Forgotten History by Kate Lord Brown

Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography.

 
It’s always interesting hearing why authors of historical fiction are drawn to their eras. For me, the early twentieth century has always felt tantalisingly within touching distance. I grew up with my Great Aunt Rose’s tales of helping the Resistance in Occupied Holland, and hiding her husband from the Nazis in a secret room in their Middleburg hotel. I saw my grandfather sit night after night at his old mahogany dining table, surrounded by dogeared photographs of his comrades from Dunkerque, lost in his memories.

The early years of the twentieth century felt close – I wanted to understand why these experiences were still vivid, why they haunted my family. Later, when I specialised in twentieth century art, and particularly photography, at the Courtauld Institute, I realised that even history this close to our present day becomes ‘lost’. When I studied Man Ray, why were there so few mentions of Lee Miller’s remarkable war photography in the standard text books? Why did Robert Capa’s mythical figure throw such a shadow over Gerda Taro’s body of work? In writing about the Spanish Civil War in ‘The Perfume Garden’, I wanted to give Taro her correct place as his equal.

Gerda Taro © International Center of Photography

Capa by Taro © International Center of Photography

Writing historical fiction feels, at its best and most exhilarating, like detective work. A tiny clue can spark years of research. For ‘The Beauty Chorus’, it was a tiny obituary for one of the ‘Spitfire girls’ – the women who flew with the Air Transport Auxiliary. The great joy of writing twentieth century histfic is that you have the privilege of talking to people who lived that history. I spoke to women now in their eighties and nineties, who told me exactly how it felt to fly those planes, and gave me details for the story that can’t be found in any text book.

Diana Barnato Walker © ATA Archive, Maidenhead Heritage Centre.

It’s that wealth of experience which is so thrilling to draw upon – and how well documented the era is. I love that it’s possible to immerse yourself in archives of unpublished papers, diaries, that you can listen to the same music, watch the same films. I’m still a ‘new’ writer, and each book is a steep learning curve, but finding these fragments of ‘forgotten’ history, and breathing life into them, conjuring a fictional story around them is like nothing else. I hope I never stop learning.



So, that’s my story – I’d love to hear why you are drawn to the era(s) you write about …

Kate's latest book

Theft of Life by Imogen Robertson

I own I am shock’d at the purchase of slaves

And fear those who buy them and sell them are knaves;

What I hear of their hardships, their tortures and groans,

Is almost enough to drive pity from stones.

I pity them greatly, but I must be mum

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

William Cowper ‘Pity for Poor Africans’ Northampton Mercury 9th August 1788

Theft of Life is my sixth novel, and my fifth set in the 1780s. It’s also my first to deal with slavery. I’m often asked why I chose to write about this period and I talk about how the Georgians in their letters, diaries, architecture and music feel very close to us in spirit. I talk about the growth of consumer culture and the beginning of industrialisation. I also talk about how at the same time life could be brutal and short. After researching and writing Theft of Life, I see all of that, the civilities and the brutalities, in a very different, harsher, light.

I am sure that many readers of, and contributors to, this blog are well aware how Britain profited from slavery, but I suspect there are others who might not be. I wasn't, and I've been studying the period for some time. Basically when I thought of the slave trade I thought of the role of people like William Wilberforce in ending it. I remembered the references in Mansfield Park to Sir Thomas’s West Indian property.  I thought of slavery and its legacy being primarily an American problem. I think you can see a little of this attitude in some of the responses to the brilliant 12 Years a Slave. I never really considered the fact that much of the wealth pouring into the country throughout the 18th century was blood money and with it we built those beautiful Georgian streets, those wonderful country houses and paid for all that art and music of which I am so fond. There are some examples from historian James Walvin here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/abolition/building_britain_gallery.shtml 

I thought slavery horrific, of course I did, but I didn’t really think of it as being part of my cultural history, and it is.

