Venice on the eve of World War 1, part one - Michelle Lovric

 

Last summer I took a chatty ride down the Grand Canal in the company of Michael Portillo and a television crew. We were filming an episode of Great Continental Railway Journeys in which Mr Portillo investigated Europe in 1913, the last year of the old world and its ways before the apocalypse of the Great War. The programme was screened again recently, reminding me of the other journey I made in the weeks before the filming, the one around my own library.

I’d been asked to prepare information on how a British visitor/expatriate in Venice would have found the city in those final months of peace. The closest to that time that I had written was 1901, the period of my children’s novel, The Mourning Emporium.

I’ve said before that there are many Venices – one for each epoch of her history. While her built environment has not changed drastically since the sixteenth century, each of her walls holds successive layers of history, as a tree’s rings express its age.

So Venice in 1913 was a whole new place for me to explore.

I was surprised to find quite how many well-known Britons were living on the Grand Canal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed some of their most English of names had become attached to the sonorous roll call of palazzo titles. This is not to say that coming to Venice was like coming home for the British traveller, but there was much here that resonated with British notions of  Empire, Literature and Art. Venice was already imprinted on the traveller's mind via Byron, Browning, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Arthur Symons and many others.

In London, an image of la Serenissima had been etched into the imaginations of thousands who flocked to see the illuminated acquatic spectacular Venice, The Bride of the Sea, at Olympia.

On the eve of the Great War, Venice was still a romantic destination. 'Il turismo di massa' kept Venice on any European itinerary. The Futurists had recently staged a protest - denouncing the old- fashioned romantic view of Venice. In handbills launched in fluttering thousands from the clock tower in July 1910, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urged the Venetians to raise themselves to Modernity. The first thing they had to do was  'murder the moonlight':

We repudiate the old Venice, enfeebled and undone by centuries of worldly pleasure,though we too once loved and possessed it in a great nostalgic dream.
We repudiate the Venice of foreigners, a market for counterfeiting antiquarians, a magnet of snobbery and universal imbecility, a bed whose bottom has been staved in by caravans of lovers, the bejeweled hip-bath of cosmopolitan courtesans,the cloaca maxima of passéism.
We want to cure and heal this putrefying city, this magnificent sore from the past. We want to reanimate and ennoble the Venetian people, fallen from their ancient grandeur, drugged by the morphine of nauseating cowardice and debased by the habit of shady business.
We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice that can dominate the Adriatic Sea, that great Italian lake.
Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals with the ruins from its leprous and crumbling palaces.
Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for cretins, and raise to the heavens the imposing geometry of metal bridges and factories plumed with smoke, to abolish the cascading curves of the old architecture.

It was a masterpiece of oratory, but loving couples were not going to be denied their gondolas, their kisses on bridges, their cascading curves and their moonlit adventures.

Meanwhile  there were signs of a different kind of doom approaching. Indeed Italy herself had been at war with Turkey over Libya between 1911 and 1912. It was the Italians who had pioneered the idea of aerial bombardment: there was no reason to expect that the Austro-Hungarian airforce would spare Venice, Italy's main naval base in the Adriatic. Even before the advent of aeroplanes, Austrians had not scrupled to bombard Venice with canon balls during revolution and siege of 1848-9.

So those travellers arriving in 1913 might have been among the last to see San Marco's basilica in its glory. Soon the portals would be walled up with sandbags and the four famous horses packed up and sent to Rome for safekeeping.

Meanwhile, as a kind of omen of what was to come, dancing on the Lido proved a fatally explosive experience for one young woman.

Le Petit journal, September 21, 1913, showed a dramatic picture of a 'charmant jeune fille' struck by lightning during an outdoor ball in Venice:
 

C'était au Lido, lieu de plaisir recherché pour ses fêtes et où l'on dansait avec l'ardeurs et la fougue particulières à ces bals vénitiens. Soudain, un orage éclate, brusque, rapide, et un éclair zèbre le jardin où les danseurs allaient interrompre leur valse : la foudre tombe et frappe une charmante jeune fille qui s'affaisse, foudroyée, sur la poitrine de son danseur. Celui-ci n'éprouva qu'une sorte secousse et laissa glisser le corps de la jeune fille, morte sans un cri sans un geste.

photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As the Great Continental Railway programme was based on the train network in 1913, my research initially focussed on Santa Lucia station.

In that year, the railway itself was still a relative newcomer in an antique city. The 222 arches of the railway bridge over the lagoon were built by Venice’s Austrian occupiers between 1842. The station opened 1846. (The current building dates from 1955).

For many, the railway represented a kind of psychological unseaming of Venice, a triumph of Teutonic efficiency over romantic isolation. She had been a virgin city, unbreached by any enemy invasion for 1400 years. (Napoleon was permitted to stroll in, by negotiation).

I don’t think it is surprising that two years after the railway opened the Venetians rose up in revolt against the Austrians, who besieged and bombarded the city for sixteen months, and were thereby forced to destroy parts of their own bridge. Below is Vittorio Emanuele Bressanin's painting of the Austrians bombarding the railway bridge, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons



 

Ruskin in 1843 - before the Railway.
Photogravure of lost watercolour
 after George Richmond.
Wikimedia Commons

 

John Ruskin hated the bridge that interrupted the serenity of la Serenissima. He felt it reduced Venice to the state of a British industrial slum. He was working on the second and third volumes of his Stones of Venice when he first beheld its incursion. And Ruskin always saw Venice as a warning for the British Empire.

In The Stones of Venice, Volume I, Ch. Xxx. Ruskin approaches Venice gondola hired in Mestre: he does not hold back his feelings. He's ever the master of the devastating short sentence, strategically placed.

