The Tower Suffragette by Penny Dolan

Inside Harrogate Library, at the start  of March,a new display was put up, decorated with small flags and  badges, and arranged by the Local Studies group. As I studied the labels, printed images and photocopied extracts,  the story seemed like a glimpse an exciting Edwardian detective adventure. Secret meetings? Foreign infiltrators? Concealed figures hurrying across the dark and lonely moor? Undercover surveillance? What made the incident interesting was that, I learned, it involved a famous local Suffragette.

I had learned about the Votes For Women movement many decades ago, after seeing the horrifying posters about force-feeding and the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act inside  Bruce Castle Museum in Tottenham, London. Whenever my grandmother took there - one of her favourite outings, I stared at the images again, had nightmares again, and was felt revolted by the thought of food. Those images still have that awful power. And, in addition, searching for this image today, I noticed that many of the poster images seemed to be without their original wording.

                                                 

 Recently, I spent time with the Suffragettes again, reading ‘Old Baggage’, author Lissa Evans' enjoyable historical novel, set in the twenties and thirties. Though the book looks back at the bravery of the women, the plot also speaks about the mix of ideology, ‘sisterhood’, money and class within the organisation, and at the lives of all those unmarried women once the 'European War' was over. Evans' novel also warned me of the biased descriptions and attitudes I read in a local newspaper article (June 1914) quoted below.

                                                      
The main subject of the display was Leonora Cohen, who was known as 'The Tower Suffragette', born in Leeds in 1873. Canova Throp, her father, who was a sculptor and stone carver, died when Leonora was five. His wife, Jane Lamie, worked  long hours as a seamstress to support Leonora and her two younger brothers. As a child, Leonora worked alongside her mother, and at sixteen, trained as a milliner. She went on to become a milliner’s buyer, travelling from Yorkshire to London.                                                        

                                                         

 These experience taught Leonora about the working conditions of women, and the inequalities of men and women's wages. Her mother, who had suffered from poverty and injustice, was the one who inspired her radicalism, saying “if only we had a say in things”. Leonora’s telling statement was that “a drunken lout of a man had the vote simply because he was a male. I vowed to change things.”

In 1900, aged twenty-seven, she married Henry Cohen, a jeweller’s assistant, and childhood friend. He was Jewish and Leonora was not, so his parents disapproved of the marriage. Leonora’s mother disapproved too, fearing that marriage would distance her daughter from the Suffragette cause, in which the women were both now involved. However, Henry knew and supported Leonora's beliefs and married her, despite being warned by a friend that “if I had a wife like yours, I should tie her to the table leg.” In 1902, she gave birth to their son, who died at a year old and then a surviving daughter. For a few years, the family lived quietly. 

Then, in 1908, Leonora joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), popularly know as the Suffragettes, and at one point became one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s bodyguards.Three years later, In 1911, Leonora was arrested after throwing a rock against the window of a government building. She was pummelled on the jaw by a police officer, knocked down by a police horse and sentenced to seven days in Holloway prison.

In 1913, Leonora made headlines again when she staged an angry public protest after Asquith’s capitulation and dropping of the Reform Bill. Taking the tube, she went to the Tower of London where because of her quiet elegance, she was assumed to be a lady teacher escorting a group of visiting school boys into the Jewel Tower. On reaching the display of jewels, she drew out the iron bar concealed under her coat and smashed the glass case containing the Insignia of the Order of Merit and other treasures. Sent to Leeds Assizes and again imprisoned, the press named her "The Tower Suffragette.'

After this incident, the Cohen family moved from Leeds to Harrogate, a thriving spa town whose health facilities, churches, concerts and entertainments brought many visitors - and an ideal place to conceal a few extra visitors. They set up The Reform Food Boarding House, a vegetarian establishment, at Harlow Moor Drive, as a refuge for fellow suffragettes and sympathisers. 

Number 31 is one among a long row of impressive four and five storey boarding houses, situated just by the Valley Gardens where visitors promenaded after taking the waters, and close by the Royal Baths and the busy main centre of town. However, across the road, in the other direction, was a wild uphill expanse of open moor, pasture and woodland. In fact, the boarding house was an ideal situation in more ways than one.

In 1914, notoriety arrived: Leonora Cohen gave shelter to the “tiny, wily, elusive Pimpernel” known as Lilian Lenton. A famous firebrand, Lilian had already been imprisoned for window smashing, and in 1913, was involved in several arson attacks, the most famous being on the Tea House in Kew Gardens.

                                               

Imprisoned in Holloway, Lilian had gone on hunger strike, refusing food and liquid, and was force-fed until she became seriously ill. Though Lilian was then released, under the notorious ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, she was to be re-arrested after seven days, when her health would be said to have 'improved'. 

Instead, Lilian left London, travelled to Harrogate avoiding any re-arrest, and took refuge with Leonora at the Reform Food Boarding House, among friends and sympathisers. However, wisely or unwisely, while speaking at a meeting on The Stray, a large grassy area in the town, Mrs Cohen, told listeners “We have Lilian Lenton in Harrogate.” As soon as word got out, the authorities made plans to swoop on the boarding house and, attracted by “the hysterical wantonness of the militant’s misdemeanors”, the raid made news.

