History Today 01-2016

January 2016
Vol 66 Issue 1
SIKKIM
A pawn between
India and China
GYPSIES
500 years of fact

and fantasy
TERROR
Defeating ISIS
with history
SHELL
SHOCK
The Strange Hell of Warfare
Publisher Andy Patterson

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18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
2 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2016
IN THE TESTS designed to identify those of subnormal intelligence, I proved

unable to assemble a bicycle pump, confesses Keith Thomas in Army Life, an essay
published in Resplendent Adventures with Britannia (IB Tauris, 2015). It did not stop
this priggish innocent from being posted to the Royal Engineers during his National
Service, much of which was spent in the Caribbean (he was too young to fight in the
Korean War, from which some of his colleagues never returned). Nor did it prevent
him from becoming a fellow of All Souls and the author of one of the great historical
studies produced during the postwar years, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in
Popular Beliefs in 16th- and 17th-century England (1971).
The elegance, irony and erudition on display in Thomas essay is typical of the
learning lightly worn in Wm. Roger Louis enthralling compilations, which began
with Adventures With Britannia in 1995, have continued with regularity ever since as
More Adventures (1998), Still More Adventures (2003), Penultimate Adventures (2007)
and so on and has now reached its 12th volume.
The line up of contributors to the series is a remarkable one and testament to the
esteem in which Louis, Professor of English History and Culture at the University of
Texas and Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford History of the British Empire, is held. The latest
volume includes, as do all its predecessors, many names familiar to readers of History
Today: in addition to Thomas there are offerings by Jane Ohlmeyer, Archie Brown,
Lawrence Goldman and Bernard Porter.
There are few more pleasurable means to understanding Britain and its long
engagement with the world, for good and bad, than these collections, which have
contained some of the best history writing of the last two decades. I think especially
of Simon Green on the decline of English puritanism (attributed in part to wartime
rationing), Avi Shlaim on the Balfour Declaration (judged one of the greatest
mistakes in our imperial history) and Richard Davenport-Hines on the wholly
unstable Gordon of Khartoum (whose response to watching a performance of the
Paris ballet is priceless).
Louis and IB Tauris are to be congratulated on this series which, along with your
copy of History Today, is the perfect accompaniment to those long winter evenings.
Long may it run.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Counter-terrorism Citron DS St Pauls in the Blitz Ravensbrck
Too Tolerant of Terror?

The Victorians were wedded to fundamental tenets of liberalism, even
when threatened with terrorism from abroad.
Bernard Porter
THE NOVEMBER terrorist attacks in
Paris heightened concerns across the
Channel. London has already endured
its own experience of Islamist terror,
in July 2005, though Britain has long
faced terrorist threats. In the 1880s
the Fenians, precursors of the IRA,
bombed several targets in the capital,
including the Tower of London and
the offices of The Times. Around
the turn of the century there was a
widespread scare about anarchists,
who had murdered innocents in
Parisian cafs and a Barcelona theatre,
as well as judges and heads of state.
They were also active in Britain: a
bomb-making factory was discovered
in the West Midlands town of Walsall
in 1892 and a device exploded prematurely near Greenwich Observatory

in 1894, killing the bomber himself.
That campaign gave rise to a plethora
of sensational novels, the best-known
of which is Joseph Conrads The Secret
Agent (1907). Another, George Glendons The Emperor of the Air (1910),
even anticipated 9/11. That is without
going back to the Gunpowder Plot of
1605 or forward to more recent IRA
bombings. Reactions to these threats,
however, have varied. It is worth
remembering how and why.
Victorian Britain was wedded to
two great principles, which were supposed to distinguish her as a nation.
The first was that she welcomed or
tolerated foreign refugees, due to
the lack of any effective legal means
Inept: anarchist
Martial Bourdon
is blown up by
his own bomb at
Greenwich Park,
illustration from
the Chronicle, 1894.
of denying entry to any foreigner who

arrived, or the capacity to expel any
immigrant, certainly any political
one. Victorian Britain put up with
fierce foreign critics, including Marx
and Engels, for many years and dozens
of Continental anarchists. Added to
this free entry principle was another:
massive public opposition to espionage. This made it difficult to find out
what bombers and other malcontents
were doing in Britain (not Ireland
and the colonies, though, which were
more rigorously policed). The latter
principle was sometimes broken: at
the beginning of the 19th century,
against democrats and Chartists; in
the middle of the century, when one
man Sergeant John Sanders reported on French refugees; and from the
1880s, with the help of a new London
Police Special Branch, charged with
preventing Fenian attacks. These
however were exceptions and usually
rather incompetent. (The Special
Branch was still keeping a watch on
Marx two years after his death.) They
also kept themselves hidden from the
public, Parliament and even ministers
(Gladstone once deliberately absented
himself from a Cabinet meeting
because he knew the subject of surveillance was coming up).
If hints of underhand police activity ever got out, there was usually
a public outcry. One government got
into serious difficulties in 1844 when
it was discovered that the letters of
the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe
Mazzini were being opened at the
Post Office; another fell (though this
was not the sole reason) in 1858,
when Palmerston tried to pass legislation enabling foreigners in Britain
to be tried in the country though
not expelled, which was out of the
question for terrorist acts committed abroad. That was because foreign
governments were increasingly irate
at Britain for sheltering these desperadoes, almost as if as one French
propagandist claimed it was
JANUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
deliberately using them to undermine

its European rivals.
Many of Britains rulers sympathised, though they could not admit this
in public. They had a lot in common
with their aristocratic cousins
overseas more perhaps than with
most of their fellow subjects. The
latter viewed espionage as intrinsically dishonourable and prone to
corruption. Indeed, the Metropolitan
Polices earliest plain-clothes branch
seemed to bear that out when it was
Spydom was held to be one of

the causes of much of the unrest
to be seen on the Continent
implicated in a betting fraud that it
was supposed to be investigating. In
the 20th century, when the secret services finally emerged, albeit mistily,
agents were suspected of plotting
against governments they did not
like. You could not trust them, nor
any government that resorted to such
practice. And trust was necessary to
keep the populace loyal. Should the
practice of spydom become universal, pronounced The Times in 1859,
farewell to all domestic confidence
and happiness.
Indeed, spydom was held to be
one of the causes of much of the
unrest to be seen on the Continent.
Terrorism was nurtured by what
today we would call police states.
It followed (a) that it was the fault
of foreign governments, if terrorists
caused them problems; and (b) that
they could do little harm in Britain.
Palmerston expressed this concept
picturesquely in 1852:
A single spark will explode a powder
magazine, and a blazing torch will
burn out harmless on a turnpike road.
If a country be in a state of suppressed
internal discontent, a very slight indication may augment that discontent, and
produce an explosion; but if the country
be well governed, and the people be
contented, then letters and proclamations
from unhappy refugees will be as harmless as the torch upon the turnpike road.
This boosted Britons amour propre
immensely; which was perhaps the
main reason why they neglected the

most obvious counter-terrorist measures secret policing and the power
to exclude or expel foreigners until
1905 (the first modern Aliens Act) and
1911 (when MI5 was born). It showed
how superior Britain was.
Happy days. Circumstances are different now. If 19th-century anarchists
and modern jihadists have much in
common chiefly a bestial disregard
for human life todays suicide
bombers disregard for their own
lives, encouraged by a perverted
form of their religion, makes them
more dangerous, as does their access
to far more dangerous and efficient
weaponry. (The Greenwich bomber
did not intend to blow himself up;
the advance of terror is an example of
history beginning as farce and ending
in tragedy.) So Britains surveillance
state (with its accompanying CCTV
cameras, largely absent in Paris) and
the new counter-terrorist powers
sought by governments may be justified. Even so, Britons should be aware
of what they have lost as a nation by
embracing such measures: an essential
part of their historical identity, no
less. They should also ponder the
reasons for Victorian objections to
secret domestic surveillance, in particular. Some of these may still stand.
Bernard Porters latest books are British Imperial:
What the Empire Wasnt and Empire Ways, a
collection of essays (both IB Tauris, 2015).
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
60 Years of the
Citron DS
French innovations in style

and design revolutionised
our concept of the car.
Andrew Roberts
ANY VISITOR to the London Motor
Show on October 19th, 1955 would not
have lacked for interesting cars for the
price of a ticket. There was the new 2.4
litre compact saloon from Jaguar, the
latest MGA sports car and Rolls Royce
Silver Cloud, plus a Sunbeam Rapier
coup with its exuberant (or vulgar)
whitewall tyres. There was even a
Daimler Golden Zebra displayed by the
famed coachbuilders Hooper for anyone
who wanted to spend a vast amount
of money on a gold-plated coup with
upholstery from an unfortunate animal.
But even this paled in comparison with
the vehicle innocuously billed as the
2-Litre Six-Seater saloon on the Citron
stand.
To the average British motorist of 60
years ago, the DS claimed to be a motor
car but was clearly an escapee from
Hammer film studios. Some visitors fled
to the safe haven of the StandardTriumph display, where the Vanguard
Phase III was as reassuringly sensible
as an army vest, but others stayed to
marvel at a car that represented a new
future. All the joys of restful motoring
are yours in the new Citron 2-Litre,
claimed the British market brochures,
but the French sales slogan was rather
more accurate. Quand vous avez dit
Citron, vous avez tout dit (When you
have said Citron, there is nothing
more to say) and the DS rendered many
Earls Court visitors speechless.
Citron was not an unfamiliar
marque in the UK; between 1926 and
1965 their assembly plant in Slough
produced cars for the British and
Commonwealth markets in order to
circumvent swingeing import duties. For
the previous 21 years their staple offering had been the Traction Avant range,
familiar from newsreels and made when
front-wheel drive was a novelty to the
average Austin driver. This was augmented in 1954 by a Berkshire version
HISTORYMATTERS
Daring design:
Francine Breaud,
wife of singer
Sacha Distel, and
the Citron DS.
France, 1955.
It was the DS styling that caused the

initial sensation, for even in repose it
looked like a basking shark
of the 2CV, a favourite of the motoring
press but regarded with suspicion by
Morris Minor owners, who did not perceive the appeal in a car that looked like
a mobile greenhouse. Readers of
the Motor and Autocar would also have
been aware of the DS from coverage
of its French debut and they may have
seen Gina Lollobrigida with the new
Citron on the cover of Octobers Paris
Match. But pictures alone could never
compare with that encounter at the
Earls Court show.
Citron had been working on their
Voiture Grande Diffusion (VGD) project
since the 1930s. Development continued
in secret during the Second World War
and it was in 1942 that the engineer
Paul Mags proposed that hydraulic
power could not only level the VGDs
suspension but also power the brakes,
steering and transmission. By 1950 the
prototype was renamed Projet D and
five years later, on October 5th, 1955, the
DS was launched at the Paris Salon; by
the end of that day Citron had taken
over 12,000 orders.

It was the DS styling that caused
the initial sensation, for even in repose
it looked like a basking shark. In the
immortal words of Roland Barthes 1957
essay The New Citron:
It is obvious that the new Citron has fallen
from the sky in as much as it appears at first
sight as a superlative object The DS the
goddess has all the features of one of those
objects from another universe which have
supplied fuel for the neomania of the 18th
century and that of our own science fiction.
The Traction Avants replacement made
its debut at a time when aerodynamics to the lay person often inferred the
use of tail fins, especially on Detroit
cars such as Fords Thunderbird or the
second-generation Chevrolet Bel Air.
But the new Citron was almost entirely
lacking in chrome direction, exaggerated
wings or any form of adornment per se.
Flaminio Bertoni, the companys
design maestro, wanted to create a car
in which form and function coexisted
in a perfect fusion and the coachwork

of the DS was not merely incredibly
aerodynamic but defined its own terms.
Beneath his coachwork was the 1.9 litre
Traction Avant engine driving the front
wheels but that and the double chevron
badge were the only familiar reference
points. There was hydro-pneumatic
suspension that allowed the driver to
raise or lower the DS as road conditions
demanded and hydraulic power for the
semi-automatic transmission, steering
and dual circuit brakes. At a time when
a Rover or Wolseley would have been
virtually naked without its hide trim and
timber-decorated fascia, the Citron
delighted in its use of artificial materials. In place of a wooden fascia studded
with Bakelite switches, the DS featured
a one-piece moulding made from plastics. Indeed, Andr Lefebvre, the chief
design engineer of Citron, revelled in
the fact that he was one of the first
Frenchmen to wear a nylon shirt.
The Citron DS was a car that set
out its own terms from the outset,
down to the seemingly minutest detail.
The doors were devoid of window
frames and there were rear indicators
designed to be in the eye line of following motorists when not a few British
cars still used semaphore trafficators.
In 1955 winter motoring meant duffle
coats and freezing but the DS sported a
comprehensive heating and ventilation
system, complete with ducts to the rear
seat and dashboard-mounted fresh air
vents. The slim pillars meant for excellent visibility, unlike peering through
the porthole-like window of a UK-built
rival, and the roof was constructed of
fibreglass in order to lower the centre
of gravity. Even the act of starting the
engine caused any number of hissing
noises and the unforgettable sight of
the DS rising on its haunches.
A Slough-built version of the DS
was launched in 1956, featuring leather
trim and a walnut-veneered dashboard,
but these concessions to British tastes
only highlighted how different the
Citron was and indeed still is, for the
2-Litre transcended mere fashion and
redefined the idea of what a car could
represent.
Andrew Roberts writes on the history of cinema

and popular culture.
HISTORYMATTERS
Image Wars
A great photograph of the
Second World War offers
many interpretations.
Tom Allbeson
FROM SEPTEMBER 1940, the Luftwaffe
attacked UK cities in what became
known as the Blitz. By the end of 1941,
41,987 civilians had been killed. At the
height of the bombing of London,
Associated Newspapers photographer
Herbert Mason was on a City rooftop.
He took at least three photographs
of the skyline alive with flames and
smoke. One of these was a photograph of St Pauls, used ever since as
visual shorthand for, not only the Blitz,
but Britains role in the conflict. It was
first published on December 31st, 1940,
on the front page of the Daily Mail.
Wrens cathedral was freighted with
symbolism. It evoked the Great Fire of
1666, for one, and the devastation of
December 29th, 1940 quickly earned the
sobriquet of the Second Great Fire. The
editors of the Daily Mail (the strapline of
which, was For King and Empire) drew
on such associations. The photograph
was cropped to emphasise the dome
of St Pauls and to minimise the gutted
buildings conspicuous in the original.
The audience addressed by the photograph despite paper rationing,
the Daily Mail had a circulation of
around 1,450,000 was encouraged to
cherish this picture as a symbol of the
steadiness of Londons stand against the
enemy: the firmness of Right against
Wrong. Masons image was presented
as nothing short of a symbol of civilisation itself.
Such allusions were repeated when
the photograph was reprinted in the
Illustrated London News on January 4th,
1941 as, a symbol of the indestructible
faith of the whole civilised world. In the
US (not yet at war with Germany), the
photograph appeared in Life magazine
that same month.
This frame of reference was turned
on its head when, soon after, the photograph appeared in the German photomagazine Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. Here
it bore the legend, The City of London
Burns. Rather than wreathing the
Opposing view:
front page of
the Berliner
Illustrierte Zeitung,
January 23rd, 1941.
dome, the caption asserted, the clouds

of smoke obscured the extent of the
damage. Emphasis was placed on associations of the City of London with high
finance. The photograph was framed
not as a symbol of endurance, but as
that of a dangerous enemy.
Such a hostile gloss is almost inconceivable in Britain, though little about
the photograph, which conveys sparse
detail about the Blitz, makes such positive associations inevitable. It is rather
the repeated investment in the photograph of particular meanings, through
the uses to which it has been put and
the captions which have accompanied
it that has established this seemingly
obvious significance.
For a brief moment in the 1940s and
early 50s the photograph played a different role in British visual culture, when
it assumed significance in the debate
about postwar reconstruction, which
had begun as the bombs fell. Ralph
Tubbs used an uncropped version of the
image in Living in Cities (1942). Giving
equal prominence to the ruins and the
dome, Masons St Pauls (captioned The
New Opportunity) helped present the
destruction of the Blitz as a chance to
improve the public and domestic spaces
of Britain through the application of
modern architectural and townplanning principles. This campaigning
booklet, setting out a bold vision of a
London likened to Wrens unrealised

masterplan, sold 134,000 copies.
The buildings symbolic value also
made St Pauls a key element of that
renowned postwar spectacle, the Festival of Britain, opened by George VI
from the steps of the cathedral before
a procession made its way to the
festivals South Bank site. Dominated by
Tubbs Dome of Discovery, an imposing
modern structure with a circumference
of 365ft, matching exactly the height of
St Pauls, the festival received over eight
million visitors before closing in September. Thus, while in wartime Masons
photograph was associated with the
Blitz spirit, in the postwar period it
was used to promote the Spirit of 45:
the desire to build a different Britain, expressed in the Labour manifesto of that
year (Let us Face the Future) and the
establishment of the NHS in 1948.
In subsequent decades Masons
photograph was uncoupled from any
progressive postwar agenda. Opinion
turned against the architecture of
reconstruction to such an extent that, in
his Mansion House speech of December
1987, the Prince of Wales could (without
any sense of dissonance) invoke Masons
photograph as part of an indictment of
the postwar rebuilding of London: You
have, Ladies and Gentlemen, to give
this much to the Luftwaffe, he said.
When it knocked down our buildings it
didnt replace them with anything more
offensive than rubble. We did that.
Masons photograph has been a vital
part of diverse visualisations of the Blitz,
which have, in turn, bolstered messages or arguments with contrasting
political agendas. The malleability of
the photograph accounts in part for its
wide circulation. The volume and variety
of its uses should compel historians to
consider in greater depth the role of the
image in shaping collective attitudes
and memories of historic events. Images
as widely circulated as Masons can be
formative influences on our understanding of history, helping to create
and promote particular views of the
past. They constitute what, alongside
cultural and social history, we might
term visual history and they demand
greater attention.
Tom Allbeson is Lecturer in Modern History at

Swansea University.
HISTORYMATTERS
Together:
Zwei Stehende
(Two Women
Standing), a
monument to
Ravensbrck.
Women of Ravensbrck
The site of the concentration camp near Berlin remains little known.
Anne Sebba
THE QUESTION of how we should
commemorate the concentration camps
is a live one. On a bitterly cold day in
November I took the train from Berlin
to Frstenburg, a village to the north,
where women destined for Ravensbrck
were let out of their overcrowded cattle
trucks to be marched to the camp itself.
Some French resisters, sent there
as late as summer 1944, had endured
months in other prisons and thought
the new camp might at least offer them
a chance to work outside, a hope they
grasped on arrival as they smelled the
salty Baltic air. But, as Jacqueline dAlincourt wrote, they were soon disabused
of this notion: We were forced to step
out amid the yelling of guards accompanied by their dogs, tugging at their
leashes, showing their fangs. Fists rained
down upon us.
The camp location, amid forests and
lakes, was chosen by Heinrich Himmler
because it was far enough away for
people not to know about it, yet within
reach of the railway station at Frstenburg, which, then as now, had a direct
link to Berlin. Built in 1939 as the only
all-women camp, Ravensbrck was
intended for social outcasts, gypsies,
political dissenters, foreign resisters,
the disabled and other inferior beings.
Some 130,000 women from 20 different
nationalities passed through it. Around

