of this French involvement was considphone Africans and white settlers, whereby Rhodesian beef was flown
erable, providing the white Rhodesians and their government with
into the Gabonese capital of Libreville, before being re-exported to
an important economic lifeline at a time of British and international
sanctions. Although not the sole external power willing to breach the
various European capitals, including Amsterdam and Athens. This trade
trade embargo, French support for white Rhodesia was unique due to
was maintained throughout the UDI period, providing the Rhodesian
regime with access to much needed foreign currency reserves and thus
its intricate entwinement with the networks that formed the basis
contributing considerably to its survival until 1979. Its significance is
for Frances wider efforts to retain a privileged position on the African
continent in the post-independence era.
attested to in the autobiography of Ken Flower, head of Rhodesias
Central Intelligence Agency, published in 1989, in which he claimed
that this venture contributed more than any other single factor to the
RENCH INVOLVEMENT in Rhodesia stands apart in another
defeat of economic sanctions in Rhodesia.
way, due to the particular psychological consequences that it
had on Rhodesias white population. As has been noted, at all
IT IS APPARENT, therefore, that certain actors linked to the French
levels of Rhodesian society, France was seen as an ally and a
state, and more specifically those involved in the parallel official mechpotential formal backer of white rule in southern Africa. Although ofanisms through which French policy in Africa was conducted after
ficial French diplomatic support for Smiths government was never
An armed guard provides

security for white
Rhodesian golfers at
the Leopard Rock Hotel,
Manicaland, 1978.
accorded and it is highly unlikely that this possibility was ever seriously
contemplated by France the fact that such perceptions could exist
in the minds of many white Rhodesians underlines the importance
that should be accorded to the moral backing Rhodesia received from
France, even if this support was sometimes little more than a figment of
the Rhodesian imagination. Moreover, the memory of French support
outlasted Rhodesia itself, as can be seen by references to it in various
memoirs written by former Rhodesian settlers. In Alexandra Fullers
account of her childhood in Rhodesia, Dont Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight
(2002), for example, there is a description of being driven around
the country in an avocado-green Peugeot. Similarly, Peter Godwins
Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (1997) makes reference to the RhAFs
use of an Allouette helicopter, made in France. French assistance, both
real and imagined, made a lasting imprint on the Rhodesian psyche.
FRENCH SUPPORT for white Rhodesia physical and psychological,
direct and indirect contributed to Rhodesias commitment to maintaining white rule in southern Africa. This, in turn, prolonged the settler
rebellion against Britain and delayed Zimbabwean independence until
1980. Thus, this episode brings to light a previously unknown dimension of the history of the end of the British Empire, whereby French
and Francophone actors crossed national and imperial boundaries to
influence the decolonisation process in Anglophone Africa. Beyond the
secret archives, there exists a much wider history of the British Empire,
still in the process of being uncovered by historians.
Moreover, French involvement in Rhodesia was closely bound up
with the particular way in which France decolonised its own African
empire and the subsequent form of post-colonial Franco-African
relations, which enabled the maintenance of ties between certain
actors from France, Francophone Africa and Rhodesia. By examining

French involvement in Rhodesia historians can not only learn about
the end of British colonial rule in Africa. We can also gain fresh insight
into Frances efforts to maintain its position on the African continent
in the post-independence period. This tale of French involvement in
Rhodesia after UDI is not merely a hitherto unknown dimension in the
story of the end of the British Empire. Rather, it is part of a much wider,
interconnected web of previously neglected transnational histories,
which provide new perspectives on the end of European colonial rule
in Africa. It is only by looking beyond individual Empires and crossing
national and colonial boundaries that this secret history of decolonisation will fully come to light.
Joanna Warson is a fellow of the Centre for European and International Studies Research
at the University of Portsmouth.
FURTHER READING
Tony Chafer and Alexander Keese (eds), Francophone Africa at Fifty
(Manchester University Press, 2013).
Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from
Empire (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Joanna Warson, Entangled Ends of Empire: The Role of France
and Francophone Africa in the Decolonisation of Rhodesia, Journal
of Colonialism and Colonial History (Johns Hopkins, 2015).
Carl P. Watts, Rhodesias Unilateral Declaration of Independence: An
International History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
| FATHER OF PSYCHIATRY
Johann Weyer,
History of Magic,
woodcut 1577.
Johann Weyer used his compassion and a pioneering

approach to mental illness to oppose the witch-craze
of early modern Europe. Ray Cavanaugh profiles the
founder of modern psychiatry.
THE MISUNDERSTANDING and persecution of disturbed

people was a fact of life in 16th-century Europe and many
who suffered were hunted down as witches. Against this
injustice there stood one man: Johann Weyer (151588), the first physician to specialise in mental illness, or
melancholy as it was then termed. Weyer (also known as
Wier) fought the practice of punishing or killing suspected witches, contending that these melancholics were not
demonic but mentally ill.
For his insight into the mental turmoil of disturbed
persons, Weyer has been credited as the founder of
modern psychiatry and the year 2015 marks the 500th
anniversary of his birth. Though his exact birthdate is
unknown, historians say that Weyer was born in 1515
in the town of Grave, in the Dutch province of North
Brabant. Scant information is available on his family, but
we do know that Weyer had two brothers and that his
father was a merchant. We also know something of young
Weyers educational background. Among his teachers was
the controversial philosopher, magician and occultist,
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, who undoubtedly exposed him to radical ideas.
At age 19 Weyer enrolled at the University of Paris
to study medicine. Upon obtaining his medical degree,
he returned to his hometown of Grave but eventually
relocated to the Dutch city of Arnhem. Here he served as a
city physician, in charge of preventing and counteracting
infections such as plague and syphilis. He also married and
started a family, becoming a father to five children.
Injustice of the Inquisition
Weyer became the personal physician to Duke William V
of Julich-Berg-Cleves in 1550, serving in this capacity for
three decades. Maintaining the dukes health was not
his only pursuit. He had become fixated on the subjects
of witch-hunting and a nascent psychopathology. At this
point it is not clear what sparked his interest, though it is
true that everyone in that era was aware of the witchhunts running rampant in both Catholic and Protestant
communities. Maybe Weyer could not stand the injustice
he saw, which had flourished for hundreds of years and
brought misery to those of unsound mind. Organised
religion, instead of being a solace for the mentally ill, had
become largely their enemy.
The Vaticans miscomprehension of mental illness
had surfaced on December 5th, 1484, when Innocent
VIII issued a papal bull on the matter of eccentric people
who, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from
the Catholic faith, have abandoned themselves to devils.
From Demons
to Doctors
The pontiff added that, when encountering such people,

inquisitors [should] be empowered to proceed to the just
correction, imprisonment, and punishment of any persons,
without let or hindrance. A year after this proactive papal
bull there appeared a now infamous book, Malleus Maleficarum (Witchs Hammer), which became a bible for some of
Europes most dogged and ruthless witch-hunters. Robert
E. Adler, author of the 2014 study Medical Firsts, writes
how Malleus provided moral support to its readers, as well
as serving as an instruction manual on how to best execute
the stages of arousing suspicion, making an arrest, conducting an interrogation and performing a successful torture
and execution.
Responses
Many of the people arrested confessed to
practicing witchcraft. However, most of these
confessions were given while the suspect was
prostrated on the rack or under the duress of
thumbscrews or some other coercion. Weyer
argued in his writings that these confessions
could be distorted. Not everyone agreed.
The political philosopher Jean Bodin wrote
that Weyer should stick to examining urine
rather than intruding into the lofty territories
of theology and jurisprudence. Of course, negative publicity was not the only consequence
the doctor risked. He was well aware of the
perils involved in standing against the practice
of witch-hunting. Others could potentially
reason that Weyer himself was a demon,
looking to secure the survival of his fellow
demoniacs. Indeed Bodin felt that the doctor
must be a wizard in league with the devil to
have shown such sympathy with witches.
Weyers published works had some initial
impact; they saw multiple editions in Latin,
as well as translations in French and German.
The author won the support of some scholars,
ecclesiastics and even a group of enlightened judges, who dismissed charges against
suspected witches. On the whole, however,
the culture of witch-hunting was undeterred.
Either Weyers medical arguments were
insufficient to convince the inquisitors, or the
inquisitors didnt want to be convinced.
No one has any clear idea as to how many
lives the witch-craze claimed. Estimates range
from 50,000 into the millions. The panic spread to the New
World, peaking most notably in the early 1600s in Salem,
Massachusetts. It would take time for the persecution to
end; for example, the last witch in Germany was decapitated only one year before the American Revolution. The
memory of witch hunts long remained and its frenzied hysteria could serve as a premonition of the fanatical ideologies
that would take hold of Europe in the 20th century.
Weyer, the anti-fanatic, wrote in his magnum opus, De
Praestigiis Daemonum (1563), that many of the excoriated
witches were in reality melancholics, whose senses are
often distorted when the melancholic humour seizes
control of the brain and alters the mind. He added that
A woman, accused
of witchcraft,
bound and
thrown into a
river, 16th-century
woodcut.
some of these melancholics think they are dumb

animals, and imitate the cries and bodily movements of
these animals. Other melancholics fear death, and yet
sometimes they choose death by committing suicide.
Others yet imagine that they are guilty of a crime,
and they tremble and shudder when they see anyone
approaching them. Weyer also contended that such
psychological states as fascination and enchantment
could contribute to the belief in witchcraft. Additionally,
social isolation could predispose one to abstruse beliefs.
Weyer also provided case studies. Among them was
one man who was certain he had become a wolf. Another
case involved a man who believed that he was monarch
and emperor of the whole world. A third involved a
woman who would linger by night about the tombs in
the cemeteries for weeks at a time.
Sometimes, she would run through the
streets vandalising peoples property.
Without Weyers insight and support
such a person would have stood a slim
chance against witch-hunters. What
else, other than demonic influence,
could cause someone to smash her
neighbours window for no reason?
Legacy
For such a pioneering figure, there is
surprisingly little known about Weyer.
He left behind no autobiography, nor
did any of his contemporaries write
anything sizeable on his life or work.
In the 1991 edition of Witches, Devils,
and Doctors in the Renaissance, George
Mora relates that the latter part of
Weyers life is particularly obscure.
One might assume it was less than
blissful. Though Weyer had made
some initial impact, the grim truth
was that the overall persecution of
eccentric and disturbed persons was
only to intensify. Weyer spent his final
years in exile and died following a
brief illness, at 73, on February 24th,
1588. Ten years before his death, he
had retired from his medical career;
the retirement might well have been
involuntary.
For centuries, Weyer and his work
went largely neglected. Then, in the 1940s, a psychoanalyst and medical historian named Gregory Zilboorg
revivified Weyer as a forerunner of modern psychiatry.
Today his case studies serve as the progenitor of the current-day psych evaluation, and the Johannes Wier Foundation a Dutch human rights organisation for health
workers honours a man who breached prejudices that
had smouldered for centuries. Where some people
saw witchcraft and evil, Weyer saw suffering. And he
devoted his talents, compassion and bravery so that
others might see it as well.
Where some people

saw witchcraft and evil,
Weyer saw suffering
Ray Cavanaugh is a historian of medieval Ireland and early modern Europe.

MakingHistory
The increasing commercialisation of sites known for their gruesome and violent history raises
troubling questions. But to ignore such events would be worse, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.
Shedding light on dark history