It’s probably worth saying that I think there were many in England in the 18th century who were similarly ignorant. Some wilfully, some not. The prevailing attitude is summed up in the satirical lines from William Cowper which are at the top of this post and form one of the epigraphs of Theft of Life. In the novel I have written are characters who have benefited from slavery, and some who have been enslaved. There are some who try and make amends for their ignorance and some willing to defend their freedom both as a fact and a principle. It is only a novel, but I hope that reading about my characters might encourage some readers to find out more about the individuals who inspired them and read their works, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano in particular. Equally I wish the works of the early campaigners against slavery, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, were better known. I also hope readers might think a little of all the lost stories of the millions of Africans who were murdered for profit. 

I shall be very interested to see how the government responds to the ten point plan on reparations adopted by Caricom this month. For those people who say that it was all a long time ago, and its unfair to expect apologies and reparations now, I’d just like you to remember that fifth slide on the Walvin link above. The collection that helped found the British Museum, the collection that formed the basis of the National Gallery were both donated by individuals whose wealth was slave wealth. So we are, make no mistake, still enjoying the profits of slavery today. 

For those who are interested in a non-fiction perspective, these are excellent:

Sugar in the Blood - Andrea Stuart

Sugar Barons - Matthew Parker

Bury The Chains - Adam Hochschild 

Theft of Life is published on 22 May 2014

Sulpicia's cranky poems by Tansy Rayner Roberts

We welcome to the blog today Tansy Rayner Roberts, to tell us more about the Cranky Ladies of History blog tour and crowdfunding project. Here she introduces us to a forgotten Roman poet.

Tansy is a fantasy author with a PhD in Classics who lives with her partner and two daughters in Tasmania, is one of the three voices of the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast, and won a Hugo for her fan writing in 2013. She also write crime fiction as Livia Day and is the co-editor of the forthcoming FableCroft Publishing anthology Cranky Ladies of History.

Tansy blogs at tansyrr.com and you can also find her on Twitter.

   Sulpicia in her own words

On the whole, history tends to disapprove of women being cranky. Or outspoken. Or in anyway… unsatisfied with their lot in life beyond the roles of mother, daughter, wife.
When I was studying Ancient Rome, it was definitely noticeable that all the women we read about fell into one of two categories: the modest, virtuous paragons of womanly perfection, and the wicked vixens who were out to destroy men.

There really was not a lot of nuance to be found. Ambition, pride and power were all female vices, even though they were considered manly virtues.

The Romans even invented the word ‘virago’ meaning ‘woman who acts like a man’ as a grave insult.

There were times when studying the women of Ancient Rome did rather affect my morale.

The worst part of it was the words. There are almost no words left to us which were written by Roman women. It’s not that Roman women were not educated - many of them were, among the upper classes. But no one saved their words. No one thought they were worth saving.

The most ‘outspoken’ Roman woman we have is a girl poet, Sulpicia, whose lines were saved by the happy accident of being written on the back of a book of Tibullus’ poetry and for a long time they were attributed to him.

Sulpicia is pretty much the only woman whose words have actually survived from Ancient Rome to the present day. We know of others who wrote literature, letters and even biography (Agrippina’s family history is a particular loss to posterity as it’s impossible to imagine it wouldn’t have been full of juicy political scandal and that it would given us a whole new way of looking at her as well as the Emperors of the Julio-Claudian dynasty)

Only in the later 20th century did Latin scholars take Sulpicia seriously as a poet worth reading rather than a gendered curiosity and even then, many fell over themselves to explain her away. Those who have read Joanna Russ’ How To Suppress Women’s Writing will not be surprised as some of the arguments used against Sulpicia’s very existence.

She wrote it but… if she really was a woman, it isn’t very good.

She wrote it but… she must have actually been a man because it’s *too good* for a woman to have written it.

Sulpicia was cranky. She wrote a whole poem about how much it sucked to be spending her birthday in the country, away from her secret lover Cerinthus.

