Developing Histories by Imogen Robertson

Southwark Park

Over the long dry summer, shadows of Southwark’s past began to emerge in our local park. As lines and curves of yellow grass sketched out former ponds and buildings, it was as if we held a palimpsest up to the light and saw the ghosts of the previous parks under the one we knew. The long summer in fact provided a feast for archeologists as Long Barrows, Tudor Mansions and Bronze Age settlements revealed themselves on the parched landscape. And of course, aerial archeologists don’t need a plane anymore, drones have provided a quicker, cheaper way to get up in the air for a fresh perspective.

This sudden wealth of new evidence about Britain’s deep past is one instance of a larger truth. The study of history, just like the study of science, is a continual process of discovery and reassessment. This year it was the hot weather which provided us with a wealth of new information, but technological advances are constantly adding to what we can know about our ancestors, where they came from, what they ate and how they lived. It’s how we know that the pigs slaughtered at Stonehenge were raised in Scotland, and the Amesbury Archer probably grew up near the Alps. 

Food and Feasting at Stonehenge
© English Heritage (photo by Andre Pattenden)

And Lord knows there’s still plenty to find out. Whenever I start following a rabbity idea into the warren of secondary and primary sources, Old Bailey Archives, British History Online, Parish registers and ordinances, I’m amazed at how little we really know about periods, people, places, that seem to have been thoroughly studied already. Hallie Rubenhold’s upcoming book, The Five, is a case in point. I knew Hallie would bring a fresh eye and perspective to the study of the lives of the women who were murdered by Jack the Ripper, but I assumed that everything which could be known about them would have been studied in some detail already. I was wrong. Hallie’s found an astonishing amount of unexamined material which will, I’m sure, inform fiction and non-fiction writing on Victorian London for years to come. 

Hallie’s work also demonstrates the importance of the changing perspectives from which we view history. Reading histories from the 1950s, I’m struck not so much by the misogyny of some of the authors, though there is plenty of that, but the fact it never even occurs to many of those writers that women might have had significance, let alone intellects and abilities equal to those of the men on whom they built their ‘authoritative' accounts. We are, quite rightly, now asking about how the assumptions of previous generations have filtered out women, working people and people of colour from the cannon. We also find in our Alice in Wonderland journeys, that stories, repeated in books and articles as unquestionable facts can often rest on very questionable sources or interpretation.

Current events shift our perspectives too, when I was studying German history in the early nineties, it was quite common to find historians searching for particular reasons in the societal makeup of Germany to explain the rise of Nazism, the unspoken assumption being it could never have risen / could rise anywhere else. The rise of populism now, makes us reassess that idea, and our look harder at own histories. 

Writing about history in fact or fiction is a constant reminder to be yes, questioning and skeptical, but also empathetic, open-minded and imaginative. To study history and create stories within it is to be curious about past and present, to be challenged and be challenging, to open up, for better or worse, to the wealth of human stories, to judge and to be judged.

This is my last regular post for the history girls, and I give up my slot with much regret. I’ve learned a great deal from the other bloggers here, and very much enjoyed being part of these discussions. I hope I’ll be able to pop in for the Cabinet of Curiosities or other events in the future, and in the meantime I shall continue to applaud all of those writers and researchers who realise an enquiring understanding of the past deepens and enriches our understanding of the present, and of each other. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Rough Music & Twitter by Imogen Robertson

Hudibras and the Skimmington (1721-26) - William Hogarth

How different are we to our ancestors? I’ve had that debate with fellow authors and audiences a number of times since I started writing historical fiction and I think the answer is a great deal and very little. 

The way in which a woman like me, born in England to English parents in 1973, understands the world is going to be very different to the way in which a woman born in 1473 understood the world which surrounded her. Most obviously, aside from the discoveries and innovations of the last 500 years, I had access to the same education as my brothers, I had the legal rights necessary to set up an independent household and make my own decisions about children and marriage. I also, like many of my generation was brought up on the atheist end of agnostic. Of course the world looks very different to me. 

