The Song of the Whale and my Visit to Biarritz by Carol Drinkwater

Many years ago, in a period of my life that is almost history now, while I was filming the TV series All Creatures Great and Small, I was invited to take part in a Save the Whale rally which was to be held in Trafalgar Square. It was a Sunday. A high stage had been erected in the centre of the square and each of us was to present our reading or give our speech to a bank of microphones that relayed the message to thousands and thousands of people who had gathered to support the event. I read an extract from Moby Dick. The conservationist and television presenter, Sir Peter Scott, was the main focus of the occasion. He was the chairman and founder of the World Wildlife Fund International, an organisation that I had aligned myself with back then. I was particularly interested in its conservation of threatened marine life and habitats as I had recently become a qualified scuba diver.

Sir Peter Scott 1909 - 1989

I have tried to date the year this rally took place, but I have failed. The end of the seventies or early eighties, no later. Aside from the fact that it was the first and only time I have ever appeared on the BBC evening News at Ten, what I most remember about this event was Sir Peter’s introduction and a recording he had made of the song of humpbacked whales. Try to picture it: a fine clear starlit evening, possibly a dozen of us high on a stage surrounded by banks of microphones and floodlights, the sky clear, and what seemed like half of London standing at our feet. Sir Peter steps forward, introduces his work with WWF and then switches on his recording of the whales singing. Recalling it today still sends shivers up my spine. Because we were in an open space, the recorded songs rose into the evening. The audience were utterly silent, as were we. These great mammals were communicating with one another and on this special occasion with us. Today, we can Google and find recordings on the internet but back then, not. Sir Peter told me later a most extraordinary fact that has stayed with me all my life. When conservationists began to study whales in earnest they found that each whale travels oceans throughout any given year and then makes its way to its mating waters. No matter which route it has taken, no matter how separated it might have been from others of its own species, when they come together again, each whale has a new verse/stanza/addition to its song and that added unit is the same for all whales. Somehow or other, across oceans it would appear that the whales have stayed in touch, in communication with one another, have extended their song, created their narrative together.
I am still awed by this information.

In our twenty-first century world of Facebook, emails, blogs etc, such a far-reaching ability to communicate might not seem so remarkable, but it is. I was already respectful of the majesty of these cetaceans, still, Sir Peter, on that exceptional evening, blew my perception of nature wide open. He transmitted to me his respect for the natural world and I have been grateful to him for that gift ever since.

I have just returned from a work trip to Biarritz. For those who don’t know it, it sits at the south-western edge of France, bordering Spain and overlooking the wild Atlantic Ocean. It is one of the great surfing spots of the world. It is Basque country first, French second. The locals are fiercely proud of their Basque language and heritage and I determined that during this visit I would try to find out a little more about the location and its people. The town itself has a fascinating history and was made popular as a holiday resort by Napoléon III when he built his beloved Empress Eugénie a summer villa overlooking the rocks and surf in 1855. Even after the fall of Napoleon’s dynasty in 1870, Biarritz remained a fashionable summer spot. The French state, once again republican, took possession of the Empress’s possessions, a bank took the villa and turned it into a casino before it became, in 1893, a prestigious hotel visited by royalty, including Queen Victoria.

I paid a visit to the town’s Musée de la Mer where, extraordinarily, they had a small exhibition on about the history of whaling. Aside from sitting for half an hour with the seals, this was where I spent most of my afternoon. 

Aside from Japan which has a millennia-long whaling history, the origins of organized whale hunting begun here along this Basque coast, some one thousand years ago. The first mention of Basque whaling is recorded as 1059. At its peak, there were forty-nine ports with whaling establishments along the Basque coast. It was a dangerous occupation with the fishermen, whale-hunters, setting out to sea in small boats with harpoons. Their principle target was the North Atlantic right whale, caught during its migrating period between November and March. During this season, men were positioned in on-shore watchtowers (vigias) near the coast or in the lower Pyrénées. When a whale’s blow or spout was spotted, the watchmen lit fires to alert the sailors in the hunting boats to set off to sea.

This lighthouse in Biarritz stands on the spot of what was once a vigias, a stone watchtower.

Up to the seventeenth century, the Basque hunters had the territory to themselves and hunted off their own shores but fewer whales began to pass by – they had been overhunted and, rather shockingly, the hunters had been targeting calf whales because they were easier to catch. Possibly, also, the mammals were smart enough to eschew this route. Once the right whales were gone, the whalers were obliged to travel greater distances to catch their prey and they made for Greenland and Norway where vast schools of whales were to be found. Sometimes, the whalers were away for months on end. Around the year 1600, a Dutch explorer, William Barents, discovered the island of Spitzbergen off the coast of Norway. This was rich whaling territory and before long both the Dutch and British were sending fleets to these icy waters to harpoon the great beasts. Originally, they looked to the Basque fishermen to teach them the technique. In 1612, the Basque towns of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Saint-Sebastian sent twelve whaling boats, but they were soon seen off by both the British and the Dutch who wanted all for themselves.

