Under the Volcano - by Lesley Downer

On August 11th 1863 seven British warships steamed into Kinko Bay in the southern Japanese province of Satsuma and dropped anchor in the shadow of the great volcano, Sakurajima, draped, then as now, with a plume of black ash.

The British crew and marines and legation officers on board were some of the first westerners ever to see the beautiful bay with its fringe of palm trees, balmy blue skies and precipitous hills soaring behind. I was there just last month and found myself trying to imagine how they must have felt as they saw this scene which has changed surprisingly little in the last 155 years. Later visitors called it the Naples of Japan.

But the British hadn’t come to sightsee. They’d come to attack the city of Kagoshima on the opposite shore.

Sengan-en Villa with Sakurajima behind

In those days Japan was made up of two hundred and sixty princedoms, each ruled by a daimyo lord, much like the earls and barons of Elizabeth I’s day. The Satsuma domain, in the far south, was so far from the capital, Edo, that it felt like another country. To this day the people of the area still think of themselves not so much as Japanese but Satsuma. The old clan loyalties remain.

The Prince of Satsuma was one of the wealthiest and most powerful in the land. Besides his imposing castle set against a dramatic hillside covered in dense forest, he had an exquisite seaside villa surrounded by pleasure gardens, overlooking the bay.

Replica of Princess Atsu's lavish palanquin,
 belonging to Shimazu Nariakira

But the lord who had brought the domain to its pinnacle had died five years before the British arrived. Shimazu Nariakira, a brilliant and wise man, was fascinated by Dutch knowledge, the only western knowledge available in Japan at the time. He spoke Dutch, met the Dutch scholars who spent time in Japan, collected western books, studied western technology, and even kept a diary written in the Roman alphabet. He had a telegraph system, the only one in Japan, installed in his castle grounds, and owned Japan’s first camera, a daguerreotype, bought in 1853 in Nagasaki. The first photograph to be taken in Japan was of his castle and the first photographic portrait was of him.

Kagoshima Castle

He also established Japan’s first glass works which produced beautiful red and blue Satsuma cut glass. And he had built a whole industrial complex under the cliffs down by the bay, looking across to the volcano. There he had a foundry and the first reverberating furnace in Japan where he cast cannon. He also had a secret shipbuilding yard on the lower slopes of the volcano where he built his own warships in defiance of the shogunal decree forbidding such activity because he anticipated western attack and wanted to be ready.

But this great and enlightened lord had no surviving children and when he died was succeeded by the young son of his ruthless and unscrupulous half brother, Hisamitsu, who thereafter held the reins of power.

Satsuma glass ware with Sakurajima behind

  When the British sailed into Kinko Bay it was ten years after Commodore Perry had appeared in Edo Bay with his four Black Ships to force Japan to open to the west. So the people of Kagoshima had certainly heard of these monstrous ships even if they hadn’t seen them. All the same it must have been an awe-inspiring sight - seven mammoth warships, fifteen times bigger than the largest Japanese ship, steaming into the bay in a long line, bristling with cannon..

First the British seized three merchant ships and pillaged them. But the people of Satsuma were not easily frightened. Hearing the British were on their way they set up gun emplacements all along the seafront and turned the cannons, cast in the late lord Shimazu Nariakira’s iron foundry, on the British ships.

Bombardment of Kagoshima by the Royal Navy
August 15th 1863, Le Monde Illustre

They also knew there was a typhoon coming and that it would cause havoc for the British ships. The British were taken by surprise. They'd seen themselves as administering punishment to unruly natives; they didn’t expect the Satsuma to fight back. It took them a couple of hours to regroup. Then they sailed along the coast bombarding the city.

The reason for the attack was the death of a British merchant, killed the previous year by samurai of the Satsuma domain. Charles Richardson, a British merchant from Shanghai, had been visiting Yokohama for a few days and wanted to go riding. He’d been warned not to go on the highway because there was a huge procession coming through. But he ignored the advice. After all, he was British.

