History Today

August 2015
Vol 65 Issue 8
From One, Many
The Bronze Age roots of

Indo-European languages
Forever Medieval
The strange cult of Richard III
To the
Guillotine!
Exploding the myths surrounding
the fall of Robespierre
Publisher Andy Patterson

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London School of Economics
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2 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2015
PUBLIC HISTORY appears to be a growth area within the academy, though a

contested one. A pioneer of the genre has been the Centre for Public History,
Heritage and Engagement with the Past at Royal Holloway, University of London,
where Anna Whitelock, the director, and Edward Madigan are tireless promoters of
the noble idea that people outside the academy should have a chance to engage with
those within. We at History Today strongly support such initiatives.
A seminar at the International Medieval Congress, held in Leeds in July, was
devoted to public history and the feedback that resulted inspired me, if those are the
right words, to come up with a general set of principles for its practitioners.
First, do not underestimate your audience. I cannot count the number of times
when a letter or email to History Today, or an interjection in a public debate has
made me and no doubt others think again about our take on a particular subject. As
Eleanor Parker says and her blog, A Clerk of Oxford, is as fine an example of public
history as exists today Be prepared for the public to teach you as much as you teach
them. Second, try to steer away from forced parallels with the past; if you want
countless examples of the dangers of doing so, just follow the coverage of the Greek
crisis. Third, do not be afraid of engaging with the strangeness of the past (though be
wary, too, of exoticising it). Fourth, show what a historian does: tell the public about
source work, revel in discoveries and show the power of mastering languages ancient
and modern. Just as importantly, learn how to write; the most revelatory work can
be leadened by dull or tortuous prose, which appears to be a speciality among some
academics; it is notable just how many of our best-selling serious historians Jessie
Childs, Tom Holland, Andrew Roberts, Dan Jones, Antony Beevor are working
beyond the reach of the traditional academy.
Finally, do not worry too much about sensitivities. We live in a age when offence
is worn as a badge of honour, but in a liberal democracy it is the price we pay for
freedom, both academic and in the wider world. History is an argument and
sometimes a robust one or it is nothing.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Child Killers Waterloo Fiction Civil War Protests De Gaulles Big Day
A most
barbarous
and revolting
murder
Infanticide is as shocking
today as it was 200 years
ago, but impressions of its
perpetrators have evolved.
Emma Butcher
THE VILLAGE OF LAMMONBY in
Cumberland was, The Times reported
in late January 1845, a scene of great
excitement aroused by the murder of a
child by its drunken mother:
On Tuesday evening, the 28th ult., she
made up a large fire in the kitchen of
her own house, with the determination
of sacrificing her child in the flames
prepared by her own hands. For reasons
only known to this wretched woman
herself, she stripped off all the childs
clothes and hid them in a hole behind the
inner door in the ashmidden, and having
done so took the child by its legs and arms
and literally roasted it to death.
Child murder was remarkably
common in the Victorian period. The
contemporary press regularly reported
sensational stories of unnatural,
villainous parents who strayed from
the celebrated image of domestic bliss
promoted by societys moral doctrines.
As in the extract above, the media
did not hold back, presenting to the
reading public the full, gruesome facts
of these tragic tales.
By the late 1850s and 1860s a
supposed epidemic of infanticide had
spread across the country. In 1866 the
Reverend Henry Humble expressed
the sense of anxiety, discord and panic
occurring in the heart of Britains
Gruesome facts:
cartoon published
in Punch, 1849.
capital, noting that people would not

pick up unfamiliar bundles in fear that
a dead child (with a womans garter
around its throat) would be found.
Everywhere, from Londons streets to
its canals, was deemed unsafe; Britain
was becoming defiled by the blood
of her innocents. Humble goes on to
say that the doctor Edwin Lankester
believed that 12,000 child-murdering
women (one in every 30 female residents) lived in London. Newspapers,
such as the Pall Mall Gazette, reported

that foreign countries viewed Britain
as a nation of infanticide.
Typically, murderous mothers
fell into similar categories, committing violent acts because they were
disgraced, desperate or drunk, or a
mixture of the three. Unquestionably,
all were diagnosed as insane. How
could they not be, when, as the poet
Robert Browning stated, womanliness means only motherhood: all
AUGUST 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
love begins and ends there? In many

ways, imposing madness on mothers
meant that the judicial system found
it easier to justify the crime and could
send the woman away to an asylum to
be cured. Even a decade before the socalled infanticide epidemic, a report
in the London Journal of Medicine
noted that of the 1,091 curable female
patients admitted to Bethlem over the
previous six years, 131, or one eighth,
were puerperal (childbirth) cases.
Newspapers reported that

foreign countries viewed
Britain as a nation of
infanticide
Treatments consisted of confinement,
purging, moral rehabilitation and,
in some cases, surgical intervention.
During the 1860s the public began to
question this lenience, especially after
the murders of three children by their
mother, Esther Lack. Although Lack
claimed that her motives stemmed
from a fear of starvation, the courts
diagnosed her instead with a debility
of constitution, caused by the delivery
of three infancies at a birth some
seven or eight years ago. Local and
national presses voiced the publics
uncertainty, The Times emphasising
that this was one of many cases where
madness has been ascribed but loosely
justified. Despite this evident continuing sympathy for murderous mothers,
it was not until 1922 that legislation
was passed to protect mentally ill
mothers from the death penalty.
If murderous mothers were caught
in a social bind that saw them both
as unnatural monsters and figures
that deserved sympathy, what about
fathers? Although few articles appear
ed in the national papers relating to
paternal child-murder, those that
did emphasised the tragedy of the
case and the awfulness of the crime.
The same sympathy was offered to
men who had previously shown good
conduct as a father. If they committed the crime out of desperation or a
conflation of insanity and drunkenness, then they were more likely to be
incarcerated in an asylum with intent
to cure. There were some, showing no
remorse, who were sent to the gallows,

but most men presented themselves in
the courtroom as troubled, melancholic, broken and on the path to
redemption. The media, despite extending some form of commiseration,
did not hold back in presenting the
facts. In the cases of Henry Seyman
and William Kemp, both committed in
the 1860s, it was widely reported how
they had slit their childs throats with
razor blades through wild, temporary derangement. Despite the wish
to sensationalise the crime through
emotional dramatisation, there was
also a prevailing need to sell a juicy,
gruesome story.
In the 21st century, with headlines
such as Evil Fire Death Dad, Evil
mum jailed for beating her baby to
death, Cruel mother and sadistic boyfriend, our society still revels in these
scandalous headlines while showing
composure and understanding towards
mothers who kill while suffering
from postnatal depression: Mum who
killed five-week old baby needed more
support. Although our society has
come a long way in the treatment of
mental illness from the casual glaze
of insanity ascribed during the 19th
century, child murder is still as shocking, as troubling and as sensational as
it was nearly 200 years ago.
Emma Butcher is a postgraduate researcher at
the University of Hull and associate editor of The
History Vault.
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
Waterloo in
Fiction: A Tale of
Two Sharp(e)s
Literary responses to the
battle help us understand its
place in cultural memory.
Robert Eaglestone
THIS SUMMER marked the 200th
anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo
and in discussions of memory 200 years
is an interesting amount of time. It falls
outside the saeculum, the span of living
memory. According to the historian
Alan Forrest, the last British witness of
Waterloo died in 1905: in 1815 she had
been the five-year-old daughter of a
camp follower. Beyond the saeculum lies
historical time: archives and memorials to be explored by historians. This
historical time becomes, simultaneously, fabulous time, for novelists and
film-makers to plunder for fables, stories
and settings, from the historical novels of
Sir Walter Scott to Shakespeare in Love. As
the events recede further into the past,
the historical struggles against the fabulous. Waterloo is just at the cusp of this
struggle, poised between the historical
and the fabulous, though the fictions
it inspired tell us a great deal about the
memory of the battle today.
One fabulous in both senses
occasion was the Duchess of Richmonds
Ball, held before the battle and over the
past 200 years numerous fictional characters have been added to the extensive
guest list. Two of these are currently the
most famous fictional characters from
Waterloo. Both tell us about how the
battle is remembered in 2015: oddly, both
have the same-sounding surname.
The first is the grim soldier Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Sharpe, from
Bernard Cornwells hugely successful and
meticulously researched novels. Played
memorably on television by Sean Bean,
Sharpe has dark hair (until Cornwell
changed it to match Beans), a sharp eye
for combat, a sharp tongue and, before
a battle, his ungainly sword is ritually
sharpened to a razor-like edge. In Sharpes Waterloo (1990) he attends the ball
dressed in his talismanic combat-worn
HISTORYMATTERS
green Riflemans jacket, carrying crucial

information for the Duke. He also has
business of honour with the cavalry
officer who has seduced his wife.
The other important fictional guest
looks, at first sight, utterly the opposite
of Richard Sharpe. Rebecca Sharp is the
scheming force of nature at the centre
of William Makepeace Thackerays novel
without a hero, Vanity Fair, from 1847-48.
Becky has a sharp sense of the injustices
done to her: she has a sharp wit and
sharper financial sense and she uses
these to cut her way into society. When
she attends the ball, with her black hair
in ringlets, her face is radiant, her dress
perfection. She charms (nearly) everyone
in the ballroom and dishonourably
dances with anothers husband.
These two apparent opposites, one
from a canonical novel, the other from
genre fiction, share more than a name.
Their stories and social trajectories are
the same: both are social climbers. In
Sharpes Regiment (1986), it is revealed
that Sharpes mother is a whore from
the St Giles rookery, next to Covent
Garden, where he grew up. Born (probably) in 1777, Richard has no idea who
his father is. Becky Sharps mother is a
far from respectable opera girl and her
father was a dissolute artist who lived
in Soho, where Becky lived until she
was sent to school. Richard Sharpes

ascension through the ranks, promoted
for his heroism, parallels Becky Sharps
promotion through the class structure:
she is the victor Thackeray uses
explicit military metaphors for Beckys
campaigns of different sorts of battles.
Both make advances, retreats and captures: Richards sallies and feints are on
the field, Beckys in the drawing room.
In this way, both oddly echo Napoleons meteoric social rise, too, and the
wider concerns about status at the time.
Indeed, the two Sharp(e)s show how the
memory of Waterloo is inextricably entwined with issues of class, money and
status, more, perhaps, than heroism and
courage: and, of course, Napoleon as the
prime example of the self-made man
looms large over this memory.
Richard and Becky have similar
personalities. Both are angry: Richard
Sharpe is furious at the incompetence of
the officer class with their bought commissions and at the endless slights done
to him as a commoner. Becky, too, is
angry at the way she is condescended to
and shipped off to be only a governess.
Both fight: Richard, while undisciplined,
is a superb tactician; Becky, too, has
acute insights into the ambitions and
desires (and so strengths and weaknesses) of those around her. This individu-
Looking
Sharp(e): Sean
Bean (left) as
Richard Sharpe
in Sharpes Rifles,
1993 and Reese
Witherspoon as
Becky Sharp in
Vanity Fair, 2004.
ality, too, is emblematic of the memory

of Waterloo, which is remembered, for
all its terrible slaughter, as a battle on
the cusp of the industrial period, where
individual or communal acts of heroism,
or the insights of a commander, can be
imagined to change the outcome.
Could the two Sharp(e)s be related?
Vanity Fair makes clear that Beckys
father owed money for a mile round
Soho, so might easily have known
Sharpes mother in Covent Garden and,
in 1776, might have become the father
of little Richard (his mother died in the
Gordon riots of 1780). As we have seen,
the two Sharp(e)s share more than just
dark hair. Perhaps at the ball their eyes
met and they recognised in each other a
similar rage, an ambition, a tactical mind
of genius? Or perhaps he thought her a
vain young woman and she thought him
a scruffy rogue?
There is much more to this than
mere literary speculation. Their different
spheres tell us something about how
Waterloo itself is remembered. As Judith
Hawley points out, Thackeray drew
heavily on Frances Burneys Waterloo
diaries for his novel; Cornwells wellresearched work, too, draws on the
accounts of witnesses. Both writers
represent different aspects of the battle:
the military and the domestic. For the
First and Second World Wars, the Home
Front is as much part of what we remember as the military campaigns: but
for Wellingtons time, the military and
the domestic were, almost for the last
time, separate. The impact of Britains
overseas wars in Europe or in the
rest of the world in the 18th and 19th
century, so important to the nation and
its global history, are poorly understood in their British context and often
poorly remembered. (Salman Rushdie
another literary inheritor of Thackeray has a character called Whiskey
Sisodia who says, stuttering: The trouble
with the English is that their hiss hiss
history happened overseas so they dodo
dont know what it means.) The division
between the two Sharp(e)s and our
shared cultural memory of Waterloo
is an acute case in point.
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary

Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway,
University of London.
HISTORYMATTERS
A Womens
Revolt
A protest against the Civil
War ends in tragedy.
Sara Read
THE SUMMER OF 1643 saw the political unrest that had culminated in the
beginning of the English Civil Wars the
previous year spill into the streets of
Westminster. Between August 7th and
9th there were a series of pro- and
anti-war demonstrations in the capital.
In a letter to his wife, Katherine, dated
August 9th that year, the monarchist
Thomas Knyvett reported how the
House of Lords had sent a number of
very honourable proposals to reopen
talks for a peace treaty with Charles I
to the Commons. The proposals were
thrown out by a small majority. Knyvett
was dismayed at the Commons
rejection, signing his letter thy poor
disconsolate husband T. K.. A group of
women had clearly taken the same view
and on Tuesday August 8th had gathered outside the Houses of Parliament to
protest for peace. The women, described
by Knyvett as a multitude, several
hundred strong, were apparently given
some verbal reassurances and dispersed
without incident.
However, the next day the women
returned to Westminster in much
greater numbers with the intention of
meeting with Parliamentary leaders,
such as John Pym, to present them
formally with The Petition of Many
Civilly Disposed Women. The organised
nature of the protest was clear, as all
the women were supplied with white
ribbons to wear in their hats as a symbol
of the peace they sought. John Dillinghams newspaper The Parliament Scout for
the week beginning August 3rd claimed
that 5-6,000 women were involved
in this second day of action. He also
wrote that a tenth of the women were
prostitutes, but mostly they were poor
women whose husbands were away in
the army. Richard Collings newspaper,
The Kingdoms Weekly Intelligencer, went
further and reported that the women
were largely comprised of whores,
bawds, oyster-women, kitchen-stuff
women, beggar women and the very
Femme fatale:
Wenceslaus
Hollars Winter,
1643.
scum of the suburbs, besides a number

of Irish women. The idea that this was
a random convergence of malcontented women goes against the organised
nature of the protest and, in fact, some
sources say that the ribbons were given
out by a Lady Brunchard. Around lunchtime the women heatedly blockaded the
entrance to Parliament for two hours.
The protest turned violent as Sir William
Wallers horse regiment attempted to
suppress it. Knyvett told his wife in his
next letter of August 10th that there
was much mischief done by the horse
and foot soldiers. Two men were known
to have been killed and numerous men
and women injured.
Listening to news of the days events
as they unfolded was John Norman, who
ran a spectacle shop. From the prime
position of his shop door just outside
Westminster Gate, Norman could take
in all that was happening. He was on
the side of Parliament and had been
heard to say that he would rather see
the streets run with blood than that
we should now have peace. Amid the
chaos, news spread that one of the
women protestors had been shot dead
in the nearby churchyard. Norman was
unsympathetic, commenting that it did
not matter to him if a hundred of them

were so served. Rushing out to see the
commotion closer, Norman found that
the woman who had been killed was
his own daughter. The young woman,
described by Knyvett as a pretty young
wench, worked as seamstress in Westminster Hall and was believed to have
been accidently shot when she crossed
the Palace Yard while running an errand
unconnected to the protest. The soldier
who fired the shot was investigated,
but apparently let off when his defence
that his pistol went off accidentally was
accepted.
The Intelligencer suggested that
women in general should use the young
womans death as a warning not to get
caught up in such uprisings. TheParliament Scout blamed the death on the
women themselves for uprising, claiming
that Tumults are dangerous, swords
in the hands of women do desperate
things; this is begotten in the distractions of Civil War. There is a twist in the
story of the seamstress, however, and
it is alluded to in the Intelligencer. The
papers account of the incident mentions
almost in passing that the malignants
say, it was done by a trooper that rid up
to her, and shot her purposely, others say
it went off by mischance, echoing the
soldiers own defence. The antiquarian and parliamentarian MP Sir
Simonds DEwes noted in his journal that
the horse soldier who shot the woman
was a profane fellow who bore an old
grudge against the spectacle-seller and
so used the opportunity to shoot his
daughter to death as she was peaceably
going upon an errand. We do not know
if the seamstress was unwittingly caught
in the riot, or if she had decided to join
in the unrest; nor if she was a victim
of a tragic accident or an opportunistic
murder. For Thomas Knyvett, it was an
opportunity to spread propaganda about
the other side, as a man who had been
heard to claim that he would rather
see the streets running with blood than
accept a compromise with the king had
seen his own daughters blood shed in
the street. Knyvett instructed his wife to
be bold and tell this story widely because
it was certainly true.
Sara Read is the author of Maids, Wives, Widows:

Exploring Early Modern Womens Lives, 1540-1740
(Pen & Sword, 2015).
HISTORYMATTERS
De Gaulles
Victory Over
Waterloo
Charles de Gaulle
delivered his first speech
from London on the
anniversary of Waterloo.
Jonathan Fenby
MUCH HAS BEEN MADE, especially
(and predictably) in the British press, of
French reluctance to mark the 200th
anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.
In France, however, the date June
18th is remembered for a very different event involving a very different
and ultimately more successful military
leader and politician.
Charles de Gaulle had arrived
in London on June 17th, 1940 with
Edward Spears, Churchills personal
liaison officer with the French. The
general flew from Bordeaux, where
Phillipe Ptain, hero of the First World
War battle of Verdun, had just become
head of a government that would
surrender to the advancing Germans
and preside over four years of collaboration. De Gaulle would have none
of this. He was convinced that Hitler
would eventually be defeated and that
France must not give up. Honour,
common sense and the superior interests of the nation demanded that the
combat should continue, he said.
He would be proved right at the
Liberation four years later, but his
flight to London was a huge gamble.
He had become deputy defence minister at the beginning of June, at the
age of 49, after leading his tank units
in battle; but he had no legitimacy.
Churchill, whom he had met at the
Anglo-French conference earlier in the
month, welcomed him and offered
him the services of the BBC to broadcast his message of resistance. But the
General wondered, as he put it to his
son later, if he was doing something
mad throwing myself into the water
without knowing where the other
bank is I put myself in Gods hands.
His revolt against the Ptain
administration, which had been
approved by parliament, was all the

more striking because de Gaulle came
from a reactionary, royalist family and,
as a professional soldier, placed a high
premium on discipline. He had, however,
shown his rebellious streak in the
1930s by championing offensive tank
warfare against the defensive mindset of
Frances high command championed by
Ptain and epitomised by the Maginot
Line, which the all-conquering Wehrmacht simply avoided.
As a German prisoner in the First
World War (he was captured at Verdun),
de Gaulle had written in his notebook
about what made great leaders, a
theme he developed in lectures at the
In Gods hands:
Charles de
Gaulle delivers
a speech from
London in 1940.
The British had initially hoped

for a more prominent French
politician to rally to their cause
French military academy in the 1920s.
He argued that they moved beyond
set hierarchies and regulations, ready
to take the risks involved. They were
predestined for greatness, tough individuals who lacked surface seduction and
were rarely loved but who were ready
to seize their opportunity when it arose.
His words went down badly with the
conservative military establishment, but
there was little doubt as to de Gaulle
joining their ranks when that time came
and it did so in the middle of June 1940.
Taking up Churchills offer, he
arranged to broadcast on the BBC on
June 18th, but the War Cabinet, meeting
that morning in the absence of the
prime minister, vetoed the idea since it
still hoped to nurture a relationship with
the Ptain government. Spears went to
Churchill to protest and was told that,

if he could get a majority of the Cabinet
to change their minds, he could go
ahead. Spears lobbied successfully and
de Gaulle spoke to France, declaring:
Has the last word been said? Must hope
disappear? Is defeat final? No! France
could count on Britains backing and the
immense industry of the United States,
he added. He invited all French troops
and civilians on British territory to join
him. Whatever happens, the flame of
French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished, he
concluded. (He did not utter the famous
phrase about France having lost a battle,
but not the war, which was reportedly
conjured up by the British Information
Minister, Duff Cooper, and which was
subsequently slotted into the text of the
call to resistance.)
Initial reaction was halting. The
British had initially hoped for a more
prominent French politician to rally to
their cause. The French ambassador,
Charles Corbin, went to South America.
Other leading French figures then in
London, such as the future Father of
Europe Jean Monnet and the writer
Andr Maurois, headed for the United
States. Few of the French troops who
had crossed the Channel signed up
initially with the new movement, the
Free French, who installed a cask of
wine at their headquarters.
Yet a dedicated core of early Gaullists
kept the flame of resistance alive.
Despite their recurrent and often violent
rows, Churchill maintained his fundamental support and the Treasury offered
finance (which was ultimately repaid).
The ranks of the Free French grew
bit by bit and the internal resistance
movements in France came to recognise
the general as their standard bearer. In
August 1944, although French units were
not included in the D-Day landings, de
Gaulle marched down the Champslyses in triumph at the Liberation. The
Man of June 18th, 1940 had seized his
hour on the anniversary of Waterloo and
proved himself to be, unlike Napoleon,
his countrys saviour.
Jonathan Fenby is author of The General: Charles

de Gaulle and the France He Saved (Simon &
Schuster, 2010). His History of Modern France was
published in July 2015.
MonthsPast
AUGUST
By Richard Cavendish
AUGUST 21st 1940
Leon Trotsky
assassinated in
Mexico
BORN IN THE UKRAINE in 1879 and later
hailed by one admirer as the greatest
Jew since Jesus Christ, Lev Bronstein
became famous under another name.
From 1902 he called himself Trotsky,
adapted from the German word trotz,
essentially meaning defiance, which
would prove prophetic. He was a leading
figure in the Bolshevik movement under
Lenin, after whose death in 1924 he was
the most important victim of Joseph
Stalins insatiable lust for power.
Trotsky was expelled from the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
in 1927 and exiled to Turkey in 1929.
He and his wife, Natalia Sedova, later
moved to France and then to Norway.
In December 1936 Trotsky, now 56, and
Natalia were put on a freighter to cross
the Atlantic to Mexico. There they were
warmly welcomed by the Mexican
president, the former revolutionary
leader Lazaro Cardenas, and taken to
live in the Coyoacan area of Mexico City
at the home of two other admirers, the
painters Diego Rivera and his wife Frida
Kahlo, with whom Trotsky had an affair.
In exile he had continued to work resolutely against Stalinism and his book The
Revolution Betrayed was published in Paris
in 1937. In it he said that under Stalin the
Soviet Union had betrayed socialism and
become a totalitarian state.
Moscow was determined to destroy
him. In May 1939, after breaking with
Rivera, Trotsky and Natalia moved to a
house nearby on the Avenida Viena. They
had guards, but on May 24th, 1940 at
four oclock in the morning attackers
opened fire on the house. Trotsky
thought sleepily that the noise was just
fireworks, but Natalia pulled him out of
bed and they hid underneath it while
splinters of glass from the shattered
Revolutionary
resting place: the
tomb of Trotsky in
Mexico City.
windows flew about the room.

The Soviet agents in Mexico had
succeeded in planting a woman called
Sylvia Ageloff in the house as one of
Trotskys secretaries. She had a lover,
a Spanish communist called Ramn
Mercader, who turned up at the house
pretending to be one of Trotskys admirers and began calling on him often with
chocolates and flowers. Everybody liked
him and Sylvia as well. Trotsky was ill,
suffering from high blood pressure, and
not expecting to live much longer.
About 5pm on August 20th Mercader
arrived at the house with his raincoat
over his left arm tucked firmly against his
body. He went upstairs to see Trotsky in
his study. While they were talking Mercader went round behind him, pulled an
ice-pick out of his raincoat and slammed
it into Trotskys head. Mercader afterwards described Trotsky giving a long
aaaa cry. He grappled with Mercader
and bit his hand and then staggered out
of the room. Natalia had heard Trotsky

cry out and ran upstairs to find him
with his face covered in blood. Guards
rushed to the scene, seized Mercader
and started beating him up, but Trotsky
said: No, he must not be killed, he must
talk. Soon afterwards he collapsed and
Mercader was turned over to the police.
Trotsky was taken to hospital in a
coma and died there at 7.25pm the next
day, aged 60. After a funeral procession
attended by huge crowds, he was
buried in the garden at the house on
the Avenida Viena. Natalia made sure
there were always fresh flowers on his
grave. She lived on until 1962. The house
is now a museum, supported by the
International Friends of the Leon Trotsky
Museum. The grave is marked by a tall
concrete pillar engraved with his name
and a hammer and sickle.
Mercader at first did not reveal his
true identity to the police. He told them
he had wanted to marry Sylvia, but that
Trotsky had refused to permit it and that
was what had driven him to commit the
murder. It was all Trotskys fault. Sylvia
was arrested as an accomplice, but soon
released. Mercader was tried, convicted
of murder and sentenced to 20 years
in prison. Released in 1960, he was
welcomed to Cuba by the Fidel Castro
regime and declared a Hero of the Soviet
Union the following year. He died in
Havana in 1978.
In a document known as his Testament, which he wrote a few months
before his death, at the turn of February
and March 1940, Trotsky described
Natalia as an inexhaustible source of
love, magnanimity and happiness. For
himself he wrote: For 43 years of my
conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for 42 of them I have fought
under the banner of Marxism I shall
die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist,
a dialectical materialist and consequently
an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the
Communist future of mankind is not less
ardent, indeed it is firmer today than it
was in the days of my youth.
AUGUST 12th 1865
Lister pioneers
antiseptic surgery
in Glasgow
AN 11-YEAR-OLD Glaswegian named
James Greenlees unintentionally
helped to make history that day in
1865. Run over by a cart in the street,
he was taken to the male accident
ward at Glasgow Royal Infirmary,
where the house surgeon was Joseph
Lister, a 38-year-old Englishman who
was developing a new technique to
deal with the appalling death rates
that killed half the surgery patients.
The boy had a compound fracture of
the lower left leg. He was given chloroform and Lister washed the wound
out and applied a dressing of carbolic
acid (now called phenol). A splint and
bandages were put in place and the
carbolic acid dressing was renewed
again several times as the days went
by and the wound began to scab over
An electrifying end: a
contemporary portrayal
of Kemmlers execution.
Cleansing spirit:
Joseph Lister, 1896.
and heal. After six weeks Greenlees

was discharged, fully recovered.
It was Listers first success with
this technique. From a Quaker
family, his early interest in science
had been fostered by his father, an
amateur physicist who
was a member of the
Royal Society. The son
began a brilliant career
at University College,
London, became a surgeon
and after a period at the
Edinburgh Royal Infirmary
was appointed Regius
Professor of Surgery at
Glasgow University and
in 1861 surgeon to the
Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
He was influenced by the
French scientist Louis Pasteur, who
had suggested that patients under
surgery might be fatally infected by
the development of tiny organisms
(or bacteria) in their blood. Pasteur
was a hugely influential theorist,
but Lister was a practical technician
determined to put an end to unneces-
sary deaths. Believing he was directed

