The Song of the Birds, Carol Drinkwater

 

                                                        Pablo Casals in 1917 at Carnegie Hall.

If you are reading this on the day I am publishing, it is Saint Stephen's Day (Boxing Day). In many Catholic countries, Saint Stephen's Day is a public holiday. In Ireland, certainly. As well in Catalonia. I single out Catalonia because below is a link to a very beautiful Christmas carol and lullaby from Catalonia. 

A song for peace. Its title is The Song of the Birds, or in the Catalan tongue,  El cant dels ocells. It was made famous outside Catalonia by the remarkable Catalan cellist, Pablo Casals. Or Pau Casals in his native tongue. Casals was born on 29th December 1876 in Tarragona, northern Spain, also Catalonia. His father was the organist in a local church. Although he was already playing several other instruments, Casals junior did not begin his studies for the cello until he was eleven years old, which is remarkable given that he is considered one of the modern masters of the instrument.

Here are two recordings of Casals playing this exquisite piece of music.  Do listen, they really are very moving. Casals described El Cant dels Ocells as 'The Soul of My Country: Catalonia'.

He played this music for Peace.

https://www.thestrad.com/video/pablo-casals-performs-the-song-of-the-birds/10365.article

This second recording was performed at the United Nations after forty year's of silence, of  Casals not playing in public.  His gesture of silence was his protest against war and fascism. This recording was made when he was in his mid-nineties.  He died a year later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T8DjwLt_c4&list=RD_T8DjwLt_c4&start_radio=1

When Casals was thirteen, in 1890, having already decided that he would dedicate his life to the cello, he was with his father in Barcelona. There,  in a second-hand music store, Pau made an extraordinary discovery. He found a tattered score copy of the Bach Cello Suites (composed between  1717 and 1723). The Suites were hardly known, infrequently performed, and might well have been lost forever had it not been for Casals. He spent eleven years practising the six suites before he felt ready to perform them in public in 1901. The music sheets he had unearthed had no phrase markings and, because this music was so rarely played, Casals had no references to fall back on or to help him discover how the music was intended to be interpreted.  He followed his own knowledge and instincts and the results are sublime.

Casals was the first cellist to record these suites, which he achieved in studios in Paris and London. In London at the Abbey Road studios, where decades later the Beatles recorded many of their timeless classics. Casals took three years from 1936 to 1939 to record all six of the Bach Cello suites.  It is entirely thanks to him that these instrumental pieces have been brought to the public's attention and are celebrated as part of Bach's immense legacy.

Here is a link to Casals playing the Cello Suites. (Beautifully remastered.)  I read that he practised at least one of these pieces every day throughout his long life.

https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/disques-de-legende/pablo-casals-joue-les-suites-pour-violoncelle-de-jean-sebastien-bach-2060270

Those three years, 1936 to 1939, were the years of the Spanish Civil War. 

During those three shockingly violent years, over one million Spanish lives were lost including one of my own favourite writers, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca who was shot in the back, murdered by Nationalist militia on 19th August 1936, probably on the road between Viznar and Alfacar. Lorca's remains have never been officially found but some claim that his family - in the dead of night - opened a public grave where many slaughtered Spaniards had been abandoned and took Lorca's body to a private family grave.

During my researches for my travel book The Olive Tree, I visited the site where it is believed Lorca was murdered. I stood alongside the olive tree that was possibly the murder spot. I also visited the Federico Garcia Lorca Park in Alfacar, Granada, inaugurated in 1986.

In 1939, after the Republicans had been defeated by the Nationalists and Franco took control of the country,  Casals became an exile in southern France. He swore he would not set foot again on his native soil until democracy had been restored. He settled in Prades, a small town in the Pyrénées-Orientales department of France, historically a Catalan region. Alas, Casals passed away on 22nd October 1973, two years before the end of Franco's's 36-year dictatorship. Franco died on 20th November 1975.

In that respect Casal's story is not dissimilar to another: the painter, titan of modern art, Pablo Picasso, who was originally from Malaga, down along the southern coast of Spain. Picasso vociferously denounced the Franco regime; he also had settled in France, spending his last years very close to where I live in Mougins. He died in Mougins at the age of 91  on 8th April 1973.

Franco outlived both these great artists. Tragically, neither Casals nor Picasso ever saw their mother country again.

Casals is remembered today not only as a consummate artist, for his extraordinary contribution to the world of music, but also for his voice as a pacifist, and his impassioned stand on human rights. He lived through two world wars as well as the Spanish Civil War. 