I HAVE SPENT a week on the trail of
witches in Scotland and Lancashire.
In Edinburgh, I stood on Castle Hill,
where, on January 28th, 1591, a
midwife called Agnes Sampson and a
number of other witches accused in
the North Berwick trials with which
James VI was directly involved were
garrotted and burnt for witchcraft.
There is a tiny, easily missable memorial and I found the oblivious hordes of
tourists (with their selfie sticks) or the
bizarre jocularity of some tour guides
deeply disturbing on the site of so
much horror.
By contrast, Lancashire commemorates its gruesome history. The council
offers driving and walking routes
through Pendle and the surrounding
countryside, following in the footsteps
of those accused of witchcraft. There is
even a nice poem by Carol Ann Duffy
about the victims, engraved on a stone
on Gallows Hill in Lancaster, where
ten convicted witches were hanged
in August 1612 and an eerie metal
sculpture of one of them, Alice Nutter,
in the village of Roughlee.
In both, of course, commercialism
reigns: from an upmarket restaurant
in Edinburgh called The Witchery to
Pendle Witches Brew ale everyone is
getting in on the act.
As a phenomenon, it is nothing
new: from the remains of Pompeii
and Madame Tussauds post-French
Revolution Chamber of Horrors, to
the battlefields of the Somme and
tours of concentration camps, people
have long been drawn to the sites and
scenes of disaster, murder, execution
and war. And the question of how we
respectfully and appropriately mark
and remember the darker episodes of
our history has, in the last decades,
become the subject of scholarly study.
Perhaps not coincidentally, there is an
Institute for Dark Tourism Research at
the University of Central Lancashire
and the commodification of atrocity
for the public even has its own academic term: thanatourism (from the
Greek for death, thanatos).
Visiting these kinds of macabre
heritage sites is an important way in
which the public consumes history
and therefore, for the historian just
as for the heritage industry, there are
ethical questions to consider.
On the one hand, these places do a
crucial job of memorialising the past,
What is worse? Not

remembering or
remembering in a way
that seems distasteful?
of healing wounds and of allowing for
empathy. They remember the suffering of others and help alert us to the
complex tangle of historical circumstances that created such barbarity and
could do so again. They remind us that
far too often homo homini lupus est
man is a wolf to man.
On the other hand, though, such
places are open to moralistic charges of
capitalising on the unpleasant human
impulse to voyeurism and prurience,
Eerie: the metal
sculpture of
Alice Nutter
in Roughlee,
Lancashire.
a titillated fascination with horror

and the frisson of fear it provokes, or
entertainment at the pain of others.
But what is worse? Not remembering
or remembering in a way that seems
distasteful?
One of the most moving places I
have ever been was a charnel house
in the vaults of a church in the City
of London. It was filled with the
skeletons of those who had died from
the plague. The sight of the bones
carefully laid out filled me with awe at
the reality of lives lived, the hideousness of their deaths and the transience
of mortality. But recent building
works meant that many other bones
had been packed into cardboard boxes,
which were piled up in a corridor that
also served as the general storage space
and dumping ground. Perhaps these
bones were carefully preserved and
it was only the debris that gave the
impression of neglect, but I found this
latter disregard troubling. I felt dimly
aware that all sorts of best practice
policies for the treatment of human
remains may have been contravened,
yet it was the sense of forgetfulness
that most perturbed me.
I have, therefore, realised with
some discomfort that, grim as it may
be to see human suffering exploited
by the market (another example of
our tendency to wolfishness), it is,
on balance, far worse for people not
to remember the past than for them
to remember in a way that I find
unappealing. It is not good enough:
the reason forgetfulness is so terrible
is because it betrays a lack of empathy,
just as jaunty tour guides or tasteless
paraphernalia do; our duty towards
past horror is a sombre honouring and
anything else falls short. But it is still
better to remember than forget.
Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the Faculty of
History and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History
at New College of the Humanities.
BISHOP KEN
Thomas Ken,
Bishop of Bath
and Wells, portrait
by F. Scheffer,
c.1700.
In the precarious
years that followed
the Restoration of
Charles II, the senior
clergy of the Church
of England navigated
the countrys shifting
politics at their peril.
But high principles still
had their place, as
John Jolliffe explains.
Bishop Ken and

the Non-Jurors
NGLISH LIFE in the second half of the 17th century

divides into two sharply contrasting periods. The
first, the Puritan regime of Oliver Cromwell, sought
to destroy the liturgy of the Church of England,
the backbone of most peoples devotional life. It made the
theatre illegal and abolished the feast of Christmas. It also
destroyed a great deal of the treasure of glass and stone at
the heart of the nations churches and cathedrals.
The reaction to such iconoclasm was confirmed by the
Restoration of Charles II on his 30th birthday in 1660 and
with the laxity and license of his behaviour. Between these

two extremes there were cases of devotion to high principles. One example was the stand taken on two separate
occasions by the Non-Juror clergy, led by the bishops, who
refused first to order James IIs Declaration of Faith to be
read out in their dioceses, as instructed by the king; and
then declined, shortly afterwards, to swear allegiance to
William III as Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
on the grounds that they had previously taken that oath in
favour of James, however much they disliked his attempt
BISHOP KEN
to impose Roman Catholicism on the country. Thomas Ken,
Bishop of Bath and Wells, had stood at James right hand at
his coronation in April 1685. Like Pontius Pilate in rather
different circumstances, the bishops line was Quod scripsi,
scripsi (What I have written, I have written); or, in this case,
Quod juravi, juravi (What I have sworn, I have sworn).
Their first crisis had arisen in April 1687, when James
issued his Declaration of Indulgence. In theory this was
a liberal and liberating pronouncement, reversing the
penal laws against religions other than the Church of
England. Its real purpose, however, was to facilitate the
pre-eminence of the Roman Catholic Church. At first,
addresses of thanks poured into Whitehall from Quakers,
Anabaptists and other non-conforming bodies. Far stronger
was the realisation that James was setting aside, arbitrarily,
the anti-Catholic Test Act, passed by Parliament as the
cornerstone of religious policy. Many could see that this was
likely to lead to other measures of an autocratic nature of
the kind that had cost the head of James father, Charles I. It
even seemed to be a step towards rule without Parliament.
AMES ISSUED AN ORDER in Council on May 4th,

1687, requiring the bishops to have the Declaration of
Indulgence read out in all the churches and chapels in
their dioceses. The bishops reacted quickly. Sancroft,
Archbishop of Canterbury, led six of them to wait on the
king: besides Ken there was Compton
(Bishop of London), White (PeterborJames II,
anonymous
ough), Turner (Ely) and Cartwright
portrait, c.1690
(Chester). Their petition stated their
conscientious scruples against reading
the declaration and begged the king
to withdraw it. Ken explained that
we have two duties to perform, our
duty to God and our duty to Your
Majesty. We honour you, but we fear
God. James was furious and dismissed
them as trumpeters of Sedition. The
next day a letter was sent to every
parish priest in the country urging
that the declaration should not be
read. The result was overwhelming. In
a radius of ten miles of London it was
read in only four churches, including
Westminster Abbey, where the entire
congregation walked out, leaving
only the choristers and the scholars of
Westminster school behind.
The bishops were then told they
would be prosecuted in the Court
of Kings Bench and must enter
recognizances to appear. This they
declined to do, on the grounds that,
as members of the House of Lords,
they were under no obligation to do
so. Nevertheless, the Lord Chancellor,
George Jeffreys, later to gain notoriety
as the hanging judge at the Bloody
Assizes following the Monmouth ReThe Bishops
bellion of 1685, ordered the serjeantPalace, Wells,
Somerset.
at-arms to conduct them as prisoners
to the Tower of London. A week later,
The Trial of the Seven

Bishops in the House of
Commons During the
Reign of James II by
John Herbert, 1844.
Unlike the Vicars of Bray and most

of their bishops, Ken remained
loyal to the man who had sent him
to the Tower of London
after visits from Lord Clarendon and John Evelyn among
others, they were brought to trial in Westminster Hall,
with sympathetic crowds cheering them on their way.
After the summing up they were allowed to go off to their
residences. The jury was locked in for the night and were
heard at midnight in heated disagreement, and again about
3 am. At 10am the foreman gave the verdict of Not Guilty
and crowds outside broke out in wild cheering. Church
bells rang, guns fired salvoes, bonfires blazed and soon the
bishops went home.
Events moved rapidly. By November 6th, 1688 William
of Orange was landing an army of 17,000 (of whom, ironically, a quarter were Roman Catholics). By the 24th Ken
left his diocese to avoid possible contact with the Dutch,
some of whom were known to him personally from his
unhappy time as chaplain to the child bride Princess Mary
in the gloomy court of The Hague back in 1680. Unlike the
Vicars of Bray and most of their bishops, Ken remained
loyal to the man who had sent him to the Tower of London.
But on December 11th, 1688 James fled from Whitehall by
night, casting the Great Seal into the Thames.
It is worth looking at the sequence of events that had
brought Ken to Wells. After The Hague he was appointed
chaplain to the king and when the latter ordered

the building of a new palace at Winchester, he was
in the habit of lodging at the deanery on his visits.
Ken had been installed as a prebendary there in
1669 and the harbinger responsible for the accommodation of the court had wanted Nell Gwyn to be
lodged at the prebendarys residence, conveniently
close to the deanery. Ken refused and, instead,
more conveniently still, a small apartment was built on to
the deanery to house her. In 1684 the Bishop of Winchester
had died and the then Bishop of Bath and Wells was appointed in his place. Charles had to find another bishop and
he decided to appoint the little fellow who refused poor
Nelly a lodging. In 1685, only a week after his consecration
as bishop (having already taken the Oath of Allegiance on
his election), he ministered to Charles on his deathbed.
HE CUSTOM at the time was for a newly appointed

bishop to provide, at his own expense, a banquet
for the cream of the clergy and nobility. Ken
decided instead to present what the banquet would
have cost him to the fund for rebuilding St Pauls Cathedral
in lieu of his consecration dinner. Another considerable
act of generosity by Ken was his decision to forego the sum
of 4,000, which had come to the episcopal treasury from
legal dues on the renewal of various leases. This he made
over to a collection intended to support Protestant refugees
from France, who had fled their country after the Revocation of the Treaty of Nantes. In his few short years at Wells
he regularly entertained 12 poor men and women at dinner
in the palace. Hardly were these pious acts completed
BISHOP KEN
than arose the first crisis of his time at Wells. The Protestant
Duke of Monmouth, who had been exiled by his acknowledged father, Charles II, returned with two ships and landed
at Lyme Bay in Dorset. Secretary Pepys at the Admiralty
seized the vessels and cut off any means of escape for Monmouth by sea. His only option was to fight on land. At first
Monmouth was welcomed rapturously by large numbers
of Tauntons and Bridgwaters citizens. James disciplined
troops under Louis de Duras, 2nd Earl of Feversham had
little trouble in routing Monmouths rabble of supporters,
Monmouth was captured, cowering in a

ditch, and wrote an abject letter begging
James, who he had unwisely described as
a usurper, to receive him
who were mostly armed with pitchforks, scythes and other
agricultural implements. More than 1,300 of them were
killed and perhaps as many again captured and found guilty
of treason. They were executed on and around the battlefield at Sedgemoor and left to rot. Some of the prisoners
were incarcerated in a church in Wells and Ken did what
he could to save them from death or transportation and to
relieve their families, even forgiving the amateur soldiers
for having used the cathedral as stables and terrorising the
city. Monmouth was captured, cowering in a ditch, and
wrote an abject letter begging James, who he had unwisely
described earlier as a usurper, murderer and enemy of
religion, to receive him. It did him no good. Ken attended
him in his final hours and urged him to repent. At first
Monmouth refused, but on being reminded of all the
carnage that he had caused among the Somerset hobbledehoys he repented.
N JANUARY 28TH, 1689 the Commons passed

a resolution based on no legal principle: that
James having withdrawn himself from the
Kingdom had abdicated the government, and
that the throne had become vacant. For all they knew
James might have changed his mind, rallied his supporters
and come back. William declined stubbornly to be in the
position of his wifes gentleman usher, which as far as
England was concerned was what he was, or of being regent
or even king consort. Since no alternative could be suggested and his supporters being understandably determined
to remain on the best possible terms with him (as well as
to feather their nests), he succeeded in bulldozing his way
into sharing the throne. When considering Williams character, Samuel Johnsons description of it is worth recalling:
Arbitrary, insolent, gloomy, rapacious and brutal neither in

great things nor in small the manners of a gentleman, and only
regarded his promise when it was in his interest to keep it.
Kens biographer, H.A.L. Rice, while detesting Williams
character, nevertheless concedes as follows:
In defence of the liberties and independence of small nations,
in opposition to over-towering ambition and lust for power, he
remained constant, fearless and inflexible.
It remainsan impressive tribute.
Right: The Battle

of Sedgemoor,
1685, woodcut,
17th century.
Below: James,
Duke of
Monmouth,
Studio of Sir Peter
Lely, c.1680.
of James and were harassed accordingly

by the new regime, but no evidence of
treasonable intent could be found against
them. In 1702 Queen Anne offered to
restore Ken, an offer he declined (though
he accepted a pension). It was not until
1715 that any serious attempt was made
to oust what by then was the Hanoverian
regime and it soon failed.
A DUBIOUS RESOLUTION declaring the throne vacant by

the two Houses of Parliament, in joint session, was passed
by just 62 votes to 47, Ken being among the minority.
Thirty-seven peers then protested against William and
Mary being declared king and queen, 12 of them, including
Ken, being bishops. Nevertheless, other measures were
passed transferring authority and allegiance from James
and, on February 12th, Ken quit the House of Lords, never
to enter it again. He refused to abandon his sacred principles long before being asked to swear allegiance to William.
Even in their deprived state, the more extreme bishops
still regarded themselves as legitimate holders of their
sees, while their successors were viewed as intruders and
schismatics. Bishop Sancroft died two years later, in 1693,
and the extremists, with the approval of James in exile at
St Germain, secretly consecrated two more bishops. The
Non-Jurors were now suspected of being active supporters
The Seven Bishops,

tried for Sedition,
a contemporary
engraving, with
Bishop Ken, top
row, second from
left.
MEANWHILE, Ken had been given

shelter (still in his old diocese) by his
Oxford contemporary, Lord Weymouth,
at Longleat in Wiltshire. A few letters of
Kens survive from this period, always beginning with the rather formal opening,
My very good lord. Sadly they throw
little light on Kens character, which
is anyway illustrated by his impeccable
behaviour while still in office. He sold his
personal possessions when leaving Wells
for over 700, which he handed over to
Weymouth in return for an annuity of
80. He kept only his library, which is
still at Longleat, the catalogue of which
is interesting both for its contents and
for its gaps. It contains no Shakespeare,
nor any of the Elizabethan dramatists.
No English Reformers are represented;
Cranmer and Latimer are absent, as is
Luther. Yet there are many works of the
Church fathers: Clement of Alexandria,
Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Gregory
Nazianzen, Ambrose, Augustine, Bernard,
to mention only some of the better
known. More surprisingly there are a
number of Roman Catholic notables: a
life of St Ignatius, the works of Thomas
Kempis and St Francis de Sales, Mabillon
and the Doctrines of Bossuet, as well as
the Roman Missal and Breviary. For some
reason Ken left a substantial collection
of Spanish authors to Bath Abbey, which
were recently transferred to the Cathedral Library at Wells. There are also the
works of major contemporary thinkers,
including Sancroft, Jeremy Taylor, Hobbes and others, and,
very surprisingly in view of his underhand and dishonest
treatment of Ken, three works by Bishop Gilbert Burnet.
LASSICAL AUTHORS are also well represented

and although Homer, Herodotus and Aeschylus
are absent (perhaps given away to friends?) most
of the Greek canon is there, as are the main Latin
authors: Horace, Livy, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal, Catullus,
Cicero, Lucan, Martial and Pliny, probably survivors from
Kens studies at Winchester and Oxford. English authors
include Holinshed and Froissart, Bede and Ussher and,
among contemporary literature, the works of Milton,
Crashaw, Herbert and Donne.
Although Ken was lucky to fall on his feet at Longleat,
he was just 54 and a loss to his diocese. His remaining years
were spent largely in private study and devotions, mainly
BISHOP KEN
Right: A View of
Longleat by Jan
Siberechts, 1678.
Below: William
and Mary depicted
on Englands
Happiness, a
pamphlet,
London 1689.
in the chapel that was set up for him at Longleat.