30,000 to 50,000 people were killed
there, yet Ravensbrck was not an extermination camp only about 10 per
cent of its inmates were Jews rather
it was a place of punishment, which
provided slave labour to some of the
thousands of sub-camps fuelling the
Nazi war machine, the most notorious
being the Siemens and Halske plant.
Among its inmates were Genvieve
de Gaulle, niece of the General, the
British Special Operations Executive
(SOE) agent Odette Sansom, who later
became Odette Churchill, and French
ethnographer Germaine Tillion, who
composed an opera in the camp based
on the story of Orpheus. It was also
the scene of horrific medical experimentation on young Polish women,
known as lapins (guinea pigs), some
of whom had their legs cut open and
infected with bacteria and glass shards
to simulate the effect of shrapnel.
In March 1945, when it was clear
the defeat of Nazi Germany was only a
matter of time, the Swedish Red Cross
sent buses to rescue some prisoners,
but Ravensbrck was not liberated by
the Red Army until April 30th. After
the war the Soviets used the site as
an army training camp and, although
there is a Soviet-era tank serving as a
memorial on the road from Frstenburg, investigation of what went on
there was discouraged once the Iron

Curtain descended. Today there is a
visitor centre and a building known as
the Bunker the prison cells within the
camp used for additional punishment
and torture has been refurbished. The
crematorium remains untouched.
Overlooking the lake, there is a large
sculpture by Will Lammert, Tragende,
of an emaciated woman carrying the
burden of another human being. Yet,
short of forcing all visitors to strip,
starve, endure fear and beatings, how
can one imagine what it felt like to be
here in 1944. On the day I was there the
vastness of the empty white Appelplatz
was a powerful reminder of just how
barren the site is of all signs of humanity. During my visit to Berlin, random
questions to young Germans as to what
they knew about Ravensbrck, only an
hour away, met with vacant stares.
Berlin has done much to draw attention to its Jewish past, with stolperstein
plaques embedded in pavements recording former Jewish inhabitants murdered by the Nazis, memorial signposts
in the former Jewish quarter and even
pictures in some train stations of wellknown Jews who once lived in that area.
Yet Ravensbrck is little known and not
encouraged to be part of any cultural
itinerary for tourists. Perhaps that is as it
should be, to avoid succumbing to what
has been called holocaust tourism.
In April 2015, to mark the 70th
anniversary of its liberation, 90 former
inmates gathered, probably for the last
time. Annette Chalut, arrested as a
teenager, now 90 and honorary Chair of
the International Ravensbrck Committee, said: Vigilance is our absolute duty.
Evil can return at any time, and we are
not allowed to forget what happened
here. With those remarks echoing in my
head, I emerged from my hotel to see a
group of schoolchildren on hands and
knees scrubbing the stolperstein with
toothbrushes and cleaning fluid. No,
they had not been to Ravensbruck, they
told me, but they knew of it. Its very
important to know about your history,
volunteered one of the 14-year-old boys,
especially if you are German.
Anne Sebbas next book is Les Parisiennes: How

Women Lived, Loved and Died in Paris from
1939-49 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016).
MonthsPast
JANUARY
By Richard Cavendish
JANUARY 13th 1691
George Fox
dies in London
THE STREET in Fenny Drayton, the
Leicestershire village where the founder
of the Quakers grew up, is now called
George Fox Lane in his honour. He
was the son of a prosperous weaver,
who was a churchwarden of the solidly
puritan local parish. He later recalled that
he had been an exceptionally serious
boy, of much gravity and staidness of
mind and spirit. He was deeply religious,
but he became equally deeply uncertain
about Christian doctrines and values.
From the age of 19 in 1643, with the
Civil War raging in a period of upheaval
and uncertainty, young Fox spent much
of his time for several years wandering
around the Midlands, keeping to areas
under parliamentary control, talking to
puritan ministers and others to try to
clear his own mind. He had been a cobblers apprentice for a time and so could
earn money to support himself. He grew
increasingly dubious about the Church of
England and suffered from severe fits of
depression, until at last in 1647 he heard
a voice that told him: There is one, even
Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition. His heart, he said, did leap for joy.
The experience finally convinced
him that no notice should be taken
of established teachers and practices.
The believer should rely on the Bible,
but even more on his own inner guide,
which came direct from God. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and all
church rituals and he advanced religious
and social opinions more radical and
individualistic than even most puritans
accepted. He disapproved of swearing
oaths and paying clergy and he was a
pacifist. He frowned on titles and class
distinctions, the theatre and maypoles.
It was not necessary to go to a building
to worship; it could be done in the open
fields because God is everywhere.
First Quaker:
George Fox in a
contemporary
engraving.
Believing in simplicity, wearing

plain clothes and using straightforward
speech and manners, Fox began to go
about preaching his message in the
Midlands and in the northern counties, in
Westmoreland, Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Now magnetically self-confident, he
began to attract followers, some of
whom would travel with him at times
to form a varying group of missionaries.
From the 1650s there were Quakers
in London. His emphasis on following
ones own inner guide inevitably caused
disagreements and desertions, but still
numbers grew.
Fox several times found himself
in prison for blasphemy. He and his
followers began to be called Quakers,
after a judge in Derby in 1650 mocked
his exhortation to tremble at the word
of the Lord. They referred to themselves
as Children of the Light or Friends of the
Truth (the Society of Friends came much
later). Organised Quaker congregations
were now holding regular meetings,

but persecution of them grew worse
after the collapse of the Commonwealth
regime and the restoration of Charles II
in 1660. Fox began to look abroad
and over the next decades he travelled to Ireland, the Caribbean, North
America and the Netherlands to spread
his message. William Penn, a close
ally, founded the American colony of
Pennsylvania in the 1680s as a refuge for
Quakers. Persecution eased off with the
Act of Toleration of 1689 after William of
Orange had become king.
Meanwhile, in the 1650s Fox had
inherited a legacy from his father which
made him financially secure and in 1669
he had married Margaret Fell, a Quaker
widow with eight children, who, for the
rest of his life, was a key missionary, organiser and influence on him. She helped
to convince him that women should
have equal treatment with men and he
was a kind stepfather. About 1675 he dictated his memoirs, which were published
as his Journal after his death.
In his latter years Fox lived in or near
London, staying with friends, preaching
at meetings and attending committees.
The oldest meeting house in London was
off Gracechurch Street, not far from the
Guildhall, and on January 11th, 1691 Fox
preached at the meeting there. Afterwards he said a feeling of cold had struck
his heart and he retreated to bed at the
nearby house of a Quaker he had stayed
with before. To anxious friends at his
bedside he said: All is well. The seed of
God reigns over all and over death itself.
He died in the evening two days later of
heart failure, aged 66.
Many Quakers and other Nonconformists had been interred in the
Bunhill Fields burial ground to the north
of the City, because it had never been
consecrated and so they did not have
to use the Prayer Book. On January 16th
thousands accompanied Foxs coffin as
it was carried there and buried. The sect
he had founded would spread to the
whole world.
JANUARY 1st 1791
Joseph Haydn
arrives in
England
SINCE THE early 1760s the great
Austrian composer, the father of
the symphony, had been master of
music to the Esterhazy family, the
leading Hungarian aristocrats in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. At their
palace in Hungary he composed music
for them and organised and conducted their orchestra and choir. In 1790,
however, a new Prince Esterhazy,
with no interest in music, cut spending severely, including Haydns salary.
At this point the unhappy composer
was approached by a concert promoter called Johann Peter Salomon, who
suggested they go to England where
he could organise mutually profitable
concerts. When his friend Mozart
pointed out that Haydn did not speak
a word of English, he is said to have
replied: My language is understood
throughout the world!
Father of the
symphony: Papa
Haydn portrayed
by Thomas Hardy,
1792.
By way of Munich and Bonn the

two men reached Calais on New
Years Eve and next day took ship
for Dover and went on to London.
Haydn, now 58, was both excited and
alarmed by the vast size of the city,
the numbers of people, the crush
of traffic and the
deafening noise,
but his music was
hugely admired
in England and a
week or so later
he told a friend
that his arrival had
caused a sensation.
It had been in all
the newspapers for
three days and he
had dined out for
six days already. He
promptly started
taking English
lessons, as aristocrats and leading
musical and literary figures swarmed
to meet him. He was invited to a ball
at court and taken up by the Prince
of Wales (the future Prince Regent),
who became his main royal patron.
Salomon organised Haydns
JANUARY 27th 1966
Hedy Lamarr
arrested for
shoplifting
THE HOLLYWOOD star was famed
more for her looks and her sexy roles
than for acting. By 1966, aged 51, with
her career in tatters, she was living
alone in Los Angeles after the collapse
of her fourth marriage and worrying
about ageing and money. One day she
went shopping in the big May Company
department store with a man named
Earl Mills and was seen dropping items
in her shopping bag, while Mills went to
get the car. She then walked out without
paying, but a store detective, who
thought she had seen her at the same
game before, stopped her and took her
back in. The clothes and other items in
the bag were worth $86 and Lamarr said
she would pay at once, but the store

manager called the police and she was
taken to jail before being released on
bail. She afterwards said she had given
Mills a blank cheque to pay for her purchases, but he did not confirm that.
Light fingered:
Hedy Lamarr
(right), with Andy
Williams and
Corinne Tsopei at
the Golden Globes,
Los Angeles, 1967.
first concert early in March and it

reportedly attracted homage and
even adulation. Charles Burney, the
music historian, said that the mere
sight of the great man presiding from
the piano electrified the audience and
excited an attention and a pleasure
superior to any ever before given to
instrumental music in England.
Besides handsome profits and all
the adulation, Haydn was giving piano
lessons to a wealthy and attractive
widow called Rebecca Schroeter and
a passionate affair developed. He
went back to the Continent in 1792,
but presided over another series of
concerts in England in 1794 and 1795.
George III offered him accommodation at Windsor Castle if he would
stay in England permanently, but the
composer declined.
Haydn wrote 12 symphonies and
numerous other compositions in
England. He eventually died in Vienna
in 1809, utterly worn out at the age
of 77. In a bizarre sequel, his head
was secretly cut off and stolen for
a phrenological examination which
concluded that his bump of music
was fully developed.
The press leapt on the story, which

created a sensation. When the trial
began in the Los Angeles Municipal
Court in April, crowds gathered outside
to see Lamarr arrive with her lawyer.
The case took six days. Lamarrs lawyer
maintained she had been suffering from
nervous strain and had meant to pay and
he accused the prosecution of Gestapo
tactics. Two psychiatrists testified for
the defence that Lamarr had been
in a confused, jumpy state. Two May
Company employees said they had seen
her shoplifting in the store twice before
in 1965, but the jury were told to disregard their statements. In the end the jury
of seven women and five men brought
in a verdict of not guilty. Lamarr thanked
each of them personally. Perhaps they
were simply sorry for her. Ruth Bartons
2010 biography of the actress says that
Lamarrs neighbours in her later years
knew she was light-fingered. She was
arrested again years afterwards in 1991
and once again let off.
SHELL SHOCK
A member of the
Salvation Army
writes a letter
on behalf of an
injured Allied
soldier, c.1915.
The RACKET
and the FEAR
Shell shock is associated in particular with
the First World War. Stuart M. Archer
recounts the often brutal treatment meted
out to sufferers of the condition including
a distinguished composer-poet and looks at
how use of the term fell into disrepute.
SHELL SHOCK
A recruiting
poster for nurses,
British, c.1915.
Strange Hells
There are strange hells within the

minds war made
Not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid
As one would have expected the racket
and the fear guns made.
Ivor Gurney
N A RAILWAY STATION near Lyon, in the early morning

of February 1st, 1918, staff found a man wandering alone.
They assumed he had arrived on a hospital train bringing
prisoners of war from Germany, but when they questioned him he could only mumble. He was wearing a French
uniform without any unit tags and he had no money and
no identity papers. Young, with a dark moustache, he was
sick and bewildered. Doctors sent him to a mental hospital
at Bron, on the outskirts of Lyon. When asked his name he
muttered indistinctly something that sounded vaguely like
Anthelme Mangin and that became his name.
Looked after for many years by a sympathetic doctor,
he became a celebrity. The courts and the press constantly
pursued his identity for he was one of the living inconnus
or disparus. Doctors argued over the causes of his amnesia,
some trying to deny that it was due to shell shock, for that
would have made him eligible for compensation. Anthelme
eventually starved to death in an asylum during the Vichy
regime in 1942. Such were the rewards of shell shock and
amnesia in France.
Shell shock has become one of the most common
phrases used in the description of military experience in
the First World War. The Southborough Committee of
1920 attempted to define it as:
An emotional shock, either acute in men with a neuropathic
disposition, or developing as a result of prolonged strain or
terrifying experience, the final breakdown being sometimes
brought about by some relatively trivial cause, or nervous and
mental exhaustion, the result of prolonged strain or hardship.
First used in academic circles in an article in the medical
journal the Lancet of February 1915, the term shell shock
was the invention of Charles S. Myers, who had been
trained in psychology and was co-opted into the Royal Army
Medical Corps (RAMC) to act as consulting psychologist to
The term shell shock was the invention

of Charles S. Myers, who was co-opted
into the RAMC to act as consulting
psychologist to the army in France
Charles S. Myers,
1920s.
the army in France. He distrusted and disliked the military

medical men, regarding them as hostile to research and
mental breakdown, but he quickly became experienced in
the treatment of shell shock. By July 1916 he had seen over
2,000 cases and was soon arguing the case for specialised
hospitals. He was quick to admit that shell shock was a
misleading term, as soldiers could suffer mental breakdown
without any physical proximity to bursting shells, through
the stress of battle alone.
Myers introduced class analysis
into his diagnoses: officers suffered
neurasthenia, while ordinary soldiers
experienced hysteria or trauma:
The forces of education, tradition and
example make for greater self-control
in the case of the Officer. He, moreover,
is busy throughout a bombardment,
issuing orders and subject to worry
about his responsibilities, whereas his
men can do nothing during the shelling,
but watch and wait until the order is
received for an advance.
Myers believed that neurasthenia in
officers was a mental and nervous
disorder due to exhaustion, creating
acute irritability, loss of confidence,
British troops
crossing the River
Ancre, Battle of
the Somme, 1916.
depression, headache, giddiness, insomnia, nightmares,

loss of appetite, loss of memory, loss of concentration and
paranoia. Hysteria in privates was unconscious and led to
tics, tremors, sweating, stammering or mutism, deafness,
blindness, amnesia, paralyses, muscular contractions,
difficulty in walking and inability to perform routine tasks.
Men were haunted by a past they could not forget, by memories they did not want to remember but which intruded
into both their waking and sleeping hours. Some became
impotent. Some soiled themselves. Others had multiple
orgasms under shell fire. The age group most vulnerable to
shell shock was between 18 and 25. Brooding, self-analysing, introspective types, who were always estimating their
chances of survival with imaginative power, were the most
likely sufferers.
It was easy for medical attitudes to become hostile:
there was the constant suspicion of malingering and of the
letting down of comrades. While there was sympathy with
the military ordeals creating such symptoms, there was

also contempt for the lack of willpower and self-control
involved in giving in to them. What these men needed was
stoutness of heart. The most reactionary witness was
Lt Col Viscount Gort, who bluntly stated that shell shock
must be regarded as a form of disgrace to the soldier. Those
still suffering from it were probably bordering on lunacy
before the war began.
HE SHEER SCALE of the psychological problems

was very disturbing for the brass hats. Mental
issues had first been observed during the retreat
from Mons in 1914 but then escalated in later campaigns. Sir John Collie, the then accepted English expert
on malingering, made a credible estimate that 200,000
soldiers were discharged from active service due to mental
problems. In some areas 40 per cent of all casualties were
due to nervous disorders. On the Somme from July to
SHELL SHOCK
December, 1916, 16,000 cases of shell shock occurred in
the British army alone; by 1918 the government was
providing medical care and pensions for over 400,000 disabled soldiers and sailors. Medical provision was revolutionised: by 1920, 113 hospitals with 18,600 beds, supplemented
by 319 special surgical clinics, 36 ear clinics, 24 eye clinics,
19 heart centres and 48 mental hospitals were provided
to deal with the most severely disabled. By the end of the
war, 80,000 cases of shell shock had been treated in RAMC
medical units and 30,000 troops diagnosed with nervous
trauma had been evacuated to British hospitals. After the
war 200,000 ex-servicemen received pensions for nervous
disorders and in 1939 40,000 British ex-servicemen were
still receiving pensions for mental disability stemming from the First World War.
Many factors fused in the concerns
for the fitness of the British army in the
First World War. Historically, one in six
volunteers for the Boer War were rejected on grounds of poor physical fitness. In
1904 an Inter-Departmental Committee
on Physical Deterioration had been set up
to investigate the health and physique of
the people and make recommendations
on the education and welfare of children. Fears for the future of an imperial
race bred in slums, poverty, disease and
hunger resonated. Even the reformer
Churchill had warned in 1912 that the
multiplication of the Feeble Minded was
a terrible danger to the race.
N THEIR ANXIETY to suppress the term

shell shock, the armys imagination and
its love of acronyms proudly embraced
new terminology. Cases must now
be described as NYDN (Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous) and placed in Casualty
Clearing Stations in France. They could
not be treated until their Commanding
Officer authorised it, despite the need for
speed. A distinction was made between
commotional and emotional disturbance:
the former, actual physical shock, the
latter, psychological strains. Shell shock
was stigmatised, as the sceptical RAMC
took control in the battle against malingerers. They argued that in many cases
the patient had not really been buried
alive but only thought they had: a distinction not always
understood by the victim. More seriously, deserters were
still being shot without medical examination. After the
Somme, officers complained that many of their men were
utterly useless degenerate a danger to their comrades,
their battalion and their brigade. Lord Moran, later to be
Churchills doctor, stated that some conscripts were plainly
worthless fellows without shame, the worst produce of the
towns. Was he simply aping the contempt of the Duke of
Wellington? A staff officer was reported as saying: If a man
lets his comrades down he ought to be shot. If hes a loony
so much the better. Whats the good of loonies in the army
anyway?
There are numerous accounts of soldiers experience
of the First World War. Some are realistically factual,

others gruesome and macabre: powerful poetry and novels
flourished. The German expressionist artist, Otto Dix,
wrote in 1914:
Lice, rats, barbed wire, fleas, shells, bombs, underground caves,
corpses, blood, liquor, mice, cats, artillery, filth, bullets, mortars,
fire, steel: that is what war is. It is the work of the devil.
Belgian and
British troops
retreat during
the Battle of
Mons, 1914.
AFTER THE ONSET of trench warfare and stalemate in

