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
    

Diamond Annie and the Fearless Forty Elephants by Catherine Hokin

 Jewellery Displays at the Ritz Paris

In among all the Brexit misery and non-shuffling cabinet
re-shuffles that have dominated the press so far this year, there has been one story which has had more elements of farce than even the Prime Minister can conjure up: the recent jewellery heist at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. For those of you who missed it, a group of thieves (one dressed as a builder) armed with small axes smashed through a window and assorted display cases and stole items with a value of several million euros.

Not surprisingly their actions triggered the alarms: the hapless thieves (who were all known to police), ran, scattering their loot like confetti, and were pretty much immediately caught by security. More Wallace and Gromit than the Pink Panther. Perhaps they should have spent a bit more time studying history than the hotel layout and acquainted themselves with the shop-looting tactics of the Forty Elephants, a female-run gang which dominated parts of the London crime scene for almost two hundred years.

The gang worked out of the Elephant and Castle district and, although they are primarily documented between the 1870s to the 1950s, appear to have grown out of the Elephant gang of highwaymen operating around the area's Elephant Coaching Inn in the eighteenth century.

 Female Shoplifter

Their activities included blackmail and house-breaking but they were most notorious for ransacking department stores, including Selfridges and Whiteleys. Police reports describe thousands of pounds of clothing and jewellery being seized in a single swoop, to be stored away in deep pockets, muffs and the voluminous bloomers and crinolines of the period. Perhaps because of all the stowed loot, one report (in the 1925 San Jose Chronicle) reports many of the gang women as big handsome women about six feet tall. They are also described as fashionably dressed although the mention of razors in their corsages does cast a darker side on some of the rather glamourised reporting which focused on their good looks and excessive, partying lifestyle particularly in the 'decadent' 1920s. These girls were territorial and ruled their patch as much by violence as any of their male counterparts.

 Lilllian Rose Kendall, the Bobbed Haired Bandit

The gang seems to have been at its strongest in the 1920s and 1930s when they took full advantage of the newly available motor car to extend their operations beyond London and acquire get-a-way vehicles far faster than anything the police could manage. One police report describes how they would descend in taxis and limousines like a gang of locusts, stripping out a store within an hour. Others describe the arrest of one gang member at Whiteleys who had a bag hidden inside her clothes which hung from her waist to her knees and contained over 40 stolen items and one who used a false arm in her blouse. Techniques included the 'crush' where women crowded at a counter and then handed round or dropped items for others to hide. And fighting back, hard. During this period, the gang had its most famous queen: Alice Diamond or Diamond Annie as the police dubbed her after her jewel-encrusted rings which gave her a punch to beware of. Alice was born in Lambeth workhouse, came from a crime family and was a notorious shoplifter by her teens. She took over the gang in 1916 when she was 20, continuing to rule the mob even after she was imprisoned in 1925 after the 'Battle of Lambeth' when a dispute led to Alice leading an army of women armed with lumps of concrete and broken bottles into a brutal attack. The role of Queen passed next onto Lillian Kendall and the gang continued its operations into the 1950s.

Many of the women involved in the gang have colourful reputations but also stories of lives begun in terrible poverty. Alice was one of eight children born in the dreadful conditions of a workhouse and her father was a violent and illiterate petty criminal. Life had few choices for women in her position so perhaps the path the glamour-loving Alice chose is not so hard to understand. Last year it was announced that Marnie Dickens is developing a series for the BBC about the gang and its members - with so much 'glamour' involved it's easy to see why this could be a female Peaky Blinders but let's hope it tells a rounded tale. For anyone interested in finding out more, there are a number of books about the gang, including one by Brian McDonald whose uncles led the male Elephant and Castle gang who the Forty Elephants were linked to. It's quite a story.

