MISS JEAN BRODIE AND THE MORNINGSIDE RIOT by Eleanor Updale

Some place names always raise a smile. Residents of Nether Wallop and Chipping Sodbury must be wearily accustomed to the suppressed giggles or open guffaws that their address can evoke. I’ve had to get used to it too, since I moved to Morningside in Edinburgh. People pucker up and squeal “Ooo Murrrningseeyed!” in an attempt to mimic the tone of those Edinburgh ladies who think they don’t have an accent. It’s a voice made famous by Dame Maggie Smith in her wonderful performance in the film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

The other day I went to a talk which sent me straight to Muriel Spark’s original book (different from the film in several important ways) and introduced me to an episode of Edinburgh history of which I knew nothing, despite the fact that some of its ugliest scenes took place outside my front door. Did you know about Morningside Riot of 1935?  It's not featured in the film or the book, but in the book especially there are echoes of the religious tensions that led to the trouble.

One of the things that appears in both the book and the film is Miss Brodie’s infatuation with the demagogues of the 1930s: Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. In the book, she maintains her admiration for the fascists well after the War, although she admits 'Hitler was rather naughty’. The leaders she admired were forceful, uncompromising, and charismatic. It turns out that Muriel Spark, a Morningside resident, had a local model to hand. A political rabble rouser in the style of Oswald Mosley, but driven by a different creed: his passionate Protestantism.

picture: http://www.leithhistory.co.uk

This was John Cormack, a councillor for South Leith, who drove round the city in a van with ’No Popery’ painted on its side. After serving in the Black and Tans during the nationalist uprisings in Ireland, in 1933 he set up his own political movement in Scotland: The Protestant Action Association. It was his populist (and popular) anti-catholic campaign, firmly centred on himself, that led to the events of June 25th 1935 - a clash which he had rightly predicted would be ‘a real smash up’.

Four weeks before the riot, supporters of Cormack overflowed the Usher Hall (which holds about 3,000 people). They were gathered to protest about the Catholic Church’s proposal to hold a grand gathering described as a 'Eucharistic Congress' in Edinburgh. When the event went ahead, there was trouble all over the city. In a letter to The Scotsman, the Catholic Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh said this was the culmination of months of trouble:

The office which I have the honour to hold has been the object of gross insult and of the vilest accusations. For some time it has hardly been possible for a priest to appear in the city without being subjected to unspeakable indignities. They have been not only the target for vile abuse and most filthy and obscene language, but they have repeatedly been spat upon and molested in public streets. In the factories and public works Catholic employees, and particularly defenceless girls, have suffered bitter persecution, as contemptible as it is cowardly, and strenuous efforts have been made to induce employers to dismiss Catholics on the ground of their religion alone.

On 25th June 1935, when 10,000 catholics converged on St Andrew’s Priory in Morningside for the climactic ceremony of the Eucharistic Congress, an equal number of Protestants came out to meet them.  The police, many on horseback, spent hours dealing with a throng of people crammed into three-quarters of a mile of road.  Accounts vary as to Cormack's role in the unrest, which included violence and damage.  Tram after tram disgorged Protestants ready to fight. The Scotsman noted that a van with 'No Popery" on its side was seen early on, but then apparently left - implying that Cormack was unwilling to face the consequences of unleashing a rabble.  No one was killed, and so the event's appeal to journalists and historians beyond Edinburgh was limited.  But it was an extraordinary day, nonetheless.

From The Scotsman, the next morning

But why was Edinburgh's anti-Catholic fervour focussed on respectable Morningside? Well, despite its reputation as the natural habitat of repressed and prim Presbyterianism, the area has a strong Catholic heartbeat, even now. Catholic churches are often architectural horrors, but St Peter’s in Morningside - designed by the great architect Sir Robert Lorimer, and completed only a few years before the riots - is a striking Italianate building, inexplicably off the tourist trail.

Not far away, is St Benet’s, the grand domestic base of the Catholic Archbishop.

It’s now rather under a cloud. In 2013, the then Cardinal Archbishop Keith O’Brien was removed from his post and kicked out of the house after sexual misdeeds were revealed just as he was hoping to go off to vote for the new Pope.
Round the corner from there, in 1935, stood St Andrew's Priory, where the Catholics gathered on the day of the riot.

Of course, anyone who has studied history, even in England, will not be surprised that a ferocious form of Protestantism has thrived north of the border. We’ve all been taught about that grim old Edinburgh resident, John Knox - indeed he’s one of the few non-royal names from Scottish history familiar to those of us educated down south.

Add John Calvin's teachings into the mix, and you'd got a pretty uncompromising national mindset on your hands even before Irish immigration added new Catholics to those who had survived the Reformation.

The effect of centuries of Calvinism on the Scottish temperament is a standing national joke. Who can forget Private Frazer in Dad’s Army: 'We’re all doomed!'?.
In the book, though less so in the film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the clash between Catholicism and Calvinism is a resonant theme. Towards the end, one of the Brodie set, Sandy, ponders on Calvin’s view of the almighty:

God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read about John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

In the novel, Sandy eventually becomes a Catholic nun.  In the real world, a year after the riot, Cormack was still fighting. He spent at least one night in prison, for refusing to pay caution money to keep the peace.