The technique used by both the British and the Dutch was to send small boats with roped harpoons to the whale, which once killed was dragged back to the mother ship where its skin and blubber was stripped off and boiled down to make the whale oil. Whale oil was a very valuable commodity. It was originally used for lighting (long after olive oil had lit the streets of such great cities as Rome and Alexandria, I must add). Later, the oil went into cosmetics, soap, margarine etc.
So competitive did the industry become that Britain and Holland almost went to war over who had the territorial rights to these waters. And then the Americans got involved. Their boats set sail from ports such as Nantucket, sailed huge distances and were often at sea for up to four years. (When I read this, my thoughts were with the wives and children of those men, what an existence.)

The Basque whalers were being left out. By the nineteenth century, the commercial trade that they had excelled at and lived off had become moribund along this Atlantic coast of France and Spain and the right whale was gone. Only five or six sightings were noted throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, factory ships were being sent to sea, by the Norwegians, Americans, Japanese. They were hunting all whales indiscriminately and would kill the beasts and produce the oil on board. The numbers of whales hunted was alarming. Thirty-three thousand blue whales were recorded as destroyed in the nineteenth century, for example.

Coincidentally, as I write this on 15th September 2014, the 65th meeting of the IWC is opening in Slovenia. What is the IWC? Founded in 1986, the IWC is a global intergovernmental body charged with the conservation of whales and the management of whaling. Japan and Iceland continue to hunt and slaughter whales and are regularly flouting the internationally agreed bans. As well as keeping whale catch limits under review, the Commission is working to promote the recovery of depleted whale populations. They are creating sanctuaries where commercial whaling is prohibited. Their work is essential if whale populations are to be maintained and certain species not become extinct.

As I took in all this information and so much more at the fine sea museum in Biarritz, I realised that the International Whaling Commission was founded several years after our rally in Trafalgar Square. Sir Peter Scott and the WWF were instrumental in creating awareness, in changing the course of marine history. That evening was a moment in that history whose impact I could not have appreciated at the time as I listened to that haunting, never-to-be-forgotten song.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

BLAME IT ON THE BUILDINGS by Eleanor Updale

Now, does this theory hold up?  Sometimes, when things go wrong, we end up blaming the buildings in which events take place, rather than looking at the human behaviour at the heart of the problem.

I was set off thinking about this when - to my astonishment - I spent eight hours completely absorbed in a session of Edinburgh City Council’s Planning Committee.

I’m not going to inflict all the grisly details of the meeting on you, but suffice it to say that it hinged on a proposal that has powerfully churned local juices: the fate of Craighouse: one of Edinburgh’s seven hills.

Craighouse is (theoretically) a comprehensively protected site of national ecological and environmental significance which is home to several grade A listed buildings, some dating back to the 16th century. It’s adjacent to Craiglockhart, which was made famous by Pat Barker in her ‘Regeneration’ trilogy.

The planning committee was deciding whether to allow a developer to build several modern blocks there. 

If you want more information and background, look here. The planning case is a wonderful example of the civic mess we are in in the 21st century, but this is not the place for me to vent my spleen about that. Instead, I’m going to talk about mental illness and architecture.

The link to Craighouse is its use for much of the past 130 years.  At the heart of the site is New Craig, a purpose built mental asylum designed in the 1880s.

It is a grand building in the French style, with a mighty staircase, grand hall and billiard room. 

Many of our classic mental asylums are on similar (if somewhat less lavish) lines.

Across the country, they were at first absorbed into the NHS, but have been decommissioned over recent years: condemned for their association with a cruelty and abuse, much of which was exposed during the golden age of television documentary film-making at the end of the last century.

It might come as a shock to hear how unfair is the link between the buildings and what went on inside them.  To my parents’ generation the buildings were seen as ‘Victorian Monstrosities’, almost inevitably generating the horrors inside.  But if you look back to the words of the people who commissioned and designed the old asylums, it becomes clear that they had the best of intentions.

Those old asylums are valuable properties now partly because they are often surrounded by extensive grounds.  They had market gardens, farms and workshops, not only for the maintenance of the ‘mother ship’. but also for the restorative effect of work - especially outdoor work - on the inmates.