He also composed a number of undistinguished
verses and a few hymns, among them the wellknown Awake my Soul, and with the Sun. He
is certain to have been troubled by the fate of so
many of his fellow clergy on being deprived and
to have lamented the loss suffered by the Church
of England on their departure. Some of the clergy
found employment as private tutors, schoolmasters or domestic chaplains, but this would
hardly have been appropriate for Ken, who had
held exalted positions both at court and, however
briefly, at Wells and who could not bring himself
to play any active part in the new ecclesiastical
regime. But he certainly gave encouragement and
advice over the foundation of Lord Weymouths
Grammar School in Warminster, which still survives as Warminster School. He kept old friendships alive,
not least with former colleagues who had taken the Oath of
Supremacy and whose consciences Ken respected.
HE WAS NOT TIED DOWN at Longleat. To avoid the houses
crowded Christmas celebrations he was in the habit of
going to stay with various friends and faithful supporters,
including Lord Weymouths widowed daughter-in-law
at Lewesdon near Sherborne and with Dr Cheyney, the
Principles still at stake

To bring the story of expulsion up to date,
another more bitter irony, much resented
in the Diocese of Bath and Wells, was the
recent high-handed move by the Church
Commissioners to prevent the recently installed bishop, the Rt Rev Peter Hancock,
from occupying the flat in the Bishops
Palace. This plan was made without
consulting the new bishop himself and
the commissioners failed to consult the
headmaster of Winchester, who had once been his chaplain.

He also acted as a kind of spiritual director to two maiden
ladies, the Misses Kemeys at Portishead. In 1704 he was
staying with his nephew, Izaak Walton the younger, in the
Rectory at Poulshot, not far from Longleat, when it was
badly damaged in a storm described by Defoe. Twelve ships
of the line were wrecked and the Eddystone Lighthouse
destroyed. At Wells, part of the Bishops Palace collapsed
on Bishop Kidder and his wife, killing them. It is a supreme
irony that this fate befell Kens successor and not himself.
Ken died in 1711 at the age of 74 and was buried in accordance with his instructions in a simple grave outside the
church of St John in Frome, at that time the nearest parish
church to Longleat.
John Jolliffe is a historian and publisher. His Raymond Asquith: Life and
Letters is published by Michael Russell; www.lennoxandfreda.com/publisher
FURTHER READING
Robert Southey, Bishop Kenn (Longman, 1812).
JWC Wand, The High Church Schism (Faith Press, 1951).
Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed, Britain 16301714 (Penguin History of Britain, 1997).
dean. So the new bishop was likely to be

deprived of his lodging before even setting
foot in it. A former rectory three and a
half miles away was bought back at huge
cost for him to occupy, thus removing him
from the historic centre of the diocese.
This appeared to be a purely materialistic move in order to increase thetheoretical tourist value of the Bishops
Palace. There was even a strong suspicion,
although they may deny it, that the
Commissioners would next try to sell
off the Bishops Palace itself. Following a

forceful and eloquent letter to the press by
a former dean and other robust protests,
the Church Commissioners referred the
matter to the Archbishops Council, which
sent an envoy to Wells, who investigated
the situation and reversed the Commissioners decision. No doubt they will be
more careful in future before trying to
betray their solemn obligation to protect
the Churchs architectural legacy and a
fascinating chapter in its history. JJ
| THE POST OFFICE

Hugh Gault charts the long-running
debate over the privatisation of the
Post Office amid rising competition
and shifting political agendas.
HISTORY NEVER repeats itself exactly. But patterns
recur because the contexts in which human beings
have to act repeat themselves, more or less, as Robert,
now Lord, Skidelsky put it in his 1967 book Politicians
and the Slump. The question of whether the Post Office
should be a business has been around for almost as long
as the service itself and certainly since the 1920s. But
when the question was carefully explored in the 1930s
the answer was no, as it was in the early years of this
century though only just. However, in 2013 Britains
coalition government sold off Royal Mail. The government retained the pension liabilities and a minority
stake, as well as having the ultimate responsibility for
the Universal Service Obligation (USO).
A National Audit Office report in April 2014 decided
that Royal Mail had been sold too cheaply, not achieving sufficient value for the taxpayer, and in July 2014
the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Committee
endorsed these conclusions. The market value had been
underestimated by Vince Cables BIS Department. The
business secretarys arguments that froth accounted
for vastly increased share prices in the months after
flotation were not seen as credible and, while the government might have delivered a privatised Royal Mail
with an employee share scheme, it was the taxpayer
who lost out.
Competition
Not for the first time since privatisation, Royal Mail
has complained recently about the USO making them
uncompetitive. It requires Royal Mail to deliver six days
a week to every address in the UK at the same price. Its
competitors, however, can pick and choose where they
deliver, cherry-picking the easily accessible and more
lucrative parts of the country and leaving alone those,
usually rural, that are less so. Royal Mail argues that
the private sector should be required to deliver to every
address, too, preventing it from targeting urban areas
and business mail only. This would also mean that less
accessible areas would gain increased access to Internet
shopping.
Almost exactly the same questions were raised in a
letter to The Times in 1932, when Post Office privatisation was under consideration:
Who is to prescribe the policy of the new body? Will it be
allowed, like any other concern run on business lines, to
select its own business? Much of the present business is
Helpful hints: a
public information
poster issued by
the Post Office,
1950.
probably unremunerative. Will the emancipated [i.e.,

privatised] Post Office be allowed to jettison this?
These questions anticipate those that are with us now:
around parcels/letters distinction, the organisation of
private delivery and the viability of non-commercial
rural services. Just as the USOs viability was questioned
in the 1930s, so it is today, although Cable has described
Royal Mails comments as scaremongering and Ofcom
has dismissed them. Nevertheless, Royal Mails management must be hoping that it will be forgotten that their
over-arching purpose is as public service, rather than as a
profitable business prioritising shareholder return.
In March 1930 the Conservative MP Roundell Palmer,
later Lord Wolmer, made his intentions clear in Parliament:
I want to remove the Post Office altogether out of the
The Stamp of Success?

| THE POST OFFICE

or, still Leader of the Labour Party in 1954, perhaps he
thought this would improve his chances of becoming
prime minister again. Possibly he was simply repeating
what he had told Roy Jenkins six years earlier. In 1948
Jenkins had published an interim biography of Attlee,
based in part on the former prime ministers powers of
recollection and hitherto unpublished writings.
Wood set up the enquiry committee Wolmer had
sought, with the politician William Bridgeman in the
chair, accompanied by the industrialist John Cadman
and the accountant William Plender. In less than six
months they produced a short but pithy and extremely
sophisticated report to the terms of reference Wood had
given them:
hands of politicians and the Civil Service, and to put it in

the hands of a statutory authority controlled by the ablest
business brains we can find, in a position to raise its own
capital and to run this great concern as a business.
Wolmers campaign was conducted initially through
proposals to fellow MPs, then in articles in The Times
and other newspapers and finally by a petition to the
Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, signed by 320 MPs
in November 1931. The Postmaster General (PMG) Sir
Kingsley Wood had political responsibility for the Post
Office and was directly in the path of the Wolmer reform
bandwagon; but would he also be in its way?
Kingsley Wood was the 19th
person to hold the office of PMG in
the 20th century and the fourth in
1931, with Clement Attlee having
been PMG for five months earlier
in the year. Attlee was beginning to
make some changes, but was furious
when the Labour government came to
an end and the National Government
took over, putting him out of a job.
Though Wood would not have been
MacDonalds choice, leading Conservatives such as Stanley Baldwin and
Neville Chamberlain knew him well and must have won
this argument. The upshot was that two months later
Wood was left holding the parcel at the head of a quarter
of a million people. In those days the Post Office included a savings bank, telegrams and telephones, as well as
its deliveries and counter services. The savings bank,
created in 1861 when Palmerston was prime minister,
was hived off as a separate department in 1969 and BT
(British Telecom) was sold in the 1980s.
Whose reforms?
In November 1931 Attlee had described the Post Office
as the outstanding example of collective capitalism,
a view then widely held, with the BBC and electricity
supplying other examples. He argued that its contribution to the Treasury should be restricted, judged the
civil service-type structure too inflexible for the active
campaigning required and wanted to reduce parliamentary control. These proposals would have been anathema
to Evelyn Murray, the hide-bound Secretary of the Post
Office, who had day-to-day control and a particular
distaste for public relations. Nevertheless, they were
not as radical as the claims Attlee made in his 1954
autobiography, asserting that it was he who introduced
public relations, adopted advertising and improved the
telephone service. These are very striking, especially for
someone who was only in the post for five months and
generally so modest, even deprecatory, about his own
achievements. He had set up an advisory committee on
public relations and invited Stephen Tallents to join it,
but it had progressed no further than that. With regard
to the telephone service, he only received the report
setting out proposals the day he left office. Perhaps Attlees memory was faulty, or he confused his intentions
with the changes that his successor Wood did introduce;
To enquire and report as to whether any changes in

the constitution, status or system of organisation of
the Post Office would be in the public interest.
Postmaster
General Kingsley
Wood listens in
to a shortwave
transmitter, 1932.
The report distinguished the Post Office communications services from its other state functions,
such as the savings bank and pension payments.
It was very positive about the efficiency and
effectiveness of the latter and, indeed, about
the postal service itself. It was more critical of
the telegram and telephone systems (as Wolmer
had been), but it was most concerned about the
dead hand of the current administration and Murrays
excessive authority as Secretary, judging, and in reality
condemning, it as a stifling initiative. The PMGs proper
role was to separate policy from operation and to maintain parliamentary oversight and the public interest.
But modern management demanded a board chaired by
the PMG, led by a director general and comprising other
executives charged with regional and/or specialist functions. The Secretarys post would no longer be required.
These and other recommendations were endorsed
by the government and brought into effect for, as the
committee had concluded:
The criticisms, so far as we find them to be justified, in our
opinion point to defects in the present organization which
can be remedied without a complete change of status.
we wish to place on record our opinion that on the whole
the Post Office performs the services for which it is responsible with remarkable efficiency.
The committee had rejected the transfer of some
services to a public utility company or Wolmers private
sector option, concluding that this would result in the
development of the more remunerative business of
the denser areas to the detriment of more remote and
sparsely populated districts. They were also critical of
ill-informed public criticism for the public will come to
learn that it cannot demand luxuries at the same price
which it pays for necessities. Both judgements remain
pertinent today. It is to be hoped that they are not joined
by a third: only realising what one had when it has gone.
Hugh Gaults most recent book is Making the Heavens Hum: Kingsley
Wood, Volume 1 The Art of the Possible 1881-1924 (Gretton, 2014).
Volume two, Scenes from a Political Life 1925-1943, is scheduled to be
published in 2016.
REVIEWS
Claire Holleran on the day that Commodus killed a rhino

Stephanie Eichberg admires a story of pain John E Law explores Italian Venice
Frank Hudspeth carries the FA

Cup after Newcastle Uniteds win
against Aston Villa in 1924.
SIGNPOSTS
British Sports History

Robert Colls rises to the challenge of arguing the case for sports history
as a serious academic subject, digging deep into its beginnings in the
1960s and winning with a wealth of scholarly works and skilled rhetoric.
UNLIKE ITS European and
American counterparts, the rise
of British sports history as an
academic subject in the 1960s
came out of social history and
theory, not physical education
and sports science. That said,
the most ambitious works were
decidedly left field Huizingas
Homo Ludens (1938) came out
of cultural linguistics, Elias The
Civilizing Process (1939) out of so56 HISTORY TODAY APRIL 2015
ciology, economics, and psychotherapy and Guttmanns From