His campaign seems to have fizzled out with the advent of the Second World War, and though he remained on the City Council until 1962 (a year after Spark’s novel came out), his death in 1978 appears to have gone unmarked in The Scotsman. His memory is kept alive now by the present Orange Lodge, but otherwise he seems to have disappeared from the memory of the city.

This is from the Scotsman website.  I'm not sure whether the Orange Lodge know 

about the site's addition of an invitation to light a candle in Cormack's memory, 

or what 

they make of it if they do

Although sectarian rivalry remained fierce in Glasgow well after the War and into the present century, to hear that as recently as 1935 there was such extremism in Edinburgh seems surprising - even shocking.

A young boy who had been caught up in the riot spoke to The Scotsman more than 70 years later, after a career as an undertaker:

I was chased along Canaan Lane by a group of gentlemen when I was just seven-years-old because I was dressed in the uniform of St Andrew's Priory, which is where the Catholic Congress was being held when Cormack's lot turned up. It was a terrifying experience at the time. But while that was a horrible experience, I can honestly say it was the only anti-Catholic thing that ever happened to me. It's in the past and I just don't think you'd come across anything like that now in Edinburgh.
I remember my dad telling me about problems he faced, but again that was mostly Cormack's crowd. Many years later I actually met Cormack's son and a nicer person you couldn't meet.
I really don't think sectarianism or bigotry has been an issue in Edinburgh like it is in Glasgow. I'm in the funeral business so you come across all sorts of religious types but I've never experienced any prejudice or discrimination.

Nevertheless, some Catholics still talk of discrimination. As recently as 2006, Cardinal Keith O’Brien said:

It is not poverty, alcohol or football which underpins most cases of religiously aggravated crime in Scotland, but blatant anti-Catholicism.

But today the main feature of the many Protestant churches in the capital is their emptiness. True, the population is over catered for, after the 19th century competitive orgy of church building which accompanied the many schisms in the Presbyterian camp, but the city on a Sunday is nothing like the bleak, buttoned-up place I first encountered more than forty years ago.

A personal note:
This is my last post for The History Girls. I haven’t written an historical novel for a few years now, and I’ve only read a handful in that time, so I no longer have the essential credentials. As Jean Brodie would say, I am past my prime. It’s been great to be part of Mary Hoffman’s bold enterprise, and some wonderful new writers (the Creme de la Creme) are about to join the gang.
Before I go, may I return to the hobbyhorse I rode in my first ever contribution, more than four years ago? That piece was a plea for everyone involved in broadcasting about history to stop using the present tense - or 'Nowspeak' as I call it - when they are talking about the past; or at least to be consistent if they really can’t help themselves. If you listen to or watch history programmes, you will know what a failure my campaign has been. Maybe I should paint my message on the side of a van and drive around like John Cormack.
But there is new hope. The Royal Literary Fund asked me to do a podcast about it, and you can listen to it here:

http://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/wa_episode36/

Come on, History Girls. Let’s send this ugly and unhelpful fashion to the abyss in which it belongs!

Farewell.

www.eleanorupdale.com

THE FALLEN WOMAN by Eleanor Updale

Today, a new exhibition opens at the Foundling Museum in London.

Frederick Walker, The Lost Path, 1863 © The Makins Collection

With a special emphasis on Victorian times, it is an exploration of society's attitude to, and depiction of, women who were caught straying outside the conventional bounds of sexual behaviour: caught so often because their pregnant bellies or fatherless babes told the tale of what they had been up to.

Thanks to a habit of donation started by William Hogarth (one of its original benefactors) the Foundling Hospital became the first public art gallery in the UK, so it is appropriate that this exhibition is illustrated with paintings by some of the most celebrated artists of the period it discusses. They include Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Frederic Watts, and those whose work is shown on this page.  Using art, music, newspaper reports, artefacts and records from the Foundling Hospital archives - and with reference to fictional, as well as real unmarried mothers of the time - the exhibition describes their plight.  They were likely to be rejected by their families, unable to find work or other support, and to face the prospect of the workhouse and an early death for themselves and their children.

Richard Redgrave, R.A., The Outcast, 1851 © Royal Academy of Arts, London, 

photograph by John Hammond

The hypocrisy of blaming everything on the woman was not lost on the painters or on many social commentators of the time. Yet the artists weren't just pointing out double standards in a society where male sexual incontinence was accepted, or even condoned. There was also an element of salaciousness in some of the visual warnings about the distress dishonour could bring. To depict the women was also to invite speculation about what they had done, how, and with whom.

The museum, on the site of the original Foundling Hospital, is an ideal location for such an exhibition.  The curator, Professor Lynda Nead, examines much more than the plight of 'Foundling' mothers, but they, of course, are at the heart of the display.

Henry Nelson O’Neil, A Mother Depositing Her Child at the Foundling

Hospital in Paris (detail), 1855 © The Foundling Museum

The exhibition takes us through the emotionally searing process by which a mother might secure her child's admission to the Hospital.  First there was a trip to the porter's lodge to collect an application form. The porter kept a notebook in which he assessed each woman's appearance. His emphasis was on a quality that hangs over the entire exhibition: respectability. By the mid nineteenth century, almost 100 years into its existence, the Foundling Hospital had abandoned its original 'first come first served' policy, and an experiment with random balloting. The Hospital authorities shifted their attention from the children to the mothers, and the women they were most willing to help were those who, to their minds, carried the least 'guilt' and showed the best potential for rehabilitation.
 It was not only the babies who were to be 'saved'.