It’s true that the man behind New Craig, the psychiatrist Sir Thomas Clouston, had some (to us) pretty alarming views about 'self-abuse', and so on, but he and the architect Sydney Mitchell, deliberately built therapeutic features into their plans.  It was their over-medicating successors, and a society reluctant to pay for quality carers who messed everything up. The buildings were not inevitably the cause of that, but somehow it was the buildings, and the concept of large-scale institutional care, that got the blame.

The same is true of general hospitals, with their ‘Nightingale’ wards: designed to provide ventilation, cleanliness and good eyelines for the nurses. It’s hard not to pine for them when visiting the stifling, shopping-mall style centres of infection and neglect built in the past thirty years or so.

But the mental health cycle of enlightenment and horror is not new.  Way back in the 17th century, Robert Hooke was asked to design a new building for the squalid Bethlem (Bedlam) hospital in London.  He did it with as much élan as the buildings he created alongside his friend Sir Christopher Wren.  Even though he was forced to abandon some of the most grandiose elements of his plan, Hooke gave his ‘Bedlam’ airy proportions and even the new sash windows he’d invented and installed in some of the grandest houses of the day.

His aim was to provide an humane environment.  But within a century, under the supervision of 'correctionist' supervisors, who denied inmates the use of the grandest internal or external spaces of the site, the Bedlam at Moorfields was a byword for cruelty and abuse, and playground for voyeurs, paying to watch the lunatics.

The solution?  another new building - this time in Lambeth, on what is now the site of the Imperial War Museum.

In the late 18th century, a crucial 'enlightened' attempt to contain and care for the mentally ill took place at The Retreat in York.  

It was a Quaker institution, and when, in 1797, George Jepson took control there, he introduced a kinder regime than that of his contemporaries elsewhere in the city - not least because he felt that lunatics, like wild animals, were more likely to be tamed by gentleness than force.  The Retreat went on to become a model for asylums worldwide.

I invented an enlightened Victorian mental asylum for one of my books (Montmorency’s Revenge) and set some of the story in a real American example  - Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.

Like so many hospitals, that institution has changed its name as the very words ‘Asylum’ and ‘Insane’ have suffered from an association with the conduct of the mid-20th century doctors and nurses who practiced under its roof.  Language, like building styles, can become contaminated in the public mind.

So did the buildings themselves generate the bad behaviour of the staff inside or the public on the outside?  I like to think not. But then I find myself reflecting on the concrete and steel sheds in which so much modern medicine is practiced, and wondering whether some of today’s heartlessness by be generated, or at least exacerbated by, environmental factors.  It’s hard not to long for the rolling acres of the old asylums. But ultimately, it’s people who are responsible for poor care, and they can find a way to abuse or let down their patients in any environment.  

And finally, in case you’re wondering...

Despite a day-long series of speeches opposing the Craighouse development, the councillors narrowly allowed the plans through, thanks to the developer’s argument that they can’t afford to maintain Craighouse without converting the listed buildings into flats and constructing new residential blocks and car parks on the surrounding land.  That put me in mind of the Vietnam War, and the famous quote from a US Major, explaining the obliteration of Ben Tre in February 1968:  “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it”.

Apparently, Craighouse's A-listed buildings and their surroundings are so needy of TLC that the only way their owner can afford to save them is by contravening multiple planning laws and destroying everything that makes them special.  Never mind that, under the law, the owner of a listed building has an obligation to maintain it.  In future, buying one, and then pleading poverty, will be a ticket to by-passing the planning regulations. Once again the buildings, and not the people, get the blame.

www.eleanorupdale.com

MOOCHING IN MUSEUMS: A photo roundup by Elizabeth Chadwick

Over the last couple of months I've had occasion to be out and about at various appointments and events that have brought me to London.  Whenever I'm in in the capital I always make sure to have my trusty camera with me, and if I can squeeze in a visit to a museum to take research shots and photographs of interesting images (some outside my medieval timeline) then I do.  Those shots, being my personal property can then be used to illustrate my blog, enhance reader interest and enjoyment on my website page, Facebook page and Twitter. They spark lively discussions and help readers to visualise aspects of bygone ages.

My photo archive is also a great inspiration for scene setting and character moments in my novels. I can imagine my characters using these items. I can create anything from an ambience to an entire scene from a photograph.  They are portals through which my imagination can step into the past.

I thought for my monthly turn on the blog, I'd post a selection of my recent shots from The Wallace Museum, the British Museum, the Victorian and Albert Museum and The Museum of London. (and one from a recent visit to Lincoln Cathedral).  My specialist period is the twelfth century, but the wider Medieval is fair game, and I've been known to go earlier and later if something particularly intrigues me!  Enjoy!