by God, he succeeded and between
1865 and 1869 his wards death rate
after surgery fell to only 15 per cent.
It took time for Listers methods
to gain acceptance, but the evidence
was too strong to be ignored and in
Britain and abroad other medical men
were exploring similar techniques. In
1869 he was appointed Professor of
Clinical Surgery at Edinburgh and in
1877 he returned to London, to Kings
College Hospital. He retired from
medical practice in 1893. Greatly honoured, he was Sir Joseph Lister from
1883, President of the Royal Society in
1895, Lord Lister from 1897 and one of
the 12 original members of the Order
of Merit in 1902.
Lister was almost worshipped by
those who worked with him, but he
was shy and reserved and it seems
that few people ever knew him well.
He was blind and deaf by the time he
died in 1912 at the age of 84, which his
doctor considered a merciful end. He
was given a magnificent funeral in
Westminster Abbey.
AUGUST 6th 1890
Awakened at five oclock in the morning

in his cell, Kemmler dressed neatly in a
suit, white shirt and tie. He ate breakfast
and said prayers before his head was
shaved. At 6.38am he entered the
execution chamber and said calmly to
the assembled witnesses: Gentlemen,
I wish you all good luck. I believe I am
going to a good place and I am ready
to go. He was fastened into the chair,
which had been successfully tried out on
a horse the previous day, and said to the
executioner, Edwin Davis (whose official
title was state electrician), Take it easy
and do it properly, Im in no hurry.
The generator was charged with
1,000 volts and the current was passed
through Kemmlers body for 17 seconds.
He was unconscious, but still breathing. The current was turned on again
at 2,000 volts. Kemmlers skin began
bleeding, part of his body was seen to
be singed and a horrible smell spread
through the death chamber. The New
York Times reported that the stench was
unbearable. The procedure had taken
about eight minutes.
The first
execution by
electric chair
THE ELECTRIC CHAIR was invented
by employees at Thomas Alva Edisons
works at West Orange, New Jersey in
the late 1880s. The inventors involvement has embarrassed many of his
biographers and an entry for electric
chair in their indexes is a rarity. Edison
wanted to see capital punishment
abolished altogether in the US, but
meantime he thought electrocution
would be quicker and less painful than
hanging. A commission organised by
the governor of New York State agreed
with him and it was the Edison chair
that was used in 1890 to end the life of
a street pedlar called William Kemmler,
a German-American who had killed the
woman he lived with in a drunken rage.
The death sentence was carried out
at Auburn Prison in New York State.
RICHARD III
A Medieval Relic?
By no stretch of the imagination was Richard III a saint,
but the furore that sprung up around his discovery and
reburial was strongly reminiscent of a medieval cult of
sainthood, says Anne E. Bailey.
N
Souvenirs from
the King Richard
III visitor centre in
Leicester.
O CATHEDRAL HAS SEEN anything like this

before. These were the words of Channel Fours
Krishnan Guru-Murthy, spoken at Leicester
Cathedral on March 22nd, 2015, ahead of a week
of celebrations marking the reburial of Richard III.
The arrival of the last Plantagenet king of England at his
final resting place was the climax of an extraordinary
journey, one which began for the general public in February
2013 when archaeologists from the University of Leicester
confirmed the identity of the skeleton excavated from a
city centre car park six months earlier. From this moment
on the British public became intimately familiar with the
posthumous affairs of a long-dead, short-lived monarch.
They involved, among other things, a squabble between
ecclesiastical institutions competing for the remains, the
modification of a church chancel to accommodate a new
tomb and prospective visitors, an ambitious public relations
campaign and a grand religious ceremony marking the

relics reburial in a prominent place in a cathedral.
We have indeed witnessed a unique episode in history,
at least in the opportunity it has provided for ordinary
people in the 21st century to observe the reburial of a
medieval king. Nonetheless, the series of events leading up
to the reburial is not as unusual as we might suppose and
Leicester Cathedral is not the first English place of worship
to have become the focus of public excitement centred on
the discovery of ancient bones.
In the 11th century, for example, a peasant ploughing
a field belonging to Ramsey Abbey unearthed a strange
object: a coffin containing ancient human remains. The
monks of Ramsey were informed and the bones were
washed and placed on the altar of a local church. News of
the discovery quickly spread and parishioners hurried to the
church, their spirits raised, praying that the identity of the
man might be revealed.
Divine revelation came to their aid when the dead man
appeared in a vision to a local smith. The spirit claimed to
be a seventh-century archbishop and demanded that his
remains be treated with reverence. The relics were duly
placed in a specially commissioned shrine and so many
pilgrims flocked to Ramsey Abbey for the accompanying
RICHARD III
It is difficult not to see more

than a hint of saint veneration
behind this determination to
honour Richard III
religious ceremony that the fields around the church could
scarcely hold the rush of people. The monks of Ramsey had
successfully transformed their surprise find into a pilgrim
attraction and the cult of St Ivo was born.
The account of St Ivos discovery and reburial was recorded by Goscelin Saint-Bertin, a Flemish hagiographer living
in England, who specialised in recording and promoting
the lives, deaths and miracles of saints. St Ivos posthumous
story closely echoes those of other Christian saints of the
11th and 12th centuries, for the recovery of long-lost relics
was not an uncommon occurrence in this period. The cult
of saints was blossoming and religious tourism was proving
to be a profitable source of income. Hoping to cash in on the
booming pilgrimage trade, Ramsey Abbey was just one of
many religious houses acquiring the must-have religious
accessory of the time: a holy relic.
Hagiographers like Goscelin made much of two key episodes in a saints posthumous career: the finding (inventio)
and translation (translatio) of their relics. As in the case of
St Ivo, the inventio the discovery of relics was the event
which launched a lost saint into stardom. However, it was
the translatio the ritual transference of a saints remains
into a new shrine which signalled the formal beginning
of a cult. Translation ceremonies were often grand affairs,

conducted by the local bishop and, in the case of important
saints, attended by leading churchmen and nobles. They also
attracted ordinary pilgrims, keen to be present when the
newly enshrined saint was revealed to the public.
Crowds watch
the procession of
Richard's coffin,
Leicester, March
22nd, 2015.
OR MEDIEVALISTS, then, there is much about

Richard IIIs recent discovery and reburial that
has a familiar ring. Particularly noteworthy is the
service in Leicester Cathedral on March 26th, 2015,
celebrating the ritual relocation of Richard to his new tomb.
Leading churchmen, senior royals and celebrities played
prominent roles and the less exalted were also present.
Those unable to get into the church congregated in the
cathedral gardens outside. Although the ceremony, which
was based on a documented 15th-century reburial service,
was not technically a translatio, it is difficult not to see
more than a hint of saint veneration behind this determination to honour Richard III in an appropriate, medieval way.
It should be stressed that no-one is claiming that
Richard III is a saint, nor suggesting that he should be
honoured as one. The English Protestants rejected relic
veneration at the Reformation and, although some monarchs attracted cultic attention in the Middle Ages, Richard
was never one of them. Not only was the political climate
against such a move in the late Middle Ages, but by the time
of Richards death papal canonisation required candidates
for sainthood to have led demonstrably pious lives and performed posthumous miracles. For a cult to take hold, devotees would also need to believe that their saint had a hotline
to God and could help them in their daily tribulations.
Although these key criteria for sainthood are absent,

Richards mortal remains have nonetheless undergone
some intriguingly cult-like adventures in their journey
from discovery to reburial. This can be illustrated by considering one of Englands best known saints, the ninth-century bishop of Winchester, St Swithun. His legendary request
to be buried beneath the dripping eaves of his church went
unheeded by later generations of Winchester monks and,
after the demolition of the Anglo-Saxon minster in 1093,
Swithun was not for the first time dug up and translated
into a new church.
TRANSLATION PROMPTED by the rescue of

relics from a demolished or ruined church was a
fairly frequent event in the 1th and 12th centuries. The recovery of Richard III from the site of
a Franciscan priory is, then, entirely in keeping with cultic
tradition. However, it is the subsequent history of these
original burial sites which provides one of the most unexpected parallels between Richard and many medieval relics.
At Leicester, the archaeological trench which had once
contained Richards skeleton now forms the main attraction in the new visitor centre. This kind of heritage tourism
may seem very modern, but medieval cult promoters were
also cognisant of the attraction of empty graves and there
are numerous hagiographical references to the veneration
of burial places formerly occupied by saints. St Ivos empty
tomb in the fenland village of Slepe, for example, drew
crowds of pilgrims looking for miraculous cures. In the case
of St Swithun, his old grave outside the Pilgrims Door of
Winchester Cathedral was turned into a paved area known
as Memorial Court, which became a popular stopping-off
point for devotees visiting the shrine.
Top: statue of
Richard III in
Leicester
Cathedral
gardens.
Right: St Swithun
from St Swithun's
Church, Wickham,
Berkshire.
WHEREAS MODERN CURIOSITY in Richards former grave

has not aroused much media interest, the same cannot be
said for the legal row between the cities of Leicester and
York over the site of Richards reburial. Disputes over the
possession of 500-year-old bones may not be everyday
occurrences in 21st-century England, but in the Middle Ages
rival claims to newly discovered relics were not uncommon.
Ecclesiastical institutions fighting for the custody of dead
celebrities were usually motivated by the hope of fame
and fortune. However, strategies to win possession of a
favoured relic were rather less polite then than now, as a
hagiographical motif known as furta sacra (sacred theft)
attests. The bones of Londons patron saint, St Erkenwald,
were reportedly the subject of a foiled smash-and-grab raid
when thieves broke into the crypt of St Pauls in the dead of
night. According to a 12th-century account, the crime had
been engineered by one of several covetous monasteries.
Having acquired an important relic by fair means or
foul it was the responsibility of medieval custodians to
provide their saint not only with a worthy resting place,
but also one that balanced the needs of pilgrims with those
of the working clergy. English churches in the late 11th and
12th centuries frequently underwent alterations to create
new spaces for their saints in areas mutually convenient for
clergy and visitors. The chancel at Winchester, for example,
was remodelled so that pilgrims could view St Swithuns
shrine by moving around a purpose-built ambulatory
without disrupting the monks daily office in the choir.
In the 21st century exactly the same considerations
RICHARD III
the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Reverend Tim Stevens, was

quick to point out on March 27th, Richard is interred in a
tomb below ground level and not as is normally the case
with saints elevated above the church floor in a shrine.
Notwithstanding this distinction there are, however,
curious nods towards saint veneration in the material
environment and iconography associated with Richards
tomb within the cathedral.
A
dictated the location of Richard IIIs new tomb at Leicester, as is made clear by the cathedrals Brief for Architects
for the grave. The tomb now sits in a reordered chancel,
away from the liturgical areas, and visitors are encouraged
to circulate anti-clockwise around the church, filing past
the tomb sited in a specially constructed space described
as an ambulatory. Particularly striking is the decision to
position Richard IIIs tomb in the place usually reserved for
important saints in the Middle Ages directly behind the
high altar rather than to one side of the chancel where the
bodies of lesser mortals were more usually buried.
There is, nevertheless, one crucial difference between
Richards resting place and those of medieval saints. As
Top: visitors
circulate around
Richard's tomb in
the chancel.
Above: prayer
ribbons on the
railings outside
Leicester
Cathedral during
Richard's reburial
week.
S RICHARD IS NOT considered a saint he has no

chapel or altar dedicated to him. However, hints
of a cultic setting suggest themselves in the new
chapel lying directly behind the tomb dedicated
to Christ the King. Since the dedication derives from
the chapels east window a First World War memorial
depicting Christ the King in Glory we might assume that
any implied association between the kingship of Christ
and Richard to be coincidental. After all, although medieval saints were presented as Christ-like, such comparisons
would be unusual for secular individuals such as Richard.
Nonetheless, a pair of stained-glass windows, commissioned for the Katherine Chapel to the north of Richards
tomb, makes a more explicit link between Richard and
Christ. Designed by stained-glass artist Tom Denny, and still
under construction at the time of writing, the windows will
(according to the cathedrals brief) reflect aspects of the
life, death and subsequent treatment of Richard III, while
at the same time signifying the death and resurrection of
Jesus. In addition to being reminiscent of the medieval
Becket windows of Canterbury Cathedral commemorat-
ing the 1220 translation of St Thomas relics, the Richard

windows at Leicester set the lives of Richard and Christ
side-by-side.
Leicester Cathedral is careful to frame the religious symbolism of its new windows in generic, rather than specific,
terms. From this perspective, Richard does not stand apart
from the crowd as an exemplary human being. Rather, he is
to be viewed as a Christian Everyman: someone to whom
we can all relate. Visitors to the cathedral are invited to
identify with Richard. In his sermon at the re-internment
service, Tim Stevens drew attention to Richards human
side. Richard, he said, bore his disability with courage and
knew the pain of bereavement and loss. Richards story, in
other words, is also ours.
Attachments to historical figures, forged through a
sense of shared understanding, were likewise endorsed
by the medieval church. Pilgrims were encouraged to
empathise with the suffering of saints and martyrs and
they brought their own hardships often in the form of
disability, bereavement and loss to saints shrines in the
Left: the Right

Reverend Tim
Stevens, Bishop of
Leicester, arrives
at Leicester
Cathedral, March
26th, 2015.
Right: a crown
rests on Richard's
coffin in Leicester
Cathedral, March
22nd, 2015.
reburial was presented as an occasion for reconciliation,

for example bringing together Catholics and Anglicans and
symbolically healing the strife of the 15th-century War of
the Roses through a token gathering of 21st-century Yorkshire and Lancashire peers.
It is interesting to note that medieval hagiography also
made numerous references to the wide-ranging nature of
a saints appeal. In an effort to draw attention to the popularity of a favoured saint, hagiographers repeatedly stressed
and possibly overstated the social diversity of pilgrims
and the long distances they travelled. As with visitors to
Leicester today, those who had come from overseas received
a special mention, such as the man said to have journeyed
from Rome to Winchester to see St Swithun at the turn of
the 11th century. Motifs of social unity and reconciliation
also appear as part of the medieval discourse about saints. It
was thought that sins were forgiven at a shrine and hagiography makes much of the fact that saints had the power to
heal fractured communities, reconciling troubled souls not
only with God but also with their neighbours.
Tim Stevens comment that Richard belongs to all of us would have struck
a chord with pilgrims listening to stories of their favourite saints
hope of spiritual or practical help. Local saints, such as
Swithun and Ivo, owed a great deal of their popularity to
the fact that they were felt to be approachable because,
fundamentally, they were like us. As the historian Peter
Brown said, medieval saints were envisaged as invisible
friends. It is easy to imagine that Tim Stevens comment
that Richard belongs to all of us would have struck a chord
with pilgrims listening to stories of their favourite saints in
the Middle Ages.
Reaching out to all, we witness to Christ holding all
things in unity. This is the mission statement of Leicester
Cathedral and extends, as we have seen, to Richard III who
also reaches out to all in religious symbolism. The principle was put into practice in Leicester during the reburial
week services: representatives of multi-faith communities
were invited and the heads of both Anglican and Catholic
churches presided. The message of social and religious
unity was echoed by the citys tourist industry and enthusiastically taken up by the media. The universality of Richards appeal became a popular concept, frequently evoked
to remind us that visitors came from all over the globe and
from different faiths and cultures. In particular, Richards
Although some aspects of the so-called Richard effect

such as unity, universality and reconciliation may seem
closer to wishful thinking than to reality, one frequently
repeated theme does appear to correspond to the thoughts
and feelings of the general public. This is the idea that
people have taken Richard to their hearts because he is
someone to whom they feel emotionally connected.
PEAKING TO VISITORS waiting to see the newly

revealed tomb on March 27th, I asked what had
brought them to Leicester for Richards reburial.
For most the primary reason was an interest in
history. However, the way that this interest was expressed
is revealing. Seven out of ten stated that they felt some sort
of personal connection to Richard. One woman told me: He
has come alive as a person this week to me and another confided that she felt close to Richard because she had read that
he had been devastated when his son died. A third passionately championed Richard because he was an underdog.
These responses, delivered with feeling, suggest a
human tendency to externalise our emotions by projecting
them onto someone, or something, else. This possibility
RICHARD III
was hinted at by Tim Stevens in his reburial sermon when
he commented that people had come to Richard that week
bearing their own grief. The idea that Richard provides a
focus for our own emotions was brought out again when
interviewees were asked whether it was important to them
that Richard was reburied in a place of Christian worship.
There was unanimous agreement that a Christian burial,
and the religious services provided by Leicester, were entirely appropriate. Asked why this mattered, six out of ten
replied, it was what Richard would have wanted.
As is well known, Richard was given full Catholic
obsequies at his first funeral, so a
second burial service made palatable
for a post-Reformation audience by
expunging all references to the very
thing that lay at the heart of Richards
concerns about his afterlife purgatory was, in all probability, not what
the 15th-century Richard would have
wanted. Indeed, Richards one and
only documented request in this area
that provision be made for 100 priests
to say masses for his soul has, as far
as I am aware, not been granted.
It is likely that popular notions about what Richard
would have wanted are a further example of unconscious
emotions being attributed to another person, with the
views expressed about Richards funeral wishes revealing
more about our own hopes, fears and values than his. A
second point of interest here is that making emotional connections with a historically distant figure such as Richard
necessitates closing the five-century gap between his story
and ours. One way to achieve this, it seems, is to conflate
the 15th and 21st centuries and create a kind of fictional
fusion between the two.
It is this merging of historical periods which has been
Richards one and

only documented
request in this area
has, as far as I am
aware, not been
granted
A portrait of
Richard III in the
choir of Leicester
Cathedral.
one of the most striking features of the Richard III phenomenon. From the funeral cortege with its escort of police
cars and armoured knights to the burial service with its
curious mixture of medieval and modern elements (such as
Judith Binghams anthem set to the words of the medieval
mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg), much of the ceremony
of Richards reburial week seems to have been orchestrated
to blur the line between past and present. This gave the
impression, as noted by the novelist Philippa Gregory, of
the veil of time ... almost disappearing.
F COURSE, the desire to draw the past into the

present is not new: in the Middle Ages historical
figures, including Christ, were continually refashioned for the medieval present. Saints were
similarly updated and made relevant for each new generation. The iconography of the Richard windows in Leicester Cathedral will continue this tradition in its merging
of Christs life with Richards and Richards with that of
todays viewers. In the words of Tim Stevens, history meets
the present here, eternity breaks into time.
Why is the idea of reliving the past in our own times,
and on our own terms, so attractive? Myth and ritual
theorists, such as the cultural anthropologist Claude LviStrauss, have sought to explain this perennial yearning
with reference to commemorative rituals which conceptually collapse the boundary between past and present.
Myth, in this context, does not necessarily refer to a
fictional past, but to a re-imagined one which ritual
attempts to recreate in the present. In anthropological
terms, the ritual expression of myth is generally seen as
socially beneficial, as it binds communities together by
fostering a sense of belonging and shared cultural values.
For their part, participants are said to find emotional
links with historical events and people comforting. The
feeling of being closely connected to the past provides a
Above: designs
by Tom Denny for
the stained glass
windows in the
Katherine Chapel
of Leicester
Cathedral.
Left: stained glass
window in the
Richard III visitor
centre, Leicester.
reassuring sense of continuity and gives meaning and hope

to the present.
Myth and ritual theories make sense in the religious or
folkloric context for which they were intended and may
account for the popularity of saints cults in the Middle
Ages. However, the idea that we have a tendency, in our
postmodern era, to mythologise national history is a less
than comfortable one with implications for how, and why,
we engage with history. One might argue that sentimentality engendered by the Richard effect is an inappropriate reaction to the past. Yet, without an emotional need
to connect ourselves with our history stimulating us to
discover, explore and constantly reappraise historical narratives there might be no history at all.
This last point was brought home to me when I spoke to
visitors queuing to see Richards tomb on March 27th. Many
explained that their interest in history had been invigorated, or even triggered, by the events of Richards reburial
week and one American lady made a point of telling me that

she had been inspired to enrol on a medieval history course.
The mortal remains of Richard III may not be credited with
miracles or the granting of prayers, but it seems that they
nonetheless have the ability to affect those who are drawn
to them in powerful, and perhaps even life-changing, ways.
From his discovery in a lost grave to his reburial behind
the high altar of an English cathedral, Richard IIIs posthumous journey in many respects follows in the tracks of
medieval saints. The cultural discourse he has accrued along
the way would have been familiar to people in the Middle
Ages and his relics like those of saints have generated
strong emotions. Is the Richard effect relic devotion in
a secular guise? Perhaps not, but for a week in 2015 King
Richard III was the closest thing the Anglican Church had
to a saintly relic. The veil of time may have remained
intact, but we could be forgiven for imagining a faint echo
of the Middle Ages.
Anne E. Bailey is a member of the faculty of history at the University of Oxford.
FURTHER READING
Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped
the History of Medieval Europe (Yale University Press, 2011).
Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?
Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation
(Princeton University Press, 2013).
John Crook, English Medieval Shrines (Boydell Press, 2011).
Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central
Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, revised 1990).
IN THE DOCKS
A hatch foreman
of an unloading
gang at Liverpool
Dock whistles a
signal to a crane
driver, 1938.
Britons like to think that

they all pulled together
during the Second World
War, but as Clive Emsley
shows, some of the work
force, in particular those
employed in the nations
ports, were just as likely to
be pulling a fast one.
Cops & Dockers

U
NDER THE HEADLINE Dock Thefts: Substantial

and Deplorable the Manchester Guardian carried
a short article on March 20th, 1944 quoting the
annual report of the Liverpool Steamship Owners
Association:
Pilferage of essential supplies, whether those coming into this
country or going overseas to our forces or those of our allies,
is an offence no less serious than looting and the small fines
or short sentences that magistrates impose on its detection are
no real deterrent to a profitable business. Participants in that
business should be so dealt with as will ensure its discouragement. It will continue unchecked so long as its rewards are out
of proportion to its risks.
In the naval dockyards of Nelsons day, vast quantities
of wood, paint and nails were removed and sold, as well
as being used outside the yards by the men themselves.
Testimonies allege that men spent the last half hour of a
working day sawing up pieces of good wood that they then
took out of the dockyard gates as chips. While historians
have been keen to explore labour struggles on the docks,

fiddles and theft on the docks have been discussed largely
with reference to the emergence of policing systems. There
has been little attempt either to pursue the extent of dock
theft or to assess the motivations and justifications of those
involved in such appropriation. In his study of crime at the
workplace, Cheats at Work, published some 30 years ago,
the anthropologist Gerald Mars categorised the principal
characteristics of different occupations and their workplace fiddling. He gave each of these groups an animal or
bird name: donkeys, hawks, vultures and wolves. Fiddling
dockers were included among the wolves.
For Mars, as for others, dockers were a working-class
group labouring in what was, in many respects, a closed
institution. They were bound by close ties of kinship, with
sons following fathers into the job. They lived in, or close to,
their place of employment, so that work, home and leisure
easily and invariably overlapped. At work they acted as a
team: the holdsmen in a ships hold; hatchmen, winchmen
and signallers ensuring the safe passage of cargo into or
IN THE DOCKS
out of the hold; and the stowers working in the warehouses.
When it came to fiddling they also worked together and the
wolves became wolf packs in the way that they worked,
fiddled, stole and supported one another.
IDDLING AND TAKING CARGO from the docks goes

back at least to the 18th century and was central
to the creation of the Thames Police in 1799. In his
Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, published in
1796, the magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, who was instrumental in founding the force and never one to avoid
deploying dubious statistics declared:
Above 5,000 individuals, employed in various stationary
situations upon the River have, with a very few exceptions,
been nursed from early life in acts of delinquency of this
nature. In a group so extensive there are unquestionably many
different shades of turpitude; but certain it is, that long habit,
and general example, had banished from the minds of the mass
of the culprits implicated in these offences, that sense of the
criminality of the action, which attaches to every other
species of theft.
With the coming of the so-called new police in the early
19th century many dock police, such as the ones in London,
were incorporated with those employed by local government. The dock police were principally recruited to prevent
cargo being appropriated and smuggled out of the docks.
Occasionally they were successful, but it was a thankless
task. Dockers were poorly paid and the opportunity to
make a few pence by selling small quantities of fruit,
vegetables or any other commodity with a market value
was a useful way of adding to the family diet or boosting the
family income. Arthur Harding, an East Ender born in 1886,
who became well-known to the police, recalled that his
Aunt Liza had a pretty decent-sized shop with a great stock
of things in it:
A policeman keeps watch over
Surrey Docks, London.
The dockers used to come into the shop with what they knocked
off theyd come in with pocket loads of tea which they had
pinched. She would weigh it and give them a price for it then
she used to make it up into bags, using a sheet of old newspaper.
Tyne Dock, Sunderland in the northeast of England, late 1930s.