But I think our emotional lives are not very different to those of our ancestors. We still love, struggle, fear and celebrate, experience pain and pleasure. Even if the changing culture might alter how we express and share those emotions, personally I believe human nature in all its diversity and complexity which underlies those expressions hasn't altered much since we started pressing our hands onto the cave’s wall and leaving our mark there. 

Cave of Pettakere, Bantimurung district (kecamatan), South Sulawesi, Indonesia.
Hand stencils estimated between 35,000–40,000 BP and Shoreditch Graffiti 2018

I was forcefully reminded on these debates reading Edward Palmer Thompson’s article on Rough Music (Folklore, Vol. 103, No. 1, 1992) the other day. Rough Music, (also know as charivari or skimmington inter alia) is the name given to the tradition, common throughout Western Europe from the Early Modern period onwards of publicly mocking a violator of societal norms. It often involved a parade, street theatre, rhymes, sometimes the burning of an effigy, and was always accompanied by a crowd, normally mixed, making an unholy row by hoots and hollers and the banging of pots and kettles. In early modern times, it seems it was mostly used to humiliate couples where the man was known as ‘hen-pecked’, though in the nineteenth century it was often used to humiliate men known to beat their wives or children. Adulterers, those of loose morals, or widows and widowers thought to have remarried too quickly were often also victims, as were those suspected it seems (peering though the bowdlerised and purposefully vague accounts) of being gay. Unfair trade practices could also be a justification. 

Deatil of
Hudibras and the Skimmington (1721-26) - William Hogarth

The noise and pantomime could go on night after night and though some victims were taken from their houses and dunked in ditches or ponds, the aim was humiliation more than violence. People seemed to regard it as their right to punish a wrong-doer in this way. It was seen as a valid expression of community feeling, a punishment, a warning, a way of policing and reenforcing standards and expectations. At times it seems to have become a way of bullying the price of a drink out of the newly married. It was common for centuries and in Folklore (Vol 91, No 1 1988), you can even find an example from 1940. The writer’s lodger had a habit of undressing without closing the curtains and the locals showed their disapproval by standing outside the house, shouting and screaming and banging saucepans and kettles. 

Thanks to changes in the law and shifts in societal norms, a woman born in Darlington in 1973 has no reason to fear, or need the help of, rough music. The law is on my side, by and large. But now we find ourselves in an age where there is another sphere where the law seems unwilling or unable to reach, not the domestic space but a virtual one. 

Jon Ronson wrote a superb book in 2015 So You’ve been Publicly Shamed, expressing his uneasiness with the twitter mobs who seem to get such pleasure from finding someone to condemn and making a lot of noise about it. It’s well worth a read, and also interesting to look at in our post Brexit post Trump world. Ronson seems most concerned by a sort of left-leaning mob eager to condemn racism, or the sins of people like Jonah Lehrer. In other words, they were condemning crimes I would also also condemn. He though was discomforted by the self-congratulatory glee of some of these pile ons, and I find them discomforting too. Now a reenergised right wing search out remoaners, libs, feminists and snowflakes and though the targets are different, the glee looks familiar. 

Then of course there are the hate filled threats of violence so many, especially women, experience on twitter. I can’t help noting all those cases of women being punished for not accepting their husband’s authority in the history, and also note that even if rough music rarely involved direct physical violence, it threatened it with its effigies and rituals of shunning. Think of the photoshopped images passed out online and you'll see the equivalence. Many of the twitter users who are most foul in their abuse hide their identities, many don’t see the need. Some of those participating in rough music went masked, most did not. It was a an exercise in community bonding as well as a way to punish. The participants joined in to show they were moral, right-thinking people and, I’m sure, gained confidence and a sense of identity from looking right and left and seeing their friends around them, just as, I’m sure, many on twitter piling onto some celebrity or private individual for saying the wrong thing, do the same. 