November, 1914, Lord Kitchener had told the foreign
secretary, Sir Edward Grey: I dont know what is to be done.
This isnt war. But it was and it led to mental collapse on an
unprecedented scale.
Political and social attitudes to shell
shock varied greatly, ranging from
contempt to compassion. Medical and
military attitudes reflected wider concerns and were also divided between the
tough and the tender. Issues of class and
gender soon became intertwined with
morale and discipline. The distinction
between genuine and spurious cases was
not easy to resolve and indeed was never
satisfactorily solved. The military establishment proved hostile to the arguments
of psychology and psychiatry: only in
examples of battle-hardened troops were
they sympathetic to breakdown, so great
controversy focused on the potential for
malingering, scrimshanking, funking,
cowardice and desertion. Were those who
succumbed to shell shock merely letting
their comrades down? How could an
army be kept in the field, if high levels of
mental breakdown were inevitable? Why
did some lose their self-control when
others did not? Recreation and sport
helped some to relax, humour alleviated
stress, religion might soothe. Most soldiers did overcome the stress of battle
successfully, but what of those whose
morale was shattered?
How could an army

be kept in the field if
high levels of mental
breakdown were
inevitable?
Strange Hells
Where are they now, on State-doles,
or showing shop-patterns
Or walking town to town sore in
borrowed tatterns
Or begged. Some civic routine one
never learns.
The heart burns but has to keep
out of face how heart burns.
RIVATE IVOR BERTIE GURNEY (1890-1937) was

celebrated by his contemporaries for his musical
compositions, but is now well known as a talented
poet of the Great War and the Cotswold countryside. With Isaac Rosenberg, he is one of the few war poets
to come from the ranks. His work reveals the mentalit of
the privates war, a rare glimpse in war records dominated
by officers and politicians in frock coats. He came from a
humble background and must have been a brilliant pupil,
for he attended the Kings School, Gloucester as a
Above: Shelling the

Duckboards by Paul
Nash, from British
Artists at the Front, 1918.
Left: an unused field
postcard issued to
British soldiers and one
filled in, from March
22nd, 1916.
chorister and won a choral scholarship to the Royal

Academy of Music under Sir Charles Stanford.
In London Gurney was regarded as an eccentric with
nervous problems. His friend and fellow composer Herbert
Howells described him as a strange, erratic, lovable,
brilliant, exasperating, unteachable but wholly compelling
youth. He was rejected by the army in 1914 for defective
eyesight, surprising because he was good at football and
cricket and turned out to be a crack rifle shot. He hoped
that an outdoor life would improve his nervous health and
he successfully enlisted in February 1915, serving in France
from May 1916. He was a chaotic soldier in many ways,
rebelling against the tedious drill and the boring bull of
army life, of brass cleaning and button polishing, but he was
posted to the Signallers Corps and later to the Machine Gun
Corps. When his slovenliness was criticised at an inspection, he was defended by his sergeant as a good man who
was extremely cool under shell fire. He hated military routines but felt deep sympathy with his comrades stoicism
and bravery: only the love of comrades sweetens all. In the
trenches he found it easier to compose poetry than music.
GURNEY HAD AN EXACT, precise vocabulary and a stubbornly realistic attitude to the war. He was never impressed
by tales of glory and even less by vainglory (blither written
by knaves for fools). He did find solace in the courage
and humour of his companions, simply praising them for
paying the price that must be paid. He also appreciated the
people and the landscape of France behind the lines. The
titles of his poems and his first lines usually set the exact
tone for his themes. A well-read man, his work was modernistic, with unusual syntax and grammar. His early work
is a reaction against the patriotic fervour of Rupert Brooke.
The specific concreteness of his style brings the war close
with a unique blend of sight, sound and sensibility. He was
devastatingly honest, even admitting to disobeying
orders which could have led to a court martial.
Ballad of the Three Spectres

As I went up by Ovillers
In mud and water cold to the knee,
There went three jeering, fleering spectres,
That walked abreast and talked of me.
The first said, Heres a right brave soldier
That walks the dark unfearingly;
Soon hell come back on a fine stretcher,
And laughing at a nice Blighty.
The second, Read his face, old comrade,
No kind of lucky chance I see;
One day hell freeze in mud to the marrow,
Then look his last on Picardie.
Though bitter the word of these first twain
Curses the third spat venomously;
Hell stay untouched till the wars last dawning,
Then live one hour of agony.
Liars the first two were. Behold me
At sloping arms by one-two-three;
Waiting the time I shall discover
Whether the third spoke verity
Sadly, Gurney had anticipated his own fate.
Above: a soldier
receives electric
treatment for
shell shock, c.1916.
Below: a British
army recruitment
poster, c.1915.
Twice wounded, in 1917 he spent time in various military hospitals in England. He fell in love with one of his
nurses but the affair did not last and he began to show
signs of recurring depression and instability, making a
suicide attempt in June 1918. He was discharged from the
army in October 1918. He returned to the Royal College
of Music and was a pupil of Ralph Vaughan Williams but
could not concentrate and returned to Gloucester with a
small disability pension, relying on help from friends and
family. He would escape from the house at night and walk
miles in the countryside. He composed prolifically, but in
September 1922 he was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His brother, Ronald, had little patience
with or understanding of his problems and committed him
to Barnwood House, an expensive private asylum on the
outskirts of Gloucester. Ivor hated the regime
there, feeling that he was virtually in prison.
His idealism turned to despair. He was kept in
asylums for the rest of his life.
ORRIES about his sanity grew

when he revealed that he talked
with Beethoven. Gurney felt that
his service in the army deserved
reward and he was bitter when his request for a
full pension in October 1918 was denied on the
grounds that his condition had been aggravated
but not caused by the war (a familiar strategy
of the Ministry of Pensions). He was granted a
pension of 12/- a week (a 30 per cent pension),
because the doctors who examined him did not
think he was sufficiently disabled to justify the full
sum. He was denied the material independence to
write music and verse because he had claimed, untruthfully, that his state was due to shell shock. He
hated the idea that he had to grovel for his rights.
Instead he was subject to electrical treatment. In
March 1925 he wrote from Dartford Mental Hospital:
The pain of a twelve hour day in a ward is great. A twelve hour
day and eating too much Imprisonment would be better
A twelve hour day, small exercise and a crowded ward do not
make for happiness.
SHELL SHOCK
In 1917 Myers had been asked to find out how treatment for
shell shock in England was progressing; by April 1916 more
than half of the 24,000 cases that had been sent back had
ended up in general military hospitals with no specialist
staff and with their notes lost. The cure for rankers
privates like Gurney was discipline, punishment and electricity: for officers, it was therapy, discussion and hypnosis.
EWIS R. YEALLAND, a Canadian psychologist who

came to England in 1916 to become resident medical
officer at the National Hospital in London, epitomised the tough treatment of shell shock and sometimes his methods verged on torture. In
one case study, he treated a 24-year-old
private for mutism:
The man took part in the Mons retreat, the

battle of the Marne, the battle of the Aisne
and the first and second battles of Ypres.
He also fought at Hill 60, Neuve Chapelle,
Loos and Armentires. In April 1916 he was
sent to Salonica and, three months later,
while attending to his horses, fell down
unconscious; he says on account of the
intense heat. For five days he remained
unconscious and on waking he shook all
over and could not speak. When I saw him
nine months later he was mute. Many attempts have been made to cure him. He had
been strapped down in a chair for twenty
minutes at a time, when strong electricity
was applied to his neck and throat; lighted
cigarette ends had been applied to the
tip of his tongue and hot plates had been
applied to the back of his mouth. But all
these methods proved to be unsuccessful in
restoring his voice. I talked to him sternly
about his duty and his family. In the electrical room lights were turned out and doors
locked. The patient was told that he would
not leave the room until he was cured,
and strong currents were applied for long
periods of continuous treatment until he
was permanently cured.
HELL SHOCK in the Great War

occurred on such a massive scale
that it appeared to be a new
phenomenon. Both medical and
military attitudes were ambiguous and
treatment was haphazard. Inefficient
recruiting was blamed. Complex class and
gender issues were involved. Psychiatric
techniques developed and more enlightened, liberal views gained weight. It was
hoped that improved training might
lessen the rate of breakdown. Yet the
hidebound suspicion and condemnation
of malingering persisted, especially
towards the ordinary soldier. Officers
were treated with greater deference and,
in general, received more sympathetic
therapy.
The use of the term was eventually
abandoned in 1922 by medical experts,
but it was too popular to be removed from
public use. More neutral terms such as
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
were used after 1945 in wars in Vietnam,
Iraq and Afghanistan. Another variant
is combat stress disorder or reaction (CSR). Whatever the
name, it seems that fewer than 20 per cent of the soldiers
who were diagnosed during and in the aftermath of the
First World War were able to return to normal lives.
Gurney was diagnosed

as suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia and was
committed to asylums
until his death
Yealland cites many other comparable

cases, emphasising his frankness and the
direct way he talked to his patients: Do you want to be
cured?, he would ask them. He showed little sympathy, for
he thought this would only encourage them to cultivate
their symptoms. Bullying and browbeating was his style
and he would not listen to excuses. Treatment and cure
must be rapid.
Yealland did not consider malingering to be a serious
problem; Sir John Collie did. Perhaps unfortunately he
had too much power and influence in the war and postwar
years. Deceit, fraud and exaggeration became his obsession. He even interfered in treatment: he disapproved of
female nurses treating shell-shocked patients, arguing
that: Nothing retards recovery so much as the flying visits
of unthinking but kindly intentioned philanthropic lady
visitors. He was an expert on insurance claims and became
the arbiter for claims to pensions for the military in the
1920s. The war and shell shock were to provide him
with fertile fields for investigation. He dismissed psychoanalysis as mere quackery and argued that only hard work
was the panacea for mental problems: It is the salvation
for those suffering from functional nervous disease. After
the war he remained inflexible, blaming lack of willpower
and perverted mentality for any problems and calling for
re-education through discipline and hard work.
By 1920 over 20 institutions in England were dedicated
to the treatment of patients with mental issues and war
neuroses. Hysteria among the rank and file challenged male
virility and accepted ideas of masculinity were tainted by
suspicions of homosexuality and signs of effeminacy. Public
school ideals of muscular Christianity, the
stiff upper lip, self-control, will power in
leadership and self-restraint were weakened as female hysteria spread to men
in a mass retreat from battle. Tradition
led to harsh treatment, perfunctory care
and eventual release into a civilian life of
frustration and futility.
Stuart M. Archer is a former HMC inspector of history teaching, an author of

text books and monographs of northern artists and a teacher of history.
FURTHER READING
Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British
Soldier of the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock Treatment and
Recovery in Britain 1914-30 (Continuum, 2011).
Edgar Jones, Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military
Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (Psychology Press, 2005).
XXXXXXXXXXX
ISIS
Betrayed by the
British: King Feisal
of Iraq on a visit
to London,
November 1927.
THE RAPID RISE of ISIS and the attempted establishment of its anachronistic caliphate, along with a seeming
omnipresence that has allowed it to wantonly strike out
in brutal terrorist attacks abroad, has left many reeling
in shock and disbelief. Political commentators have tried
to account for the alarming alacrity and sheer audacity of
the phenomenon by shining a critical light on the recent
history of western intervention in the Middle East. Indeed
the emergence of ISIS cannot be understood without taking
into account the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003;
the wanton destruction of the countrys infrastructure
in its wake; the dismantling of its military and security
apparatus, which left insecurity and power vacuums; the
installing of a divisive, sectarian Shiite political administration in Baghdad; and the broader context of decades of
western support for Middle Eastern despots and dictators at
the expense of their people. The ISIS propaganda machine
has been busy capitalising on the unintended consequences
of disastrous western foreign policy in recent years to legitimise not just its goals, but its very existence.
As historians, however, we must be aware of the context
of a much deeper history of western intervention in the
Middle East than political commentators suggest, in part
because ISIS manipulates a much longer historical legacy of
western intervention for its own ends in its propaganda and
recruitment efforts. There are numerous examples of ISIS
invoking a tendentious reading of history to justify violence
and legitimise its world-view, but perhaps the most striking
of these can also offer insights into just how precarious its
historical narrative really is.
Conflicts rebranded
The toxic legacy of the Crusades features prominently in
ISIS propaganda. The Crusades have long symbolised the
seminal conflict that defined the troubled relationship
between western Christendom and the Muslim world. In
recent years the Crusades have again become ideologically
loaded, employed by Jihadists to validate their claims and
actions. Al-Qaeda rejected the idea that the current wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere were part of a Global War
on Terror, preferring to rebrand these conflicts as renewed
aggression by the Zionist-Crusader Alliance against the
Muslim world. The al-Qaeda leadership was keen to portray
Jihadist fighters as chivalrous Medieval knights serving
as the vanguard, heroically resisting these new incursions
into the Muslim heartlands. Al-Qaeda was so successful in
utilising this narrative that even its ideological opponents
have recognised its success in promulgating a historicised
reading of contemporary events, with Michael Scheuer, the
ex-head of the CIAs Bin Laden Unit, referring to Osama
Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader killed in May 2011, as a
ISIS and
the Abuse
of History
Akil N. Awan and A. Warren Dockter argue that
the defeat of Islamic State can only be achieved
if we take a long view and question the Jihadists
simplistic interpretation of the Wests troubled
relationship with the Middle East.
| ISIS
XXXXXXXXXX
modern Saladin [who] makes brilliant use of the intimacy of Muslims with Islamic history.
ISIS propaganda has taken this appropriation of the
history of the Crusades to a new level. Issue four of its
flagship glossy magazine, Dabiq, published in October 2014,
was entitled The Failed Crusade and framed the campaign
against them as the The Final Crusade. In a striking illustration of the anachronism represented by the ISIS worldview, the magazines front cover featured a photoshopped
ISIS flag fluttering atop the Holy See in the Vatican, with
threats against Romes Crusaders. ISIS again invoked the
spectre of the Crusades following Novembers attacks
on Paris, accusing France of participating in a Crusader
campaign ... striking Muslims in the land of the caliphate
with their aircraft. By framing the current conflict between
western allies and ISIS as an anachronistic struggle against
Crusaders, it re-imagines the history of the Crusades to
force a comparison with western medieval aggression.
Chief crook of our gang
Another glaring example of ISISs shrewd manipulation of
historical narratives can be seen in its invocation of the 1916
Sykes-Picot agreement, a secret treaty drawn up during
the First World War, which carved up the remains of the
Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. This agreement was reached despite promises made by the British
High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, to King
Hussein that he and his sons would have their own kingdoms in exchange for rising against the Ottoman Empire in
the Arab Revolt, which began in 1916. T.E. Lawrence, who
played a major role in helping organise the revolt, regarded
this as a betrayal and felt that he had
become the chief crook of our gang.
Once Prince (later King) Feisal, the leader
of the Arab Revolt, entered Damascus
on October 3rd, 1918, he expected these
pledges to be honoured. Britain, however,
was in no place to honour the pledges
in Syria, since that territory fell within
the French sphere of influence. Feisal
and Lawrence went together to the
Paris Peace Conference with the goal of
overturning Sykes-Picot, but to no avail.
The agreement was formalised at the San
Remo Conference in 1920 and established
the borders of modern Syria and Iraq.
These contradictory agreements
planted terrible seeds in Arab relations with the West and
the legacy of broken pledges and betrayal continue to haunt
us, a fact ISIS has capitalised on. Last year it released a
video, The End of Sykes-Picot, in which bulldozers symbolically levelled part of the border between eastern Syria and
northern Iraq. This was accompanied by a Twitter campaign
with the hashtag #Sykespicotover. The agreement has
taken on a symbolic nature for ISIS, representing the crucial
moment when the West intervened in Arab affairs and fragmented Dar al-Islam or the house of Islam. In a video called
Breaking the Borders an ISIS militant commented:
The Middle
Easts legacy of
broken pledges
and betrayal
continues to
haunt us, a fact
that ISIS has
capitalised on
Today we are happy to participate in destroying the borders

placed by the oppressors to prevent the Muslims from travelling
in their lands. The oppressors broke up the Islamic Caliphate

and made it into countries like Syria and Iraq, ruled by manmade laws.
This conveniently overlooks the fact Syria and Iraq have
often been ruled as separate entities. Syria, Baghdad, Basra,
Mosul, Beirut and Jerusalem were all distinct Ottoman
vilayets by 1876. The idea that the caliphate automatically
represented all Muslims or a homogenous global body
of believers (the Ummah) is also highly contentious and
refuted by even a cursory reading of Islamic history. After
Muhammads death in 632, no Islamic polity could claim to
represent all of Islam or garner unanimous support as the
legitimate heirs to the Prophets mantle. Even the reign
of the first four rightly-guided caliphs (632-61), who are
viewed nostalgically as representing a utopian model of
Islamic governance, is problematic. Three of the four were
assassinated while in office; hardly a model of success.
Furthermore, the early caliphs also had to contend with
violent rebellions that contested their authority, such as
the Apostasy Wars (632-3) under Abu Bakr, or internecine
warfare, such as that witnessed at the Battle of the Camel
(656), involving no less than Muhammads wife Aisha on
one side and his son-in-law and later fourth caliph, Ali, on
the other.
Realpolitik
Later Muslim dynasties were equally antagonistic, often
jostling violently with one another and, in some cases, even
seeking political alliances with non-Muslim powers against
their fellow believers in their pursuit of power. The case of
the Fatimid caliphate, which sought alliances with Crusaders against the Seljuk Turks, is a good example of this type
of realpolitik at play. The very idea of a single caliph holding
exclusive office is also belied by the troubled coexistence
of multiple adversarial caliphates throughout the ages.
Indeed, between 929 and 1031 no fewer than three separate
caliphates simultaneously and incongruously exercised
sovereignty in different spheres of the Muslim world: the
Umayyads from their seat of power in Cordoba, the Fatimids from their capital in Cairo and the Abbassids, who protested impotently at their waning influence on the empires
peripheries, from their glorious capital, Baghdad.
These historical facts utterly undermine ISISs rosetinted narrative of sublime Muslim unity fractured by
nefarious western intervention. This is not to deny that the
West has played a primary role in dictating the contours of
the modern Muslim world, particularly through the painful
colonial period, a legacy with which we are still contending.
The stark reality, however, is that the appeal of ISIS rests
largely on convincing audiences to adopt a Manichean
world-view, which divides the world into simplistic binaries
of Islam and the West, based on a fabricated historical
premise. By revealing the contradictions and complexities
of these polarising narratives and by exposing just how
tendentious and skewed ISISs reading of history really is,
we can also help to undermine its appeal.
Akil N. Awan is Associate Professor in Modern History, Political Violence and
Terrorism at Royal Holloway, University of London. A. Warren Dockter is
Junior Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.
SIKKIM
A Himalayan
Chess Game
When India and Pakistan gained independence
from Britain in 1947, the regions Princely States
including tiny Sikkim became pawns in South Asias
great power politics, as Andrew Duff explains.
Above: a US-built Sherman

tank of the Pakistani army
rumbles through Slalkot
in the Pakistani Punjab in
September 1965.
Right: a view of Gangtok,
the capital of Sikkim, 1965.
T THE HEIGHT of the Indo-Pakistan war, in

mid-September 1965, Britains ITN broadcast a
15-minute report from what they called another
potential starting point for a Third World War.
The images were not of Indian and Pakistani soldiers in
disputed Kashmir. Instead, the dramatic footage showed
Indian and Chinese soldiers 14,000 feet up on the other
side of the Himalayas, on either side of the border between
the Kingdom of Sikkim (an Indian protectorate perched
between Nepal and Bhutan) and Chinese-occupied Tibet.
The broadcast highlights an often-overlooked international dimension to the 1965 conflict, which caused frantic
diplomatic activity involving India, Pakistan, China, the US
and the Soviet Union and was, in fact, an important factor
in the eventual de-escalation of the crisis.
SIKKIM
Right: a Chinese
soldier gesticulates
at Lt Col Raj Singh of
the Indian army at
Nathu La, 1967.
Below: Hope Cooke
and Crown Prince
Thondup Namgyal
of Sikkim, 1963.
Kashmir, the largest of the 600 Princely States of