Shortly after the First World War, one company that used
the London docks estimated that, while almost a shilling
per ton of cargo handled was subject to a claim for loss or
theft before the war, the average had now risen to nearly
two shillings and three pence. A former constable who had
served on the Liverpool docks during the 1930s recalled
how dockers appropriated all kinds of cargo: If they saw a
case of apples or anything, they would break it open didnt
regard it stealing. Sometimes a bale of cloth went and you
wondered how it could get past the Dock gate. Nor was it
unknown for the police on the docks to accept the occasional gift from dockers, often in the form of appropriated
brandy or whisky, or to take things themselves.
The public could be sympathetic, as is evidenced by the
widespread outrage in 1930 when PC Alexander Thom was
sentenced to two months imprisonment and dismissed
Dried beans are

unloaded at
Liverpool Dock,
February 1942.
from the force for stealing four oranges from a shed on

Liverpool Docks. This kind of petty pilferage indicates why
low-paid dockers did not regard it as theft; indeed, it seems
often to have been kept to a minimum so as not to attract
too much attention. There were opportunities for largescale profiteering, though, which occasionally included
men with some authority within the docks collaborating
with others outside; men involved with some form of
haulage concern were particularly useful. The Second World
War provided ample opportunities for petty theft, which
was made especially tempting by shortages and rationing.
The enormous quantities of supplies alcohol, bedding, cigarettes, clothing, foodstuffs, medicines and so forth also
provided opportunities for profiting from extensive theft.
The resulting losses persuaded the authorities, both civilian
and military, of the need to deploy special police units on
docks to supervise the loading and unloading of ships and to
ensure the safety of military supplies.
Within weeks of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)
landing in France in 1939, concerns arose among the high
command about the amount of equipment and supplies
disappearing from French docks. Initially much of the

blame was placed on French civilians, but when Chief
Inspector George Hatherill, a Scotland Yard detective, was
sent to investigate the scale of offending in December 1939,
he concluded that much of the pilfering of NAAFI (Navy,
Army and Air Force Institutes) stores took place as the
supplies were loaded in England, though the theft appears
to have varied from place to place.
The problem in France was compounded by the unreliability of the British Labour Corps, which worked alongside
the French dockers. The majority of the British soldiers
in the ports of St Nazaire and Le Baule were in labour
companies most of which have been drawn from the dock
labour class of Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. It was
much the same with the Labour Corps at Le Havre, where
Hatherill considered that:
These men, finding such an unaccustomed lack of control and
with their experience, are taking full advantage of the situation. Where sentries exist, they are usually of a younger type
than the dockers and are therefore unable to control them as
IN THE DOCKS
they should do. Further, owing to the nature of these men, their
own NCOs have to think of their personal safety when dealing
with them. One NCO has already been found dead and three
men have been found drowned at different times in strange circumstances, which illustrates the urgent need for rigid control.
Hatherill may have been jumping to conclusions regarding these deaths. The war diaries of Military Police (MPs
or Redcaps) units record several men falling into the sea
at different docks later in the war. This was considered to
be the result of dark nights, no lights on the docks, rain
making the quays slippery, the difficulty in obtaining appropriate torches and MPs who were not always familiar with
dockyard dangers and layouts. Yet there can be little quibbling over the scale of the losses in supplies that Hatherill
presented. No statistics were available for the losses of
drink and cigarettes, though in the first three weeks of November it was reckoned that at Nantes 400 tins of foodstuff
had been stolen, together with around 40 bottles of spirits
and beer and some tens of thousands of cigarettes.
The immediate result of Hatherills investigation was
the creation of a detective branch for the Corps of Military
Dock workers
pause for a
cigarette among
wartime damage
in Wapping, East
London, 1948.
Police: 20 men, all volunteers from the Metropolitan Police

CID under the command of Detective Superintendent Clarence Campion, were given military rank, two weeks army
training and sent to France. Within weeks of their arrival
the German blitzkrieg forced the British evacuation and
Campion was killed in action; one colleague, Charles James,
was seriously concussed by German bombing and had to be
invalided out of first the Military and then the Metropolitan Police, while another, Harold Dibbens, was mentioned
in despatches for his role in organising withdrawal from the
Dunkirk beaches. The Metropolitan detectives had also impressed the army high command with their detective skills.
The survivors were kept on as the cadre of the new Special
Investigation Branch of the Military Police, the SIB.
OLDIERS COMMITTED the same crimes as civilians

and the new army detectives had the whole range of
offences to investigate, from theft to murder, from
white-collar fraud to rape. Pilfering from the docks
did not end when the British population supposedly pulled
together to win the war. In a time of rationing and the
shortages occasioned by the conflict it was understandable
and way bills, listing large quantities

of whisky and beer, were placed on the
outside of wagons. On Tyne Docks,
Sunderland, the latter problem was compounded by the failure to seal the railway
wagons.
The presence of Military Police on the
docks created a legal problem. Military
Police were never sworn as constables
and therefore, technically, could neither
arrest nor police civilians. The volume of
military equipment and supply moving
across the docks created an exceptional
situation but, unless the suspect was
in the armed forces, the SIB men or the
patrols of the provost companies had to
report suspects to the civilian police for
arrest and charge. Committees of senior
military and civilian police officers, port
authority administrators and customs
officers were organised on the different
docks to resolve these problems, though
there remained the potential for friction
with the dockers.
In a time of
rationing and
shortages it was
understandable
that food, clothing
and other items
might be purloined
that food, clothing and various other
items might be purloined from the
military supplies passing through the
docks. Yet there were other items
whose acquisition cannot be explained
by rationing and shortages. In September 1943, for example, it was noted
that Sherman tanks and mobile guns
unloaded in ports in South Wales
were having clocks removed from dashboards before their
delivery to the ordnance depots; the dashboards were often
damaged during the removal. From elsewhere came complaints about the theft of Red Cross parcels and currency, as
well as the usual food, alcohol, cigarettes and tobacco. As a
result the Military Police organised Ports Provost companies early in 1940 and in September the following year these
companies got their own detective unit.
The presence of Military Police on the docks exposed
lax behaviour by dock management and labelling practices,
which revealed to would-be thieves the location of goods
they might want. Early in 1943, the commander of the
Provost Company in Liverpool noted the problems that
arose from stacking goods in the middle of dimly lit sheds
at night-time and leaving the shed doors open. It was noted
elsewhere that boxes of razor blades were clearly labelled
Top: pepper is
unloaded from the
steamer
Glenearn at the
Royal Albert
Docks, London.
Above: unloading
goods at Liverpool
Docks, December
1938.
OCKERS OBJECTED when Military

Police sought to enforce no-smoking
regulations, even on ships carrying
non-flammable cargo, but, above
all, they took exception to the appearance of
Military Police in ships holds. Work in a ships
hold was hard but it offered the best opportunities for pilferage. The hold could be murky and
space was confined and here the dockers had
some of the best opportunities to tamper with
crates. Winchmen and signallers were in on the
fiddle; they were part of the community with all
of its local ties and kinship. Military Policemen
were not. On many docks the workforce marked
their opposition to them with strikes. In March
1943 there was a strike at Middlesbrough when
dockers protested about the presence of Redcaps
as they were loading Red Cross comforts.
Agreement was reached on this occasion with a
promise that the Redcaps would stay on the deck
with the right to search men as they left the
ship. However there was no such agreement on
Barry Docks in South Wales that October when, to ensure
that a ship carrying NAAFI stores got away on time, the
MPs were removed from the ship. Initially it was claimed
that the ship sailed with its cargo, including beer and
whisky, untouched; a few days later it was reported that 35
minor articles had been pilfered. The provost martial was
furious, especially when, some ten days after the initial
incident, the dockers in Barry went on strike again over the
presence of MPs in ships holds. The excuse subsequently
offered to the authorities was that the men involved in
this second strike were a shift from Port Talbot, who were
unaware that Redcaps were usually present in the holds.
Talks followed at the highest level and the headquarters of
the Ports Provost Companies determined that there would
be no more climbing down. There were more strikes over
the issue, but the refusal of the Military Police ever to
IN THE DOCKS
budge again meant that they were over in an hour or so.
Indeed, according to the port director at Hull, the presence
of the Redcaps began to be welcomed by the dockers on
the grounds that they could not now be blamed for thefts
which had occurred at the port from which a ship sailed.
The arrest figures for the Military Police on the docks are
not particularly striking and provide no help in assessing
the motives for thefts nor the kinds and amount of goods
taken. There is some qualitative information in newspapers,
unit war diaries and the surviving Ports Provost Company
Crime Books, which help to flesh out the figures. Sometimes the scale of the thefts was considerable and involved
individuals from outside the docks. Towards the end of
1943, for example, 16 cases of whisky, one case of rum and
21,000 cigarettes disappeared between being offloaded
from railway wagons on Bromborough Docks, Liverpool
and being loaded on to a ship. Sometimes the thefts were
petty, like those of the Welsh stevedore arrested in March
1943 for purloining some bacon and corned beef.
T A MEETING of the Pilferage

Sub-Committee of the Hull
Port Emergency Committee
early in 1943 a superintendent
of the city police reported that during
the previous six months the stolen
commodities that had resulted in trials
were mainly foodstuffs, boots and shoes
hosiery and the major in charge of the
Hull Provost Company had a list of pilferage reports concerning chiefly tobacco,
wines and spirits, and foodstuffs. At least
two suspects insisted that they had been
bullied into pilferage. William Morson
and Thomas Moon were mobile dockers
from West Hartlepool who, early in 1942,
had been moved across the country to the
north-west. At Salford magistrates court
they claimed to have been abused, insulted and threatened to join in the thieving
on Liverpool docks. This was probably
an excuse, since it seems most unlikely
that a tight-knit, community-based wolf
pack of dockers wanted men who were
outsiders and potentially unreliable. It
is possible that the locals were pleased
to see the two men removed because of
the attention that they had attracted
and because, with their removal, the
locals could proceed with their customary fiddles. The court would have none
of Morson and Moons story, perhaps
because, when arrested, Morson was
wearing a complete set of stolen underclothes and socks
marked with the government stamp and the two men had
55 in their possession.
Military units were involved in unloading some ships,
as they had been in France with the BEF. In October 1944,
for example, 15 NCOs and 31 sappers of 902 Company, Dock
Operating, Royal Engineers, were arrested for larceny,
receiving and improper possession of army clothes, rations,
etc . At the same time another three sappers from 907
Company were apprehended for the theft of 9,000 NAAFI
The Special Investigation Bureau of the Military Police, set up to oversee activities in
the ports. Clarence Campion is first row, fourth from left.
At Hull, the presence of the Redcaps began to be

welcomed by the dockers on the grounds that they
could not now be blamed for thefts at the port
Dockers at the
port of Hull
prepare to dump
foreign imports,
1930s.
cigarettes from Alexandra Docks, Grimsby. A wolf pack

came together as easily among soldiers of the same unit as
it did among men from a long-established local community.
Moreover, as with the civilian police, some Military Police
members of the ports provost companies appear to have
accepted bribes for turning a blind eye, or perhaps themselves yielded to the temptation of appropriating goods
bound for the army or the NAAFIs. In August 1943, four
Military Policemen were sentenced by a Salford magistrate
to two months imprisonment for the theft of cigarettes
and tobacco; a fifth MP was sentenced to one month for

receiving. All five had been arrested by the civilian police.
In March 1945 a member of 174 Ports Provost Company
was sentenced by court martial to 12 months detention for
being in possession of a bottle of NAAFI whisky.
Service personnel usually faced military discipline
when charged with committing an offence involving
military goods or other soldiers. In such circumstances
they were dealt with by their commanding officer
roughly the equivalent of the summary jurisdiction of a
magistrates court. Men could opt for a court martial if
they so wished, or they could be slated for a court martial if
the offence was regarded as sufficiently serious. However,
where soldiers on British soil were involved with civilians
or civilian property, or where civilians alone were charged,
the accused went before a civilian court; either a magistrates court, local quarter sessions or assizes, depending on
the severity of the offence.
ERGEANT DICKIE HEARN of the

SIB published two memoirs of his
war experiences. He had served
seven years in the Coldstream
Guards followed by one year as a constable
in the Surrey police before being recalled to
the colours in December 1939. On recall,
Hearn was quickly transferred to the
Military Police and then to the SIB, even
though he had no previous training in,
and no experience of, detective policing.
He arrived in North Africa in the early
summer of 1943 and shortly thereafter
shot and killed a man for the first time; a
North African dock worker. At the time
Hearn was tracking a gang including a
French dockyard checker, two British privates and about ten locals who were stealing flour from the docks in Tunis. The
unfortunate man refused to stop running
when Hearn and a colleague caught the
gang in flagrante. Subsequently Hearn
and his section moved to Italy and established themselves in the southern port city of Bari. But
the problems there were relatively minor compared with
those faced by the SIB sections and Port Provost Companies
in Sicily and Naples. The problems in Italy were aggravated
by the appalling economic conditions of the mezzogiorno
and by the presence of the Honoured Societies: the mafia in
Sicily and the Camorra in Naples. Mussolini boasted that he
had destroyed the mafia, after which the press declined to
run stories on their activities and a combined Carabinieri
and police report on the continuing seriousness of the
problem, prepared in 1938, was shelved. It was forgotten
until discovered by a historian in the Palermo state archive
in 2007.
Belgium had no mafia but vast amounts of supplies were
illicitly appropriated from Antwerp docks when they were
reopened towards the end of 1944. Its 37 miles of docks
became the key port for unloading supplies for the advance
into Germany during the closing months of the war.
Military personnel, often gangs of deserters, were involved
in the pilferage and theft, but Antwerp was also home to a
traditional dock community whose city streets, homes and
A photograph of
Sgt Dickie Hearn
attached to
notifications of
medals awarded
to him by the
Italian government, May 1945.
shops were only a few hundred metres from where goods

were unloaded and transferred to other forms of transport.
In the spring of 1945 one of the two SIB sections in the city
had to send men to Bornem, about 10 miles to the southeast, where bargees were engaged in pilferage. The importance of Antwerp at the centre of supply delivery made it a
prime target for German V weapons and the chaos of a raids
aftermath provided opportunities for looters; in mid-January 1945 the SIB arrested 18 British civil defence workers
for looting damaged barges after such a raid. Shortages and
the appalling winter of 1944-5 encouraged Belgians of all
kinds to engage with the dock fiddlers and thieves. In February 1945 one of the ports provost companies in the city
raided the houses of some local Belgian police detectives
and in 18 of them they found war department property.
In June the SIB reported recovering, among other things,
seven and a half tons of soap, 8,370 yards of hospital sheeting and 2,304 tins of salmon.
WHAT MIGHT ALL OF THIS ADD UP TO?
First, it suggests the longevity and ubiquity
of particular forms of workplace offending which survives, and at times may be
encouraged and fostered by, the economic
environment. Dockyard fiddling and theft
offer good examples of this. Such offences
appear to have changed little from the days
of Patrick Colquhoun, but the Second World
War offered additional opportunities as
seemingly limitless military supplies and
foodstuffs moved across the docks in a time of
shortages and rationing, which in themselves
fostered a booming black market. During the
war the docker wolf packs maintained their
cohesion. They combined to resist external
interference, such as the presence of Military
Police in ships holds. At the same time they
worked with service personnel, even Military Policemen, who were prepared to turn a
blind eye; and at times the team expertise of
dockworkers meant that they were employed
in military dock labour companies where their
fiddling continued even though, temporarily,
the workers wore khaki. Ultimately it was not legislation,
policing or prosecutions that ended fiddling by the docker
wolf packs, but containerisation and the break-up of the
traditional communities that for generations had lived, in
extended families, close to those docks in which all of the
menfolk had found work. That is another story.
Clive Emsley is Professor Emeritus of History at the Open University.
FURTHER READING
Gerald Mars, Cheats at Work: Anthropology of Workplace
Crime (George Allen & Unwin, 1982).
Gary Sheffield, Redcaps: A History of the Royal Military
Police and its Antecedents (Brassey's, 1994).
Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman: Crime and the
British Armed Services Since 1915 (Oxford University
Press, 2013).
InFocus
Farewell to Aden
EN OF THE Parachute Regiment conduct a

house-to-house search in the last months
before Britains final departure from Aden in
November 1967. The local military and police
forces have recently mutinied and there are regular attacks
on the British, quite apart from a civil war between two
rival factions looking to take the place over when independence arrives. Everyone knows of the intention of the
British to leave within a year, so why the violence directed
at them? Because their word is not trusted, because the
Arab peoples have been humiliated in Junes Six-Day War by
Israel, because a freedom fighter stands a better chance of a
prominent position once independence comes.
Aden had been a British Colony since 1839 and over time
the emirate states surrounding it had been given protectorate status. In the early 1950s it was clear that independence
was on its way, but equally that Aden and the emirates were
too small to survive on their own and so must form a federation. After the arrival of Nasser and the Suez dbcle of
1956 there should have been a new urgency, but it was not
until 1959 that the South Arabian Federation of Arab Emirates was established, which Aden only joined in 1963, held
back by Colonial Office foot-dragging. By then there was
a dangerous complication to the north, in Yemen, where
the new Imam had been ousted and replaced by the Yemen
Arab Republic (the YAR), backed by Nasser. The western assessment of the situation was nave, unaware that most of
When the last troops left, the

band played Fings Aint What
They Used To Be
Yemen remained in royalist hands and that Egyptian troops
were there for one reason only: to take over the rest of the
Arabian peninsula and its oil. The US recognised the YAR
and the Foreign Office wanted to, but a hawkish cterie
within the Conservative Party was alerted to the true state
of affairs. A secret operation began to send a limited number
of ex-military to maintain radio communication with and
among the loyal tribes, give medical aid and supervise the
supply of stores and arms. Air drops were carried out by
Israel and finance came from Saudi Arabia. The latter had no
knowledge of the formers involvement.
The Israelis reaped their reward in June 1967, when
there were still 50,000 Egyptian troops tied down in
Yemen, who could have been used against them in the war.
The operation, however, could not prevent Nasser stirring
up trouble in Aden, spreading his propaganda via the new
cheap transistor radios and backing the formation of trade
unions there, who later formed a socialist party. There were
riots and intimidation when Aden joined the federation
and at the airport in December 1963 a grenade was thrown
at the governor. He survived but one of his staff was killed.
A conference at Lancaster House in June 1964 finally

agreed to independence by 1968 at the latest, but then the
election in October was won by Labour and any interest in
a post-colonial legacy was replaced by a preoccupation with
technology and ambitions to join the EEC. In 1966, against
the background of Britains balance-of-payments crisis, a
Defence White Paper announced that the Aden base was to
close and that there would be no more support for the federation. In Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus the military situation
was under control and a coherent successor authority in

place before exit, but not here.
The shootings and bombings went on through 1966
and 1967 and the number of British dead went past the
100 mark, but the army kept the initiative. When the last
troops left for the 25 warships anchored offshore, the band
played Fings Aint What They Used To Be. To the surprise
of Nasser, the UN and the British government, it was not
the group known by the initials FLOSY (Front for the
Liberation of Occupied South Yemen), whom they had been

supporting, that took over, but their rivals the Marxist
National Liberation Front. The federation soon vanished
and in its place the communist Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) emerged in 1970. It was a violent
country, home to Palestinian and European extremists. In
1986 civil war broke out, ending, after 10,000 deaths, in the
PDRY joining with the YAR to the north in 1990.
ROGER HUDSON
PERFUME
The Perfumers
Costume, a portrait
of a street vendor
selling perfumes
and cosmetics,
Nicolas Bonnart,
early 18th century.
The Success of Sweet
Smells
We tend to think of the early modern city as one beset by foul,

dangerous air and dank odours. Yet it also inspired a golden age
of perfumery, explains William Tullett.
HAT DID AN EARLY modern perfumers shop smell like?

Despite valiant attempts by those in charge of certain
historical attractions, such as the scratch and sniff cards
of Jorvik Viking Centre and Hampton Court Palace, we
can never truly smell the scents of the past. However, Nicolas Bonnarts
engraving of the Habit de Parfumeur gives us a visual representation of
the mingled concoction of odours that emanated from early modern
perfumers shops. Bottles of essences and oils, perfumed lozenges for
the breath, pomatums for the hair, fragrant fans and scented handkerchiefs comprise the perfumers costume. A perfume-burner rests upon
his head and disperses fragrant smoke with its religious, luxurious and
medicinal effects around him. The powerful scents of the perfumers
trade meant that in early modern England overly odorous men and
women were regularly accused of smelling like a perfumers shop. Abel
Boyers 1702 English Theophrastus described the start of the fashionable
fops day thus:
When his Eyes are set to a languishing Air, his Motions all prepard
according to Art, his Wig and his Coat abundantly Powderd, his Handkerchief Perfumd, and all the rest of his Beauetry rightly adjusted tis
time to launch, and down he comes, scented like a Perfumers Shop, and
looks like a Vessel with all her Rigging without Balast.
Perfumers and their shops represented important physical and imaginative spaces in early modern England. Yet they have often been ignored
by historians in favour of the stinking streets on which they lay. And
so a picture is summoned of a pre-modern world of dirt and disgust,
supplying the foul foil to modernitys clean and pleasant land. Western
In early modern England overly

odorous men and women were
regularly accused of smelling like
a perfumers shop
modernity, the French historian Alain Corbin has argued, is founded on
a vast deodorisation project, which had its roots in the 18th century. The
Victorian sanitarian Edwin Chadwicks dictum all smell is disease
has come to represent, for many historians, a distinctly modern fear
of odours, both good and bad. This distinction between a stench-ridden
past and a clean modernity is often further encouraged by programmes
such as the BBC Televisions Filthy Cities. What histories often do is
to take the upturned nose of the bourgeois sanitarian as indicative of
societys collective attitude to smell.
THE STREETS OF EARLY modern England may perhaps have been
dirtier, smellier and noisier than today. The sources used to demonstrate these facts, so often authored by medical writers and government
officials who were charged with seeking out stench, naturally foster the
conclusion that early modern towns would have stunk to modern noses.
However the noses of Londoners in the period from the 16th to the
18th century were rather differently attuned. Modern neuroscience and
neurobiology suggest that frequent exposure to the same smell renders
the nose less able to perceive it: constant stench will eventually fall into
the olfactory background. In diaries, correspondence and print culture,
early modern individuals frequently foreground a whole range of other
smells, particularly those associated with the proliferating world of
luxury and exotic goods. Perfume therefore points to a different, more
pleasant, way of examining odour in the past.
We that is to say the 21st-century western world have inherited
a view, born from the rise of synthetics and the atomiser in the late
A Chelsea scent
bottle depicting
a mother and her
children picking fruit,
18th century.
PERFUME
19th century, that perfumery is evanescent and immaterial. By contrast, medical understandings and processes of production gave early
modern perfumery different material resonances. In early modern
medical literature scents themselves were believed to be invisible but
not immaterial. Odours were thought to be tiny parts of the object
from which they came. These corpuscles, atoms or effluvia floated
through the air and touched the organ of smelling. It was not until the
1690s that the nose was widely accepted as the olfactory organ. Instead
it was understood to be the brain, the nose merely being the pathe or
walke of odoriferous things. This medical interpretation of olfactory
objects and organs lent smells great power: the act of smelling involved
Above: Odor,
from a series of
etchings devoted
to the senses by
Francis Cleyn,
published London,
1646.
Right: The Civet,
an engraving by
Simon Charles
Miger, France,
1808.
Collected from the secretions of

the civet cats perineal glands, raw
civet was a popular ingredient in
16th- and 17th-century England
A pomander with four

compartments used to
hold perfumes, English,
c.1580.
material substances, which quite literally touched the brain.

The category of early modern perfumery also encompassed a materially diverse range of compositions including powders, pomanders,
pastilles and pomatums alongside perfumed gloves, scented waters
and wash balls. The mortars, pestles and stills and the accompanying
practices of grinding, mixing and distilling used in perfumery, were
shared with the making of medicine and simple enough for many to
practice at home. While, by the end of the 18th century, the market
in ready-made perfumery had expanded significantly, printed recipe
books still recommended themselves as guides for the weary consumer.
HE MAKING OF PERFUMERY also involved an engagement

with raw natural materials, a fact that has been obscured in
the modern perfume industry, with its chemical compounds
and synthetic sprays. Hundreds of different ingredients were
used in perfumery across the early modern period, ranging from the
obvious ones, such as roses, to the downright dangerous, such as white
lead. A multitude of herbs, flower petals, fruit rinds, animal excretions,
aromatic gums, fragrant roots, exotic barks, oils and essences were all
used in the manufacturing of odoriferous goods and determined the
final scent, texture and colour of the product.
Civet, for example, was an eminently popular ingredient in 16th- and
17th-century England. Some 17th-century English texts described raw
civet, collected from the secretions of the civet cats perineal glands,
as sweet. Although synthetic civet continues to be used in modern
perfumery, many now identify its fecal qualities on first sniff. While
some early modern writers reflected on civets sweet odours, others
made great play of its brownish colour and pasty texture. In his 1698
London Spy, the Grub Street satirist Ned Ward told the story of a bathhouse owner who, while washing a gentleman, found a stool left by the
previous visitor (a high class prostitute) among the water and herbs. The
owner successfully convinced his patron that this was in fact nothing
but an italian paste and, incapable of distinguishing a fair ladys sirreverence, from the excrement of a civet cat, the gentleman rose out
of his Bath extremely pleasd, and gave him that attended him Half a
Crown for his extraordinary Care and Trouble, so marchd away with
great Satisfaction. The look and feel of civet was just as important as
smell in appreciating the material qualities of perfumery.
One of the most important uses of civet was in the perfuming
of gloves, a process which appears in many 17th-century household
recipe books. Perfumed gloves, in the Spanish style, became popular in
16th-century England due to the taste exhibited for them by Elizabeth I.
They subsequently became desirable commodities, dispersing from the
court outwards. A later recipe book, compiled by one Madam Carrs
between 1681-2, contains a simple recipe To perfume gloves:
Take benjamin Civet Musk Ambergrease grind all these exceeding well on
a painters stone with the oyle of sweet balsam and a little water, wash
your gloves with sponges, putt them on litle sticks to dry
Printed recipe books give similar insights into the types of perfumery available and how they were composed. As in manuscript recipe
books, these might be included alongside other medicinal, cosmetic or
culinary receipts. One hugely popular book, which included guidance
on producing perfume, was Delights for Ladies (1602), by the inventoragriculturalist Sir Hugh Plat. A recipe for pomander asks the reader to:
Take two ounces of Labdanum, of Benjamin and Storax one ounce, muske
sixe graines, civet sixe graines, Amber greece sixe graines, of Calamus
Aromaticus and Lignum Aloes, of each the waight of a groat, beat all these
in a hote mortar, and with an hote pestell till they come to paste, then wet
your hand with rose water, & roll vp the paste soddenly.
Pomanders were scented balls of paste that were to be worn, once dry, in
spherical metal pomanders or, once pricked with a needle, on necklaces
and bracelets. Elaborate 16th-century pomanders, made from gold and
pearl, were hollow spheres in which such balls of perfume might be
secured. By the 17th century, smaller pomanders developed, someAUGUST 2015 HISTORY TODAY 31
PERFUME
times in the shapes of skulls or female heads. These had between four
and six compartments into which strongly scented materials, such as
ambergris, cloves, lavender, roses, musk, mace and marjoram, might be
inserted. Pomanders were not just luxury items, they were also used
as odorous amulets to defend urbanites against the plague when out in
the city. Leaky pomanders created an aromatic atmosphere around the
individual, defending against foul air and disease.
The creation of such atmospheres might also be managed in homes,
gaols and hospitals through the use of fumigations. This was the earliest role in which perfumers could be found: Henry VII paid a maker
of fumycacions in 1498, while in 1564 Elizabeth Is bed chamber was
fumigated with orris powder burnt in a perfuming pan. By the 17th
century, as perfumers themselves expanded into the production
of a wider range of scented cosmetics, recipes for fumigations
could be found in household manuscript collections. A late
17th-century manuscript recipe for A perfume to burn
went as follows:
Take 2 ounces of the powder of juniper, benjamine,
and storax each 1 ounce, 6 drops of oyle of cloves, 10
grains of musk, beat all these together to a past
with a little gum dragon, steeped in rose or
orange flower water, and roul them up like big
pease and flat them and dry them in a dish
in the oven or sun and keep them for use they
must be put on a shovel of coals and they will
give a pleasing smell.
of scented powders, pomatums and waters, including the ever-popular

lavender water and Hungary water.
By the mid-18th century perfumed gloves were increasingly
advertised for their ability to soften and scent the hands, rather
than to emit a heavy perfume into the space around the body. These
were superseded in part by powders, pomatums and pastes but
more particularly by a massive growth in the popularity and
availability of scented essences and waters. These usually
had French-sounding names, such as eau sans parille, eau
de bouquet and eau de cologne, the last of which was
becoming increasingly popular in Britain by the end of the
18th century. Scented waters and mixtures of perfumed
essences and smelling salts, such as eau de luce, could be
held in smelling bottles to be sniffed at when needed or
dropped on to handkerchiefs. While pomanders leaked and
created atmosphere, smelling bottles, in cheaper glass or
more expensive porcelain varieties, emphasised a more
inward-looking, contained, engagement with smell.
S LIQUID PERFUMERY became increasingly

popular, the definition of perfume loosened
from its material moorings. In dictionaries of
the 16th and 17th centuries perfume was most
often defined by its materiality: per fume in Latin literally being to scent by smoking. By the later 18th century this
definition was increasingly replaced by a simpler, more emotionally inflected one: perfume was simply a scent that was
agreeable to the sense of smelling. This more affective and
Fumigations, ranging from the use of perfumes to
inward-looking engagement with scent was the sensory
hot vinegar, were used well into the 19th century
despite the increasing trend towards the use
equivalent of the emergence of new ideas of selfhood and
of ventilation. Even in the 20th and 21st
interiority during the 18th century.
centuries practices of airing and cleanliThe new importance of agreeability in defining
ness continue to smell. As anyone who has
perfume did not, as some historians have suggested,
experienced the distinct hospital odour of
remove perfume from the pharmacy and relegate it to
carbolic soap will know, methods of disinthe cosmetics counter. Into the 19th century perfume
fection and deodorisation often leave their
was tightly intermeshed with the concepts and pracown unmistakable odours.
tices of medicine. While the pomanders and fumigations of the 16th and 17th centuries might rectify the
ET, WHILE SOME forms of fumigaatmosphere and prevent the inflow of foul air into the
tion survived across the 16th, 17th, and
body, the smelling bottles of the 18th century contained
18th centuries, other changes were
scented waters, essences and salts to revive and energise
afoot in the types of perfumery conthe spirits.
sumed. Recipes for pomander and perfumed
The significant overlaps of perfumery with medgloves become less common. A second promiicine meant that the selling and making of scented
nent recipe book, Simon Barbes The French Perfummaterials was itself contested ground. The historian
er, which went through three editions between
Holly Dugan has described the competition between
1696 and 1700, illustrates this shift. Barbes text,
the London College of Physicians, the apothecaries
A scent bottle and stopper from
deriving from his work as perfumer to Louis
and the grocers guild in the 17th century over the
Charles Gouyns factory, London,
XIV, was popular among the perfumers of early
right to sell and use the strongly scented ingredients
c.1750-60.
18th-century London. While a small number of
common to all. Attempts to stamp out abuses and
recipes for pomanders and burnt perfumes make an appearance, more
incriminate the opposition resulted in bonfires of faulty aromatics
of the text is taken up with powders, waters and essences.
outside the doors of their purveyors shops. During the 16th century
Charles Lillie, a perfumer on the Strand in the first half of the 18th
perfumers began to emerge within London, first in the East End among
century, bemoaned the popularity of Barbes text and referred to it as a
the immigrants and women excluded from the guilds and, by the 17th
silly little book, whose author was so unfortunately ignorant, as not
century, in the West End among the blooming collection of luxury
to know even the names, much less the composition, of the articles he
trades. This association of perfumery with the West End would continue
undertook to write about. Lillie himself, whose products were meninto the 18th century. John Gay reflected in his topographical poem
tioned in the Tatler and the Spectator, had written a manuscript recipe
Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716):
book intended for publication. The original is now missing but an edited
O bear me to the Paths of fair Pell-mell,
version found its way into print in 1822, long after Lillies death in 1746.
Safe are thy Pavements, grateful is thy Smell!
While containing only a single recipe for perfumed gloves, from which
the formerly popular civet was absent, Lillies text contained a panoply
Left: a silver pomander in the form of a book,