E. P. Thomson wrote his article in 1992, those far off days when something like twitter was unimaginable. I had to keep reminding myself of that as I read these last lines of his article as they seem to resonate so strongly in 2018. This is a man who thinks he is writing about something which no longer happens, but it seems to me new technology has given us the opportunity to fall back on old ways. 

“… rough music could also be an excuse for a drunken orgy or for blackmail. It could legitimise the aggression of youths, and (if one may whisper it) youths are not always, in every historical context, protagonists of rationality or of change. I make the point strongly, arguing in a sense with part of myself, for I find much that attracts me in rough music. It is a property of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureaucratised, but is enacted by and within the community. Where it is enacted upon an evident malefactor-some officious public figure or a brutal wife-beater one is tempted to lament the passing of the rites. But the victims were not all of this order. They might equally be some lonely sexual non-conformist, some Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley living together out of holy wedlock. And the psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear upon them was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their ancient associations with heretic-burning and the maiming of images - the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of masking and of animal-guising--  the flaunting of obscenities-the driving out of evil spirits with noise.

Rough music belongs to a mode of life in which some part of the law belongs still to the community and is theirs to enforce. To this one may assent. It indicates modes of social self-control and the disciplining of certain kinds of violence and antisocial offence 

(insults to women, child abuse, wife-beating) which in today's cities may be breaking down. But, when we consider the societies which have been under our examination, one must add a rider. Because law belongs to people, and is not alienated, or delegated, it is not thereby made necessarily more 'nice' and tolerant, more cosy and folksy. It is only as nice and as tolerant as the prejudices and norms of the folk allow. Some forms of rough music disappeared from history in shadowy complicity with bigotry, jingoism and worse. In Sussex rough music was visited upon 'pro-Boers' including William Morris's close friend, Georgie Burne-Jones. In Bavaria the last manifestations of haberfeldtreiben were linked to mafia-like blackmail, anti-semitism and, in the final stage, to ascendant Nazism. For some of its victims, the coming of a distanced (if alienated) Law and a bureaucratised police must have been felt as a liberation from the tyranny of one’s ‘own’.

Next time you see a twitter storm whipping through your timeline, listen out for the sound of clattering pots and pans. Yes, we are very different. Yes, we are still the same.

www.imogenrobertson.com

@RobertsonImogen

The Gentle Author's East End Vernacular by Imogen Robertson

I'm sure that most if not all of the History Girls and our readers know of the brilliant blog http://spitalfieldslife.com/  If you're not a regular visitor, then do go and spend some time there and you'll discover lovingly written and richly illustrated stories of life in London, particularly the East End. There's a grim but fascinating post on The Hackney Whipping Post, once thought a suitable subject for postcards, now rotting away in a backlot, as just one example from May.

While you're there, I'd also recommend you buy this book, edited by the writer of the blog, The Gentle Author:

Buy Now

I got my copy from the marvellously eccentric bag and packaging emporium Gardeners on Commercial Street, but you can buy copies direct from the blog. Anyone with an interest in art or the East End should get one immediately. And another for a friend.

It's a very handsome, beautifully produced volume which chronicles the artists who have caught the East End on canvas over the last hundred years or so and is a rich sampling of a huge range of work. The Gentle Author takes pains to gather the testimony of the artists themselves which makes for a fascinating, intimate read and an inspiring glimpse into their lives. The images are reproduced with enormous care and if they share anything other than geography it's a sort of intimacy and particularity which makes them, I think, universal in their appeal.



Taken as a whole the book offers a fascinating way to look at the range of styles of art created in paint and pencil in the 20th century as well as a portrait of a shifting urban landscape. I found something particularly fascinating about some of the later images such as those of James MacKinnon and Marc Gooderham who incorporate the street art of the area into their work in the same way earlier artist such as James Boswell used signage and advertising. 