British India, which became the main theatre of the 1965
war between India and Pakistan, had been a running sore
between the two countries for nearly two decades. At
Partition in 1947 the question of the Princely States future
loomed large. All ran their own affairs under individual
agreements with the British. Official policy was to allow
the ruler of each to determine whether the Princely State
would join India or Pakistan. For most it was a simple
decision. For Kashmir, it was not. The Hindu Maharaja, Hari
Singh, ruled a majority Muslim population. Indias leaders
presumed Singh would decide to join India. Pakistans
leaders argued that the Muslim population should join
Pakistan. Singh, fearing the socialist Nehrus India almost
as much as he did the prospect of joining Jinnahs Pakistan,
considered a third option: asserting independence, harbouring dreams of creating a Switzerland of Asia.
Reality jolted Singh out of his reverie. When Kashmiri
Muslims began to flee to Pakistan (principally to avoid punitive taxes), Pakistani Pathans crossed back into Kashmir to
liberate its people from their Hindu ruler. A bloody conflict
broke out. Nehru sent military support to Singh on the
condition that he accede to India.
The Indians sought to internationalise the issue, taking
it to the newly formed United Nations in early 1948. The
UN commission to New Delhi and Karachi advocated a
plebiscite in Kashmir. As the fighting continued, relations
between Pakistan and India deteriorated. Positions became
entrenched. Nehru (whose family originated from Kashmir)
reneged on the idea of a plebiscite. The Kashmir operation
was vital to prove the subcontinent could rise above communalism. It was, he said, a fight for the freedom of India.
FRAGILE UN-promoted ceasefire line in 1949 left

India in control of the lions share of the state,
including the vital Vale of Kashmir. Pakistan
settled in to its position as the aggrieved party. As
Pakistan and India found their feet during the 1950s, the
Kashmir issue festered in the background.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Peoples Republic of China
was consolidating its de facto control of Tibet, which it had
invaded in 1950. Nehru dreamed of a Pan-Asian entente
between China and India. But after the Dalai Lamas flight
to India in 1959, such hopes faded. Worried by such developments, the Indians attempted to assert control in two
disputed areas of the Sino-Indian border. The result was the
short, sharp 1962 Sino-Indian conflict. The Chinese, who
had repulsed Indian advances and moved deep into Indian
territory, were regarded as victors.
Pakistans new president, Ayub Khan, who had assumed
power in a coup in 1959, watched these developments with
interest. Indias military had appeared unprepared and
blundering during the 1962 war. Khan and his new foreign
minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, sensed an opportunity to
enlist Chinese support in pushing their claims in Kashmir.
HE AGEING NEHRU, desperate to leave a positive

legacy for Kashmir, agreed to negotiations with
Pakistan; historians have often pondered the counterfactual question: what would have happened if
Nehrus death had not cut short negotiations in June 1964?
With the inexperienced Lal Bahadur Shastri at the helm
in India and with the developing relationship between Pakistan and India as a backdrop, in late 1964 Foreign Minister
Bhutto stated that Kashmir is to Pakistan what Berlin is
to the West. It was deliberately provocative. Meanwhile,
he prepared plans for Pakistani tanks to roll into the Rann
of Kutch, an unremarkable expanse of salt marshes at the
southern extremity of the border with India. Pakistan got
the better of the tank skirmishes between April and June
1965. Bhutto then put forward plans to Ayub for Operation
Gibraltar, an infiltration of Kashmir in August 1965, with
which the serious fighting began.
Curiously, some of the 1965 battles involved US-made
The 14th Dalai

Lama (front, in
black) flees Tibet
for India with his
Khamba warrior
guards, 1959.
SIKKIM
The coronation
as 12th King of
Sikkim of Thondup
Namgyal at
Gangtok, April
4th, 1965.
Sikkim emerged with a treaty

with India in 1950 that gave it
an international personality
of sorts, albeit with highly
limited powers
Patton tanks (sold to the Pakistanis) firing on American
Sherman tanks (sold largely to the Indians). Cold War arms
sales to South Asia had grown massively after the SinoIndian war, which had coincided with the Cuban missile
crisis. At the height of the twin 1962 crises, President
Kennedy, fearing a two-front global war against Communism, had sent the carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of
Bengal. Further arms sales followed the resolution of the
conflict. In November Kennedy stated that all our aid to
India is for the purpose of defeating Chinese communist
subversion. Sales to Pakistan also flowed, but more slowly.
It was another reason why Ayub, who felt Pakistan had
loyally supported the US anti-communist effort since the
mid-1950s, had tilted his allegiance towards China.
When the main Indo-Pakistan conflict broke out in
August 1965, Bhutto, who was increasingly leading the
Pakistani decision-making, hoped that Chinese pressure,
real or imagined, might squeeze Indian confidence.
Kashmir was not the only Princely State that had sought
a different future in 1947. Nepal, Bhutan and, squeezed in
between the two, the Kingdom of Sikkim all had specific
Children from the

Paljor Namgyal
Girls School dig
trenches against
Chinese attack,
October 1965.
Hope Cooke and

her husband
Thondup Namgyal
at a party, late
1960s.
agreements with British India and, therefore, put forward

arguments for special treatment. While Nepals independence was a foregone conclusion, the cases of Bhutan and
Sikkim, whose rulers came from related families, were
more complicated.
Bhutan, at least, had signed a formal agreement with
British India in 1910. A protectorate arrangement signed in
1949 was a formality. Sikkim proved more problematic. The
state, one sixth the size of Bhutan, lay along the Chumbi
Valley in the Himalayas, which had served as a principal
trading route for centuries. Its Buddhist ruling family had
migrated from Tibet in the early 17th century. The British,
recognising in the 19th century that Sikkim was a key
access point for Tibet, slowly brought the states ruling
family into the fold of Empire. Although various agreements were signed, none clarified the exact relationship
between British India and Sikkim. Nevertheless, Sikkim
emerged with a treaty with India in 1950 that gave it an
international personality of sorts, albeit with highly
limited powers.
URING THE 1950s Crown Prince Thondup

Namgyal set about reforming the administration in Sikkim. But events in Tibet loomed large.
Soon the state became a base for a secretive CIA
operation supporting Tibetan guerillas. Thondup and his
glamorous sisters, Coocoola and Kula, became involved,
even running messages between the Americans and the
young Dalai Lamas Tibetan leadership. The dramatic 1959
flight of the Dalai Lama highlighted Sikkims vulnerability.
The Chumbi Valley was now, Nehru claimed, a Chinese-
occupied dagger pointed at the heart of India. Although

Sikkim was never under serious threat during the 1962
Sino-Indian war, Indian troops arrived in numbers.
There had been another critical development in Sikkim
in 1959. The Crown Prince, widowed in 1957 at the age of
34 with three young children, fell in love with a willowy
19-year-old US debutante, Hope Cooke. Their 1963 marriage
thrust Sikkim onto the international stage. The American
press christened Cooke the Grace Kelly of the East. Both
Paris Match and National Geographic tripped over each other
to cover the couples lavish wedding, which was an extraordinary clash of cultures: Guests in top hats and cutaways
mingled with others in fur-flapped caps and knee-length
yak-skin boots, fawned Time magazine. J.K. Galbraith, the
US ambassador to India, was seen doing the twist with
Princess Coocoola.
For India, these developments in Sikkim were less
welcome. Some questioned why the young American had
suddenly appeared in geopolitically sensitive Sikkim. Hope
Cookes uncle had been US ambassador in Iran during
the turbulent 1950s. There were allegations that she had
connections to the CIA. It did not help when, at their coronation in April 1965, Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke
announced that they would be using the ancient Sikkimese
titles of Chogyal and Gyalmo. In an Indian republic not yet
two decades old, such assertions of separate identity and
monarchical rule were bound to raise questions.
In early September 1965, when the fighting in Kashmir
was at its fiercest, China moved 5,000 troops into the
Chumbi Valley, alleging that the Indians had been violating
the border between Sikkim and Chinese-occupied Tibet.
SIKKIM
The Indians were greatly concerned. The fact that
Pakistan had an eastern wing (later to become Bangladesh)
already provided dual security challenges. The build-up on
the Sikkim border raised the nightmare prospect of a two(or even three-) front war.
The US was also worried by the thought of a Chinese
intervention. President Johnson, ever deeper embroiled in
Vietnam, was desperate to avoid an escalation of tensions
in another part of Asia. Both Ayub for Pakistan and Shastri
for India were in constant contact with US representatives,
sometimes directly with Johnson in Washington. Meanwhile, the US ambassador in Delhi noted another complication: there were Soviet SAMs protecting Delhi and other
cities from attack by Pak MAP-procured B57s, Soviet tanks
fighting US tanks in Punjab and additional MIGs apparently
on their way the Soviets have already made deep inroads.
HE CHINESE issued a three-day ultimatum to

the Indians on September 16th, which raised the
prospect of an attack on Sikkim. Ayub was quick to
plead innocence of any collusion, claiming it was
Bhutto who was leading the interactions with the Chinese.
Shastri meanwhile asked the US to state that it would stand
with the Indians in the face of Chinese aggression. L.K. Jha,
a leading member of Shastris cabinet, even asked the US
ambassador if Johnson would be willing on strictly covert
basis to authorise US personnel to consult with Indian military planners on contingency basis. Johnson refused, but
he was concerned at the magnitude of the escalating crisis.
On September 18th, he commented to Arthur Goldberg, US
ambassador to the UN, that India and Pakistan just cant
afford to have this World War III ... They cant have that
kind of crime around their necks.
That same day the Chinese extended the ultimatum
by three days, buying crucial breathing space. In the files
Indira Gandhi had the tiny

palace in Sikkim surrounded,
stripped Thondup and his
family of any remaining
power and annexed the state
available on the US Department of State website, it is clear
that Walter McConaughy, the doughty US ambassador
to Pakistan, played a critical role in resolving the crisis.
Despite an atmosphere of extreme paranoia in Pakistan, he
managed to meet with a senior official on September 19th,
without the usual attendant minders. Ayub, the official told
him, was strongly averse to entering any Chicom association and open to a sensible compromise way out and growingly aware of Bhuttos extremism. Whether this was true
or not, McConaughy skilfully conveyed the message that
Pakistan would become an international pariah unless it
de-escalated and agreed to the UN-proposed unconditional
ceasefire (that India had already accepted). At the last possible moment Bhutto announced, at the UN, that it would
do so. The climbdown had dire consequences in Pakistan,
where the people had been led to believe wrongly that
they were winning the war.
Cartoon mocking
Indira Gandhi at
the time of the
vote to make
Sikkim an
'associate state
of India, Hindustan
Times, 1974.
On the Sikkim-Tibet border, tensions were reduced. For

the Sikkimese ruler, Thondup Namgyal and his American
wife, however, something fundamental had changed. After
Shastri collapsed of a heart attack at the Soviet-sponsored
negotiations in January, Nehrus daughter Indira Gandhi
assumed the mantle of leadership in India. Thondup knew
her well and harboured hopes of gaining a more secure
future for his tiny kingdom. But clashes between Indian
and Chinese troops on the Sikkim-Tibet border in 1967
and another war between India and Pakistan in 1971 this
time resulting in the eventual liberation of Bangladesh
(formerly East Pakistan) further highlighted Sikkims
vulnerability. Indira Gandhi, facing internal opposition and
sceptical of the rapprochement between President Nixon
and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Chinese
leadership, moved on the tiny state in 1973. Indias intelligence services provided covert support for the democratic
forces in Sikkim, forcing Thondup to relinquish much of his
power. Cooke, still only 33, left for the US. Thondup clung
on for a further two years but, on the eve of declaring an
Emergency in June 1975, Indira Gandhi had the tiny palace
in Sikkim surrounded, stripped Thondup and his family of
any remaining power and annexed the state.
As the ITN broadcast of September 1965 said: Small
states are often pawns in the game of power politics and
Sikkim is one of the smallest and weakest states in Asia.
The events on the Sino-Tibetan border in 1965 had a direct
impact on the course of the Indo-Pakistan war. They also
set the tone for Indias complex relationship with China in
the Himalayas throughout the following decades.
Andrew Duff writes on India and related subjects and is the author of Sikkim:
Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom (Birlinn, 2015).
FURTHER READING
Andrew Small, The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia's New Politics
(Hurst, 2015).
Neville Maxwell, India's China War (Natraj, 2011).
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India
and Pakistan (Yale, 2008).
Judith Brown, Nehru: Profiles in Power (Routledge, 2000).
Out of the Margins

The Durham Proverbs, a selection of Anglo-Saxon bons mots, show that medieval daily concerns and
popular wisdom still have resonance today, says Eleanor Parker.
Speak Well and Act Accordingly

THERE IS something irresistible about
proverbs. In an age when the Internet
is flooded with inspirational sayings,
dubiously attributed but widely
reproduced, it has never been easier to
observe the popular appeal of short,
cleverly phrased nuggets of wisdom.
Medieval literature placed a high
value on proverbs and many lines of
Anglo-Saxon poetry have a vaguely
proverbial ring. But our best source
of Anglo-Saxon proverbs is a single
collection, which survives in a manuscript now in Durham Cathedral
Library. The Durham Proverbs provide
a vivid glimpse into the everyday life
of Anglo-Saxon England, offering
sayings on subjects ranging from
mead-drinking and hunting to the
benefits of friendship, caution and
self-control. The manuscript is a
collection of hymns and canticles, in
Latin with interlinear English translations, probably for the use of the
monks at Christ Church, Canterbury
in the first half of the 11th century.
Not long after the manuscript was
made, someone in the monastery took
advantage of a blank space between
the hymns to write down a group of
46 proverbs. The proverbs each appear
in English and Latin versions perhaps
a monk was giving himself a bit of
practice translating from English into
Latin, or the other way around.
Some of the proverbs collected in
this manuscript are recorded elsewhere, but in most cases we would
not know of their existence, if not
for that anonymous monk. He made
a sporadic effort at arranging them,
at least at the beginning, where we
find several proverbs on the theme of
friendship: A friend is useful, far or
near; the nearer the better; In time of
need, a man finds out his friends; No
one can have too many friends. These
offer a rather pragmatic approach to
the theme, focusing on the usefulness

of having friends who can help you out
when you are in trouble.
Many of the sayings are mildly
cynical in tone, as proverbs tend to be,
casting a wry glance at fallible human
nature. Sometimes people are most
thirsty after drinking mead, says one,
commenting on insatiable desires
both literal and metaphorical. They
conjure up comic images with downto-earth humour and the quality of
sharp observation, which makes for
a good proverb: No one can have a
mouth full of flour and also blow on a
fire, warns one about the dangers of
Common
concerns: tending
the boar. Calendar
page, c.1030.
does not look with the heart. One

proverb, found in a very similar form
in the Old English poem The Wanderer, describes the behaviour of a wise
warrior: Ne sceal man to r forht ne to
r fgen, One should not be too soon
fearful, nor too soon joyful.
Since some of these proverbs are recorded in other sources, it may be that
here we have a glimpse of the kind
of sayings which might have been in
common use. They make themselves
memorable by rhyme, alliteration and
wordplay. For instance: Better to be
often loaded than overloaded (Betere
by oft fere onne oferfere) recommends the virtue of doing
things step by step. A few of
the proverbs are recorded
from centuries after the end
of the Anglo-Saxon period:
The fuller the cup, the more
carefully one should carry it,
a saying first recorded in the
Durham Proverbs, was still in
common use (in the form full
cup, steady hand) as late as
the 19th century.
The Proverbs, despite their
connections to other texts, are
special: for all the great wealth
of surviving Old English literature it
is rare to capture something which
sounds so much as if it may actually be
the everyday speech of Anglo-Saxon
England. Proverbs are often the kind
of sayings everybody knows but no
one bothers to write down. It would
be nice to think we could bring some
back into use, but the proverbs sound a
note of caution for anyone who might
want to adorn their speech with words
of Anglo-Saxon wisdom: Gyf u well
sprece, wyrc fter swa, If you speak
well, act accordingly.
It is rare to capture something

which sounds so like the everyday
speech of Anglo-Saxon England
doing two things at once. (Apparently
this also makes good practical sense;
flour and fire together form an explosive combination.) A proverb drawn
from hunting, He who wants to catch
a hart cant worry about his horse, is
perhaps the Anglo-Saxon aristocrats
equivalent of you cant make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Others are more reflective and
would not be out of place in the
philosophical world of Beowulf: A
person acts what he is when he may do
what he will; Truth will make itself
known; He never knows the pleasure
of sweetness, who never tastes bitterness; He is blind in both eyes who
Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog

at aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk.
InFocus
Out of Gaol in Ghana
RIENDS AND RELATIONS of a political prisoner just

released from gaol in Ghana greet him joyfully. It
is February 1966 and the army and police have just
staged a coup (codenamed Cold Chop) toppling
Ghanas autocratic President-for-Life, Kwame Nkrumah,
while he is in the Far East on a vainglorious mission to end
the Vietnam War. He has grown increasingly authoritarian
and remote since the start of the decade, calling himself
successively the Redeemer, Man of Destiny, Star of Africa,
High Dedication, while his countrys economy succumbs to
the corruption and incompetence of its state agencies.
The British colony of the Gold Coast became Ghana in
1957, the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from its European master, several years before
Harold Macmillan made the Winds of Change speech that
signalled the wholesale end of Empire. That it was a trailblazer was due to its valuable cocoa export crop and, much
more, to its charismatic leader, with his great organising
ability. After time at university in the US and at the London
School of Economics, Nkrumah returned in 1947 and
campaigned for the ending of British rule. In 1950 he was
imprisoned as leader of a wave of civil disobedience but the
following year he was released to become the Gold Coasts
first prime minister after his partys election victory.
The orthodoxy among development economists of
the time was that only the state, not markets, could bring
economic transformation and Nkrumah thought so, too:
Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society.
After independence, marketing boards for cocoa, timber
and diamonds were set up as well as many other state
bodies. This put a huge measure of control in Nkrumahs
hands, with all the jobs, contracts and licences that could
be handed out to cement political support. Cocoa farmers
could sell only to the Marketing Board, which kept the price
low because its revenues were desperately needed to cover
losses elsewhere and to service foreign loans. Predictably,
the quantity smuggled out shot up.
Unrest began in 1960 and, after bombs went off in Accra,
there were concerns in the House of Commons about the
Queens projected visit. Macmillan was desperate not to
cancel it for fear of driving Nkrumah into Soviet arms and
the Queen took the same view, so it went ahead in 1961,
though at the state banquet there were empty places meant
for political opponents who had been gaoled as a precaution. As political arrests became a regular feature, all the
British officers helping train the army were told to leave. By