Although there can be no doubt that many of the children were the result of consensual intimacy, and others of exploitative relationships or even rape, the story that the then governors of the hospital wanted to hear was of the 'fallen' woman. She had strayed or allowed herself to be seduced, and for her child to be worthy of rescue from the harsh life a single parent could offer, she must show shame and regret.
For that reason, each applicant had to write a petition, recounting the circumstances that had led to the birth, and pleading for her child's acceptance. The exhibition includes a sound installation by the musician Steve Lewinson, drawing on the archives with the aim of bringing the petitioners' voices to life.
Of course, women came to know of the requirements for entry, and their petitions were crafted accordingly. It's important to exercise a certain amount of caution before assuming that they convey a completely accurate picture of lifestyles or circumstances.
 To be successful in finding care for her child, a woman had to show that this was her first 'mistake' (an assertion that might be supported by anatomical evidence from a midwife). She had to construct a narrative that suggested she had been led astray, and possibly that her very innocence had made her vulnerable to manipulation.
All this was put to the test at an interview. It was a process that needed deliberate preparation, and possibly assistance from someone who could help with writing the petition, or supply clothes for the public appearance. There's a grotesque parallel with some of the contortions modern day aspirational parents put themselves though for the sake of their children's education, but I won't go into that here.

Emma Brownlow, The Foundling Restored to its Mother, 1858  ©Coram in the care of the FoundlingMuseum

The interviews probably took place in one of the rooms depicted in a painting on display in the exhibition.
 In the background you can see some of the donated pictures which made the Foundling Hospital such a successful visitor attraction. The room itself was saved when the original Foundling Hospital was demolished between the Wars, and was reconstructed in the 1930s building that is now the Museum.

I have written a little here before about my father's experiences in the Foundling Hospital. He spent his entire childhood there, just after the period examined in this exhibition, having been admitted as a baby in 1913.  After he died - unaware of his origins - in the mid 1970s, the law was changed, and in 1985 I was told something of his back story. The narrative was identical to so many in the exhibition. A young woman was promised marriage, tricked into anticipating the vows, and then abandoned. Her petition told how her fiancé had fled to America, leaving her alone.
I know now, after some research, that the man was in London throughout. It must have been necessary for my grandmother to make up that part of the story to paint herself as the right kind of victim.

It intrigues me that, more than a century on from the period covered by this exhibition, the the person in charge of the Foundling Hospital archives felt it necessary, when giving me the 'facts', to stress that my grandmother was 'respectable'.

This was written in 1985

Why should it have mattered? After all, who could be more deserving of public or philanthropic support than the innocent child of truly dissolute parents?  At first sight, the Victorian obsession with worthiness seems ridiculous, or at least rather quaint. But do we persist today in penalising the children of those we regard as 'undeserving'?  Why is it that we find ourselves able to accept a care system so bad that its 'beneficiaries' often leave 'care' woefully unprepared for adult life, and with few of the supports other children now expect well into their twenties? According to the Who Cares Trust, almost 40% of prisoners aged under 21 were in care as children. A quarter of young women leaving care are pregnant or already mothers, and only 13.2% of children in care obtain five good GCSEs - compared with 57.9% of all children.*
 Are we so relaxed about consigning those children to a bleak future because we think it's all they deserve?  Do we see it as the inevitable consequence of the inadequacies of their parents? Are we in any position to sneer at the Victorian moralists, or to set ourselves up as so very different from them?

We may scoff at the Victorian obsession with 'respectability'.  It may seem to have been an odd criterion for rationing places in an orphanage, and I know that many of the children raised in the Foundling Hospital were not allowed to forget their mothers' sins.  But for all the shortcomings of the institution, the lucky children whose mothers passed the entrance test were given the tools to forge a future and to raise families of their own. I know now that my grandmother went on to marry and to have 'legitimate' children.  I have no idea whether she ever told them of her past.  She can never have known what happened to her son, whose name was changed on the day she gave him away. I'm grateful to live in an era when I am not expected to carry her 'shame' with me, but grateful too that she was spared the fate of so many fallen women and that, thanks to the Foundling Hospital, my family has survived and prospered ever since.
 At least, when she 'fell', somebody caught the baby.


George Cruikshank, A destitute girl throws herself from a bridge,
1848 © Wellcome Library,London

Here are details of the exhibition:

The Fallen Woman -
The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ
25th September 2015 - 3 January 2016
Open: Tuesday - Saturday, 10:00 - 17:00 and Sunday, 11:00 - 17:00. Monday closed.
Admission: £8.25 (including Gift Aid), concession £5.50 (including Gift Aid). Children, Foundling Friends and Art Fund members go free. Half-price admission for National Trust members.
Tube and train: Russell Square, King’s Cross St Pancras and Euston

http://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

* http://www.thewhocarestrust.org.uk/pages/the-statistics.html

www.eleanorupdale.com

DEATH OF THE SUN KING by Eleanor Updale

300 years ago today Louis XIV to took to his bed for the last time. His legs had been hurting for a while and his doctor thought he had sciatica. In fact it was senile gangrene. Louis' extremities were turning black. The disease is caused by the gradual death of peripheral blood vessels, and it is not a pretty sight.
If you want to see pictures of what it looks like you know how to Google for them. Here's a little (rather more tasteful) taster:

Discolouration and decomposition of the right foot
Watercolour by Barbara E. Nicholson, 1947. 
http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0036242EL.html

Not a good look - but it's nothing like as bad as the real thing, which I have had the misfortune to see in someone who was dying.