The silver beak cleaves [the water] fast; it widens: the rank grass of the banks sinks lower, and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots along an expanse of weedy short. Over it, on the right, but a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a low and monotonous dockyard wall, with flat arches to let the tide through it; this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches there rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused buildings, which, but for the many towers which are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English manufacturing town. Four of five domes, pale, and apparently at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line; but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which issues from the belfry of a church.

It is Venice.

Indeed the British train traveller would have arrived in a part of Venice already devastated by Napoleon, who had suppressed the convent and church of Corpus Domini, the original church of Santa Lucia and other buildings here in his cull of Venetian churches between 1806 and 1810. here is how the area around the station looked in 1650 when Matthaeus Merian drew his map.

 

 

One of the few to survive Napoleon is 17th century Church of Santa Maria di Nazaret, which served the Barefoot Carmelite fathers, and is consequently known as the ‘Scalzi’. It was not yet finished when Merian recorded the area. In fact the friars were permitted sandals, but not socks, a cruel enough penance in Venice’s sharp winters. Ludovico Manin, Venice’s last Doge, is buried here and British tourists might have wanted to see his grave and shake their heads over the so-called ‘leggenda nera’ – that Venice deserved the fall of her thousand-year-old Republic because the Venetians themselves partied it to death in one last century of decadence. Those British tourists would be among the last to see the Scalzi’s glorious ceiling frescoed by Giambattista Tiepolo with the story of the translation of the house of Nazareth.

On October 24th, 1915, a full moon guided a squadron of Austrian planes into Venice. They circled for two terrifying hours before releasing their bombs. The intended target was the railway station, but it was the Scalzi church that took the punishment. A chilling photograph of the damage can be seen here. The new ceiling is a work on canvas by Hector Tito (1859-1941).

The Bridge of the Scalzi already existed in 1913, but not in the sterile curve of marble we see today. That bridge dates only as far back as 1934, so our tourists would have seen an iron construction dating from 1858 – 60, by Alfred Neville, a British engineer, who was also the author of a flat iron bridge at the Accademia. It is thought that this bridge too was in the sights of the Austrian bombers. It was the Scalzi's misfortune to be exactly in between the bridge and the railway station.

But arriving at the station back in 1913, the traveller would emerge blinking into a scene straight out of a Canaletto painting, but not nearly as serene or silent. The air would have rung with the importuning of the gondoliers, the facchini (porters) and gransieri (the men who hooked the boats and held them steady). There would have been a few motor boats, a couple of omnibus boats, and the steam ferries still known vaporetti, which started in 1881.

old style vaporetto with gondola

The vaporetto represented good value for the Edwardian traveller on a budget. E.V, Lucas, writing in 1914, noted joyously that the Grand Canal was bargain: ‘For fifteen centimes one may travel its whole length in a steamboat, and back again for another fifteen, and there is no more interesting half-hour's voyage in the world.’ That same journey now costs 7 euros.' Even then, however, there were strikes. Lucas noted that a vaporetto strike in April 1914 turned the gondoliers into ‘plutocrats’

Augustus Hare, another writer of the pre-war period, claimed that two sets of people ought always to live in Venice: those who have heart complaints and those who are afraid of horses; the peaceful floating gondola life would be so suited to them

Whether heart-sufferers or equinophobics, I am fairly sure that my visitors to Venice in 1913 would have been readers. The long journey through the Alps and across the plains of the Veneto would have given them plenty of time to catch up with their reading.

So, crammed in their valises, would have been the Venetian poems of Byron and Browning. They would have Augustus Hare’s jaunty little travel guide ; also, if they were lucky, William Dean Howells’s splendid Venetian Life. The more learned would have read the readable parts of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. They might have read the Wilkie Collins story, 'The Haunted Hotel'. They would have been titillated by Henry James’ Venetian novels, The Aspern Papers (1888) and The Wings of a Dove (1902).

There would not yet have been suicide/misery-tourists, as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, published in its original German in 1912, would not be available in English until 1925. Nor would they have access yet to the manuscript that would become the most notorious roman a clef about the English expatriate scene in Venice, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, by the self-styled Baron Corvo. Its publication did not take place until 1934, when all the protagonists were safely dead.

But if they arrived in October 1913, the British tourists would have heard about the redoubtable writer’s somewhat shabby death, which took place in Palazzo Marcello, not far from the station and on the same side of the canal: just to the right of the Vendramin Calergi palazzo where Wagner had died in 1883, his body bundled into a gondola by night and taken to the station for its final journey to Bayreuth.




Palazzo Vendramin Calergi left and Palazzo Marcello at right

Baron Corvo was in reality simply Frederick Rolfe, an Englishman who had spent the last six years of his life in Venice thoroughly upsetting the entire British community here.

He was a writer, a painter, an active practitioner of ‘Greek Love’, a photographer, a mild pornographer, but above all possibly the most ungrateful spongers who ever lived, who wound his way like a tapeworm into the heart of anyone who befriended him and then harassed them with toxic letters demanding cash, sometimes signed 'Your Faithful Enemy'. As he told one of these generous enemies, in Venice Rolfe was principally engaged in dying as slowly and publically and annoyingly as possible. For several years he lived pretty much on fury and paranoia alone. He was reduced to starving, to living on a boat, where he believed that the crabs and rats would eat him alive. But in fact he died in the Palazzo Marcello, apparently of a heart attack that came on while he was removing his boots. Such an unromantic end would have infuriated him. He is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele.

Frederick Rolfe dressed up as a priest in 1886
photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

While he was busy dying, Rolfe amused himself with scribbling the book that would be published as The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. Nicholas Crabbe, the protagonist, rescues a young girl from an earthquake in Messina and rather improbably brings her to Venice where she becomes his private gondolier, dressed as a boy – a cross-dressing veil that enabled Rolfe to write passionately of his homosexual proclivities. Soon the girl is speaking and eating Venetian, and saves the acerbic Crabbe from himself.

Nothing could save the expatriate British in Venice from Crabbe’s/Corvo’s vicious pen, however. Many of them are mercilessly parodied in the book.