Should you ever find yourself in the small town of Prades, you might want to attend the Pablo Casals Festival. It was created by Casals in 1950 and is held annually from the end of July to mid-August. After the Spanish Civil War and the victory in Spain of fascism, Casals refused to play in public. It was his peace protest. In 1950, the bicentenary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, musicians from all over the world declared that if Casals would not play in public at concerts, they would come to him, to his village, his home. Thus was born the Festival pf Prades, now known as Festival Pablo Casals. It has drawn over the years the finest of the world's chamber musicians and audiences from everywhere.

I thought I would also mention, because for me it resonates after the preposterous renaming of the Kennedy Centre last week, that President John F Kennedy and his First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy invited Casals to play at the White House. He performed in the White House East Room on 13th November 1961.

I found this photo by Robert Knudsen on the internet. It was taken at the White House after Casal's concert. Thanks to the copyright owner.

I hope you have enjoyed a pleasant Christmas in the company of loved ones and that 2026 will bring peace to our deeply troubled world. I am writing this from Marseille where I am working on my next novel set predominantly during the Second World War. Marseille was a vital and vibrant hub for fugitives trying to escape Nazism. It was the last free port in France and became known as the Port of Exiles.

My most recent novel, (not a war story!), ONE SUMMER IN PROVENCE, is available as an e-book or paperback and can be found in all good bookshops. Here is a link to the Kindle edition:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Summer-Provence-olives-Margolyes-ebook/dp/B0DQZS6ZCM/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0

As well as offering the above links to the magnificent pieces of music played by Casals, I would like to include a quote from Lorca: 

"I will always be on the side of people who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace."

It rings very true for today, doesn't it? 

I pray that 2026 brings an end to the wars we are witnessing and that several western governments are supporting, and that we can find resolutions to the escalating world conflicts. Might I also dare to pray for the world to be blessed with leaders who have their people's health and welfare at the heart of their policies?

Art, the arts, artists and their voices for peace, are vital lifelines in times of conflict and dissension. It takes courage to take a stand. My huge respect for those who do.

Happy New Year to you all. Peace on Earth. 

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Richard Dadd by Miranda Miller

 

   My seventh novel, The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd, was first published by Peter Owen in 2013. Sadly, Peter Owen died in 2016 and I now own the rights of the four books of mine he published. This one is now out of print and my husband Gordon and I have decided to reprint it next summer to coincide with an exhibition of Richard Dadd’s work at the Royal Academy:Richard Dadd Beyond Bedlam 25 July - 25 October 2026. For nearly twenty years I’ve been fascinated by the tragic destiny of this man and by the remarkable work he produced, including  The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, the mysterious and compelling  painting on the cover of my novel.

Richard Dadd was born in 1817 in Chatham, in Kent. His father, Robert Dadd, was a chemist who lectured on Chemistry and Geology and was interested in both science and art. Richard was the fourth of seven children, four of whom were considered insane at the time of their death. When he was seven Richard’s mother died and his father remarried but his second wife also died, leaving two sons. As a widower with nine children Robert Dadd must have worried about money and about their future. Richard, in his early teens, showed signs of talent as an artist and it may have been because of his vicarious ambition for his son that in 1834, when Richard was 17, the family moved from Chatham to London. Robert Dadd bought a framing, gilding and bronzing business in Suffolk Street. After teaching himself to draw in the British Museum, Richard became a student at the Royal Academy schools, which had just moved from Somerset House to the very new National Gallery, a five minute walk from his family house. 

     As an art student at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools Richard was taught by Maclise, Etty, Landseer and Turner. He was considered exceptionally promising and won three silver medals, including one for the best life drawing. His closest friends were William Powell Frith and Augustus Egg, both of whom later had enormous success. 

                                                         Derby Day by William Powell Frith

    Frith’s paintings, Ramsgate Sands, The Railway Station and Derby Day were immensely popular as pictures of everyday life that were just sentimental enough to flatter the idea of themselves that middle class Victorians had. When they were first shown at the Royal Academy they attracted so many admirers that a railing had to to put up to keep the crowds back. In Derby Day, (1858), Richard Dadd appears in the crowd, wearing a fez. In my novel, which is set the previous year, Frith comes to visit Richard in the hospital. Augustus Egg’s most famous works, also painted in 1858, are three oil paintings called Past and Present, which show a woman who commits adultery and so falls from a state of married bliss, surrounded by her children, to become an outcast.This is the final painting. Didactic and moralistic, it appealed to Victorian taste. 