The doctors have longer and less apocalyptic names for senile gangrene these days - among them, is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome II (not to be confused with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome I, which is something quite different). Its short name is Pott II syndrome, which sounds quite jolly, but suffice it to say that if your legs start to rot, you know the game is up.
Nevertheless, Louis went out in the style for which he will forever be famous. His servants dressed him up, complete with a high wig, and for a week he held court from his bed, repeatedly saying his last farewells and yet failing to die until the first day of September. He was almost 77 and had reigned for 72 years.
I don't know about you, but I was never told anything about the deathbed scene when I was at school, nor have I read about it much in accounts of the Sun King's reign since then. 

Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743), ‘Louis XIV, King of France (1701),
Musee du Louvre, Paris. Image: Wikimedia commons

Louis XIV must be one of the best examples of image protection in European history. It's hard to picture him as an invalid literally decaying in his own bed. And what a miracle it seems that his dynasty managed to cling on to power almost to the end of the eighteenth century, despite the fact that, in 1715, Louis had outlived most of his legitimate descendants, and was passing on the throne to a great-grandchild who was only five years old. We have been so conditioned to see the collapse of the French monarchy as inevitable that it's easy to underestimate the achievement of the regency which followed Louis XIV's death, and of king Louis XV himself, who reigned for almost as long as his great-grandfather. 

The First Homage to Louis XV
Wikimedia images

But even more of a triumph is the way popular culture remembers Louis XIV as the Sun King: an autocrat perhaps, but somehow a 'good' one. The conventional portrayal is of a dashing monarch who employed and championed great artists, architects, gardeners, scientists and writers. No doubt one of the reasons he did those things was to forge the very image of himself which has endured. But as well as treasuring the cultural achievements of France during his reign,we should perhaps admire the brand management of those who came after him and made sure that, despite the Revolution of 1789, we still picture Louis XIV as a man with an elegant silk-clad calf, and not as an ageing despot hiding his festering legs under the sheets.


www.eleanorupdale.com

A PARADISE FOR MARRIED WOMEN by Eleanor Updale

I have a good friend with a gift for finding the perfect book. A few weeks ago she appeared with a slim volume that had been languishing in a charity shop: Life Among the English, by Rose Macaulay.
Yes - THAT Rose Macaulay, the author of The Towers of Trebizond.

Dame Rose Macaulay by Howard Instead

matte bromide print, early 1920s

NPG Ax20446 © National Portrait Gallery, London

This little book, published in 1942, was one of a series published by William Collins of London, aimed at capturing, for a wartime readership, the essence of the Englishness they were fighting to preserve. 

Each book was very short - in this case, just 48 pages - but the list of authors is impressive. Graham Greene was signed up to do British Dramatists, John Betjeman British Towns and Cities, and John Piper British Romantic Artists.

It fell to Rose Macaulay to romp though English social history from 'the first two or three centuries AD' to the middle of the Second World War.  What a daunting task. But Macaulay launched on it with spectacular verve, right from the start. Here's the opening:

Owing to the weather, English social life must always have largely occurred either indoors, or when out of doors, in active motion.

Macaulay's voice is one of the prime attractions of the book. Any modern academic historian would have little difficulty finding 'facts' to quibble with, or quotations infuriatingly unsourced, but who could fail to enjoy forays into mind reading, and tongue-in-cheek passages such as this vignette of post-Roman Britain:

....toga-wearing Celtic chieftains whose wives vainly aped Roman manners, but seldom went so far as to use the fashionable baths in their courtyards and did not really grasp the plumbing system (possibly some Romans, if they at all resembled Romans today, did not grasp it either).

The Dark Ages and the Medieval period are crunched into one (much as they still were when I was at school).  They are summed up as having provided:

A full life for both men and women, and if one adjective had to be selected to describe it, perhaps the aptest would be 'quarrelsome.'

The book really fizzes into life when it gets to the Tudors. Like so many history books, this one tends to describe the manners and lifestyle of the upper classes as if they pertained to everyone, but most of the time, Macaulay catches herself when she falls into this trap. What she is remarkably 'modern' about is her concentration on the lives of women -- and for most periods she portrays them (especially those who were monied and married) as having had a pretty good time, quoting a Dutchmen who saw England as The Paradise of married women...Their bodies satisfied and their heads prettily mizzled with wine.

Lack of space drives Macaulay to almost poetic concision.  Here's how she opens the section on the Stuarts:

We slide, with the seventeenth century, into a gentler, less rampageous age; socially more civilized, intellectually less at the boil, but more adult. 

Amidst the racy detail of fashions in clothes, food, learning and manners, the message throughout this little book that people, and especially social climbers, don't change. And though Rose Macaulay inevitably sticks with the standard narrative of events, she does challenge some clichés.  For example, she rejects the idea of a crudely polarised clash of cultures in the run up to the Civil War.

