The Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder - by Lesley Downer

Dawn over the Ayeyarwaddy (Irrawaddy) at Mandalay

'What will our descendants think of us when they read that the British banished the King of Burma, annexed his country, and proceeded to govern it by officials of their own race? Historians will add that we saw no harm in this, though we always resisted such a fate to the death when it threatened our own land.' - Maurice Collis, The Journey Outward, 1952

King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat
and her sister Princess Supayalay

In 1885 King Thibaw of the Konbaung dynasty was governing Upper Burma from his palace in Mandalay. He was 26 years old and had succeeded to the throne after his father, King Mindon, died suddenly in 1878. Following Mindon’s death, seventy nine of the king’s relatives who were potentially Thibaw’s rivals were murdered in a plot hatched by Thibaw’s implacable mother-in-law to make sure that he took over the throne.

Thibaw was convinced that his father’s apartments in the palace were haunted by Mindon’s ghost. He had them moved out of the palace grounds and rebuilt as a monastery. It’s a gorgeous building made of teak and covered in intricate and delicate carvings depicting the Jatakas, the Buddhist scriptures. You can still see King Thibaw’s meditation couch there. As it transpired the vast palace complex which forms the heart of Mandalay was destroyed in World War II. King Mindon’s apartments were the only part of the palace to survive. 

Thibaw set about reforming the administrative structure of his kingdom, Upper Burma. His government was one of the best educated the country had ever seen, including many scholars who had returned from Europe and were fluent in the Burmese classics as well as English and French. 

King Mindon's palatial apartments,
now the Shwenandaw Kyaung, Mandalay

The British had annexed western Burma in the First Burmese War of 1824 and had ruled Lower Burma for thirty years, since the Second Burmese War of 1853. Jane Austen’s brother, in fact, Rear Admiral Charles Austen, commanded the British Expedition of 1853 and died in Burma of cholera. 

The king was determined to win back his kingdom and started making moves to align more closely with the French, signing a Franco-Burmese commercial treaty which both he and the French swore had no military or political clauses. But the British were not convinced. There was also the Great Shoe Question. Visiting British dignitaries refused to remove their shoes on entering Thibaw’s palace, causing deep offence. 

Old capital at Sagaing, outside Mandalay

In 1885 Thibaw issued a proclamation calling on his countrymen to liberate Lower Burma, thus providing the pretext the British were looking for. Declaring that the king was conspiring with France, they denounced him as a tyrant who reneged on his treaties and sent an invasion force of 11,000 men in a fleet of flat bottomed boats and elephant batteries. Great paddle steamers crowded with troops thrashed up the broad Ayeyarwady - the Irrawaddy, as the British called it.

Mandalay fell almost immediately. The next day the British escorted the king and his wife away on a bullock cart. It was said that Thibaw begged for his life but his proud queen refused to bow her head. They were exiled to Ratnagiri in Maharashtra, in India, where they lived out their days. Thibaw’s kingdom was officially annexed by Britain on January 1st 1886.

Stupa at Bagan

To crush any residual support for the monarchy, the British painted Thibaw as an ogre, despot and drunkard, uniquely weak, not up to the task of government, all of which was taken until recently as gospel.

British rule was hated. Resistance by fighters whom the British derided as dacoits or bandits continued for many years and for the colonialists Burma was a hardship posting.

Four years after Thibaw’s fall, in March 1889, a little-known 23-year-old journalist called Rudyard Kipling passed through Burma. He was there for just 3 days, in Rangoon and Moulmein. In his famous poem, Mandalay, he conjures up the magic of Burma and the siren call of the east:

‘ ... “If you’ve ’eard the East a callin’, you won’t never ’eed naught else.” ...’

When Boris Johnson quoted Mandalay when he visited the Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon in 2017, he was lambasted on the basis that Kipling was a racist and a colonialist. But when the poem was first published in 1890 what annoyed everyone was the line, ‘An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay’, China of course being not across the Bay of Bengal at all but a long way north and east.

Sunset over the stupas of Bagan

Thirty years later, starting in 1922, another young Englishman called Eric Blair spent five years serving in the Indian Imperial Police in Moulmein. I spent much of our own trip along the road to Mandalay reading George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934. It’s a savage indictment of colonialism. But it’s also a paean to the extraordinary spell the east can cast, evoking Burma’s maddening heat, drenching monsoon rains, dark tangled forests and mesmerising culture in glorious prose.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, is an epic tale based on a true story, set in nineteenth century Japan at the time of the Meiji Restoration. It’s out now in paperback. 