She also complained about Cerinthus chasing after cheap tarts, took a break from a fevered illness to compose a poem in the hopes of raising his sympathies, and wrote another out of apology to him for leaving him in the lurch.

There’s a sweet honesty about her, and a sharpness that I really enjoy because, finally, here is an ordinary Roman woman telling her own story.

Oh, and there were even days when she wasn’t cranky at all, just loved up and happy with the world:



Venus has kept her promise. Let people talk, who never

themselves have found such joys as now are mine.

I wish that I could send my tablets to my love

unsealed, not caring who might read them first.

The sin is sweet, to mask it for fear of shame is bitter.

I’m proud we’ve joined, each worthy of the other.



[Sulpicia I, translated from Latin by Jon Corelis]


https://sites.google.com/site/romanelegy/sulpicia This post is written as part of the Women’s History Month Cranky Ladies of History blog tour. If you would like to read more about cranky ladies from the past, you might like to support the FableCroft Publishing Pozible campaign, crowd-funding an anthology of short stories about Cranky Ladies of History from all over the world.

Cranky Old Lady by Theresa Breslin

Even now I’m not sure in what specific year Great Aunt Mary was born. When I was growing up she always claimed to be a child of the ‘modern era’, but as I got older and recalled the stories she’d told me of her youth, I began to think that her actual birth day must have been in the last years of the nineteenth century rather than the opening years of the twentieth. She was brought back into my mind over these last months as I was liaising with my editor on the re-issue of Remembrance, my book about youth in WW1, the new edition of which is due to be published next month.

 

There was tweaking to be done here and there. Am I alone in noticing places where my text would benefit from a comma / preposition more or less when doing readings from my  work? I also spotted a few typos that were missed first time around, and had been carried over even during in the transition from hardback to paperback. But the main bulk of my work was to prepare Readers Notes for inclusion in this new edition.

And it was then that I started to think of Great Aunt Mary.

In her youth the most obvious outrageous thing about her was her appearance. She wore trousers. In public. I recall my mother saying that it was known as a family disgrace, a notable scandal in our very small town. She told me about this in a slightly shocked tone of voice (tinged with admiration?) It wasn’t so much a girl wearing trousers that upset people. It was the fact that they buttoned up the front. It would appear that they would have been deemed infinitely more modest if they had been fastened at the side.

‘I mean, Mary,’ a female relative remonstrated with her, ‘they look as if they are men’s trousers.’

At this, Great Aunt Mary knocked the ash from her cigarette and snapped back. ‘That’s because they are men’s trousers!’  

She was the inspiration for Maggie, one of the lead female characters in Remembrance. The custom in Great Aunt Mary’s home was after dinner, which had been shopped for, prepared, cooked, served and cleared up, by the women of the household, the family sat before the fire for an hour or so before retiring. The men might smoke but the women’s hands were not idle either. They busied themselves knitting, darning or sewing – there was always work to be done. Father would read the newspaper and, when he had finished, he would then read it out aloud and give them his opinion about the items it contained.   

As Great Aunt Mary progressed into her teens it dawned on her that her father was censoring what he told them. It caused a tremendous row one day when she voiced a different point of view. She quoted facts to support her argument and he asked her where she got her information. When she replied, ‘In the newspaper’ he was furious. She must not read his newspaper. It would upset her too much. He knew what was best for her. He forbade her to do it again. Great Aunt Mary went out and got herself a job delivering newspapers. Then she proceeded to read every newspaper, magazine and journal she could get her hands on. Given an opportunity she would have a set-to with her father and anyone else who tried to tell her what to think.    

In Remembrance Maggie’s father reads out the newspaper to the family, omitting the negative news about the progress of the War. It’s only after having a conversation with Francis, the young man from the manor house outside the village, that Maggie realises this.

I knew I wanted that scene. But I had to find the trigger for it. Part of my research was going through copy after copy of The Times, making notes and collecting items both ‘shiny’ and dull. This is what I found.