Ritual to Record (1978) out of
literature, history and American
studies. With no clear theoretical lead, British social scientists
could be found strapping sports
history into hard-boned theories
(Marxist, Functionalist or
Figurationist) that did not always
fit though Dunnings and
Sheards Barbarians, Gentlemen
and Players (1979) was influential

and deserves a prize for trying.
Wray Vamplews Pay Up and Play
the Game (1988) introduced the
Utility Maximisation Hypothesis,
which was interesting, while
Neil Tranters Sport, Economy
and Society (1998) sought to
answer some of the big sociological-historical questions and did
well by both disciplines. On the
other hand, there was Desmond
Morris The Soccer Tribe (1981)

that zoolo-anthropologised
sport.
The social historians
preferred specific events and
established chronologies. James
Walvin was first with The Peoples
Game: The Social History of British
Football (1975). I can remember
the cries of folly that followed
the young Walvin as he tried to
win the interest of York Universitys history department. After
all, here was a man who had
done his doctorate in a proper
subject (popular radicalism)
wasting his time (and his youth)
on Manchester United. Forty
years on, the book is still in
print. Tony Masons Association
Football and English Society
followed in 1981, while Tony
Mangan brought the middle
classes into sports history in
the same year with his study of
public school athleticism. But
the ground for academic British
sports history was really cleared
with Dai Smith and Gareth
Williams Fields of Praise (1980),
a deep history of the Welsh, and
with Richard Holts Sport and the
British (1989), a sweeping work
which showed historians how
to think about sport and how to
cast it into the mainstream. In
this context, we cannot signpost
sports history without pointing
to Keith Thomas Work and
Leisure in Pre-Industrial Society
(Past & Present, 1964), R.W.
Malcolmsons Popular Recreations in English Society (1973),
Gareth Stedman Jones Working
Class Culture and Working Class
Politics 1870-1900 (Journal of
Social History, 1974) and Ross

McKibbins Classes and Cultures
(1998).
Since Holt, the subject has
grown into a small but distinctive corner of British university
teaching, with its journals (Sport
in History and International
Journal of the History of Sport),
its teaching manuals (such as
Booths The Field, Polleys Sport
History and Cronins Oxford
VSI) and its societies (the British
Society for Sports History). See
R W Coxs immense bibliographical labours to track this growth,
Pascal Delheyes attempts to
make sense of it and Jeff Hills
reinterpretation of it as a form
of peoples representation. The
subject is so confident these
days it can even ask Whats the
point of Sports History? (Martin
Johnes, IJHS, 2013). Britains only
dedicated Sports History department was founded in 1996 at De
Montfort University in Leicester,
British sports
history came out
of social history
and theory, not
physical education
and sports science
where it continues to flourish.
Last year it launched the first BA
in Sports History and Culture.
Meanwhile, Ramachandra
Guha reversed the batting order
in 2002 with his Indian history
of an English sport, Corner of
a Foreign Field. Emma Griffin
pushed back the boundary in
2005 with her fine early modern
study, Englands Revels and Mike
Cronins indefatigable work
on Irish identity found a rich
sporting vein in his work on the
GAA. But all in all it has proved
difficult for sports historians to
spot the mainstream let alone
figure a way in. Tony Collins
rugby histories (League in 1998,
Union in 2009) found a way in,
somewhat, as did Simon Inglis
Engineering Archie (2005) and
Masons and Riedis Sport and the
Military (2010). Ina Zweiniger
Bargielowskas Managing the
Body (2010) and Neil Carters

Medicine, Sport and the Body
(2012) showed how far the sporting body could stretch into other
subjects.
By and large sports historians
have remained true to their social
history instincts by concentrating on mass activities. Football
has predominated. No sooner had
Matt Taylor and Adrian Harvey
brought the British story to a
fine scholarly pause by 2007,
than David Goldblatt reminded
everybody that the journalists
were still a force with his global
history The Ball is Round, a work
not likely to be bettered in my
lifetime. His The Game of Our
Lives followed in 2014, a bold run
into the crowded area of English
national identity that started
with a long pass from Dave
Russells Football and the English
in 1997.
Sports history is on the up at
a time when sport itself is on the
down. The British, it seems, are
world-beating Olympians who
suffer from record-beating
levels of obesity, while the
Premier League and Sky Sports
has achieved the impossible by
turning football into shopping.
Tony Collins Sport in a Capitalist
Society (2013) gets it exactly
right in this respect and sports
historians are going to have to
widen their remit to deal with it.
If modern celebrity is a kind of
fools paradise, sporting celebrity
is a living media death played
over and over again.
For sports historys one
perhaps irredeemable fault is
that it is taught and written by
fans. There are exceptions (some
mentioned here) but, unlike the
political historians who do not
feel obliged to love politicians,
or the religious historians whose
belief is not presumed, sports
historians are believers. While
the old challenges are being dealt
with such as Jean Williams
on football and Kasia Boddy on
boxing the next challenge
comes from within: the fan,
the supporter, the partisan,
the white guy in the chair who
secretly wants to be the man on
the ball.
Robert Colls
The Day Commodus

Killed a Rhino
Understanding the
Roman Games
Jerry Toner
Johns Hopkins University Press 136pp 13
THE EMPEROR COMMODUS was

immortalised in the film Gladiator as an unstable and insecure
ruler who fought in the arena to
win the adulation of the crowd.
While the film is fictional, Jerry
Toners excellent new book
provides the historical context
for Ridley Scotts emperorgladiator, drawing on the
senator Dio Cassius eyewitness
account of the lavish games
held by Commodus in Rome in
ad 192. It was not enough for
Commodus merely to host, he
wanted to perform. He hunted
animals, albeit from the safe
vantage point of a catwalk
suspended above the arena, and
fought as a gladiator, although
he was never in any real danger
since he and his opponent
were armed only with wooden
weapons and he was flanked by
his most trusted aides.
This book is not solely about
Commodus, but explores the
Roman games more broadly,
focusing in particular on the
violent pursuits of the arena,
including beast hunts, executions and gladiatorial games. It
is often difficult for a modern
audience to get beyond their
revulsion at these aspects of
Roman entertainment, but
Toner manages to achieve an
appropriate balance between
compassion for the level of
human suffering involved and
a non-judgemental analysis of
an audience whose world was
very different from ours, even

wondering at one point how he
himself would have responded
to the sights and sounds of the
arena.
Toner demonstrates that
the games should not simply be
dismissed as a reflection of the
peculiar cruelty of the Romans.
Rather they were central to
Roman identity, since paradoxically, while a gladiator was on
the margins of society, he embodied the core Roman values of
masculinity, bravery, self-control, discipline and military
virtue. The gruesome executions
that were held in the arena were
a means of asserting law and
order in a society that had very
minimal policing. Beast hunts
were a display not only of skill,
but also of the power and extent
of the Roman Empire, as more
and more exotic animals were
sought, pushing some species
to extinction. Furthermore, the
crowd was not a mindless bloodthirsty rabble. Since the loss of
voting rights in the early Empire,
the games were the principal
location for political dialogue
between the emperor and the
people. It was an opportunity for
the crowd not only to display its
loyalty, but also its displeasure,
including demonstrating over
issues such as food shortages.
For his part, an emperor was
supposed to respond magnanimously to the peoples demands
and to join with them in their
enjoyment of the games.
Toner has published extensively on Roman social and
cultural history and here he
vividly captures the atmosphere
and spectacle of the games,
while providing a thoughtful
analysis of their importance in
Roman culture. His account is
full of colourful anecdotes and
fascinating details, such as the
memorable image of Dio Cassius
chewing laurel leaves to stop
himself from laughing in Commodus face, surely a suicidal
move for any senator. Toners
voice throughout is warm and
engaging and his wry comments
and personal observations make
this book a pleasure to read.
Claire Holleran
REVIEWS
The Temple of
Perfection
A History of the Gym

Eric Chaline
Reaktion 272pp 20
KNEES UP, knees uphead the ball

Nervous energy makes him tick. Hes a
health fanatic ... he makes you sick
Despite his cutting stanzas, John

Cooper Clarkes 1978 poem, Health
Fanatic, gave a cultural legitimacy
to the 20th-century fitness craze.
Going to the gym is now a wellworn phrase with the 16 per cent of
Americans who are gym members;
in Britain the figure is 12 per cent.
Gyms have become a familiar part
of the global urban landscape.
Their brightly lit and open facades
expose their occupants pounding
away on the rows of treadmills and
stationary bikes, while listening to
their iPods or watching big screens.
In Britain the history of sport
has largely been a product of its
social and labour history roots. In
more recent years there has been a
shift to the cultural turn in order to
explore some of the wider meanings associated with sport and
physical activities. Eric Chalines
engaging and thought provoking
history of the gymnasium is part of
this growing trend.
Using a chronological structure,
Chaline outlines the origins and
meanings of the gymnasium from
ancient Greece to the 21st century.
He identifies the changing philosophical shifts in the idealisation
of the body through exercise and
argues that the Greek ideal of
masculine beauty remains the
basis of western male fitness and
attractiveness.
This ideal has manifested in a
number of ways. Since the 20th
century, for example, bodybuilding

pumping iron has represented
the most extreme form of body
culture, while the fitness body
of today has been a product of a
cross-fertilisation between gay
and straight men. Throughout,
Chaline pays particular attention to
the history of same-sex relations
through the lens of the gymnasium
and its changing body cultures.
The gymnasium and its accompanying meanings of fitness has
served a number of functions,
including the shaping of personal
identities, entertainment and,
occasionally, the needs of the state.
Arete, or reaching ones full potential in life, was the prime objective
for those male freeborn citizens of
Ancient Greece who had exclusive
access to gymnasiums, which were
also important cultural institutions. During the Renaissance the
relationship between exercise
and body culture underwent a
revival based around the rebirth of
Vitruvian Man. However, the gyms
modern roots were firmly established in the early 19th century
through Friedrich Jahns Turnplatz
and the states increasing need to
improve the health of the population for military and industrial
and women, although different

parts of the gym continue to
reflect gender stereotypes, with
males mainly occupying the free
weights section while women are
predominant in group exercises.
The Temple of Perfection is an
illuminating study that provides
insights into historical practices
of physical culture and further
evidence of the ideological impact
of sport and leisure.
Neil Carter
Chaline ... provides

insights into
historical practices
of physical culture
[and] further
evidence of the
ideological impact
of sport and leisure
IN THIS engrossing book, Mark

Hailwood opens the doors on
one of the least understood
institutions in the history of
British drinking. Charting the
period 1550-1700, Hailwood
describes how the alehouse
became one of the most important social spaces of the time
and reveals a world of rich social
relations, laughter, mishaps and
occasional violence that thrived
despite repeated bouts of government repression.
Alehouses and Good Fellowship
in Early Modern England updates
a history that, according to
Hailwood, has been through
two distinct phases. In the early
1980s, social historians such as
Peter Clark and Keith Wrightson
documented the control and
regulation of alehouses, using
legal records, while a more
recent cultural history phase
explores alehouse life through
literary sources. Hailwood
judiciously combines these
production purposes. Entrepreneurs, such as Hippolyte Triat,

Eugen Sandow and Jack LaLanne,
also began to exploit a growing
consumer demand for healthy lifestyles. However, the most successful fitness entrepreneur has been
a woman. Jane Fondas aerobics
classes and videos not only opened
up a new form of exercise but also
acted as a form of emancipation
for womens bodies. The gymnasium has increasingly become a
shared, equal space between men
Alehouses and Good

Fellowship in Early
Modern England
Mark Hailwood
Boydell and Brewer 266pp 60
approaches, triangulating a fine

study of contemporary ballads
with diaries, depositions and
other documents to build up a
compelling picture of regulatory
ambivalence, cultural significance and complex social mores.
At the heart of all this is what
Hailwood refers to as good
fellowship: a practice centred
on recreational drinking in
alehouses [which] was a widespread, meaningful and potent
form of social bonding in early
modern England. Good fellowship involved hard drinking but
pursued merriment rather than
oblivion. Indeed, there are striking parallels with the controlled
loss of control that social researchers see in todays drinking
cultures. Social drinking, then as
now, was less about escapism
than rituals of friendship, the
loosening of social restrictions
and, of course, the occasional
kind of drunkenness that would
be as readily regretted the next
day as gleefully recounted by
those who witnessed it.
Hailwood shows convincingly
that alehouses blurred social
relations. They were not, for
instance, places where women
were excluded, but rather where
conventional gender hierarchies
were dissolved: for all the undoubted sexual harassment and
violence (and marital tension),
there was also much all-female
sociality, mutual flirting and
Alehouses blurred
social relations ...
they were places
where gender
hierachies were
dissolved
mixed-gender drinking. Furthermore, for all that the state
sought to repress the alehouse
through bouts of restrictive
legislation, those efforts were
continually undermined not
least by the tendency of many
officers of the law to embrace
the behaviours they were meant
to control. One John Lufkin,
an Essex constable, appears
REVIEWS
throughout this book, shirking
his official duties for a series of
ever more outrageous drinking
escapades: from swiping the
codpiece of a companion he has
bested in an all-night drinking
game to dropping his wifes sex
toy into a jug and proposing a
toast to she knew where, much
to the amusement of his wife
and the whole company.
The meticulous research and
lively writing make this a mustread for anyone interested in the
early history of drinking cultures
in England. Like the good fellowship it celebrates, it is both
complex and fun. It also serves
an important purpose in reminding us that the lowly alehouse
was an ersatz public sphere,
as filled with social meaning as
any high-class tavern or coffee
house; and that the sociability it fostered had a value that
deserves preservation.
James Nicholls
The Story of Pain
From Prayer to Painkillers