For more see www.lesleydowner.com

The picture of King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and her sister Princess Supayalay in late November 1885 is made from a negative found in the Royal Palace, Mandalay, and is by an unknown photographer; in the collection of Willoughby Wallace Hooper, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 

The other pictures are mine.

History and Humility - Joan Lennon

The collapse of the Quebec Bridge in Canada in 1907 and the resultant deaths were caused by irresponsible engineering. But then, twenty years later, something rather wonderful happened ...

The first ceremony of the Calling of the Ring took place in 1925, using a ritual created by Rudyard Kipling, at the request of H.E.T. Haultain, professor of engineering at the University of Toronto.  To this day, the ring is worn on the "dominant hand" so as the engineers draw or write, the reminder is always present. 

Learning humility from history ...


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

Merlin's isle of Gramarye - by Katherine Langrish

See you the dimpled track that runs
All hollow through the wheat?
O that was where they hauled the guns
That smote King Philip's fleet!

So begins 'Puck's Song' from Rudyard Kipling's love-song to England, 'Puck of Pook's Hill'. Enchanted by the Sussex countryside which was to him - born and bred in India - both home and 'strange', the stories in this classic children's book explore the layers of history which lie deep as leaf-mould in every part of this ancient land.

A few years ago a Saxon brooch was found only a mile or so from where I live in Oxfordshire. I saw it the same day it was taken out of the ground, and you can see it both as it was then, and after restoration, at this link.

This is what I wrote about it at the time:

I took a brisk walk out this morning to the Anglo-Saxon grave.

It was only discovered yesterday. We were out for an afternoon stroll in the mellow sunshine, taking a lane that runs out of the village towards the Downs in the distance, when we realised the wide, flat fields were full of widely separated, slowly walking figures (mostly men) with bowed heads, swinging long metal detectors. Every so often one would stop and dig a little hole, pick something up, then wander on.

We started talking to some of them. One pulled out a wallet and showed us a medieval silver penny. Another had more pennies, Roman and medieval: and belt buckles: and buttons. ‘And over there,’ they all said, pointing towards the furthest field behind a belt of trees – ‘over there, that’s where they’ve found an Anglo Saxon grave!’

Everyone was alight with it. A huge gold brooch had been found, together with some bones. The police had been called immediately and had thrown a cordon around the site. In their marquee by the farm, archeologists were already examining the brooch and we headed back to look, chatting on the way to a group of three men who wouldn’t have seemed at all out of place at a Saxon chieftain’s burial. Big lads, with acres of tattoos. One had long black hair, another a shaved head. One wore an enormous plaited gold ring on his thick forefinger.

‘Any luck?’ we asked. They were friendly, shook their heads: ‘Nah. Only rubbish today. Here’s what we got, on this table over here, take a look if you like.’

‘If you want some, have some,’ added the black-haired man. ‘It’s rubbish. It’s all going in the bin otherwise. But have you heard about the gold brooch?’

On the table was a clutter of stuff. Bits of pottery, coins, harness buckles, buttons, crumpled tin and lead. ‘Take it! Take it all!’ exclaimed the black-haired man. He shovelled it all into a plastic container. It was heavy.

‘When you start this game,’ explained the man with the gold ring, ‘you’re really excited about a coin or two, but then you get ambitious. Tell them about that ring you found.’

‘18th century, with seven diamonds,’ said the man with the black hair.

‘We’ve all found rings, one time or another,’ said Gold Ring Man. He laughed. ‘Once you start this game, you get addicted.’

We went on down to the tent. The brooch was there on display. It was the size of a large jam-pot lid, with a white coral boss surrounded by an inlay of flat, square-cut, dark red garnets. Around that, a broad band of bright yellow gold, with four set garnets standing out from it. Then more coral. And around that, a ring of intricate filigree, now black and dirty. People pored over it, photographed it, stared at it with awe, excitement, and reverence.