He and three friends were on the Tokaido highway riding towards Edo. At Namamugi village they met Hisamitsu himself, Nariakira's haughty half brother, heading straight towards them at the centre of a huge procession with an escort of a thousand retainers. The procession was a mile long. It filled the entire road, from one side to the other. Like Trooping the Colour, it didn’t do to barge into it. When such a procession passed, Japanese fell to their knees and bowed their heads. An American merchant, Eugene Van Reed, meeting this same procession did the same, to the disgust of the foreign community. But at least he managed to keep his head.

Richardson (in the middle, with hat) meets Hisamitsu (to the right) at Namamugi

Richardson refused to dismount. He rode down the middle of road and came between Hisamitsu’s palanquin and his bodyguards - like getting right up close to the queen’s carriage at Trooping the Colour. The bodyguards cut him down. 

The British were outraged. The death of an Englishman was an unforgivable offence. They demanded that the shogun’s government pay a huge indemnity of £100,000, more than £10 million today, and 1/3 of the Japanese government’s annual revenues, enough to bankrupt the shogunate. They threatened to bombard Edo if payment was not made. They also demanded that the offending clan, the Satsuma, arrest the perpetrators and pay £25,000 compensation, nearly £3 million today.

The shogunate paid up but Satsuma refused. The British waited a year and eventually sent seven ships from Yokohama to attack Kagoshima.

In the end Kagoshima burnt down and many beautiful buildings and treasures were lost. However the city had already been evacuated and only 5 Japanese were killed as opposed to 11 British.

Under the volcano: Sengan-en Villa with Sakurajima behind

To the British it was just another small war, a very long way away. Probably very few British people ever even heard of it. This was an era when Britain was waging wars and taking colonies all over the globe. It was not long after the Crimean War in which Britain along with France and the Ottoman Empire had defeated Russia while in China the Second Opium War had only recently come to an end. Britannia definitively ruled the waves. But in the annals of Satsuma it looms large as the Anglo Satsuma War.

The long term result was that Satsuma recognised the superior fire power of Britain and wooed the British who were impressed in their turn by the spirit of the Satsuma. They ended up backing them against the shogunate and, as usually happened in those days, the side the British backed won.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is the epic tale of Princess Atsu, Shimazu Nariakira's adopted daughter, whom he sent to Edo to marry the shogun. Out now in paperback. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

The pictures of Kagoshima Castle, the bombardment of Kagoshima and Charles Richardson at Namamugi are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The rest are mine.

French view of the First World War by Janie Hampton

During the last four years we have seen the First World War from many angles. But how did the French see it? A few years ago I found two large-format bound volumes of the magazine L’Illustration in the street with a notice ‘Take Me’. Being an obedient citizen, I did. And then wondered what to do with them. Now I am glad I did not throw them out.  My school French can read the titles and the subject matter but not the detail. So I share with you some of the 100s of illustrations, drawn and photographed.

A fictional village in Alsace the day after German occupation
- suddenly the residents are very patriotic

French soldiers crossing the Canal d'Yser under fire....

..while officers of several armies enjoy life in the Café du Paix in Paris...

...and their daughters play in the Bois de Boulogne...

...and refugee children from the North hope for morsels of food.

Aeroplanes were a new weapon of war..

...but the French Army relied on donkeys for transport in the trenches.

...and reinforcements from the 43rd Battalion of Senegal.

L’Illustration dealt with subjects other than war, including the dangers of high heels (with X-Rays of damaged ankles to prove it); how to bottle apples; and the Russian Revolution (the editor of L’Illustration did not seem to like the Bolsheviks). In December 1918, advertisements reappeared on the back page. 

At the end of the war, there were celebrations across France. 

..while German prisoners-of -war wondered 'What next?'
Nearly 130,000 prisoners were taken at La Somme in August 1918.

France, depicted as a lovely woman, thanks a French soldier for saving her....

..while a surprised 'America' glares at a conquered 'Germany'.