In 1913, as now, the British tourists would not have had to wait long for retail opportunities in Venice. A large number of palazzi on the grand canal were antique shops at that point … selling off Venice’s heritage bit by bit, partly as a result of awful restorations that were more like pillaging. Frescoes and mouldings were literally scraped off the walls.

The Fondaco dei Turchi is where the cultured British tourist would have gone for a little light history. Between 1890 and 1920, this old Turkish foundation housed the core of the city’s museum, the Correr collections. Painfully cultured tourists would also go to shake their heads knowingly and complain about the place. One of the great scandals of the late 19th century was the brutal over-restoration of the fondaco, ‘overpristinated’ as the Venetians put it, between 1860 and 80.

E.V. Lucas found the museum a dismal duty: 'It is necessary to visit the collections preserved here, but I cannot promise any feelings of exultation among them. …Since none of the exhibits have descriptive labels (not even the pictures), and since the only custodians are apparently retired and utterly dejected gondoliers, the visitor's spirits steadily fall.'

At left, the 18th century Ca’ Gussoni-Grimani-della Vida, near San Felice, can be distinguished by its stripy stemma. British historian and famous Venice obsessive Rawdon Brown had been its proprietor  – having ruined himself by trying to restore the haunted Ca’ Dario further up the canal. He had bought the Dario for £480 in 1838, and then moved to Palazzo Businello and finally ended up the Gussoni in 1852, where he stayed till he died in 1883. His life work was the Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, ambassadorial correspondence, edited diaries of Marin Sanudo. The rest of the time he applied himself as a diligent 'fixer' for the expat community, finding them palaces to buy or rent and facilitating introductions to the good and great.  In fact Venice of the 19th and early twentieth centuries was dominated by two gentlemen called Brown. Horatio Brown (no relation to Rawdon) was to take over much of his research and social function.

Ca' Pesaro in 1900 from Brooklyn Museum Archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

At right is the florid Ca’ Pesaro, started by Baldassare Longhena in the 17th century. Modern Art was just dawning as a concept at the turn of the twentieth century. This palazzo was donated to the city by the Duchessa Felicita’ Bevilacqua La Masa. It became the first modern art museum in Venice, in 1902 – seven years after the first biennale of art in the Giardini (which Napoleon had destroyed several more convents and churches to create). Lucas described the museum as ‘the Tate Gallery of Venice’. He also noted, ‘I have been absolutely alone in this building, save for the custodians. The Venetian can live very easily without picture galleries, ancient or modern.’

At left, at the turning into Apostoli canal is a palace called Smith, or, to be precise, the Ca’ Balbi Smith Mangilli Valmarana. In this palazzo lived the British reason that Venice was drained of Canalettos. To this day, scandalously, there are only two Canaletto paintings left in the city, both at Ca’ Rezzonico. Consul Joseph Smith, friend of Casanova, died here in 1770, having extensively remodelled the place to suit his personal grandeur. In his time, Joseph Smith’s palazzo had been an essential place to visit on any British Grand Tour. He was a wheeler art dealer, and agented for Canaletto, even bringing him to London in 1746 for ten years.

Still on the left, is Ca’ d’Oro, the oldest gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal, dating from the 1430s. Another big 19th century vandalism scandal was what the ballerina Marie Taglioni did to mutilate the inside of this palazzo in the name of renovation, removing the gothic stairway from the inner
courtyard and the balconies that looked over it. The stairway was reconstructed in the early 20th century.

The Rialto was the first bridge in Venice and the only one for centuries. Originally a pontoon in the 12th century, then a wooden bridge in 1255, it was burned by Baiamonte Tiepolo in the 1310 conspiracy that led to the creation of the Council of Ten. The next one collapsed under excited wedding crowds in 1444 and another one in 1524. Eventually a stone bridge built in 1591. Below is watercolour of it by Maurice Prendergast, painted in 1911 or 1912, and capturing all its pre-war gaiety.

painting courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

I always think of William Beckford here, a notable 18th century English eccentric who wrote the comic gothic masterpiece, Vathek, which was Byron’s favourite book. Contains a cannibal queen and a monstrous camel called Alboufaki. Cultivated readers would have been familiar with William Beckford’s Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, with its descriptions of languid noblemen arriving here at the market at dawn, in their black robes, after a night of gambling and debauchery. They came to buy grapes to refresh their jaded palates before going home to mourn their losses and sleep the whole day.

Under the bridge, and a few palazzi up on the right, the sixteenth century Palazzo Coccina Tiepolo Papadopoli was one of the few noble houses open for visitors in 1914. Lucas: ‘the efficient and discreet French major-domo is less formidable to several visitors than to one. The principal attraction of the Papadopoli Palace is two carnival pictures by Tiepolo; but the visitor is also shown room after room, sumptuous and unliveable in, with signed photographs of crowned heads on ormolu tables’. Photographs of the palazzo during this period still exist and confirm Lucas’s description. However, I take exception to Lucas’s jibe of ‘unliveable’ as it is the Venetian home of the Irish protagonists of my forthcoming novel, The True & Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters.



Henry Layard courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons

Also on the right is the rather austere Ca’ Cappello Layard. Archaeologist Sir Henry Layard was hailed as ‘the man who made the Bible true’. He had excavated Nimrud and Ninevah, delivering the treasures of ancient Mesopotamia to Britain. Rawdon Brown found the palazzo for Sir Henry and Lady Enid in 1874. After serving as a diplomat in Constantinople, Sir Henry retired to Venice with his wife in 1880, moving into Ca’ Cappello in 1883 following a massive restoration They began to amass an astonishing collection of art. They owned Gentile Bellini’s superb portrait of Sultan Mehmet II which used to have a room to itself, which it shared with a parrot . They also works by Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini, all of which were eventually left to the National Gallery in London.