Joanna Bourke
Oxford University Press 416pp 20
HAVE YOU ever experienced a

pain that felt like a toothache
about six inches long in the hip?
Or one that tortured you like
a demand from Her Majestys
Inspector of Taxes? From these
two descriptions of pain, expressed
in 1909 and 1910 respectively, we
could deduce that toothache must
have been the most common
and excruciating visitation of pain
against which all other kinds of
pain were likely compared at the
time and that tax collections anno
PHOTOGRAPHY
injustices of the time. Morgans methodological
THE EARLY YEARS of photography saw
approach to examining their work illustrates the
pioneering practitioners explore every facet
growing pains of the then new genre of text and
of photography, pushing at the boundaries of
photography. The reader sees how, in response
communication and perceptions of reality.
to their readers and critics, Smith and Thomson
Street Life in London: Context and Commentary
gradually adjusted the form and content of
by Emily Kathryn Morgan is the first in-depth
subsequent issues to improve their circulation.
examination of the ground-breaking series of
It was pioneering and a positive addition to the
illustrated articles, entitledStreet Life in London,
growing lexicon of photographys potential uses.
by the socialist journalist Adolphe Smith and
The foreword by Michael Pritchard, the
the photographer John Thomson, published in
present Director General of the Royal Photo1876-7 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and
graphic Society, contextualises the significance
Rivington of Fleet Street, London. Smith and
of the establishment of street photography and
Thomson innovatively combined photograprovides a valuable additional appreciation of
phy and essays, as they sought to publicise the
Smiths and Thomsons work that this volume
precarious conditions of a life of poverty in the
presents.
capital. They captured myriad street-peddlers,
Morgans fascinating 556-page tome is
such as those selling fish, flowers and fancy
well researched, referencing critical primary,
wares (inset), as well as proffering their skills
secondary and theoretical sources. The structure
as chimney sweeps, shoe blacks and cane chair
is presented so as to introrepairers. Although not the
duce the range of complex
first images of their kind,
historical perspectives that
Smith and Thomson felt
influenced the work of
that their work was taken
Smith and Thomson. There
from life, adding greater
is a broad and generous selauthenticity to the accomection of pertinent plates
panying texts.
interspersed throughIn the present
out the writing, but not
volume, Emily Kathryn
necessarily adjacent to
Morgansets out to
the relevant text (an issue
demonstrate the genesis of
Street Life in London
that Smith and Thomson
designing a significant new
Context and Commentary
also experienced). They
form of fascicle publicatEmily Kathryn Morgan
range from examples of
ion, addressing its successearly photographs by John
es and failings, examining
MuseumsEtc 556pp 59
Thomson during his years
the photographs and texts
from historical and theoretical perspectives. Her in Asia, examples of illustration engravings from
the English press, original periodical covers
sharp focus then turns to biographical analysis
of Smith and Thomson, providing a better under- and photographs by Emily Kathryn Morgan.
The publishers have been careful to match the
standing of their credentials, motivations and
tonalities and colours of the original images and
oeuvres, whilst framing them within the social
photographs in the book, although some of the
and historical context in which they responded
facsimiles of the deep rich brown Woodburytype
photographs from Street Life in London have lost
a little of their original detail.
Should the reader wish to better appreciate
the full beauty and fine detail of the original
images, these can be found in the recent publication of a version of the original book Street Life
in London, also published by MuseumsEtc, which
complements Morgans tome. Alternatively, visit
the excellent LSE digital archive and the History
Pin resource: http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/colto their subjects. Subsequent chapters address
lections/streetlifeinlondon#historypin.
content, reception and impact of Street Life in
The LSE /HistoryPin site links each image to
London when first published.
These two Victorian collaborators significant- its original location, the date taken, Smiths and
Thomsons original accompanying texts, and has
ly shaped a genre of publications linking socially
a growing collection of later photographs, some
conscious images and texts. Their approach was
of them taken in the same locations.
consciously intended to stimulate debate, to
Janine Freeston
educate and to heighten awareness to the social
Pioneering practitioners
of photography pushed
at the boundaries of
communication and
perceptions of reality
REVIEWS
1910 must have been equally excruciating affairs. In her new book,
Joanna Bourke takes the analysis
of such pain expressions one step
further, arguing that the figurative
language we use does not simply
describe our pain, but also impacts
on the way that pain is, and was,
felt throughout history.
Tracing the story of pain from
the 18th century to the present day,
Bourke introduces us to a variety
of sufferers from all walks of life
who have communicated their
pain in colourful metaphors that
enable the historian to identify the
language games that people residing in the foreign kingdom of the
past have played. The changing
language of pain also reveals to
us major shifts in the understanding of how the body works, the
fortitude of sufferers and the way
that the pain of others has been
and still is evaluated, at times
with harrowing results. In the 18th
century, for example, infants were
believed to be exquisitely sensitive
us mad, even with the most

sophisticated pharmaceutical
drugs at our disposal. According
to Bourke, every year around
10,000 women in the US are
diagnosed with pain-induced
post-traumatic stress disorder
after giving birth. Chronic pain, an
evil of modern society, is steadily
on the rise, posing a challenge
to modern medicine. Horrifically,
recent studies also indicate that
the under-treatment of pain has
worsened in the last decades, not
least because pain relief is not
distributed equally in society due
to ongoing prejudices based on
class, gender and ethnicity. Pain
affects everyone, but, as Bourke
convincingly shows, there is still
nothing democratic about pain.
Meanwhile, neuroscience is reducing the experience of pain to an
altered brain state, based on the
milliseconds of brain activity made
visible by the latest neuro-imaging
and magnetic resonance imaging
technology. Bourkes acknowled-
Historians and general readers alike will

find much of interest in Joanna Bourkes
meticulously researched, entertaining
and thoughtful book
to pain. From the late 19th century
onwards, however, physiologists
and physicians came to think
otherwise. Based on the belief that
a babys nervous system was not
yet fully developed, they concluded
that neither consciousness nor
pain nor memory were possible
yet. As a consequnce, newborns
were operated upon without anaesthesia up until the 1980s.
In chapters investigating pain
metaphors, the influence of religion, doctor-patient relationships
and the sympathy that we feel
as onlookers to someone in pain,
Bourke shows us how much of a
difference it makes whether the
person-in-pain conceives of the
event as having been inflicted by
an infuriated deity, being due to
imbalance in the ebb and flow of
humours, as punishment for a lifetime of bad habits, or as the result
of an invasion by a germ.
Pain is still literally driving
gement that the body is mindful

and the mind is embodied is a
healthy antidote to reductionism
in science that can never capture
the experience of pain as an integrated type-of-event that affects
the whole person.
Historians and general readers
alike will find much of interest in
this entertaining and thoughtful
book, with its meticulously
researched wealth of patient
accounts throughout history. It
turns out that, when it comes to
pain, history is not such a foreign
country after all. Despite the different language games, the reader
can easily relate to those sufferers
in the past who Bourke introduces to us. After all, as the moral
philosopher Adam Smith wrote in
1759, for as to be in pain excites
the most excessive sorrow
surely a statement with which we
can still identify today.
Stephanie Eichberg
REVIEWS
The Sick Rose
or: Disease and the Art of

Medical Illustration
Richard Barnett
Thames & Hudson 256pp 19.95
THE PUBLISHERS call this

elegantly designed collection of
medical illustrations before the
advent of colour photography,
beautifully gruesome. It is certainly
that: many of the images such
as the head of a 13-year-old boy
utterly disfigured by leprosy, or
grotesquely pendent tumours
painted by Lam Qua in 1830s
Canton will make most readers
close their eyes before yielding to
horrified fascination. In addition,
The Sick Rose offers a brief yet
thought-provoking commentary
by Richard Barnett, a historian
attached to the Wellcome Trust
and author of Medical London: City
of Diseases, City of Cures (2008).
Barnett begins with an
eye-opening quote from William
Hazlitt, written in 1817, around
the time that Edward Jenners
controversial method of vaccination against smallpox, discovered in
the late 1790s, was catching on in
Britain. We have known a Jennerian professor as much enraptured
with a delineation of the different
stages of vaccination, as a florist
with a bed of tulips, or an auctioneer with a collection of Indian
shells By 1853, the Compulsory
Vaccination Act made vaccination
obligatory for all children born in
England and Wales. It aroused
strong opposition, especially from
those unable to afford private
vaccination. Jenner was derided
as a money-grabber and a quack,
observes Barnett; in 1862 his statue
was removed from the fourth
plinth in Trafalgar Square in central
London to a more discreet site in

leafy Kensington Gardens.
The books ten sections are
each devoted to a disease or group
of related diseases. They begin
with skin diseases one reason
for those modest Victorian high
collars and long skirts followed
by leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis,
cholera, cancer, heart disease,
venereal diseases, parasites and
finally gout, that fashionable
agony of the leisured classes.
Cholera provides a compelling
cover image, depicting a young and
lovely Viennese woman with disturbingly bluish skin and lips in 1831,
during the first European cholera
epidemic. Inside, the image appears
beside her portrait when healthy
a standard comparative device in
medical illustration. Shockingly, the
sick image shows her a mere hour
after contracting the disease which
killed her four hours later.
More familiar is the epidemiologist John Snows historic 1854 map
of cholera incidence in Londons
Soho slums, which revealed cholera
transmission as waterborne.
However, Snows discovery had
little influence on the course of
19th-century medicine and public
health, in which the miasma theory
of airborne cholera transmission
predominated, notes Barnett.
He could have added that even
Florence Nightingale, whose 1858
Diagram of the Causes of Mortality
of British troops in the Crimean
War is included, remained a strong
proponent of the miasma theory.
The social history illustrations,
for example, James Gillrays 1799
etching of a small black demon
sinking its claws and fangs into
a foot swollen by gout, or some
morbidly erotic paintings warning
against syphilis, are of general
appeal. The more numerous
images of diseased internal
organs are probably more
engaging for connoisseurs with
specialised medical knowledge.
But anyone living in 21st-century Britain will feel very grateful
that they are unlikely to become
personally acquainted with these
diseases apart from cancer, heart
disease and, once again, gout
outside the startling pages of The
Sick Rose.
Andrew Robinson
The Greatest Shows on

Earth
A History of the Circus
Linda Simon
Reaktion 296pp 29
The Golden Age

of Pantomime
Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England

Jeffrey Richards
I.B. Tauris 438pp 25
FEW DEVELOPMENTS signal the

sunset on a Golden Age like
the creep of nostalgia: when
the combined Ringling Bros and
Barnum & Bailey Circus opened
in New York in 1943, performers
wore turn-of-the-century costumes to music from the 1890s.
The circus of that earlier decade
had been forward-looking, even
era-defining. Exotic menageries
and international performers
showcased limitless diversity
and potential. By 1943, the
Greatest Show on Earth was
referencing its former glories.
If the story of circus Golden
Age is one of rapid invention,
beginning with 18th century
hippodramas and reaching its
zenith around and just after the
turn of the 20th century, then
pantomimes equivalent was the
result of continuous innovation
seen by many Victorian critics
as a process of vulgarisation.
Circus was born spectacular;
pantomime became it. Yet, while
they occupy different stages
the latter requires faux magic,
while the formers spectacular
feats are, as one performer
noted, really just physics both
enjoyed a 19th-century heyday.
What each form offered and
the shape into which they were