England, 17th century. The rat motif suggests it
was used as protection from the plague.
Below: the trade card of perfumer
Charles Lillie, based in the Strand, London.
Bottom: an extract from a perfume recipe book,
English, c.17th century.
The overlaps of perfumery with

medicine meant that the selling and
making of scented materials was
contested ground
PERFUME
A still life of flowers celebrating the month of May, hand-coloured engraving, England, 1730.
Shops breathe Perfume, thro Sashes Ribbons glow,

The mutual Arms of Ladies, and the Beau.
While many more individuals calling themselves perfumers had
emerged during the late 16th and 17th centuries, apothecaries continued to deal in many items of perfumery. In turn, the trade cards of
18th-century perfumers listed large numbers of proprietary medicines,
such as Daffys Elixir, Dr Hoopers Pills and Fryars Balsam, the ostensibly wondrous effects of which often attracted charges of quackery.
Many items of perfumery, especially the expanding and popular
range of scented waters, could also be described as medicines. Under a
1785 Act of Parliament stamp duties had to be paid on licences to sell
medicine and on many of the medicines themselves. A similar Act in
1786 extended stamp duties to Sweet Scents, Odors, Perfumes, and
Cosmetics. However the blurred line between perfume and medicine
encouraged dirty tricks by informers. In Cambridge in March 1788 one
informer was busy buying small quantities of essence of lemon from
apothecaries and then informing against them as perfumers without
licenses. The enraged populace forced him to be
escorted to the local tavern (ironically named The
Rose), where he was held prisoner at the behest of
the mob. Only after the Riot Act was read was the
informer able to escape. The attempts of the state
to tax perfumery showed just how blurred the line
between luxury and medicine, pleasure and health,
continued to be.
invaded the nose of the passerby. Although such critiques built on a

belief that perfumery connoted effeminacy, the more pressing point
at issue was the amount of perfume that fops and macaronis wore. It
was not necessarily the wearing of perfume, but the sheer strength of
scent that was problematic.
NOTHER CRITICISM directed at the most pungent perfumery of the early modern period was that it tended to signify
to the nose of the observer the very thing it attempted to
conceal. To wear perfume was to suggest you had something
to hide. Such criticisms are significant because they question a historiographical commonplace. According to some historians, including
Alain Corbin and Constance Classen, a shift in attitudes to smell occurred in the late 18th and 19th centuries. They suggest that changes
in environmental science, public health and manners combined to
produce a bourgeois quest for an odourless modernity. One of the things
that supposedly exemplified this new departure was a critique of the
masking potential of perfumery.
In the 18th century, mockery was heaped on the
wives of merchants who attempted to cover up the
odour of filthy lucre tobacco, train oil and tar
with the scent of lavender, amber or rose. However,
earlier, in a theatrical allegory of the senses first
performed between 1602-7, Thomas Tomkis has
one character suggest to Olfactus that:
The fop was

criticised for his
use of overbearing
perfumery and
inability to
stand the more
masculine odours
of tobacco
N the later 18th century perfumers emerged who

built a much wider brand name for themselves,
often on the back of a particular commodity.
Richard Warren, who in the 1770s had shops in
Marylebone, Cheapside, Bath and Tunbridge Wells,
was one such individual. Warrens Milk of Roses,
a mixture of almonds, rose water, spirits of wine,
oil of lavender and soap, was highly popular. American shops advertised
London Milk of Roses, while perfumers in Edinburgh assured their
customers that their own milk of roses was just as good, if not better
than, Warrens much loved composition.
The popularity of Warrens brand signalled the rise of rose as a
popular scent. This represented something of a back-to-the-future
moment for British perfumery. Otto of roses had been popular during
the early 16th century at the court of Henry VIII. Dispensed from
casting bottles to infuse the spaces of the court, it became a key part
of Henrys performance of power. In the 18th century its connotation
shifted from kingly magnificence to the exotic fragrance of the imperial
east. Marketed as Indian or Persian, the demand for otto of roses
represented the growing influence of British imperial expansion on
luxury goods.
Tracking changing attitudes to perfume usage is more difficult.
Among the problems that a historian of smells and smelling faces is
that the unexpected, inappropriate, or out of place odours are the ones
that tend to be recorded. In diaries, periodicals and satires it is the
misuses of perfume that tend to be discussed. In the 18th century the
overuse of smelling bottles might be criticised for their role in the affected display of nervous sensibility. Yet most criticisms of perfumery
were aimed at the use of highly scented hair powder, handkerchiefs or
pastes, all of which tended to infuse the atmosphere around the body
with scent. By the late 17th century the fop an effeminate figure of
fun was criticised for his use of overbearing perfumery and inability
to stand the more masculine odours of tobacco. The macaronis of the
1770s, fashionable gentlemen who paraded Londons pleasure gardens
to display their continental costume and cosmetics, were also criticised for their overpowering atmosphere of ambrosial essences that
Of all the senses, your objects have the worst luck,

they are always jarring with their contraries, for
none can wear civet, but they are suspected of a
proper bad scent.
More significant was the conclusion drawn from

the observation: He smelleth best, that doth of
nothing smell. This early 17th-century observation paraphrased the Roman writers Plautus (A
womans best smell is to smell of nothing) and Martial (He smells not
well, whose smell is all perfume). The Renaissance essayist Michel de
Montaigne had quoted the same authorities in his discussion of odours
and their effects on his lively spirits. Criticisms of perfumed masking
could therefore be found long before the supposed perceptual revolution of the late 18th century.
In his Treatise on the Diseases of Tradesmen, published in Latin in 1700
and translated into English in 1705, the Italian physician Bernadino
Ramazzini noted that while a great many things have been said of
smells ... a particular and exact history of them is yet wanting. While
Ramazzini believed strongly that this large Field of History would
benefit from further plowing, he admitted he was not the man to do
it: both the pleasantness and intricacy of the subject required more
time and pain than he could afford. The history of perfume suggests the
potential for historians to discover a more pleasant and intricate history
of scent, more in keeping with that which Ramazzini had described.
William Tullett is a PhD candidate at Kings College London working on smells, smelling
and perfumery in 18th-century England.
FURTHER READING
Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume (John Hopkins
University Press, 2011).
Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Harvard University Press,
1988).
Jonathan Reinarz, Past Scents (University of Illinois Press, 2014).
| CUNARD
XXXXXXXXXX
From luxury liners to troopships:

Roland Quinault examines the close
relationship between the Cunard line
and Winston Churchill.
Churchill and
the Cunarders
Above left:
Shipbuilder
and Marine
Engine-Builder
magazine, Queen
Mary special issue.
Right: Churchill
arrives in New
York with his
family in the
Queen Elizabeth,
March 23rd, 1949.
THIS YEAR MARKS BOTH the 50th anniversary of Winston

Churchills death and the 175th anniversary of the opening
of the Cunard lines passenger and mail service across the
Atlantic. During his lifetime Churchill made 15 visits to the
United States: the majority of them on board a Cunard liner.
The Cunarders provided Churchill with a luxurious, speedy
and safe form of travel across the Atlantic and also a valuable
military resource in two world wars.
Winstons mother, Jennie Jerome, an American from
a wealthy family largely domiciled in Europe, also made a
number of transatlantic voyages. After the sinking of the
French transatlantic steamer, Ville du Havre, in 1873, with

the loss of 226 lives, she told her future husband, Lord Randolph Churchill, that she would stick to Cunarders, which
had never had a single accident.
Winston first crossed the Atlantic, as a young man, in
1895, en route to Cuba, where he reported on the insurrection against Spanish rule. He travelled to New York in
the 7,000-ton Cunard ship Etruria, which had been built in
1888, and described a comfortable cabin and good food onboard the great moving hotel. But he complained that only
stupid people attended the concert and that even stupider
XXXXXXXXXXX
persons applauded them. Despite a spell of rough weather,
he was not seasick and never missed a meal in the saloon. He
later recalled, however, that the choice had been between
being cold and miserable on deck or seasick and miserable
below. After eight days at sea, he looked forward to the
end of a voyage made tedious by the lack of an interesting
occupation, concluding that a sea voyage was a necessary
evil rather than a pleasure. Yet the conditions that he experienced as a cabin class passenger were much better than
those of the emigrants, who travelled steerage class.
Troopships
In 1902 the formation of the Morgan shipping combine,
which brought together American finance and several
British and European shipping lines, seemed to threaten
Cunards dominance of the transatlantic passenger trade.
But Balfours Conservative government continued its mail
contract with Cunard and granted the company a loan, at a
low rate of interest, to subsidise the building of two new fast
and efficient liners. The government wanted steamers that
could be armed in wartime and which were fast enough to
catch the foreign ships currently operating on the Atlantic.
Churchill had been elected as a Conservative MP in
1900 but his support for free trade in 1904 led him to leave
the party and join the Liberals. He criticised the governments aid to Cunard in 1905 as a protectionist measure and
accused the president of the Board of Trade of having been
panicked by the Morgan combination already a failure
into granting Cunard an overly generous loan. He did,
however, concede that the Admiralty needed fast steamers
to aid the deployment of troops abroad.
As First Lord of the Admiralty, during the early part of
the First World War, Churchill deployed the large Cunard
liners as troopships. They were an essential element in
Britains ability to act, in Churchills phrase, as the great
amphibian. He instructed the Aquitania and the Mauretania
to carry 8,000 men apiece to the Dardanelles in May 1915
to assist the Gallipoli landings, despite the misgivings of an
Admiralty that was fearful of the consequences, if the ships were sunk. In
the event they returned unharmed but
their sister ship, the Lusitania, was not
so lucky. After crossing the Atlantic
from New York on a regular commercial run, she was sunk by a German
U-boat off the coast of Ireland with
the loss of 1,200 lives. The ship had
been carrying some military supplies
but all those aboard had been civilians,
many of them Americans. The sinking
aroused widespread revulsion and
Churchill realised that it provided a propaganda coup for the
Allied cause against Germany. Churchill has been criticised
for not providing more protection for the ship but he considered that the Admiralty had insufficient resources to do so.
Between 1900 and 1929 the demands of Churchills political career he held high government office for most of that
time prevented him from re-visiting North America; but in
1921 he had an investment of 1,200 in the Cunard Steamship Companys stock and his 1929 resignation as Chancellor
of the Exchequer (after the defeat of the Conservative government at the general election) gave him an opportunity to
During the early

part of the First
World War,
Churchill deployed
the large Cunard
liners as troopships
return. He originally intended to travel on the Cunard liner

Berengaria but his initial destination was Canada and the
Canadian Pacific Company offered him the use of a private
car for his rail journey to the Pacific coast. Consequently he
felt obliged to cross the Atlantic on that companys liner, the
Empress of Australia.
When Churchill returned to America in the winter of
1931-2, he took the first available transatlantic crossing on
the German ship Europa but he returned to Southampton
on the Cunarder Majestic. That ship, like the Mauretania,
was reaching the end of its life. To replace them Cunard
ordered, with the aid of a government loan, a new liner of
unprecedented size and weight: 81,000 tons. The ship was
built at Clydebank and launched by Queen Mary after whom
it was named. Churchill visited the new vessel and wrote
an article on her, entitled Queen of the Seas, published in
the May 1936 edition of the Strand Magazine. He began by
observing that for nearly a century Cunard had operated
as the Atlantic ferry. But he pointed out that the companys large transatlantic liners such as the Mauretania were
old and unable to compete, either in speed or in comfort,
with the more recent ships built by the Germans, French
and Italians. To win back the cream of the trade, Cunard
required two new fast ships that could operate a regular
weekly service between Southampton, Cherbourg and New
York. He noted that the Queen Mary would cater, not for
the modest needs of the now much diminished number of
emigrants, but for the luxurious tastes of the great army
of tourists from Europe that had discovered America. In
that respect he thought that the ship would help to cement
Anglo-American friendship.
Blue Ribbon liners
Churchill also claimed that the Queen Mary was a boon to
the workers, as well as to the rich, because its construction
and outfitting provided much needed work at a time of
high unemployment. Besides the 7,000 men employed in
building the ship at John Browns yard at Clydebank, there
were also a quarter of a million other workers scattered
across the nation who made some contribution to the liner.
They included china makers from the Potteries, cutlers
from Sheffield and textile manufacturers from Lancashire,
Yorkshire and Northern Ireland. Consequently he described
the ship as an epitome of Britain and a symbol of its renaissance, which would act as a floating British industries fair.
It was also a manifestation of the British Empire, since it
was fitted out with different woods from various colonies.
In conclusion, Churchill hoped that the Queen Mary would
win back for Britain the Blue Ribbon for the fastest crossing
of the Atlantic.
Soon afterwards, the Queen Mary began its regular and
profitable transatlantic service. Its sister ship, the Queen
Elizabeth, was launched in 1938 but it was not delivered to
Cunard until after the outbreak of the Second World War.
Thereafter the two Queens as the only two 80,000-ton
ships in the world played a vital role as troopships. They
were initially sent to the Indian Ocean to transport Indian
and Australian troops to the Middle East. But Churchill complained, in March 1941, that only 3,500 troops were carried
in each of the two ships hardly more than they would
have carried when engaged in luxury passenger service. He
recalled that over 8,000 men had been sent on both the
XXXXXXXXXX
| CUNARD
Mary to sink after she had been torpedoed. He was told that
it would probably take several hours because the ship was
divided into watertight compartments. Churchill was afraid,
not of dying, but of being captured and so he arranged for a
machine gun to be kept in his lifeboat.
During the war the two Queens carried more than a
million men over 80 per cent of them from the US. Occasionally each ship transported a whole division or 15,000
men. Consequently Sir Percy Bates, the Cunard chairman,
claimed that the Queens shortened the war by a year.
Churchill was invited to speak at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1949 and he travelled with a
family group to New York in the Queen Elizabeth as first
class passengers. The Cunard general manager proposed that
Churchill be the guest of the company as a mark of their
appreciation of his great services to the nation. He presented signed copies of his newly published book, Their Finest
Hour, to senior Cunard staff as a token of his thanks for their
attention. He also informed them that it was 55 years since
he had first crossed the Atlantic in the Etruria. The Cunard
general manager replied that it was a matter of pride to
them that Churchill was among their longstanding friends.
Aquitania and the Mauretania to the Dardanelles in 1915

When the USA joined the war, at the end of 1941, Churchill
offered the two Queens to transport US troops to the UK.
Churchill went by battleship across the Atlantic for
his first and second wartime meetings with President
Roosevelt. He sailed from the Clyde to New York in the
Queen Mary his first passage on that ship in May 1943.
The prime minister and his delegation were housed on the
main deck, which was sealed off and equipped with offices,
a conference room and a map room. To avoid a German
attack, the identity of the delegation was disguised and false
rumours circulated about its personnel. Churchill insisted
that 5,000 German prisoners should also sail with them.
At the end of the voyage, he observed that it had been most
agreeable and that the staff had done a vast amount of work.
In September 1944, Churchill again embarked on the
Queen Mary en route to the second Quebec conference. His
private secretary, Jock Colville, described the meals on board
as gargantuan in scale, epicurean in quality and a shaming
contrast with the shortages at home. The weather was hot,
so Churchill spent much of the time in his cabin reading
the novels of Anthony Trollope or playing bezique. On his
return home, again on the Queen Mary, his doctor, Lord
Moran, recorded that he was in a sober mood. He gazed at
the enemy submarines on a vast chart in the map room and
asked the First Sea Lord how long it would take the Queen
Travelling in style:
the main lounge
of the Queen Mary,
1937.
Crucial role
Churchills 1954 voyage in the Queen Elizabeth was the last
occasion on which he crossed the Atlantic by a Cunard liner.
When he visited the US in 1959 he went by air in both
directions. His final visit to New York was in 1961 as a guest
of Aristotle Onassis on board his luxury yacht Christina.
After the yacht had docked in the Hudson River, Churchill
sat on deck, watching the Queen Mary leave the Cunard pier
on her transatlantic voyage. It was a fitting end to his long
association with the two Queens and the other Cunarders.
During Churchills lifetime there was a revolution in
the size, power and equipment of the Cunard transatlantic
liners. His first ship, the Etruria, was, at 7,000 tons, less
than one tenth the size of the two Queens. Etruria was also
the last Cunarder to be fitted with auxiliary sails. Most of
her accommodation was for emigrants, travelling steerage
class, whereas the Queens catered almost exclusively for
wealthy tourists, who were provided with an array of leisure
areas, including swimming pools and beauty salons, for
which there was no space or demand on earlier ships, such
as the Etruria. Passengers had to wait to send or receive
mail until they reached land or passed a ship travelling in
the other direction. By contrast, the two Queens kept in
close radio touch with the outside world. But all the Cunard
liners, from the Victorian to the new Elizabethan age, were
designed to provide the best facilities available for their
passengers. That endeared them to Churchill, whose taste
for luxurious living was pronounced. Yet he also valued the
Cunard liners for less indulgent reasons. They gave him the
opportunity to carry out serious work, either on his own
behalf or that of the nation. The two Queens, in particular, played a crucial role as troop transports in his strategic
planning during two world wars. Thus for Churchill, both in
war and peace, the Cunarders were a vital link between the
old world and the new.
Roland Quinault is the author of British Prime Ministers and Democracy
(Bloomsbury, 2012).
9 THERMIDOR
The decapitated head
of Robespierre, wood
engraving, 1794.
HE FACTS ABOUT the overthrow of Maximilien

Robespierre, leading figure in the French Revolutionary Governments Committee of Public
Safety, on July 27th, 1794, or 9 Thermidor, Year II
in the Revolutionary Calendar, are well established. On this
journe (day of Revolutionary action), right-wing elements
within the national assembly, or Convention, organised a
coup dtat against Robespierre and his closest allies in the
hall of the Convention, located within the Tuileries palace
(adjacent to the Louvre). These men at once set out to
end the Terror, which Robespierre had conducted over the
previous year. They instituted the so-called Thermidorian
Reaction, which moved government policies away from
the social and political radicalism espoused by Robespierres
The sans-culottes had been

instrumental in bringing
Robespierre to power during
the crisis months of 1793
Revolutionary Government towards constitutional legalism and classically liberal economic policies. In the hours
following the Thermidorian coup, Robespierres supporters
in the Paris Commune (the citys municipal government,
housed in the present-day Htel de Ville) had sought to
organise armed resistance against the Convention among
the citys sans-culottes, the street radicals who had been
instrumental in bringing Robespierre to power during the
crisis months of 1793, when France had been wracked by
civil and foreign war. But the Parisian popular movement
proved to be marked by political indifference and apathy at
this decisive moment. Shortly after 8pm, some 3,400
The Fall of
Robespierre
The momentous final days of the French revolutionary are well
known and well documented. Yet, argues Colin Jones, many of
the established facts are myths that do not stand up to scrutiny.
9 THERMIDOR
sans-culottes, mainly National Guardsmen from the citizen
militias of each of the citys 48 sections, along with over 30
of their cannon, had gathered on the Place de lHtel de Ville
after a call-up by the Commune. Though seemingly at that
moment primed for action, by midnight the popular forces
had scattered, speeded on their flight by a shower of rain,
which dampened revolutionary ardour. The people of Paris
preferred to go home to bed, it seemed, rather than stay up
and fight for Robespierres cause. Shortly after midnight, the
Conventions National Guard, drawn from the bourgeois,
western city neighbourhoods, attacked the Htel de Ville,
in which Robespierre was holed up. In the mle accompanying his arrest, Robespierre sought to commit suicide,
managing only to blow a hole in the lower part of his cheek.
He was guillotined the following evening, July 28th.
Robespierre was certainly overthrown on 9 Thermidor
and he was certainly guillotined on July 28th. But most of
the other established facts in the above account are either
completely false or else require substantial qualification.
Indeed the above paragraph contains no fewer than six
myths about the journe and one continuing conundrum.
ET US START WITH the conundrum, namely, of

whether Robespierre did attempt suicide. Witnesses to the act either did not live to tell the tale his
co-conspirators were executed alongside him and
were never interrogated about the facts of the day or else
are unreliable. The man who led the assault on the Htel
de Ville, Convention deputy Lonard Bourdon, claimed
that National Guardsman Charles Andr Mda (or Merda,
a name he understandably chose to change) had fired the
shot that incapacitated Robespierre. Merda is depicted in
the most famous engraving of the Htel de Ville episode
and, long after the event, his memoirs recounted his role in
the day. However, that account is so full of self-aggrandising exaggeration that his testimony seems fundamentally
untrustworthy. In hundreds of accounts of the day, which
I have located in, for example, the Archives parlementaires
and the Archives nationales, Paris, as part of a wider project
to write the history of the journe of 9 Thermidor, Merdas
The jury is still out, but

overall a botched suicide
attempt seems the most likely
conclusion
name never occurs, save in occasional association with
Bourdon. If he really was the days hero, as he claimed, one
would have expected others to accredit at least part of his
story, which seems in fact to be largely fantastical. Against
his candidature must also be weighed the fact that the story
on the streets of Paris merely hours after the event was that
Robespierre had indeed sought to take his own life. A much
more plausible representation of this decisive moment in
the Htel de Ville is an engraving by the Parisian sans-culotte
artist, Jean-Louis Prieur, which was until very recently
believed to show the September prison massacres of 1792.
On the shooting incident, the jury is still out and the conundrum remains in place, but overall a botched suicide attempt
seems the most likely conclusion.
Contemporsry
portrait of
Maximilien
Robespierre by
Louis Leopold
Boilly.
If uncertainty still hovers over this part of the day, we

can be pretty sure that most other facts about the day in
the above account of the day need substantial revision.
The first myth has it that the deputies who toppled
Robespierre were from the right wing of the Convention.
In fact, the coup dtat was very largely concocted and
conducted by the left-wing caucus of the assembly, the
Montagne, as it was known. The Montagnards within the
assembly were the deputies ideologically closest to Robespierre and by 9 Thermidor, they were feeling threatened by
the increasingly erratic behaviour of their colleague. On 8
Thermidor, Robespierre had come into the Convention and
made a long and vehement speech. It had been six weeks or
so since he had actually attended the assembly (and he had
absented himself from the meetings of the Committee of
Public Safety for much the same period). The speech was a
wild, mildly unbalanced and swingeing attack on the way
the revolution was going. Robespierre voiced his fears for
the revolutions future in such a way that it seemed clear
that he wished to conduct a purge of the government and of
the Convention itself. When asked to name the individuals
that he had in his sights, however, Robespierre airily declined to do so. In this he was ill-advised, for it meant that
no-one within the assembly, save a small cohort of his most
dedicated supporters, could feel safe. Later that evening,
Robespierre repeated his speech in the Jacobin Club, very

much his stronghold at this time, and in the ensuing debate
named two Montagnard colleagues from the Committee
of Public Safety as his principal targets, Collot dHerbois
and Billaud-Varenne. The two men were present in the
club and sought vainly to answer back. Shouted down, they
were driven out of the club with cries of To the guillotine!
ringing in their ears.
I
Engraving by
Jean-Louis Prieur
of Robespierre
inside the Htel
de Ville, July 27th,
1794.
T WAS THUS little wonder that both Collot and Billaud

should be at the heart of the action in the Convention the
next day, as concerted efforts were made to silence Robespierre and to order his arrest. Those who appear to have
been most closely involved in the plot alongside them were
other radical Montagnards, including Tallien, Frron and
Fouch men whom Robespierre disliked because of the
violent ultra-revolutionary repression of provincial dissent
that they had conducted in 1793 and early 1794. Rightwing deputies in the Convention had been talking secretly
for some time about wanting to get rid of Robespierre, but
without much sign of purposive action. It was Robespierres
wild accusations on 8 Thermidor that drove them pell-mell
into the arms of Montagnard deputies, with whom they
shared little ideological ground. In all, 33 of the 35 deputies
who are known to have spoken on the two sessions of
the assembly on 9 Thermidor were in fact Montagnards.
Right-wing deputies ensured the success of the Montagnard
coup only by allowing events to unfold without protest or
intervention. When Robespierre seemed to gesture directly
to them for their support, as the attack on him in the Convention hall shaped up, they simply sat on their hands.
EVEN BEFORE ROBESPIERRES head had hit the guillotine
basket at around 7pm on 10 Thermidor, a further falsehood
was visibly taking form. This our second myth was that
Robespierre had been principally responsible for the Terror
through which the Committee of Public Safety had ruled
the country. He certainly was a very powerful figure. His
chilling rhetoric had been critical in imposing much of
the programme of Terror on the Convention, notably the
General Maximum on prices, the execution of political
opponents including Danton, Camille Desmoulins and
Hbert, the notorious Law of 22 Priairial, which had made
it even easier for the Revolutionary Tribunal to convict
and the Cult of the Supreme Being. Yet he was not the
Terrors sole artisan. For the previous year he had been
only one among 12 members of the Committee of Public
Safety, several of them imposing figures themselves, and all
committee decisions were collective. Indeed Robespierre
personally signed a relatively small number of the Committees decrees. As the number of executions ordered by
the Revolutionary Tribunal increased in June and July 1794,
moreover, Robespierre was actually absent from the Committees meetings. On 9 Thermidor he was attacked less as
the sole director of Terror than as someone whose prestige
and behaviour threatened to spin Revolutionary Government out of control, though in what directions seemed
unclear, given his delphic speech on 8 Thermidor. From that
moment onwards, however, it suited all sides among his
assailants to magnify Robespierres responsibility, allowing
him thus to carry the can for the excesses of the Terror. This
helped to explain the creation of a Robespierre-theAUGUST 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41
9 THERMIDOR
The French
People, or the
Regime of
Robespierre,
France, 1790s.
dictator myth, which has remained surprisingly tenacious.