The account quoted below, appearing in the loyal, local newspaper ‘The Harrogate Advertiser’, and is very much written in the populist and racist language of the time. Ot also reflects that the piece was written at a troubled time, at home and on the continent, and as what was then known as the European War began.  

Reporting on the Harlow Moor Drive incident, The Harrogate Advertiser described how: “The front door opened and two men took up positions at the gate, holding it ajar. Another went across the road to a gate a few yards down the Drive which opens on to Harlow Moor. He pushed the gate back, and wedged it. That was the setting of the scene.

A small group of spectators, including two plain clothes officers, had not long to wait for the actors, for in a few moments there emerged from the house a most laughable and grotesque company. Like as the animals are recorded to have entered the Ark, so these latter day fanatics came down the steps two by two.

There was a man for every woman and several of those doughty cavaliers, it was noted, were of a marked semitic cast of countenance. The women without exception advertised a quite new and unexpected suffragette trait - modesty. They had shrouded their their faces with wraps, with antimacassars, with tablecloths and impenetrable veils. No Moslem woman was ever more chary of exposing her features to the gaze of men than these bashful suffragettes! Quite 40 people engaged in this masque, Then over the Moor in divers directions, they scuttled like so many rabbits and were quickly swallowed up in the gathering gloom. Then follows a typical press law-and-order press complaint: Might not they have been arrested for obstructing the police in their duty of watching a criminal? It has been said that a coach and four can be driven through every Act of Parliament. To the police who perforce stood by impotent at the time the extraordinary procession passed, we can only say - ” (Extract from The Harrogate Advertiser, June 1914)

One can almost imagine what was said, when it was revealed that the police, arriving to capture that wily female Pimpernel, were outwitted. Lilian, dressed in a boy's suit given to her by Leonora, had slipped out of the boarding house and escaped, racing over Harlow Moor to freedom. Lilian was not re-arrested  and survived in liberty for that day, at least.

                                       

In 1916, Leonora Cohen and her family returned to Leeds, where she remained active in both the Suffragette and the Trade Union movements, and by 1924, was appointed the first woman Magistrate in Yorkshire. Many years later, Leonora appeared with two other still-living Suffragettes on the cover of the Radio Times, to publicise the BBC's ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ series about Votes for Women story.  Her scrapbooks and memorabilia are now kept in The Abbey House Museum in Leeds. 

                                        

Leonora Cohen, the Tower Suffragette: a most amazing woman! 

 

However, I want to end this post by mentioning the 'Tower Suffragette' display that so caught my attention, and thank the Local Studies team for the work that created those three boards at Harrogate Library, building shown below.

                                

 The display is part of a year-long local project, celebrating the anniversary of Women’s Suffrage through the lives of Leonora Cohen and two other local women: Dr. Laura Soby Veale, a pioneer lady doctor, and Lady Frainy Bomanji, wife of a shipping magnate and local philanthropist. 

This August, their stories, and others, will inform 'Winning Women', a specially-designed walking tour led by enthusiastic local expert Harry Satloka and friends, probably starting opposite Betty’s Cafe and close by the War Memorial. Visitors can enjoy a slice of the town’s history as well as a slice (or two) of delicious local cake. Though please note that many other establishments are available.                            


Penny Dolan

Hannah More, by Sue Purkiss

 Twelve or so years ago, I started a creative writing class in Cheddar, where I live. I tried out several venues, one of which was a house owned by the Parish Council, named Hannah More Cottage. It's a pleasant looking old cottage with whitewashed walls, small windows and a pretty garden: the roof used to be thatched, but now it's tiled. Inside, there's a large room where meetings take place, and where, at the beginning of May, local artists exhibit as part of an annual - and very successful - arts trail. There's also a much smaller room, with book shelves and wooden settles on either side of a fireplace.

It's called after Hannah More because this is where, in 1789, she started a village school. Miss More (after reading about the sort of person she was, I think she would find it overly familiar of me to call her 'Hannah') was born in Bristol, but now lived in nearby Wrington. She was an experienced school teacher, having taught at a school her father had founded in Bristol, and also at schools in Somerset which she ran with her sisters. She was also a philanthropist and a poet, and wrote moral and religious tracts - which sold in large numbers: a series of tracts written in 1796 exhorted the poor  'to rely on virtues of contentment, sobriety, humility, industry, reverence for the British Constitution, hatred of the French, and trust in God and the kindness of the gentry' (Wikipedia) - but still managed to sell over two million copies.

She must have visited Cheddar and been horrified by the poverty she saw there, because she suggested to her friend William Willberforce MP (famous for championing the abolition of slavery) that he should go there and see the benighted state of the poor. Equally appalled, he agreed that something must be done, and offered to finance a school if Miss More would organise it. So, in 1789, the cottage was given a new thatched roof and presumably a lick of whitewash, and 140 children gathered to inaugurate her Sunday school. The part nearest the camera had formerly been an ox shed, but now became the classroom: the front section was a cottage, for the use of the headmistress, a Mrs Baker from Bristol. People complained about this radical idea of educating the poor, but she declared to the Bishop of Bath and Wells: her schools 'taught only 'such coarse works as may fit them [their charges] for servants. I allow no writing for the poor. My object is... to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.' (Also Wikipedia.) School must have been a lot of fun.