From the Communist Party to Peaky Blinders: The Real Jessie Eden by Catherine Hokin

For those of us who like their televised historical fiction with a slag-heap of grit and a soundtrack that favours Nick Cave over luscious strings, this month's return of Peaky Blinders has been like Christmas come early. This recreation of 1920s Birmingham and the truly terrifying gangsters stalking its grimy streets blends fact with fiction: the Peaky Blinders gang existed but wasn't run by the Shelby brothers; Small Heath and the Garrison pub had strong associations with gangs and betting rings between the wars although the satanic-mill factories that form the backdrop were not in such consolidated ownership. Real characters are mixed in with the series' fictionalised family, including appearances by Winston Churchill and Billy Kimber, leader of the Birmingham Gang and vicious enough in real life to make Tommy Shelby seem almost a softy by comparison.

 The Peaky Blinders Women off to listen to Jessie Eden

Part of the series' appeal for me has always been its core of feisty female characters, centred on Helen McRory's Aunt Polly who ran the illicit gambling rings when the men were away being damaged by war. In series four, a new women has been added to the mix: Jessie Eden, a shop steward in one of Shelby's factories who we first encounter putting on her lipstick in the gents' toilet and responding to demands she go somewhere more suitable with the rather cracking: 'You don't have a woman's lavatory on the second floor because no women get this far up."

Publicity round the series suggests Eden has been brought in as a possible love interest for Cillian Murphy's character Tommy. Given the show's track record with its female characters, I think we can hope for something closer to the actual Jessie Eden, who is something of a Brummie, and certainly a trade union, hero. She was born in 1902 and, when we meet her challenging Tommie about female pay in 1925, was actually working at the Joseph Lucas Motor Components Factory where she was a shop-steward for the Transport and General Workers' Union. At the time of the General Strike in 1926, the percentage of unionised women at the factory was tiny and completely over-shadowed by the 10,000 non-unionised women, nevertheless Eden marched the women in her section out to join the strike.

Tanks in the General Strike - Daily Mirror

When she was interviewed by the Birmingham Post on the 50th anniversary of the Strike in 1976, Eden recalled the privations of the period: "We used to take our turns picketing or join the big meetings in the old Bull Ring, which was much larger then. Sacrifices had to be made. We had practically no meat during the strike. We lived on bread, jam and marge.” She also recalled her own brush with the law on the evening of the May Day march which saw a procession of 25,000 people, witnessed by another 100,000. "One policeman put his hands on my arm. They were telling me to go home, but the crowd howled, ‘Hey, leave her alone’ and then some men came and pushed the policemen away. They didn’t do anything after that. I think they could see that there would have been a riot. I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me, you see. I don’t know what I’d have felt like on my own."

 The young Jessie Eden

Five years later, Eden really came into her own when she led 10,000 women out of the Lucas factory on a week long strike over new working practices which were driving female workers to the point of collapse. The irony of the story was that the new working speeds intended as a result of the American-designed systems were to be based on Jessie's work-rate as she was judged as an exemplar of efficiency. A further irony was that Eden, now a member of the Communist Party, was one of those who lost her job when a furious management imposed cutbacks. The 1931 strike is credited with starting mass unionisation among women workers but its aftermath was tough on Eden who apparently struggled to find work. She seems to then disappear for a period of two years but was actually in Moscow, rallying Soviet women construction workers employed building the city's metro. No mean feat for a working-class, apparently tiny, woman from Birmingham.

Jessie Eden was a champion of social justice her whole life. She was a key figure in the 1939 Birmingham Rent Strike which brought 49,000 tenants out on strike, successfully winning them rent control in the council and private sector. She stood for the Communist Party in the 1945 General Election and led a march against the Vietnam War in Birmingham in 1969. Graham Stephenson, whose website is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in Eden and union/Communist politics, knew Eden in later life and described her in a recent Guardian interview: "People say that in her prime she was an electrifying speaker, who poured out words from the heart without notes and whose confidence in victory was contagious." That's a tribute I'm sure most of us would love to have and hopefully Peaky Blinders is set to give us a deeper flavour of this woman whose actions made such a difference to the women around her, women who she fought to see treated with dignity, equality and respect. Somehow the time for remembering her seems right.