Reliquary head of St. Euistace circa 1180 - 1200 from Basle, Switzerland. Fits over a sycamore core containing relics. Made from silver gilt with gems of recycled Roman glass, amethyst, rock crystal and chalcedony.  British Museum.

Anglo Saxon crozier head with what's known as a 'Tau' design to rrepresent the Green letter 'T'. Christ's crucifixion is carved on one side and on the other the risen Christ tramples a lion and a dragon.  Walrus ivory. British Musem.

German horse armour circa 1480.  The Wallace Collection.

Shoe 1660-1680. Leather with silk, embroidered with silk. Wooden heel. English. V&A

Wonderful Italian smoothing iron circa 1700. V&A

Fabulous ring brooch circa 800.  Gilded silver decorated with gold wire and green glass. Elements of both Irish and Scottish design.

Close up of 12thc column from Lincoln Cathedral showing Adam and Eve eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge while the serpent gnaws on their genitals!

Flintlock duelling pistols in case dating to 1810.  Museum of London.

Shoe dating to 1300.  Museum of London.

White flower brooch set with a Sri Lankan pink tourmaline. Possibly a man's hat badge. Circa 1400 British Museum

Water sprinkler for watering tender young plants. 1400-1500 British Musem

Leather protective case to hold a high status drinking cup of Syrian glass. Circa 1400-1500 V&A

And here is the cup itself. Known as the Luck of Edenhall, talisman of the Musgrave family in Cumbria and said to have belonged to the fairies.  In actual fact it's Syrian glass and dates to around 1350. V&A

The V&A also has an area known as 'The Cast Court' where Victorian replica casts of effigies and famous objects can be seen.  This particular one is the head of the effigy of Berengaria of Navarre, queen to Richard I. What especially interests me is the pillow case design.  I love little details like this!

Detail from the Syon Cope 1300-20. Originally a chasuble but adapted foruse as a cope. It's made from linen embroideredwith silk, gilded silver and silver.It probably originates from London.  V&A.

And finally, to finish, something from a later century, but very apt.  A bookish biscuit tin dating to 1901.  I'd love one of these. I've seen them for sale on e-bay but a bit too pricey. The V&A should sell replicas in their shop!

FAT IS A HISTORICAL ISSUE by Leslie Wilson (with a footnote about attacks on artistic freedom)

Writing in the Guardian about the increase in obesity recently, Rosie Boycott, food advisor to the Mayor of London, said (in the middle of some very sensible talk about school dinners) 'Go back fifty years, and virtually no-one was(obese). For women, size 10 and 12 was the norm, rather than 14 and 16 today - and we ate three meals a day, with tea thrown in for special occasions. Most of us didn't eat unless we were sat at a table at a regular time of day.'
I am totally in favour of healthy eating initiatives, nor would I query that there are far more obese people about than there used to be - what I do decry is the rosy glow that is currently bathing the food culture of the '50s - which was, in my memory, dreadful. Granted, I did not eat British food at home, so my memories of it are mainly derived from school dinners. But those school dinners are now also seen in the same glow of nostalgia.

My mother with her pupils, probably about 1960

 I remember fatty stewed meat (which made me retch - I was told it was 'white meat' and wondered who the teacher thought he was fooling), limp salads consisting of one lettuce leaf, one slice of beetroot, a slice of hard-boiled egg (placed next to the beetroot so that the colour could run into it), a quarter tomato, a piece of dried-out cucumber, and a splash of salad cream, which I loathed; at home, we had mayonnaise, plenty of tomato, no ghastly beetroot, and cut-up apple and nuts with the lettuce). And a boiled potato. The vegetables tasted only of steam, having been cooked for hours to beat the resistance out of them. Fish came in a thick stiff jacket of batter; I wanted to leave the batter and only eat the fish, but was forced to 'eat up everything on your plate'. And every day there was pudding; sometimes this was nice, sometimes as penitential as first course (tapioca 'frogspawn' anyone?).
Now, since then I have had traditional British food which was good - my aunt Mollie, who I first went to stay with as a teenager, served up the most wonderful roast dinners, with Yorkshire puddings that floated away, instead of the slabs of moist stodge I had at school. But my impression from my schoolmates was that the first course was to be endured in case the pudding was nice. And often, it was - syrup sponge, for example.
My friends came to school always furnished with one or two bags of sweets, which they mainlined at playtime (so much for only eating when sat down at table). I wasn't allowed sweets except as an occasional treat, which did my popularity no good, as I had nothing to exchange. On the other hand, when the school dentist arrived with his van, they disappeared inside it and emerged, lurching from the effects of gas, and blood running out of their mouths from the extraction.