 

 It’s an account of the battle of Loos where, after suffering heavy losses to take a position, the Allied troops ran out of ammunition. As Maggie’s twin brother is fighting on the Western Front this is a news article that Maggie’s father would keep to himself. Aha! My story progresses as planned. But wait! Here’s the thing. I had intended Maggie to become a nurse. I had done the research. I had outlined scenes - with dialogue. I read and re-read the chapters I’d just written re Maggie’s elation and sense of fulfilment at reading the newspaper for herself, and of having enough knowledge to be able to discuss the War on equal terms with another intelligent human. But, after that, what would Maggie do? What did Great Aunt Mary do when she saw the posters asking for women to help the War effort? There's a brother out there fighting. The soldiers need ammunition….

 

Yes, indeed, a feisty girl would do War Work. Now I have to dig up everything I can find about munitions factories and ask elderly relatives about my personal Cranky Old Lady. Great Aunt Mary stories come flooding back. The stand-off with management when they tried to restrict the toilet breaks of the women workers, the ignoring of basic safety rules and being called a traitor if you complained. Women munitions workers lost fingers when dealing with unstable explosives. It’s not all in the book, but the backdrop is there. And in time, so also is the decision, after staring at the ‘sullen rows of shells’ and thinking of her brother lost in the War, Maggie makes to turn to nursing.  

 

Shell cone from Western Front

I felt a deep responsibility when writing Remembrance, not only to get the facts right, but to be true to the people of the time. To connect to the past with a life-line of real characters.

For this new edition, adding the section at the end to show photographs taken when I visited the Battlefields of the Western Front, with excerpts from my research diaries, and writing up the Readers Notes has taken me on journey which I hope others can share.

Images and Photographs Copyright:  © SCARPA

 http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor     Twitter: @theresabreslin1  

http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/ 

THERESA BRESLIN WRITING ON WW1

BOOKS

 Remembrance

Ghost Soldier

CONTRIBUTOR:

War Girls

Only Remembered

Fight for the Right - Emily Davison and the Internet - Celia Rees

Bossy Girls, Cranky Ladies, Daughters of Time? The History Girls have blogged about them all. We now have our own anthology, no news to anybody, and I can't resist a bit of a trumpet. I have to admit that when the anthology was first mooted by Mary Hoffman, I couldn't immediately think of any one woman to write about. It was not until later that day, when I was talking to my daughter, Catrin, that an idea began to form. We were talking about suitable candidates and she suggested Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who threw herself under the King's horse on Derby Day, 1913. She mentioned the return ticket to Epsom that Emily had about her person and suddenly a story began to form.

The actual ticket is in the collection of the Women's Library which was in the process of moving from its historic home in Aldgate to LSE amid some controversy Future of Women's Library but I did not have to visit it to view the historic ticket. It was there for me to see - on the internet. I'm a fiction writer, and although historical accuracy is vital and I'm meticulous in checking my facts I'm not necessarily looking for the same information as a writer of non fiction. I do visit libraries to consult books and archives on occasion but it is not always necessary for me to do so. In this case, I just wanted to see the ticket. And there it was.

Emily Wilding Davison's dramatic intervention in the 1913 Derby was recorded by newspaper photographers there to report on the race and also by a novel form of news reporting: the pathe newsreel.

 Emily Davison throws herself under the kings horse

The cameras were there to record Derby Day, Emily Davison's intervention in the race was recorded by accident. The viewing is chilling. The short clip shows the build up to the race, crowds arriving, the race course itself, the runners, the start of the race, but all the time the viewer knows what's coming. I viewed the footage over and over again, not just to see frame by frame what happened, but to see everything else: the people, the vehicles, the course, the stands, the horses; details that add to my palette, help to give the scene immediacy, make it convincing and vivid and add that trace of deja vu dread, of disaster about to happen. Without the internet, I doubt that I'd have been able to see the film, or the dramatic newspaper coverage, so describing it convincingly and with accuracy would have been that much more difficult.