   In Tate Britain you can see Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, Frith’s Derby Day and  Egg’s Past and Present.  I think it’s very moving to imagine these three ambitious young art students in the 1840s, getting drunk together and criticising each other’s work, arguing furiously - and then, nearly two hundred years later, having their paintings hung in the same world famous gallery.

   Richard’s family couldn’t support him and when he finished his art course he had to struggle to survive. He was interested in imaginative art and was already painting fairies, and although he managed to get various commissions, then,as now, it was very hard to earn a living as an artist.  He never would have been able to afford any kind of grand tour by himself but a Welsh solicitor, Sir Thomas Phillips, who had just been knighted by Queen Victoria for shooting Chartists, invited Richard to accompany him as his pet artist. Twenty years later, of course, Phillips would have taken a camera. In July 1842 the two men set out on a ten month journey to Italy, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Here’s a drawing Richard did of his patron, all dressed up in traditional Arab robes.

      As Richard comments in my novel, Phillips looks more like a wet night in Pontypool than an Arabian one. This journey must have been fascinating, exhausting and confusing. Writing home to Frith, Richard said that when he lay down at the end of the day his imagination was “so full of wild vagaries that I have really and truly doubted of my own sanity.” He probably smoked hashish and it is now known that drugs can trigger schizophrenic episodes in vulnerable young people. Richard imagined that he was being persecuted by evil spirits who took on various forms: a sea captain, an old lady in the Vatican galleries in Rome and Phillips himself, and he became obsessed by the idea that he was a ‘catspaw’ of the Egyptian god Osiris. When they reached Paris, on the way home, Phillips wanted him to see a doctor but at the end of May 1843 Richard fled back to London.

   That summer Richard’s behaviour became increasingly strange and paranoid. His friends and family were naturally very worried about him and his landlady was terrified of him. Richard’s father, Robert, insisted that his son was suffering from sunstroke and needed rest and quiet. Soon after Richard’s twenty-sixth birthday, Robert Dadd took him to see Dr Alexander Sutherland, a famous ‘mad doctor’ at St Luke’s Hospital in Old Street, who told him that his son was very ill and should stay in the hospital. 

   Despite this Robert Dadd was convinced that he knew his son better than anyone else and that a trip to the country would help. Father and son set off together for Cobham, in Kent, to revisit the area where Richard had grown up. That night they went for a walk in the grounds of Cobham Park, where Richard stabbed and killed his father. 

   It was one of the most sensational Victorian murders. Richard had brought a spring knife, passport and money to Cobham with him, so the murder was clearly premeditated. After killing his father Richard fled abroad. He later told a doctor he was on his way to assassinate the Emperor of Austria and was soon arrested after he tried to cut the throat of a fellow passenger in a carriage in France. Eventually he was extradited and in August 1844 was confined for life to the criminal lunatic department of the Bethlem hospital, or Bedlam, which was in the building that is now the Imperial War Museum. 

                                                                        Dr Charles Hood

   The most impressive thing about those long years of incarceration is that they were not lost; Richard continued to draw and paint. When I was researching this novel, I expected to find that patients in a mental hospital in the 1850s were treated abominably but, when I visited the Bethlem archives at Eden Park in Kent, I discovered  that in 1853 a new young Resident Physician, Dr Charles Hood, was appointed. He carried out a number of reforms after a public scandal about the way the inmates were mistreated. Dr Hood abolished chains and other mechanical restraints and tried to make the wards comfortable. In 1857, the year my novel is set, an article in Household Words, the magazine Dickens edited, described a visit to the hospital and concluded hat “thousands of middle class homes contain nothing so pretty as a ward in Bedlam,” and that, “as to all the small comforts of life, patients in Bethlehem are as much at liberty to make provision for themselves as they would be at home”. Dr Hood removed bars from the windows and introduced aviaries, pets, plants and pictures to the wards. Keepers were given training and became more like nurses and patients were encouraged to occupy and entertain themselves.

   All the time I was writing about Richard Dadd this photograph of him haunted me and I looked at it constantly.

 

    It was taken in about 1857, the year my novel is set, and shows Dadd, aged 40, in the hospital at his easel, where the unfinished oval of Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (another of his fairy paintings) sits, waiting for the brush he holds to continue to bring it to life. He stares at the camera, at us, with recognition and warmth, looking more like an artist in his studio than a prisoner in his cell. 