Hannah More Cottage

Whatever it was like, the school was soon well established. When she died in 1833, she left £50 towards the cost of a new school in Cheddar, next to the cottage. The Marquis of Bath (whose family still own Cheddar Caves and part of Cheddar Gorge, as well as Longleat) contributed £100 and the rest of the cost was raised by public subscription. This became the National School, only finally closing in 1964, when the Kings of Wessex School opened.

The National School, which followed on from Hannah More's Cottage. It's now been converted into flats.

There is a reproduction of her portrait hanging in the cottage, and I used to look at it and think that she looked like a rather sweet, kindly old lady. Having read more about her, I'm not so sure about that. She was certainly extremely capable, but she was also quite formidable. 

In her youth, she was engaged for six years to one William Turner. He finally broke the engagement, but agreed to compensate her by paying her an annuity of £200 a year for the rest of her life - and it was this that gave her the freedom to pursue her literary interests. She spent a good deal of time in London, meeting Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick (who penned the forward to a play she wrote), and many others. She was anti-slavery, and she became a member of a group of literary women caleed the Bluestockings. But she wasn't a feminist. She refused to read Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and turned down an offer of honorary membership of the Royal Society of Literature, seeing her 'sex alone as a disqualification.'

Hannah More was buried in this grave, with her four sisters, none of whom seem to have married. The churchyard is in Wrington, where Miss More lived for many years. It's a lovely village, which probably hasn't changed that much since her time there.

This is a very brief look at the life of someone who contributed enormously to the lives of many children, in Cheddar and in the other schools she founded with her sisters. Who knows how many lives were influenced by her? - and hopefully not only to become sevants. 

She isn't the figure that, based on very little evidence, I had imagined. And this makes me think about the process of creating characters based on real historical figures. Suppose I had been thinking or writing a novel based on her life. (Full disclosure: I'm not.) I could write a book based on the things she did, the people she met and so on: I could make suppositions about how her broken engagement affected her and changed the course of her life.

But there would really be no way of knowing how close I had got to the truth, to the person she really was. And so would it be fair, to take what I know of her, and weave a story round that, knowing that, in all probability, she was a far less sympathetic character than the one I had created?

It's a tricky one.

(Apologies for the erratic font sizing. This seems to happen when you copy and paste quotes, and I've tried but failed to sort it out.)

The Golden Hour by Kate Lord Brown

Reviewed by Stephanie Williams

I must have been about thirteen when my imagination was first captured by Akhenaten, the legendary pharaoh who brought the revolutionary idea of one god to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE.   His wife, rumoured to be his sister, was even more romantic:  the beautiful, powerful and mysterious Nefertiti.  

 

Bust of Nefertiti, Nofretete Neues Museum

My source was a wonderful historical novel by someone like Mary Renault, who I was devouring at the time — but it wasn’t … whatever the book was, it is long gone, leaving me with an enduring fascination with Egypt.  Last year, I was lucky enough to float down the Nile to see the Valley of the Kings and the temple of Karnak at Luxor — where, in the days when it was ancient Thebes, Nefertiti may once have walked.

‘Fair of face, great of charm,’ Nefertiti represented the female element of creation, while her husband was a living god — their source, the sun, worshipped by holding up a disc to the sun.  Through your prayers to them, you would have access to the true god. Together Akhenaten and Nefertiti overhauled the state’s religion, based on a pantheon of gods and their henchmen.  The king’s feet never touched the earth, their whole life, from daily worship, to the marital bed was a religious act. 

A house altar showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters. 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten

After 17 years, Akhenaten died. What happened to Nefertiti afterwards is a matter of dispute.  Did Nefertiti rule briefly as a female pharaoh? Oversee the kingdom as regent? Akenhaten’s son – DNA testing suggest Nefertiti was not his mother -- was the legendary child pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose golden sarcophagus has entranced millions around the globe.  He repudiated his father’s sun worship, and reinstated the old gods.  

 

When did she die?  One thing is certain, despite generations of strenuous efforts, her tomb has never been found.  

 

The quest to find Nefertiti’s tomb is the inspiration behind Kate Lord Brown’s new novel, The Golden Hour. 

Archaeologist Dr Lucie Fitzgerald has travelled to the Lebanon in March 1975, to visit her dying mother, Polly.  Beirut is emptying; it is the eve of the civil war. Polly, whose life has been consumed breeding Arabian horses on a farm west of Cairo, and after the war, outside Beirut, knows that it is time to tell her daughter the truth about her close friendship with Lucie’s godmother, Juno Munro.

 

The narrative weaves back and forth between 1975 Beirut and 1939 Cairo and the Valley of the Kings where Juno, an archaeologist, is part of a team searching for the tomb of Nefertiti.  Juno has a particular gift for recording hieroglyphs and scenes from the walls of the tombs they uncover. Disaster intervenes, war descends on Egypt, the dig is closed.  Thirty-five years later, Lucie too is on the track of Nefertiti’s tomb. Professor Brandt, who oversaw Juno’s dig, turns up at Lucie’s lecture on the myth of Osiris in London on the eve of her departure for Cairo.  And we wonder...

 

But the centre of the action is Egypt, and the louche life of the European communities in Cairo at the outbreak of the Second World War.  It is a period which Olivia Manning brought so vividly to life in The Levant Trilogy, later turned into The Fortunes of War, a BBC series from 1987, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson – still out there on DVD.