After the war, soldiers rescued a bronze sculpture of  Eve, made by Auguste Rodin
in 1881 and buried in a garden in Douai, northern France

The British Prime Minister Lloyd George was awarded a double-page  portrait on the last page of L'Illustration 1918.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Diane Atkinson’s “Rise Up Women!” by Janie Hampton

 Only this month I realised that although I was not born until 1952, I am among the first generation of women born in Britain to have the right to vote: my mother was born before 1918. A few months after my 18th birthday, in 1970, I was also among the first Britons under 21 years to vote. I knew it was a big deal, but until I read Diane Atkinson’s excellent new book Rise Up women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes, I didn’t realise what extraordinary sacrifices so many women had made for British women. Apparently, my paternal grandmother chained herself to the railings of Buckingham Palace. Sadly, she died before I was born, so I can’t ask her about it. But this energetic and detailed history brings the fight to life, from the Chartists of the 1830s, to the start of women’s suffrage in 1918.

Suffragette chained to a railing, later copied by activists chaining
themselves to trees to demonstrate against road-building. 

A question often asked is ‘What is the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette?’ Suffragists hoped to achieve votes for women by gentle persuasion. Although there were fewer suffragettes, they were noisier, more militant, often violent, and so got noticed. They showed, as many activists have done since, that being polite and asking nicely may not get you as far as attacking property and blowing up  post boxes. 

`Deeds Not Words!' was the suffragette's slogan on bombed post-boxes, acts of arson and works of art.

From the start of Edward VII’s reign in 1901, the suffragettes’ actions were public and militant and as a result, they endured public derision, assault and imprisonment. In the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, courageous suffragettes marched from Newcastle, Cromer, Bangor and Land’s End, meeting in a rally of 50,000 people in Hyde Park. Women of all classes walked together, camped together and stayed in each other’s homes. They also endured being stoned, beaten up, having dead rats thrown at them and their speeches interrupted. But it gave them even more strength, solidarity and purpose; and they refused to be crushed.

Suffragette rally in Trafalgar Square.

Atkinson relates the tales of women from all classes who fought with flair, energy and imagination: mill workers and actors; teachers and doctors; seamstresses and scientists; clerks and boot-makers. The stars of the suffragette movement are well known: the Pankhurst family, Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia; and Emily Wilding Davidson who became a martyr after running under the King’s race horse at Epson. There were also female students at Oxford University (a rare breed) who opened a hat- repair shop to raise funds; the Honorable Evelina Haverfield whose talent was to stand beside police horses during demonstrations and get them to lie down; and Mary Richardson who after slashing Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. 

Suffragette Dora Thewlis is arrested in 1907.

Phyllis Keller broke the windows of anti-suffragist Lord Curzon and in her Holloway prison cell longed for Camp coffee and potted meat. The government refused to treat suffragettes as political prisoners, so they stopped eating and went on hunger strike. And the stronger the women, the crueler became their punishments. Kitty Marion, a comedian by profession, was force-fed lumpy soup through a tube 232 times during her three months sentence in Holloway Prison in 1914. It made little difference to her nutrition: she vomited for hours after each ‘meal’ and lost 36 lb. “I found blessed relief to my feelings in screaming, exercising my lungs and throat after the frightful sensation of being held in a vice, choking and suffocating,” she wrote later.

This poster of a suffragette being force-fed in prison haunted me as a child.
I could not understand how women and doctors could do this.

The infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (officially the “Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-health) Act, 1913”) allowed suffragettes early release if they had been on hunger strike, but once their health was restored, they were re-arrested, and the starvation and force-feeding began again. Atkinson relates the stories of many who endured horrific prison sentences, when they could easily have led comfortable lives as dutiful wives or daughters. While recovering from a hunger strike at home, Annie Kenney donned black clothes and escaped from the police by climbing down a rope ladder at night. After secretary Hilda Burkitt and bookkeeper Florence Tunks were arrested for a campaign of arson in Suffolk, Burkitt told the judge to put on his black cap “and pass sentence of death or not waste his breath”. You have to admire these gutsy women, and what they did for us, the next generations. 

'How women will answer Mr Asquith'
the new British Prime Minister in 1908.