Dance Around in Your Bones by Joan Lennon

I live in Scotland, so I am rarely troubled by being too hot.  But the summers were scorchers where I grew up and I now have a son living in Indonesia - and when I visit oh how I wish I could follow the delectable Lee Morse's advice!  Which advice is that, I hear you ask?  Listen up -

I've combined the various versions of the lyrics that the internet has to offer for you.

Dancing may do this and that

And help you take off lots of fat

But I'm no friend of dancing when it's hot

So if you are a dancing fool

Who loves to dance, but can't keep cool

Bear in mind the ideas that I've got

When it gets too hot for comfort

And you can't get ice cream cones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When the lazy syncopation

Of the music softly moans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

The polar bears aren't green up in Greenland

They've got the right idea

They think it's great to refrigerate

While we all cremate down here

Just be like those bamboo babies

In the South Sea tropic zones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When you're calling up your sweetie

In those hothouse telephones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When you're on a crowded dance floor

Near those red hot saxophones

Ah, t'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Take a look at the girls when they're dancing

Notice the way they're dressed

They wear silken clothes without any hose

And nobody knows the rest

No more singing in the bathtub

With those television phones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Now, we are gathered by the river

Listen to your Deacon Jones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

You must all go in that water

Let me hear your sinful groans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Do what I say right away, wicked sinners

For this is your judgement day

Come andele in the river with me

Wash your sins away

Throw away your gin and razors

Throw away your gambling bones

For t'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones


There are definitely bits I had to look up.  Andele, for example, is, according to Wiktionary, American slang for hurry up; come on; get a move on!  Gin and razors could refer to a cocktail of gin and cayenne pepper, which seems to me a ghastly thing to do to gin, so definitely worth throwing away.  But who is Deacon Jones?  Other than a preacher who conveniently rhymes with bones?  And why were telephone boxes so hot?  Let me know if you've got any ideas.  And what about that reference to television phones way back in 1929?  Wow!

One last tidbit - in the comments of the instrumental version of 'Taint No Sin by Fred "Sugar" Hall and His Sugar Babies here, I learned that this was Ray Bradbury's favourite song as a boy.  ("Zen in the Art of Writing")  

Lee Morse, American jazz and blues singer and songwriter (1897 - 1954)

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Walking Mountain.

Judicial Murder in Melbourne by Katherine Webb

I recently travelled to Australia for the first time to visit my sister, who emigrated out to Melbourne earlier this year. It might have been winter over there, but it was still a wonderful trip - I'm not much of a city person, generally, but Melbourne is a lovely one. By the sea, not too big, full of character, and with far more visible history than I'd expected - from the old wooden trams in the centre to the cobbled laneways; the grand Victorian villas with their fancy ironwork balconies and the tiny miners' cottages in their compact rows.

Victorian architecture in Melbourne

I had particular, albeit sombre, fun visiting Melbourne Old Gaol. This grim place, now brilliantly set up as a tourist attraction, gives a clear reminder of how far we have come, as a society, in the last hundred years or so! It must have been a terrible place to be incarcerated. Inmates were kept in tiny cells only just long enough for them to lie down in, for twenty-three hours a day in some cases - allowed out for a single hour of exercise during which time they weren't allowed to talk to the other prisoners. Disobedience was punishable by lashing. If you'd been of sound mind when you went in, it's doubtful whether you would have been when you came out! If you came out, of course. The prisoners lived their lives in full sight of the prison gallows, where a good many met their end.

Inside the gaol, on the ground floor. There are cells to either side, and rising two floors above as well.

The gaol was built in the early nineteenth century, and the first executions there were of two native Tasmanian men in 1842. They were found guilty of the murder of two white whalers, but were essentially hanged as a deterrent to other troublesome natives. A proper cell block was built on the site by 1845, but this was soon dangerously overcrowded, since the population of Melbourne exploded from 23,000 to 90,000 after the discovery of gold in the area in 1851. A second cell block was built in 1859, and a separate women's wing in 1864.