   In fact, 1857 was the year when Dadd was moved from the grim, Home Office block at the back of the hospital, where the criminal lunatics were housed, to the main part of the hospital, where he was given a spacious room to paint in. He went, quite literally, from darkness to light and this resulted in his best work, although he had heroically carried on painting and drawing even during the thirteen years when he was incarcerated in the overcrowded and dungeon- like conditions of the criminal lunatic block. The doctors in the hospital encouraged and even collected his work. In 1863 he was transferred to the new Broadmoor hospital in Berkshire, where he remained until his death in 1886.

                                                      www.mirandamiller.info

IF IT'S CHRISTMAS IT MUST BE WINDSOR By Elizabeth Chadwick

 In the course of my research, I often have to know (if possible to know) where a particular English monarch was spending Christmas.  This has led me to a few other posts on the history girls regarding the festive whereabouts of King Henry I, his grandson King Henry II and his great grandson King John.  Henry I's  whereabouts are here. If it's Christmas it must be Westminster   For Henry II go here If it's Christmas it must be Chinon  and King John is here.  King John's Christmas Eve

I continue the tradition now with their many times descendent Edward III, scion of the fourteenth century, and his whereabouts at this time of year, if known.   Some such as Windsor were common to all, but many had different preferences, or itinerant residences.  Windsor itself seems to have been a particular favourite of Edward III when not engaged in warfare or travelling for business. 

King Edward III grants Aquitaine to his son Prince Edward Initial letter "E" of miniature, 1390

Lets have a look from 1327 onwards. 

1327 Edward was at Worcester

1328  Edward was again at Worcester 

1329  Kenilworth was the venue for all of December as it had been in November.  He finally moved on to Alcester on January 3rd. 

1

ruins of Kenilworth Castle.  Photo Rosemary Watson

330 Kingston Upon Thames

1331 Wells

1332 Now in Yorkshire at Beverley

1333 Wallingford

1334  Back up north at Roxburgh

1335 Newcastle On Tyne

1336 Hatfield, Yorkshire

1337 Guildford

1338 Abroad now in Antwerp where his second son Lionel was born

1339 Antwerp again

1340 Reading

1341 Melrose and Roxburgh

1342 Vannes

1343 Woodstock - a favourite pleasure palace of the Angevin kings and still in frequent favour

Print of Woodstock palace, demolished in the 18th Century 
to make way for Blenheim Palace. 

1344 Norwich

1345 Woodstock again 

1346 Across the Channel in Calais which was under English rule and control

1347 Guildford for the second time.  He'd been here 10 years ago in 1337

1348  Oxford - a one and only.  This was the year that the Black Death came to England.

1349 Havering atte Bowere

1350  Ludgershall 

1351 St Albans followed by Woodstock the next day

1352 St Albans again

1353 Eltham

1354 Hampstead Marshall - in an earlier century the home of the great William Marshal

1355  Newcastle on Tyne.  Last previous visit was in 1335, 20 years earlier

1356  Eltham

1357 Marlborough

1358 Havering atte Bowere - a favourite residence of his wife Queen Philippa of Hainault

1359 Abroad at Verzy

1360 Woodstock again.  From here on in, King Edward holds Christmas in the Home Counties within a shortish distance of London.

1361 Windsor.  Now we begin a consecutive run.

1362 Windsor

Modern Windsor Castle: author's personal photo collection

1363 Windsor

1364 Windsor

1365 Windsor

1366 Windsor

1367 Eltham

1368 Windsor

1369 King's Langley  - Queen Philippa died in the autumn of this year. 

1370 Sheen or King's Langley

1371 Eltham

1372 Eltham

1373 Woodstock

1374 King's Langley or Sheen

1375 King's Langley

1376 Havering atte Bowere

Tomb effigy of Edward III: Web Gallery of Art

Elizabeth Chadwick is a million selling author of historical fiction.  Her latest novels cover the life and times of Joan of Kent in The Royal Rebel and The Crownless Queen.  She is currently writing a novel about Katherine Swynford and her relationships with her husbands Hugh Swynford and John of Gaunt. 

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Dickens and the Ghost at Rockingham Castle by Judith Allnatt

In the summer I visited Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire and was fascinated to learn that it was a source of inspiration for Charles Dickens. In particular, he drew on its ancient rooms and the story of its resident ghost in his novel Bleak House, a work of Gothic fiction and a satirical treatment of the English legal system. Its plot concerns the long running probate case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in which, by the time it is brought to conclusion, the lawyers' fees have actually used up all of the money in the estate.  Rockingham Castle, was the inspiration for Chesney Wold, home of Lord and Lady Dedlock in Bleak House. 