 

The Layards were prime movers in expatriate British society. They held formal receptions every Tuesday and a musical soiree every Friday, hosting visiting royalty, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and luminaries like John Ruskin. Food served by gondoliers in gold sashes, but was said to be perfectly horrible.

The house was nicknamed ‘The Refrigerator’ because Lady Enid insisted on such frigid formality in everything. Even her picnics on the Lido were served in six courses by white-gloved servants. For 51 years, Lady Enid wrote regularly in her journal. Her 8000 page diary includes over 14,000 entries. The Venetian chapters are littered with the names of all the most illustrious expatriates and foreign visitors of the time.

Henry Layard had helped revive the glass trade in Murano along with the Salviati family. But his big preoccupation was setting up the English church in Venice

He died in 1894. In November 1913, Lady Enid Layard was just one year dead. Up until the end, she was involved in charities including setting up the Cosmopolitan Hospital for English Sailors on Giudecca. She was one of many people who tried to help Baron Corvo. Characteristically, he repaid her by parodying her as Lady Pash in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole.

 

As the canal curves into the 'volta' we see the 1th century Ca’ Giustinian. Wagner had written Act II of Tristan and Isolde there. It became a business school in 1868 and is now the principal seat of Venice’s university. This etching shows something much missed in Venice today: the plentiful striped awnings on the boats and terraces of the city.

The Gaudi-esque Chimneys of the Palazzo Fortuny are visible from the canal at this point. The Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny came to Venice in 1899. His figure-caressing silk clothes, which rippled like the Grand Canal, were to make him famous. Only the richest of British tourists could afford his creations however. His famous Delphos gown, created in 1907, and inspired by the chiton of ancient Greece, was far beyond the purses of ordinary tourists. The pictured one is available to buy here  - price on request.). You’d also need a certain amount of self-confidence and daring to dress in the Delphos: it was designed to be worn without underwear. Proust was a great enthusiast of Fortuny’s sumptuous dresses, comparing them to musical harmonies. He must have seen them both in Paris and during his visits to Venice, where his itineraries followed those of his literary hero, John Ruskin. After the war, Fortuny would purchase as site on the island of Giudecca in Venice from Giancarlo Stucky, a close friend and owner of the wheat mill next door (now the Hilton Hotel). The new Fortuny factory occupied a space once occupied by yet another convent closed down by Napoleon.

Ca' Viaro Martinengo Volpi

Although the phoenix of the Ca’ Viaro Martinengo Volpi is centuries old, I feel it constitutes a kind of stone premonition.

 

One of the palazzo’s century owners, Count Giuseppe Volpi, brought electricity to Venice in 1905. Volpi is a controversial figure. He dropped out of university and went east to seek his fortune. He became rich exporting tobacco from Montenegro, investing his money in the nascent electricity business. On the eve of the Great War, Volpi was busy negotiating an end to Italy’s own war with Turkey. He would later found the Venice Film Festival and serve as Italy’s finance minister. He escaped prosecution for collaboration with Mussolini’s regime, and died in 1947.

On the left nearby we see the rather undistinguished Ca’ Benzon, salon of Marina Querini Benzon, where Byron was a frequent guest. She was a scandalous old woman, sometimes known as el Fumeto, the steamy one, because she would walk around with hot polenta between her breasts to keep warm. When Napoleon had subsumed Venice into his Regno Italia, she was in San Marco wearing an indecent Athenian petticoat slit to the thigh, dancing around the liberty tree and pyre on which they burned the Golden Book, the charter of all Venice’s noblemen. But her most memorable claim to fame was her alleged role as Lamberti’s heroine in the song ‘La Biondina in Gondola’, in which a man watches a woman seductively falling asleep.

There were rumours that Byron slept with her, despite a large age difference. From here and from the other salon, of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi, the poet would swim home from receptions in full evening dress, holding a torch aloft. He met the last female love of his life at one of their salons: Teresa Guiccioli.


Speaking of Byron, just a little further up on our left are the four Mocenigo palazzi. Byron came to live in one the middle pair in 1818 and stayed till 1819. For Byron’s exploits in Venice, see my earlier blog The Goes the Neighbourhood. Enough said.

Almost enough said. It behoves me to explain that Venice invented sexual tourism, and has always drawn the playboys of the western world. John Day described it as ‘the best flesh-shambles in Italy’. Thomas Coryat, the British traveller, deemed Venice in 1611 a city of 20,000 women so loose that they ‘opened their quivers to every arrow’. Her upper-class prostitutes were like geishas: educated and pampered. Some were kept by a club of noblemen, each having his own appointed evening. Others were honoured – Veronica Franco had her books of poetry and letters published. Even humbler prostitutes were treated with certain respect, as merchants of their own persons. Girl orphans had become one of the lucrative tourist spectacles of Venice, performing in choirs and orchestras.

The gondolas (described by one writer as ‘knowing swans’) used to have little enclosures – felze – for added privacy – all the better to facilitate a Venetian tradition of adultery that favoured the wives.

Leo Rauth, Venezianisches Nocturno,  1910 Wikimedia Commons

Leo Rauth, Venezianisches Nocturno,  1910

Wikimedia Commons

By the Venetian system, each noble woman had her legal, dynastic husband (to ignore her) and also an acknowledged lover (cavalier servente or cicisbeo) to pay her attention, as described by Byron in his Don Juan. The poet was a prime beneficiary of the system himself. All his cohabiting conquests in Venice were married women: the draper’s wife Marianna Segati, the baker’s wife Margherita Cogni and the count’s wife Teresa Guiccioli. In order to ensure the legitimacy of the first born son, women were faithful to their husbands for the first year. This state of purity was indicated by a row of pearls at the throat. Thereafter, she might choose her own lover. The arrangement, like the city, was both romantic and practical, as Giorgio Baffo, Casanova’s godfather, put it:

The professional whore
Is an over-used item,
But someone else’s wife
Is a private resource.