The gaol in 1859

The gaol's most famous inmate was without doubt Ned Kelly, the bushranger folk hero who was also, indisputably, a thief and a murderer. He was the 101st person to be hanged at Melbourne gaol in November 1880, and the gaol has replicas of the iron armour he wore for his final showdown with the police - which did stop several bullets before it failed to stop the bullets that halted him. However, I also 'met' another notorious criminal there. A friend of my sister's had asked me to look in a register or log book, if one were available at the gaol, for any record of a relative of hers, recently uncovered by her mother's family history research - a man named Fred Deeming, who was apparently an inmate at one time. I agreed, not holding out much hope, so imagine my surprise when a whole story board was dedicated to the man!

I should explain that in each cell of the gaol, a story board and plaster cast death mask of a particular inmate are on display. In many cases, these provide a damning commentary on the harshness of justice and Victorian society, since many people - including women - were hanged for what boiled down to the crime of poverty and desperation. Fred Deeming's case, however, is a little different. To summarise the story board above, he came to Melbourne from the UK with his second wife, Emily, in 1891. He rented a cottage, but soon moved on. Early in 1892, the landlord noticed an awful smell, and an excavation of the hearth stone turned up Emily's decomposing body. The Melbourne authorities communicated with those in Liverpool, UK, where Deeming had lived before, and a similar excavation at his previous address turned up the bodies of his first wife and their four children, also murdered by Deeming. He was arrested in March 1892 in Western Australia, on the verge of marrying his third wife - who clearly had a lucky escape! Deeming was hanged in May 1892, in spite of a plea of insanity. Possibly not the kind of relative my sister's friend was hoping to hear about!

I mentioned above that there are original plaster cast death masks of many of the hanged inmates on display at Melbourne gaol. The Victorians did love to document death, and to look at it square on. I found these extremely poignant, and a little disturbing; not least because, having been hanged, the masks all show a terrible weal across the throat that the rope has caused. There is also, in some hard to define way, absolutely no chance of mistaking these for masks taken in life. I didn't want to put many up on here as it seemed somehow disrespectful - but in Fred Deeming's case I'll make an exception:

Fred Deeming's death mask

For anyone interested, a quick google will reveal images of Ned Kelly's death mask too. Perhaps the most fascinating case I learned about, however, was that of Colin Ross, executed in 1922 for the rape and murder of twelve year old Alma Tirtschke. For the first time in Australian history, forensic evidence was used to obtain a conviction - namely, some hairs found on a blanket of Ross's which were found by an 'expert' to match those belonging to the dead child.

Colin Ross, shortly before his execution

Alma Tirtschke

The little girl's body was left dumped in a cobbled back street called Gun Alley, near a covered arcade of dubious repute where Ross and his brother kept a bar. Under intense public pressure to make an arrest, the police soon lit upon Ross as a suspect, and, in the commanding officer's own words, then looked for ways to prove his guilt, rather than his innocence. Crucially, the press went into a frenzy over the case, and printed all kinds of uncorroborated stories and 'evidence'. Enough people with an axe to grind against Ross were willing to testify having seen him talking to Alma, and even to her having been drinking in his bar all afternoon - which her family strenuously denied.

Hounded to trial by the police, and then faced with a jury of his 'peers' who had, for weeks, been fed a stream of damning, sensationalist stories about the case, Ross stood little chance. The forensic evidence of the hairs found on a blanket from his bar was the final nail in his coffin. He was hanged, still protesting his innocence, in the spring of 1922. As a final cruelty the hanging was bungled, and Ross's death was by no means painless or instantaneous.

The gallows in Melbourne Old Gaol, a simple affair with a trapdoor dropping through the middle floor of the prison, where Colin Ross, Ned Kelly, and many others, met their end.