 

Manning, of course, had lived what she wrote.  Kate Lord Brown has absorbed Egypt. The details of how you run a dig.  That as a pre-war archaeologist you draw, not trace hieroglyphs.  The scent of rosewater, sandalwood, men smoking shisha, coloured glass, carab rings, the golden light at sunset.  Dust. She’s good on horses, the backstreets of Cairo, the old clubs and the Mena House and the vanished quarter of Ezbekiyya.  But I wished for more of a sense of war-time tension. 

 

This is a quick fun read, full of romance, the friendship of women, mysteries and tragedies.  Love and desire:  Polly and Fitz, Juno and Max, Lucie and her handsome Australian, David.  At its heart is the secret on which Lucie’s life turns.    

 

Take it on holiday and enjoy.

 

Stephanie Williams is the author of Olga’s Story,  and Running the Show, The extraordinary stories of the men who governed the British Empire.  Her latest book, The Education of Girls, will be published in the US on 23 May and in the UK later this year.  For more see www.stephanie-williams.com and https://stephaniewilliamswrites.substack.com/

 

Japan’s Jazz Age: Flappers and Feminists ~ by Lesley Downer

‘In the beginning, woman was the sun.’

Hiratsuka Raichō

Moga, pictured in 
Mainichi shimbun 

‘Modern gals’

If you had visited Tokyo in the 1910s and 1920s, you would have met Japanese women stepping out confidently with short flapper skirts and scandalously short hair, a million miles from the stereotypical ‘submissive Japanese woman.’ They were moga - ‘modern gals’ - a term coined by the great Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in his novel A Fool’s Love. Not all women were moga, but there were enough to flavour the era.

While Europe was engulfed in World War I, Japan, which was allied to Britain, was enjoying an economic boom. In the Meiji period, Japan’s Victorian era, the country had burst spectacularly into the modern age and onto the world stage. And by now westernisation, prosperity and mass culture had spread to nearly everyone in Japan. Now everyone was enjoying the benefits.

1929 ad for Shirokiya department store

Speed, sport and sex
After the hard work and discipline of the Victorian era, when the government was determined to build up the nation to protect it against colonisation, the new era (named Taishō, after a new emperor came to the throne) was like a fresh breeze blowing through.

The Meiji constitution had been all about keeping women in their place, slotting them into the template of ‘good wives, wise mothers’. But by the 1910s and 1920s the rebuilding was done. Suddenly people were free to let their hair down and be themselves. 

At last the younger generation had a voice. They didn’t have to follow in the drab footsteps of their elders. Those of us who remember the Sixties - Flower Power, Women’s Lib - will recognise the thrill, the exhilaration. 

Moga 1928 in 'beach pyjama' style

Youth power
This was Japan’s Jazz Age - the age of speed, sport and sex, of anything goes. There was universal education. With one of the world’s largest student populations, Tokyo was enjoying a boom in the publishing of books, journals and newspapers. People were free to think and talk and argue and throw around words and ideas like socialism, Marxism, anarchism, democracy and freedom. They also had money which they could spend any way they liked.

Forget ‘good wife, wise mother’. These women had jobs. They could be typists, elevator girls, shop clerks, nurses, writers, journalists or beauticians, and be financially independent. Some moga worked as waitresses in cafes, dispensing sexual favours where they saw fit, like Naomi in Tanizaki’s ground-breaking A Fool’s Love, a sort of Japanese Lolita, the story of a man hopelessly besotted with one of these cool aloof creatures.

Tipsy by Kobayakawa Kiyoshi

The moga were the trendsetters along with mobo - ‘modern boys’. Moga cut their hair short, like boys, and flaunted short flapper skirts, while dapper mobo wore their hair long and swept back in the all-back style and sported bell bottoms, bowler hats and horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd glasses.

They hung out in cafes and bars, they smoked, talked and argued, they practised free love and they strolled along the Ginza, Tokyo’s most fashionable street. They listened to jazz, danced the Charleston, watched American movies and ate ice cream. Until the authorities clamped down, Marxism was all the rage and everyone read the latest revolutionary Russian novels, such as Aleksandra Kollontai’s A Great Love.

Militant feminists
Out of this fizzing free love milieu sprang pioneering feminists.

Hiratsuka Raichō (1886 - 1971),
 from her autobiography

Hiratsuka Raichō lived the life. She famously said that marriage was ‘slavery during the daytime and prostitution at night.’ In 1908 at the age of 22 she eloped with an older married man, Morita Sohei, and the two tried - and failed - to commit suicide together in time-honoured Japanese fashion. She then had two children by a much younger lover whom she only married when her children were adults, taking her husband’s surname so that her son would not be negatively impacted when he was drafted.

She was also more than prepared to speak up for women’s rights. In 1911 she founded Seitō - Bluestocking - Japan’s first all-women literary magazine. The first words were ‘In the beginning woman was the sun’ - a reminder that in Japanese mythology the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu, is the creator of all life.

The first issue of Seitō, 

September 1911,

cover illustration by 

Naganuma Chieko

Seitō was packed with stories and articles expressing women’s sexuality with no holds barred. One story detailed the break up of an arranged marriage, another was a graphic description of casual sex with a man the author picked up in a bar. The upholders of traditional values, particularly in the government, were outraged and both issues were banned.