James Mackinnon - Broadway Market (featuring the street art of Eine)
via Spitalfields Life

The book celebrates the work of a healthy number of women artists too, such as Rose Henriques, Grace Oscroft and Pearl Binder and reflects on the particular challenges they faced in their work with clear-eyed empathy.

Grace Oscroft - Bryant and May, Bow. via Spitalfields Life

But please, don't just read the extracts linked to above - get the book. It's delicious and inspiring brainfood and that's always worth paying for.

www.imogenrobertson.com

The Market for Historical Fiction by Imogen Robertson

So this is a question for all the writers, agents and publishers out there. What is the state of the market for Historical Fiction at the moment? 

A Scholar seated at a Table with Books - Rembrandt 1634

I do some reading for The Literary Consultancy when my own deadlines allow, and it’s a question I’m often asked. If I think the manuscript I’ve read is of publishable quality, I’ll say so, but that’s different to saying it will be published. And as to money? Might be two thousand, might be twenty, might be fifty, or one hundred thousand. Or one point five million.

Yes, that just happened. And that’s for a book about a book too (the writing and publishing of Dr Zhivago, We Were Never Here by Lara Prescott). I‘ve chatted to two publishers in the last year who said that writers writing about writing is a terrible idea. I have nodded sagely when they said it too. See, nobody know anything. That phrase by the way is the mantra repeated through William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’, which is brilliant and painful in equal measure.

I can say with certainty that there is plenty of excellent, crime, adventure, and literary historical fiction being published. Big names such as Wilbur Smith (full disclosure - I’ve been co-writing with Mr Smith), Alison Weir and Robert Harris, literary luminaries like Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst, master warmongers like Harry Sidebottom and Ben Kane, crime lords - S.D. Sykes, Rory Clements, stonking debuts - Stuart Turton, Imogen Hermes Gower and the consistently excellent Antonia Senior, Katherine Clements, Abir Mukherjee. And many, many more. So the talent is there and the publishers are making sure new books arrive on the shelves every week. An army of book bloggers support and promote the love of fiction and audio book sales are shooting up. So that’s all good.  

The Hangover - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I’ve also spent time with various writers sobbing into our pints about advances cut to the bone, shrinking foreign markets and the drop off in the sales of hardbacks. We’re not so much a literary elite, I’m afraid, as Del Boys on the 21st century Grub Street, trying to find alternative ways of making a living, publishing our work and fiercely staking out time to write the stories we want to write, all in the hopes that the next project we spend our blood and treasure on will be the one that breaks through and earns big, big enough to give us a chance to sit back and do more writing rather than ducking and diving. ‘This time next year, Rodney…’ 

We would all like to be able to spot trends and know in advance if a particular book is going to be a massive bestseller. (Ideally, before we write it). But in the end sales are in the lap of the Gods. And yes, I know, marketing spend and being named a lead title can be a huge boost, but we all know a superb book can fail to find readers even when a publisher blows the budget on it. We also know another book, universally rejected, can suddenly find a champion and snowball into a huge success. An author whose last book broke sales records sees the next one limp out into the daylight and then retreat, unremarked. It’s the cover, the subject, Brexit, the TV deal, the lack of a TV deal. We can always find reasons for the success or failure of any book after the fact. And we know (now) the moment everyone is in the pub saying that historical fiction is an impossible sell right now, and for God sake, don’t write about writers, is the moment someone lands a 1.5 million deal for doing just that. Nobody knows anything.

BUT

Rules are made to be broken, even the ‘nobody knows anything’ rule. I do believe no writer or publisher ever found fresh markets without being bold about what they write and publish. That doesn’t mean you have to live on soup in a bothy until your masterwork is complete, or hire the Natural History Museum for a launch party and buy advertising space on the side of a bus. It means we need to keep finding stories, places and times which ignite our passions and encourage new writers to do the same. 