How utterly tragic that the first use of forensic evidence, now so indispensable to judicial process, should have formed part of such a terrible miscarriage of justice. Following extensive research begun in 1995 by journalist Kevin Morgan, Colin Ross has become the first man in Australian history to be pardoned after judicial execution. Ross may have been a bit of a ne'er do well, a bit of a chancer, but he was certainly no child murderer. The hairs on his blanket were not Alma's. The testimony of the witnesses who spoke against him is inconsistent and riddled with flaws; one witness was almost certainly induced by the police to recite a 'confession' Ross supposedly made to him whilst on remand. Colin Ross was tried by public opinion, an over-heated press and a police force so convinced they had their man that it blinded them. And whoever did rape and kill Alma Tirtschke was never brought to justice for the crime.

I wholeheartedly recommend Kevin Morgan's book, which I bought having read about the case during my visit to Melbourne Old Gaol, whether you're interested in true crime or not. It's a meticulous, unputdownable reconstruction of the case which points, ultimately, chillingly, to the identity of the real killer. Far too late for the purposes of justice, of course, and far too late for poor Colin Ross and his family. I've always supposed this to be the crux of the argument about capital punishment: Which is the worst injustice: to let a guilty man live, and perhaps walk free, or to take the life of an innocent one? Because sooner or later, one or the other is bound to happen - however sound we believe the evidence to be. Personally, I think hanging an innocent man is by far the worse of those two options.

Cabinet of Curiosities by Katherine Webb

My first ever offering to the Cabinet of Curiosities are these very plain, rather dented pewter jugs:

The largest stands at 10cm tall, the smallest at a mere 6cm; or, more importantly, stamped onto the handles are the volumes they hold: 1 deciliter, 1/2 deciliter and 2 centiliter. Any guesses as to what they were for?

I bought these jugs in Italy while I was there researching The Night Falling a few years ago, from an old lady in the town of Gioia del Colle in the far south of the country. I had just been to look around a wonderful private museum called the Museo Della Civilta' Contadina - or Museum of Rural Life. This vast, private collection has been put together and is run by a man called Vito Santoiemma, and fills several huge warehouses in what used to be the family's sawmill in the town. It holds an astonishing array of objects related to every aspect of rural life in that part of Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I got lost in it for hours.

Inside the museum. The jars on the floor with the wooden lids are called prisor, and are what most families would have had as their only toilet. It had to be carried out and emptied daily, into a slops barrel which was then dragged out of town and used to fertilise the fields. Disease, unsurprisingly, was rife.

At the end of my visit, I asked if there was any small thing I could buy to take back with me, and was told that an old lady (I never did get her name!) might have something to sell. These jugs appeared, and I was asked how much I was willing to pay for them - always a tricky question when you have absolutely no idea of an item's worth - both materially and to the person selling it! She seemed both delighted and bemused by my offer of Euro20, and so I had a piece of history to bring home with me.

The smallest jug, with 2 centiliter stamped onto the handle.

I've written before about the shocking living conditions experienced by the vast majority of people in Southern Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. A few wealthy, often absent, landlords owned all the land and all the housing, and the peasants - some 80% of the rest of the population - had no means to live but to pay for the rent on tiny, inadequate apartments by selling their labour in the fields for a daily rate. They were exhausted, hungry, angry, and powerless, and when they rose up in 1921 and 1922, in a broadly socialist movement, they were crushed again by the rise of fascism.

The milkman's bicycle in Vito Santoiemma's museum, and other dairy-related items.

My jugs date from the years immediately after this, after Mussolini came to power in 1922. These jugs were given out as part of a new system of rationing intended to alleviate the problem of the poor simply starving to death in years of drought and bad harvest - and also to conserve produce that was desperately scarce all over Italy after the First World War. It seems impossible to imagine Italy being short of olive oil, but that is what the jugs were for - the rationing of olive oil. How many calories does the 2 centiliter jug represent? I estimate maybe about 100. I don't know how many people that was supposed to feed, but I do know that this was a weekly ration, not a daily one. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of women selling their bodies to corrupt officials for an increase in the ration for their family.

So perhaps my piece of portable history is a bit dark in nature, and links directly back to dire times for one particular family. But there is always something so emotive and powerful about actually holding an object from a time that has now passed out of reach, and I kept the jugs on the shelf by my desk as I wrote my novel.