1964 Ghana was a one-party state and corruption was out
of control, as was Nkrumahs personality cult. His crowning
folly was a palace with 60 luxury suites and a banqueting
hall for 2,000 built in 1965.
For most of the ten years following the coup Ghana was
run by generals, more corrupt even than their predecessors,
the civilian big men. Then in 1975 junior officers led by
half-Scottish Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings took control,
The British colony of the Gold

Coast became Ghana in 1957, the
first sub-Saharan African nation
to achieve independence from its
European master
executing eight senior officers, including three former

heads of state, in public and flogging profiteers. From
the lowest of bases things gradually got better. Rawlings
remained Ghanas most powerful man until 2000, when his
anointed successor lost the election. From then up to 2014
annual GDP growth averaged 7.4 per cent, regular presidential elections have continued, while in 2007 there was a
major offshore oil and gas discovery.
ROGER HUDSON
GYPSIES
Romance
and the
ROMANY
Since their arrival in Britain around 500 years
ago, Gypsies have created a rich tapestry of
romantic folklore. Yet, argues Jeremy Harte,
this aspect of their past has been almost
completely ignored by academic historians.
EPRESENTATIONS OF Gypsy culture are often contentious.

Even those produced by Gypsies typically show a selective
history; there is only so much about the community that the
ordinary non-Gypsy wants to know. As long as the conversation
is kept to the safe nostalgia of the past, we can talk about a history of
prejudice, eviction, brutality and disenfranchisement. But get too close
to the present and the conversation becomes much less comfortable.
The majority of the 500 years since Gypsies first arrived in Britain have
been spent telling the strangers of the host nation what they want to
hear, which is not necessarily the historical truth.
There is a consensus that whatever Gypsy life is like today, the
romantic side of the Romany past its old waggons and coloured horses,
music by the fireside should not be forgotten. In the traders stalls
Above: police talk to Gypsies on Epsom Downs, c.1920s.

Left: Gypsy Life: The Hop Pickers by Alfred Munnings, 1913,
Estate of Sir Alfred Munnings. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.
GYPSIES
at Appleby, Stowe and Epsom, where goods are laid out to appeal solely
to Gypsy taste, the same tropes appear again and again. Everyone agrees
that these things help to define the historical identity of the community.
It is ironic, then, that Gypsies, the most genealogically-minded of
all groups, in which teenagers routinely carry pictures of great-grandparents on their phones, are often treated by researchers as a people
confined to the ethnographic present. For many Gypsies, communal
memory goes back 150 years; the old families the Boswells, the Stanleys or the Lees can trace their lineage back to the 17th century, to
within a hundred years of their arrival from the Continent. And the
past which is preserved in the Romani language goes back further,
through Greece and Persia to the first migration of the Roma from
north-west India.
When, in the 1970s, academic historians began to study the Gypsy
past, they tended to see it not as it is framed by Gypsies themselves,
but through the lens of sociology, with a focus on the economic role
fulfilled by nomads of all kinds. Since the 16th century, mainstream
society has both needed and despised a mobile, casual workforce and
this creates a place for Traveller communities on the outskirts of the
settled world. It does not matter which historic group fulfils the role.
Some countries, such as Ireland and the Netherlands, have generated
their own indigenous travelling people, but throughout Europe, it is
mostly the Romany who occupy this niche.
Because of this, social historians have tended to overlook the exotic
tradition of Gypsy lineage in favour of more mundane interpretations,
emphasising the way in which this outcast group has forged an identity
around strategies of subsistence, far removed from the romance of the
waggon and the fireside. This marks a sharp break with the earlier tradition of Romani studies or, as its practitioners would have put it, Gypsy
lore. For almost a century, this pre-academic tradition was handed down
through a succession of scholars, all of whom celebrated the aspects
of Romany life which their successors have tended to ignore: lineage,
language and a tradition of colourful creativity.
The Smith Family

Stopping on
Putney Common,
engraving, 1870.
HE GYPSY LORE SOCIETY, founded in 1888, brought together

many characters who had been involved in Romany studies
over the previous ten years. Most of the activity came from
Francis Hindes Groome, the husband of Esmeralda Lock. While
travelling in the Welsh border country he had met the Lock family,
descendants of Welsh Boswells. Their daughter, Esmeralda, one of the
most famous Gypsies of the age, had married outside the community
to the town clerk of Bridgnorth, but now she fell for Groome and they
eloped to Germany. There, she made a living for both of them as a singer,
while he struggled to get recognition for his writing. Four years later,
back in England, Frank wrote In Gypsy Tents (1881), in which he brilliantly evokes the knowledge and discoveries of a Victorian gypsiologist
without ever quite having the courage to confess that he is talking
about his in-laws.
Following an interval in which its unstable finances had crashed
completely, the Gypsy Lore Society was refounded in 1907. Its new
incarnation was not particularly respectable. Scholarly gravitas was
provided by John Sampson, a portly linguist who had some official status
as the librarian of the University of Liverpool and had acquired the
academic habit of sleeping with his students. But the inner circle of
the Society also included Arthur Symons, the poet, and Augustus John,
an artist so impossibly Bohemian that his slouch hat, flowing beard
and unstoppable anecdotes were beyond parody. To balance things out,
Sampson invited the participation of a clergyman, although the Very
Reverend George Hall was not perhaps the best choice. His career in the
church had faltered, perhaps due to a fondness for drink, and he could
often be seen in his tattered clerical coat clutching a short pipe and beer.
With backgrounds like this, it might be doubted what the gypsiologists would be able to accomplish. But in fact they went on to publish,
year after year, a journal full of details on genealogy, language, foodways,
crafts, marriages and funerals. This information, however, has been
mostly ignored by non-Gypsies. Instead, the gypsiologists are famous
for their rhetoric about race.
From top:
Sylvester Boswell,
Sam Smith,
Augustus John,
Arthur Symons.
Right: 'Fighting'
Jack Cooper, 'The
Gypsey', 1824.
HEN THEY addressed the public, members of the society

singled out the pure-blooded Gypsy as the most admirable racial type. A true representative of the race was
honest, clean and free from the taint of modernity. He
could be easily recognised since he was black as teak, spoke archaic
Romani and travelled in the deep countryside where he kept his cherished liberty and followed ancestral law. This shadowy figure is a construction by non-Gypsies an exotic English Oriental onto whom was
projected all the ages concerns with race, freedom, nature and nostalgia.
For the historian of ideas, anxieties such as these provide unlimited
material on the Gypsy as a trope in Victorian literature, art and science,
which were avidly consumed in genteel settings.
This is quite a stereotype to live up to. Most Gypsies, struggling to
make a living mending chairs in Battersea or telling fortunes in Blackpool, failed to meet the ideal standard; but that just meant they could be
dismissed as degenerate half-breeds and left to the mercy of policemen
and the local authorities. Some armchair members of the society may
have whole-heartedly believed this, but most gypsiologists maintained
a double standard, praising the noble pure-blood in principle, while
being more realistic about the people they actually knew. Here is John
Myers, one of the refounders of the Gypsy Lore Society, in the pub at
Caerleon Fair:
GYPSIES
Gypsy children
play in Corke's
Meadow, Kent,
1951.
Come an sit along o me, my Arry, says a good-looking buxom showtype woman, as she shoved and elbowed sufficient room for two seats.
She had the most fluent profanity Ive yet heard from a woman; but each
time she enriched her otherwise complete collection with adjectives of sex
derivation, Harry remonstrated in no uncertain fashion ... Natty Smith,
who years ago was literally well below the poverty line, but was now
quite the best dressed dealing man in the room, commenced the ballad
of Lord Bateman. Our navvy friend, finding this long and presumably
tedious, tried to sing his song, but at the third attempt, a young Herne,
with a hand of twice ordinary size, lifted him bodily from his seat by the
face; another turned him smartly and completely round by the shoulders
almost within his own stance; other willing hands carried on the process,
and he sailed sweetly through the door, down the lobby and into the fair.
Anecdotal accounts like this are as close as we will ever come to direct
knowledge of the older generation of Gypsies. It is a pity that so many
historians have shied away from studying actual people like these and
focussed instead on the Gypsy of cultural studies.
Personal contact was most likely to take place, not in the sylvan
greenwood, but around the grubby fringelands of big cities. In London,
for example, there were settlements at Notting Dale in the west of the
city and the Potteries to the north of the River Thames, while on the
south side there was a ring of urban commons where Gypsies had made
their homes, from Barnes through Wandsworth and Putney to Dulwich,
if they were not lodging in one of the yards Carters, Mills, Manleys
or Donovans which hosted rows of a dozen or more waggons. Not
many outsiders visited these places and those who did were seldom
complimentary about their experiences. Wandsworth Common was
described as bare, muddy and sloppy after a little rain, undrained, and
almost devoid of trees or seats ... covered with huge gravel-pits, many
of them full of stagnant water.
Yet a handful of devotees came to this dismal spot, picking their way
past the stinking puddles in search of one small old lady and hoping
for an hours Romani conversation by her smouldering fire. For Wandsworth Common was the home of Charlotte Cooper, once Charlotte
the Beautiful, who 50 years earlier had been the favoured daughter of
the Lees and the wife of Fighting Jack Cooper, a man who took on
all England in the ring. In the estimation of society member Charles
Leland, Charlotte was a living link with all that was wildest in England.
Visitors reported that Charlotte was a good talker and, although
she did not charge for her reminiscences, a small donation was always
welcome. While the wildness of the Romany appeared much less glamorous to other people such as the judge who eventually sentenced
Jack Cooper to transportation the romantic perspective came from
Charlotte herself. She was not the passive recipient of non-Gypsy mythmaking but the author of her own life story.
Modern discussions of the Gypsy as a Victorian cultural icon often
overlook the facility with which real Gypsies got to know the tropes that
were being circulated about them and the speed of their response. In
1879, while staying at a hotel in Wales, Frank Groome opened his news-
paper and read a piece by George Smith on the reclamation of Gypsies.

Smith was a social reformer who had campaigned for legislation to
improve the lot of working children and was now turning his attention
to the various Traveller groups. His first and most pressing requirement
was to have them registered, then settled. Once they had given up their
old lifestyle and traditions, they could be made into useful citizens. The
sooner we get the ideal, fanciful, and romantic side of a vagrants and
vagabonds life removed from our vision, he wrote, the better it will be
for us ... I cannot see anything romantic in dirt, squalor, ignorance, and
misery. Groome, knowing that Noah and Dilaia Lock were staying in
the neighbourhood, tucked the paper under his arm and, after they had
met up for tea, read the passage out to his father-in-law. Noah Lock, not
being sociologically minded, did not see the essential reasonableness
of this view of Gypsies as a marginal and under-achieving community.
He listened through in silence, then picked up a teapot and
threw it violently against the nearest stone wall, saying to
his wife: Theres your teapot all to atoms, Dilaia, and I wish
to God George Smiths head were in it.
George Smith went on to write three books and disseminate his view of Gypsies among the reading public, while all
that remains of Noah Locks riposte is a few colourful shards
somewhere on a Welsh hillside. This is the perennial problem
for anyone who wants to write a Gypsy history: until the last
few generations, official records were all written by nonGypsies, who were rarely interested in the community for its
own sake, but only as an obstacle to the goals and values of
settled society. Their disdain for romantic idealisation might
sound like the hard facts, but it was just as likely to be covering
some other, less attractive agenda.
Non-Gypsy disdain for romantic

idealisation might sound like hard
facts, but it was just as likely to be
covering some other agenda
OHN SPENCER, the Right Honourable Earl Spencer,

gave evidence in 1875 about Wimbledon Common to the
Select Committee on Open Spaces (Metropolis) and his
views were not favourable. He was well acquainted with
the common and its problems the swampy ground and encroachments, the gravel diggers and gorse cutters and, worst
of all, the Gypsies. I have had, within the last few years, innumerable complaints by letters and petitions ... They express,
very strongly, the nuisance which these gipsies and tramps are to the
neighbourhood. The Rev. Dr Biber of Roehampton went further and
accused the Gypsies of things so atrocious that it had been impossible
to put them on paper. As he did not give any testimony to the commission, we will never know just what these things were and, since no
Gypsies were invited to give evidence, it remains a matter of speculation whether there was any truth in them. But John Spencer was by no
means a disinterested witness. He had been planning for several years to
have Wimbledon Common enclosed, guarded and divided up; one part
to be maintained as a public park and the other to be sold off for development. Naturally, the Gypsies were an obstacle to this and would need
to be evicted before the new houses could be sold for their full price.
In fact Wimbledon Common had been a stopping place for generations before the Spencer family ever laid claim to it. It was a days
journey out from Southwark and the gateway to Molesey Races and
the Thames Valley. Every year, as April brought the warm weather,
there was an exodus of Gypsies from the cramped yards and vacant
plots of London. They left behind the wet and dirt for green-fringed
roads and wooded hills. Just how general this migration was can be seen
from census records; a couple might have been
Top: Gypsy Encampstopping in outer London on census night, but
ment, Appleby by John
the birthplaces of their children will be scatAtkinson 1919. Left:
tered along the migration routes through the
children at a Romany
south-east.
camp site in Beckton,
Thus the image of the nature-loving
east London, c.1970.
GYPSIES
Gypsy, Victorian stereotype though it was, had its roots in the life of
the Gypsies themselves. There was a realistic element to all this; the
summer saw increased opportunities for farm labour and working the
fairgrounds and a chance to meet new customers for handcrafts. But
when it came to nature and the call of the outdoor life, realism and
romance were not opposites but the same social process.
Here, as with many other characteristics of the community, racial
stereotypes were not just invented by the gypsiologists in the privacy of
their studies. Rather, they emerged in the field from a dialogue between
scholars and the subjects of their study. This is most obvious in the area
where dialogue was essential: the Romani language.
By the 1870s, the home language of English Gypsies was a mixed
dialect combining an older Romani vocabulary with a predominantly
English grammar and word-order. Whatever it might have lost in the way
of morphological elegance, Anglo-Romani was a functional language in
which Gypsies could express themselves at length and with a speed that
left a monoglot English speaker unable to grasp a word that was being
said. The first step in Romani studies was to acquire some fluency in this
language, which was not easy. Romani had survived precisely because
it was a cryptolect, a language in which you could say things that you
did not want the farmer or the policeman to understand.
HETHER AN UNDEFILED HERITAGE actually existed

is debatable; but the gypsiologists behaved as if it did,
and so, in their own way, did many Gypsies. There
was a profound generational regret among Victorian
Gypsies for the loss of the old language. A man talking in the ordinary
Anglo-Romani of the day would stop, blush and revert to the earlier
inflected forms what would my old dad think if he could hear me
now! It was the status ascribed to good Romani speakers which made
research so easy for the language scholars. The arrival of scholars on
Epsom Downs would see men leaving the beer tent and the racetrack
in a competitive linguistic scramble, each asserting that he knew words
with which the others were unfamiliar.
Given the prestige associated with the old language, it is not surprising that some began indigenous research into their own traditions. Sam
Smith, who travelled in the Thames Valley, was a scholar of this kind.
Approaching his tent, Leland was careful to call out an archaic Romani
welcome in the style of 50 years earlier: Sam likes to be considered
as deep Romany. He tries to learn old gypsy words, and he affects old
gypsy ways. He is pleased to be called Petulengro, which means Smith.
Therefore, my greeting was a compliment.
In an exchange like this, there is not much to choose between the
imagined Gypsy of Victorian stereotype and the cultural ideal to which
a prosperous, well-connected Gypsy might himself aspire. As a basis for
social policy, a world view that divides Travellers into a handful of good
Gypsies (dark, Romani-speaking, traditional-living) and mobs of bad
mumpers and cross-breeds, is a disaster and it is regrettable that, well
into the 20th century, gypsiologists like Brian Vesey-FitzGerald were
still framing their advice to government in terms of the protection of
racial types and not of human rights. But these views were not conjured
out of nothing by the host society. They had their root in values held
by Gypsies themselves.
WHERE OUTSIDERS saw race, Gypsies were more likely to talk of
lineage. In a community which had no landed property and which
placed strong cultural barriers in the way of inherited wealth, status
could nevertheless be allowed to those descended from ancestors
who had exemplified the Romany way. Genealogies going back over
more than a hundred years were not uncommon; Liverpool University
still houses a wealth of notes made by George Hall and others which
(allowing for some uncertainties in oral transmission) have been shown
to match the documentary record.
Romany Day
at Tilford,
Surrey.
This pride in ancestry was matched by a continual policing of the

boundaries of the community. Never! replied a girl in the New Forest
after being asked whether she would consider marrying a non-Gypsy.
In fact, as the example of Esmeralda Lock shows, marriages did occur
across the ethnic boundary. But they were problematic, not so much
because they diluted some mythical purity of the race, but because
they reduced the scope for family alliances within the community. If
someone was, as people used to say, a half-blood, then they had only
half as many cousins to draw on for support and co-operation. The
more successful they were at the Gypsy life, the more likely they were
to marry back within the community and reaffirm the bonds which
existed among those of common descent.
A host of relatives, a claim to famous ancestors and a family
background in making a profitable living all helped to mark out a prosperous Gypsy. Other ethnic markers, from old-fashioned Romani to
the ornate carving and decoration of waggons, could be added once
the economic base was secure. The foremost members of the community (the pure-blooded contacts of the gypsiologists) were well-off
by the standards of the Victorian working class; a good waggon, at late
19th-century prices, was worth more than 100. Prosperity gave them
confidence in their dealings with the host culture. From Matty Cooper,
who taught Romani to Charles Leland in the 1870s, to Ted Scamp, who
travelled with Rupert Croft-Cooke in the 1940s, there was a line of
Gypsies who took it on themselves to educate scholars in the ways of
the community. Instead of seeing these resourceful and creative people
as the passive recipients of non-Gypsy stereotypes, it is more useful to
ask what role the light of romance played in their own lives, before it
was twisted into the fantasies of a hundred images which they never
saw and novels which they never read.
Jeremy Harte is the curator of Bourne Hall Museum, Ewell, Surrey and the keeper of the
Surrey Gypsy Archive.
FURTHER READING
Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies,
Roma and Travellers (Reaktion, 2014).
Janet Keet-Black, Gypsies of Britain (Shire, 2013).
Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 18071930 (Columbia University Press, 2006).
Patrick Jasper-Lee, We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the
Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture (Ravine, 2015).
Angus Fraser, The Gypsies: Peoples of Europe (John Wiley, 1995).
XXXXXXXXXXX
SCIENCE
Garlic and Magnets