Then Hiratsuka started publishing articles daring to attack the capitalist system and the established order and demanding women’s rights. For the powers that be this was the last straw. In 1916 the Home Ministry forbade distributors to supply the magazine. Sales instantaneously dried up and the magazine had to close down.

But that didn’t stop Hiratsuka. At the time women were banned from attending political meetings on the basis that they should be at home looking after their families. In 1922 Hiratsuka and her fellow activists managed to get this law overturned though female suffrage was still a long way off. Women were not included when universal male suffrage was introduced in 1925. She and her fellow activists were condemned as ‘New Women’, a term which they enthusiastically embraced.

Yosano Akiko (1878 - 1942)

Seitō’s most famous contributor was the poet Yosano Akiko. She too had an affair with a married man whom she later married; the couple had eleven children. Her first volume of poems, Midaregami - Tangled Hair - was a passionate expression of her love for him. Critics attacked the book as immoral and obscene but it was loved and widely read and became a beacon for supporters of women’s rights. At the height of the Russo-Japanese War she published a poem entitled ‘Thou shalt not die’, exhorting her younger brother who was a soldier not to sacrifice himself for this senseless war. It became the anthem of the anti-war movement and was picked up again after World War II.

Midaregami (Tangled Hair)
by Yosano Akiko

These were women who took their lives in their own hands. Their power was their independence. Perhaps some of them even thought that the times they were a-changing, that a new age was dawning, as we did in the Sixties as we looked forward to the coming of the Age of Aquarius. But those that did discovered all too soon - as we did - that they were wrong. The era of speed, sport and sex turned out to be just a flash of brightness before the darkness of World War II closed in.

For more on Japan’s pioneering feminists, you could read

In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist by Hiratsuka Raichō, translated with an introduction and notes by Teruko Craig (Columbia University Press 2006)
and
A Girl with Tangled Hair: the 399 poems in the Midaregami by Akiko Yosano, translated by Jane Reichhold and Machiko Kobayashi

All images are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and in particular all things Japanese. For more about these amazing women and much else, please see my new book, The Shortest History of Japan (Old Street Publications). My travel book, On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, was also reissued last year, by Eland. For more see www.lesleydowner.com
    

The Fake Gestapo Cell in London in WW2

by Deborah Swift

During WW2 the government did its best to suppress the British Union of Fascists (BUF), but MI5’s effort to prevent fascist activities was hampered by the government’s advisory committee on internment. This advisory committee consisted of members who were influential in society, friends of aristocrats and the upper classes. They were there to make decisions about who should be removed from society as a threat to the war effort. But members of the BUF had friends on the committee who frequently recommended the release of their upper-class colleagues despite their fascist sympathies.

 

Pic: Oswald Moseley and the British Union of Fascists (British Library)  

Determined to stop this, MI5 set about forming a fake Gestapo cell. It was led by Eric Roberts, an unassuming-looking bank clerk who worked for the Westminster Bank. Roberts was a former fascist sympathiser, but he had changed allegiance and now became an undercover agent in the BUF.


Roberts was supplied with a fake Gestapo identify card and then assumed the alias of ‘Jack King’, supposedly a German agent who’d been recruited in Britain in early 1939 to compile information on those who would be ‘loyal to the Fatherland’ in the event of Nazi domination.

 

Pic Jack King's Nazi identity Card (National Archive)


Over the next three years, ‘Jack King’ put together a network of hundreds of Nazi supporters. His aim was to channel all the information given to him back to MI5 whilst pretending that this intelligence was being fed back to the Gestapo in Berlin. Jack King maintained his nerve and was able to successfully defuse many of the plans made by Hitler’s supporters in Britain.






Central to the BUF network were two ardent fascists, Marita Perigoe and Hans Kohout, who also feature in The Silk Code. Marita Perigoe had a grudge against the British because her husband Bernard, a committed fascist, had been imprisoned by the internment committee. Marita made herself King’s second-in-command, and unbeknownst to her, MI5 housed her in a specially bugged flat in central London so they could track her conversations and contacts.

In my novel 'The Silk Code' all these characters make an appearance. Spies like Marita provided ‘Jack King’ with maps showing the location of Britain’s petrol and aviation stocks, top secret research on new types of engines for fighter planes, and reports on experimental tanks. Some recruits spied in their home towns for information on possible targets for German bombers, or for sites of military bases and civil defence.

Some were even happy to gloat over the death and injuries caused by air raids, incorrectly putting their success down to intelligence they had provided, when in fact none of the information ever got to Germany.

When Oswald Moseley was released from prison he tried to revive his plans for a fascist Britain, but this failed. So in 1949 Marita Perigoe left England and headed for Australia where she had several further marriages and became a costume designer for theatre.

Marita Perigoe died in 1984, never learning that she had been fooled by ‘Jack King’ in WW2.

Read more about it on the BBC website

Read about Marita in The Telegraph 

 

‘The Silk Code had me absolutely hooked… A great storyline full of bravery, trust, love, survival, betrayal and determination.’ NetGalley reviewer ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Based on the true story of ‘Englandspiel’, one woman must race against the clock to uncover a traitor, even if it means losing the man she loves.