The fact that the 9 Thermidor coup was led from the
Left rather than the Right determined what happened
once Robespierre was out of the way. Myth three about the
journe has it that the Convention immediately initiated the
Thermidorian Reaction, shifting government policy to the
Right. In fact, as the composition of the anti-Robespierre
plotters suggests, many in government expected the Terror
to continue and indeed to proceed more smoothly now that
Robespierres influence had been removed. Collot dHerbois
and Billaud-Varenne, for example, stayed at the helm within
the Committee of Public Safety. It took time for right-wing

reaction to gather speed a process that was immeasurably
helped by the return to the assembly in December 1794 of
moderate deputies proscribed by the Montagnards in the
course of 1793. The reintegration of these men roughly 80
in total, all nursing a sense of grievance against the Revolutionary Government altered the political complexion of
the Convention in a way that opened the floodgates of reaction. The component parts of the programme and personnel
of the Revolutionary Government had already started to be
disassembled and the process accelerated. The extent of the
the way for an even more dogmatic assertion of economic

liberalism. By then, deputies saw in Collot dHerbois and
Billaud-Varenne less the men who had toppled Robespierre
than the guilty souls who had been his accomplices over the
previous year of Terror. They were sentenced to deportation
to French Guiana.
HE THERMIDORIAN REACTION was thus a

slow-burning phenomenon which took time to
establish itself. Further complicating the steady
drift to the Right was the fact that some of the
most vocal Thermidorians attacking the legacy of Revolutionary Government in Year II were individuals who, on 8
Thermidor, Robespierre had in his sights for being too violently left-wing : individuals like Tallien, Frron and Fouch.
Viewed as extremist (if still Montagnard) radicals before
9 Thermidor, Frron and Tallien, for example, switched
track and led the drift to the Right, marshalling the citys
bourgeois youths into the gangs of jeunesse dore who
launched violent street attacks on former Jacobins and
ex-sectional personnel. Renouncing the universal male
suffrage that had been the crowning institution of the (in
fact never-implemented) Constitution of 1793, the Thermidorians accepted for the new Constitution of Year III (1795)
a property franchise which would take the vote from most
erstwhile sans-culottes.
Had those Parisian sans-culottes been quite such political
push-overs on the journe of 9 Thermidor as they are usually
accounted? Myth four regarding the day has it that a shower
of rain played a key role at a critical juncture in encouraging
Had those Parisian sansculottes been quite such

political push-overs on the
journe of 9 Thermidor as
they are usually accounted?
powers of the Committee of Public Safety were reduced

and its members purged. The Paris Jacobin Club was closed
down altogether and radical sans-culottes driven out of local
committees within the citys 48 administrative sections.
The Revolutionary Tribunal was closed down. The General
Maximum that had kept food prices low was removed, with
the deregulated economy creating great hardship for the
popular classes. When in March and April 1795 there was
armed protest in Paris against the political and economic
policies of the Convention the journes of Germinal and
Prairial the deputies initiated a fierce repression, clearing
Top: Jean-Marie
Collot dHerbois,
French, 18th
century.
Above: Jacques
Nicolas
Billaud-Varenne,
by Jean Baptiste
Greuze, c.1790.
Robespierres sans-culottes supporters from staying in the

streets late at night and staying loyal to his cause. This story,
much repeated in accounts of the day, is simply false. None
of the hundreds of micro-narratives of the day that I have
consulted mention rain. The meteorological data recorded
at the Paris Observatoire (at the southern end of what is
now the Boulevard Saint-Michel) is crystal clear. There was
a mild westerly wind and the day was rather overcast and
warm: 180C at midday and almost 150 at 10.15pm. But with
the exception of a light shower in the morning at 9.15am,
well before even the overthrow of Robespierre, the day was
bone dry. No rain fell to test the fidelity of the sans-culottes,
save in the imaginations of many of the days historians.
This convenient contributing factor to the story of
Parisian sans-culottes apathy and indifference on the day can
thus safely be discounted. So, indeed, can Parisian popular
apathy and indifference, which constitute the fifth myth
about the day. The picture of sans-culottes demobilisation,
which appears in almost all accounts, turns out to be false.
Doubtless, there were cases of individuals who went off to
bars and taverns or back to their homes and beds. But the
numerous and largely neglected accounts of the day
that exist show that the vast majority of the men on the
9 THERMIDOR
Place de lHtel de Ville at 8pm seemingly in the Communes cause stayed on active duty and simply passed over
to support the Convention against Robespierre. The citys
48 sections acted, too, as mobilisation centres, drawing
additional recruits into the ranks of the pro-Convention
National Guard. Orders from the assembly to neighbourhood authorities late in the evening saw half of sectional
forces patrolling their neighbourhoods to ensure that law
and order were upheld, with the other half detailed to rally
at the Place du Carrousel outside the Tuileries palace which
housed the Convention. By then the assembly had also
Membership card
of a sans-culottes
club from
southern France.
palace was such that they had been among the first that
the Convention mobilised. But the forces that actually
launched the attack on the Commune were a cross-city
sampling of sections. One of the most prominent delegations, for example, came from the Gravilliers section, one
of the poorest, which had always been among the most
radical sections in the city. The idea that Robespierre was
toppled by a bourgeois militia of prosperous Parisians while
depoliticised sans-culottes slumbered in their beds is simply
untrue. Robespierre fell to a socially hybrid army. It would
not be wrong to say that it was the massed forces of Parisian
sans-culotterie who toppled him.
T IS ODD THAT a big political event like the

day of 9 Thermidor has attracted so much
mythology and misrepresentation. It is all
the odder in that the day is exceptionally
well-documented. Barras ordered each of the 48
sections to produce multiple accounts of what
had happened within them on the days of 8, 9
and 10 Thermidor and these voluminous
accounts still exist. So too do numerous individual police dossiers of arrested individuals, plus
the background documentation brought together by a Convention committee charged on 10
Thermidor, Year II to produce an official history
of the day. Headed by the moderate deputy
Edme-Bonaventure Courtois, this official
history was presented to the Convention
almost as an anniversary gift on 8 Thermidor,
Year III (July 26th, 1795). Courtois account
is detailed and thorough, but it has a decided
ideological parti- pris which is curiously at
odds with the documentation that his committee had amassed. One full year after the
anti-Robespierre coup dtat, Courtois was
evidently endeavouring to tell the Thermidorian
reactionaries what he thought by then they
wanted to hear. He thus vaunted the role of the
Convention as a whole and almost completely
effaced the role of both the people of Paris and
the Montagnard deputies in securing the days
victory. This was quite a rhetorical achievement
and, unfortunately, a highly influential one, for Courtois
official history has guided the pens of generations of historians ever since. If we wish to demythologise the history of
one of the most epochal days in the whole Revolutionary
decade, we must return to the archives.
If we wish to demythologise the history

of one of the most epochal days in the whole
Revolutionary decade, we must return
to the archives
placed its forces under the orders of the deputy, Barras. As
a result of this impromptu call-up, Barras commanded an
active force far larger certainly by several multiples than
the number of men who had been outside the Htel de
Ville at 8pm.
At some time after midnight, Barras determined to use
his forces not only in a defensive stance around the Convention but also as an attacking army against the Commune.
From 1am, or just after, two citizens armies under Barras
command, each thousands strong, wended their way in a
pincer movement from the Tuileries eastward towards the
Place de lHtel de Ville. They arrived to find it with scarcely
an individual to be seen. Not a shot needed to be fired
before the advance guard stormed into the Commune itself
to confront Robespierre and his allies in their lair.
Myth six about the journe of 9 Thermidor has it that
Barras troops, who seized Robespierre and his accomplices, were drawn essentially from the more prosperous
sections of the west of the city. It is certainly true that
the propinquity of many of these sections to the Tuileries
Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London

and the author of The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (Oxford
FURTHER READING
Franoise Brunel, Thermidor: la chute de Robespierre
(Editions Complexe, 1989)
Philippe de Carbonnires, Le sans-culotte Prieur,
Annales historiques de la Rvolution franaise (2009)
Colin Jones, The Overthrow of Maximilien Robespierre
and thre Indifference of the People, American Historical
Review (2014)
MakingHistory
High-minded allegations of prurience should not stop historians from examining the intimate lives
of people in the past, argues Suzannah Lipscomb.
Sex changes over time

I RECENTLY introduced my undergraduates to Montaillou, the classic
1975 study by Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie, which provides insight into
the lives of 14th-century peasants
in the tiny Pyrenean village of that
name. Studying depositions collected
during inquisitorial investigations into
the Cathar heresy by Jacques Fournier,
Bishop of Pamiers (and future Pope
Benedict XII, meaning the records
were preserved in the Vatican Library),
Ladurie was able to reconstruct the
villagers beliefs about God, love,
sex, death, time, space, marriage and
magic. It is an outstanding example
of microhistory, exposing the most
intimate secrets and daily experiences
of these remote medieval people.
An academic review of Montaillou, responding to its appearance
in English translation, critiqued its
methodology and prurient focus. The
reviewer, David Herlihy, censured it
on the grounds of sloppy and manipulative mistranslations (although,
in turn, I find fault with some of
Herlihys Latin) and for including what
he thought were lengthy, explicit and
atypical examples of sexual behaviour
and treatment. Herlihy suggests that
one chief reason for the commercial
success of the book was its frank, extended treatment of sex and asks: Is it
the historians chief duty to titillate?
Clearly an ethical approach to the
past is one that does not reduce people
to their sexual activity or proclivities,
any more than it is one that employs a
sort of moral parochialism in judging
its subjects. In both cases, E.P. Thompsons injunction against the enormous
condescension of posterity is apt.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott
thought that history was obscene necromancy: the raising of the dead. An
historian who writes to titillate runs
the risk of obscene necrophilia as well.
The reasons why sex might sell
history books and why the consideration of sexual attitudes and behaviour
might be thought mere titillation are
one and the same: it is easy to assume
that sex is a kind of activity outside
history, a constant through time. We
imagine that we experience and think
about bodily pleasures in similar ways,
no matter whether a 21st-century professional or a 14th-century peasant.
Yet, since Keith Thomas article on
the double standard in 1959, sexual
behaviour and attitudes to sexuality
have been topics that scholars have
Historians should not assume

that sex and the panoply of
ideas surrounding it have
always been the same
historicised. How sexuality was manifested, how sexual desire has been
understood and how sexual behaviour
has been governed have been deemed
fit subjects for historical inquiry.
Such studies not only tell us much
about changing social mores, but also
about notions of identity, community
and power relations. Michel Foucault,
in his History of Sexuality (1976),
coined the term biopower to describe
Behind the
curtain: an
illustration from
Barthelemy
l'Anglais' Le livre
des Proprietes des
choses, c.1410.
the emergent nation states attempt

to regulate its early modern subjects
by subjugating their bodies. Faramerz
Dabhoiwalas book, The Origins of Sex
(2012), examines the culture of sexual
policing in 16th- and 17th-century
Europe and America that predated
what he describes as the first sexual
revolution: the intellectual shift in
attitudes to the regulation and prosecution of the body. In one chilling
story, he relates the voluntary confession of Massachusetts settler James
Britton in 1644 to having tried to have
sexual intercourse with an 18-year-old
bride, Mary Lathan, without success.
The couple were convicted of adultery
and hanged. Crucially, such severity
towards sexual rebels was not just
an imposition by church and state;
people internalised ideals of chastity,
believing that passion was dangerous
and shameful and illicit sexuality
criminal, policing themselves with
vigour. In Nmes in 1588, a group of
women demanded to be let into Vidal
Raymonds house, crying out that they
knew he kept a woman inside. When
he would not open the door, they
forced an entry and found a woman
trying to hide herself under the straw;
the women called her a whore and
chased her out of town.
Historians do not want to be the
equivalent of those women: chasing
down our subjects, demanding they
give up their secrets and passing
judgement on them. Nor should we
write merely for prurient amusement.
But neither should we assume that sex
and the panoply of ideas surrounding
it have always been the same. Even on
this most familiar of territories, when
we look into the past, we see through
a glass darkly.
Suzannah Lipscomb is Senior Lecturer in Early
Modern History and Head of the Faculty of History
at the New College of the Humanities, London.
NEUVE CHAPELLE
The Battle of
Neuve Chapelle
& the Indian Corps

The contribution of Indian troops to one of the first major battles
on the Western Front has been all but forgotten by historians. A
century on, Andrew Sharpe makes amends.
HIS YEAR MARKS the centenary of the Battle of Neuve

Chapelle, fought over the most dismal, swampy and disgusting region of the British Front between March 10th and 12th,
1915. The historian John Terraine wrote that Neuve Chapelle
marked Britains debut as a major land power, but that statement is
only partially accurate. Half of the infantry that assaulted the German
lines on the first day were from the Indian Corps and three quarters of
those men were recruited from the subcontinent itself. They fought
exceptionally well and gained all of their objectives, winning two
Victoria Crosses along the way. Yet, to a large degree, both they and
their heroic exploits have been airbrushed from popular history, for,
as Terraine implied, if this was the end of the beginning for the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front, it also marked the
demise of the Indian Corps.
At the beginning of March 1915 the BEF comprised just 11 infantry
divisions. Two of those were the Indian Corps, commanded by LieutenantGeneral Sir James Willcocks. The Corps began to arrive at the front
during October 1914 and was immediately committed to the intense
fighting at the First Battle of Ypres. As with the rest of the BEF, they
had suffered a severe battering and were under strength. However,
when on March 4th General Sir Douglas Haig, then commanding the
1st Corps, inquired whether the Indians would be ready to attack at
Second Rifle
Brigade and Second
Battalion (39th
Garhwal Rifles) at
Neuve Chapelle,
contemporary
illustration.
NEUVE CHAPELLE
Right: Indian troops holding a
trench near Neuve Chapelle.
Below: cover of the Sphere, showing
Bengal Lancers returning from
Neuve Chapelle, April 10th, 1915.
Neuve Chapelle in six days time, Willcocks replied that the prospect
of a sharp fight, cheered all ranks and lifted their spirits. That was no
doubt true; the severe winter that the BEF had endured was, according
to Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, trying and
possibly enervating. But Willcocks enthusiasm was apparently contradicted only four days later at a conference of his senior officers. He
later wrote that it was unanimously agreed that I should represent to
the C-in-C that it would be wise to relieve the Indian battalions then
in France as soon as this could conveniently be done.
The reason for this apparent contradiction was that making good
the losses sustained by the battalions of the Indian Corps was difficult,
not because of the distance from training depots but because of the
recruitment practices of the Indian army.
Recruitment to the Indian army was dictated by a pernicious racial
theory, which held that men from the northern part of the subcontinent, principally the Punjab and Nepal the so-called Martial Races
were better suited to soldiering than men from Bengal or the south,
in spite of plentiful and persuasive evidence to the contrary. The theory
developed as a consequence of the Indian Mutiny of 1857; soldiers from
the Martial Races had generally remained loyal to the British. Whatever
the rights and wrongs of the theory, in practice it caused considerable
difficulties when the army was sustaining significant casualties. Indian
battalions were either all recruited from one class, such as Sikhs or
Gurkhas, or were constructed along class-company lines: for example,
the 57th (Wildes) Rifles comprised a company each of Sikhs, Dogras,
Pathans and Punjabi Muslims. This made coherent reinforcement and
replacement of losses absurdly complex. The problem was further
exacerbated by the fact that British officers were expected to speak
the language of their men in addition to Urdu, the lingua franca of the
army, as well as understanding their cultural and religious practices.

Partly because British officers were much easier to discern in Indian
than in British units, the casualty rate among junior officers on the
Western Front was close to 100 per cent, compared with 20-25 per
cent in equivalent British battalions. The narrowness of the recruiting
base thus led to a critical shortage of men and British officers capable
of leading them. As Willcocks and his generals acknowledged on March
8th, 1915, the logistical effort required to maintain the Indian Corps
in France was in danger of overwhelming their army.
HE PLAN OF ATTACK for Neuve Chapelle set a template for

many of the battles that were to follow on the Western Front.
For the first time, aircraft conducted a thorough aerial survey
of the battle area. Artillery was prepared and ammunition
stockpiled for the preliminary bombardment, which, among other
tasks, was designed to cut the German wire and destroy the frontline
trenches. The Garhwal Brigade was designated to attack from the south
towards Neuve Chapelle and then wheel to its right after securing
the village. The British 23rd and 25th Brigades were to attack west to
east directly facing the village. The 2nd Battalion, 39th Garhwal Rifles
were to link with the right-hand British unit, the 2nd Battalion, the
Rifle Brigade. The reserves were then to push through and on to the
battles tactical objective, the Aubers Ridge, and if possible beyond.
The concentrated bombardment that began at 7.30am on March 10th,
1915 was of unprecedented violence. At 8.05am the infantry advanced.
In the centre of the attacking line, the first phase of the assault was
successful, although some of the British battalions suffered casualties
from their own short artillery fire. The German wire had been cut and
their trenches largely destroyed. The Garhwals and Rifle Brigade linked
The Indian Corps was partially

decapitated and, owing to its
recruitment practices, much less
capable of making good its losses
the wood at dusk but in so doing had no support The Illustrated

and exposed flanks. They were also receiving in- War News with a
telligence from German prisoners that the wood spread showing
Indian soldiers at
had been reinforced. As night fell on March 10th
Neuve Chapelle,
the brigade therefore withdrew to a position 200 March 24th, 1915.
yards to their rear and entrenched. They were still
400 yards to the front of the Rifle Brigade and on their left. This manoeuvre was to attract unjustified criticism from Haig after the battle,
but it is difficult to see what other course of action was open to them.
Further British and Indian attacks and a sizeable German counterattack were mounted on March 11th and 12th, with considerable losses
and gallantry on both sides, but no further progress was made. Haig
issued orders ceasing operations at 10.05pm on March 12th.
British forces at Neuve Chapelle sustained 12,811 casualties. The
Indian Corps suffered 4,233 of which 133 British and 60 Indian officers
were killed, wounded or missing. The Indian Corps was partially decapitated and, due to its recruitment practices, much less capable of
making good its losses than the British.
up as planned at 8.50am and Neuve Chapelle was entirely in British

hands 40 minutes later. Along the way, Rifleman Gobar Sing Negi of
the Garhwals had fought a trench-clearing action with his bayonet and
was to be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.
The lead battalions pushed on to their objectives and began to entrench. Although the village had been taken with relative ease, there
were difficulties on both flanks. On the left the 2nd Battalion, the
Middlesex Regiment and the 2nd Battalion, the Scottish Rifles (The
Cameronians) had encountered uncut wire and been held up. This
exposed the flank of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Irish Rifles to their
right and although the Irish Rifles commanding officer recognised that there was an opportunity to encircle and cut
off the German defenders, his request to do so was denied.
Damage at
The Germans rapidly reinforced their strongpoints facing
Neuve Chapelle
these units, in particular with machine guns on a bridge over
following its
the relatively narrow River des Layes towards the northern
capture, 1915.
end of the battlefield. Those guns were able to dominate the
battlefield and would ultimately help prevent any further
British progress.
On the extreme right, the 1st Battalion, 39th Garhwal
Rifles had also come unstuck. Their trenches were not perpendicular to the line of advance. As a result they attacked
to the right of their intended target and assaulted German
trenches that had not been touched by British artillery.
This fighting involved both the Garhwals and the 2nd Battalion, the Leicestershire Regiment, among whose number
Private William Buckingham won a Victoria Cross. This
action had far less impact on the rest of the battle than
the British problems to the left but still took the best part
of the day to resolve. However, the Germans were kept
occupied and did not significantly threaten the flank of the
Indian attack.
Despite these local difficulties, the supporting Dehra Dun
Brigade did eventually receive orders to push on and make for
their objective, a wood called the Bois du Biez en route to the
Aubers Ridge. The 2nd Battalion, 2nd Gurkha Rifles reached
NEUVE CHAPELLE
HE REGIMENTAL HISTORY of the Garhwal Rifles posited a

theory as to why the 1st Battalion attacked the wrong German
trenches on the right flank of the main attack. The battalions
left-hand company was actually comprised of men from a different regiment, the 38th Dogras, who had joined as reinforcements
in January 1915.
[I]t can only be conjectured that the Dogras, being the younger in the war,
and relying greatly on the more experienced Garhwalis alongside, kept
touch with them, instead of, as ordered, keeping their left flank on the
line assigned.
Their company commanders, Captains Owen and Clarke, were killed

leading their men.
The Indians had fought with great credit since their arrival in France,
in some cases pioneering innovative tactics for the nascent art of trench
warfare, but their arrival and deployment was not without controversy.
The historian David Olusoga has persuasively argued that the Germans
were affronted by the allies use of troops from their colonies on the
Western Front. In some cases those feelings were mirrored in their own
armies. The British were apt to find fault, or to only damn with
faint praise, the actions of the Indians. As Willcocks wrote at
the time, the Indian Corps did not always receive the credit
in its own Army that it was due.
The most enduringly controversial aspect of the Indian deployment concerned the issue of self-inflicted wounds. There
is no doubt that the shock of arriving at an intense industrial
war, for which the Indian army was not recruited, designed,
trained nor equipped, led to a brief outbreak of self-wounding
among Indian troops. This was dealt with promptly by the high
command and had ceased by mid-November 1914. What has
not ceased is the reporting of implausible statistics throughout
the historiography with no attempt to place this brief phenomenon in any kind of context with the other combatant
armies: there is considerable evidence that the self-inflicting
of wounds was common to all Allied units.
BJECTIVELY THE INDIANS achieved more than

any other participants on March 10th, 1915. That
was not necessarily the fault of their British counterparts. The battle became bogged down for many
of the reasons that would reappear in allied set-piece efforts over the
next few years. Battlefield command was difficult in the fog of war,
particularly when the makeshift telephone cables had been destroyed
by artillery fire, and at this point in the war the British were suffering
from a severe shortage of artillery shells, which meant that exploiting
infantry successes on the battlefield was difficult, if not impossible.
The shell shortage was a scandal that would eventually contribute to
the toppling of the government.
Nevertheless the Indian Corps deserved better than Haigs heavily
qualified and rather churlish praise:
India Office wired for names of Indian units which had done well in the
fighting In sending this information I added that, to prevent misconception [in India] and false conclusions it should be stated that though
Indians had done very well the task accomplished by them was not so
difficult as that of the British.
This was a nonsense that was subsequently amplified in the official
history as the Indian Corps senior officers lack of connections became
evident. Careers spent skirmishing on the fringes of Empire carried a
social and political cost and Brigadier-General Edmonds, the official
historian, was closer to some generals than others.
The Times editorial of April 19th argued that at Neuve Chapelle for
the first time the British Army has broken the German line and that
the battle proved that the German Army was not invincible, therefore
providing a much needed fillip to British morale. What has tended to be
underestimated was the Indian contribution to that battle.
The Battle of Neuve Chapelle was a limited success, Britains first
in offensive operations. The opportunity for a breakthrough fleetingly existed during the morning of March 10th. A dangerous salient
was blunted and over a mile of ground was captured. Tactics were pioneered that could, and would, work again, if managed with precision. It
prompted a critical reappraisal of British offensive capabilities by friend
and foe alike. However, a significant portion of the credit for all of that
deserves to go to the Indian Corps. This battle was not quite their swan-
The Indians had fought with great

credit, in some cases pioneering
innovative tactics for the nascent
art of trench warfare
Graves of Indian
soldiers from the
Garhwal Rifle
Brigade at Neuve
Chapelle.
song on the Western Front, but the casualties they sustained hastened
their departure. They struggled on until December 1915, when what
was left of the Corps sailed for the ill-fated campaign in Mesopotamia.
Major-General Keary, commander of the Lahore Division, noted that
the Corps was like a squeezed orange sucked dry and chucked away
without a word of thanks or recognition. He had good grounds for
bitterness. His division would go on to lose 50 per cent of its strength
a month later at the Second Battle of Ypres. The more diplomatic Willcocks agreed. He lamented that the Indians raconteurs are few and far
between. That is a situation that deserves to be addressed 100 years on.
Andrew Sharpe works in finance and is an occasional military historian specialising in the
Indian Army.
FURTHER READING
Geoff Bridger, The Battle of Neuve Chapelle (Pen & Sword, 1998).
Gordon Corrigan, Sepoys in the Trenches. The Indian Corps on the
Western Front 1914-1915 (Spellmount, 2006).
Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour. An Account of the Indian Army, Its
Officers and Men (Jonathan Cape, 1974).
XXXXXXXXX
AGE
| BRONZE
Spreading
the Word
Many of the worlds languages

derive from a single source.
Harry Ritchie tells the story of
Proto-Indo-European.
Linguistic
overlord: Bronze
Age cult wagon
miniature,
c.ninth-fifth
century bc,
discovered in
Spain.
IN ENGLISH, the word for a male parent is father. In