‘There’ll be another one,’ the archaeologist was saying. ‘They always come in pairs.’ And he had a look at the ‘rubbish’ the big guys had let us take away. It included four Roman coins, a bit of a medieval ring brooch, some Roman pottery, a lead musket ball the size of a marble - cold and heavy in the hand - and an 18th century thimble. Just a tiny fraction of what still lies under the dusty ploughlands. 

Well, there wasn't another one.  If the Hanney Brooch ever had a twin, it hasn't been found.  However I thought you might like to see some of the stuff that Gold Ring Man and his mates were about to throw in the bin as 'rubbish'.  Here they are, laid out together rather like that awful party game of my youth where you had to remember and write down a selection of disparate objects placed on a tray. The pencil of course is there to give a sense of scale. To the bottom right is the stem of a clay pipe. I have no idea what the bronze, grooved object just above it may be, or the crushed copper thing just below the middle of the pencil. The thing below the point of the pencil is a bone with a hole in it, age unknown, and the curved bronze object to the right of the bone is part of a clip for holding down the loose end of leather belt. There is a small flower engraved upon it.

In the middle are four Roman coins to remind us, as Kipling wrote,

And see you, after rain, the trace
Of mound and ditch and wall?
O that was a legion's camping place
When Caesar sailed from Gaul!


 (Actually they're probably later than that. But still.) To their right is a piece of red Samian ware which suggests that somewhere around here people were dining and wining with high-status imported pottery.  Diagonally from top left to bottom right are three pieces of thick, greyish pot: these -

I'm ashamed to say I can't remember what the archeologists told us about these - whether they were Iron Age, or medieval - but how very different from the delicate Samian Ware!

Then there's a musket ball.

This fragile curve on the left is part of a medieval ring brooch, while to its right is an 18th century thimble.

And these are the cast-offs, the bits and pieces one small group of metal detectorists were going to throw away and even the archeologists weren't much interested in.  Imagine how much else came out of the ground that day!

A couple of years ago, my brother was privately involved in charting archeological remains in a large field which was being developed for housing not far from Didcot, Oxfordshire. As the topsoil was removed, the clear outlines of over ninety pits and circles appeared, along with many shards of pottery and bones. My brother took photos and even made a survey of the site. But it proved impossible to attract the interest of any professional archeologists, and the field is now a housing estate.  You can see some of the darker pits, here:

 And in close up, here:

While here are some of the pottery shards:

Sadly, we'll never know more about that particular site.


Move on to the present day, and our small village is informed of a planning application to build 600 houses in some of the fields across which those metal detectorists were doggedly plodding back in 2009.   While recognising the need for more homes, especially affordable homes for young people, 600 houses springing up on the outskirts of a tiny village (whose school is already full) is a big, big change. And I really don't know how 'affordable' those houses will be. It may be that in the end a smaller number of houses will be built.  But I'm happy to report that partly as a result of information supplied by the Hanney History Group, 82 trial trenches have just been dug in the field where the development is planned, and an archeological excavation will take place to discover just what, if anything, is really there. I nipped out a day or two back to take photos.

The truth is, dig a hole in the ground almost anywhere in England, and you're likely to turn up spadeful after spadeful of history - and houses must be built nevertheless. But important sites shouldn't be built over without any preliminary investigation.  So well done to the Hanney History Group, and I'll keep you posted as to what comes next.

See you our pastures wide and lone
Where the red oxen browse?
O there was a City thronged and known
Ere London boasted a house!
...
And see you marks that show and fade
Like shadows on the Downs?
Oh they are the lines the Flint Men made
To guard their wondrous towns!

Trackway and Camp and City lost.
Salt marsh where now is corn;
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born!

She is not any common Earth,
Water or Wood or Air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye
Where you and I will fare. 

Carry On Up the Gothic Kyber by Eve Edwards

Terrible dark things happen to British men when they go to India - at least according to the fertile imaginations of the late Victorian short story writers.  While doing some research into the gothic stories of the 1890s - the same decade as Dracula and Dorian Gray - I came across a whole sub genre of what we have to call oriental gothic - and a fabulous little sub group it is too!