At the outbreak of the war in August 1914, an amnesty was announced and all suffragette prisoners were released. They threw themselves into the war effort and in February 1918 were rewarded with the Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote to women over the age of 30 years, albeit only if they were married or owned property. It wasn’t everything but it was a start. 

History is about remembering the people who got us where we are, and Rise up Women! certainly does that. At over 600 pages,this is a definitive history of the suffragettes’ determination during the decade-long militant campaign they fought on our behalf. This book would make an apt present for anyone, female or male, on their 18th birthday. Then they will appreciate what was done to win half our population the right to a vote.
Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson is published by Bloomsbury.

Baby, it's cold outside by Julie Summers

Seventy seven years ago today Great Britain was paralysed by the most dramatic cold snap of the twentieth century. Winter 1947 was cold. Very cold indeed and there was a lot of snow for a very long time and people who lived through it will assure you it was the worst on record. But the end of January 1940 saw weather of such severity that even at the time the forecasters predicted it would be considered, in the future, the weather event of the century.

London, 28 January 1940

On 28 January 1940 there was an ice storm which Virginia Woolf described in her diary: ‘Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles and gates have a shiny, green varnish of ice.’ The cause of the weather was a warm Atlantic front meeting continental high pressure over England. The rain fell on ground already frozen and covered with drifting snow and was engulfed by the freezing air. 

Bolton under feet of snow, January 1940

Antony Woodward and Robert Penn published a book in 2007 called The Wrong Kind of Snow. As a keen weather-watcher I cannot recommend this delightful book highly enough. It charts the extremes of British weather day by day over the last 350 years. Of that fearful ice storm they wrote:

On impact, the rain turns instantly to ice: plants turn to glass rods, machines become ice sculptures, trees are split in two, wild ponies in the mountains of Wales are entombed in ice. In Kent, birds die in flight when their wings lock solid. Roads are like skating rinks, railway points cannot be change, thousands of telegraph poles collapse. The country is paralysed.

Birds on the Thames at Oxford, December 2016
I could not bring myself to show frozen birds or ponies!

What a sight it must have been and how miserable to wake up to towels frozen solid in bathrooms, no running water anywhere, ice on the inside of bedroom windows and a complete lack of any transport for essentials such as bread, milk, coal. The ice storm lasted for five days and left a deep impression on those who lived through it.

My friends in the USA or continental Europe raise their eyes to the (weather bringing) heavens when I talk about the weather. 'You British are fixated by it!' they laugh. It is true. When I lived in Germany in the 1980s we had snow on the ground in my village south of Munich from December to April and I was once caught in a full-blown ice storm in Philadelphia which made a strong impression on me but those were both weather events that occur quite regularly and in countries that are used to dealing with them.

Enjoying the British weather at an outdoor concert, Summer 2016

Watching the weather is a national pastime. I have never been able satisfactorily to explain to people living on vast continents why we talk about it incessantly. In The Wrong Kind of Snow I think you might find the answer. It is the lack of extremes and the minute variability which we cherish. Woodward and Penn point out that London gets less rain that many places in the USA, and Paris for that matter. But it gets it in drizzle form. Britain is, on the whole, damp, mild and benign. They point out that overcast skies and persistent drizzle have given Britain the best grass in the world and helped us to become one of the most advanced economies in the world from wool.

The 'perfect lawn', Trinity College Oxford

It has given us perfect turf for cricket, lawn tennis, hockey and bowls and it nurtures the English Garden to be the envy of the world. Dr Johnson once said: 'In our island every man goes to bed unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere.' With modern weather-forecasting we do a little better than that but I still like to think that the unpredictability of our weather brings us something worth talking about. One extreme weather event such as that of 77 years ago is a blip, something stupendous and unimaginable. Well worth remembering but as for tomorrow... I'm expecting light rain all day, winds of 11 miles per hour, north veering north westerly and a temperature of around 9 Celsius. Hm. Might even get out into my garden...

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HISTORY & GEOGRAPHY by Penny Dolan

I’m in that” trudging through a tangled story state” right now, so my mind isn’t up to too much precise history. Here’s today’s alternative:

HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY?