The Scientific Revolution put an end to beliefs that were once considered
rational but now seem bizarre. If we want to understand why, we need to
look at the increasing importance of the fact, says David Wootton.
PEOPLE IN THE past held all sorts of strange things to be

true. The philosopher Descartes believed that a drum made
of lambs skin would fall silent if it heard a drum made
from the skin of a wolf. It was generally maintained that
lions are frightened of cockerels and that barnacles hatch to
produce barnacle geese: Kepler, the astronomer, believed
this. It was claimed that diamonds are indestructible, unless
smeared with goats blood, which softens them. And it
was accepted that if you smear a magnet with garlic it will
cease to work. By the end of the 18th century nearly all
these strange (or so it seems to us) beliefs had disappeared.
Gathering bulbs:
garlic harvested in
a Latin version of
an Arabic book on
health, late 14th
century.
Among the last to go was the belief that swallows hibernate

at the bottom of ponds; although he knew that other birds
migrate, the great naturalist Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778) still
believed this. I use the word belief, but these beliefs were
rather regarded as reliable knowledge: people knew that
garlic disempowers magnets; they claimed that there was
plenty of experience behind their convictions.
These beliefs, which seemed rational at the time, are
now thought bizarre. Something changed which radically
altered peoples understanding of what constitutes a
well-founded belief, of what counts as knowledge. The
XXXXXXXXXX
| SCIENCE
case of garlic and magnets is a particularly good

example, as it is possible to trace in detail the
debate as to whether garlic really does disempower magnets. Both the ancient Greeks and
Romans thought the belief was unproblematic.
The first person to attack this theory
systematically in print was Giambattista della
Porta in 1589; the last person to defend it was
Robert Midgeley in 1687. The near-century
that separates the two is that of the Scientific
Revolution and this little example of garlic and
magnets is a way into the much larger problem
of how modern science was invented.
Two things need to be kept in mind. First,
that the ancient Greeks and Romans had plenty
of garlic but very few magnets; they became
widely available with the introduction of the
compass for navigation. (The compass was
introduced from China and was used in both
the Islamic and Christian Mediterranean from
the 13th century, so for centuries the compass
and the false belief that garlic disempowers
magnets coincided.) Second, and more important, that the introduction of movable type
printing (from 1450) brought about a long slow
information revolution, comparable to the
impact of the Internet in our own world.
Iron in garlic juice
Della Porta claimed to have smeared a compass
with garlic juice and found it went on working
just fine. He also spoke to fishermen who
assured him they ate garlic in their meals and
were happy to breathe all over their compasses; they would, he said, rather die than give
up eating garlic and onions. Although della
Porta appealed to experience, not everyone
was willing to believe him; some reported his
claims with considerable scepticism, but others
repeated his experiments with care and even
improved on them. Thus Thomas Browne, the author of
Religio medici, heated up an iron bar and then quenched it
in garlic juice, yet found he could still magnetise it. Equally,
he took magnets and left them floating in garlic juice until
they started to rust and they still pointed north-south. In
1654 Walter Charleton mocked those who continued to
believe that a wolfs skin drum would silence a lambs skin
drum; all it took was an easy and cheap experiment to
prove the contrary. (Wolves were rare in England and even
Scotland by the mid-17th century; but presumably wolfskin
was imported from Europe.) A few years later Robert Boyle
mocked those who believed diamonds were indestructible
unless smeared in goats blood: he had spoken to a diamond
merchant who regularly ground up diamonds to make a
fine dust, a diamond polish. Experience and experiment dissolved these ancient beliefs; but how had they survived for
2,000 years? One answer is that they were interlocking and
mutually supporting: diamonds, it was believed, would also
disempower magnets and goats blood would restore them.
It is easier to explain why these beliefs suddenly disappeared in the middle years of the 17th century. First, old
Attractive:
a variety of
magnets from a
German textbook,
c.1850.
authors no longer carried the same authority. The word

author originally meant authority and you could not be an
author until you were dead. (This was true for Shakespeare,
who was only called an author after his death.) Suddenly
eyewitness experience was being used to trump the reports
of authorities such as Plutarch and Ptolemy. The problem
with so many writers, Boyle complained, was that they
reported things without checking their veracity: things as
neither themselves ever took the pains to make tryal of, nor
receivd from any credible Persons that professd themselves to have tryd them. Della Porta indeed was one of the
authors Boyle distrusted and not without reason. Although
it seems he had indeed anointed magnets with garlic juice
he reported other experiments with magnets, which he had
plagiarised and had never performed, and in the introduction to his book he gives a long list of mysterious natural
processes, including that old favourite, that garlic disempowers magnets, a belief that he was obviously reluctant to
abandon even though he had disproved it himself.
Why did old authors lose their authority? Partly because
the printing press provided a vast flood of new information.
XXXXXXXXXXX
Since much of it was contradictory, readers had to pick and

choose. In 1543 Vesalius published his De Fabrica, in which
he listed errors he had found in Galens account of anatomy.
How was one to establish who was right? Only by looking
for oneself, or turning to another reliable source written
by someone who had looked for themselves. The printing
revolution thus had a paradoxical effect: it undermined the
authority of texts in general and raised the authority of a
particular class of texts, those that claimed to be written by
reliable eyewitnesses.
It was not just printing that undermined the authority
of ancient texts. It was a word that runs through all the
key sources experience. In the 15th century the governing
assumption was that all knowledge was to be found in a
In 1663 the Royal Society dedicated

itself to establishing new facts, which
were to be beyond dispute, unlike the
explanations offered for them
book, if one only located the right book (which might well
be hiding on a cobwebbed shelf of an ancient monastic
library). This view was destroyed by the voyages of Amerigo
Vespucci, after whom America is named. Columbus always
believed that he had nearly reached China; Vespucci grasped
that he had found a vast new landmass. In his account of his
voyages Vespucci used an old word in a new sense: he had
discovered a new land. The word spread as fast as news of
Vespuccis discoveries and it established for the first time
the notion that old knowledge could not be trusted, that
there could be real progress. From that moment the authority of ancient texts was fatally undermined.
Tall stories
The printing press, the discovery of America: these are
pretty obvious events. But something else was at work.
We can see it in Galileo. When in 1612 he published an
account of why bodies float he was attacking the Aristotelian view that ice floats, despite being heavier than
water, because it is flat. His critics replied that according
to Seneca there was a lake in Syria on which bricks would
float; Galileo dismissed this as a tall story, much to their
dismay as they thought authors such as Seneca deserved to
be trusted. A few years later Galileo was involved in a debate
as to whether cannonballs get hotter or colder as they fly
through the air. His opponent declared they got hotter and
pointed out that in ancient Babylonia people had cooked
eggs by placing them in slings and whirling them through
the air. Galileos reply was simple: we have eggs, slings and
fit young men. Why do we not give it a try? His assumption was that our eggs, our slings, our fit young men are no
different from theirs. Alexander Ross, who defended the
ancient texts on garlic and magnets as late as 1652, would
not have agreed. He wrote:
I cannot believe that so many famous Writers who have affirmed this property of the garlick, could be deceived; therefore
I think that they had some other kinde of Load-stone, then that
which we have now. For Pliny and others make divers sorts of
them, the best whereof is the Ethiopian. Though then in some
Load-stones the attraction is not hindred by garlick, it follows
not that it is hindred in none; and perhaps our garlick is not so
vigorous, as that of the Ancients in hotter Countries.
When it came down to it, you could only conclude that
Pliny, Seneca and all the other authorities were wrong if
you believed that nature is uniform: that magnets and garlic
are everywhere much the same.
By the middle of the 17th century old authorities were
no longer accepted without question. What were needed
were experts diamond dealers and sailors and eyewitnesses. Deference was dead. Publication had turned the
world of learning into a sort of courtroom in which claims
to truth were tested by appeals to witnesses. One word
perfectly symbolises this new world: fact. Before the 1660s
facts in English were deeds (from the Latin facio, I do)
and usually they were criminal acts. The job of a jury in a
court of law was to rule on the facts and there was no appeal
beyond their decision. (We still use fact in this old sense
when we talk of an accessory after the fact.) Suddenly,
facts became what they are now, impersonal truths; but at
the same time they remained incontestable: you can have
a false belief but not a false fact. In 1663 the Royal Society
dedicated itself to establishing new facts, which were to be
beyond dispute, unlike the explanations offered for them
(which were soon to be called theories) that were up for
grabs. The language of the law was being used as a key term
in the new science.
In this new world of the fact all sorts of old beliefs came
to be dismissed as mere fables and one of the first to go
was the belief that garlic disempowers magnets. We tend
to think of the Scientific Revolution as the work of great
minds Galileo, Kepler, Newton but there was, alongside
the work of these mathematicians, a much wider cultural
shift, a new disrespect for traditional authority, symbolised
in a preoccupation with getting the facts right. Scientists
played a part in this, but so did people who do not count for
us as being scientists at all (della Porta, Browne). This was a
new culture and one we still live in today.
There is a recent school of thought that argues that all
knowledge is grounded in trust; but the trust that became
fashionable in the 17th century was a new, sceptical trust:
one for eyewitness accounts, for experiments that could
easily be repeated. Compared with the old culture, it was
a form of organised distrust. The critics of della Porta and
Galileo, when they insisted that Seneca, Pliny and Ptolemy
could not possibly be wrong, belonged to the old culture
of deference, a culture that is now almost unimaginably
distant from our own. Before the invention of the fact, the
standard view was that only truths deduced from incontestable premises were reliable; theology, philosophy and
mathematics provided the only reliable knowledge and
everything else was a form of public opinion or reputation.
Now we have all sorts of reliable knowledge and it is an
obsession with facts that has made this possible.
David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York.
His latest book is The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific
Revolution (Allen Lane, 2015).
BERNAYS
DWARD L. BERNAYS is regarded as one of the fathers

of public relations. Although he died more than two
decades ago, his influence pervades modern western
consumer culture.
Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of
Freedom, read the front page of the New York Times
on April 1st, 1929. It was no April Fools joke; rather, this
spectacle of liberated, smoking women was one of Bernays
most celebrated publicity stunts.
Bernays client, George W. Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, had asked him: How can we get
women to smoke on the street. Theyre smoking indoors.
But, damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we
can get em to smoke outdoors, well damn near double our
female market. Do something. Act!
Bernays began to ponder. How best to employ the
theories which had already proven so effective in his public
relations campaigns: Gustave Le Bons principles of mass
psychology, Wilfred Trotters herd instinct theses and,
above all, the hidden drives of human beings that Sigmund
Freud Bernays Uncle Sigi in Vienna spoke about?
Bernays needed advice and consulted the psychiatrist
A.A. Brill, who had been one of Freuds pupils. What, he
asked Brill, is the psychological basis for a womans desire
to smoke? Cigarettes which are equated with men, came
the reply, become torches of freedom. That was Bernays
inspiration. His campaign? To get young feminists to light
up cigarettes torches of freedom in public as an act of
emancipation during New Yorks Easter Parade. This, he
believed, would make its way into the nations newspapers.
Before that, however, he still had to take care of a crucial
issue: to give instructions to Bertha Hunt. She was Bernays
secretary, but at his behest she was to forget that for a
few days. She had to pass herself off as a womens rights
advocate and drum up comrades-in-arms for the feminist
torches of freedom campaign; no inference to American
Tobacco was to be permitted.
Edward L. Bernays
with his wife,
Doris E.
Fleischman,
aboard the
SS Mauretania,
1923.
The Great
Manipulator
The self-styled father of PR, Edward L. Bernays ability to mould
public desire made him one of the 20th centurys most influential
yet invisible characters, as Iris Mostegel reveals.
BERNAYS
In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight
another sex taboo I and other young women will light
another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while
strolling on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday. These were the
first lines of the telegram signed by Bertha Hunt which
was sent to selected American debutantes.
March 31st, 1929 was the day Bernays had set aside for
his campaign. He himself was not in attendance, but would
later be informed of how a group of ten young women,
walking up and down Fifth Avenue, contentedly lit up cigarette after cigarette, while Bertha Hunt fulfilled her role
professionally as the purported initiator of the campaign.
When a reporter from the New York World approached
Hunt to ask how she had arrived at the idea of a womens
smoking march, she answered that she first got the idea
Below: Bernays,
second right, with
other delegates of
the Committee on
Public Information, 1917.
Below right:
A.A. Brill, top left,
with Sigmund
Freud and other
psychiatrists at
Clark College,
Massachusetts,
1908.
media reports and provided substantial evidence that the

original reception of the campaign was a Bernays-driven
myth: there was significant media coverage, but it was by no
means as celebratory or as influential on womens smoking
habits as we have been led to believe.
Bernays methods, however, opened a new chapter in
public relations, a profession that he and others pioneered
in the 1920s. Bernays was not the first man in the field.
There were a handful of others before and beside him,
notably his great rival Ivy Lee. Bernays, however, may have
had the greatest impact. He bolstered the new profession with theory, gave it a philosophical framework and
processed the findings of the blossoming psychological
disciplines by coming up with new methods of manipulating the public. Although practically invisible to the outside
world, Bernays became an influential architect of modern
mass persuasion techniques, which continue to inspire the
PR industry. Harold Burson, CEO of Burson-Marsteller,
one of the worlds largest PR enterprises, was quoted in the
1990s as saying: Were still singing off the hymn book that
Bernays gave us.
ernays was related to Sigmund Freud on two sides:

Freuds sister Anna was Bernays mother and his
father Ely, a grain merchant, was the brother of
Freuds wife Martha. Bernays was born in Vienna in
1891 and emigrated to the US with his parents a year later.
He was to die on March 9th, 1995 at the age of 103 in Massachusetts. Another member of the Freud family followed
in his footsteps: Matthew Freud, who is considered one of
Britains most successful PR men.
Influenced by his famous uncle, with whom he corresponded regularly, Bernays got to understand the power
Bernays generated events, the events

generated news and the news generated
a demand for whatever he was selling
for this campaign when a man with her in the street asked
her to extinguish her cigaret [sic] as it embarrassed him. I
talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high
time something was done about the situation.
In their coverage of New Yorks Easter Parade, scores of
US newspapers reported the story of the young women and
their torches of freedom. While some correctly suspected
a publicity stunt or stated that the smokers had not attracted much attention, others presented it as a campaign
of emancipated women. Neither Bernays nor American
Tobacco were ever mentioned by name in the press reports;
their camouflage remained intact.
The Torches of Freedom campaign became a legendary
milestone in the history of public relations, still cited in
marketing textbooks, which claimed that it caused a national debate and prompted emancipated women to smoke
in public. These claims, however, stand on shaky ground.
Vanessa Murphree from the University of Southern Mississippi presented an analysis in September 2015 of the 1929
of the unconscious, of universal longings, of emotions and

instinct. He exploited them for whatever he had to sell:
artificial flowers, racehorses, gramophones, politicians, ideologies. No matter what it was, he often worked according
to a certain dramaturgy, which his biographer Larry Tye
described thus: He generated events, the events generated
news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he
happened to be selling. In Bernays eyes, generating events
was one of if not the most important task of a PR adviser.
He himself labelled it as the creation of circumstances,
the staging of apparently spontaneous events to influence
peoples behaviour, according to the wishes of the clients.
This was genuinely innovative, because until then business

advertising was relatively straightforward: extolling the
product and its functional advantages. Bernays, by contrast,
aimed at the unconscious and trusted in the indirect
method. Its like shooting billiards, he once pointed out,
where you bounce the ball off cushions, as opposed to pool,
where you aim directly for the pockets.
Above: an
advertisement
for Lucky Strike
cigarettes, 1930s.
Right: one
for General
Electric, 1926.
NFLUENCED BY THE principles of Gustave Le Bons mass

psychology, Bernays believed that human behaviour could
be effectively manipulated, if purportedly independent symbolic figures were manipulated to play upon
unconscious aspirations and fears: in the name of health, a
hearty breakfast recommended by Dr. A.L. Goldwater or, in
the name of equality, cigarettes smoked by feminists. Soon
Bernays would expand this third-party technique (employing a third, opinion-leading party as the mouthpiece for
the clients interests) using a PR tactic which at that time
was novel but has since become common. He began to field
front groups, that is, seemingly independent organisations
which profess to support concerns of the common good: the
Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary
Dispensing of Foods and Drink; the Radio Institute of the
Audible Arts; the Temperature Research Foundation; the
Middle America Information Bureau all seemingly innocuous associations that were, in reality, set up by Bernays
solely for PR purposes.
The bosses of big corporations, such as the United Fruit
Company, Proctor and Gamble or General Electric, were
fascinated by Bernays new methods and flocked to his
Manhattan-based PR company, forking out huge sums for
his advice. People like him were needed. The First World
War was over and a sharp recession began in 1920. One of
the numerous problems for Americas magnates was the
consumption of the average citizen. Many only purchased
what they really needed, a behaviour which moguls wanted
to change. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur summarised
this in a particularly straightforward manner: We must
shift America from a needs to a desires culture, he wrote
in 1927 in the Harvard Business Review. People must be

trained to desire, to want new things even before the old
have been entirely consumed. Bernays claimed to understand how such methods worked. He had been experimenting with the human psyche since the 1910s, while
working as a press agent on Broadway, where he persuaded
US citizens to become enthusiastic about acts from Europe
that had earlier left them cold, such as Russian ballet or
opera performances with Enrico Caruso. However, his shift
from simple publicity to strategic PR had taken place during
the First World War. At that time, in his mid-20s, Bernays
was working in a lowly position for the Committee on
Public Information (CPI), the US war propaganda agency.
BERNAYS
He was fascinated by how the CPI succeeded in gearing up
Americans to take part in the war. Within a short time their
initial rejection had turned into an irrational enthusiasm
for war. Bernays realised, as he recalled decades later: If this
[propaganda] can be used for war, it can be used for peace.
HORT OF STATURE, with a thick black moustache,