One of the least endearing things and strangest things about Byron – a compulsive dieter himself – was the fact that he could not stand to watch a woman eat. He also despised women writers: ‘Of all bitches alive or dead a scribbling woman is the most canine’. I suppose he never forgave Mary Shelley for trouncing him so comprehensively in the art of ghost stories during a wet summer at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. Mary’s story would be published as Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818. Byron did, however, think well of Italian women in general. He thought they were the best kissers in the world, because they practised so often on religious icons.

At this point I am going to leave this tour of the Grand Canal, to be continued in my next History Girls blog. To come: Casanova, Browning's parrot Jacko, The Lady with the tame cheetahs and Cole Porter.

I have been distracted by a skype conversation with another History Girl in which we were arguing about which of our male characters would have been a desirable lover. As Byron, in my humble opinion, could not possibly have been, it is seemly to draw a veil at this point.



Michelle Lovric’s website

Great Continental Railway Journeys

The True & Splendid History of The Harristown Sisters will be published by Bloomsbury on June 5th 2014

Unattributed photos are by the author or her sister, Jenny Lovric. Venetian etchings and ephemera from the author's own collection.

Black Bile in Sunny Paris by Caroline Lawrence

I'm in Paris this weekend on the first glorious days after a wet and miserable winter. On Monday I will speak to children at Marymount International School about Mysteries of Ancient Rome. One of the things I do when I travel is look for the past in the present. But where are elements of ancient Rome to be found on a glorious Saturday evening on the Île de la Cité? The cafes are packed with tourists. Pedestrians are eating ice cream, crêpes and the latest Parisian craze: les macarons.

On Eurostar, I was listening to a podcast on Rick Steve's excellent (and free) travel app, an interview with a native Parisian. In Stuff Parisians Like, Olivier Magny tells us what Parisians like and – more importantly – dislike.

Parisians are exquisitely delicate people who like all things in moderation and shiver in horror at any manifestation of over-enthusiasm. They mistrust indulgence, and when something pleasurable is mentioned in conversation, Parisians always have to dilute it with their favourite word: petit.

Olivier tells of Parisians' disdain for grinning tourists. "In Paris enthusiasm is considered a mild form of retardation. If you complain on the other hand, you must be smart. The person who complains is the person who spotted the problem. The person who spotted the problem is a smart person." This observation made me think of the melancholic type person on my questionnaire for kids about Which of the Four Humours are You?

Romans believed the world was made of the four elements, and so are people. We all have a balance of the four, but everyone has more of one humour than the others. People with too much blood are sanguine: cheerful, optimistic, flighty. Those with too much yellow bile are choleric: good leaders but tending to be hot tempered. Phlegmatic types have too much phlegm or mucus, which apparently makes you easy-going and fearless. But an excess of black bile makes you a perfectionist trouble-shooter on your good days and a moody pessimist on a bad, or black day.

Marymount School in Neuilly-sur_Seine

Someone in this century has likened the melancholic to a beaver: resigned to a hard life of work. In this pattern the lion is choleric, a faithful dog the phlegmatic and a person of sanguine temperament is an otter, floating on his back and enjoying his abalone, a type of giant oyster.

My son Simon is of a typically melancholy disposition. Like the beaver on my questionnaire, he always found my sanguine cheerfulness a burden to be borne. His father is French Huguenot by descent, and I suddenly wondered if the French are melancholy by nature. Of course you can't plop a whole nation into a box, but it got me wondering.

As we walked through the glorious evening full of laughter and ice-cream, the sun sparkling on the Seine and Notre Dame looming like a benign golden souvenir, I spotted these two Parisian men (look at their body language) walking resignedly through the streets of Paris. "Fait beau," one of them might be saying gloomily to the other. "Oui, mais il y a trop de tourists."

I have now downloaded Stuff Parisians Like onto my Kindle and am enjoying it hugely. It turns out I have a soupçon of black bile, too.

Caroline devotes the months of March and October to school events. Sometimes she gets to go to Paris. 

'Sow-drunk or Sheep-drunk' by Karen Maitland

Now that January's month of sobriety is well and truly over and the wine intake has started to creep up again it is, perhaps, comforting to remember that the 8th March is the feast day of St Duthac, a Scottish bishop, who died in 1065. One of his miracles concerns a man who had drunk too much at a great feast and had a hangover. He sent some pork to St Duthac to ask the saint to cure his sore head. But Duthac’s disciple left the pork and a golden ring on a grave while he went off to pray. A kite, flying overhead, spotted the feast and stole both ring and pork. Duthac commanded the kite to return, took the ring from the bird, but allowed it to eat the pork as a reward for its obedience and the man’s hangover was cured.

If you don’t have local saint you can call upon to cure the after-effects of a party, there are a few other

remedies you could try. Gervase Marham,writing in 1611, said that if you didn’t want to get drunk, you

Field Cabbage or Colewort

should mix powdered betony and colewort and swallow as much of the mixture every morning 'that will lie upon a sixpence'. I’m not sure if this lessened the effects of alcohol or simply made you too queasy to drink.

Wearing a piece of jewellery that incorporated an amethyst was also supposed to ward off drunkenness. While an old Lincolnshire belief was that three horseshoes nailed to the bedhead would allow the person who slept in that bed to drink as much as he liked without becoming over-talkative.

Ivy used to be hung outside taverns as a sign that the wine was sold there, because ivy was sacred to the gods Bacchus and Dionysus, both gods of wine. A bowl made from ivy wood was thought to have the power to separate water from wine. If you knew you were in for a heavy night, drinking vinegar in which ivy berries had been soaked was supposed to protect the stomach from the ill-effects, while after a bout of drinking you were advised to boil ivy leaves and drink the water in which they’d been cooked.