Dutch it is vader, in German vater and in the Scandinavian
languages far. Father is also related to French pre and padre
in Spanish and Italian, which all derive from Latins pater,
to Classical Greeks pateras and even to peeta in Bengali or,
indeed, pacer in Tocharian, an extinct language believed to
have been last spoken about a thousand years ago on the
north-western border of China.
Almost all the languages spoken in Europe, northern
India, Iran and Afghanistan are related to one another. But
this language family tree is an inverted form of the typical
family tree. Almost all the European and north Indian languages are twigs and branches that grow thicker and fewer
as they recede into the past and, like a real tree, they turn
out to have grown from one seed. One language, spoken by
one group 5,000 years ago, is the ancestor of almost every
language now spoken from the Hebrides to the Himalayas,

by nearly three billion people.
This is not a new discovery: the uncanny similarities
between Indias Sanskrit and Ancient Greek were first
noticed a couple of centuries ago and the ancestor language
was first painstakingly reconstructed by linguists in the
19th century. They traced the connections and ancestries of
words and structures, beyond the invention of writing, far
into the distant past.
Yet most people remain unaware of the extraordinary
legacy of that one Bronze Age language. And it is extraordinary. The linguistic evidence is vast and undeniable.
Around 5,000 years ago, one tribe, known by the unwieldy
name of Proto-Indo-Europeans, achieved the complete
linguistic takeover of Europe and northern India, yet there
is nothing in the actual, archaeological record to suggest
| BRONZE AGE
anything like an ancient empire stretching from Portugal
to Orkney to Nepal. In fact, there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that this tribe existed at all: no
monuments, no settlements, no buildings, not even any
distinctive ornaments or pots. The only traces they left
behind were the words they used, which have survived in
their various forms in our modern languages and which can
be reconstructed following logical rules of language change.
So what happened? Who were these linguistic overlords
of an entire continent and half of another? Where did they
come from and how did they do it?
This tribe may remain invisible to archaeology but,
because so much of their language has
been successfully reconstructed, we
know a lot about them from their vocabulary. We know, for example, their
number system we can count to
ten: oynos, duwo, treyes, kwetwores,
penkwe, sweks, septm, oktu, newn,
dekm. We know that theirs was a
patriarchal society based on clans and
three social classes (priests, warriors
and farmers/herdsmen). The tribe was
led by one man, possibly a warrior/priest, called the regs
(giving Latins rex). We know about the animals they reared
and the food they ate (lots of meat and dairy, from their
herds), washed down by mead (medhu). We know about the
gods they worshipped, headed by a Sky Father (Dyeupihter); the feasts they used to hold; the taboo words they
would never use while hunting. Language reconstruction
offers the kind of insight conventional archaeology cannot.
We even know that they distinguished two different sorts
of fart. This is the reverse of conventional archaeology. With
these language conquerors, we know their word for a soft
fart (pezd, with disarming onomatopoeia), but we cannot
tell who they were nor how they managed to impose their
language on such an enormous area of the Earths inhabitable land mass.
Scholars have been trying to find answers to these
questions for nearly 200 years, puzzling over their vocabulary for clues. We know that they did not come from the
Mediterranean, as no words for olive or cypress survive,
for example. The absence of any terms for banana, monkey
or elephant suggests that they were not from Africa. They
did have words for things like wolf, beaver and oak, which
points to a homeland with forests and rivers, and they had
a word for bee (bhei), which means they lived west of the
steppes (where there are no bees), and beech, which places
them west of the beechline that runs south from what is
now the city of Kaliningrad to Crimea.
One theory is that they were the people who introduced
farming to Europe and India, but unfortunately the dates
are wrong. Farming had spread west into Europe by 6500 bc
but, according to linguists estimates, this language could
only have been around by 4000 bc at the earliest.
Recent research has, however, made significant progress
and has, for the first time, pinpointed the tribe to a particular place and time, to a homeland just south of Volgograd
in southern Russia and to a date of 3500 bc.
It now seems that these Proto-Indo-Europeans spread
out from their homeland on the border of the Russian
Their influence can

be seen in many
areas, from their
decimal numbers
to their gods
steppes in a series of separate migrations. The first of these

is the most astonishing. In 3500 bc a small group of them
trekked across the grass desert of the steppes to a lushly
fertile and uninhabited area at the foot of the Altai mountains, on the north-western border of China.
The next large migration was in 3000 bc, along the
Danube. Thereafter, there were separate waves, west into
Europe and south to Iran, Afghanistan and north India.
Wherever they went, they left nothing behind no towns,
no forts or stockades, no temples, no signs of even a single
house apart from their language, which somehow
replaced every local tongue.
Although this new interpretation suggests they did not
advance through military means, they did have two evolutionary technological innovations: the wheel and the horse.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans certainly had a warrior caste
and they seem to have set great store by manly prowess in
battle. In his The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (2014)
the historian Adam Nicolson has argued persuasively that
Homers Iliad evokes a previous era of Proto-Indo-European
warriors descending from the north to ransack the palaces
and cities of the Mediterranean. But, mighty though their
warriors were, the Proto-Indo-Europeans could not have
conquered by military power alone. There were too few of
them and cavalry charges and chariots were both inventions far in the future.
These people were nomads, who rode horses to control
their vast herds and who put their wheels to use by making
the wagons and carts that were their mobile homes. Hence
their invisibility to the archeologists they had neither
permanent settlements nor buildings, but moved from
one area to the next, through Europe and Iran and India in
search of pasture for their herds. Theirs was a new form of
nomadic farming and it was very successful at a time when
settled farmers were struggling with the increasingly dry
conditions of Bronze Age climate change.
Wealthy, well-fed, with wheels, the Proto-IndoEuropeans were like postwar Americans and the language
they spoke was like English now, the prestige language of
a successful and powerful people, isolating and killing off
local languages, just as the majority of the 7,000 languages
currently spoken in the world are fated to extinction and to
be replaced, possibly by Spanish or Mandarin, but usually
by English.
These Bronze Age people were inadvertent globalisers,
transforming their known world, giving that world their
voice and, in doing so, remaking that world in their own
image. It was not just their language they bequeathed to
the length and breadth of Europe and beyond but their
culture and their mindset, too. Their influence can be
seen in many areas, from their decimal numbers to their
religious beliefs (those sky gods, ruled by Dyeu-pihter),
to entertainment, the descendants of their epic poems
including Homer, the Vedic epics of Sanskrit and even our
films and novels.
Britons, Swedes, Russians, Indians, Iranians, Afghanis,
everyone from Reykjavik to Nepal: they are all children of
the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Harry Ritchie is the author of English for the Natives: Discover the Grammar
You Don't Know You Know (John Murray, 2014).
XXXXXXXXXX
| TERROR
Young Guns
By looking at terrorism in Japan during the 1970s, Tim Stanley reveals the cyclical
nature of political violence and the means of its defeat.
ISLAMISM HAS BROUGHT revolutionary violence to the
city streets of the developed world. In January 2015 two
brothers forced their way into the offices of the Charlie
Hebdo magazine in Paris and killed 12 people. Two days later,
another man murdered four and held several hostage at a
kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes. All the culprits
were relatively young, all apparently Islamist ideologues. All
were eventually killed.
The cause of the Parisian violence is a controversial
subject. Some note the material deprivation or racism
experienced by the attackers; a few have charged Hebdo
with incitement; others point the finger at antisemitism,

fundamentalist brainwashing or even Islam itself. What has
been rarely discussed is the history of urban revolutionary
violence and the way it conforms to patterns. For evidence
of a formula, we can look four decades back and thousands
of miles away, to the snowy mountains of Karuizawa, Japan,
in February 1972. This was the site of the Asama-Sans
Incident and the moment when Japans revolutionary Left
bloodily self-destructed live on national television.
It began when the Japanese police launched a raid on the
countrys United Red Army (URA), led by Tsuneo Mori and
Standoff: police
officers outside
the Asama Sans
lodge, February
1st, 1972.
XXXXXXXXXXX
Hiroko Nagata, hiding out in a compound near Karuizawa.

It was not much of an army just a couple of dozen young
members. Nor was it particularly united. Mori and Nagata
decided that URA needed to purify itself against capitalism
and so initiated a purge. Eight soldiers, and one hapless
civilian who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time, had the life beaten out of them. Six other members of
the URA were tied to trees and left to freeze to death in the
cold winter air. On February 16th the police arrived. Some of
the gang were arrested but five grabbed their guns and ran
into the mountains.
The fugitives came across a cabin called Asama Sans
and decided to hole up there while they tried to figure out
what to do. Inside they found Yasuko Muta, the 31-year-old
wife of the lodges caretaker, and took her hostage. It looked
like they had landed on their feet: the lodge was difficult
to access, built into the side of the mountain, designed
like a maze and easily defended. So when Mutas husband
came home and discovered that his wife was hidden behind
a barricade of furniture and he called the police, the five
revolutionaries settled down for a long siege. One of them
later explained that they realised they had committed a sin
by initiating the brutal purges. By resisting the authorities,
they hoped to obtain some sort of absolution.
Shielded by futons
The arrival of the police was followed by the arrival of
the television cameras and the incident quickly became
a ratings hit. For ten days, the whole of Japan was glued
to its television sets as the police set up roadblocks and
loudhailers and begged the students to come out quietly.
They even bombarded the walls of the lodge with baseballs
to keep the radicals awake all night. Finally, on February
28th, a wrecking ball smashed into the walls of the lodge.
The police made their way in floor by floor, dodging bullets
and homemade bombs. Two died, along with a member of
the public. They finally found the five rebels buried behind
a shield of futons. Muta was released and said she had been
treated well. The father of one of the revolutionaries hanged
himself in shame.
The incident was not unique in the 1970s. Revolutionary movements across the developed world had discovered
that there was little will among the working class for a
general uprising, so they had to create the circumstances
under which class tensions might be accentuated. They did
this through acts of violence designed to provoke the state
to make it reveal its unjust, ugly reality. In West Germany
the Baader-Meinhof Gang torched department stores,
bombed US barracks and kidnapped an industrialist. In
Italy the Red Brigades kidnapped and assassinated a former
prime minister.
The Japanese Left liked to hijack planes and felt a
particular affinity with the Palestinian struggle. It had
a spiritual dimension to its Marxism that suggested its
members were far more attuned to Japanese traditionalism
than they would like to admit. Japans militarist movements
of the early 20th century had also been dominated by young
men who believed that Japan was being betrayed by liberal
capitalism and who thought that redemption could be
achieved through violence. They also thought it important
that the revolutionary fight a war against himself. They had
to confront their own decadence and doubts, squeeze them

out or die trying. Hence, Japanese militarists revived the
samurai bushido code, which redefined death as a political
and personal statement: often a means to saving or regaining face after an act of shame. The deaths by beating or exposure that occurred shortly before the incident should not
then be dismissed as accidents or youthful dogmatism gone
awry. The URA did not even accept that their comrades had
been murdered. They said that they had undergone haiboku
shi: death by defeatism. And, like a good samurai, Tsuneo
Mori killed himself in prison on January 1st, 1973.
Television access
These young guns were all products of the television age.
They understood the power of the cathode ray tube. In a
similar incident in Japan in 1968, a man called Kim Hee Roh
took hostages and demanded access to television cameras
to vent his grievances. That criminals could make such a
request, that it would be met and that Japanese viewers
were prepared to watch, recast violence as political theatre
an act that transformed killers into actors and citizens
into a bloodthirsty audience. The audience share for the
Asama-Sans Incident peaked at 89.7 per cent and blotted
out coverage of Richard Nixons visit to China,
which was arguably more important. In many
ways, it invented Japanese rolling news. Revolutionary violence turned young nobodies
into celebrities.
Fast forward to the 2015 Paris killings and
the parallels are striking. The differences are
that the French killers were Muslims rather
than Marxists, rather more proletarian and
motivated by grievances towards French
racism. But they, too, practiced a philosophy
that blended politics and religion. They, too,
used suicidal violence to make a political
statement and achieve redemption (in their case, rebirth
in a heaven full of willing virgins). They, too, understood
the power of images in politics. The attack upon Hebdo for
publishing cartoons was an assault upon the media that
simultaneously invited the media to film and comment
upon the violence.
The repetition of terrorist violence down through the
decades is depressing, but acknowledging its cyclical qualities can also be helpful in combating it. We can deduce that,
while ideologies invite people to kill, it is not ideology alone
that motivates them to do it. Equally appealing is risk, the
desire to die for a cause, the thrill of spilling blood and the
chance to appear on television. These instincts are evergreen but the people acting on them can be beaten. In Japan
and Europe in the 1970s, urban terrorism was defeated
by the state becoming cleverer and tougher. The violence
also turned many people away from the movements that
used it. They dwindled as the children in the ranks died off
or were arrested. Most importantly, the great revolution
came almost completely to an end with Marxisms defeat in
the Cold War. Defeat ideas decisively and the groups they
sustain can be beaten, too.
In the 1970s,
urban terrorism
was defeated
by the state
becoming
cleverer and
tougher
Tim Stanley is the author of Citizen Hollywood: How the Collaboration

Between LA and DC Revolutionized American Politics (Dunne Books, 2014).
REVIEWS
Robert Carver revels in the Hellenistic life of Hannibal

Anthony Fletcher on Queen Caroline Sarah Dunant enjoys a convent scandal
Jacques-Louis David
Leonidas at Thermopylae, 480 bc
(1814), Louvre, Paris.
SIGNPOSTS
Ancient Sparta in Modern Fiction

Paul Cartledge argues that all historiography can be seen as fictionalised
and relishes the fact that novelists breathe new life into ancient worlds.
PROBABLY MOST HISTORIANS
fall into one of two camps on the
sensitive issue of historical fiction
(see Jerome de Groots Signposts,
March 2015). There are those
who hate it, precisely because it
is fiction and so exempted from a
fair number of articles of the historians binding code of practice,
such as objectivity, avoidance of
anachronism, fidelity to source
materials and an overriding
concern with explanation. On
the opposite side are those who
welcome or even embrace it, for

the sake of the insights that a
novelist, unfettered by professional historiographical protocols,
may bring in the way of empathetic understanding, feel and
contemporary colour. Then, of
course, there are those historians
who like to have a foot in both
camps in their own historiography, passing off unwarranted
speculations as dead certainties
(no names, no pack drill).
I belong unhesitatingly to
the second camp. This is partly

because I recognise that all
historiography is to some degree
fictionalised: it is we historians
who make history, after all, out of
what we are prepared to count as
certain facts of a significant past.
But it is mainly because, lacking
the necessary imagination
myself, I relish the efforts of novelists, some of whom are also historians, who attempt to breathe
new life into the ancient worlds
of the Greeks and Romans:
Edward Bulwer Lytton, Robert

Graves, Rosemary Sutcliff, Peter
Green, William Golding, Harry
Sidebottom there is a long and
noble tradition of such writing.
Perhaps my favourite remains,
after 50 years, Mary Renault:
I first read her Last of the Wine
(1956) as an early 1960s schoolboy and fairly recently re-read it
as a professional ancient historian
of 40 years standing. It still
stacks up remarkably well as a
sympathetic recreation of Greek
and Athenian culture and society,
not least in its homoeroticism.
In this brief contribution,
though, it is ancient Sparta that
I want to take centre stage. The
modernist, feminist pioneer
was Naomi Mitchison: her Black
Sparta novella (1928) anticipated
her full-blown novel The Corn
King and the Spring Queen (1933
and again republished 40 years
later by Virago). Over the last
decade or two there has flowed a
further steady stream of Spartabased novels. This includes the
graphic novel series of the 1990s
by Frank Miller, which became
the basis of the digitallyenhanced movie franchise 300
(not bad) and 300: Rise of an
Empire (execrable). But, as literature, Steven Pressfields Gates
of Fire (1998), a novel of the
Battle of Thermopylae (480 bc),
knocks that into a cocked hat.
The list of US vets going back as
far as the Korean War who have
paid tribute to its authenticity
not necessarily the same as
historicity is staggering for its
warmth and length.

Most Sparta-based novels are
indeed set in wartime, hardly surprisingly. Two that focus, like Last
of the Wine, on the Athens-Sparta
Peloponnesian War (431-404 bc)
are Jon Edward Martins Shades
of Artemis (2004) and Nick
Nicastros The Isle of Stone (2005).
Martins is helpfully subtitled
A Novel of Ancient Greece and the
Spartan Brasidas. Brasidas died at
Amphipolis in 422 and certainly
deserves his fictional exhumation, given the tantalising hints
dropped by Thucydides and
Plutarch; but Martins style is a
bit clunky and, though he credits
help from a professional ancient
historian with an expert knowledge of the subject, he makes too
many factual errors, not least in
the spelling of ancient names, to
inspire total confidence.
Gorgo (her name

means gorgon)
had a mind of
her own, had
something to say,
and was not afraid
to say it in public,
to men
Far more reliable and in
conception more stimulating is
Nicastros Novel of Ancient Sparta,
which focuses on one of the most
fascinating of all episodes in that
prolonged and devastating conflict. The isle in question is Sphacteria, lying off the south-west
coast of Messenia in the Peloponnese, where a small Spartan
detachment got itself trapped in
425 and the survivors, in flagrant
contravention of the strict
Spartan code, or at any rate myth,
decided to surrender to the Athenians rather than die to almost
the last man, like their famous
300 ancestors at Thermopylae.
The scenario offers the author
plenty of scope for exploring, in
the manner of Mitchison before
him, the educational, marital and
male-bonding practices of this peculiar (as the ancients themselves
saw it) society.
By contrast, Spartan by Valerio

Massimo Manfredi (English
translation 2003, Italian original
1988) is set, like Pressfields Gates
of Fire, in the Persian Wars era
of Thermopylae and other great
anti-Persian battles (Salamis,
Plataea ) at the beginning of
the fifth century. The generic
brother versus brother plottype is of course itself ancient
(think Sophocles Antigone), but
Manfredi thickens it by making
one brother a noble Spartiate, the
other brought up believing he
was of Helot (servile underclass)
birth and becoming by conviction
a Helot liberationist. Never mind
that the way the plot is spun is
factually, historically impossible,
not just implausible: this is gripping narrative fare.
My final example, the novel
that has most immediately
prompted this survey, is set in the
same era but makes no such basic
historical error. Like Mitchison,
Tariq Chaudhry has chosen
to focus his A Queen of Sparta
(2014) on the distaff side of
ancient Spartan life and politics.
The queen in question is Gorgo,
daughter of King Cleomenes I,
wife of his half-brother Leonidas
and one of the undoubted stars of
300 (the film). Gorgo (her name
means gorgon) had a mind of her
own, had something to say and
was not afraid to say it in public,
to men. That much is apparent
from the couple of delicious
mentions of her in the pioneering
Histories of Herodotus (no stranger to fiction, he).
The ancients themselves
were very exercised by Spartan
women. Most of the other
Greeks, such as Aristotle but
unlike Herodotus abhorred
their allegedly undisciplined
sexual license and materialistic,
luxury-loving ways. The truth
is, of course, unrecoverable, but
Chaudhry has no need to fret
about that and gives the fictional
Gorgo his best shot, in an ambitious tale of murder and mayhem,
which stretches from Greece to
the Swat Valley (in the authors
native Pakistan) and from the
early fifth century bc to the late
fourth. Go, tell
Paul Cartledge
Introducing the
Ancient Greeks
From Bronze Age Seafarers

to Navigators of the Western
Mind
Edith Hall
The Bodley Head 287pp 20
EDITH HALL has written a

flamboyant, readable and
different account of the ancient
Greeks, well tailored for the
modern reader. She tells the
old stories, but she presents
them innovatively, in a package
of ten chronological chapters
structured around a cute (and
contestable) ten characteristics
or qualities, which she claims
were shared by most Greeks
most of the time. These are that
they were seagoing, suspicious
of authority, individualistic
and inquiring (her four primary
qualities) combined with six
others: that they were open to
new ideas, witty, competitive,
admired excellence in talented people, were elaborately
articulate and were addicted to
pleasure. Whatever one thinks
of these characteristics, Halls
achievement here is to unfold
a long and vivid narrative that
sticks effectively to the remit of
their framework.
Many good things are
offered: an excellent account
of colonies and colonisation, a
wonderful presentation of the
Persian Wars through the prism
of the playwright Aeschylus, a
dynamic unfolding of a changing
political and literary culture.
Many things are absent from
what one might imagine to be
a balanced picture. The book is
much stronger on literature and
literary culture than on archae-
ology, art, philosophy or history

all areas of crucial Hellenic interventions and all areas where
the rich evidence nuances our
understanding. Hall spends too
long on the Bronze Age (guided
by the texts of Homer and
Hesiod and less by archaeological evidence) and on the Classical moment, while the great
extent of Roman Greece and of
the turn to Christianity (where
many of the finest intellectuals and writers were cultured
Greek speakers) are given just a
chapter each. She offers nothing
about the great era of Byzantine
Greece, when the Roman Empires capital moved to Constantinople, as if the ancient Greeks
somehow ended with the rise of
the Church, despite the fact that
all the ancient Greek literature
and learning on which her story
depends was lovingly preserved,
copied, edited and taught for
over a 1,000 years in Byzantium.
Halls story is thus beautifully
packaged, but strangely conservative. It accepts the traditional
break at the point of Christianity
and, especially in her insistence
on the individual, it returns us
A flamboyant,
readable account of
the ancient Greeks,
well tailored for the
modern reader
to a historical model of great
men (mainly) initiating action.
Leaders come to stand for the
groups and communities that
they lead and their initiatives (as
opposed to their responses to
the pressures of those groups in
historical circumstances) come
to direct the thrust of history.
It may be so. But as Hall admits,
many scholars emphasise other
factors than individual excellence in shaping history. Her
account is of course personal. A
story less secularist or hedonistic would have given more space
to the ascetic strand of ancient
polytheism from Pythagoras to
Plotinus, to which the Christians
owed so much.
Jas Elsner
REVIEWS
The Rise and Fall of

Classical Greece
Josiah Ober
Princeton University Press 464pp 24.95
THE GREEKS had their gods and

the modern world has the Greeks.
Something about them ensured
that their political, artistic and
philosophical ideas would be
spoken about down the centuries
in a way that other ancient
peoples were not.
They achieved immortality
while their Greece spiralled out of
recognition. No one who visited
in the early 20th century could
have tallied what they saw there
with the world evoked in the
accounts of Homer, Thucydides
and Herodotus. Greece had gained
independence from the Ottoman
Empire, but living conditions were
so terrible that the average life
expectancy was under 36 years. A
period of rapid population growth
followed, which only contributed to
its woes. Unemployment became
its defining feature. In the run-up
to the Second World War, Greece
had become the poorest nation in
Europe. What went wrong?
The gulf between ancient and
modern Greece is the impetus for
Josiah Obers new book. Its title
may lead one to expect a grand,
sweeping narrative, but it is in fact
a sharp and insightful economic
history founded upon a quest to
discover what made the ancient
Greeks fall so precipitous.
Unsurprisingly, wealth had a
lot to do with it. Obers book is
not a light read, but benefits from
various graphs and charts, which
help those without a background
in economics to visualise the shape
of Greeces changing economy.
Greeces efflorescence, with
which this book is concerned, was

dependent upon a fairly even distribution of wealth across a dense
population. Whereas in the Mycenaean period (c.1400-1100 bc) the
population of Greece was relatively
small, with wealth concentrated
among the elite, in the most illustrious years of the classical period
(500-336 bc) Greece had a dense
population with a thriving middle
class, whose spending helped to
drive the economy forward.
Perhaps Theocritus and other
poets of pastoral verse are to
blame, but the modern assumption that the Greeks inhabited a
predominantly rural environment
is quite wrong. Greece was made
up of numerous city-states, which
became more urbanised throughout the period from 1000 to 300
bc, until about a third of the total
population lived in urban dwellings. From these urban homes
they chose to import their food
rather than grow it themselves.
For this to work, certain environmental conditions had to be met.
Meteorologically, the collapse of
the Early Iron Age coincided with
a protracted arid period in Greece
(lasting roughly 1450-850 bc), the
end of which might have proved
fertile ground for the improved
living conditions and flourishing
intellectual network of classical
Greece. But Greeces success was
determined by more than good
weather, a dense population and
even wealth distribution. Its citystates might easily have become
an empire on the model of the
later Roman Empire so why
not?, Ober asks. Given that the
city-states were often at war with
one another, the system seems,
to modern eyes, inherently fragile.
But that is to forget how much the
Hellenes thrived on competition.
The various poleis tended to assimilate or imitate each others best
ideas, which made them stronger.
Over time they became so fortified,
as Ober says, that the first
Hellenistic kings had little choice
but to allow them a degree of
autonomy.
The turning point in Greeces
fortunes coincided with its flowering and it was this, Ober argues,
that helped to render it immortal
in the eyes of people like Byron.
By the mid-fourth century bc

Macedon was the most powerful
state in the Greek world. Ober
does not suggest that the power
of the Macedonian dynasts was an
exaggerated faade, but he does
point out that Greeces city-states
continued to enjoy independence
from them. This argument would
have proved more controversial
among the ancient writers than
it will among scholars today, but
as part of Obers definition of the
decline of Greece it works well. The
conquests of Alexander the Great
ensured that the Greek world
continued to grow, but it did so
while converging on a common
polis culture. The art and literature
of Hellenistic Greece became too
embedded in the Roman world to
suffer the same fall as Greece itself,
as it was consolidated into Romes
empire. It was, essentially, the fact
that Greece ended on a high that
ensured that it was insuperable.
Daisy Dunn
The Cambridge History

of Painting in the
Classical World
J.J. Pollitt (ed.)
Cambridge University Press 500pp 150
FACED WITH a man in overalls

flecked with white, saying I am a
painter, we know we are talking
to a painter and decorator.
Faced with a book entitled
Victorian Painting, we expect it
to be about the pre-Raphaelites, not about how Victorian
industrialists got their houses
painted. In the Greek and Roman
worlds the same distinction was
made: in the price edict of the
emperor Diocletian from the
Greek and Roman

writers, fascinated
by the work of the
pictor imaginarius
... found the
possibilities of
representation
wondrous, as when
Zeuxis painted
grapes to fool birds
early fourth century ad the pictor
imaginarius gets 150 denarii a day,
the pictor parietarius (wall-painter) just 75.
What fascinated Greek and
Roman writers about painting
was the work of the pictor imaginarius: the relationship between
a flat painting and the world
that it represented. Whether
they found the possibilities of
representation wondrous, as
when Zeuxis painted grapes to
fool the birds, or, with Plato,
dangerous, it was painting that
put the very possibility of representation starkly on the line. The
only point at which wall-painting roused intellectual interest
was when a wholesale change
from realistic representation
of the world as it might be to
representing the world in ways
that defy the laws of science
aroused the moral indignation of
the Roman architect Vitruvius,
who fulminates against the
monstrous things painters have
taken to creating.
Except for Egyptian mummy
portraits, discussed in two
pages here, effectively nothing
survives of panel paintings from
antiquity and the only history
we can write is of what the pictor
parietarius got up to. Here the
evidence has increased significantly in the past 50 years as
more careful excavation and
preservation have recovered
painted plaster from public
and private buildings from the
Bronze Age to late antiquity.
Where once all that we had to go
on were the walls of the palace
at Knossos, the tombs or Etruria
and Pompeii and Herculaneum,
REVIEWS
supplemented by some material
from Rome, this book displays
Bronze Age material from Thera
and the Greek mainland, archaic
fragments from Greek temples,
extraordinary Macedonian
and Thracian tombs from the
fourth and third centuries and
a previously unknown tradition
of tomb painting at Paestum, as
well as material from all over the
Roman Empire.
The editor and authors of this
book hanker, however, after this
history that we cannot write
hence Pollitts own chapter on
painting in Greek and Roman art
criticism and StansburyODonnells chapter on what one
can deduce about monumental
painting from what is painted
on Greek pots. For the first half
of the book any story is crushed
by catalogues of examples as
the reader juggles between the
in-text halftones, the grouped
sections of colour plates and
additional images on a CD.
How Greeks, Etruscans and
Romans decorated the private
and public spaces in which they
lived is quite as interesting
as the story of high art. That
emerges above all from the
discussion by Irene Bragantini,
brilliantly translated by Pollitt
himself, of Roman painting in
the Republic and early Empire.
In an impressive display of
what high-quality archaeology
enables, she shows that we can
date very precisely the seachange in Roman decorative
practice that so appalled Vitruvius, when trompe loeil recreation
of the world beyond, denying
the very existence of the wall
on which it was painted, was
replaced by decorative schemes
which turned rooms back into
boxes whose re-affirmed walls
showed off pictures and fancy
decoration alike. That change
comes with the Battle of Actium
and is part of the Augustan
revolution in visual imagery.
Here the history of decoration
becomes part of the political
history of Rome a reminder
of the totalitarian nature of
Augustus control and how much
it matters how people decorate
their environment.
Publishers like multiauthored volumes, which tend

to be faster to write, and it
is hard to imagine that any
single scholar could command
the enormous range of data
on display here. But writing a
history demands following
through a common set of
questions and working within
a common framework. The
contributors here seem to have
been left to define painting as
they wish and even authors
of adjoining chapters adopt
very different manners of
working. There is much that is
eye-opening in this weighty and
expensive book, but not even
an attempt to give the reader a
story to take away.
Robin Osborne
Hannibal
A Hellenistic Life
Eve MacDonald
Yale University Press 332pp 25
JOHN RUSKIN anathematised