There were then, as now, a hundred different Englands. Through one recorder's eyes we see frivolous court-goers, scent-soaked, ornament-hung, wearing little mirrors in their hats, crowding round gaming tables and drink bars, furnishing texts for puritan invective; through another's, quiet, well-bred thoughtful country squires...

The Civil War itself gets hardly a mention. The Commonwealth paradoxically presents a disciplinary problem for young people on the make. Macaulay quotes from Dorothy Osborne::
"The want of a court to govern themselves by is in great part the cause of their ruin. Though that was no perfect school of virtue, yet vice yet wore her mask."

It seems that the 'Interval' was not as successfully straight-laced as we have been led to believe.  Macaulay sums it up like this:

People idled, joked, sang and played, talked in coffee houses, courted, travelled, consulted astrologers and quacks, hunted witches, met for secret worship, laughed at 'the canters' and their comical ways, wrote verse, read romances, kept journals, drank the waters at Tunbridge and Bath, went by Smithfield and 'saw a miserable creature burning that had murdered her husband,' then on, unperturbed, to see curiosities in ivory.

It's hard not to wonder whether, writing when Britain's very Britishness was under threat in World War Two, Macaulay wasn't making a contemporary appeal not to let fear cramp fun and individualism.

She goes on to capture the relief and release of the Restoration with equal zest, once again revelling in the intellectual and social power of women.  In her eyes, that power increased still further in the 18th century Augustan age, with the birth of the Bas Bleus (bluestockings) and their salons.
There's a swift transition from this to the nineteenth century (and what follows is only the second half of a very long, but elegant sentence):

Ladies flocked to lectures, pressed flowers, made purses of beads and mats of Berlin wool, read Keepsake, and floated round ball-rooms with lovely shoulders sloping up from gowns that passed from classical to puff-sleeved rococo and thence to stately Victorian flow; while gentlemen, progressing from bucks and dandies into swells, curled their hair and grew side whiskers.

While making fun of those 'swells', Macaulay nevertheless acknowledges that they were probably little different from their dandy, buck, beau and maccaroni ancestors.

But women, she insists, were, as the Victorian age progressed, subject to more change, heralding the rise in education for the sake of pursuing a professional career, rather than the simple acquisition of 'accomplishments'.

Although the series prided itself on being lavishly illustrated (especially for wartime) the pictures are pretty dreadful.  The blurring of this image is not entirely down to my photography, and the colours are the same for everything from medieval documents to eighteenth century cartoons.

Other aspects of the Victorian era are swept aside dismissively. Writing in the early 1940s, Macaulay could only see Victorian architecture and taste as 'monstrous'.  As for the Edwardian society of her own youth, she celebrates its class-squashing social provisions such as Old Age Pensions and Health Insurance, but derides its pleasure-seeking excesses.  Her wit carries through into an account of the domestic effects of the war that was going on around her in 1942:

Bare legs became a feminine summer fashion; men, more sartorially conservative, clung to such socks as they had.

Within the same paragraph, as the book comes to a close, we get a taste of of the dangerous world in which Macaulay was celebrating her homeland:

English social life is, in these curious, troubled years, moving a few steps nearer that democracy for which we say we are fighting and which have never yet had.  Only a few steps; and whether these will be retraced or continued when the solvent furnace of war dies down, and we are left to grope a way through the wreckage and smouldering ashes, we cannot yet know.

If only Macaulay could have carried on to cover the rest of the twentieth century.  But what a joy it is to read such a quick romp through English history, even if it is packed with assumptions and prejudices from which we now recoil. Wouldn't it be fun if there were a similar book from the perspective of the twenty-first century, and one of today's great writers could make it as easy for a new generation to get a feel for the sweep of our strange little island's story?

www.eleanorupdale.com

ETHEL WHO? by Eleanor Updale

Last month, I was inspired by an old magazine to write about aluminium knickers.

I warned you then that the publication might prove to be a treasure trove for History Girls posts.  So here's something else from the June 1945 edition of Everybody's.

The magazine carried a full-page review of the premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at Sadlers Wells.  

The article, though wildly enthusiastic about Britten's achievement, was in part a lament for the state of British music, and the failure of this country to appreciate its native talent.  The reviewer, Ronald Hilborne, put it like this:

With the twentieth century, English composers such as Goring Thomas and CV Stanford wrote opera after opera.  In vain.  Stanford’s “Much Ado About Nothing," music and words in our native idiom, was generously heard by London in 1901 - for two nights.  Then it was thrown out.  The late Dame Ethel Smythe, the finest woman composer the world has yet seen, composed a vigorous opera with a Cornish setting called “The Wreckers” It was eventually give an enthusiastic first night in 1906 - in Germany.

The bold type is the magazine's own.  Hilborne could not have been more enthusiastic about Dame Ethel.  I wondered why (as I thought) I had never heard a note of her music.

It didn't take long to find a performance of the overture to The Wreckers on YouTube.  It's wonderfully stirring stuff.  You can find it here.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maozbZsiK0c 

And there is a recording of the entire opera, although it doesn't seem to have originated in a stage performance.