In the 17th Century they distilled acorns to make a drink that would prevent alcoholics from craving alcohol. But the ancient Greeks claimed an owl egg broken into a cup would put you off alcohol for life.

On the other hand, if you wanted to heighten the effects of alcohol, you would have mixed the ashes of human bones with your favourite tipple to make you drunk more quickly.

Cyclamen, though a purging and emetic plant was also known as the ‘drinkers plant’ because it was said to hate the sobering plants and love the grape. Adding a little cyclamen to wine was believed to markedly increase the alcoholic effect. Whereas eating cakes of cyclamen was thought to make you a good lover. It also helped prevent baldness in men if you stuffed it up your nose, presumably not at the same time you were attempting to use it as an aphrodisiac. Curiously, while parsley seeds sprinkled over the head three times a year was also supposed to prevent hair loss, parsley seeds were also supposed help men with ‘weak brains’ stand up to the effects of alcohol better.

The Bitter Tonic by Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638)

Apparently though, parsley didn't work for every one, for in the Middle Ages they identified four levels of drunkenness which were supposed to correspond with how men behaved at each stage – sheep-drunk, lion-drunk, ape-drunk and sow-drunk. Seems rather unfair on the animals, though I think it does describe the stages vividly.

A final piece of advice on alcohol is to be found in John Myrc Instructions for Priests written in the late 14th Century. ‘But what if you are so drunk that your tongue will not serve you? Then you must not baptise the baby on any account, unless you can say the words.’

I’m sure many a mother has been grateful for that instruction, for quite apart from the danger of dropping the infant, there is always the problem of what the poor child might end up with as a name.

FIFTY YEARS ON: The Hang Down your Head and Die Reunion. by Adèle Geras

Back in September 2013, I promised that I'd write about the major theatrical event of my time at Oxford. I had a stroke of luck in my first week and it changed the whole of my time at University.

I went to audition for Braham Murray and David Wright in University College. They wanted to put on a Joan Littlewood type show (remember 'Oh What A Lovely War'?) about capital punishment which in 1963 was still a sentence available to judges. My own father was a judge in Tanganika, as it was then, and once the publicity machine started rolling, "Judge's Daughter in Anti-Hanging Play" was the kind of headline we were seeing.


The production hadn't been written yet. David Wright was the 'writer' which meant that his job was to collate, arrange, adjust all kinds of input from members of the cast. This was to be a collaborative show.


I was chosen. I was one of the lucky ones. I think it was my version of Joan Baez's 'El preso numero nueve' which swung it. I have a voice that doesn't need amplification and the huge room we were in had a marvellous acoustic. Braham and David were practically blasted out of their chairs.


That was in 1963. We had our run-ins with the Lord Chamberlain (who had to read all scripts and decide if they needed any censorship.) We had a simulated execution in the show which caused a bit of a problem, and it was touch and go at one point whether we'd be allowed the poster, which depicted a hanging, rather graphically. But in the end, the show when it opened in the Oxford Playhouse was a huge hit and moved to the Comedy Theatre in London in March 1964.

The first few nights coincided with some exams I inconveniently had to sit. Oh, the impossible things you can do when you're 20! As soon as I finished writing whatever exam it was, I ran out of the building, leapt into a waiting car driven by a lovely medical student called John Godber, and straight to the Comedy Theatre where I was into my costume before you could say "The Show Must Go On." At the end of the performance, John was again waiting and back we went to Oxford where I climbed in, and sank into bed, sometimes not even bothering to take my make up off properly. You had to wear sub-fusc (black skirt, white shirt etc) for exams and by the time my papers were over my shirt was terra cotta all round the neck. Who had time to do the laundry?

This year marks 50 years on....about 25 of us met in London in February for a really marvellous lunch and session of reminiscence. We sang all the songs again. We chatted about what an unusual coming together of talents it was at a particular time. Many who appeared in 'Hang' have gone on to make their mark in show business of one kind or another. Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Michael Elwyn, Richard Durden, David Wood, and of course Braham Murray (who is now a Grand Old Man of the Theatre) were all there. So was Paul Collins, who became a judge and never had to sentence anyone to death. And Viv Ault (now Wylie) Susan Solomon, Jasmina Hamzavi, and Greg Stephens, one of the musicians and still playing beautifully....they were all there. Also, Bob Scott (now Sir Bob!) who even when he was a very young man, had a paternal presence and a fabulous voice. We are older. Peter Wiles, the Stage Manager was there and still seeing, along with David Plowright, that everything ran like clockwork. Max McBurney who played banjo couldn't come but he did sent me a memory which may be of great interest to fans of guitar/banjo music. 

 

Several of our number are now dead: John Gould, master musician, Iwan Williams, who wrote the lovely 'Tripe Seller's Lament,' Tim Godden with whom I was in love at the time and who did the lighting. Hope McIntyre is gone but memories of her glamour live on. And David Wright, who was the most beautiful young man I'd ever seen. I asked for some memories of those days and the pieces that follow are what I've been sent.I'm starting with David Wood... his picture is below. He did more than anyone to set the tone of the show and has since then been the chief archivist and has kept brilliant records. Moreover, he's the one who organises reunions and we're all in his debt.
 