Bernays was one of the fledgling PR industrys
most controversial figures. He was considered vain,
obtrusive and arrogant. It was said that he referred
to his secretaries as Little Miss Nitwits and that the word
failure was missing from his vocabulary (despite numerous
setbacks). Above all, he was someone who never lost an opportunity to beat his own drum and who presented himself
all too readily as the father of public relations. Just as
Bernays avoided his colleagues, so he too was avoided. The
PR historian Scott M. Cutlip, for instance, in his book The
Unseen Power: Public Relations, tells of a group of influential
PR men in the 1930s who imposed a golden rule for their
meetings: that nobody was allowed to mention the name
Edward L. Bernays. If it happened, a 25-cent penalty had to
be paid; at the end of the year they bought a round of drinks
with the money.
Bernays was considered

vain, obtrusive and arrogant.
It was said that he referred
to his secretaries as Little
Miss Nitwits
Bernays cared little about all of this. He devoted himself
to his lifes work: the planning of campaigns. He never
made any secret about his passion for propaganda, characterising himself as a propagandist for propaganda, even
attempting to rehabilitate the word after the First World
War gave it a negative connotation. The only compromise
he had been willing to make was to omit propaganda
from his job title and to simply call himself Counsel on
Public Relations. But when writing his book, he could not
help calling a spade a spade. Propaganda will never die
out, wrote the then-37-year-old Bernays. Intelligent men
must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by
which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring
order out of chaos. This was the last sentence of his book
that he titled, to nobodys surprise, Propaganda. Sigmund
Freud would later congratulate him on his clear, clever and
comprehensible book. Freud could not have anticipated
that his nephew a Jew like him may have also inspired
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels some years later.
According to Bernays own account he was informed by Karl
von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, that in 1933 Goebbels was using his PR classic Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign
against the Jews of Germany. Bernays commented on this
in his 1965 autobiography: This shocked me, but I knew
any human activity can be used for social purposes or
misused for antisocial ones. Bernays frequently produced
campaigns for charities free of charge, for example, that of
the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Bernays first piece
of advice to Sylvia Lawry, the then chairperson was that:
Edith Lee smokes

a cigarette on
the 'Torches for
Freedom' march,
New York, 1929.
The name Multiple Sclerosis is too difficult for the public.

Shorten it to the initials MS. It was a recommendation the
wisdom of which remains true to this day.
Yet Bernays had an even larger vision of public relations,
one that extended beyond the narrow bounds of marketing
campaigns. For him, PR was the instrument to guarantee a
smoothly functioning society. Since the masses according to Bernays are incapable of making rational decisions, the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the
organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important
element in democratic society. His daughter, the novelist
Anne Bernays, speaking in a 2002 BBC documentary,
recalled: Democracy to my father was a wonderful concept,
but I dont think he felt that all those publics out there had
reliable judgment.
This stance was typical of the sentiment of Americas
elite of the 1920s: they believed, because of the propaganda
experiences of the First World War, that the public was profoundly irrational and, ergo, dangerous and had to be controlled. Without violence, decision-makers were dependent
later Operation Desert Storm began. There was only one

problem: the incubator story was not true and the 15-yearold nurse turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti
ambassador to the US. This, however, did not come out until
after the war was over when, in January 1992, it became
known that the New York PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, was
behind the story. Hill and Knowltons client was the front
group Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an organisation funded
by the Kuwaiti government in exile. It wanted to convince
the US public to strike against Iraq and did so. This was what
was meant by the engineering of consent.
on the public and its approval and this now seemed

controllable. If cigarettes, bacon and gramophones could
be sold to the people, so could opinions, ideologies or politicians. To Bernays, one was like the other: goods without
inner value that had to be sold. He called this selling technique the engineering of consent, that is, the manufacturing of public approval: in Bernays words, the very essence
of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and
suggest. Harold Lasswell, one of the leading US political
scientists of his day, wrote in 1927 of the collapse of the traditional species of democratic romanticism and described
the increasingly powerful public opinion-moulding apparatus: If the mass will be free of chains of iron, it must accept
its chains of silver.
These were the years of the birth of modern political
PR. Bernays methodology would soon be part of its stock
equipment and inspire future generations, resulting in the
events of a campaign which went down as a dark chapter
in the more recent history of the industry. In October 1990
on Capitol Hill, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah
stated in a public hearing of the Congressional Human
Rights Caucus that, while volunteering in a Kuwaiti hospital, she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies out of their incubators,
leaving them on the cold floor to die. More than 700 TV
stations broadcast the appearance of Nurse Nayirah, which
shocked the US public and finally convinced it to take military action against Saddam Husseins Iraq. Three months
Top: Joseph
Goebbels,
Berlin, 1936.
Above: Edward
Bernays aged 89,
1981.
ERNAYS aged 100 and still active at this point

was not involved in this PR campaign, but he would
have recognised it as such, since it was very much a
replica of his own campaigns: exploiting an emotion
(in this case fear) by means of a credible symbolic figure
(the 15-year-old nurse) and placing it in an apparently
natural event (her appearance in Congress), because it is
the overt act that makes news, and news in turn shapes the
attitudes and actions of people.
Bernays career spanned a period of more than 80 years,
eight decades in which his ideas changed the texture of
modern western societies. The essence of reality itself
had begun to alter: what is an authentic event and what is
merely an apparently authentic one? What is information
and what is manipulation disguised as information? Successive generations of public relations practitioners have
extended Bernays legacy. Authentic posts on the Internet
are indistinguishable from those subverted by companies
and independent political blogs are intermingled with those
that are paid for. Allegedly, scientific studies are passed on
to journalists via news agencies, but they represent both
real science and commercial interest. If anything, the 21st
century has witnessed the encroachment of Bernays ideas
into every crevice of our lives, concludes the historian
Stuart Ewen in his introduction to Bernays classic text
Crystallizing Public Opinion. Though still virtually unknown
by the public, Bernays was in 1990 chosen by the US magazine LIFE as one of the 100 most important Americans of
the 20th century.
Some have claimed that his wife and business partner,
Doris E. Fleischman, played a decisive role in his success, a
fact that Bernays downplayed. Meanwhile, the controversy
that surrounded him did not abate until he had outlived all
of his competitors. In his later years he was revered as the
master of his craft. Bernays regarded himself as a member
of an intelligent minority, who could steer the masses
at the push of a button. What he conveniently forgot was
that it was always his clients who decided to what end the
buttons were to be pushed.
Iris Mostegel is a writer based in Vienna. She is a regular contributor to the
Wiener Zeitung, the Stuttgarter Zeitung and the Frankfurter Rundschau.
FURTHER READING
Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (IG, 2007).
Danny Rogers, Campaigns That Shook the World (Kogan
Page, 2015).
Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth
of Public Relations (Holt, 1998).
MakingHistory
We live in an era sceptical of singularity and authority, yet attracted to narrow certainties. Might a
more self-consciously subjective approach to history offer solutions, asks Mathew Lyons?
Between fact and fiction

What does it mean to write history
today? What claims can historians
make about their work? These are just
two of the questions that sprang to
mind after listening to Niall Ferguson
tussle with the Pulitzer Prize-winning
novelist Jane Smiley on Radio 4s Start
the Week in October.
Ferguson was attempting to clarify
the distinction between historians
and writers of historical fiction. What
happened and how it felt are not separate things, he said:
Historians are as much concerned with
how it felt the difference is, we are actually basing it on research rather than
our imaginations. People who write
historical fiction are telling you what it
must have felt like. But thats not what
it felt like, because essentially theyre
projecting back, in [Janes] case early
21st century ideas.
Ferguson, Harvards Laurence A. Tisch
professor of history, has long been
a proponent of the counterfactual,
which whatever its virtues and vices
is at heart an imaginative project.
Indeed, Ferguson edited one of the
leading books on the subject, Virtual
History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997).
Yet how do historians justify what
they do? Certainly they can no longer
pretend to Olympian distance and
uninterested authority. We are all a
product of the times we live in, fed by
the oxygen of our experiences, and it
is disingenuous to claim otherwise.
We live in a multi-channel, multivocal era, which is sceptical of singularity and authority, but paradoxically
attracted to narrow certainties and
averse to self-doubt. How should historians adapt their practice to reflect
these competing tensions? Doubt is
'Voluminous
chaos': Portrait
of John Aubrey
by William
Faithorne, 1666.
central to intellectual enquiry, but

by the time a work arrives in print,
doubts have usually been effaced. The
goal of historical research is to work
our way out of doubt towards authority; perhaps work that articulates
explicitly that process would better
represent to the wider public what
historians actually do.
To write history is to fill our

glass with water from the
Thames and claim we have
captured the river
Likewise, do historians challenge
themselves enough to find an appropriate form for their ideas? They strive
for originality of research and analysis, but how often do they strive for
originality or inventiveness of form?
The book or long-form essay may still
be the best format historians have for
sustained and rigorous argument. But
do they default to it out of admiration,
laziness, or cultural deference? After

all, todays cultural and technological
fragmentation and diversity offers
enormous opportunities for generically and therefore intellectually
satisfying creativity to those with the
requisite talent, ambition and desire.
To take two examples in different media: Ruth Scurrs My Own
Life (2015) might best be described
as an autobiographical biography
of John Aubrey, piecing the great
antiquarians life together out of the
voluminous chaos of his published
and unpublished writings. Elsewhere,
and largely unmarked in the press,
BBC televisions Footballers United, an
innovative historical drama, recently
won a Prix Italia for Best Digital
Storytelling. It used its medium to
create a touching and thoughtful narrative illuminated by archive materials
actually embedded in it. Rather than
a drama-documentary, it was a new
thing: a documented drama.
To write history is to fill our glass
with water from the Thames and
claim we have captured the river. This
is as true of Jane Smiley as it is of Niall
Ferguson, but the author of fiction
makes no claim to objective truth or
authority and so may be more true to
our times.
Certainly, the boundary between
fiction and non-fiction is more porous
than we like to think. Perhaps an
approach to non-fiction historical
writing that was more comfortable
in acknowledging its subjectivity,
its contingency and its intellectual
frailties would challenge readers to
think more deeply about the nature of
history and its place in our culture.
Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh
and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).
XXXXXXXXXXX
HEALTH
| SEXUAL
Private pain:
draining fluid
from a hydrocele
of the scrotum.
Engraving by
Frederik Dekkers.
Dutch, 1694.
MEN DO NOT talk about their bodies. We often hear this

objection today when talking about attitudes to prostate
and testicular cancer. This reticence has led to high-profile
events such as Movember and Go Dad Run, which raise
money to combat these serious illnesses and encourage
men to open up about their bodies. You could be forgiven
for thinking that this is purely a modern issue, but it is not.
Men in the 17th and 18th centuries were similarly described
as being less than forthright about their bodily afflictions.
Medical and surgical writers lamented that they hid their
diseases because they were embarrassed, neglected them
through misguided notions of their own bodys invincibility
or wilfully ignored illness, because it would interfere with
their daily lives. As today, this was particularly true of mens
sexual health conditions.
At the time manhood and manliness were qualities that
men earned and displayed to reinforce their status. Simply
being male was not enough to be granted status automatically. Men shaped their reputation through being the head
of a household and by being a father, which confirmed their
virility, and also by practising philanthropy, spirituality and
social paternity. To support this, a mans body was expected
to be strong and well-formed, but equally important were
self-control and mastery over the body and self. Sexual
health and genito-urinary conditions could thus undermine a mans apparent masculinity. Those suffering from
disorders such as incontinence or nocturnal pollutions
(involuntary loss of semen during sleep), for example, were
seen as lacking self-control, while those who were sexually
incapable were emasculated by their inability to satisfy
their wives, who might then commit adultery, making
them a cuckold. Likewise impotent and infertile men were
in a precarious situation as they struggled to fulfil their role
as head of a household: childlessness meant their honour,
reputation and credit were open to question.
Vilification and virility
John Muys 1686 treatise on surgery included the story of
a bold young virgin who vilified her bridegroom on their
wedding night when his hernia was revealed. She complained such a distempered Body [could not] satisfie a Maid
in the flower of her Age and argued that she would rather
die than live with her new spouse. Muys noted that the
husband had to prove himself a Man sufficient by impregnating her with twins. This mans hernia had allowed his
wife to complain and scold, inverting the gender hierarchy
of the household. The bridegrooms manhood was placed in a
precarious position and had to be visibly displayed to regain
his position as head of the household. The French surgeon
Ambroise Par urged those treating male sexual health patients to be particularly diligent for precisely these reasons.
He claimed: But for the wounds of the Testicles, and genitall
parts, because they are necessary instruments for the
Shameful
Secrets
Mens awkwardness when talking about their bodies,

especially as regards their sexual health, has changed
little since the 17th century. Jennifer Evans looks into
the private worries of men and their doctors.
| SEXUAL HEALTH
XXXXXXXXXX
preserving thespeciesby generation and to keepe all

things quiet at home, therefore the Chirurgion ought to be
very diligent and carefull for their preservation.
Yet some medical writers did their best to argue that
sexual health issues were not always that serious. Alexander
Read, a surgeon and anatomist, argued that because wounds
of the male genitals were not deadly and men could evidently live if their testicles were removed it was unnecessary
to discuss their treatment in any detail. Others framed their
descriptions of sexual health and genito-urinary conditions
in a way that implied men would be returned to full health;
they would not be left with any lasting symptoms that
would damage their reputation or daily
life. Frequently surgeons and physicians
wrote that men were perfectly cured.
Nicholas Gaynsford, apprentice to Dr
George Willet in Groombridge on the
Sussex/Kent border in the early 18th
century, recorded that Samuell Curde,
who hurt his scrotum while climbing over
some bars, was perfectly cured without
elaborating on what this meant.
These descriptions sometimes
stretched plausibility. Theodore Mayerne,
royal physician to James I, recorded the
story of a man who suffered from a range
of genito-urinary afflictions, including ulcers and fistulas.
He noted that following treatment this Gentleman enjoys
a perfect health, nor doth perceive any inconveniency of
these great Griefs, even though the patient still suffered
from a painful itching when urinating and the loss of
matter, possibly seminal, each time he urinated. It seems
that surgeons and physicians not only emphasised their
own abilities as healers, but also encouraged men to seek
medical help.
Because men could

evidently live
if their testicles
were removed, it
was unnecessary
to discuss their
treatment
Embarrassment
It is clear though that not all men believed that these
conditions were harmless, either to their reputations or to
their long-term health. In particular, venereal disease caused
shame and embarrassment and medical writers repeatedly
noted that men hid the condition from those around them.
John Marten wrote in the early 18th century that most
Men blush to own [the disease], because it carries with it
Disgrace, and seems to reproach them with Frailties and Irregularities. Indeed, Richard Wiseman, surgeon to the Royalist army during the Civil War, recorded that several of his
patients were deeply ashamed of their condition. One, when
Wiseman interrogated him on the nature of his disease,
grew passionate, and denied it to be Venereal; and a day or
two after removed out of his lodgings two or three miles into
the Country to avoid the discovery of his affliction. Moving
two miles away evidently did not help, as the patient eventually had to undergo treatment for the pox.
It was not only patients embarrassment that prevented
men from seeking appropriate help. Medical practitioners
also moaned that men, particularly young men, seemed
to think that their bodies were invulnerable and did not
require help. Philip Barrough explained that young mens
sense of invincibility and bravado about their health
endangered them:
The yong man flourishing as it were in the Aprill of his age,

cockereth in himselfe a foolis[h] imagination of his own
lustinesse, & reputeth it as a discredit to him to seeme to feare
the approache of any disease if at any time they be overtaken
with anie infirmitie (which often happeneth) as unwilling to
be beholding to the science of Physicke, they leave it to be worne
away by the strength of their bodie.
Similarly several case notes suggest that men downplayed
the severity of their conditions to avoid the doctor. Gaynsford wrote of Samuell Curde, who by getting over a pair of
Barrs Hurt his Scrotum that, he thinking [it] to be not very
much neglected himself for Sometime, causing his condition to worsen.
Passing pride
Perhaps surprisingly, there were some conditions that men
openly and freely discussed. In particular they seemingly
discussed bladder stones and their associated symptoms
without concern. Some men even showed off the stones
they had managed to pass. Mathew Purmann noted that
in the late 17th century Baron Van Horst Lieutenant
Colonel of the Hannover Troops had kept his bladder
stones and in the year [of ] 1687 shewed me a great Box
full of Angular, Oval and Round Stones which came from
him in Six Weeks Time, the largest whereof was about the
bigness of a great Pea. The historian Ulinka Rublack has
also revealed that in 1574 the ambassador Ogier Ghislain de
Busbecq discussed a bloody discharge in reports he sent to
Emperor Maximilian II while on his travels. He explained
that while travelling from Vienna blood began to flow
from me in large quantities along with urine, but without
any sensation of pain or greater inconvenience of any sort.
The ambassador recounted this affliction without any
apparent shame and, although he halted his trip for health
reasons, there is no suggestion that he saw the condition as
problematic.
The key factor that tended to prompt men to discuss
their conditions was pain. Conditions of the male genitals,
as they are today, were known to be particularly painful: a
British surgeon John Banester noted that: Wounds of the
gendring parts are most perillous for paine. Men in this
era were expected to bear pain with stoicism. It is clear,
however, that when it became severe enough to interfere
with daily activities men sought help from friends, family
and physicians, albeit without giving in to their emotions,
which might suggest a lack of restraint. In September 1629
Sir Francis Harris wrote to Lady Joan Barrington that his
kidney/bladder stones were causing him severe pain, which
forceth mee to bee bould to send unto yow for your accostomed [sic] charity.
Far from being a modern issue, mens complex relationship to their sexual, reproductive and genito-urinary health
has a long history. Medical practitioners then, as now,
sought ways to make men more comfortable with their
bodies and tried to encourage them to voice their concerns
and seek medical help in good time despite their enduring
refusal to admit to the need.
Jennifer Evans is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hertfordshire,
where she researches early modern medicine.
MARIGNANO
Relief from the Basilica of St Denis,

tomb of Francis I depicting the
Battle of Marignano, 16th century.
A Battle of
GIANTS
So bloody was Francis Is defeat of the Swiss at
the Battle of Marignano in 1515 that it made
previous battles resemble childrens games.
Robert J. Knecht traces the French kings route
across the Alps towards war in Italy.
ITHIN A FEW MONTHS of becoming king of France on