moulded by their propagators
captured the late-Victorian
zeitgeist. As a gauge of societal
wonts and wants, popular
entertainment, enjoyed without
pretension, does not lie; a manifestation, in Freudian terms, of
societys id. Two new studies by
Linda Simon and Jeffrey Richards
cover the development of entertainment at arguably the first
time the term could be prefixed
by the word mass.
In The Greatest Shows on Earth,
Simon describes how the circus
satisfied the duality of the Victorian psyche: its hidden desires
and ostentatious standards.
Indeed, the teetotal Phineas
Taylor Barnum considered his
circus a force for good. The
freak shows popularity suggests
the eras interest in science
(stoked by Darwinism) and its
morbid corporeal obsessions.
Impossible acrobatic feats held
audiences rapt, both as showcases of human triumph and as
a potential arena for satisfying
latent bloodlust.
Circus embraced the railway
and was coming to and shortly
departing from a town near
you soon (offering a literal form
of escapism). But what Simons
study makes clear is that its
visit was as much an invasion
of paper as of performers. The
book is illustrated with colourful promotional material that
wallpapered the destinations on
a circus itinerary. Not everyone
could attend the circus, but all
felt its presence. Those who did
see it, says Simon, often saw
what [promotional posters] told
them to see. Circus popularity
was based on grand feats and a
REVIEWS
mighty, overwhelming, colossal
image, as promoters increasingly
put their efforts into spectacle. Its going to take a regular
apocalypse to make us raise our
eyebrows again, noted a character in a circus-themed story by
the poet George Garrett.
Proffering era-defining
slogans is a Victorian characteristic: the Age of Societies, Cant
and Equipoise are suggested
by various critics quoted in The
Golden Age of Pantomime. Based
on Simons and Richards books,
we might propose another,
coined decades later (with different intent) by the Marxist writer
Guy Debord: the Society of the
Spectacle. Richards identifies
the Victorians as literalists,
obsessed by the act of seeing,
with a thirst for the visual,
claims borne out in his masterful
account of pantomimes renaissance. The ascendancy could
begin after the 1843 Theatres Act
ended patent theatres monopoly on drama, prompting the
decline of Harlequinade, which
embodied cruel and outdated
Regency values. The hero (or,
indeed, villain) in the ensuing
battle for pantomimes soul
was, from the 1880s onwards,
Drury Lane manager Augustus
Harris Jr., under whose ambitious guidance panto became a
hotchpotch of muddled themes,
with lavish scenery, visual
effects and topical allusions.
One measure of Harris success
is that today we would expect
nothing less: panto has followed
the beaten track ever since. The
battle was recorded in newspaper reviews (where spectacle
was often a pejorative) but won
at the box office, presenting
an awkward truth that rising
education standards coincided
with dramas perceived decline.
Spectacle, admitted the stage
painter William Beverley, was
what people wanted.
One detractor of pantos
egalitarian shift distinguished
between competent and
incompetent audiences, the
latter referring to those upon
whom highbrow allusions were
wasted. No theatrical form
can survive long if it attracts
a predominantly incompetent
audience, was the misguided
forecast. Given pantomimes endurance an accurate reappraisal
would accept that no form can
achieve the popularity required
to flourish if it draws a distinction between the two, but the
barbed condemnation does offer
another self-defining name for
the era in which mass entertainment embraced pure spectacle:
the Age of Incompetents.
Rhys Griffiths
The Original Folk

and Fairy Tales of the
Brothers Grimm
The Complete First Edition

Translated and Edited by Jack
Zipes. Illustrated by Andrea
Dezs. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Princeton University Press 568pp 24.95
THE BROTHERS GRIMM began

collecting their tales at the start of
the 19th century, taking them from
existing books and manuscripts,
transcribed them from living storytellers in Hesse and Westphalia
and correspondents who sent tales
from all over Germany. Since then,
the tales have evolved in unexpected ways. The stories we know
today, as Jack Zipes points out, are
mostly retellings, as often musical,
theatrical or filmic as literary.
Zipes insists that it was the
Grimms who began this process
of repeated revision in successive
editions of their work. Most tales
were amended, some drastically,
others deleted. Footnotes were
removed, illustrations added. Their
final edition of 1857 was very different from what they had ushered
into the world nearly 50 years
earlier. Its target audience had

also changed: not philologists and
folklorists, but middle-class families
and, increasingly, children. What
Zipes has produced here is a new
translation of the first editions 156
tales. His aim is to grasp the original intentions of the Grimms; to
show tales that are more fabulous
and baffling than those refined
versions in the final edition; tales
that retain the pungent and nave
flavour of the oral tradition.
Pungent and baffling the tales
certainly are and morally ambiguous, occasionally antisemitic, often
very violent and almost always
disturbing. Children murder each
other in their games, or once dead,
they refuse to lie quietly buried,
but push up an arm through the
earth until their mother smacks
it down. What is surprising, given
Zipes thesis about the gradual
sanitisation of the stories, is how
much of the unsettling and frankly
unpleasant material was retained.
They may have decided that it was
not quite proper for the Prince to
get Rapunzel pregnant, a detail
that was quickly excised. But most
of the gruesome, antisemitic
and potentially upsetting tales
remained. Zipes leaves us wondering why they chose to cut, alter
and augment. Perhaps they were
simply seeking to make their work
more marketable, hoping for the
success with young readers that
the Taylor and Cruikshank English
translation (1823-6) had achieved.
What seems more likely is that
their conviction of the importance
of capturing true folk culture
gradually diminished. Whereas
in 1812 and 1815 they had sought
to collect Germanic tales as a
gesture of protest against French
occupation and a gesture of
solidarity with those people who
wanted to forge a unified German
nation, after Waterloo the need to
assert the pure origins of the tales
seemed less pressing. The Grimms
gradually saw themselves more as
authors than antiquaries, owners
of the tales rather than mere
collectors. In short, they made their
tales their own, just as generations
of writers and readers, illustrators
and filmmakers, have continued to
do happily ever after.
Matthew Grenby
The Spy With 29 Names

The Story of the Second
World Wars Most Audacious
Double Agent
Jason Webster
Chatto & Windus /Vintage 336pp 8.99
IN WARTIME, Churchill remarked to Stalin during the

Tehran conference of November
1943, truth is so precious that
she should always be attended
by a bodyguard of lies. This is a
story about stories about lies
and deceptions, the precious
truths behind them and the
most effective double agent of
the Second World War.
Juan Pujol Garcia, better
known as agent Garbo, makes
his first appearance through a
fog of German traffic deciphered
at Bletchley Park. Whats going
on? MI5 wondered as they intercepted messages from an apparent German spy informing his
masters about the movement
of non-existent British convoys.
Skillfully unpicking Pujols story,
Agent Garbo makes

his first appearance
through a fog of
German traffic
deciphered at
Bletchley Park
Jason Webster follows MI5s
transition from incredulity to
delight, as they first realise and
then fully exploit the potential
of this self-created double agent,
who offered his services to the
British when already embedded
in the German system. Things
progress from passing on cipher
REVIEWS
tables and providing an insight
into German strategic priorities,
to preparations for the biggest
deception of them all fooling
Hitler over the D-Day landings.
This familiar story has
never been spun in quite this
way. Webster makes much of
Pujols guile stemming from the
Spanish literary tradition of the
picaro, the lovable, imaginative
rogue, who deftly weaves his
way through the world, smart,
wily and slippery like mercury.
The real value of creative storytelling is deeply woven into the
fabric of this book. Pujols first
cover story was that he was a
writer; he went on to create
a network of fictitious spies,
whose fabulous code-names,
added to his own, comprise the
29 of the title. By the end of the
war, the distinction between
storytellers and characters has
blurred. Several real people play
the parts of invented agents,
or even play themselves having
been unwittingly co-opted into
deceptions. Meanwhile Pujol and
his British handler are forced
to live their fictions so deeply
that, at times, the fantasy spills
over into life. This is the point:
to change the world by telling
tales.
Appropriately for a book
about the blurring of facts and
fictions, this true story powers
along like a novel. It has a compelling narrative and an almost
filmic quality to its key scenes,
as befits an author better known
as a crime novelist. In his VE
Day scene, Webster considers
another fiction. If we were to
remove Pujol and his handler
from the picture, from history
altogether, he muses, the scene
would collapse. Rather than
jarring, this stray into what
if seems fitting. Ultimately
we dont know whether Pujol
completely fooled his German
spymaster; having a Jewish
grandmother, it was in his interests to maintain the value of his
espionage network. However,
we do know that he fooled Hitler
with profound consequences for
Europe. This telling of the story
is well worth reading.
Clare Mulley
EXHIBITION
Churchills Scientists
Science Museum, London SW7

The exhibition is free and is open until March 2016
MORE THAN any other country in the world,
Britain must depend for survival on skilled
minds. So said Winston Churchill when he
opened Churchill College, Cambridge in October
1959. It summed up his life-long belief that, if
Britain could gain any advantage over an adversary by drawing upon the ideas of its scientists
and inventors, then they should be encouraged.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Churchills
death, the Science Museum has put together a
fascinating exhibition to illustrate the support
he gave to a range of scientists during the Second
World War.
That war generated an immense number
of scientific leaps and technological advances.
New inventions ranged from jet engines to atom
bombs, from flying wings to
floating tanks and from miniature radios to ballistic missiles.
Churchill immersed himself
in the work of the nations
engineers and physicists and
a new word appeared, boffin,
to describe the scientists who
worked away on machines,
the purpose of which most
people did not even begin to
understand. But Churchill
knew that among them were probably the ideas
that would help win the war and he wanted
them realised as soon as possible.
The exhibition begins with the development
of radar and the giant receiver (4 feet high and 6
feet wide, pictured) used by Robert Watson-Watt
in the famous Daventry experiment in which he
invented British radar in February 1935. Even a
valve used in the Chain Home radar system in
1940 is 15 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter.
Yet only three years later there is an H2S radar
receiver small enough to be carried in an aircraft
and accurate enough to pick up a signal from the
conning tower of a U-boat. These three exhibits
speak louder than words on the pace of scientific

change in the Second World War.
There is a spread on Operational Research,
the process of mathematical analysis pioneered
by Professor Patrick Blackett, that was applied
to many military questions. Also a section on
food and nutrition and on the new drugs of
war, the antibiotics that helped to save, among
millions of others, Churchill himself when he
caught pneumonia in Tunis in December 1943.
It was feared he might not survive but treatment with a new antibiotic called M&B brought
recovery.
There is a section on Tube Alloys with a
suitcase of fine mesh screens for uranium enrichment and a set of Churchills galley proofs from a
chapter on science, which he called The Wizard
War in his six-volume history. Churchill dictated
great chunks of these books and saw the galleys
almost as a first draft. Screeds of handwritten
re-writes cover the proofs (publishers beware of
the Churchill method). The cast of characters
featured is extensive and it is good they are not
all backroom boys, but there are a few girls, too,
like Elsie Widdowson, who demonstrated that
the body could exist on a diet of far fewer calories
than was supposed; and Dorothy Hodgkin, who
unravelled the structure of penicillin.
The last section explores how many of the
wartime advances were taken forward in the
postwar era. A few boxes of wartime surplus
radar kit helped create radio astronomy and
Bernard Lovells magnificent 250-foot radio
telescope at Jodrell Bank. A
Gee navigating device turned
into a machine to measure
the electrical currents in the
brain. But the mushroom
cloud dominates here, with
William Penny building the
British atom bomb without
any help from the Americans.
Of course, not everything
can be included in a small
exhibition. I would have liked
something on the encouragement Churchill gave
to scientists in the Great War at the Admiralty
and, although Frederic Lindemann is there as
Churchills scientific adviser, he gets off lightly
with only a passing reference to his sinister
misuse of statistics to prove that the bombing of
Germany would disable the Nazi war machine
by killing all the workers. Also, the captions
are minimal and would benefit from far more
background. But lead-curator Andrew Nahums
exhibition opens up a little-known aspect of
Churchills wartime achievement. It is a tremendous subject and a fine tribute to Britains leader.
Taylor Downing
Opens up a littleknown aspect

of Churchills
wartime
achievement. It is a
tremendous subject
and a fine tribute
REVIEWS
The Italians
John Hooper
Allen Lane336pp 20
WHO KNOWS? Perhaps the true

truth will never be known, an
Italian in a deckchair says to a
girl on the beach who has asked
him, What is the time?. This
cartoon from an Italian newspaper is quoted by John Hooper
as an example of the multiple
realities, differing versions and
competing narratives that afflict
all those who seek to discover
what is really going on among
contemporary Italians. Likewise,
an Italian football referee is
cited as having been hounded
and attacked because he gave
a verdict. If there are so many
versions of the truth, how can
one decision be correct and the
others false? Mussolini, also, is
given his say: It is not difficult to
rule Italians, merely pointless.
The authors way through
this labyrinth of subjectivity
and relativism is not to attempt
a chronological or analytical
history, but rather present a
thematic, discursive personal
view John Hoopers Italians,
if you will. He does devote one
chapter to geography, pointing
to the Alps and the long sea
coast as isolating elements and
the mountainous terrain as a
separator of people; the river
valleys naturally places of close
settlement. He also devotes a
chapter to early Italian history,
putting focus on the Sack of
Rome in 1527, which he considers
to be of great importance as the
origin of many of the countrys
woes, though how this affected, say, Sicily and Calabria, or
the Veneto and Savoy, was not

clear.
Hooper has been a Romebased journalist since 1994,
largely in the Berlusconi era;
his is a fluent, often persuasive account based largely on
personal experience, buttressed
with many statistics from
government and NGO sources
and the results of opinion polls.
However, there are relatively
few Italian voices. The author
has conducted interviews he
mentions one with a police
chief in Catania but this book
is his own authorial narrative
and the few Italians quoted are
usually anonymous barmen or
unnamed fellow journalists.
Italians are not easy to get
information from, the author
claims, let alone accompanied by names and places of
residence. He gives an example:
his London editor rings up
asking for the price of a Big Mac
hamburger. Neither Hooper nor
his assistant know, nor does a
phone call to McDonalds help: If
the information is for a British
newspaper I can say nothing,
is the unhelpful reply. Hooper
concludes that Italians are
cagey, even with freely accessible information. It did strike me
that perhaps the guy at McDonalds thought the question was
a wind-up I would have done,
frankly.
Familiar themes in Italian life
are examined: crime, corruption and politics; the mafia,
the Church, Freemasonry and
conspiracy theories; the strong
family, sexism, feminism and
the role of women; dominant
mothers and clinging sons,
comfort food, traditionalism,
technophobia, soccer madness
and celebrity footballers,
fashion conformism and more.
The world of work is not much
dwelt upon: industry, science,
technology and agriculture are
largely absent. The regions get
thumbnail paragraphs only,
written largely from a metropolitan viewpoint.
Occasionally, the author
moralises:on the phenomenon
of stay-at-home adult children
who do not move elsewhere to
find work, he comments: this