School nativity play, Holme County Primary School, probably about
1959. I am playing Mary.

Sweet rationing ended in 1953, with what the BBC described as a 'sugar frenzy'. Toffee apples, sticks of nougat, and liquorice strips were the biggest sellers, but men in the City queued up in their lunch breaks to buy boiled sweets and boxes of chocolates to take home. 'One firm in Clapham Common gave 800 children 150lbs of lollipops during their midday break from school.' BBC 'On this Day'. Sugar remained on ration, but after that, people laid into sweet stuff in order to make up for what they felt were the privations of the war years.
I can believe that people might have been trim in the early '50s, when rationing had forced them to eat fairly healthily - but in the later '50s, I can remember plenty of plump ladies who must have been between sizes 16 and 18; indeed, my memory of comfortably-off middle-class ladies was that they were mainly that size, but usually corseted, which gave them the appearance of upholstery. There were less hugely fat people, it is true; they were normally said to have 'glands' (the rest of us being strangely lacking in these anatomical features). There were also fat kids at school with me. 'Puppy-fat' it was called.

Edwardian Northern Irish relatives, showing
the effects of plenty of good farm fare

Go back much further, and you will find plenty of stout people. In an 1890 Girls Own Annual, 'Medicus' handed out advice to girls anxious to lose 'adipose tissue' (a high-protein, low-carb diet with more than a taste of Atkins). Flora Thompson writes in 'Over to Candleford', 'Food had to be of the best quality and not only sufficient, but 'a-plenty' as they expressed their abundance.. Many of the great eaters grew very stout in later life; but this caused them no uneasiness; they regarded their expanding girth as proper to middle age. Thin people were not admired. However cheerful and energetic they might appear, they were suspected of 'fretting away their fat' and warned that they were fast becoming 'walking miseries.' And the nudes of great art were largely - well, what would be considered nowadays to be large.

My Baker grandparents between the wars (centre); I think
it is Auntie Nellie on their right, who is definitely
about size 16.

Fashion models of the past look big, compared to today's hungry-looking striders down the catwalk. And it is odd that, in an era when the admired look is pathologically thin, we have more obese people than ever before.Given the recent study that demonstrated the negative effect of 'fat-shaming' (those who were abused found it much harder to lose weight than people whose own efforts were encouraged and supported) perhaps our culture of 'fat-shaming' is one factor in what we are seeing. Clearly, sugar added to ready meals, and advertising of unhealthy food and drink are also major contributors. Also, we should not forget that for some people, size is not down uncontrolled appetites but to illness. But when unhealthy thinness is paraded as an ideal, and magazines attack celebrities for being slim rather than stick-thin - women in particular are being told that their body is not 'good enough', and that induces despair and hitting the doughnuts.

On quite a different topic - Hilary Mantel is attacked for writing a story about a fantasy attempt on Margaret Thatcher's life. Various Tory politicians want the police sicked onto her (not sure if that is the right spelling, but it seems appropriate.) This is incredible, and smacks of the Thought Police. Thatcher is dead, for God's sake, she never did get assassinated, anyway. So need we beware of what we write now, for fear of the police, even when we are writing about history?

The Angels of Mons by Kate Lord Brown

The commemorative service at Mons during the summer reminded me of an interesting tale from WW1 that I came across researching the work in progress. As ever, much of the research has hit the cutting room floor in the final telling - however tempting it is to shoehorn in a fantastic bit of history, if it doesn't serve the story, you have to let it go. 

On August 23rd 1914 the British Forces were confronted and outnumbered by enemy troops at Mons. The 'Victory by Christmas' looked set to turn into a protracted nightmare. In the heat of the battle - so the legend goes - a soldier called upon St George for help.

The accounts of angelic and divine intervention at Mons came from several sources. Arthur Machen's 'The Bowmen' is one of the most well known. Printed six months after the event, and conveniently 'unable to reveal sources for security reasons' it was at once military propaganda and a morale boost for the troops and public. Machen described the visions as 'English angels with longbows'.

Another account surfaced in a parish sermon, and reached the newspapers. From William Doidge of the Scots Guard, to Brigadier General John Charteris who wrote to his wife on 5th September 1914 of an 'angel of the Lord on a white horse and with a flaming sword', the accounts came from sources across the spectrum of the British forces.