Universal Link https://mybook.to/SilkCode

Spitfire Women by Rebecca Alexander

At the start of the second world war, the government realised that the Royal Air Force (RAF) would play a pivotal role in defending Britain. The German air force, the Luftwaffe, had been devastatingly successful in invading first Poland then progressing through Europe. Fighter planes harried troops, provided intelligence and protected the heavier bombers. These strategically blew up important defence positions and infrastructure and demoralised the civilians on the ground. In response, the RAF needed to rapidly build its supply of modern planes, trained pilots and air fields. 

First Officer Maureen Dunlop on the cover of Picture Post magazine 1944

In response to this need, a organisation called the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) was set up rapidly, starting at White Waltham in Berkshire. Originally formed out of volunteers who had already learned to fly, whether commercially, through the RAF or recreationally. The service was created to ferry planes to where they were needed, the active aerodromes, to support the combat pilots. Eventually, the ATA had fifteen ‘ferry pools’, with women making up about twelve percent of the total at 166. The male pilots were mostly unsuitable for active service with the RAF, being impaired in some way or disqualified by age. Many came from other countries who were not able to recruit for combatant roles as their countries were neutral. 

The female recruits were different. Most had learned to fly for pleasure before the flying clubs closed in 1939. A few had worked in flying circuses or had taught flying. They ranged in age from teenagers to grandmothers. As well as the British recruits, led by Pauline Gower, groups of American and Polish pilots bolstered the number of active pilots. They were also joined by famous flyers like Amy Johnson, who had become a celebrity after flying solo to Australia in 1930. The press followed the story of the gallant band of diverse characters, calling them the ‘Attagirls’, as they worked through accelerated training to fly everything from low powered Tiger Moths to four engine American bombers like Liberators and Flying Fortresses. Much of their work was delivering new planes such as the Supermarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes for fighter pilot units, and returning damaged planes back for repairs. Women of all ages joined up, married or not, and some had children during their service.

Women pilots were also teaching new pilots, especially in the more difficult planes. When the Bristol Beaufighter was introduced, the RAF refused to test it, considering it too unstable and temperamental. Guy Gibson VC DSO DFC described the moment one was delivered to an airfield in his book Enemy Coast Ahead (1944). 

“There is a story that one particular squadron in the north had got to the stage when they almost refused to fly it. They said that it stalled too quickly and that it was unmanageable in tight turns. They were sitting about one foggy day on their aerodrome when there was no flying possible, and were discussing the subject heatedly, when suddenly a Beau whistled over their heads at about 100ft, pulled up into a stall turn, dropped its wheels and flaps and pulled off a perfect landing on the runway. Naturally, this attracted a lot of attention. They all thought that this pilot must have been one of the crack test pilots who had come up to show them how. As it taxied up to the watch office, they all crowded around to get the gen. However, a lot of faces dropped to the ground when from underneath the Beau crawled a figure in a white flying-suit, capped by blonde, floating hair; it was one of the ATA girls. I am told that this squadron had no trouble from Beaus from that day on.”

Diana Barnato Walker climbing into the cockpit of a Spitfire

The ATA were required to fly their planes without radio or radar. They couldn’t phone ahead for weather reports or advice on enemy aircraft, they were on their own. They flew missions in weather conditions that were deemed unacceptable for RAF pilots. There was even a shortage of maps for the ATA, who had to carry out of date charts where they could. Each plane was described in a manual that covered all the most common planes with important information like weight, maximum velocity, fuel capacity and stall speed. Unlike RAF pilots who trained in the planes they were going to fly, ATA pilots were expected to fly anything in the manual. If they met an enemy plane (they did occasion) they carried no ammunition so the best they could do is try to evade the enemy. 

The recovery flights of damaged planes were highly dangerous. Aircraft could be labelled ‘one landing only’ or given speed restrictions because they were so damaged they might need to be brought down in an emergency. Many ATA flights ended with a crash landing on a beach, field or road. The ATA soon needed their own engineers, both men and women, who often flew with the pilots to help with the bigger planes or where the damage was unknown or severe. Pilots often flew two or three missions in succession, making their way back from their final drop off or delivery by train. 

Writing about a fictional ATA pilot in my latest book, I found it hard not to write about all the heroic women who defied social expectations and took on the most dangerous challenges. A US Army Air Force pilot caught a lift with one of the female pilots, to be absolutely horrified to see her hunkered in the pilot’s seat apparently reading a book while flying, single handed, a huge American bomber. He was not relieved when she explained she’d never flown one before and was just running through her manual before the landing. In many cases, I found true stories were more extreme than fiction. 

The ATA women were recognised in 1943 when they were given the same pay as the male ATA pilots. This was the first time any government agency had paid women the same rate as men. By the end of the war, the women had lost eighteen pilots and engineers to crashes, including Amy Johnson. She had been forced to put her plane down on the Thames Estuary on 5 January 1941, in thick fog, attempted to bale out and despite efforts to save her, disappeared under the water. 

Amy Johnson 1930

Over the course of the war, 1320 ATA pilots flew 309,000 delivery or recovery missions with a loss of 174 pilots in total. Without their efforts, RAF fighter and bomber pilots would have had to fly those missions, at a cost of half a million pilot hours flying.  