undermines Italys economic
competitiveness and robs young
Italians of a sense of responsibility for their own lives.
Perhaps Italian families are just
happier together, compared
with their miserabilist northern
equivalents? Behave, or Ill give
you to an English family! was
an effective threat that I often
heard saidto a squalling child
when I lived in Provence. On the
other hand, Hooper does admit
that the cohesive family is probably the reason for the absence
ofcriminal youth gangs and a
grunge culture.
In my view, this study has an
under-edited feel. Such cliches
as mind-spinning legacy, momentous interaction, dazzlingly
eclectic culture, dizzyingly
complex diplomacy, foreign
yokes, benighted village, and a
slew of polls all of which occur
over just a few pages could
have been eliminated in an early
draft to good effect.
Robert Carver
Italian Venice
A History
R.J.B. Bosworth
Yale University Press 352pp 25
THE HISTORY of post-Risorgimento, post-Unification Italy has

been much discussed, but relatively
rarely has the history of the states
that once made up a disunited
country been explored. This
Bosworth seeks to address in the
case of a city state which regarded
itself as sovereign and independent
up to its surrender to Napoleon
in 1797. After a long period of
Austro-Hungarian rule, Venice

was ceded to the newly formed
Kingdom of Italy in 1866.
Bosworth takes up the challenge that Venice had no history
after 1866, an impression encouraged by those who sought (seek)
to keep the city as it was, or even
to separate it from the Italian state.
A negative impression is also encouraged by those who see Venice
as a dying city due to disease (up
until the 20th century), depopulation, environmental and climate
change, tourist invasion, the loss
and abuse of political power.
It is clear that Bosworth has not
been parachuted into his subject
with a publishers advance and an
archive of cliches. The history of
Venice presented here operates
on a wide range of levels. The city
was obviously involved in the wider
Italian experience: two world wars,
the first placing Venice on the front
line, then the rise, ambitions and
failures of Fascism; industrialisation, largely on the mainland; the
conflicts between Left and Right;
terrorism; political atrophy. But
there are other Venetian histories: coping with poverty, poor
housing and hygiene; the issues of
flooding and conservation; cultural
initiatives in terms of the festivals
of the arts and film and the growth
of its universities. An innovative
element introduced is the role of
the Church, at least at the patriarchal level. The traditional Myth
of Venice suggests that the State
held the institutional Church at
arms length, but Bosworth argues
that Venetian patriarchs and popes
could aspire to be highly interventionist in political, social and cultural terms. Venice introduced the
ghetto and the plight under later
Fascism of what had been one of
the largest, settled Jewish communities in Europe is discussed.
Bosworth has explored journals,
newspapers and the records of
some of Venices learned societies,
but perhaps too few Venetian
archival sources. He also has a
good sense of place and makes
effective use of buildings, monuments and districts to illustrate
change. The Island of San Servolo,
for example, was once the home of
monastic communities, then hospital and asylum; now the island has
REVIEWS
become an international education
and conference centre.
An index would have been
useful and there are sections
when the reader feels that he has
opened an Italian newspaper to be
confronted with the usual incomprehensible plethora of political
groupings, initiatives, compromises,
new dawns, corruption scandals
and a blizzard of acronyms. In
general, though, Bosworths
treatment of Venice and its history
is evocative and revealing and
what he says about the glitterati
and literati, such as, Cole Porter,
Noel Coward, et al, deserves to be
enjoyed out loud. More could have
been made of films about Venice;
where was Katherine Hepburns
ill-advised leap into the canal at
the Campo San Barnaba?
John Easton Law
The Age of Asa
Lord Briggs, Public Life and

History in Britain Since 1945
Edited by Miles Taylor
Palgrave Macmillan 311pp 60
ASA BRIGGS says he likes to think

in threes. In the three years
following his 90th birthday,
the author of Victorian People,
Victorian Cities and Victorian
Things published three books
of memoirs: one on his time at
Bletchley, another on people
and places (which includes at
one point some musings on his
own three-letter first name)
and a third which concludes
with a chapter entitled Pasts,
Present, Futures.Appropriately
enough, The Age of Asa, a volume
containing a dozen freshly
commissioned essays about
Briggs and his work, is divided

(like Gaul) into three parts.The
first and longest focuses on
Briggs the social historian and
leading figure in the revival of
interest in Victorian times. The
middle section covers Briggs
contribution to the history of
broadcasting and the media,
while the final essays chronicle
what the editor Miles Taylor
himself a distinguished Victorianist nicely encapsulates
as Briggs career as a university
impresario.This is no academic
Festschrift; rather, a celebration
of the sheer range and energy
of Briggs work over a long and
fruitful lifetime.The man who
emerges from these pages is
a genial, open-minded figure
from provincial West Yorkshire
blessed with a personality
summed up by Rohan McWilliam as that of a scholarship
boy who never really failed at
anything.
Social history was not new
with Briggs.But while learning
from his predecessors, Briggs
proved open to ideas from all
sides, a bridge between Marxists and non-Marxists, says John
McIlroy, who went on to write
about the history of business
and labour, health, education,
transport and urban development, food and drink, the arts
and sciences, broadcasting, publishing and the thousand and
one trinkets of everyday life.
Inevitably, perhaps, his writings
have occasionally been criticised
for privileging information over
argument or interpretation.
As Martin Hewitt points out,
there is no Briggs school of
historians. Briggs was always
more concerned with bridging
divisions and solving problems
than in highlighting them.
This became abundantly
clear at the University of Sussex,
where Briggs (leaving a chair at
Leeds) was one of the founding
fathers and later vice-chancellor. The aim at Sussex was to
re-draw the map of learning,
notably by the replacement of
traditional academic departments with cross-disciplinary
Schools of Study.As a young
Sussex lecturer from 1963, I
remember finding this approach

both challenging and exhilarating, with Briggs himself always
easy to talk to provided you
could catch him as he dashed
from his office to a lecture or
meeting, a taxi, railway station
or airport.Briggs left Sussex in
1976, the year of his peerage,
to become Provost of his old
Oxford college (Worcester),
while continuing to undertake
a bewildering variety of good
works: the Commission on
Nursing, the Workers Educational Association, Open
University and University
Grants Committee, the Labour
and Social History Societies, the
Commonwealth of Learning and
Glyndebourne Trust, the Bront,
Ephemera and Victorian Soci-
The Age of Asa

... is no academic
Festschrift; rather,
a celebration of
the sheer range
and energy of
Briggs work over
a long and fruitful
lifetime
eties and the editorial board of
journals and magazines (including History Today). Briggs was
associated with them all and
chaired many while managing
to remain a prodigiously active
historian.His five-volume
history of broadcasting in
Britain led to further innovative
work on the history of communications more generally.
The Age of Asa does not
pretend to give comprehensive
coverage to all that Briggs has
done.No single volume could
do so.Rather, it is a carefully
researched and affectionate
(but not uncritical) portrait of
Briggs principal public achievements by an assemblage of
authors, all of whom have
themselves benefited from his
example.
Daniel Snowman
CONTRIBUTORS
Neil Carter is the author
of Medicine, Sport and the
Body: A Historical Perspective
(Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).
Robert Carver is the author of
The Accursed Mountains: Journeys
in Albania (Flamingo, 2009).
Robert Colls is Professor of
Cultural History at De Montfort
University, Leicester.
Taylor Downing is author of
Secret Warriors: Key Scientists in
the Great War and Churchills War
Lab: Code Breakers and Boffins in
WW2 (both Little, Brown, 2014,
2011).
Stephanie Eichberg is
a Teaching Fellow in the
Department of Science
and Technology Studies at
University College London.
Janine Freeston is
contributing writer to the Royal
Photographic Societys RPS
Journal and PhotoHistorian.
Matthew Grenby is the author
of The Child Reader 1800-1840
(Cambridge, 2011).
Rhys Griffiths is Editorial
Assistant at History Today.
Claire Holleran is the author
of Shopping in Ancient Rome: the
Retail Trade in the Late Republic
and the Principate (Oxford, 2012).
John Easton Law is Reader in
History and Classics at Swansea
University.
Clare Mulleys reflections on
British womens lives from
1945-1979 will be published by
William Collins in 2016.
James Nicholls is Research
Manager at Alcohol Research
UK and and Senior Lecturer
at the Centre for History in
Public Health, London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Andrew Robinson is the
author of The Last Man Who
Knew Everything (Oneworld,
2006).
Daniel Snowman is a Senior
Research Fellow at the Institute
of Historical Research (London).
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Percentage Points
Daniel Tilles spirited account
of Oswald Mosleys fascist
antisemitism (Mosley: antisemite, February, 2015) raises a
number of interesting questions
and opens up issues that, in all
probability, Tilles did not have
space to address. Given that he
referred to my work on violence
and the British Union of Fascists
(BUF), might I be permitted to
add a little more detail on that
question?
Tilles rightly notes that I
argued that only a minority of
those arrested at BUF meetings
were Jews, especially in 1934-5.
He goes on to say that the BUFs
recognition of this fact was also
evidence of the fascists mendacity, as the figures they gave
of Jewish arrests as a percentage
of anti-fascist arrests fell from
a claimed 80 per cent to 50
per cent and then, by 1936, to
just 20 per cent, which latter
percentage Tilles thinks was
correct. The Home Office figures
show that over the period from
January 1934 until September
1938, half of all those anti-fascists arrested at BUF meetings
(those that were collated by the
Home Office) were from clearly
identifiable anti-fascist groups
and a quarter of the entire
non-fascist arrests were of Jews,
half of whom were also communists. In fact, of the communists
arrested, 43 per cent were also
Jews. These figures are certainly
an underestimate of the role of
communists, Jews and Jewish
communists and it is likely that
more than 25 per cent of antifascist arrests were of Jews.
The central role of the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB) in the violence that
marked much of the BUFs campaigns is something that Tilles
does not mention. The antisemitism of the BUF was a gift to the
CPGB and one that it accepted
with open arms. In East London,
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
in particular, the CPGB greatly

exploited Jewish fears of the
BUF to boost its own strength
and standing. As a result, in some
localised areas, such as Stepney
and Bethnal Green, the fascistcommunist struggle took on a
distinctly ethnic cast. Richard
Thurlow, who receives rather
poor treatment in Tilles article,
characterised this as an interactionist dynamic underlying
political violence in these areas.
What is interesting is that,
where Jewish community
leaders were successful in
damping down the urge of some
young Jews to attack the BUF
(an example being in Cardiff
in 1936), the BUF did not, as a
result, thrive. In reality, there
were, as the essays in Varieties of
Anti-Fascism (2010) have shown,
other ways to oppose fascism
than those favoured by the
communists.
It is also important to note
that Tilles arguments have
previously been well-rehearsed
by Stephen Dorril in his widely
noticed biography of Mosley,
Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and
British Fascism (2006). It is not
the case, as Tilles implies, that
he is the first to trace Mosleys
antisemitism to the founding
of the BUF. For myself, it would
be interesting to know just how
antisemitic Mosley was prior to
October 1932. Matthew Worleys
Oswald Mosley and the New Party
(2010) gives no clues and there
is nothing currently available
that throws light on Mosleys
time as a significant figure in
the Independent Labour Party,
or as a member of the Labour
government.
Stephen Cullen
University of Warwick
Backyards and Biff Boys

Daniel Tilles article retelling
what we have already been told
about Oswald Mosley and the
British Union of Fascists adds
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twitter.com/historytoday
little that is new to the subject.