The retreat of the 80,000 from Mons to the Marne saw them caught up in a nightmarish battle of shrieking, thundering guns and shells that tore men limb from limb. In the midst of this furnace of torment, the idea that someone cried 'May St George be a present help to the English' has more than a whiff of propaganda about it. And yet. There are many different accounts of a line of angelic shapes beyond the British line, a cloud of arrows descending on the enemy, and of slain men found with arrow wounds. Or of individual warriors with 'a shining about them', and of three vast angelic figures hovering over enemy lines protecting the British. It was enough to turn one 'old contemptible' I read about from a hard drinker to a teetotal pillar of the community.

Then there was a group of Coldstream Guards, the last to retreat from the Battle of Mons, cut off and lost in the Mormal forest. They had dug in for a valiant last stand, when a tall slim angel apparently beckoned them towards an open field, and a hidden sunken road where they were able to effect their escape from the enemy swarming towards them.

Angelic intervention, or mass hallucination? Whatever the truth, the story of the Angels of Mons helped morale and saw British troops through the hell to come at Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele. It would be interesting to know how many of the HGs have come across tales of supernatural intervention researching their historical periods?

Ightham Mote by Imogen Robertson

Where has she taken us now?

One of the best holidays I had before I left home was when my brothers were travelling far afield and Mum and Dad offered to take me to Shropshire in the caravan. They sweetened the deal by saying they would take me to as many stately homes as I could handle. I can handle a lot of stately homes. 

I’d sit in the caravan of an evening with the National Trust handbook saying ‘I want that, and that and that’, rather in the manner of a Russian oligarch with a copy of the Lady Magazine - though perhaps they don’t do their house choosing in a caravan. 

I stopped studying history at school at fourteen, but had a voracious interest in the matter of history - the houses, the furniture the silted layers of story found in houses made and remade, in the blocked up windows, the great halls with medieval carvings, Tudor panelling and Victorian battle banners. 

I’m not sure I ever really wanted one of my own - though if anyone wants to offer me an estate, I’ll give it a go, but I wondered even then about living under the weight of so much history. It would be like living in your own 3D memento mori. Also my father used to tell us about going to see Lord Barnard - must have been the father of the present one - to give the staff a quote for moving some furniture down to London from Raby Castle, and described him as sitting in one of those deep porter’s chairs in a cavernous hall next to what my father described as ‘rather a meagre fire’. The way he told it made the caravan feel very cosy.

Anyway, my love of snooping around National Trust Properties hasn’t abated with age and I’ve married a man who likes scrabbling around in old stuff too. Neither of us drive though, so when Mum and Dad offered to take us out for a day in Kent and asked if there was anywhere we wanted to go, I was straight on the National Trust site and nominated Ightham Mote near Sevenoaks. 

It’s a gem. A 14th century moated manor house build of Kentish ragstone with a great hall which is still watched over by an oak carving of a green man. There is also some civil war armour in there which they found in the 1890s in the moat. 

Part of the fascination of the place is that it was continuously inhabited from when it was build until the twentieth century, the fabric has not been dramatically altered - only adapted. The Trust has not tried to impose a particular period on the house, so upstairs one finds a former solar set up as a 20th century sitting room and you are encouraged to sit there and read more about the house by the Vicrtorian fireplace by the light pouring through the leaded windows. 

The hand-painted wallpaper 

You go via an Edwardian bathroom to a chapel with 16th century German stained glass and ceilings painted with Tudor roses and into a long drawing room with 18th century hand painted wall paper and a Tudor fireplace. The fireplace was found to be far too large for the room when it was delivered to the house, so the owners raised the roof of that wing to accommodate it. The volunteer guides were enthusiastic and well-informed and had a tangible love of the place. 

The house was nearly lost when it was put up for auction in 1951. The proposal was to demolish it or convert it into flats, but three local men bought it to prevent that happening. They hung onto it until a buyer they could trust with the funds to conserve the house could be found. The eventual purchaser was an American gentleman in who took it on, loved it, and left it to the National Trust on his death.  

I had another reason for going to Ightham Mote though beyond curiosity and the need for a bit of fresh air. I think it will be the model of the house in a novel I’m working on at the moment. I’m not the first to be inspired by the place - wikipedia tells me that both Anne Easter Smith and Anya Seaton have both set novels there. Fair enough, I think I’ll be transporting it to Suffolk and renaming it, but I’ll be keeping the rest from the painted chapel to the fish-filled moat, the surrounding woodland to the medieval orchard and this will be the house my characters live in. I shall give them the glamour and the draughts and observe what happens from the comfort of my centrally heated London flat.