At school, at a certain point, I was (ahem) moved from the form that did History to the class that enjoyed Economic History, and very glad I was too. Later, as far as I can recall, one chose History or Geography, People or Places. You were either studiously academic or supposed to like the open air and walking.  I am very glad how well these subjects now work together.

I am not a great traveller, unless you count books and stories, but when I flew to Canada recently, history and geography seemed inseparable. 

The rail track from Leeds to Manchester went through steep valleys, the trees lush green from the same damp that assisted cloth production, and with names like Halifax and Huddersfield. The railway pushed on through the remains of the industrial revolution: stone bridges, arched viaducts and sudden tunnels; canals, four storey mills and cloth factories. It was a fine journey, if time was not an issue, although one that any “Northern Powerhouse” rail route could destroy. Then, after a purgatory of junk food, booze and shopping, came take-off and flight.

 

Unusually, the day was clear and sunny, so peering down was like gazing at a familiar map of Great Britain. The landscape was a patchwork of green fields, hedges and trees, pleasing now, less pleasing during the Enclosures. The small roads twisted here and there between them, naturally fit around the contours, and curves. Over this gentleness lay the rigid lines of motorways, straight and autocratic as Roman roads.

On the plane went, out over the shipping lanes that carried people and cargo into and out of Liverpool and the other ports along the coast. Now, the calm sea just held the tiny pins of the wind-farm, and the pale silt-laden water still spreading out into Morecombe Bay. The shipyards and trade along this coast have gone.

Next, the plane passed over the great hook of Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria. In the middle ages, the Cistercian abbey at Furness was a centre for mining minerals; by the twentieth, the small natural inlets offered protection for the building of warships and submarines. 

 

The plane passed across the Isle of Man with its circling road and then above Ireland. At one point, there was Derry, clearly divided by the Boyne, just like the aerial view I’d seen on a recent history programme. 

Then all was gone. We were over the Atlantic.

 

Five hours later, land re-appeared: a vast area of trees, lakes - seemingly small - and more trees and more lakes, a seemingly empty terrain as divided and broken as a jig-saw puzzle. Now I’ve checked, I think this was Newfoundland and Quebec. Then, as I looked down, all I could wonder was why and how would people travel over such a difficult, inhospitable landscape, and when, as there seemed to be no roads winding between the patches of water and rock. Suddenly, from the yellowed text book came a long lost term: “Canadian Shield”.  Surely this landscape, scraped by glaciation, was what that term had meant? The land itself was history and home for the First Nations.

Before long, down below the wings, we saw the long channel of the St Lawrence River. We were flying inland past Quebec city, south west, down towards Toronto, Lake Ontario and the flat lands beyond.

The curving British roads had gone. Now I stared at a grid of square plots and straight roads and flat roof buildings. These were the blind-eyed signs of colonial settlement where the simplest way was to draw boxes on a map and sell the land off in tidy lots. When the geography of a place is so vast, why take landscape into account? Other than the divisions come back to haunt us, as in the troubled lines drawn on Africa.

Once we had landed, I started longing for a map, a real map because I did not know where I was at all. There was only the hire-car GPS - and at one point even that stopped working – and the half-familiar names like Lincoln or Grimsby or Cambridge only confused me further.  How can one understand the land and its story when you are guided by satellite alone?

I apologise if all this sounds like bleating, but I hated being map-less. I hated the sense of not being able to find out where I was, of being unable to read the layers of history in the landscape, the architecture or in the curve of a road. 

Even though we went to a Mennonite Market, drove past Sir Allan MacNab’s Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, peered through the Victorian peepholes out into the torrent of Niagara Falls and more, I felt as if there were layers of history missing, stories I could not see.

I admit I was surprised by that sense of loss. Was it just the lack of a map? Or because I had no history in my head when I could see a map? 

Here, at home, I live in the triangle between York - of the castle, the walls and the Vikings - and Leeds - with its Victorian arcades and waterways - and the ancient sheep pastures of the Dales where low sunlight reveals the strip and furrow farming of older settlements.

There, in Canada, I admit I did feel the absence of those histories.

Penny Dolan

www.pennydolan.com