 

In a letter, Dickens described Rockingham as “a large old castle, approached by an ancient keep, portcullis, etc., filled with company waited on by six-and-twenty servants” and his time spent visiting as “the dear old Rockingham days.”

Dickens first met the owners of Rockingham Castle, Richard and Lavinia Watson, in 1846 on holiday in Switzerland, discovering shared interests in Liberal principles, art and theatricals. It seems to have been a lively and joyous friendship with reference made in letters to playing Tricks, Charades and Battledore  (similar to badminton). 

When staying at Rockingham he put on plays in the Great Hall  and wrote with gratification of ‘all the household headed by an enormously fat housekeeper occupying the back benches . . . laughing and applauding without restraint.’ On occasion the plays were followed by dancing until three in the morning.

When Richard died at the age of only fifty two, Dickens was shocked and saddened. He wrote to Lavinia “We held him so close in our hearts ... and we have been so happy with him”. He and Lavinia continued to be lifelong friends and correspondents.

 Dickens had a favourite room at Rockingham, on the first floor looking out along the gap between two yew ‘cloud hedges’. 

These enormous topiary creations are known as the Elephant Hedge and are cut to resemble elephants following each other, trunk to tail.  Looking out of his window Dickens claimed to have seen a ghost and the story attached to it caught his imagination.

 

In the Civil War, Sir Lewis Watson was a royalist but his wife espoused the cause of the parliamentarians. In Sir Lewis Watson’s absence, the parliamentarians conquered Rockingham and, so the guide told me, it was thought to be a bit too easy. In Bleak House, Sir Morbury Dedlock thinks that his wife is laming their stabled horses to stop the royalists being able to make use of them and in a physical struggle with her she falls and injures her hip. 

Dickens continues the story thus: 

She had been a lady of a handsome figure and a noble carriage. She never complained of the change; she never spoke to anyone of being crippled or of being in pain but day by day she tried to walk upon the terrace, and with the help of the stone balustrade, went up and down, up and down, up and down, in sun and shadow, with greater difficulty every day. At last one afternoon her husband (to whom she had never on any persuasion, opened her lips since that night), standing at the great south window, saw her drop upon the pavement. He hastened down to raise her, but she repulsed him as he bent over her, and looking at him fixedly and coldly, said ‘I will die here where I have walked. And I will walk here though I am in my grave. I will walk here until the pride of this house is humbled. And when calamity or when disgrace is coming to it, let the Dedlocks listen for my step!’ Bleak House, Charles Dickens.

The character that Dickens uses to tell this story is Mrs Rouncewell, who has been housekeeper for fifty years and  who is reminiscent of the ‘enormously fat housekeeper’ referred to in his letter. On my visit, the tradition of both housekeepers and ghosts was apparent in the comment of the guide to the grounds. She said that she and others had heard the sound of children playing when none were in the castle and that on one occasion when the housekeeper was hoovering, a back door had flown open and the plug was pulled out, as if snatched by an unseen hand! 

 

When being shown around the Long Gallery, I also learned that Dickens had a favourite chair, which is still there in the same position.  I pictured Dickens ensconced in this wing-backed leather chair, musing or writing, taking breaks to gaze down the length of the long room at theItalian glass chandeliers, low hanging and tipped with pink flowers, the red drapes hanging heavy and the busy gold and green wallpaper providing the rich, ornamented interior so typical of grand Victorian taste. Perhaps he would have imagined the shades of ladies past, making their promenade up and down the room, as was their wont when the weather outside was inclement. 

 

This idea of musing makes me think of the famous painting of Dickens  imagining his characters.

The painting, Dickens’ Dream by Robert William Buss, consists of a combination of painted and sketched characters because it was unfinished. However, when standing in front of it, I can’t help seeing it as a visual representation of the creative process of writing – the development of characters first as having the shady outlines of a ghost then filling out with life and colour as the author actually puts pen to paper and the story, drawing inspiration from a multitude of interesting fragments of experience begins to take shape. Rockingham is rich in such fragments and it’s no surprise that its people, atmosphere and legends lodged with Dickens and fed his remarkable creativity.

For those interested in finding out more, Rockingham Castle has lots of Dickens memorabilia  and the castle’s own long history is also fascinating.  https://rockinghamcastle.com

Acknowledgements: My thanks to David Shipton, Head Guide, Rockingham Castle for his excellent pamphlet ‘A Short Account of Charles Dickens, the Watsons and Rockingham Castle’, which is available from the castle, and to Mike Burton and the grounds guides for their help and informative comments.