I remember reading Edward Said's seminal work, Orientalism, when at college.  He exposed the false assumptions coming from the Western world about the culture of the Middle East and Asia but I don't remember anything quite like these stories.  You have 'The Mark of the Beast' by Kipling - a terrifying tale about what happens to Europeans who disrespect Indian deities.  The offender gets bitten by the Silver Man, a holy leper with no features, and turns into a werewolf-like creature.  In B.M Croker's 'The Dak Bungalow at Dakor', any overnight visitors are haunted to the point of madness by the murdered victim seeking justice.  And in the wonderful 'The Phantom Rickshaw', again by Kipling, a Raj Englishman is tormented to death by the ghost of his former lover, Mrs Wessington. There are many many more, some of which started life as ephemeral pamphlets sold on Indian railway stations to amuse the passengers.  Look out the window and the gothic stared right back.

Bombay station 1905: Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries

H.G. Wells did his own sort which happened to be set largely in the distant west - the Pacific and the Amazon, but I am bending my rules here to include him because the setting is equally exotic - distant empire.  You might be familiar already with the chilling 'The Island of Dr Moreau' - a scientist creating were-creatures in the overweening manner of Frankenstein.  You can probably guess that it doesn't end well for him.  Even creepier to my mind is The Empire of Ants, set far up the Amazon.  In best disaster movie fashion, ants get sentient and start to take over.  I'm half convinced that this is entirely plausible!  They may be small but they are mighty - and invade all orifices.

What is particularly interesting to me is that the Kipling and Wells stories make it quite clear that it is the European who has crossed the line and brought the punishment on himself, like Victor Frankenstein playing god and being pursued by his own creation.  Mrs Wessington is a stalker, in life and after death.  The Indian context is rather by the by, a glamorous backdrop to an old tale of sexual betrayal. Fleete falls foul of a country he doesn't understand, having a just punishment meted out to him for his asinine behaviour in the temple. Dr Moreau, a heartless vivisectionist, creates the cruelty that kills him.  This are all rather clever commentaries on the empire project, questioning European supremacy. The gothic genre is doing its familiar job of making us look into the shadows of our selves as well as the external setting of scary huts in forests, claustrophobic islands, alleyways and jungles.

Kipling

Where has such oriental gothic gone?  I am now thinking that we place out gothic horror in space.  Darth Vader could be seen as a Frankenstein turning into his own creature.  The Borg from Star Trek - if you don't know them take a moment to watch a 1990s episode with Patrick Stewart - for my money one of the scariest monsters of them all.  Even Doctor Who has its moments in this genre.  Anyone got other suggestions?  Warning: once you get going, it is fairly addictive!

Eve

Smugglers Ahoy!

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I had a new book published on March 7th! No prizes for guessing what it's about.
Smugglers were so much fun to research. I began with my memory of the Rudyard Kipling poem A Smuggler's Song, which you can read here: http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/junior/literacy-hour/year-5/longer-classic-poetry, I worked my way through various novels, including Moonfleet by John Mead Faulkner and watched an old BBC series called Smuggler which reduced my sons to tears of laughter it was so dated. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There were also plenty of non-fiction books to read about smuggling in various parts of the country. The problem for me with a lot of these was that they described the practice without clear timelines. It's no good writing about the smuggling of tea in 1720, when my book is set, because duty wasn't put on tea until 1724 Also I needed to be very clear about which laws were in force when my tale was set. Was smuggling a capital offence and when did that come into force? When was the law governing signalling ships at sea passed? When was the coastguard brought into existence?
And many quite surprising details aren't known. What uniform did revenue officers wear? What did the pennant look like that they flew from their ships? Not recorded. There are only theories.
And of course the history of the smuggling activities themselves are shrouded in a certain amount of secrecy. It was a clandestine trade carried on mainly on wild, dark winter nights with nothing incriminating written down. Fascinating stuff!
Enough has emerged from trials and confessions to paint a picture, though who can say how reliable this information is? And a great many stories have become local lore and legend, but much of this is even more unreliable.
One book, for example, devotes a whole chapter to debunking the myth that smugglers used long tunnels, pointing out the resources such tunnels would have required to build. And where did these intrepid engineers dump all the earth they supposedly dug out? Besides, no significant tunnels have ever been found. The truth is that in the early years of the 18th century especially, smugglers worked quite openly, sometimes even landing cargo in ports in broad daylight. The overstretched revenue officers simply didn't have the resources or manpower to prevent them. And when they began to tighten up a little, there were still so many hundreds of miles of wild, inaccessible coast to patrol. The smugglers, or free traders, still had plenty of options.