Not everything you find makes its way into a story. Emily Wilding Davison also hid in a broom cupboard in the House of Commons during the night of the 1911 Census. An event recorded on this plaque by Tony Benn M.P.

He said:  'I have put up several plaques—quite illegally, without permission; I screwed them up myself. One was in the broom cupboard to commemorate Emily Wilding Davison, and another celebrated the people who fought for democracy and those who run the House. If one walks around this place, one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum.'

Tony Benn died last week and with his passing, we have lost a man of great principle, one who did not forget the sacrifice of others and carried on the fight for the rights of all. 

Read Return to Victoria

Interview in the Overflowing Library

www.celiarees.com

THE BOOK OF BOSSY GIRLS? By Penny Dolan.

Recently my interest was caught a media discussion: the kind where X says this, so Y spouts up with that, often through tweets and social network sites, and giving both X & Y & also Z material for an article or two.

This controversy was about the use of the word “bossy” to describe girls. It does come across as a word drenched in negativity and rejection. For one thing, “bossy” is what girls aren’t supposed to be, but it is hard to refute without sounding – er, bossy.  

Last year, researching Mary Wollstonecraft for a short story, I read Clare Tomalin’s excellent biography. By the end, I had decided that Mary, though hugely admirable, was probably not a very comfortable person to be around for long. 

Mary had opinions she wanted to share, better beliefs she thought herself- and others - should live by, and much to feel angry about, at both a personal and general level. She organised her family and friends, who were not always grateful or glad, and she spoke and wrote against what she saw as injustice and inequality. In other words, Mary was probably a bit difficult and, yes, sometimes bossy. 

 

 Do women ever get anything done without being accused of being bossy, I wonder?

What about the women in the past who fought alongside men – Boudicca and her daughters, or maybe Alfred’s daughter Aethefled? Or Mary Seacole, caring for her soldiers even if Florence Nightingale’s hospital rejected her?

What about the girls and women who negotiated their roles among the dangerous men of power: Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth Stuart, or the remarkable Eleanor of Aquitaine?  

Or women like anchorite Julian of Norwich, playwright Aphra Ben, or even my Mary – women whose writing explains how they see life and their world? Isn’t writing, as authors and journalists know, a way of raising your voice?

Speaking out has often been seen – or heard – as a problem, the ultimate demonstration of bossiness: the women protestors at Greenham Common became the stereo-types of stridency. In contrast, Emily Davison, facing the king’s horse, used her own body as a way of “speaking“ when people in power wouldn’t listen. 

What about those who persisted in their own paths? There is Mary Anning, the self-taught fossil-hunter whose discoveries were subsumed into the collections and reputations of wealthy and aristocratic palaeontologists? Or what about the persistence needed to be Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia, and who may have been a British spy?  Amazing women, all.

 

As I’m typing this, Woman’s Weekend Hour is airing an item about female “Game Changers” as part of their Power List 2014 campaign:

 

Rachel Short, an organisational psychologist says that the key aspects of “game changers” were their intellectual independence, the fact that they were socially eclectic and that their motivation was guided by initiative, resilience and deep-rooted self-belief. 

Unsurprisingly, the words “difficult” and “bossy” came up again. (Not the word "cranky", though that might fit too.) It seems that bossy girls and women – and you will have your own favourite heroines – are often those who make things happen, however subtly or noticeably they manage it. Perhaps “bossy” is a kind of compliment, after all?

You can read fictional tales about all these historical heroines now in the BOOK OF BOSSY GIRLS - more properly and correctly known as the DAUGHTERS OF TIME anthology, edited by Mary Hoffman. (Templar)

Penny Dolan

'Poetry is no way to teach the Great War': Sue Purkiss

It will not have escaped your notice that this year is the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. There have already been masses of documentaries, dramas, articles and books to mark the event - one particularly interesting series, Britain's Great War, came from Jeremy Paxman. And there's still some time to go before we reach 28th July, when the war actually began.