Travelling in the Past by Katherine Webb

The fashion for ‘vintage’ seems to grow all the time - clothes and home decor and hobbies that either are or have been made to look old. As someone who has always loved old buildings and old things and old stories, and the sense of something having its own personal history, I can quite understand the appeal. For others, this harking back is a reaction to today's instant, throwaway culture - the hurried transience that seems to afflict every aspect of our daily lives. The permanence and ‘authenticity’ of things that were ‘built to last’, in an era we can look back upon through the rose-tint of nostalgia, can be comforting. I noticed this happening everywhere I looked in Puglia, in the southern ‘heel’ of Italy, when I visited to research my novel, The Night Falling.

Peasant wedding in Alberobello, 1920

It’s well known that the economy in the south of Italy suffers in comparison to the more affluent north - it has for generations. I’d had no idea before I began my research just how poor the south had been, until very recently. But, today, tourism is helping to change things. Puglia’s climate is hot and dry; it has miles and miles of dramatic coastline, riddled with caves and long expanses of beach where the waters of the Adriatic are crystal clear. It has white-washed medieval towns clustered on the high ground inland; it has fantastic food and wine. Basically, it has everything it needs to tempt sun-starved northerners to visit. What was most interesting to me, as I explored and learnt, was how the remnants of Puglia’s hard, violent history have been incorporated into this new tourist expansion. And have, in their own way, been white-washed.

The same street in Alberobello today

The Night Falling is set in 1921, at a time when Puglia still suffered a repressive system of land ownership called latifundism. This basically meant that a single wealthy land owner - who often lived away in Rome or Paris - owned huge tracts of land, divided into farms that were run by tenant farmers - often also outsiders with no incentive to improve the land. The vast majority of Puglia’s population, the braccianti, had no opportunity to acquire land of their own. They lived in squalid towns and sold their labour for a daily rate, walking miles to wherever there was work before the day had even begun. The same landowners they worked for owned their apartments and rooms, and charged outrageous rents for even the dankest of cellars. In the town of Matera, huge numbers of people simply lived in caves. Even water had to be bought. In years of poor harvest - of which hard, bone-dry Puglia had many - large numbers of these peasant poor simply starved to death.

In the aftermath of the First World War,  the same socialist movement that rocked much of Europe made tentative inroads into Puglia. For a short while there were workers’ registers, rosters, and fixed wages. However, almost immediately, the fledgling Fascist movement rose up in response, and crushed it. The armed brute squads with which the landlords had always intimidated upstart peasants now had official sanction, black shirts and emblems. Political corruption was so rife, and the police so partisan, that the peasant movement stood no real chance in Puglia. It fared slightly better elsewhere in Italy, but, by 1922, Mussolini was in supreme command.

A ruined trullo, used to house the poor, to shelter animals, or the guards who watched the crops

Once you know a bit about this history you can see traces of it everywhere. Puglia is riddled with trulli - the conical stone houses which served for the secure storage of grain and animals, as guards huts out in the fields, and also as housing for some of the poorest people. Now, they are being converted into holiday homes; and in Alberobello, which has the highest concentration of trulli, they have been quite literally white-washed, with many now selling souvenirs. At the other end of the property ladder are the masserie - the huge, imposing farmhouses of the tenant farmers and landowners. These are typically fortified, with high, impenetrable walls around an inner courtyard, where people and produce could be protected. Some of them look like castles. Why so fortified? Because they were built to withstand attack from generations of starving, desperate, despairing men. While I was there, I met several men whose grandparents and parents had spoken of the infamous Massacre at Marzagaglia, when unarmed peasants demanding to be paid were shot down by guards from behind the masseria walls. It was an outrage so heinous that it lives on in the oral history of an area overladen with outrages. 

The formidable walls of a masseria

Puglia’s food, for which it is also developing a reputation, leans heavily towards the organic, the slow food movement, and the revival of peasant food. Black pasta - made from burnt wheat - is very popular. Why burn the wheat? The chefs I spoke to talked about the nutty, smoky taste it gives, but it dates back to when the poor would make flour from the charred grains they were allowed to scour the ground for once the stubble had been burnt. Chicory and beans is another favourite - beans being the only protein the poor could generally get, and chicory - or any other dark, bitter greens - that could be pulled up wild around the fields. Weeds, essentially. The peasants had no land to grow vegetables, and no money to buy from the market. Their food was scraped together, scavenged, desperately inadequate. One common meal so very meagre that it hasn’t been up-cycled by today’s restaurants is aqua sale - water, with a little salt and either a dash of olive oil or some chunks of stale bread in it. It would have astonished those peasants, I'm sure, that wealthy travellers would ever choose to eat such fare.

Burnt wheat pasta, upcycled

So, while I heartily approve of traditional cooking and recipes making a resurgence, and of old buildings being brought back to life, part of me also wishes that more was known of their origins, and their past. But then, it is a hard and dark history. Perhaps the people living there, the descendants of those who survived such times, are content to watch things moving on. And enjoying a trip to Puglia - or anywhere - does not, of course, rely on knowing anything at all about its history. But for me, it hugely enriches the experience of any travel.

Those Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines - Aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s by Christina Koning

Having just finished my latest novel, ‘Time of Flight’, which is set in 1931, and features - amongst other characters - a number of female flyers, I wanted to make my last post for the History Girls about these wonderful ‘queens of the air’, who did so much to popularise flying in its golden years. One of the most celebrated was Amelia Earhart - pronounced ‘Air-heart’ (1897-1937) - who, apart from setting numerous aviation records, including being the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic, was instrumental in setting up ‘The Ninety-Nines’, an association of women pilots.

In 1920, Amelia visited an airfield at Long Beach, paying $10 for a 10 minute flight in an aeroplane piloted by Frank Hawks. This proved a turning-point for the young enthusiast: ‘By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground,’ she said. ‘I knew I had to fly.’ Like Amy Johnson after her, she saved up for flying lessons and had her first lesson a year later, gaining her pilot’s license in 1923.

Her instructor was the delightfully named Neta Snook (1896 - 1991), who ran a commercial flying school in Virginia (the first woman to do so), and who later wrote about her friendship with Earhart in her book, I Taught Amelia to Fly.

After the enormous popular interest in Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amelia was selected, the following year, to take the place of aviatrix Amy Phipps Guest (1873 -1959) as the first woman to make the trip, after the latter decided to drop out. Interviewed after the flight, which was piloted by Wilmer Stultz, Amelia said, with characteristic self-deprecation: ‘Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage…’ adding, ‘maybe someday I'll try it alone.’

 In May 1932, having undertaken many lengthy flights across America, she got her wish. Setting off from Newfoundland, she arrived, 14 hours and 56 minutes later, in what she hoped was Paris. In fact, it was a field in Ireland - her Lockheed Vega 5B aeroplane having been blown off course. But she’d done it - becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Awards and acclaim followed, but Amelia refused to rest on her laurels. She was determined to fulfil her dream of flying around the world, and, after several false starts, set off in July 1937 with co-pilot Fred Noonan, in her Lockheed Electra 10E. What followed has been the subject of speculation ever since, after the aeroplane disappeared over the Pacific. Was it sabotage, engine failure, or (the most likely scenario) a breakdown of the inflight radio system which caused her to lose her way? 

Amy Johnson (1903 - 1941) was Britain’s ‘answer’ to the woman nicknamed ‘Lady Lindy’ by the American press, and became a close friend of her ‘rival’, several years before Earhart’s untimely death. Born, the daughter of a prosperous businessman, in Kingston upon Hull, Amy went first to university to read Economics, then got a job as secretary to the solicitor William Charles Crocker.

My grandfather Charles Thompson - the model for my ‘Blind Detective’, Frederick Rowlands, in the series of novels of which ‘Time of Flight’ is the latest - worked as a receptionist in the same office, and knew Amy when she was first getting interested in flying. (It’s one of the reasons I knew this book had to have an aviation theme.) This was in 1928; a year later, after saving up and paying for flying lessons at £2 an hour, she gained her pilot’s license, and later the same year became the first woman to gain a ground engineer’s ‘C’ license - a qualification that would stand her in good stead on her record-breaking flight. This was the first solo flight by a woman from England to Australia. Amy was twenty-six years old, and had had only 90 hours’ flying experience when she set out from Croydon Airport on May 5th, 1930 in her De Havilland GH60 Gipsy Moth ‘Jason’, on the first leg of her 11,000 mile journey.

During the course of this epic flight, she averaged 800 - 900 miles a day, battling through rainstorms and fog, and on one occasion was forced to land in the Egyptian desert, on account of a sand-storm. Much of the time she was ‘flying blind’, unsure of her direction - radar had yet to be discovered and the instruments she had to guide her were rudimentary. She was therefore obliged to find her way by the simple expedient of looking down from the open cockpit, and following the lines of rivers and roads. Reaching India in a record six days, she ran into the monsoon, which reduced visibility to zero, and forced her to crash-land. Her engineering skills enabled her to fix the damaged plane, and she took off again for Singapore, sometimes flying so low over the sea that she was skimming the tops of the waves. After yet more hair-raising escapades, she reached Darwin on May 24th - to an ecstatic reception.

‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’ became one the hit songs of 1930; lucrative contracts with the Daily Mail (which had sponsored the flight) followed. ‘The Flying Typist’ became an instant celebrity - a role with which she was far from comfortable. Her passion was flying, and she continued to set records throughout the 1930s, including one for a solo flight from London to Cape Town in 1932, breaking her husband Jim Mollison’s record, set the previous year. Billed as ‘The Flying Sweethearts’ - the press then being as fond of a sentimental headline as they are today - she and Mollison made several long-distance flights together, including one to New York which ended in a near-fatal crash. After the marriage ended, Amy continued to pursue her fascination with speed, taking up rally driving and gliding, and becoming a part of what was then known as the ‘Smart Set’.

I haven’t space to give more than a brief mention to a few of the other distinguished aviatrices of the 1920s and 1930s, whose exploits were no less daring and ground-breaking than those already described. Beryl Markham (1902- 1986) is one of these - the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West, a journey she wrote about in her 1942 memoir, ‘West with the Night’, whose style was much admired by Ernest Hemingway (not a man given to praising other writers). Glamorous and headstrong, Beryl was renowned not only for her flying skills but also for her many love affairs - including one with Denys Finch Hatton, the husband of her friend, the writer Karen Blixen, and a member of the notorious ‘Happy Valley' set.

Other celebrated female pilots of the era include two flying aristocrats - both, rather confusingly, with the same first name. Born in County Limerick, Lady Mary Heath (1896 - 1939) began her adventurous career as a dispatch rider during the First World War. In 1928, she became the first woman to fly from London to the Cape - a journey which took her three months. Lady Heath liked to travel in her pearls and fur coat - no doubt a sensible precaution, in those days of open cockpits.

Her extraordinary feat was matched by another Irish aviatrix, Lady Mary Bailey (1890 - 1960), the daughter of the fifth Baron Rossmore, whose 18,000 mile journey across Africa was the longest solo flight ever attempted by a woman. She was modest about her difficult and dangerous achievement, saying in an interview with The Times that she’d been ‘just flying about’, and breaking her journey back to Croydon Airport with a stop-over at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, because, she said, she badly needed a bath! 

Then there was Jean Batten - called ‘The Greta Garbo of the Skies’, on account of her shy and reclusive temperament. Jean was the first woman to fly from London to New Zealand, in 1936 - just one of her record-breaking long-distance solo flights. She, too, was fond of fashion, and always packed an evening dress when flying…

I could go on - but I’ve run out of space and time. So I’d just like to say, ‘Thanks for having me,’ to all my fellow history girls. May your ‘flights’, literary and otherwise, all have safe landings. Over and out!