The opera didn't receive its American Premier until 2007, more than a hundred years after it was written.

The story of The Wreckers is perfect for the new Poldark generation: salt of the earth starving Cornish-folk scavenge on wrecks for survival, and a love affair comes to a watery end.  It's no more far-fetched than European operas that are performed all the time.  Why has it been confined to near-oblivion?

The same question might be asked of Smyth's moving Mass in D, and many of her chamber works (which can also be tracked down on the internet).  

But who was Ethel Smyth?

Ethel Smyth 

by John Singer Sargent, 1901

[National Portrait Gallery]

Well, she was born in 1848, and died in 1944.  After battling against her parents to be allowed to study music, she learned composition in Leipzig.  She knew Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and was romantically involved with various well-known men and women of her era.  But she lived in suburban Surrey, near Woking.  Perhaps that explains the dismissiveness of the British artistic community about her work.
Smyth was not only a prolific composer. She wrote several books, and she was a leading campaigner for women's suffrage.  In 1910, she wrote to Mrs Pankhurst, lamenting her previous ignorance of the cause, and offering to do whatever she could to support it.

As well as taking direct action, Smyth donated her musical talent to the cause.  And it is in this context that I found I had, after all, known one of her works for many years.
Ethel Smyth wrote the famous March of the Women, which you can hear on YouTube, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NuypEkg-4

Here's the first verse:

Shout, shout, up with your song!

Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.

March, march, swing you along,

Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.

Song with its story, dreams with their glory,

Lo! They call and glad is their word.

Forward! Hark how it swells

Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord.

The anthem was first heard at a rally in the Royal Albert Hall in 1911.
Years later, Smyth gave her own account of the event:
In those early days of my association with the W.S.P.U. occurred an event which, in her pride, the writer must recount ere the pace becomes such that a personal reference would be unthinkable, namely the formal introduction to the Suffragettes of ‘The March of the Women’, to which Cicely Hamilton fitted the words after the tune had been written – not an easy undertaking. A suffragette choir had been sternly drilled, and I remember Edith Craig plaintively commenting on the difficulty of hitting a certain E flat. But it was maintained that the interval is a peculiarly English one (which is true) and must be coped with. We had the organ, and I think a cornet to blast forth the tune (a system much to be recommended on such occasions), and it was wonderful processing up the centre aisle of the Albert Hall in Mus. Doc. robes at Mrs Pankhurst’s side, and being presented with a beautiful baton, encircled by a golden collar with the date , 23^rd March 1911.

Suffragette March in Hyde Park

[National Portrait Gallery]

It is said that in 1912, an impromptu performance of The March of the Women was conducted by Smyth from the window of her cell in Holloway Prison, using her toothbrush as a baton.

By 1922, she was no longer considered a risk to society, and she was made a Dame. In her last years, she became deaf, and stopped composing.  By the end of the Second World War, she was dead and, if the article in Everybody's is a guide, already on her way to being forgotten by the musical establishment.  

Maybe some opera house, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Poldark, will put on a full production of The Wreckers, and give her back her place in Britain's musical history.

Dame Ethel Smyth
[National Portrait Gallery]

www.eleanorupdale.com

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE GNOMES? by Eleanor Updale

When I was a History student (in the 1970s and again at the turn of the century) one of the things I liked most was being buried in the library.  In those days, part of the joy of historical research (and one of the main things we were being tested on) was slogging through cardboard indexes and untangling illegible handwriting.  We were looking for something no one else knew about, or which had been routinely overlooked.
In those days, it was perfectly in order to spend several years doing a PhD.  Some people never finished at all.  In the great mahogany stacks there were old men who never spoke to anyone, but shuffled to the same seat every day to slog away at a great work no one would ever see.  The true professionals sat in a strange huddled posture, their arms guarding their books and papers from the prying eyes of rival scholars, like children protecting their chips from hungry siblings.

Not much changed for four hundred years

Those of us who were on time limits of three or four years for delivering a thesis laughed about the Gnomes, as we called them, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who silently envied their secret world. I learned, like them, to feel a frisson of superiority when a new person arrived at an archive, unaware of the particular bureaucratic gymnastics that particular institution had invented for ordering something up.  I remember the thrill of finding letters and notebooks that ad languished, unread, for hundreds of years.
My excitement was only slightly dimmed by the knowledge that I was the only person in the world who cared.
I was even a little sad at the thought that when my thesis was done, anyone with the detective power to trace a copy, and the muscular strength to lift it down from the shelf, would be able to find the location of 'my' documents in the bibliography.

My idea of a fun place

But then, in the early years of this century, the grown-ups taught me to share.

I was lucky enough to be taught by some truly wonderful scholars.  They were all equally brilliant, but in academic esteem, some were more equal than others.  Those whose books were commissioned by commercial publishers and sold in normal bookshops were condemned by the Gnomes as 'popular' historians.  Their success in spreading their knowledge to people outside the magic academic circle was taken as proof of their intellectual inferiority.  It's not surprising that the collective noun is a 'malice' of historians.
The popular historians got their own back in the late 20th and early 21st century, when well researched, beautifully produced history books temporarily became money-spinners, but that was also the time when the Gnomes' contempt for such authors reached its highest point.