To get such a meaty role in such an experimental production in my very first term at Oxford was a dream come true. For us then to receive such plaudits at the Oxford Playhouse that we transferred – first to the famous Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon and then to London’s West End – was a huge cherry on the dream cake. I remember the audition – I had to improvise a commentary on a public hanging as though it were a sporting event. I remember the rehearsals, trying things out, with Braham, our director, cleverly assessing our individual skills and finding ways to utilise them. I remember commenting that to use THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS as our ironic closing number was a great idea, but why not have a new song rather than an existing one. ‘Go away and write one, then!’, barked Braham. I did, and sang it to him next day. THE SHOW’S THE THING was accepted, I was asked to write more, and suddenly I was a songwriter. Thanks to HDYH, fifty years on I’m still writing songs for my shows. HDYH introduced me to musical genius John Gould, with whom I performed, wrote and ran a theatre company for forty nine years until his early demise in 2012. I’ll never forget, in the Opening Parade of our circus-themed production, running across the stage and jumping joyfully into the arms of dear Bob (later Sir Bob) Scott. Da Da!!! We both played clowns. And before every performance my treat was to visit the girls’ dressing room, where the lovely (and much missed) Hope McIntyre would backcomb my extra-long locks into a wild afro. HDYH gave me my first tv appearance – we were featured in the BBC Arts programme MONITOR. And I was even nominated as Best Newcomer to the West End in the VARIETY Critics’ Poll. All at the age of 20. What more could I, theatre-mad from the age of six, ever wish for? Two years later, the incomparable songstress Adele Weston, Bob Scott, John Gould and I were reunited and back in the West End in FOUR DEGREES OVER, our post-degree gold-plated entree into the real world. HDYH opened up for me a magical world I am thrilled to be still part of..

David Wood OBE


SIR BOB SCOTT WRITES:


I remember a lot, like all of us trooping off to No11 Downing Street before a performance to have drinks with Reginald Maudling (his son was a friend of someone)and most of us arriving on stage drunk to the disgust of Braham. I think he was specially cross because he had not been at the party. I also remember Princess Margaret coming to the show one night and sitting Front Row Stage Left – literally below my feet when I sang Sam Hall. All went well for a verse or two until I got to the word “Parson” and my emphasis was on the “s” and suddenly a terrible glob of spit landed fair and square on the Royal lap. At which point she raised her programme either to protect herself or to find out the perpetrator`s name so that he could be taken to the Tower. I remember Michael Emrys-Jones (now Michael Elwyn) making me corpse dreadfully once. I remember a whole group of us waiting for the Reviews after the First Night Party and opening the Mail to read Bernard Levin and being rocked back by the one word headline – BRILLIANT. It all seemed so easy and normal somehow. What a crazy thing for us all.

DAVID PLOWRIGHT writes:

One memory of Hang in the West End which stays with me is the night when the communal flat was full and the only place I could find to sleep was the top floor bathroom with some mangy blankets. Not many people can say that they've caught crabs in Reginald Maudling's bath!

(note for the young. Reginald Maudling was Chanceller of the Exchequer at the time. Hence the party at Number 11 Downing Street ...AG)

MICHAEL ELWYN writes a characteristically witty piece which is pretending to be part of a historical novel!

An extract from THE SHADOW OF THE NOOSE by Michaela Jones

Oxford in the winter of fifty years ago was a cold, bleak city. The rain knifed down the alley way outside the Gloucester Arms as a black leather clad figure emerged from the warm fug of the inn and made a run for the stage door opposite, a Gauloises clenched in his nervous fingers. The Lord Murray, Master of the Experimental Revels, was about to confront his destiny; and so were the merry band of youthful rogues and vagabonds who awaited him inside the Playhouse…


‘History was indeed made that February night. The dreaming spires awoke from sleep to watch a tale of supreme dramatic horror, laced with biting wit and soaring songs. The audience applause rolled on and on, out of Beaumont Street, into the surrounding colleges - where the quadrangles resounded to one of the greatest theatrical triumphs Oxford had ever seen, And outside the Playhouse, The Lord Murray, somewhat drunk with success, was suddenly approached by an elegantly dressed stranger.


My name is Michael, Duke of Codron. You may know that I am Master of the West End Revels. Hang Down Your Head And Die is extraordinary. It must have another life - on a larger stage. I propose we open next month at the Comedy Theatre, London.’ For once, the Lord Murray was almost lost for words. ‘Yes’ he gasped. They shook hands. And the stranger vanished into the night.


PETER WILES writes:


I was in my first year when I was lucky enough to get swept into the HDYH whirlpool of excitement. Val Myers who was stage managing was my mentor. She, along with the wonderful staff at the Oxford Playhouse, including the lovely Ken Bonfield, taught me a huge amount. I remember the professionalism of the show. To end us as a youngster 'on the book' in the West End was amazing. I think capital punishment was abolished in 1965. I suppose one can't estimate Hang's influence in helping to end the barbaric practice?

PAUL COLLINS (later a Judge in the real world) writes:

I was parachuted in for the week in Stratford - a great thrill. I had been playing Toby Belch (in a production of Twelfth Night which was directed by Michael Rudman and starred Michael York) and unlike Emrys, couldn't do both at the same time! Unbelievably I had the no 1 dressing room with a balcony overlooking the Avon, with a hip bath. Similar luxury never repeated.


MAX MCBURNEY, banjo player extraordinary writes:

At the time when "Hang" was running in the UK, from February to April 1964, there was a whole new generation of British guitarists coming along on the folk/acoustic/roots scene, with a new way of playing.

Foremost among these were Bert Jansch and Davy Graham and I first bought their LPs in the year after "Hang". I hadn't heard of them at the time of the show.

The claw-hammer style they introduced is actually derived from five-string banjo playing, where the first finger picks up, the nails of the right hand drive down and the thumb follows through on the fifth string, a drone. By hammering on or pulling off notes, this creates a very satisfactory rhythm: bum-diddy, bum-a-diddy.

On the guitar, the thumb plays two beats in the bar on the bass strings, while the fingers play the melody line on the top strings. The little finger is normally anchored in front of the bridge. You can watch Mark Knopfler doing it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_7feGF9TA8

One of our fastest songs was "900 miles", with the tempo depending on what Greg and I decided at that evening's strategic planning session in the Hand and Racquet. Dickon Reed would come out stage right and we would belt into the song, in E minor and G.

I used bluegrass picking for this song, a combination of first and second fingers with thumb that makes for a faster performance. It was the style that Earl Scruggs made famous.