Yes, that is a Grade I listed Doghouse in the courtyard

www.imogenrobertson.com

'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

My husband has a cold. The house reeks of eucalyptus, the bins are full of tissues, and the air is loud with complaint. My sympathy of Day One has eroded into the irritation of Day Four, and it’s only a matter of time before I say, ‘Well, you’re not actually dying, are you?’ 

But of course that’s a modern luxury, and a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have dared say it. A ‘chill’ can lead to bronchitis, pleurisy, or pneumonia, and in the days before antibiotics these were often fatal. It might even be the precursor to influenza – and the pandemic of 1918-1920 killed between 3-5% of the entire world’s population. A mere cough could be the first sign of ‘consumption’, ‘phthisis’, ‘scrofula’, ‘Pott's disease’, or the ‘White Plague’ – the global killer we’ve now learned to call ‘tuberculosis’. Everyone knows that if a character in a historical drama is seen to cough, then the next scene is going to be a funeral.

'At Rest': The death of Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop' by George Cattermole

We still fear some of these things. TB is making a comeback, pandemics are always good for newspaper sales, and we are once again being advised to take precautions our grandparents took for granted. Yet the fact we need to be told to cover our mouths when we cough shows the astonishing degree of our modern complacency. The miracles of modern medicine have stripped away so many of our natural fears that we’ve come to see science as a shield against death itself.

But when we write historical fiction that shield has to be the first thing to go. There’s obviously huge variation in place and period, but awareness of sickness and mortality colours every one of them, and our characters can’t but share in it. How can they do otherwise when they’re seeing it every day?

'The Beggars' by Brueghal the Elder

And really they would be. There’ve been sick beggars on the streets since before even Roman times, and as late as the 17th century it was impossible to walk the length of the Champs Elysée and remain ignorant of the reality of blindness, paralysis, lameness, dropsy, or even disfiguring cancers. Nor was visible sickness restricted to the poor. Smallpox struck kings as well as paupers, and even Elizabeth I bore the scars of it on her face and hands as evidence that she had faced death and survived. Almost equally prevalent (especially in mainland Europe) were the terrible signs of syphilis, on which many medieval church gargoyles are deliberately modelled to show the deadly wages of sin.

Smallpox victim 1911 Illinois                 Bust of tertiary syphilis

But syphilis didn’t end in medieval times, and neither did most of these other horrors. Fast forward to the civilization of Victorian England and we can laugh at the grotesque minor characters populating Dickens’ novels – but the truth is that he was largely describing what he saw. Some deformities were caused by accidents or war wounds – eye-patches, wooden legs, and hooks for hands – but many others are immediately recognizable to doctors as the result of childhood illness or malnutrition. 

'The Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall' from 'Nicholas Nickleby' by Phiz

Goitres were a consequence of iodine deficiency, ‘hunchback’ is kyphosis, often caused by poor childhood nutrition, bandy legs were a sign of rickets, while ‘cripples’ with atrophied limbs were probably victims of polio. Many of these conditions are still with us in the poorer countries, and when we look at those heartbreaking photographs of children with cleft lips and palates it’s hard to believe that not very long ago we’d have seen these in London too.

 

 

 All these things are an essential part of the ‘historical world’, and we often have enormous fun writing them. With In the Name of the King I was delighted to find the real character of Fontrailles was genuinely a ‘hunchback’, and only wish I’d had the space to develop the ways in which that affected his personality. I also took a hideously writerly pleasure in basing my fictional Comte de Vallon on a real-life syphilitic nobleman whose return to society was eased by Louis XIV requesting his courtiers ‘not to notice his having no nose.’ Anything out of the ordinary is grist to a novelist’s mill, and I was going to grind it all I could.

But sometimes it’s in the 'ordinary' that the real gold is buried. We can write historical novels where nobody gets ill at all, and yet the characters will still have been shaped by a world in which these things happen. Their perception of cruelty will be different, their ideas of fairness, even their concept of religion, and they will be constantly aware of their own mortality. Dreadful as they were, the hunchbacks and crooked legs were tokens of those who had survived, and served as a terrible reminder of the many who did not.

People could and did die of the most minor things, and the fact they were so imperfectly understood only added to the sense of a random destiny that could strike at any time. This 1665 Bill of Mortality raises far more questions than it answers, and while ‘sore legge’ might be tetanus, for instance, what are we to make of medical causes of death listed as ‘Bedridden’, ‘Suddenly’, or even ‘Grief’? Yet the one that brings home to me most powerfully the reality of the pre-antibiotic world is described in that ominously single word – ‘Teeth’.

And of course we have to show this awareness in our writing. We can’t have characters say modestly ‘It’s just a scratch’ when everyone would have known that a scratch could kill. We can’t even give them a quick bout of toothache and then forget about it. Ridiculous as it is, we even have to let most of our characters believe it’s possible to die of a broken heart.