When broadband came along, even popular historians were tested in their belief that their work - and, more importantly, their source material, - should be available to the masses.  Many ancient documents are now online in facsimile form.  You can zoom in and out of indistinct lettering until a meaning emerges. You can compare documents housed a world apart, wearing your pyjamas or over a cappuccino. And you can do all this without any entrance exams, just for fun.

Try deciphering this by the light of a 40 watt bulb in a library

I know that is a good thing, and I love using the Internet. But I'm ashamed to say that somewhere deep in my heart, I am sad. I miss our old secret world.  I'd like to think that there's something noble in that sentiment, but if I'm honest it's founded on a pretty despicable form of snobbery.  I liked knowing things that other people didn't know - and stood little chance of finding for themselves.  I adored my old work tools (pencil, notebook, magnifying glass and silence).  I thrived on the simultaneous torture of being kept away from my source material when the library was shut and the blissful encounter with real life that the closure forced on me. 

Many professionals whose status depends on feats of memory are being undermined by our new world of information.  Imagine how medics feel when patients arrive having correctly diagnosed their own illnesses online. It is becoming more difficult for them to appear omnipotent, or to bury their mistakes.

It is still (just) possible to do an historian's work in the old way.  Some of the Gnomes are still there, bending over their books.  Many more must have died of starvation in a world that only rewards published results.  Others may have been driven out by the clicking keyboards of students using the library as a place to access the Internet while saving on heating bills at home.

I have said goodbye to my inner Edward Casaubon.  But sometimes I secretly wish that I'd been born a little earlier, and could have carried on gnoming forever.



www.eleanorupdale.com


pictures :Wikimedia Commons.  Library picture: Benjamin D. Esham / Wikimedia Commons.

HISTORY DOESN’T LOOK THE SAME ANY MORE by Eleanor Updale

When I was young, I watched a lot of black-and-white films. They were on the telly every wet weekend afternoon, and although I must have seen some of them many times over, I never lost the sense that the people in them looked odd. Those women with their cinched waists, full dark lips and tightly waved hair were peculiar. You ever saw anyone looking remotely like them anywhere else. The past really was another country.

Not one of us

Earlier fashions were even more foreign: skirts to the floor, flapper dresses, even men’s hairstyles such as buzz cuts and slicked-down college boy styles were unfamiliar on the eye.

Something has changed. The people around us in our everyday lives now wear such a wide range of clothes that almost nothing surprises. It seems to me that there is almost no distinctive ‘21st century’ style - at least, not yet.  Fabrics may be different and easier to launder, but almost all looks are (often deliberately) reminiscent of something that has gone before. Even school photos now feature blazers, badges and boaters that would have looked antiquated fifty years ago.

Until very recently, it was only the shoulder pads and big hair of the early 80s that looked comic to the modern eye. Now they are beginning to make a comeback, and soon nothing from the 20th century will raise a laugh. If you see television archive material from the 60s, 70s or 80s, the language and attitudes might be a clue to their date. The green tinge of the film (caused by the copying and storage customs of the time) will tell you it is old. But the clothes? it’s only the fact that everyone in shot seems to be wearing a version of the same style (and the presence of cigarettes) that suggests this isn’t the present day.

Of course, our lives have changed in many ways, the new role of technology being the most obvious. As I type this, a robot is vacuuming the floor for me. But innovations are not always for the better. The machine I am working on now makes me unhappy every day - and cost me more than the proceeds of the last piece of work I wrote on it. 

All of writers know that, thanks to the capabilities of our software, we are now not only composers, but editors, typesetters, and accountants. Our days are spent battling with printers instead of sharpening pencils. But, on the plus side, at least we can back things up, and don’t lose whole manuscripts on trains any more.  And, with a few clicks, we can actually see people from the past.

One of the influences my generation’s perception of near history was in the way we viewed old newsreel footage. Until recently, this was shown on ‘modern’ cine equipment, which ran at a slightly different frame-rate from the cameras on which it had been recorded. The result (as anyone over about 45 will remember) was a comic jerkiness. People in the past were not like us. They were less sophisticated. They couldn't even walk properly.  Their regrettable political judgements were somehow the product of their less formed minds.

Lloyd George with the King in a clip from 1922

You can see the whole thing here:

ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYeLTdW2b4c

Lloyd George was one of the first politicians to feature regularly in newsreels.  I always thought he looked a bit of a prat.  Now that we see the films at (almost) the proper speed, it’s easier to appreciate that people like him were, in most of the ways that really matter, just like us.

Last night, while doing the very 21st century task of assembling furniture using wordless instructions, I watched an old edition of Steptoe and Son. I’m old enough to have seen the first episode on transmission, in 1962. In those days, we laughed at the shambles of junkyard that surrounded Harold and Albert. Now the programme looks like an edition of the Antiques Roadshow. If the sad couple auctioned off the contents of their house, they would be made for life. 

What would a teenager of today make of it, I wonder? Almost certainly, they wouldn’t see anything remarkable in a man in his thirties still living with his father. That was a crucial ingredient in painting Harold’s pathetic character way back then.