So this is what I'm saying to myself and anyone else who wants to listen at the moment: Be bloody minded. Don’t try and chase a market, write the story you can’t let go off even if it goes against the current shibboleths, and find a way to pay the mortgage round the edges if you have to. Be wise about your money on the occasions it does turn up. 

Like, I spend my PLR income on negronis, but I think that is wise. 

Triumph of Bacchus Diego Velazquez 1628

So I think the market for historical fiction is… there. That’s probably all we can ever say to anyone, and it might have to be good enough. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

The Good Book - Federico Zandomeneghi 1897

Your (Tudor) Dinner Awaits by Imogen Robertson

The kitchens at Hampton Court have re-opened and I had meatballs with ginger and cinnamon to celebrate. I wrote a while ago about my involvement scripting the sound landscape for Hampton Court Place Base court and how much fun I had doing it. Once that was complete we moved on to the kitchens and this time we got to use pictures as well as sound. I was hired by Matthew Rosier of Chomko Rosier again, and once Matt had done all the hard stuff like working out the initial concepts for each area we were working on, the budgets and where all the wires went, I got to join forces with him, James Bulley and Kyle Waters for the fun stuff. Researching, scripting and, as we filmed and recorded, a little light directing.

We were providing elements for five areas. The Carpenter’s Court was where food stuffs arrived throughout the day. The Board of the Greencloth was the administrative centre of the operation. A group of senior household officials gathered there each morning to make sure the needs of the Court were being met and accounted for, supported by clerks doing the counting and book keeping. They worked out what they would pay suppliers, what dishes would be served to whom and kept a close eye on all of the money flowing out of the palace, and all the food stuffs coming in. 

Installing Board of the Greencloth

In the Boiling House vast numbers of joints were seethed for the table in a giant copper. 

In the kitchens themselves, visitors can touch the chopping boards to see the cooks preparing the meat in front of them. The special speakers used for this bit mean you can feel the knife coming down to mince the meat and the vibration of the pestle and mortar as the spices are ground. 

On the other side of the wall, invisible fires crackle and the pots seethe, spit and bubble as the cooks go to and fro.

Intensive pot listening with Matt and James

My job was primarily getting into the detailed research with the guidance of the brilliant Hampton Court team, and coming up with the words. The research was much trickier than it was for Base Court - general gossip about historical figures of whom we know a fair amount is one thing, making sure you’re getting it right quoting the price of fish in 1538 is another. What does a 16th century cook say to himself as he’s making a pie mix, stirring his pottage or shredding herbs from the garden? It’s quite like novel writing in fact. You have to find those small very specific details to make a place and a time come alive, and then find a way to make them feel natural.

Filming Board of the Greencloth

I do miss the collaborative elements of this sort of work. Novel writing is a megalomaniac’s paradise in many ways. It’s your world, and you get to run it as you see fit. Film and sound production is a team sport - especially when you are dealing with the complex demands of a three dimensional sound scape and visual field. The technical side of the projection mapping, speakers, media players, loops and channels flew over my head like a cool breeze, but I think the results are pretty impressive. There’s also a particular pleasure in hearing what you’ve written come alive in the voices of talented actors. We were very lucky in our Greencloth performers who handled very complicated scripts with aplomb. As we filmed I read in the lines of the clerks coming to hand over their accounts wearing an odd hat to get the shadows right and the fact I didn't put them off completely is a testament to their professionalism. 

Kitchen Selfie. It was ironically cold.

When we were clearing up after filming the preparation of the meat, one of my take home perks was the meatballs, so if you go to the kitchens and see that dish being made, rest assured it was delicious. 

www.imogenrobertson.com
Historic Royal Palaces

Time and Tide Museum, Great Yarmouth by Imogen Robertson

The weather today in London is so blissful, it seems odd to remember the Easter Bank Holiday was chilled and windswept. It was. So obviously Ned and I thought it was the ideal day to take our nephew to Great Yarmouth. Obviously we hit the pier (see above) and the arcades and I won a spectacular keyring on the tuppence cascades - only cost me a tenner - but it wasn't exactly hanging out on the beach weather. In a way I'm glad it wasn't, because the rain drove us into the Time and Tide Museum and what a particularly brilliant museum it is. 

There's a nice 30 second video to give you a flavour here:
https://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/time-tide/whats-here/the-galleries

The kids in the video are obviously having fun, but there is a great deal for middle-aged history enthusiasts like myself too.

The museum gives a full sense of the town and the deep history of the area, entertains while it informs and is packed with those small, evocative treasures you only find in local museums. I mean those artefacts which seem to give a concrete sense of a person, a place and a time. The museum used to be a smoke house, and they’ve hung little cardboard herring up among the blackened beams in one section. The wood still gives off the smell of smoke. You can also wander down a narrow Victorian street, see the old posters and knick-knacks of the peak tourist trade times of the fifties, and see what the local Romans had for their dinner. Unsurprisingly, there is also a lot about herring.

My favourite display though was one they have put together to celebrate the earliest known museum in Great Yarmouth, the Museum Boulterianum, the collection of Daniel Boulter (1740-1802), a collection, as the signage says designed to educate and intrigue. 

The collection which made up the museum were sold off, but I think Time and Tide have done a brilliant job of reimagining what might have been in it. They do have one of the original tickets to the museum though, look at these wonderful Georgians being intrigued and educated: 

My squiffy shot of the ticket on display...

The Museum Boulterianum opened in 1778, and you can read some more details about the original collection on the Norfolk Museums Facebook page. That page does say, at time of writing, that Daniel Defoe gave the museum a puff in his Tour of Norfolk of 1795, which does seem a bit dubious given Defoe died in 1731. I think they are referring to The Norfolk Tour 

or, Traveller's Pocket Companion. Being a Concise Description of all the Principal Towns, Noblemens' and Gentlemens' seats, and other Remarkable Places in the County of Norfolk  by the somewhat less renowned Richard Beatniffe. Thank you for that, archive.org. It is an excellent write up though:

The book also contains an excellent description of the herring being landed. 

Visiting reminded me of a similar museum which turns up in one of my books, Island of Bones, which was opened by Peter Crosthwaite in Keswick around the same time. The Keswick Museum still holds some of his original collection. Does anyone know if someone has done a general history of this sort of museum? The Cabinets of Curiosity put together by middle-class business men for public display rather than private study? Where they got their artefacts, their reception, influence and what happened to them? I am quite sure they have a great deal to teach us. Any one got any leads for me?

www.imogenrobertson.com

Lectures, Courses and Ken Burns by Imogen Robertson

Fake news, data scamming, trolls…. there are times when it seems the internet or those who control it are trying to nudge us off a cliff. We are distracted and confused, clicking away at our screens to chase away the monsters real, imagined or dressed up as personality quizzes. 

Obviously you fine people have chosen to read something sensible, so that’s ok, enjoy your time on The History Girls, but once you’re through reading our years of musings, where should you go next?

I’m a great fan of podcasts, and have recommended a few of my favourites here in the past, recently though I’ve come across a trove of content which is making me particularly happy. Waiting for you out there in the ether is an astonishing collection of lectures recorded as they were given to hordes of eager undergraduates at Yale, Oxford, Cambridge and dozens of other institutes of higher education. The sound quality is often a bit poor, sometimes the links to the handouts are broken, you might only have an audio version when someone is obviously pointing at a slide, but I'm not complaining. For the first time in history you can listen in to the great educators of your time without having to leave your room. For example, Dale B. Martin’s Introduction to New Testament History and Literature is available via Open Yale Courses and has made me very irritating at dinner parties, it also offers  interesting ways to think about the context and use of scripture in the first century and now. I listened to his lectures while playing Candy Crush on my phone for the whole 21st century undergraduate experience. 

Some tempting things from Coursera

Yale offers lecture series on economics, chemistry, geology, astronomy and more as well as history, so go enjoy and become wise while the world around us grows ever less so. Also, go look sooner rather than later. Many of the Yale courses are being moved over to Coursera. For many that will probably be a good thing. Coursera is slick and the content is broken down into shorter sections, supported with quizzes and peer-marked assessments. You can even pay for a certificate if you choose to do so. I tend to scramble away from sites which invite me to ‘introduce yourself to your fellow learners’ though, so I’ll be listening to the echoing halls and coughing undergrads for as long as I have that option.  

I have seen those adverts in LRB and Literary Review for The Great Courses for years, and am the sort of person who goes - yes, yes I think I would like to own a series of thirty lectures on how to play chess - luckily I’ve always just been a bit too poor to actually buy them. Now via Amazon video, I’ve signed up for their ‘signature collection’, which will probably cost me just as much in the long run but they take the money in small, relatively pain free bites so I hardly notice it. The ones I’ve watched so far all look like they were shot in 1985. Lecturers deliver a paragraph to camera one, then inhale, turn and deliver the next to camera two, then back to camera one again. Sometimes there are pictures, which is nice, even if the borders look my grandmother’s Red Room wallpaper. However that doesn’t matter too much if you are playing Candy Crush, so I just listen to the talking. History of Food has some valuable insights, Reading Biblical Literature is a personal take, but a honestly presented one and a sensitive literary reading, and I’m looking forward to the Cathedrals one. 

Or if you are a Netflix person and haven’t watched all of the Ken Burns work available, then do so, now. We’ll be here when you get back in a week or two. His histories of Jazz, The American Civil War, Prohibition, The Roosevelts and The West are beautifully produced - I put down my phone quite often - and offer a fascinating, intimate, illuminating and often harrowing history of the United States. I feel absorbing hours of his work has helped me understand where we are now with more empathy, and more subtlety than I would ever otherwise have done. Which is, after all, the larger point of history, don’t you think?

www.imogenrobertson.com

Scripting Hampton Court by Imogen Robertson

I wrote this:

OK - I know that statement needs a bit of unpacking. You see, what this photograph of Base Court at Hampton Court doesn’t show is a series of speakers cunningly hidden under the cobbles alongside the central path and in the wine fountain (out of the picture). It also doesn’t show what they are playing: a rich soundscape of passing carts and horses, the yapping of a lap-dog and the conversations of courtiers, ladies and servants going about their business one morning in 1536.

Eustace Chapuys is extracting gossip from Elizabeth Somerset by the fountain, and later locking horns with the Duke of Norfolk over the refusal of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth to recognise Anne Boleyn as Queen. Thomas Cromwell is interrogating the kitchen boys about the fancies to be served later that day, and the Lord Chamberlain is assigning rooms and chivvying the servants to get on with the unloading of their master’s goods. 

When the team at Hampton Court decided they wanted to recreate in sound the bustle and business of Base Court they turned to design agency Chomko & Rosier, who have already come up with some technologically advanced and sympathetically imagined ways of engaging the public with the context of a particular place, including work for Historic Royal Palaces. They've won awards. So Matt Rosier found a brilliant sound artist called James Bulley, and me.

Readers of this blog will know that I am not a sixteenth century specialist, at all, but before I was a full-time writer I was a TV, film and radio director working on such classics as The Shiny Show and The Numberjacks. Hang on ‘Numberjacks Seaside Adventure’ which I directed between getting the deal for Instruments of Darkness and publication has had 15 MILLION views. Please stand by while I hyperventilate for a bit. 

Just imagine if one in ten of those viewers grew up and bought one of my novels. I’d be J.K. Rowling.

....and I’m back in the room. 

Anyway, I’m still on a number of mailing lists from my TV days, so I saw Matt’s search for potential writers and sold him on my experience working in production to get myself the gig writing for the Base Court project. 

It’s been fascinating. This is a continuous loop of action where visitors might pause for a few seconds, just absorb the atmosphere as they wander by in search of an audio guide, or spend time seeking out bits of gossip and conversation. That means that any conventional ideas of storytelling are out of the window. On the other hand, it all needs to make sense as a coherent whole as invisible characters (Norfolk, Cromwell, the lap-dog) move around the space over the twenty minutes or so the piece runs. 

One of the speaker trenches. Glad I'm not involved in that bit.
Or the specifications for the speakers which I hear were very complicated.

In the end I thought of it like the staging of a ball scene in an opera on a grand stage. Lots of characters and individual members of the chorus have their own sequence of actions around the space, all happening at once, and the viewer decides which bits to focus on, or they let the whole thing wash over them.  In this case what they get to focus on will depend on where they are.

Because the scene is set at a particularly gossipy time (everyone is waiting to see if Anne will produce a son and wondering about Henry’s wandering eye), coming up with the conversations was relatively straight forward. I plunged into the notes from Hampton Court and, of course into the works of some great historians, such as the lovely Alison Weir. I also freely admit that my ideas of the personalities are deeply influenced by Hilary Mantel. Interestingly, I would find that a problem were I writing a novel about the Court, but not on this project. This project is nothing to do with what I think of the period, so it’s wonderfully ego-less compared with the business of writing novels. Also I know Mantel really, really does her research. 

I had, of course, the usual fears about accuracy, but not too badly, because everything I wrote was checked by Tracey Borman. (God, I wish I could get Amanda Vickery to go through my Crowther and Westerman novels. Or maybe not.).

The real joy of the process comes after the writing though. Working with actors again is such a pleasure, they bring so much to the text and convey with an inflection, a breath what would take you forever to get across on the page.

Then there's the edit. The sound I’ve been involved with in the past is designed to come out as a stereo mix from your TV while you sit and watch the pictures. This is a world you can walk around in, and which will sound completely different depending on where you are in the space and when.

Mixing on the move

James did most of the work of putting the piece together, and creating the underlying atmosphere, then we gathered to listen, discuss, move things about, add space, swap lines, find lute music and decide what a goblet being chucked on the cobbles sounds like. The back and forth is great. With novels, after months working in isolation, the whole process of waiting for comments, responding to them, working out the ramifications of changes through a text of 120K words is slow and painstaking. Here decisions are quick, the effects immediate, and the ownership shared. It’s…enlivening.

As with novel editing though, a lot depends on the relationships you have with the people you are working with and at the moment I’ve lucked into working with people I thoroughly like and admire. Which is nice. 

I'm sure I just said something really useful to James about the mix here.
By the way, this is a corner of Hampton Court, not James's studio which is much more comfortable.

I don’t seem to have put them off with my helpful comments yet either. Since recording Base Court, we’ve also been working on both sound and vision elements for the Tudor Kitchens. 

The research and writing has been more of a challenge this time, as it involves delving deep into the specifics and practicalities of this huge operation rather than the skim of gossip, but the same pleasures pertain - having the experts on hand to consult throughout including Richard Fitch and his team, the collaboration with Matt, James and now Kyle Waters on images, and the practical, hands on elements of filming. 

Oi!! You scum.#BoilingHouse pic.twitter.com/RPWJLPCGsE

— Richard Fitch (@tudorcook) February 15, 2018

I still love the megalomaniac’s paradise of world-building in novels, but it is a great and particular pleasure to get out into the world and be part of a team.

Oh and as I have a longstanding and almost Trumpain tendency to try and rope family members into things wherever possible, I just thought I’d point out that the cute little voice of ‘0’ and ‘1’ in that Numberjacks video is now one of the teenaged servant boys being quizzed by Cromwell in Hampton Court. Thank you, Dylan.   

If you want to see what we’ve been up to, the Base Court soundscape is now live, and the Tudor Kitchens should be ready for inspection by early May.

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