the painter J.M.W.Turner as having
lived in imagination in ancient
Carthage, lived practically in
modern Margate acknowledging it all the while to be ugly and
wrong. A long western tradition
of historical and moral commentary generally agreed with both
the Romans and Ruskin that the
Carthaginians were a bad lot. As
Prescott later stigmatised the
Spanish Conquistadors, so the
Romans developed their own
leyenda negraof Punic iniquities.
Hannibal may have been a great
general, but - like Rommel long
after him - he was batting for the
Rotters First XI. Eve MacDonald
tries to find a way around this
demonisation by rejectingRoman
and Greek anti-Punic bias, while
still relying onvictors history, particularly those of Polybius and Livy.
This study attempts to be
even-handed and unprejudiced.
For every act of bad faith, craftiness
or cruelty by Hannibal, MacDonald
can usually point to the same or
worse committed by the Romans.
In an attempt to normalise him,
she proposes Hannibal as a typical
ruler of the Hellenistic age, a man,
say, like Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse. There is so much we do not
know about Hannibal, MacDonald
reminds us; what were his relations with the Senate in Carthage?
What wasthe exact status of his
family, the powerful Barcas, in
Iberia, largely conquered by his
father Hamilcar? Hannibal wasnot
a prince defending a homeland,
rather, MacDonald concludes, a
Carthaginian warlord, constantly
on the move in Iberia and Italy.
Would he have ever returned to
Carthage had he totally defeated
Rome, or remained as a Carthaginian Caesar? Carthage had a habit
of crucifying its returning generals
when they had failed to please.
Arguably, MacDonald bends
over backwards too far in her
attempt at fairness. Unless you
knew the Carthaginians were of
Semitic origin, speaking a Semitic
language, worshipping a Semitic
pantheon of gods, whose ancestors
came from Mesopotamia and
further East, you would be no
wiser after reading the main text
of this book. The words Semite,
Asiatic, Oriental andEastern are
all avoided so as not to appear
prejudiced; multiculturalism and,
arguably, multifaith multi-ethnicity,
are instead stressed overmuch.
Buried in a small-print footnote at
the back, MacDonald repudiates
the clash of cultures, arguing that
the Romans were not western,
nor the Carthaginians eastern or
Semitic, these values having been
dismissed for their colonialistand
anti-Semitic overtones, she states.
Perhaps this important authorial
point of view might have been
highlighted early on in the main
text, so the vexed racial and ethnic
dimension could be fully discussed?
MacDonald is surely correct in
thinking Hannibal saw himself as
a hero under the protection of the

god Melqart-Herakles. She does
not ask if his journey was really
necessary. Hannibals nemesis,
Scipio, built a fleet with which
he captured Punic Cartagena in
Iberia while Hannibal was away
in Italy. Hannibal might have done
the same in reverse and avoided
losing half his army in the Alpine
crossing had he invaded Italy by
sea and gone straight for the
jugular in besieging Rome directly.
It was lack of manpower that
always prevented him doing this,
hence the endless and ultimately
futile marching up and down Italy,
Hannibal may
have been a great
general, but like
Rommel long
after him he was
batting for the
Rotters First XI
always defeating Roman legions
but never able to actually assault
Rome directly.
Arthur Miller called Al Capone
The greatest Carthaginian of them
all, MacDonald tells us. Also, that
Muammar Gadaffi called a son
Hannibal and that Ataturk put up
statues of him in Asia Minor, where
Hannibal finally killed himself to
avoid capture by the Romans.
Napoleon was an admirer, as was
Sir Walter Ralegh. The afterglow
of Hannibal sometimes makes
him seem less a Punic imperial
adventurer and proto-Caesar
and more like the Che Guevara of
antiquity.
Ironically, Hannibals greatest
legacy was to Rome. He taught
the Romans military tactics and
strategy, deception, ruse, deployment, the effective use of cavalry
and auxiliaries. Caesars campaigns
in Gaul and Britain read as if he
had the great Carthaginian at his
elbow advising him. Hannibal also
has achieved modern sartorial
apotheosis, MacDonald informs us,
viz: My Dad crossed the Alps with
Hannibal - and all I got was this
lousy T-shirt.
Robert Carver
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
not made explicit, the display also offers the opDEFINING BEAUTY: the Body in Ancient Greek Art
portunity for considering the way that we often
explores depictions of the human body in Greek
come to Greek sculpture through copies: three
sculpture and, to a lesser extent, vase painting,
out of the five pieces are copies of the Classical
predominantly 500-300 bc. It is a story of the
originals (two are Roman and one is from the
gradual change in style from the stiff Archaic
19th century).
through idealised Classical naturalism to the
Next is the use of colour and gilding in Greek
realism of the Hellenistic period. The exhibition
statuary; although this practice has been known
and accompanying literature emphasise how
since the 18th century, it is still frequently overinnovative was this depiction of the naked body
looked and the use of painted plaster casts in the
and the distinctively Greek idea of the condisplay is highly effective.
nection of physical and moral beauty. This is a
The underlying Greek cultural ideology in the
well-established interpretation; the exhibition is
depiction of the body is also covered, a highlight
not innovative, but carries off what it does with
of which is the display of an Egyptian male sculppanache. The display is visually arresting but
ture, a Cypriot youth, a
not overpowering, spread
Greek Archaic kouros and,
over six rooms. It creates
a little beyond, a copy of
new combinations of
a Classical athlete, which
well-known sculptures and
underlines the enormous
this generates a fresh and
changes in the depiction
stimulating way of seeing
of naked anatomy, posture
pieces that are so familiar,
and interior psychology,
we are almost immune to.
otherwise known as Greek
Perhaps the most exciting
naturalism. From there we
element is to see five
move to the body in key
fragments of the Partherites of passage (childnon sculptures displayed
hood, marriage, sex and
next to other important
death), followed by the
pieces, including part of
Greek view of the bodies
the Telephos frieze from
of hybrids and foreigners,
the Pergamon altar now in
together with the new
Berlin and a Neo-Assyrian
trends in realism and
relief from northern Iraq
portraiture that occurred
in the British Museum.
Defining Beauty
in the Hellenistic period,
In this way, the vexed
The Body in Ancient Greek Art
and finally the influence
question of ownership of
British Museum, ran until July 5th.
of Greek art through space
the Parthenon sculptures,
and time on Gandharan
which frequently overThe catalogue is available, priced 25
art and on the western
shadows them, is successtradition from the Renaissance onwards.
fully sidestepped and instead the visitor can see
The emphasis of the exhibition is exclusively
them within the broader context of Greek and
on the development of the depiction of the
Near Eastern sculpture.
body and the establishment of an ideal, while
The tone is set in the first room, which introfunction and context of use of these objects
duces female and male naked idealised Classiare largely ignored. For example, pottery is
cal forms the crouching Aphrodite from the
displayed for its painted or moulded decoration
British Museum (inset) and a stunning bronze
of the human body and the context of use, which
athlete from Croatia and places together on a
platform three naked male sculptures associated varied from the drunken symposium to the cold
grave, is hardly referred to. Arguably this limits
with the names of three top Classical sculpthe potential for understanding the meanings
tors: Pheidias, Polykleitos and Myron. This is
traditional art history focusing on big names and carried by these depicted bodies, although the
placing on a pedestal what has been identified as richly illustrated catalogue does offer further
details, including function. The final room offers
the height of Classical art from the very outset
of the discipline of its study in the writings of J.J. a stunning visual dialogue between Dionysos
from the Parthenon pediment and the Belvedere
Winckelmann in the 18th century. The physical
torso from the Vatican, mediated by drawings
presence of these pieces is overwhelming,
of Michelangelo and Haydon. This is an inspired
both to those first encountering ancient Greek
and forward-looking closure to a traditional but
art and to those who are familiar with these
remarkable sculptures in isolation and usually in beautifully executed exhibition.
a two-dimensional photograph. Although this is
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
Gothic Wonder
Art, Artifice and the Decorated

Style, 1290-1350
Paul Binski
AESTHETIC QUALITIES and ways

of thinking about their power to
persuade are at the heart of Paul
Binskis new book. The focus is
the English Decorated style of
the first half of the 14th century,
a new style found across the
visual arts, distinguished by
dazzling decorative effects in
multiple media, often in brilliant
colour. It was highly versatile in
its application to settings, both
ecclesiastical and secular, in the
reigns of the first three Edwards
and has often been given a
prominent place in narratives of
European art and architecture.
Objects of many kinds are considered here, from buildings and
tombs, to monumental painting
and illuminated manuscripts;
fashions in clothing are also
addressed. While there were
contemporary responses to the
latter, these are much harder to
find for art and architecture, as
Binski recognises. In its interest
in rhetoric and ideas of beauty,
the book develops themes
explored previously by Mary
Carruthers.
The author challenges much
20th-century scholarship on the
period, especially that deriving
from modernist ideas about
architecture, for example by
Jean Bony in The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture
Transformed, 1250-1350 (1979). In
its inventiveness, Binski argues,
English building should not
be interpreted as some kind
REVIEWS
of avant-garde, transforming
French Rayonnant ideas and
reinvigorating European architecture from the geographical
margins. Rather, on a long view,
he presents it in fertile dialogue
with a tradition of English
building, back to the Norman
Conquest, that had its own authority. Abroad, he fruitfully explores ways in which English art
was received, from Trondheim
cathedral to the papal court at
Avignon, in a series of discrete
episodes facilitated by trade and
diplomacy, but also by means of
portable goods or designs and
travelling craftsmen.
Issue is also taken with the
The focus is the

English Decorated
style of the first half
of the 14th century
... distinguished by
dazzling decorative
effects in multiple
media, often in
brilliant colour
interpretation of other kinds of
margins. The marginal images
in manuscripts have been a
favoured object of study from
socio-political perspectives
in recent decades, including
in Michael Camilles Image on
the Edge (1992). The search for
moral or social meanings in
such locations, it is proposed,
has obscured the pleasure
and amusement in subjects
that could be simply nonsensical. Rejecting the binaries of
20th-century scholarship, he
argues: I favour an impure or
mixed centre, seldom or never
severed from that which is both
serious and delightful or on the
edge. On Binskis reading, such
border imagery, self-conscious,
amusing and memorable, is the
result of a new professionalism
and orderliness in book production and of new expectations in
consumers. Among the earliest
consumers of such images he
identifies a new elite, trained in
the universities.
Characteristic features of
contemporary art and architecture are assessed for their
rhetorical potential and cultural
resonance, from curvilinearity
and density of surface decoration, to playfulness in the
application of designs on
different scales and modes in
the representation of nature.
The effects elicit pleasure in
artifice and skill, it is argued,
but also responses that can be
deployed to ethical or affective
devotional ends. He makes
particular case studies of the
octagon and Lady Chapel at Ely,
assessing their magnificence
and variety, which he identifies
as enduring aesthetic values.
The internal height of the
octagon rivals the Pantheon in
Rome, for example, in a tradition of heroic emulation.
A chapter on the economics
of art and architecture surveys
wages and material costs,
new types of art (often on a
small scale), the demand for
intercessory prayer and new
kinds of patrons. Lay patronage
increased vastly, it is argued, for
the field of manuscript production, at least. A relatively small
group of influential patrons is
also identified within the kings
household and administration.
Common aspects of the style
were often adopted within this
network of mandarin royal
clerks and bishops. Throughout
the book, courts are identified as
key foyers for the development
of artistic ideas, whether that
be the English royal court or the
papal court in Avignon. More
broadly, Binski sets this upsurge
of creativity within the context
of an increasing commercialisation of society, proposed by
economic historians. The final
section reassesses the relationship between stylistic change
and social and economic upheaval: was there a relationship
between the end of the Decorated and the Black Death?
Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and
the Decorated Style is beautifully
produced and well illustrated, in
colour.
Tim Ayers
Ceremonial Entries in
Early Modern Europe
The Iconography of Power
J.R. Mulryne with Maria Ines
Aliverti and Anna Maria
Testaverde (eds.)
Ashgate Publishing 388pp 85
ONE OF THE FEW occasions

on which an early modern ruler
interacted with his subjects was
during a ceremonial entry into
one of the cities in his realm. In a
ceremony that goes back to the
Roman adventus ritual, in which an
emperor entered Rome in triumph,
the ruler appeared before the city
gates and formally requested the
citizens to be allowed to enter. The
burghers of the city recognised
the rulers authority by presenting
him with the keys to the city gates,
which the ruler returned, thereby
confirming his relationship with
them. The ruler then rode into
the city, often under a baldachin,
accompanied by his entourage.
The procession wound its way
along a ceremonial route marked
out by triumphal arches and other
ephemeral structures. The decoration of these arches was often
the occasion for the citizens not
only to praise their lord but also
to declare what it was that they
hoped for from him. Where the
ruler himself had commissioned
the decorations, he naturally dictated the iconographic programme
and used it to put across an
agenda of his own.
Jacek ukowski, in an acute
analysis of hitherto unresearched
source material relating to the
entries of Vladislaus IV Vasa, King
of Poland (r.1632-1648), into various
Polish and Lithuanian cities, shows
how an independent city such as

Gdask could use the complex
decorations on their ephemeral
architecture to convey their fears,
aims and expectations. The first
four essays in the book relating to
France demonstrate the opposite,
showing how French monarchs
used the ceremonial entry to
present themselves in a particular
light and convey their message.
Richard Cooper shows how
16th-century French kings used
their entries to present themselves
as army commanders, while Margaret M. McGowan explains how
Henri IVs entry into Rouen in
1596 depicted the king as restorer
of the state after a time of war.
Linda Briggs discusses the progress
of the teenage Charles IX round
his kingdom from 1565 to 1566,
a progress masterminded by his
mother, Catherine de Medici, while
Marie-Claude Canova-Green
analyses the way in which
Louis XIII represented himself as
the victor over Protestantism.
The popes had their own
version of the ceremonial entry
called the possesso, in which a
The ruler rode

into the city,
often under a
baldachin ... along
a ceremonial
route marked out
by triumphal
arches and
other ephemeral
structures
newly crowned pope, in a ceremony modelled on Christs entry
into Jerusalem, rode from St Peters
in Rome to the church of St John
Lateran. In an excellent chapter
Lucia Nuti shows how the popes
remodelled the city of Rome to
make a ceremonial route for their
possessi. Her transcription of the
manuscript Register of Expenses
for the coronation of Pope Leo X in
1513 by Leonardo di Zanobi Bartolini
is usefully printed as an appendix.
Entries, like all festivals, had to be
organised by someone and Anna
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
complex silhouette and the muscular mass of
THE PRACTICE of drawing from classical
the Torso (inset). In two other works, the same
sculptures or casts was standard in British art
artist contrasts the qualities found in the Apollo
schools until the mid-20th century. In other
Belvedere and the Farnese Hercules, including the
parts of Europe and in the USA drawing from
awed attention of the beholders in his repthe antique continued a little longer but has
now all but disappeared. The struggles for artistic resentation. Many ancient sculptures became
canonical, representative both of the society
self-determination in the 19th century in
Realism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism, right that begat them and of the aspirational culture
of the Renaissance and the artistic periods that
up to Hydra-headed Modernism hastened the
followed. Thus, the Gladiator, the Crouching
decline in popularity of a tradition of drawing
Venus and the Spinario, among others, became
well-established in Italy since the early 1500s.
significant names to artists and tourists throughDrawn from the Antique explores the origins
out Europe. Their presence was epic, their
and development of this tradition through a
cultural value immeasurable;
sequence of prints, drawings
they became the source of
and paintings. They reveal
visual quotations, their poses
overlapping concerns with
incorporated into subject
a concept of the Ideal and
paintings and portraits where
beauty that could be perceived
they extended or elevated
through the viewing of
pictorial narratives.
ancient sculpture. Displayed
In many works displayed
in the Vatican and other
here, depictions of living
more public places, they were
figures contemplate the ideal
admired by collectors and
marble bodies. The onlookartists alike. A system of arers engagement is always
tistic training was established
significant. In Joseph Wright
and subsequent treatises on
of Derbys An Academy (1772),
taste and discernment folexhibited in a velvety mezlowed. In books on proportion
zotint, a variety of responses
the beauty of these sculptures
to the Nymph with a Shell
was extolled by mathemaare captured. The wondering
ticians and philosophers. In
stare of the youth on the
the Academies established
Drawn from the Antique extreme left is, however, the
throughout Europe, where
Artists and the Classical Ideal
most completely engaged.
drawing became the founSir John Soanes Museum,
His besotted gaze represents
dation of artistic excellence,
Lincolns Inn Fields, London WC2
a subtle change in European
sufficient skill in translating
art as a concern with such
the forms of sculpture had
Exhibition runs until September 26th, 2015
sculptural figures shifted from
to be demonstrated before
the official to the personal, from the anatomithe student could progress to drawing from
cal to the amatory. In the final section the less
the nude, from which stemmed the crowning
achievement, istoria, the painted representation familiar of two drawings by Turner, depicting
male figures wrestling, is a particularly striking
of religious and historical subjects.
example of the decline of the ideal. The artists
In an etching by Odoardo Filaretti depictimagination has been stimulated by training in
ing an artists studio (c. 1608), we see earnest
drawing from classical sculpture but has altered
it to something less Ideal, neither serene nor
noble, and far removed from the intentions
either of Vasari or Winckelmann, let alone
Reynolds.
An engrossing display, full of well-chosen
delights. Works from the private collection of
Katrin Bellinger are accompanied by loans from
young students studying a modest selection
the British Museum, the Courtauld, and the
of sculptural fragments, probably casts. Here,
Teylers Museum, Haarlem, among others. The
as elsewhere, the sculptures have not been recatalogue is essential for university teachers,
stored, authentically headless, and sometimes
students and general enthusiasts who seek to
as in the celebrated Belvedere Torso limbless too. understand the place of drawing in western
A red chalk drawing (dated 1591), by the Dutch
culture and the persistence of the Antique.
engraver Hendrick Goltzius, delineates both the
Colin Cruise
An engrossing display, full

of well-chosen delights;
where the ideas suggested
are expansive
Maria Testaverdes discussion

of the Book of Ceremonies of the
Florentine master of ceremonies
Francesco Tongiarini (1536-1612)
allows us to look over the shoulder
of one such organiser.
A different sort of entry was
that of the foreign bride, arriving
for the first time in her husbands
kingdom and being presented to
her new subjects as her coach
drew into the capital. Lucinda
Dean discusses the entry of Anne
of Denmark as Queen of Scotland
into Edinburgh in 1590 and the
earlier 16th-century entries into
Scottish cities that preceded it.
Sara Trevisan analyses the use of
the myth of the Golden Fleece by
The ceremonial
entry is brought up
to date by linking
the procession on
the Thames for
Anne Boleyn ... with
the rain-soaked
water pageant for
Elizabeth II in 2012
the Drapers Company in the Lord
Mayors shows in 16th- and 17thcentury London and Margaret
Shewring brings discussion of the
entry up to the present by linking
the processions on the Thames
for Anne Boleyn and Catherine of
Braganza with the rain-soaked
water pageant for Elizabeth II in
2012. Sixteenth-century Habsburg
festivals, music in the Italian
Renaissance entry and Elizabeth of
Valoiss entry into Spain in 1559 are
the topics of other essays in this
beautifully-produced book with its
seven colour plates and 38 halftone illustrations.
My only criticism is that the
book lacks a final chapter that
would have drawn out some
general principles or trends, highlighting similarities and differences between so many disparate
and dazzling events in so many
different territories across two
centuries.
Helen Watanabe-OKelly
REVIEWS
Shakespeare in London
Hannah Crawforth, Sarah

Dustagheer and Jennifer Young
Bloomsbury Arden 280pp 16.99
THE WORLD might be forgiven for rolling its eyes at the

prospect of another book on
Shakespeare. Does Shakespeare
in London, the latest addition
to the Bloomsbury Arden list,
have anything new to say? The
answer is a confident yes.
Shakespeare in London is a
short book with big ambitions.
It weaves together various narratives Shakespeares London
career, a physical journey west
to east across early-modern
London with vivid readings of
eight plays, each of which is used
to explore aspects of London
life around the turn of the 17th
century. So, for example, the
book opens with an account of
Titus Andronicus, relating it to the
culture of punishment, bloodshed and retribution embodied
in the site of Tyburn.
The process is not without its
difficulties. Where the Merchant
of Venice, say, can be mapped
closely onto an examination of
the law, or King Lear onto early
modern ideas of medicine and
madness, the approach taken to
Romeo & Juliet marrying it to
the domestic wealth and power
evident in the great riverside
mansions on the Strand is
more subtle, perhaps even metaphorical.
But on balance the flexibility
of that approach is one of the
books greatest strengths. The
fact that the book is a wholly
collective effort and each
chapter is co-authored by all
three authors seems commendably appropriate to the collaborative working practices of the
theatre they describe.
Shakespeare is one of the
least literal of the early modern
playwrights. Whereas the work
of Jonson, say, or Middleton
gains strength and purpose from
its precise and detailed evocation of contemporary London,
Shakespeare is characteristically
more elusive evasive, even.
The authors both capture and,
in some ways, mirror that trait:
reflecting on Shakespeares
writing at the Globe they
self-consciously echo their own
description of early-modern
London as being always and
never the same.
The society revealed here,
whether focusing on religion or
scientific experimentation or
economics, is one undergoing
a seismic collision of values.
Innovation is competing with
tradition; modernity with the
memorially fixed. This is, of
course, as true of the material
city, in which the great monastic
houses had been repurposed
into mansions as well as the
odd theatre or two if not torn
down all together, as it is of
the multitude of ideas the city
contains.
The book is clearly aimed
at a general audience and, as
such, benefits greatly from the
bold decision to dispense with
the compulsive hat-tipping and
knee-bending to the vast array
of literary critics that so bedevils
much contemporary academic
writing. That is not to say that
the text is unacademic
the ideas and insights of
others are scrupulously noted
where relevant and there is an
excellent selection of further
reading and works cited at the
end. But the writers decision
has freed them to create a more
allusive, thought-provoking
and approachable work that
should be required reading for
any undergraduate student of
early-modern English literature.
Shakespeare in London offers
useful insights into Shakespeares work and his working
practices. But it is also a
wonderful, wide-ranging introduction to the richness and

complexity of late-Elizabethan
and early-Jacobean society. It
would be instructive reading for
anyone, including young historians, although its play-by-play
structure might sadly alienate
those outside the silo of English
studies who are less engaged by
the literary culture.
Mathew Lyons
Queen Caroline
Cultural Politics at the Early

Eighteenth-Century Court
Joanna Marschner
Paul Mellon Centre for British Studies and
THIS VOLUME is a sumptuous art

history performance, with as many
images as there are pages of text.
This shows Caroline, the wife of
George II, in regal splendour, on
the back, a remarkable cut-away
drawing of Carolines creation, the
Merlins Cave in the Royal Gardens
at Richmond. The end papers show
the works of art which adorned
the Queens Closet at Kensington
Palace.
We know little in detail about
Caroline, beyond her travels around
England and the patronage she developed when her husband left her
as regent during four absences in
Hanover between 1729 and 1737. At
least she was then entrusted with
all domestic matters. The kings
long-term mistress, the Countess
of Suffolk, was replaced in 1736 by a
new one, Amalie Sophie Marianne
von Wallmoden. Queen Caroline died the next year. The king
behaved better to her in her death
than he had in her life, ordering
a new vault for the couple to be
constructed in Henry VIIs chapel in

Westminster Abbey.
The subtitle of the book
Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court raises expectations that are not fulfilled, since
it is not clear that there were any
very interesting cultural politics at
the court of George II. This leaves
a hole in the argument. Marshner
does establish with determination
and zeal how a lonely woman
found a substitute for her husbands failure to share her pleasure
in art, by forming her own large
circles of patrons. Through these
she sought to attach herself to her
adopted countrys most advanced
aesthetic circles. The intention was
to Anglicise the House of Hanover
by collecting portraits of those who
had come before her. Noting her
interest in the Gothic, Marschner
says that Merlins Cave was imitated up and down the country for
several decades, yet she gives few
examples. Caroline also assembled
and conserved the remnants of
the Tudor and Stuart collections
of paintings and drawings, of
jewels, metalwork and medals. In
the Royal Collection, Yale found
a lovely watercolour, circa 1815,
of Queen Carolines library at St
Jamess Palace. Marschener confesses she has to make much of a
considerable and remarkable trail
of material evidence.
The structure of the book is
convincingly thematic. Queen Caroline comes alive, in so far as the
scant material about her patronage activities allows, in chapters
which deal with the patronage
of garden designers, architects,
sculptors, artists, books and natural
philosophers. The Introduction
posits Caroline as a queen who the
people saw as a powerful figure
behind the throne: You may strut
dapper George, but twill all be in
vain, we know that tis Queen Caroline not you that reign. George
allowed his wife great influence, in
ecclesiastical affairs, for instance,
and in the arts, which were her
real passion: he was apparently
devastated by her death. Much she
attempted was incomplete when
she died. Marschner has made a
good attempt to rehabilitate a
rather sad figure.
Anthony Fletcher
REVIEWS
The Nuns of
Sant Ambrogio
The True Story of a

Convent Scandal
By Hubert Wolf, translated
by Ruth Martin
Oxford University Press 496pp 20
ARCHIVE FEVER among scholars

is a poetic if dangerous phenomenon: time spent hunched
over disintegrating manuscripts
breathing in the occasionally toxic
dust of the dead, Eureka moments
of discovery mixed with hours of
boredom and the risk of headaches
and sore throats. My first reaction
to church historian Herbert Wolfs

book was to wonder if his work in
the Vatican archives might have
caused a fever of the brain, such is
the lurid story he tells.
In 1857 the widowed German
princess Katarina Von Hohenzollern enters the enclosed Franciscan convent of Sant Ambrogio
in Rome. Within a year she is seriously ill, convinced she is poisoned
and desperate to leave. Her status
and connections free her and the
subsequent investigation by the
Roman Inquisition reveals a rogue
convent ripe with heresy, sex,
fraud, intimidation and murder.
Based on masses of evidence,
Wolf constructs his book as a
thriller writer might, moving backwards from the princesss trauma,
through clouds of denials, obfuscation and half confessions, until the
whole rotten edifice is explored.
At the centre is Sant Ambrogios lovely novice mistress, Maria
Luisa, a woman of such guile and
charisma that she has everyone
in her thrall. Fashioning herself as
a living saint with direct communication to God (letters from the
virgin are delivered into a box to

which only the male confessor
holds the key), she sexually seduces
novices and appropriates convent
funds to buy the gold ring which
appears on her finger as proof of
her divine marriage to God. When
faced with dissent, she shames,
expels or poisons those who might
expose her.
This astonishing story is told
against the backdrop of mid-19th
century Vatican politics and the
tussle between reformers and reactionaries within the papal court.
Sant Ambrogio was founded by a
nun once recognised as holy until
she fell foul of papal change. How
effectively such shifts in orthodoxy
penetrated the walls and the minds
of enclosed nuns is a fertile field
and relevant to this tale.
The investigation throws
light into some dark places. Not
surprisingly there were nuns who
both knew and chose not to
know in order to survive, and the
way they squirm on the hook is
psychologically as well as morally
fascinating. But darkest of all is the
story of Maria Luisa, whose subver-
This astonishing
story is told against
a backdrop of
Vatican politics
and the tussle
between reformers
and reactionaries
sive imagination is breathtaking.
Her seduction method was to
offer favoured novices one-to-one
instruction during nights in her
cell. This involved the two women
examining, touching and lying on
top of each other until there was
a gushing of heavenly liquor, an
experience that she dressed up as
a special convent rite of sexual purification, which must of course
remain secret. After a marathon
tussle of denial, she finally tries to
slip the noose by insisting that she
was only doing what had once
been done to her under the rule
of the dead and now heretical
founder. Is it possible that she
too was abused or is this another
smokescreen of lies?
REVIEWS
Like all good thrillers, it would
be invidious to give away the
whole story and there will be
historians who find the book too
sensational for its own good. But it
is worth remembering that, while
court records have long offered
scholars rich material, they only
expose the crimes that get found
out. Who knows how rogue
Sant Ambrogio really was? The
strict segregation and isolation
of convent life often imposed on
women with little or no vocation could have been a breeding
ground for all manner of subversive
thought or behaviour.
As Pope Francis surveys the
Augean stables he has set out
to reform, it is already clear that
he will not address the status of
women in the Churchs spiritual
hierarchy. Meanwhile, the dust of
the dead will continue to throw
up stories of bizarre, even criminal,
worlds within the convent system.
Sarah Dunant
The Month That Changed