Further reading: 

Air Transport Auxiliary at War: 80th Anniversary of its Formation by Stephen Wynn (2021)

A Spitfire Girl by Mary Ellis (2016) 

Amy Johnson by Constance Babington Smith (1967)

A taste of Homer, Virgil and Ovid by Caroline K. Mackenzie

Five years ago, almost to the day, in March 2020, the pandemic had taken hold and daily life as we knew it was turned upside down. Everyone scrambled to find ways of keeping in touch, since meeting up in person was out of the question, and plans that had been made had to be abandoned. And so my Classics Club, newly formed and a weekly event in the picturesque Pavilion of Burwash Common migrated to Zoom instead. We had no idea how long the restrictions, or our reading material, would last so agreed simply to continue meeting for as long as everyone wished.

One of our members recently mentioned that we are about to celebrate our fifth birthday – tempus fugit, as Virgil observed. When Classics Club was just one year old, I wrote a History Girls' blog about its origins. Now, five years in, seems a good time to reflect on the works we have read and to share some of the highlights.

It is almost impossible to pick the ‘best bits’, as each week we have read something that resonates, entertains, surprises or even comforts us. Therefore, I decided to flick through my well-worn copies of each of the books and to stop where I noticed the most scribbles in the margin, or perhaps highlighted sections of the text, and have chosen from those pages a selection of passages which I hope you will enjoy. If you are new to Homer, Virgil and Ovid, this may give you a flavour of the style and subject matter of these wonderful poets and, I hope, tempt you to read more.

All quotations are taken from the Penguin Classics series, the cover images of which I have included for each work. I have chosen this set of translations as they were the first versions of these poems which I read and have therefore been on my bookshelves for as long as I have been studying and teaching Classics. But the variations between translations and the difficulty of choosing just one for each Greek or Latin work was the topic of a History Girls’ blog I wrote last year.

As these passages are simply a taster, I have not attempted to summarise the stories of the epics or provide a detailed background. Some of the themes, such as the Trojan War, or characters from Greek mythology, such as the Cyclops, may be familiar in any event. However, for each one I have noted whether the original poem was Greek or Latin and the approximate date when the poem was composed and/or completed. The dates for Homer’s epics are approximate and the source of much academic debate.

Homer’s Iliad - Greek - around 750BC

Homer’s characters often utter observations which have a distinctly proverbial flavour, such as this musing by one of the warriors on the battlefield outside Troy:

The generation of men is just like that of leaves. The wind scatters one year’s leaves on the ground, but the forest burgeons and puts out others, as the season of spring comes round. So it is with men: one generation grows on, and another is passing away. (Book 6: 146-9.)

Or this:

…whatever we do, the fates of death stand over us in a thousand forms, and no mortal can run from them or escape them… (Book 12: 326-7.)

Homer is also known for his vivid and striking similes. The Trojan prince, Paris, whose love affair with Helen was the cause of the Trojan war, is cleverly captured with this simile:

Paris did not dally long in his high house, but once he had put on his glorious armour of intricate bronze, he dashed through the city, sure of the speed of his legs. As when some stalled horse who has fed full at the manger breaks his halter and gallops thudding across the plain, eager for his usual bathe in the lovely flow of a river, and glorying as he runs. He holds his head high, and the mane streams back along his shoulders: sure of his own magnificence, his legs carry him lightly to the haunts where the mares are at pasture. So Paris, son of Priam, came down from the height of Pergamos, bright in his armour like the beaming sun, and laughing as he came, his quick legs carrying him on. (Book 6: 503-14.)

Similes are also used to heighten the pathos of a scene. Note here the reference to Menelaos, the Spartan king and husband of Helen, now in the thick of the Trojan war and trying to reclaim his wife from Paris:

As when a woman stains ivory with crimson dye, in Maionia or Caria, making a cheek-piece for horses. It lies there in her room, and many horsemen yearn to have it for the wearing: but it waits there to be a treasure for a king, both horse’s finery and rider’s glory. Such, Menelaos was the staining with blood of your sturdy thighs, and your legs, and your fine ankles below. (Book 4: 141-7.)

A simile is used to great effect to describe the leader of the Greeks, and brother of Menelaos, Agamemnon:

Agamemnon rose to speak, letting his tears fall like a spring of black water which trickles its dark stream down a sheer rock’s face. (Book 9: 13-15.)

Words, so important in Homer’s oral tradition, are often likened to nature:

But when he released that great voice from his chest and the words which flocked down like snowflakes in winter, no other mortal man could then rival Odysseus. (Book 3: 221-3.)

Nestor the sweet-spoken, … from his tongue the words flowed sweeter than honey. (Book 1: 247-9.)

Homer’s Odyssey - Greek - around 725BC

Odysseus returns home to Ithaca after twenty years of absence: 10 years at the Trojan war and 10 years making his tumultuous journey home. He is disguised but his faithful dog recognises him:

As they stood talking, a dog lying there lifted his head and pricked up his ears. Argus was his name. Patient Odysseus himself had owned and bred him, though he had sailed for holy Ilium [Troy] before he could reap the benefit… in his owner’s absence, he lay abandoned on the heaps of dung from the mules and cattle which lay in profusion at the gate…. But directly he became aware of Odysseus’ presence, he wagged his tail and dropped his ears, though he lacked the strength now to come nearer his master. Odysseus turned his eyes away, and, making sure Eumaeus did not notice, brushed away a tear….. As for Argus, the black hand of Death descended on him the moment he caught sight of Odysseus – after twenty years. (Book 17: 291-305… 326-7.)