After one performance, I think one of the hated matinees, two guys came rushing into the band's changing room at the Comedy, one asking "Who was the guy doing the fantastic banjo?" He sounded American. We exchanged a few pleasantries, no contact developed and I never saw him again.

However, many years later I picked up a CD with early pieces by Bert Jansch and was surprised to hear him doing the same song with classic banjo accompaniment on his second LP, It Don't Bother Me, in December 1965.

You can hear it at: at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VhmT6vOZRc

It seems he had a tendency to adopt an American accent. Could it have been?

Time and Boudica's Daughters - Katherine Roberts

Tomorrow, Templar will publish our very first History Girls anthology Daughters of Time, edited by Mary Hoffman, with short stories from authors of this blog who write for young readers:

My story is first in the book by virtue of being about the 'daughter' who comes first on the historical timeline - Boudica, warrior queen of the Iceni - so I'm sneaking in here a day before publication to write one of the first posts on the book's blog tour.

Boudica's story is a brutal one, containing material at first sight unsuitable for younger readers - both her daughters were reported to have been raped by the Romans, but rape is obviously not something I could include in a children's book, so my first challenge was to work out how to tell the story without losing its power.
 
This is not the first time I've written a short story about the queen of the Iceni. My first attempt "Empire of the Hare" was published in a small women's literary fiction magazine QWF in 1998, when it was also shortlisted for the Library of Avalon Geoffrey Ashe Prize.

In this version, which was published for an adult readership, I used the elder daughter to tell the story and had her fall in love with the Roman tax collector, meaning that she had already lost her virginity behind the stables with her Roman sweetheart before the rape scene. This was long before the days of ebooks, when Boudica was spelt Boudicca (and sometimes still Boadicea - the spelling in common use when I first came across the red-haired warrior queen at school, and therefore always the most romantic one in my mind). I also named her daughters differently, since this was pre-internet days and no popular names existed to confuse people... or if they did, I was not aware of them. Historically, of course, the girls' names are not recorded, and neither is the queen's childhood name - she received her popular name Boudica, which means 'Victory', when she led her people against the Romans.

statue of Queen Boudica in London

The young readership Templar proposed for Daughters of Time gave me the perfect opportunity to use Boudica's younger daughter to give the story a new slant. In "Tasca's Secret", my heroine Tasca is removed from the violence before it begins by her young Roman friend Marcus, who sneaks her into his father's camp when the soldiers attack Boudica's village. The younger daughter is therefore held as a hostage but not mistreated. Later, when the queen captures Marcus to take her revenge, Tasca defies her mother to save her friend.

If you know a young reader has been inspired by Queen Boudica's story, here is a wonderful illustrated poem I discovered while researching this post, written for the same readership: History for Kids.

sample image of Boudica copyright History for Kids - fair use policy

To me, this is one of the joys of writing historical fiction. There is always a new way into an old story - whether it is a different viewpoint, or a fictional character (such as the boy Marcus in "Tasca's Secret") who can be introduced to breathe new life into historical fact, or a different style that can be used to tell it. There is even a bit of leeway with well-known historical characters, especially if their ages are flexible, as with Boudica's daughters.

I know the other History Girls who contributed to this anthology have taken their own unique route into their chosen stories, which they'll be telling you more about at various stops on the blog tour. I, for one, am looking forward to reading all the stories when the anthology is published tomorrow!

~~~

Daughters of Time (edited by Mary Hoffman) includes stories by Penny Dolan, Adele Geras, Mary Hoffman, Diane Hoffmeyr, Marie-Louise Jensen, Catherine Johnson, Katherine Langrish, Joan Lennon, Sue Purkiss, Celia Rees, Katherine Roberts, Anne Rooney, and Leslie Wilson.

Katherine Roberts writes historical fantasy and legend for young readers. Her latest series Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is also available from Templar. More details at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Mary Anning in My Mind - Joan Lennon

Mary Anning (1799-1847) was a fossil finder along England's Jurassic Coast, during the earliest days of the new science of paleontology. The theme on History Girls this month is Cranky Ladies in History, and Mary certainly had plenty of reasons to be unhappy, fed-up, angry, obstreperous, or, indeed, eccentric. (Tricky, these transatlantic translations ...) She had money worries, serious health problems, and more than her fair share of griefs, and she was under-valued by a scientific community made up largely of rich guys with beards. There are very few contemporary images of her other than the ones below:

sketch of Mary Anning by Henry De la Beche

painting by B.J. Donne (Mary is meant to be pointing at a fossil, not telling her dog Tray to stay)

Salt print photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot ("The Geologists" 1843) which may or may not include Mary Anning as the lump on the left (see Suzanne Pilaar Birch's article in the Guardian here.)

But the thing is, none of these images is a bit like the one of her I have in my mind.  I've been crazy for fossils for as long as I can remember, and I've had a soft spot for Mary Anning for about as long.  Which is why, when the chance to write a story about her in the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time came along, I jumped at it.  I did my research.  I found out things I hadn't known before.  I felt sorry for all her troubles and trials and frustrations.  I was in awe of her (self)learning and meticulous skill in separating her fossils from the surrounding rock and her revolutionary understanding of their meanings.  But still that was not what I saw in my mind.  For me, Mary Anning will always be a figure running along a shingly beach, with a hammer in her hand and a dog at her side and the next amazing discovery waiting for her in the rocks just ahead.  The girl who could see things that other folk couldn't - exciting things - wonderful things ...  So that's how I wrote her.

Mary Anning:  Best After Storms

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.


P.S.  Back in 2010, the first Slightly Jones Mystery was published, all about the theft of the astonishing (and sadly fictional) dragonfish fossil from the then-new Natural History Museum in London - and this is the dedication:

Everybody's heard of Florence Nightingale 

and David Livingstone.  These books are dedicated 

to the Victorian heroes and heroines 

who aren't quite so famous!

This one's for 

Mary Anning, Fossil Finder

Prescient, eh?