Maybe I’ll try muting the sound and writing a 21st century script to go with the pictures.  It might be the story of a poverty-stricken academic caring for his dementing father (a retired doctor?) with insufficient help from Social Services.  The words will be different, but the set and the costumes can stay the same.


eleanor@eleanorupdale.com

WHAT A CAREER by Eleanor Updale

One of the joys of the Internet is how quickly we can now answer questions that we would once have parked in the back of our minds - even when all the libraries are closed.  Here’s a chain of discoveries I made over Christmas.  It all started with a board game, and it led me to a very interesting 20th century man who turned out to share a lot with a 17th century natural philosopher about whom I once knew a great deal. 

For those of you who don’t know it, Careers is the best board game in the world

I’m talking here about the original 1950s version, not the feeble ‘updated’ editions of more recent times. We play using a set that has been in my husband’s family for nearly sixty years, and unlike its evil, boring, family-busting cousin, Monopoly, Careers never fails to generate laughter and good will.

The rules are pretty simple.  You go round the board according to throws of the dice, entering various careers along the way, trying to achieve a formulae of money, fame and happiness that you set for yourself before the game starts. 

The genius of the game is that it is impossible to tell who is winning until the victor emerges, and fortunes change rapidly, so you are always in with a chance.

One of the most amusing things about Careers is what it says of its own time.

Look at the Expedition to the Moon, for example, plotted out long before the era of space travel:

So the game is a bit of a history lesson for the younger members of the family.  It’s cheering to realise from the causal sexism throughout that feminism has achieved  something  since 1957: 'Gorgeous secretary. 4 Hearts'. But some things that raised a laugh a few years just back have reverted to their old status and no longer shock: In the University section: "Sweetheart has rich uncle. Draw 2 Opportunities". At the turn of the century we would have chortled at getting only £5000 for writing a successful book. Now it sounds like a pretty good deal.  And paying to get out of hospital used to seem strange.  Now you can imagine it being in someone's election manifesto.  But don't get me started on that...

For all its anachronisms, the game still captures something true about human beings and human society.  I wondered who had invented it, and it turned out to be a very interesting man, with an intriguing career of his own.

James Cooke Brown was born in 1921, and lived till 2000.  He was a sociologist, a civil rights campaigner, and above all an idealist.  He believed in the possibility of constructing a fairer society, and set to work devising methods by which that might be done. Shortly after the died, his publishers released The Job Market of the Future in which he foresaw a role for computers in a globalised world of work.

'I shall be bringing an inventor’s perspective to the solving of economic problems' he wrote. 'Blaming people who some might think had “caused" the problems is no part of the inventive process…all we need to know is how to solve them now - preferably with a solution that can remove their structural causes, and so have some chance of being a permanent solution.'

What James Cooke Browne proposed (to grossly oversimplify his theory to fit this space) was a new system for organising work - rebalancing the power relationships so that the person supplying the labour had control of its use.  The ultimate aim was to ensure security of employment combined with a living wage.

All this was prefigured in his even more fascinating book The Troika Incident, a  Science fiction novel published in 1970.

This book is interesting on two levels.  It looks forward to the world in 2070; but its immediate plot is set in 1975 which, at the time it was written, was still in the future.  So characters reflect on who won the Vietnam War (correctly diagnosed as ‘nobody’) and look back on the abandonment of conventional, and in particular nuclear, warfare in 1993 (oh well…) and to the arrival or a more equal society with enough money and plenty of sex.  The job market of 2070 would be a constantly shifting scene, where the least popular jobs were the highest paid.

It’s one of those novels you read for its quirkiness and background message rather than to find out what’s going to happen next - but it’s worth downloading it to one of the electronic readers whose invention James Cooke Brown predicted in this very book, back in 1970. 

For people who know about such things, James Cooke Brown is most famous for his tireless work to establish and develop a new universal language: Loglan

His motivation was (at least) twofold: the primary aim of facilitating universal unambiguous communication between people and between machines; and to test theories that our thinking is determined and constrained by the linguistic apparatus we use.

Obviously, Loglan has not taken over the world, but its exponents still exist, and there is a site you can visit to see how it works http://www.loglan.org/Download/Loglan1.pdf

By the way, history is hisri, and girl is nirli  -  but it’s much, much, more complicated than that, and I haven’t cracked all the rules that would enable me to say History Girls correctly.

Loglan may not yet have been a resounding success, either as a language in its own right, or as a tool for linguistic study, but it is an amazing achievement nevertheless, and it puts James Cooke Brown in good company.  One predecessor, who seems to have shared JCB's ability to drop the preconceptions of his day to enquire, invent and explain was the seventeenth-century academic and cleric John Wilkins.

Wilkins was one of the founder members of the Royal Society, who not only predicted space travel and a moon landing, but invented his own ‘universal language.’

Wilkins’s attempt was more phonetically based, and looks to the modern eye rather like shorthand, 

but his reason for developing it was very like James Cooke Brown’s.  Alas, much of the work for it was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, but Wilkins soldiered on.  Wilkins also had a profound effect on the way the Royal Society wrote about itself and its achievements, establishing a clarity of expression that survived until the deliberate self-aggrandising obfuscation of specialists in the past century or so.

Across the ages, Wilkins and Cooke are brothers.  And what fun that Cooke’s board game, which has given my family such joy over the years, led me appreciate the link between them, and to find out more about a man who deserves to be better known.

James Cooke Brown photo: Marshall Anderson http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=122109824

www.eleanorupdale.com