Odysseus is cunning, crafty and has a way with words. The word-play in the following episode is one of his more famous tricks. The Cyclops has just eaten alive some of Odysseus’ companions and washes them down with wine. Odysseus is narrating the story:

The Cyclops took the wine and drank it up. And the delicious drink gave him such exquisite pleasure that he asked me for another bowlful. “Give me more, please, and tell me your name, here and now – I would like to make you a gift that will please you. We Cyclopes have wine of our own made from the grapes that our rich soil and rains from Zeus produce. But this vintage of yours is a drop of the real nectar and ambrosia.”…

“Cyclops,” I said, “you ask me my name. I’ll tell it to you; and in return give me the gift you promised me. My name is Nobody.”…

The Cyclops answered me from his cruel heart. “Of all his company I will eat Nobody last, and the rest before him. That shall be your gift.” He had hardly spoken before he toppled over and fell face upwards on the floor, where he lay with his great neck twisted to one side, and all-compelling sleep overpowered him. In his drunken stupor he vomited, and a stream of wine mixed with morsels of men’s flesh poured from his throat. (Book 9: 353-9… 364-74.)

Odysseus and his men seize the opportunity and drive a sharpened olive stake, heated in fire, into the Cyclops’ single eye, blinding him. He shrieks and calls for help from his fellow Cyclopes who gather outside his cave and ask what is wrong and whether somebody is trying to kill him. The conversation that follows goes like this:

“O my friends, it's Nobody’s treachery… that is doing me to death.”

“Well then," came the immediate reply, "if you are alone and nobody is assaulting you, you must be sick… and cannot be helped.” (Book 9: 408, 410-11.)

Odysseus’ trick has worked, just as the Trojan horse trick worked, another of Odysseus’ cunning plans, which brought an end to the ten year Trojan war. That story was not told by Homer but by our next poet, Virgil, in his epic poem, the Aeneid.

Virgil’s Aeneid - Latin - 19 BC

Virgil’s use of personification is perhaps best showcased in this wonderful description of rumour. An ancient take on ‘fake news’:

Rumour did not take long to go through the great cities of Libya. Of all the ills there are, Rumour is the swiftest. She thrives on movement and gathers strength as she goes. From small and timorous beginnings she soon lifts herself up into the air, her feet still on the ground and her head hidden in the clouds…. Rumour is quick of foot and swift on the wing, a huge and horrible monster, and under every feather on her body, strange to tell, there lies an eye that never sleeps, a mouth and tongue that are never silent and an ear always pricked. By night she flies between earth and sky, squawking through the darkness, and never lowers her eyelids in sweet sleep. By day she keeps watch perched on the tops of gables or on high towers and causes fear in great cities, holding fast to her lies and distortions as often as she tells the truth. (Book 4: 173-88.)

Book 4 is dedicated to the story of Dido and Aeneas. If you only have time to read one book of the Aeneid, this might be the one to pick. It inspired Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas which includes the haunting and exquisite Dido’s Lament. Virgil’s account hints at the tragic ending with this observation:

Love is a cruel master. There are no lengths to which it does not force the human heart. (Book 4: 412.)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses - Latin - AD 8

Perhaps what sets Ovid apart from Homer and Virgil is his wit and rather mischievous take on popular myths. He can certainly rival his predecessors in beautiful narrative and storytelling but this passage demonstrates his comic portrayal of the man-eating monster, the Cyclops, named Polyphemus, whom we met above. In Ovid’s version, Polyphemus has fallen in love with a beautiful nymph, Galatea, and attempts to win her affections:

The wild Polyphemus was combing his prickly locks with a mattock, attempting to trim his shaggy beard with a pruning-hook, and trying to look less fierce when he gazed at his face in a pool…. (Book 13: 765-7.)

“Truly, I know myself, I recently saw my reflection in pure clear water and liked the image that met my gaze…Don’t think me ugly because my body’s a bristling thicket of prickly hair….I’ve only one eye on my brow, in the middle, but that is as big as a fair-sized shield. Does it matter?” (Book 13: 840-1, 846, 851-2.)

Ovid invites sympathy for Polyphemus and shows his romantic side when Polyphemus attempts to woo Galatea with promises of gifts: 

“My orchards are groaning with apples, my trailing vines are swollen with grapes, both golden yellow and purply red; I am storing each harvest for your delight.” (Book 13: 812-4.)

Sadly for Polyphemus his love is unrequited and, to add insult to injury, his beloved Galatea is smitten instead with ‘a beautiful boy of sixteen, with the first smooth down on his cheeks’ (753-4) – quite the opposite of a huge, hairy monster. Polyphemus’ romantic side soon turns to anger when he is rejected and he issues this threat about his love rival: 

“I’ll draw his guts from his living body, then tear it to pieces and scatter his limbs all over the fields and the waves where your home is.” (Book 13: 865-6.)

This sounds more like the Cyclops we met in Homer.

What next? Greek plays - 5th century BC

It is hard to follow the works of Homer, Virgil and Ovid but, inspired by our theatre trips to West End productions of Oedipus (two different ones within just a few months) and Elektra, Classics Club will spend the summer term reading Greek tragedies written by the playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. One of our members discovered this lovely edition with 16 plays in total: how will we choose which ones to read together? Perhaps we shall simply read them all.

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