The World: July 1914
Gordon Martel
Oxford University Press 510pp 25
THERE WAS long a complaint

among military historians, one
best voiced by Brian Bond, that
there was a major disjuncture
between their work, notably on
the learning curve of the British
army during the First World War,
and the understanding of the
war in contemporary popular
culture, which Bond referred
to as still stuck on the first day
of the Somme. Now we can
add much of the recent work
on the diplomatic background
to the war. Martel comes hot

on the heels of Thomas Ottes
July Crisis: The Worlds Descent
into War, Summer 1914 (2014) and
Christopher Clarks The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to
War in 1914 (2012). Each offers a
highly instructive account of the
diplomacy immediately leading
up to the war; but, nota bene,
not that led to. In each case,
the highly impressive scholarship and the fluent mastery of
multiple, international sources,
does not provide the whole of
the story. Indeed, in what is
traditional diplomatic history
(not itself a criticism), there is a
tendency to find the answer in
the material that is so profitably
studied. This leads to a particular
slant. In each book, this is a case
of individual and collective faults
in 1914, the latter set in motion
by the former, which led to a
degree of collective responsibility, doubtless a conclusion
suitable for our transnational
times. With Britain, there is
blame for Foreign Secretary Sir
Edward Grey, not least for failing
to send clear messages, which is
presented as important in what
was a collective malaise.
In terms of the particular
diplomatic processes, that may
appear reasonable, but is it sufficient? Each author sidelines the
military dimension and it is not
surprising that military scholars
have been sceptical about the
first to start, Clark. Martel
follows Clarks approach: Premeditation is not to be proven
by the existence of war plans or
by the warlike pronouncements
of military men. Strategists are
expected to plan for the next
war: the politicians and diplomats decide when that war is
most likely to occur. However,
that is an unconvincing account
of the role of military planning,
procurement and preparations,
of the military influences in the
decision-making process and
of cultural bellicosity. These
factors were present for all
powers even the Swiss mobilised, although I have yet to find
the historian to argue that this
caused the war; but they were
crucially different in character,
context and consequences. This

difference is underplayed by
diplomatic historians. At one
level, the obvious contrast is
between France and Britain on
one side and Austria, Germany
and Russia on the other. For
example, the pre-war French
government had decided not
to pursue the military option
of advancing via Belgium, while
Germany made its military
operational plan central to its
war strategy. However, what
mobilisation meant for Germany
was very different to what it entailed for Russia, a point largely
neglected in recent discussion.
Such distinctions are important
because they counter a widespread intellectual tendency to
focus on the supposed faults
of the system, rather than of
particular actors and groups
within it.
In 1914 the British sought to
rely on traditional means of addressing an international crisis,
that of the Concert of Europe,
which had succeeded in the case
of the First Balkan War (1912-13).
Austria and Germany were unwilling to do so. Arguably, their
policies and attitudes caused the
war, rather than the errors of
the statesmen struggling with
the developing crisis, the theme
of the diplomatic historians.
It is also necessary to locate
this German preference in the
political and cultural bellicosity
that was so strong in Germany
in the early 1910s. A fervent
national patriotism was linked
to a fear of falling behind. With
respect to Grey, criticisms of him
fail to take into account simple
parliamentary arithmetic. Any
attempts to issue a warning
before the invasion of Belgium
were likely to be hollow because
of the make-up of Asquiths
Cabinet and because the Liberals
were dependent on Labour and
Irish support for a majority in
the House of Commons. The
debates will continue to echo.
For the diplomatic account, Otte
is possibly the most precise for
July 1914, although Martel writes
well and has interesting material
on the historiography.
Jeremy Black
CONTRIBUTORS
Tim Ayers is a professor of
History of Art at the University
of York, specialising in English
art of the later Middle Ages.
Jeremy Black is author of many
books, the latest of which is
Other Pasts, Different Presents,
Alternative Futures (Indiana
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis
Professor of Greek Culture
emeritus at the University of
Cambridge.
Robert Carvers Paradise with
Serpents: Travels in the Lost World
of Paraguay was shortlisted
for the the Royal Society of
Literatures Ondaatje Prize.
Colin Cruise is Reader in
History of Art at Aberystwyth
University. He is author of PreRaphaelite Drawing (Thames &
Hudson, 2013).
Sarah Dunants latest book is
Blood & Beauty: A Novel of the
Borgias (Virago Press, 2013).
Daisy Dunn is a writer and
Classicist. Her first book will be
published by Harper Collins.
Jas Elsner is Humfry Payne
Senior Research Fellow in
Classical Archaeology at Corpus
Christi College Oxford and
Visiting Professor of Art and
Religion, University of Chicago.
Anthony Fletcher is Emeritus
Professor of English Social
History, University of London.
Mathew Lyons is a writer and
historian. His most recent book,
The Favourite: Ralegh and his
Queen, is published in paperback
by Constable.
Robin Osborne is Professor
of Ancient History at the
University of Cambridge and
author of Archaic and Classical
Greek Art (Oxford, 1998).
Alexia Petsalis-Diomides is
a lecturer in Classical Art and
Archaeology, Kings College
London and Corpus Christi
College Oxford.
Helen Watanabe-OKelly is
Professor of German Literature,
University of Oxford.
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Historians for Britain
When the aim of an article is to
stimulate debate, it is good to
know that it has done so (Britain:
apart from or a part of Europe?,
May 2015). Yet I cannot help
feeling that there is an amount
of hair-splitting in the response
(Fog in the Channel: historians
isolated, July), which mixes
quotations from the Historians
for Britain website with the
wording of the article itself. In it,
I referred to the ancient roots of
several modern British institutions, without claiming that they
have always contained a germ of
democracy or that parliamentary
sovereignty goes right back to
(say) the Anglo-Saxon Witan.
Ancient institutions evolve or
die. Nor was I referring to medieval anti-Judaism or the negative
portrayal of sometimes absent
Jews in literature (hardly a cornerstone of British culture), but
to the comparison between virulent antisemitism in Germany
(and several of its neighbours)
and Great Britain in more modern
times. Above all, I laid emphasis
on the close economic and
political bonds between Britain
and Europe that reach back to the
Middle Ages and beyond.
To say that these bonds have
always existed is not to prove that
there is little that is truly distinctive about the political culture of
Great Britain. I lay heavy emphasis here on legal theory and practice because I do not believe that
a comparable system of Common
Law exists in Europe outside
the British Isles, apart from the
ex-colony of Cyprus. To assert
that the legal systems of European states and of the European
Court of Justice have found room
for precedent and that English
law has been influenced by civil
codes is to ignore the different
presuppositions about how law
is made and how justice works.
Nor, unusually, does Britain have
a written constitution.
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
It goes without saying that

there is a historical perspective
to all this. I agree that Britains
global role and its rivalries with
other Europe-based empires
need to be taken into account;
but these priorities sometimes
distracted Britain from direct
engagement with the Continent.
Moreover, there have been significant breaks as well as continuities, including the rejection by
the Crown of papal authority over
the Church and the effects of
early industrialisation. These are
features that have made Britain
in some respects distinctive.
These questions can also be
approached from a European
perspective. What is this Europeanness that my critics trumpet?
In what sense are countries that
lay under Ottoman rule and later
under the Soviet jackboot part
of the same entity as Spain and
Portugal, with their very different narratives of the past? Such
diversity, which is even found
within countries such as Spain,
encourages the belief that Europe
has vast potential as a common
market, but that the dream of
ever-closer union and the myth
of a European identity are distractions from the work that needs to
be done.
Historians for Britain believe
that a reformed EU is needed and
that the UK can play a major role
within it. But Europe as it is at
present constituted is founded
upon historical myths about a
common past, or, worse, on the
assumption that a European
identity must and will be forged
without having to look back to
the past. To rephrase dAzeglio:
We have made Europe; now we
must make the Europeans.
Judging from the vicissitudes
of the Euro, this Europe is under
massive strain and may be on the
verge of breaking.
Politicians of both Right and
Left acknowledge that a referendum on British membership
Connect with us on Twitter

twitter.com/historytoday
needs to be held, following renegotiation. My belief is that voters

would prefer to remain within a
reformed EU, less centralised and
more democratically accountable.
I should be surprised if many of
the signatories disagreed with
that view. Surely it is time to
accept that the real myth is not
that of English exceptionalism,
for all countries become exceptional in their way, but that of
European identity?
David Abulafia
Gonville & Caius, Cambridge
Europes Past and Future

The history of Europe, writes
David Abulafia, is to a large
extent a history of division
not a history of unity. Yet for
centuries Britain was among the
most European of countries. The
many forces connecting it with
the rest of Europe have included
Christianity; court culture and
dynastic marriages, hence the
accession in 1714 of the Elector
of Hanover as George I; the widespread use of Latin and French in
England; travel, trade, banking
and migration. For centuries
there were communities of
Britons in European cities, from
St Petersburg to Lisbon. London
attracted Huguenots, bankers
and, in the 20th century, the
intellectuals from central Europe
who transformed English culture
and science.
Developments in Britain
cannot be understood outside
a European context. Henry
VII, for example, was a French
protg, with French soldiers
fighting for him at Bosworth. The
Glorious Revolution of 1688 was
a European as well as an English
and Irish event. Its triumph
was ensured by the invasion of
a European army, containing
English, Scottish, Dutch, German
and Danish regiments, under a
quintessential European, William
III, Prince of Orange, Count of
Nassau, Stadholder of Holland,
Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and

Overijssel. In the 19th century
Britain cooperated with its European allies through regular, and
effective, diplomatic congresses
and conferences. Europe is in our
past, as well as our present and
our future.
Philip Mansel
Society of Court Studies
Birth of the Boffin

I was pleased to read Lord
Howells tribute to my late friend
Hanbury Brown (Letters, June).
Your readers might like to know
that Hanbury wrote a short
autobiography, Boffin: A Personal
Story of the Early Days of Radar,
Radio Astronomy and Quantum
Optics, published by Adam Hilger
in 1991. The word Boffin is believed to have been coined by Air
Vice-Marshal G. P. Chamberlain,
with Hanbury Brown in mind.
The book contains Hanburys
own modest and often amusing
account of the early days of
radar and goes on to deal with
his peacetime career in the then
new field of radio astronomy,
first at Jodrell Bank and later in
Australia. His work in that field is
as important scientifically as his
work on radar, although harder to
explain and not as directly related
to the survival of Great Britain.
Alan H Batten
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Wheres Richard?
I was disappointed that History
Today contained little or no coverage of (a) the discovery of the
bones of Richard III at Leicester;
and (b) his subsequent reburial.
Whatever is thought of Richard,
whether he was good or bad,
these were significant events,
archaeologically and historically,
and I would have thought there
would be something included in
History Today besides a couple of
throwaway lines in the editorial.
Sheila Gove
Kings Lynn
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Coming Next Month

Outcasts and Miscreants
Samuel Johnson subscribed to a
commonly held view that
Britains transatlantic colony was
primarily a dumping ground for
its unsavoury citizens. Yet those
who made the voyage west to
the New World in the 17th and
18th centuries were pooled from
various sections of society, says
Rachel Christian, who traces the
peopling of British America from
Elizabeth Is Poor Law of 1572 to
the American Revolution.
Islam and the Nazis
As its military situation deteriorated, the Third Reich increasingly saw

the Islamic world as a potentially significant ally. From 1942 onwards, its
Islam Programme began to court Muslim communities in its occupied
territories with propaganda promising liberation and protection. Yet,
as David Motadel writes, the Nazi policy was far from straightforward,
as the policies created by bureaucrats in Berlin often clashed with the
realities being implemented on the ground.
The Strange Case of the Absent Scottish Levellers
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Why were there no Levellers in 17th-century Scotland? The traditional

narrative considers Scotland a backward society, whose citizens only
acquired the wherewithal to challenge their over-mighty magnates
after gaining full union with England. Yet the Civil Wars were sparked by
events in Scotland, says Laura Stewart, who suggests that Scotland does
not lack Englands traditions of liberty, but, rather, has forged its own
interpretation of what the word meant.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
Junes Prize Crossword
The September issue of History Today will be on sale throughout

the UK on August 20th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
EDITORS LETTER: 2 De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Punch Limited; 5
Left: Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe in Sharpes Rifles, 1993. Produced by Picture Palace and directed by Tom Clegg.
Right: Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, 2004. Produced by Focus Features/Janette Day and
directed by Mira Nair. Photographs Alamy; 6 Bridgeman Images; 7 Hulton Archive/Getty Images. MONTHS
PAST: 8 Felix Lipov/Alamy; 9 top and bottom Science Photo Library. A MEDIEVAL RELIC?: 11 Leon Neal/
AFP/Getty Images; 12 epa/Alamy; 13 top Anne Bailey; bottom Martin Beek; 14 top Stuart Crump Visuals/
Alamy; bottom Colin Underhill/Alamy; 15 Left Getty Images; right epa/Alamy; 16 David Warren/Alamy;
17 top Tom Denny; bottom Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images. COPS AND DOCKERS: 19 Rex Features; 20
top Rex Features; bottom Mirrorpix; 21 Alamy; 22 Press Association; 23 top Rex Features; bottom
Mirrorpix/Alamy; 24 top courtesy The Royal Military Police Museum; bottom Rex Features; 25 courtesy Clive
Emsley. INFOCUS: 26-27 Getty Images. THE SUCCESS OF SWEET SMELLS: 28 Muse Carnavalet/Bridgeman
Images; 29 Bridgeman Images; 30 top V&A Images; bottom Bridgeman Images; 31 Asprey & Co/Bridgeman
Images; 32 V&A Images; 33 Clockwise from top (left to right) Science & Society Picture Library; Trustees
of the British Museum; Wellcome Library; 34 Christies Images/Bridgeman Images. CHURCHILL AND THE
CUNARDERS: 36 left Mary Evans Picture Library; right Getty Images; 38 Mary Evans Picture Library. THE
FALL OF ROBESPIERRE: 39 Bibliothque nationale de France; 40 Muse des Beaux Arts/Bridgeman Images;
40-41 AKG Images; 42 Bibliothque nationale de France; 43 top Muse Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images;
bottom Dallas Museum of Art; 44 Bibliothque nationale de France. SEX CHANGES OVER TIME: 45 Ms 22531
Bibliothque Nationale/Bridgeman Images. THE BATTLE OF NEUVE CHAPELLE & THE INDIAN CORPS: 46-47
De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 48 left Mary Evans Picture Library; right Topfoto; 49 top
HT Archive; bottom Imperial War Museum; 50 Andrew Sharpe. SPREADING THE WORD: 51 AKG Images.
YOUNG GUNS: 54 Sankei Archive/Getty Images. REVIEWS: 56 Louvre/Bridgeman Images; 60 Royal Collection
Trust/ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015; 62 Teylers Museum, Netherlands. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69
Bonhams, London/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 images The Library of Congress. SIX DEGREES OF
SEPARATION: Glasshouse Images/Alamy. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in
any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.
The winner for June is Michael Betts, Norwich.
Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
1 Which town became the Paris
of Alaska in the 1890s during the
Klondike Gold Rush?
4 Of whom did Henry VIII report:

I left her as good a maid as I found
her?
9 The name of which American

product became a word defined in
Websters dictionary as a product
that fails to gain public acceptance
despite high expectations?
15 Which Japanese musician

won a Grammy for his electronic
reworking of Claude Debussy
compositions in the 1970s?
16 Which English king was said
to be so overweight that when
interred in his stone coffin his
insides burst?
5 Who stated I aint got no quarrel

with those Vietcong in 1967?
6 A market crash of which commodity afflicted the Dutch town of
Haarlem in February 1637?
17 Who referred to his domain as

small country, small people?
18 Artificial rivers of which toxic
element are rumoured to run
through the tomb of the Chinese
emperor Qin Shi Huang?
7 Who, in the estimation of The

Times, delivered a speech in the
language of a clown after being
sworn in as US vice president in
1868?
10 Who did Melvin Purvis shoot
and kill in July 1934?
11 Who was the Nine Days
Queen?
12 With what weapon did Robert
Pate attempt to assassinate Queen
Victoria in June 1850?
13 Who, according to Voltaire, On
17 August, at six in the evening
was the King of France but at two
in the morning [] was nobody?
14 Which Roman emperor gained

notoriety for cross-dressing as a
prostitute?
19 Which building, Earths best

gem according to Ralph Waldo
Emerson, was bombed to near
destruction in September 1687?
20 How many times was the
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II
excommunicated?
21 Who became known as the
Butcher of Lyon during the Reign
of Terror?
22 Which French king believed that
he was made of glass?
24 Which significant impairment

afflicted John of Bohemia during
the Battle of Crcy in 1346?
25 Josephine Teys novel The
Daughter of Time (1951) is
concerned with reappraising
the reputation of which English
monarch?
ANSWERS
3 Who did Edward Gibbon describe

as the first sovereign who voluntarily resigned his power?
8 What did Boris Yeltsin describe as

just pie in the sky?
1. Circle, or Circle City

2. 1893
3. Diocletian (245-311)
4. Anne of Cleves (1515-1557)
5. Muhammad Ali (1942-)
6 Tulips
7. Andrew Johnson (1808-1875)
8. Communism
9. The Ford Edsel in 1957
10. John Dillinger (1903-1934)
11. Lady Jane Grey (1536-1554)
12. A steel-tipped cane
13. Nicolas Fouquet (1615-1680)
14. Elagabalus (c.203-222)
15. Isao Tomita (1932-)
16. William the Conqueror (c.10281087)
17. King Leopold II of Belgium
(1835-1909)
18. Mercury
19. The Parthenon
20. Four
21. Joseph Fouch (1759-1820)
22. Charles VI (1368-1422)
23. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759)
24. Blindness
25. Richard III (1452-1485)
2 Planned in antiquity, in which

year was the Corinth Canal
opened?
23 Which two notable composers

did Ophthalmiater Royal John
Taylor partially blind in the 18th
century?
Prize Crossword
ACROSS
9 Whig statesman and (briefly)
Britains first foreign secretary (7,5,3)
10 1733 opera by G.F. Handel (7)
12 Figure emblematic of 19th-century
French literature; a stroller or loafer (7)
13 Nevil ___ (1732-1811), Astronomer Royal from 1765 (9)
14 John ___ (1940-2002), New York
mobster nicknamed the Teflon Don
(5)
15 In Greek myth, the son of king
Aeacus of Aegina, who accompanied
Jason on the Argo (7)
18/24 In ___, 1890 memoir by the
explorer H.M. Stanley (7,6)
21 Town in County Clare, associated
historically with the OBrien family (5)
23 Oh! The ___ of England Henry
Fielding, The Grub Street Opera (1731)
(5,4)
25 The ___ Museum, social history
museum in Ilkeston, Derbyshire (7)
26 Sir Henry ___ (1756-1823),
Scottish portrait painter (7)
29 Nickname given to Sir Charles
Cowper (1807-75), politician in
Australia (8,7)
DOWN
1 In Greek myth, an Oread who dwelt
on Mount Kithairon (4)
2 See 7
3 He is still fighting ___ all over again
Aneurin Bevan on Winston Churchill,
1951 (8)
Set by Richard Smyth

4 Ancient kingdom of south-east
Ireland, also known as Osraige (6)
5 James A. ___ (1831-81), US
president assassinated by Charles
Guiteau (8)
6 Island of Malaysia visited by
privateer James Lancaster in 1592 (6)
7/2 1964 play by Arthur Miller (5,3,4)
8 The ___, controversial William
Friedkin film of 1973 (8)
11 Charles ___ (1814-84), novelist
whose works include Put Yourself In
His Place (1870) (5)
15 Let him that hath understanding
count the number of ___ Revelation 13:18 (3,5)
16 Brevity is the soul of ___
Dorothy Parker, 1916 (8)
17 ___ Echo, newspaper founded in
Darlington in 1870 (8)
19 Town on the Isle of Bute, home to
a notable ruined castle (8)
20 Nancy ___ (1913-97), Liberal
politician (5)
22 Richard ___, character created
by the historical novelist Bernard
Cornwell (6)
24 See 18 Across
27 It is better to be good than to be
___ Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of
Dorian Gray (1891) (4)
28 Baptist ___ (d.1682), third
Viscount Campden, Royalist army
officer (4)
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 August 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

Liliuokalani
(1838-1917)
LILIUOKALANI
last monarch of the Kingdom of

Hawaii, attended Queen Victorias
Golden Jubilee celebrations, as did
inventor of slalom skiing,

who has a double black
diamond trail named after him
in Taos, New Mexico,
sometime home of
Abdul Karim
(1863-1909)
Georgia OKeeffe
(1887-1986)
Victorias Indian Secretary, who was

made a Companion in the Order of
the Indian Empire, as was
who was contracted to paint

pineapples for the Hawaiian
Pineapple Company, founded by
Frederick Robert,
1st Earl Roberts
(1832 - 1914)
British field marshal, who donated a
trophy for the Roberts of Kandahar
Cup ski race at Crans, Montana, in
1911, an event organised by
Sir Arnold Henry Moore

Lunn (1888-1974)
James Dole (1877-1958)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
American pineapple baron, whose

first cousin, once removed, was
Sanford B. Dole, who became
President of Hawaii after deposing
CROSSING THE ATLANTIC
FromtheArchive
The glamorous success of Alcock and Browns first non-stop transatlantic flight in the wake of the
Great War made the world smaller but no less nationalistic, argues Maurice Walsh.
Flight to the Future

IN JULY 1979, History Today marked
the 60th anniversary of two events in
aviation history, one still celebrated,
the other a technological museum
piece. In separate articles entitled
Crossing the Atlantic in 1919 D.L.B.
Hartley and B.J. Haimes recalled the
non-stop flight of Alcock and Brown
in their Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland in June that year and
the journey the following month of a
British airship, a copy of the Zeppelin,
from East Fortune airfield near Edinburgh to New York carrying
31 men and a stowaway cat.
Both authors were interested in these feats as glamorous adventures. But they
acknowledged that neither
would have been possible
without the focus given
to developing aircraft as
weapons during the First World War.
Well before 1914, as Haimes
pointed out, Germanys airships were
more feared than its formidable navy.
Zeppelins could obliterate cities and
spearhead an invasion of Britain,
replicating the plot of H.G. Wells 1907
novel, The War In The Air, in which a
fleet of German airships destroys US
battleships and forces the surrender
of New York. During the war the
Zeppelins bombarded the east coast of
England from Newcastle to Margate,
killing more than 1,400 people and
spreading fear and panic. The war also
accelerated the investments European
governments had made in military
aeronautics; by 1918 Britain had 4,500
planes and the US was manufacturing
14,000.
But when the peace conference
convened in Paris, flight was no
longer the terror from the skies, but
had once more been converted into a
subject of popular fascination. Alcock
and Browns journey was the most
obvious example of how the romance
of air travel seemed to have occluded the brutality of the bomber. Not
long after they set down in a muddy
field in Galway, to win the 10,000
prize offered by the Daily Mail for
the first continuous flight across the
Atlantic, news of their achievement
sped around the world. Crowds lined
the roads as a Daily Mail reporter
drove Alcock and Brown to Galway
city where their car was surrounded
by people thrusting pieces of paper
through the windows to be signed.
It did not occur to

Wells that nationalism
would flourish in an
interconnected world
Messages of congratulation poured
in from the king, Lloyd George and
Woodrow Wilson. A Hollywood producer offered $50,000 if they would
attempt a trans-Pacific flight. By the
time they boarded a train for Dublin
the next day to begin their journey to
London they were already celebrities.
Their faces were displayed on newsstands in London, New York and Paris,
where Le Matin proclaimed that an
immense horizon has been opened to
long distance flight.
Air travel epitomised the limitless
possibilities of the postwar era. Wells
was exhilarated by a trip in an aeroplane over Slovakia, marvelling at how
flight opened up a view of the sunlit
clearness and brightness of the outspread world. As more people took to
the skies they would realise that they
no longer needed to be constrained
by a patchwork of various sized
internment camps called Independent
Sovereign States.
On their journey across Ireland,
well wishers appeared at every train
station to greet Alcock and Brown. But

they were passing through a country
in the throes of a revolt against the
British Empire. The crowds who
cheered them on waved the tricolour,
the flag of the new government that
had unilaterally declared Irish sovereignty. The assassination of policemen
had begun and a war was developing
in which military aeroplanes would be
deployed to hunt down roving bands
of IRA guerrillas.
In my book, the arrival of Alcock
and Brown in Galway is not incidental
to the Irish independence struggle but
a motif of the transforming world the
new nation is trying to take its place
in, a world in which jazz, Freud, celebrity culture and US power will shape
Ireland as much as the national ideals
of its revolutionary leaders. It did not
occur to Wells that nationalism, far
from being an unlikely holdover from
a bygone era, would flourish in an
interconnected world. One forgotten
outcome of the postwar settlement
was that airspace was designated as
sovereign national property in 1919.
Maurice Walshs Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a
Revolutionary World 1918-1923 was published by
Faber & Faber in May 2015.
VOLUME XXIX ISSUE 7 JULY 1979

Read the original piece
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August 2015

From One, Many

The Bronze Age roots of

The strange cult of Richard III

Publisher Andy Patterson

Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.

FROM THE EDITOR

is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Total Average Net Circulation

2 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2015

PUBLIC HISTORY appears to be a growth area within the academy, though a

capital, noting that people would not

such as the Pall Mall Gazette, reported

love begins and ends there? In many

Newspapers reported that

remorse, who were sent to the gallows,

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

green Riflemans jacket, carrying crucial

was sent to school. Richard Sharpes

ality, too, is emblematic of the memory

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary

scum of the suburbs, besides a number

not matter to him if a hundred of them

Sara Read is the author of Maids, Wives, Widows:

approved by parliament, was all the

The British had initially hoped

Churchill to protest and was told that,

Jonathan Fenby is author of The General: Charles

AUGUST 21st 1940

windows flew about the room.

of the room. Natalia had heard Trotsky

AUGUST 12th 1865

and heal. After six weeks Greenlees

sary deaths. Believing he was directed

AUGUST 6th 1890

Awakened at five oclock in the morning

AUGUST 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

O CATHEDRAL HAS SEEN anything like this

campaign and a grand religious ceremony marking the

It is difficult not to see more

of a cult. Translation ceremonies were often grand affairs,

OR MEDIEVALISTS, then, there is much about

Although these key criteria for sainthood are absent,

TRANSLATION PROMPTED by the rescue of

WHEREAS MODERN CURIOSITY in Richards former grave

the Bishop of Leicester, the Rt Reverend Tim Stevens, was

S RICHARD IS NOT considered a saint he has no

ing the 1220 translation of St Thomas relics, the Richard

Left: the Right

reburial was presented as an occasion for reconciliation,

Although some aspects of the so-called Richard effect

PEAKING TO VISITORS waiting to see the newly

Richards one and

16 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2015

F COURSE, the desire to draw the past into the

reassuring sense of continuity and gives meaning and hope

week and one American lady made a point of telling me that

Britons like to think that

Cops & Dockers

NDER THE HEADLINE Dock Thefts: Substantial

have been keen to explore labour struggles on the docks,

IDDLING AND TAKING CARGO from the docks goes

Tyne Dock, Sunderland in the northeast of England, late 1930s.