Kaiser Wilhelm

What's fascinating to me is that after a hundred years, historians are re-evaluating how it came to happen. It was never easy to understand. Why should the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke have led to such a vast and savage cataclysm? Well, it was all to do with alliances, we were told. That was what I used to tell children too, back in the day when I was an English teacher and taught the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. In fact, it was even more complicated than it used to appear. Like most things, the way events unfolded had much to do with personalities. Take Kaiser Wilhelm, for example. He was a child born with a withered arm whom his mother, one of Queen Victoria's daughters, found difficult to love. According to a recent documentary about him and his two cousins, King George V of England and Nicholas, last Czar of Russia, Wilhelm was always the one who didn't fit in, the one who nobody really liked. When it came to negotiating with Russia and England, the relationships and antipathies between these three cousins must have played a part. Fascinating ground for a novelist to explore.

But I am allowing myself to be distracted. The divisive figure I'm intending to write about isn't Kaiser Bill, it's Jeremy Paxman. Last Thursday, Wellington School hosted a prestigious conference at Westminster. The subject was Schools and the Great War Centenary, and the speakers included, as well as a number of eminent historians, Michael Morpurgo and Ian Hislop (who recently co-wrote an excellent TV drama about The Wipers Times).

According to a report in The Times on Friday ( I can't provide a link because access to The Times online is not free), Paxman used the occasion to weigh into schools, which, he apparently said, are 'relying too much on poetry when introducing pupils to the realities of the First World War.' He went on: 'It seems to me poetry is part of the problem of how we teach World War One... All that is taught is about the pointless sacrifice. It's not helpful to see the whole thing through the eyes of poetry... Luxuriating in the horror of the thing really won't do and doesn't set out to answer really interesting questions.'

Please note: I am relying on the report in The Times. I wasn't there. I emphasise this to be clear that I'm very aware, as we all are on this blog, that it's important to get your facts right.

Now, as I said before, I used to teach war poetry. Before this, I studied it at school. I was immensely moved by it - by its beauty, by the pity of it, and because for the first time, through poems like Dulce Et Decorum Est and Strange Meeting, I could really see how the form of the poetry was indispensable to the meaning. Because it seized my imagination, I went on to read more about the war. And when I was teaching, I saw the same poems have a very similar effect on the wide range of pupils that I taught. More than anything except, perhaps, Of Mice And Men, reading these poems created a still and silent classroom. They spoke to the students in the same way that they had spoken to me.

As well as I could, I put them into context. I talked to the students about the causes and the nature of this particular war. (And yes, I even showed them the last episode of Blackadder. I admit it, and I don't regret it, because the effect of that last scene was electrifying.) But - here's the thing, Mr Paxman: as an English teacher, my priority was not to teach them about the war. There was another department that did that - the history department. Are you forgetting about the historians? You shouldn't. Without their teaching, none of those eminent historians at the conference would have been inspired to go on and study history.

So - please. Just think it through a little. 'Poetry is no way to teach the Great War' might make a nice soundbite. But your argument is based on a false premiss: poetry is not the way the Great War is taught - it's only a small part of it. You don't need to take inaccurate shots at teachers to make an interesting argument - they are already targets for flak from all quarters quite often enough.

Michael Morpurgo, of course, had a different approach. 'Stories engaged pupils in a way that history books sometimes failed to do, he said.' (The Times)

Just one last thought before I leave the subject of TV programmes about the war. Last night, interviews were broadcast with veteran soldiers from all sides. The interviews were offcuts from the 1964 landmark series, The Great War. Now, I remember sitting down with my whole family to watch that. It was horrifying and mesmerising.

And yet, my grandfather was himself a veteran. I knew he had fought in France. I was thirteen. Why did it never occur to me to go and ask him about his experiences? It's not always easy to explain the things we do, is it - or the things we don't do.