Death and Poetry in the Karoo - Dianne Hofmeyr

I have fallen under the spell of a vista. It has stirred up a deep-seated identity with soil and rock. I’m lost in a world of sepia, ochre and rust where having forgotten to pack my camera, I’m forced to look harder. Through a portal of soaring rocky folds that seem made of ancient paved brick where the road crosses the river 25 times, I come to the Karoo.

Karoo… the name is odd. It comes from a language of clicks - karo, karro - meaning ‘hard’ or ‘dry’. And it is dry and hard, with a gaunt, spectacular grandeur that subdues me. I can’t imagine its impact on the young British soldiers who were first offloaded here in 1899. Names like Outeniqua, Oudtshoorn, Meiringspoort, Weltrevrede and words like kopje and veldt must have faltered on the tongues of men from Harlech and Bristol who came to fight a war against the Boers in the semi-desert of the Karoo. Is this the place that gave name to the soldier Mad Carew in J. Milton Hayes’poem The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God ?

In 1901 when Rudyard Kipling was sent to report on the Anglo-Boer War, he wrote of the soldiers who sat through cold nights guarding the single train line that ran through the Karoo, from ambush by the Boer commandoes. It's a vision of stark loneliness in a very dark world.

BRIDGE-GUARD IN THE KARROO

Sudden the desert changes,
The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
Stand up like the thrones of Kings—

Ramparts of slaughter and peril—
Blazing, amazing, aglow—
’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl
And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
Lit by the last of the sun—
Opal and ash-of-roses,
Cinnamon, umber, and dun.

The twilight swallows the thicket,
The starlight reveals the ridge.
The whistle shrills to the picket—
We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the empty metals shine—
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

We slip through the broken panel
Of fence by the ganger’s shed;
We drop to the waterless channel
And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,

And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
As the sheep click past to the fold—
And the click of the restless girders
As the steel contracts in the cold—

Voices of jackals calling

And, loud in the hush between,
A morsel of dry earth falling
From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And the solemn firmament marches,
And the hosts of heaven rise
Framed through the iron arches—
Banded and barred by the ties,

Till we feel the far track humming,
And we see her headlight plain,
And we gather and wait her coming—
The wonderful north-bound train.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the white car-windows shine—
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

Quick, ere the gift escape us!
Out of the darkness we reach
For a handful of week-old papers
And a mouthful of human speech.

And the monstrous heaven rejoices,
And the earth allows again,
Meetings, greetings, and voices
Of women talking with men.

So we return to our places,
As out on the bridge she rolls;
And the darkness covers our faces,
And the darkness re-enters our souls.

More than a little lonely
Where the lessening tail-lights shine.
No—not combatants—only
Details guarding the line!

Thomas Hardy wrote two poems highlighting the blight of the Anglo-Boer War. The first, A Wife in London written in 1899 is about the irony of a wife receiving a letter from her husband on the day after she has received the news of his death. The second Hardy poem, Drummer Hodge, is about a young man ignorant and innocent of what lies ahead who wouldn’t have known the meaning of the strange words that give meaning to the Karoo but whose body would become nourishment for the veldt in years to come.

DRUMMER HODGE - 1899
I
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined - just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

II
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

III
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

I wonder if Rupert Brooke had read Hardy’s Drummer Hodge when he wrote these lines in The Soldier in 1914?

IF I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England.

Reams could be written of this war and of the soldiers who never returned to their families in England and of the Australians who gave their support to Britain. And reams could be written of the Boers who suffered and died under Kitchener’s Burnt Earth Policy and the Boer wives and children who were rounded up and put in Concentration Camps and died of cold, starvation and typhoid.

My maternal great grandfather from Yorkshire had his sheep farm in Natal expropriated during the Anglo-Boer War. My paternal grandfather fought on the side of the English. In my husband’s family there were those that fought on the side of the Boers. No wonder I feel a deep sense of identity with this vista of the Karoo.

www.diannehofmeyr.com

Some of the History Girls will be putting up books they've recently read (without reviews) at the end of their posts. These are two I've recently read - the first by our own History Girl, Louisa Young, short-listed for the Costa which deals with the ravages of WWI and The Sisters Brothers which is a cowboy story with a difference set in similar terrain to the Karoo which was short-listed for the Booker: