It wasn't the end of the world: 2012 by Eve Edwards

It was quite a year, wasn't it?  I know that now we've tippled over into 2013 we are supposed to be looking ahead but I wanted to take a moment to consider how the history books will regard last year as it touches on how events get written down.

My favourite date!

We all know the Zhou Enlai quote in answer to the question 'What was the significance of the French Revolution?'  'It's too soon to say.'  So what hope do we have of making sense of 2012 right up against the exit point?  Not much - but that's not going to stop me!

Zhou Enlai

The first thing to say is that we know it is going to be misunderstood and misremembered.  Take Premier Zhou.  He may not have said the words above at all.  It is possible he was answering a question on the 1968 riots in Paris and it all got lost in translation.  He got stuck with the quote because it fitted what we in the West thought we heard, slotting neatly in with ideas about the long course of Chinese history and how someone from that country might see our European events.

OK - so we are going to get it wrong.  See in 2012 what we want to see, not what is underneath.

A year for red white and blue celebrations!

For the UK, I think it is fairly safe to say we will want it to be recognised as a year of two conflicting streams - bad news on the economy contrasted with fabulous news on the Olympics and Jubilee.  This is the surface glitter.  We all rather enjoyed ourselves against the odds.  I worried in advance about the Olympics in London because I feared another terrorist attack.  Thank goodness that didn't happen.  I really enjoyed it though from the moment the Opening Ceremony got under way - I think I'm not alone in this so my reaction (your reaction?) is part of a greater one that will figure in our island history.  I'm guessing it will be mentioned in the future like the Festival of Britain or the Great Exhibition - a moment of pride against a complex background.  It helped us forget that economically we are bumping along the bottom.


However, I would put my money on us missing the really significant events of last year.  Dohar anyone?  Did you pay attention to what was called the 'useful housekeeping' on the UN climate change at the end of the year.  By this they meant, they got an agreed statement out at the end.  They are housekeeping, changing the sheets, but unfortunately the bed is in a cabin on the Titanic.  Historians are going to be looking back and wondering why we didn't notice the socking great iceberg we are chugging towards full steam ahead.  America looked out the porthole briefly thanks to the terrible storm in the autumn, but they can't seem to drag themselves away from the boring party of Democrats versus Republicans long enough to do anything.  To change my metaphor, we are in a dangerous round of 'who will bell the cat?' - no one stepping forward to do the job.

There are other things to ponder - will America do anything about gun control after yet another sickening school shooting?  Probably nothing effective is my guess, for the same reason as above.  Arab spring has become the Arab swing back to despotism in some places.  Another, slightly faltering step in the rise of China.  Debt deepens and Europe dithers.

All in all, an interesting year that wasn't the end of the world.

And finally I'm reaching my point as a historical writer.  We write with hindsight but our characters are always voyaging into the unknown.  In 1917 (the date my characters in my new book have reached) they did not know the war was going to end the following year or that they would be on the winning side.  They would have been making guesses and tried to draw conclusions at new year 1918 just as I have done.  Add into the mix the serious possibility that you wouldn't see 1919 if you were in combat, caught flu or lived in the South East under German bombing routes.  It challenges a writer to plot with this innocence if you are writing from their point of view.  I find it really helpful to turn, not to history books, but to diaries to recapture this ignorance.

So perhaps a future writer will look at blogs.  Even this one?  Hello to the future.  I hope we didn't mess it up too badly for you but I fear that we did.

Perhaps contemporary readers of this would like to pitch what they think were the significant events historically speaking of the year?

www.eve-edwards.co.uk

My Favourite Historical Character: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown

The Genius of Place  - or the Man who would improve on Nature

Linda Buckley-Archer

I’m always drawn to his kind, quizzical eyes whenever I visit the vine at Hampton Court - which I do, absurdly often.  I don’t, however, know much at all about the man.  But what I do like – very much – is his eye (to borrow Pope's phrase) for the genius of place.