I was disappointed that he felt
unable to break new ground,
perhaps enquiring as to why a
surprising number of Mosleys
fascist officials were themselves
Jewish.
These included the ex-Labour
MP John Beckett, the BUFs
Director of Publications, and
Bill Leaper, the editor of The
Blackshirt, to name just two
well-known examples. This is
paradoxical with regard to Professor Tilles article and requires
some explaining. I also do not
understand the authors preoccupation with antisemitism relating to a comparatively small
British political group when
surely there are much bigger
fish to fry, such as the history
of antisemitism in Poland, for
example.
As Assistant Professor of
History at the University of
Cracow he will be aware that
antisemitism was pandemic
among all classes and political
groupings in Poland before the
Second World War: surely a
study of what caused this unsatisfactory state of affairs would
be far more enlightening?
For example, is it true that
when Germany invaded Poland
in 1939 the Polish Government
was in session discussing the
expulsion of Polish Jews to
Madagascar? Also, is it correct
that most of the notorious Nazi
death camps were located in
Poland because the German
authorities believed there would
be less local opposition than in
other Nazi-occupied countries?
I have heard these things
said but have seen no evidence
of proof of such assertions:
perhaps Professor Tilles could
study the problem that existed
in his own backyard next time
rather than offer another rehash
of Mosley and his Biff Boys.
Notes on Noted
The primary meaning of the
verb to note is, according to the
Shorter OED: to mark carefully;
to give heed or attention to; to
notice, perceive. The clear implication is that one notes facts
that are certainly true, rather
than opinions. However, there
seems an increasing tendency
for historians to use the word
as an elegant variation (Fowler
was being ironical) on suggest
or assert, i.e., as an expression
of opinion.
In Decembers History Today
Suzannah Lipscomb writes: a
crop of Tudor historians have
noted that ..., a usage that
muddles her argument considerably (in the article appropriately
entitled The Error of Our Ways)
and Archie Brown does the same
thing on the Letters page. I note
that this usage is misleading and
even sometimes deliberately so.
George Beckham
via email
Daniel Bamford
University of St Andrews
Owen Toller
St Pauls School, London
Further Reading
Conor Meleadys article about
the Hashemite Sharif Husayn of
Meccas bid to establish a new
Caliphate made a refreshing
change from the usual Arab
Nationalist or Pan-Arabist
interpretation of the 1916 revolt
(New Caliphate, Old Caliphate, January 2015). My only
disappointment was to find no
recommended further reading at
the end of the article.
As the centenary year fast
approaches, I trust that History
Today will subject Husayns
revolt to genuine reappraisal. I
also think the Saudi-Hashemite
wars of 1919 and 1924-5 deserve
to be more widely known and
discussed. In the meantime, I
would encourage other interested readers to study the iconoclastic works of Elie Kedourie and,
more recently, Efraim Karsh.
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The Dnitz Regime
For three weeks following Hitlers suicide in April

1945 the Third Reich was
led from the northern
town of Flensburg by the
German navy chief Karl
Dnitz (centre) and a
temporary government.
Churchill saw the Dnitz
regime as a useful handle
with which to control
the defeated country, but to Stalin the Wests recognition of the new
government looked suspiciously like collusion. Richard Overy explains
how a bizarre footnote at the wars end fostered a mutual hostility that
developed into the Cold War.
A Womans College During the Great War
The First World War turned Oxford into a city of ghosts, with nearly
3,000 of the 15,000 men listed on the universitys Roll of Service dying
during the conflict. Yet, as Frank Prochaska describes, the war presented
an opening for Oxfords female students. When the all-women
Somerville College was requisitioned as a military hospital hosting
both Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves its students were relocated
to the prestigious Oriel College, ushering in a wonderful period of
progress for the status of women in higher education.
Subscribe
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Februarys Prize Crossword
Re-evaluating the Crusades
Since the 1980s the series of Crusades that took place during the Middle
Ages have been subject to increased scholarly attention and revision,
significantly developing our understanding of the campaigns scope and
chronology. With reference to the History Today archive, Jonathan Phillips
explains how Pope Urban II promoted the first Crusade in 1095 and
traces the history of relations between Muslims and Christians in the
Middle East into the 16th century.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The May issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK

on April 23rd. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
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The winner for February is M. Pitt, Hemel Hempstead.
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Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
1 Founded in the sixth century bc,
the Black Sea settlement of Olbia
was a colony of which archaic
Greek city and member of the
Ionian League?
22 In which year was Persepolis

declared a UNESCO World
Heritage Site?
23 In which year was London Zoo
founded and in which was it first
opened to the public?
2 What did Michael Ventris and

John Chadwick finish deciphering
in the early 1950s?
24 Which two monarchs agreed

the Peace of Crespy in 1544?
5 Which much-reviled ancient

Greek tyrant employed an
infamous torture device known as
the Brazen Bull?
8 Who was Charles Baudelaires

painter of modern life?
9 Which fascist organisation did
Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera found
in 1933?
10 Who led the royalist cavalry
at the Battle of Marston Moor in
1644?
11 The disease Roman Fever was
so-called due to its prevalence in
Rome and the campagna during the
classical period. By what name is it
better known?
12 In which year and in which city
did Sir William Ramsay and Morris
W. Travers first discover neon?
13 Who did Albert I of Habsburg
defeat at the Battle of Gllheim in
1298?
6 Which author and feminist

activist imagined the all-female
utopia Herland in 1915?
14 Which two powers signed the

Pact of Steel on 28th May, 1939?
7 Who was Catherine Parrs first

husband?
15 Who was the weeping

philosopher?
16 Who was the first Russian

monarch to assume the title of
Tsar?
17 The Leopold Museum in Vienna
is known for having the worlds
largest collection of works by
which fin-de-sicle artist?
18 Where was the Communist
Party of Finland founded in 1918?
19 Who was the last Aztec ruler?
20 Which US state did eccentric
lobbyist George M. Willing
reportedly name with a made-up
word in the early 1860s?
21 Which French architect
designed the Budapest-Nyugati
Railway Terminal in 1875?
ANSWERS
4 From where is Sir Lancelot said

to have sailed after his banishment
from King Arthurs court?
25 For how much did Alexander

II sell Tsarist Russian interests in
Alaska to the US in 1867?
1. Miletus.
2. Linear B.
3. Edward I, begun in 1283.
4. Cardiff.
5. Phalaris, tyrant of Akragas.
6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
(1860-1935).
7. Edward Burgh (c.1463c.1533).
8. Constantin Guys (1802-92).
9. Falange Espaola de las JONS.
10. Prince Rupert of the Rhine
(161982).
11. Malaria.
12. 1898, London.
13. King Adolf of Nassau (c.125598).
14. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
15. Heraclitus (c.535c.475 bc).
16. Ivan IV, the Terrible (153084).
17. Egon Schiele (18901918).
18. Moscow.
19. Cuauhtmoc (c.1495c.1525).
20. Idaho.
21. Gustave Eiffel (18321923).
22. 1979.
23. 1828, 1847.
24. Francis I of France and Charles V,
Holy Roman Emperor.
25. $7 million.
3 Which king built Caernarfon

Castle?
Prize Crossword
Set by Richard Smyth

DOWN
1 Abbot of Cieaux, known as the
Great (d.1167) (7)
2 10th-century king of England,
called Pacificus (5)
3 In Greek myth, the son of
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (7)
5 A symbolic object, such as a
heraldic device (6)
6 1743 battle, the last in which a
British monarch took command (9)
7 ___ II, King of Belgium 18651909 (7)
8 Franois-Auguste-Ren, vicomte
de ___ (1768-1848), French diplomat and author (13)
14 Baronetcy created in 1621, the
subject of a famous legal dispute of
the 1860s and 1870s (9)
16 Ruling dynasty of Iran from
1925 to 1979 (7)
18 City of southern Spain, under
Muslim rule from 711 to 1236 (7)
19 ___ Hall, historically the executive committee of the Democratic
Party in New York City (7)
20 Black Sea peninsula, annexed in
1783 by Catherine the Great (6)
23 John ___ (1874-1932),
executioner; hangman of Dr
Crippen and Roger Casement (5)
ACROSS
1/4 Austrian botanist and
Augustinian prelate (1822-84) (6,6)
9 Shoot, if you must, this old grey
head, but spare your countrys ___
John Greenleaf Whittier, 1863 (4)
10 The Great ___, 1851 showcase of
art and industry (10)
11 William Randolph ___ (18631951), US newspaper magnate (6)
12 ___ At Windsor, 1892 Kipling
poem on Queen Victoria (3,5)
13 The New ___, left-leaning political
journal launched in 1913 (9)
15 Archaic oath, derived from A
God! (4)
16 Gregory ___ (1916-2003),
imposing US film actor (4)
17 ___ is not a term capable of exact
legal definition ... it means anything
that shocks the magistrate
Bertrand Russell, 1928 (9)
21 Lorenzo ___ (1378-1455),
Pelago-born sculptor (8)
22 French city, notable for the
13th-century cathedral of
Notre-Dame (6)
24 Californian city, western terminus
of the Pony Express (10)
25 Sir David ___ (1908-91),
Croydon-born film director (4)
26 The ___ Cometh, Eugene ONeill
play first performed in 1946 (6)
27 Karl ___ (1905-50), US radio
engineer who discovered stellar radio
emission (6)
The winner of this

months prize
crossword will receive
a selection of recent
history books
Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London
WC1V 7QH by April 30th or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-82)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Poet and painter who kept two

pet wombats, a creature first
scientifically described by
Youngest brother of
Napoleon I, who owned an
ancient mosaic depicting the
death of
George Bass
(1771-1803)
Archimedes
(c.287-c.212 bc)
Naval surgeon and explorer of

Australia who disappeared at sea,
date and fate unknown, as did
Ancient Greek mathematician,

physicist, engineer, inventor and
astronomer, whose name was
the nickname of
Theodosia Burr-Alston
(1783-1813)
Daughter of US Vice President Aaron

Burr, who, with her new husband,
Joseph Alston, were the first
recorded couple to spend their
honeymoon at Niagara Falls, as did
Jrme Bonaparte
(1784-1860)
James Edward Edmonds

(1861-1956)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
Royal Engineers officer, official

British historian of the First World
War, who was educated at Kings
College School, London, as was
THOMAS CROMWELL
FromtheArchive
Michael Everett takes issue with one of Mary C. Erlers assumptions in her otherwise perceptive
article from 2014 on Thomas Cromwells friendship with Abbess Margaret Vernon.
Thomas Cromwells unlikely friendship

THOMAS CROMWELL, Henry VIIIs
leading minister during the 1530s, is
often described as a religious reformer.
According to consensus, Cromwell
was a deeply committed evangelical,
who steered the king towards reform
in religion more radical than Henry
himself wanted. Yet the little evidence
we have for Cromwells religious views
is frustratingly inconclusive; some
even points another way.
In her fascinating article, Mary C.
Erler discusses Cromwells
long-standing acquaintance
and apparent friendship
with Margaret Vernon, a
nun who was successively
head of four nunneries,
which Erler notes is surprising considering Cromwells evangelical religious
position. Despite there being no indication of Vernons own religious views,
Erler concludes that the abbess must
have shared Cromwells desires for
religious reform, without considering
the possibility that his long-standing
friendship with the head of a nunnery
may qualify any simple understanding
of him as a single-minded evangelical
reformer.
The increasingly held orthodoxy
that Cromwell was a religious radical
is a relatively recent interpretation.
Although the Elizabethan martyrologist John Foxe described Cromwell as
a valiaunt Souldier and captayne of
Christe, who sought all meanes and
wayes to beate down false Religion and
to aduaunce the true, for much of the
20th century Cromwell was seen as
a Machiavellian politician who cared
not a straw for any religious dispute
of the time. However, since the late
1950s there has been a consensus that
Cromwell was a deeply committed and
driven religious reformer who manipulated Henry to accept radical religious
reform. Erler, despite noting the

unlikely friendship between Cromwell
and Abbess Vernon, places Cromwell
firmly in the evangelical camp.
Yet there is little direct evidence
for Cromwells religious beliefs. He
did not pen any scholarly works which
might offer hints of his affiliations, nor
does his considerable correspondence
contain much which touches on theology or doctrine at all. In fact, several
pieces of evidence counter the view
The little evidence we have

for Cromwells religious
views is frustratingly
inconclusive
that Cromwell was a religious radical.
Inventories of his possessions show
that, throughout the 1530s, he continued to own many traditional religious
images, including ii ymages in lether
gylted the one of our ladye the other
of saynte christopher. Cromwells will
also invoked our blessed ladie Saynct
Mary the vyrgyn and Mother with
all the holie companye of heuen to
be Medyatours and Intercessours for
his soul. He even specified a priest of
good lyuyng should be hired to Syng
for his soul, and money was left for
friars in London to pray for my Soule.
This suggests that Cromwell still
believed in the intercessory power of
prayer and in the importance of good
works, as well as in the ability of saints
to act as mediators for mens souls.
These were notably traditional beliefs
for someone who it is often claimed
was one of the driving forces behind
the early Reformation in England.
While there is little direct evidence
for Cromwells own religious affiliations, there is none at all for Margaret
Vernon. In her article, Erler therefore

follows other historians by pointing
to Cromwell and Vernon knowing a
similar circle of reform-minded people
including Thomas Somer, Stephen
Vaughan, Ralph Sadler and Hugh
Latimer as evidence that Vernon
(and therefore Cromwell) belonged to
this religious group. Possibly; but we
should be wary of assuming that acquaintance or friendship with a person
implies agreement in all things. And it
must be remembered that, although
it is certainly true that Cromwell was
friends with people who held evangelical views, he was also close friends
with those who clung to traditional
religious beliefs.
Cromwell had a wide-ranging circle
of friends and it is perhaps better
to ask whether his friendship with
Abbess Vernon might cast further
doubt on his alleged evangelical
credentials. At the very least, their
long-standing friendship helps dispel
the notion that Cromwell the
hammer of the monks was inherently hostile to those in religious orders.
Michael Everett is the author of The Rise of
Thomas Cromwell: Power and Politics in the Reign
of Henry VIII (Yale University Press, 2015).
VOLUME 64 ISSUE 2 FEB 2014

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