But the risk that would have affected most people sooner or later is that of pregnancy, and we can’t ever take that lightly. Even today we know of the risks of miscarriage, and many couples won’t officially announce a pregnancy until the first three months are safely passed – but in the case of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, the Queen was never acknowledged to have even been pregnant until the child was born and had stayed alive a full calendar month.

Madame de Sevigne by Lefebvre

The risk to the mother was almost as great, as we see in that figure of 23 childbed deaths in a week. In 1671 the famous French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné began a letter to her married daughter in this rather cryptic fashion:

 

'Today is the sixth of March. I beg you to tell me how you are. If you are well, you are ill, but if you are ill, then you are well. I hope, my child that you are ill, so that you will be in good health for at least some time to come.’

The mystery is clear once we realize the daughter was due to menstruate, and what her mother feared more than anything was another pregnancy.

But what I actually find most fascinating about that letter is the way phrases we now use as mere formulae had real meaning in the past. ‘Tell me how you are’ is not the standard ‘How are you?’ with which we greet each other today, usually hoping we won’t be told the answer. Those of us over a certain age still tend to begin letters with the polite ‘I hope you’re well’, but this has already come to signify a broader enquiry in which health plays little part.

1864 Civil War letter with standard opening

It was different in the 19th century. I included a letter in Into the Valley of Death which began with the then-standard phrase ‘I hope this finds you well as it leaves me’, but it wasn’t until a reader asked me about it that I began to see its real significance. Outside London, a letter could take days to reach the recipient, and the writer’s awareness of time reveals a very real concern for the risk of ill-health. The most they’ll commit to is ‘I’m well at the time of writing’, because they know perfectly well that in a week or so they may not be. This seems strange in a time when even the most deadly disease usually gives the sufferer at least a few more months of life – but in 1854 a man who wrote ‘I am well’ on Monday could be dead by Friday. It’s true the phrase is a standard one and would often have been used without conscious thought, but behind it is a mindset that knows the sword of Damocles can fall at any minute.

And this one phrase exemplifies two of the things I love most about writing historical fiction. The first is the everyday reality of a bygone world, which can give us not only great texture but also the kind of plot development unthinkable in a contemporary work. 

 My favourite example is in Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Bennet walks in the rain to a dinner with two desirable bachelors, and quickly develops a cold which makes her return impossible. The house is only three miles away from her own home, but she is of course too ill to be moved, and in such a condition that requires her equally marriageable sister Lizzy to come and attend her.

This is brilliant. True, if Jane’s cold had been anything like my husband’s then her hosts would have bundled her out of the house in two minutes flat, but if we assume the phlegmier stages were passed invisibly in the bedroom, then the plot mechanics are perfect – and I challenge anyone to devise a contemporary narrative which would achieve such a result.

But, as usual with Austen, there’s far more going on here than plot. Jane’s mother deliberately sent her daughter out in the rain in the hope of engineering this very situation, and Mr Bennet is only half-joking when he hopes she’ll find it a comfort if her daughter dies following her orders. Austen is of course writing about her own time, but she uses those perceptions to create both story and character unique to that age, and I'd love to be able to emulate her.

But the second aspect I love is the Sword of Damocles itself, and the way in which awareness of death gives an extraordinary intensity to life. Our own lives are too safe to imagine it easily, but I’ve found the most useful comparison is to wartime. When living through war we’re all at once back in a time when life is cheap, death can strike without warning, and the only moment there might ever be is now. We might normally find incomprehensible the religious fervour of bygone ages, but even an atheist prays when the house they’re sitting in is being bombed. We might laugh at the superstition of the past, but from verbal rituals to ‘lucky socks’, you’ll find no people more superstitious than soldiers in even a modern war.

Everything is more concentrated and intense. The friendship forged between men who face death together is far deeper than that between those who use the same coffee machine, and when time is short, then love and passion soar as never before. And people take risks. Mad, exhilarating, even heroic risks – because there is so little to lose. Live through war, and we begin to understand some of the heroic lunacy of even sixteenth century peacetime, when men and women risked their lives for power, for politics, for religion, and for love.

It's no coincidence that the most passionate romances are often set in war

I write war in my novels anyway, but I’d still want to study it for the insight it can give us into the past. War is a magic door that can take me right back in time, to a world where death lurks round every corner - and where there are far worse things to deal with than my husband’s cold. 

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Well, OK, I am A L Berridge really, just filling in a gap in the schedule. And I hope you noticed I didn't mention Crimea even once...