‘Now there’, said [‘Capability’ Brown], pointing his finger, ‘I make a comma, and there’, pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject.’

Lancelot Brown speaking about the grammar of design in 1782.

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

The wheel has turned full circle.  From being dragged around endless National Trust properties as a young child, I gradually progressed from protesting, to acquiescing and, ultimately, to being the one doing the dragging.  Our school holidays were punctuated with trips that involved crunching up the long, dusty drives of the stately homes of England in our old maroon Ford Consul.  In its glove compartment, the well-thumbed book of National Trust properties was always to hand.  All those picnics in grassy car parks, the bracing walks through the surrounding countryside, the slower walks (oh, so slow) through walled kitchen gardens and herbaceous borders.  And all the while my horticulturally-minded parents would admire varieties and (oh, the shame of it) would occasionally secrete a choice leaf cutting into pocket or handbag.  If we were lucky, there was the reward of a tub of ice cream at the end of it.  It instilled in us children a certain idea of Englishness; I suppose it brought to life for me certain aspects of England’s history.

Something slowly accreted in my impressionable young brain during all those long summer afternoons.  What it was, I think, was a kind of burgeoning, unthinking love of the English landscape.   It was not the architectural jewel rescued by the National Trust that affected me, but rather the land into which it had been set.  What I did not appreciate until much, much later, was that what I took to be England’s lovely countryside was often, in point of fact, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s idealised vision of it.  Unlike the geometric designs typified by Le Notre’s plan for Versailles a century earlier, Brown turned his back on formality, straight lines and symmetry,  and took his inspiration, instead, from Nature.   A good percentage of the beautiful ‘views’ I grew up admiring were actually examples of his beautiful landscaping.

Writing in the 40s, Brenda Colvin commented that “it was in the eighteenth century, in England, that garden and landscape first came together and were seen to be in relationship.  The idea of designing gardens as part of the wider landscape, and the wider landscape as a garden, was new, and was not fully grasped even in the eighteenth century.”   It was this idea that was embodied in  Brown’s designs.  For him the garden was inseparable from the landscape in which it was situated.   Anything that smacked of artificiality Lancelot Brown abhorred:  formal planting, hedgerows, fences were all torn out.   Lawns were laid right up to the house to avoid the division between garden and landscape. Earth was shifted (64,000 tons of it at Petworth) to generate the perfect curve or sweep of land. Streams were damned to form serpentine lakes and breathtaking cascades (he famously flooded Vanbrugh’s bridge at Blenheim Palace in so doing).  Majestic single specimens or clumps of trees were planted to highlight and accent nature’s bounty.  For one of his designs Brown planted over 100,000 trees to create the desired effect.  Hugely influential and widely copied, Brown’s designs still draw admirers from all over the world.   

Born in Northumberland in 1716, Brown served a long apprenticeship under William Kent at Stowe.  In a career that spanned five decades (he died in 1783),  Brown travelled the length and breadth of the land, and was nothing if not prolific.  In his long career he worked on upwards of 170 of the great gardens of England:  these included  Hampton Court, Petworth, Blenheim, Burghley, Longleat, Wycombe Abbey, Syon House, Temple Newsam, Harewood House. Compton Verney, Claremont, Stourhead and Warwick Castle.  Whether you realise it or not, you will probably have seen his labours.  He also planted the Great Vine at Hampton Court in around 1768, and you can still buy the grapes in season (which are delicious and have a lovely bloom to them).  I understand that you can even acquire plants propagated from it.  Around thirty of the gardens he designed are open to the public.  In this year of the 2012 London Olympics, whose opening ceremony will be celebrating England’s green and pleasant land, I would like to propose a toast to the inimitable Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, a man of whom it can be truly said that he transformed the English landscape.

  

If anyone is interested in finding out more about the man and his work, may I recommend Dorothy Stroud’s classic biography Capability Brown, as well as the more recent The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown by Jane Brown.

Linda Buckley-Archer’s Time Quake Trilogy is published by Simon & Schuster in the UK and the US.