January 1st, 1515, Francis I invaded Italy at the head of
a large army. His actions opened a new chapter in the
history of the so-called Italian Wars, which his predecessor, Charles VIII, had launched in 1494. Italy at that time was
tempting prey for a powerful neighbour, as it was divided into many
more or less independent states, the most important being Venice,
Milan, Florence, Naples and the Papal States. French intervention had
a long history, reaching back to Charlemagne. More recently, Charles
VIII had conquered Naples only to be driven out of the peninsula by a
coalition of Italian states. His successor, Louis XII, led a new invasion in
1499. He conquered Milan and Genoa, but inadvisably chose to share the
Kingdom of Naples with Ferdinand, King of Aragon, who soon collared
the lot. Four years later, Louis allied with Pope Julius II against Venice,
but after its defeat the pope expelled the French from Italy with the help
of the Swiss cantons, then reputed to be the leading military power in
Europe. After defeating the French at Novara in 1513, the Swiss invaded
Burgundy and laid siege to Dijon. The local French commander bought
them off with a treaty, which the king then refused to honour. These
events formed the background to Francis Is invasion. He claimed the
Duchy of Milan by virtue of his descent from his great-grandmother,
Valentina Visconti.
Before invading Italy, Francis needed to secure his rear. He signed
two treaties: one with Charles of Habsburg, who ruled the Netherlands
and Franche-Comt, and the other with Henry VIII of England. The
Swiss, however, refused to sign. They resented the way they had been
cheated over the treaty of Dijon and were unwilling to give up territories in Italy given to them by Massimiliano Sforza, the then Duke
MARIGNANO
Top: portrait of
Francis I, c.1515-20.
Below: medal
depicting Francis I
with the Battle of
Marignano on the
reverse, Matteo
del Nassaro, 16th
century.
Like all young noblemen of his

time, Francis had been trained
to fight. He now had to face the
real test as a military leader
of Milan. He, for his part, could count on the support of Ferdinand of
Aragon and Pope Leo X. On July 17th they and Maximilian, the Holy
Roman Emperor, formed a league for the defence of Italy. Twelve days
later Francis left Amboise on the first stage of his journey south to join
the army he was going to lead across the Alps. Twenty years old, he was
tall and strong. Only a few days before, he had shown great bravery
when facing alone and killing with his sword a wild boar, which, having
escaped from its cage, was terrifying courtiers who had gathered in the
chteaus courtyard. Like all young noblemen of his time, he had been
trained to fight; but his military experience had been limited to two
unsuccessful campaigns in Guyenne and Navarre. He now had to face
the real test as a military leader.
Francis reached Lyon on July 12th, but before entering the city he
was invited to watch a nautical pageant on the River Sane. This took
the form of a white winged stag pulling a ship. Riding the stag was a man
dressed in the colours of the Duke of Bourbon, the regions principal
landowner, who was also Constable of France, the overall commander of
the army under the king. Legend had it that a winged stag had assisted
Clovis, King of the Franks, to fight the Almains by guiding him to a
ford across a river. Standing at the prow of the ship was a man impersonating Francis. He wore a suit of armour but no helm and beside him
a winged child blew wind into the ships sails from bellows. On a flag
attached to the mast an embroidered salamander vomited flames. The
nautical pageant was soon followed by the kings entry into the city of
Lyon, when he was again able to watch all sorts of theatrical displays in
which he was portrayed as the noble champion. In one of them a Swiss
bear could be seen tending its bleeding claws and Sforza expressing his
shame and despair.
N JULY 15TH Francis appointed his mother, Louise of Savoy,

to be regent of France in his absence. He then travelled to
Grenoble, where his army had assembled. The standing army
consisted of cavalry units known as compagnies dordonnance
or collectively as the gendarmerie. They comprised volunteers recruited from the nobility grouped into lances, each comprising a man at
arms, two archers and a number of auxiliaries. A man-at-arms wore a
heavy suit of armour while the archers were more lightly clad. Both
categories fought with lances. By this time, however, some had a bow
or crossbow. Each lance had eight horses: four for the man-at-arms
and two for each archer. A company comprised 50 or 60 lances, each
commanded by a captain or lieutenant. For infantry, the king relied on
Francis I at the Battle of Marignano, 14th September 1515, 16th century.
volunteers known as aventuriers, recruited mainly in Gascony or Picardy.

Grouped in companies of 500 men each under a captain, they wore
leather jerkins and light helmets. They fought with pikes, halberds,
crossbows or arquebuses. Francis also employed foreign mercenaries.
He recruited 23,000 landsknechts in Germany, who copied Swiss tactics
without being as disciplined. As for the French artillery reputedly
the best in Europe it consisted of 60 cannon of divers calibres. Made
of bronze, they were pulled by horses trained to keep up with an army
on the march.
Beyond the Alps between 12,000 and 15,000 Swiss troops were
waiting along with 1,500 papal cavalry commanded by Prospero
Colonna. Anticipating that the French would use either the Mont
Genvre pass or that of the Mont Cenis, they stationed themselves
in the Val Chisone or Val di Susa. But, taking the advice of Marshal
Trivulzio, Francis chose the col de Larche, a much less accessible pass
normally used only by local peasants. More than a thousand pioneers
were sent ahead to clear the pass of obstacles and to throw pontoons
across torrents. The French van under Charles, Duke of Bourbon began
to cross the mountains on August 11th. As they emerged into the plain
of Piedmont, they learnt that Colonnas cavalry was stationed close
by at Villafranca. Three companies of French gendarmes set off to take
them by surprise. Colonna was having a meal when he was captured
along with 300 of his men. Thus the Swiss lost their cavalry support.
Francis, meanwhile, set off from Guillestre with the rest of his
army. Despite the efforts of his pioneers, he found the Alpine crossing
difficult. Writing to his mother, he said:
MARIGNANO
We are in the strangest country ever seen by any man of this company.
Yet tomorrow we hope to be in the plain of Piedmont with the force I am
leading which will please us very much as we are finding it difficult to
cross the mountains wearing armour. We have to walk leading our horses
by the bridle. It would be impossible for anyone who has not witnessed
the scene to believe that cavalry and heavy guns can be transported as we
are doing.
On the Italian side the descent was so precipitous that horses slipped and
fell into ravines and cannon had to be dismantled, their parts lowered by
rope. Once in Piedmont, Francis marched rapidly eastward after a brief
stop in Turin, the capital of Savoy. Hoping to win the trust of the local
people, he imposed a strict discipline on his troops, even forbidding the
infantry to enter towns that had opened their gates. Meanwhile, the
Swiss, finding themselves bypassed by the French, retreated eastward
towards Lake Maggiore.
HOUGH WILLING ENOUGH to fight the enemy, Francis was

not ruling out a negotiated settlement, as long as the Swiss
were prepared to cede Milan. He sent his uncle, Ren of Savoy,
to negotiate with them at Vercelli. In return, he offered them
subsidies and future military aid. Meanwhile, he continued his eastward
march. He crossed the River Ticino on August 31st and at Bufalora received delegates from Milan who promised him victuals and a friendly
reception in their city. Even so, the king sent Marshal Trivulzio to spy
out its approaches. His caution was justified as the Milanese were split
into factions: while the Ghibellines were ready to treat, the Guelfs were
intent on fighting. As Trivulzio withdrew, Francis carried out a semi-circular movement south of Milan in order to contact a Venetian army,
commanded by Bartolomeo dAlviano, which was stationed at Lodi. On
September 9th, Francis received the terms of a treaty negotiated with
the Swiss at Gallarate. They were ready to give up all the territories they
held in the duchy of Milan, except Bellinzona, in return for 1,000 gold
crowns. Massimiliano Sforza was to receive the duchy of Nemours by
way of compensation for that of Milan, as well as the hand of a French
princess. Francis was to be allowed to raise troops in Switzerland. Satisfied by these terms, he collected the huge sum demanded by the Swiss
from his entourage and sent it to Gallarate.
The Swiss, however, were sharply divided. While the men of
Bern, Fribourg and Solothurn were willing to go home, those
from other cantons refused to accept the treaty. Matthias
Schiner, cardinal-bishop of Sion, who hated the French,
The descent was so

precipitous that horses
slipped and fell into
ravines and cannon had
to be dismantled, their
parts lowered by rope
The equestrian
armour of Francis I,
16th century.
urged the Swiss to continue the fight. He harangued a large gathering

in the main square of Milan. The content of his speech is not precisely
known, but he seems to have promised his audience an easy victory,
if they took advantage of a recent dispersal of the French army. While
6,000 troops had escorted Marshal Lautrec to Gallarate, others had
gone to Pavia with Louis dArs. Francis, meanwhile, had pitched his
camp at Marignano (today Melegnano), a small town ten kilometres
south of Milan. He now had only about 30,000 men. About noon on
September 13th the Swiss came out of the city. So rapid had been their
departure that many had not had time to prepare themselves; many
were without shoes, helmets or armour. Marching rapidly, elbow to
elbow and in silence, they carried wooden pikes, three to five metres
long, each ending with an iron blade. They had only eight small cannon
by way of artillery. Schiner, wearing his cardinals robes, followed them
riding a Spanish jennet. He was escorted by 500 Milanese horsemen and
preceded by a processional cross.
The French camp was situated near the village of San Giuliano,
five kilometres north of Marignano. It was flanked on the west by
the road from Milan to Lodi and on the east by the River Lambro. The
land in between was marshy and intersected by ditches and irrigation
channels. The camp was divided into three parts. The vanguard nearest
Milan was commanded by the Duke of Bourbon. It comprised all the
artillery, a square of 6,000 landsknechts and 950 men-at-arms. The
centre or battle was located at Santa Brigida, one kilometre to the
south. Commanded by Francis, it comprised 9,000 landsknechts and
the flower of the gendarmerie. The rearguard, five kilometres further
south, consisted only of cavalry commanded by Charles dAlenon, the
kings brother-in-law.
BOUT NOON on September 13th some pioneers working

beyond the French camp on the way to Milan noticed a huge
cloud of dust rising into the sky. Realising that it was thrown
up by the advancing Swiss, they immediately informed
Bourbon, who, in turn, warned the king. He was with Alviano, who
left at once to rejoin his troops at Lodi. The Swiss attack soon followed.
As usual, it consisted of three huge blocks, each of 7,000 pikemen,
advancing one behind the other. Around 4pm the first broke
through the line of sharpshooters guarding the French guns.
The French cavalry withdrew leaving the gunners defenceless.
The landsknechts, who, like the Swiss, were armed with pikes,
then engaged the enemy. Two enormous squares of pikemen
collided. The Swiss broke through and repulsed a
charge by the French cavalry. As the first
Swiss square began to falter, the second
moved forward to lend support. By now,
it was night, but fighting continued till
the moon vanished around midnight.
The two armies then separated, the
French responding to trumpet calls and
the Swiss to the great horns of Uri and
Unterwalden. But many soldiers got lost
in the dark, some even sleeping alongside the enemy by mistake. Bodies were
strewn across the plain and the groans of
the wounded filled the air.
Thinking that the battle was already
won, Schiner informed Basel. The news
spread across Europe much to the delight of
Henry VIII. Meanwhile, in the French camp,
Francis ordered his chancellor to send three
letters urgently: the first ordered Lautrec, who
was at Gallarate, to end talks with the Swiss and,
if possible, recover the money that had been paid
Clockwise from left: portrait of Galiot de Genouillac

d'Assier, army officer during the reign of Francis I,
Clouet, 16th century; portrait of Matthias Schiner, 16th
century; manuscript showing La Bataille, a chanson by
Clment Janequin, 1542.
MARIGNANO
A crowned lion
symbolises Francis'
victory, Orus Apollo,
16th century.
Marshal Trivulzio, a veteran of 13 battles, called

Marignano a battle of giants, compared with
which all the rest were but childrens games.
Gravediggers reported burying 16,500 bodies.
Of the 21,000 Swiss who had come out of Milan on September 13th,
fewer than 13,000 returned. More than 1,500 wounded were cared for
in Milans hospitals and convents. French losses were fewer. Nearly
8,000 perished, mainly among the vanguard. Among them were many
noblemen whose bodies were embalmed and carried back to France
in leaden coffins for burial on their estates. Never again, Francis said,
would anyone call the gendarmerie hares in armour. One of the days
heroes was Galiot de Genouillac, master of the artillery. Another may
have been Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard. Legend has it that the
king asked to be dubbed by him after the battle as a tribute to his bravery.
Although almost certainly apocryphal, the story, which has inspired
paintings by Fragonard and Ducis, has become an essential part of the
popular remembrance of Marignano.
to them; the second urged Alviano to bring his army from Lodi at once;
the third asked Louis dArs to reinforce Pavia in the event of Francis
needing to shelter there. Having taken these steps, the king spent the
rest of the night, as he wrote to his mother, bottom on saddle, lance
in hand and helmeted. He took a brief nap leaning on a gun barrel.
Taking advantage of the interval in the fighting, Francis also reorganised
his army: he brought the three sections together in a single line with
himself and the battle in the centre, Bourbons van on the right and
Alenons rearguard on the left.
ATTLE WAS RESUMED AT DAWN. The Swiss, now also formed

as a single line, engaged the French along their entire line. On
the right, Bourbon managed to repel them, but in the centre
the Swiss managed to cross a ditch under heavy fire from the
French guns, scattering the infantry. Francis, charging at the head of
his gendarmerie, threw them back, but on the left the Swiss captured
the artillery, dispersed the infantry and cut through the landsknechts,
who fought heroically. At this juncture, Alvianos Venetian horse arrived
shouting San Marco! San Marco! Galvanised by their arrival, the French
mounted a counter-attack which carried the day. By 11am Francis could
claim victory. The rump of the Swiss army retreated towards Milan as a
disorderly rabble. Some carried the wounded on their backs, while others
dragged their blood-soaked cantonal banners. Some sought shelter in
Bourbons headquarters, but this was set on fire by the French. Those
who threw themselves out of the windows were impaled by pikemen.
RANCIS I ENTERED MILAN in triumph on October 1st, 1515.

Soon afterwards Pope Leo X agreed to meet him in Bologna. The
outcome of that meeting was the signing of a Concordat which
satisfied a long-standing papal demand for the annulment of the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges of 1438. In addition to strengthening his
authority over the French church, Francis hoped that the Concordat
would ensure papal support for his future conquests in Italy. During
the three weeks he spent in Milan following his return from Bologna,
Francis reduced a fine he had imposed on its citizens. He also freed
hostages and allowed exiles to return home. Sforza, meanwhile, settled
in Paris where he died in 1530. After another crossing of the Alps, this
time in the reverse direction, Francis arrived at Sisteron on January 13th,
1516 to be greeted by his mother and wife. God knows, wrote Louise
in her diary, how relieved I was to see my son fit and well after all the
violence he had suffered in the public interest. The battle of Marignano
was celebrated in music and in literature, not only in France but also in
Italy. Francis was praised for his looks, which stood in sharp contrast to
the ugliness of Charles VIII, his predecessor in the peninsula. Italians
celebrated the battle as the victory of virtu over fortuna. In France it
was followed by propaganda designed to glorify the king and justify
the heavy loss of life he had inflicted on the Swiss. Accused of avarice
and pride, they were portrayed as lice-ridden cowherds. The seigneur
de Bayard was said to have called to them: Go and eat cheese in your
wretched mountains! While the Swiss were ridiculed, Francis was acclaimed as worthy to stand alongside such ancient heroes as Hannibal
(because of his crossing of the Alps) and Julius Caesar (who had also
defeated the Swiss). Franois Demoulins, in a book published in 1519,
described imaginary meetings between Francis and Caesar, one of them
in the forest of Fontainebleau. Addressing Francis, the author wrote:
Let it be noted that two drops of water cannot be more similar than
your fortune and Caesars.
Robert J. Knecht is Emeritus Professor of French History at the University of Birmingham.

He is the author of Hero or Tyrant? Henry III, King of France 1574-89 (Ashgate, 2014).
FURTHER READING
Amable Sablon du Corail, 1515 Marignan (Tallandier, 2015).
Didier Le Fur, Marignan, 13-14 Septembre 1515 (Perrin, 2015).
Robert J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I
(Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw, The Italian Wars, 1494-1559
(Pearson, 2012).
REVIEWS
Mihir Bose thinks about the French

Rachel Pope praises the Celts Peter Burke on the past as a foreign country
Tug-of-War: Ramsay MacDonald is the first man on

the rope at a Labour Party rally, 1923.
SIGNPOSTS
The History of the Labour Party
Keith Laybourn traces the emergence of the Labour Party, its highs and
lows and wonders if its forward march is now halted.
EVER SINCE the Labour Party
was formed as the Labour
Representation Committee in
1900 it has been at the centre
of intellectual and political
debate. Writings on the Labour
Party have been driven by two
central questions: first, why did
the Labour Party emerge in the
early 20th century to replace the
Liberal Party as the progressive
party in British politics? Second,
has the forward march of Labour
been halted? The second of these
has particular relevance since

the recent election of Jeremy
Corbyn as Labours leader, which
has rekindled divisive conflicts
between Old and New Labour.
As the Labour Party emerged
to replace the Liberal Party in
the 1920s, G.D.H. Cole suggested
that its success was the inevitable consequence of the emergence of class politics. This was
espoused in George Dangerfields
amorphous study The Strange
Death of Liberal England (1934)
and by Henry Pellings more

factually based The Origins of the
Labour Party (1954). Their view
was rejected by Trevor Wilsons
book, The Decline of the Liberal
Party (1966), which proposed
that Labours growth had less to
do with working-class enfranchisement than with the impact
of the First World War, when
the Liberal Party found itself
divided between the contrasting
premierships and values of Henry
Asquith and David Lloyd George.
In the 1970s, there was intense

debate between the rival interpretations of class politics and
the First World War, fuelled by
P.F. Clarkes Lancashire and the
New Liberalism (1971), which
argued that the Liberal Party was
in rude health on the eve of war,
buoyed up by Lloyd Georges New
Liberal policies and the Liberal
reforms of 1905-14, which
encouraged social harmony and
largely retained the workingclass male voter.
This view was countered by
Ross McKibbin in his The Evolution of the Labour Party 1910-1924
(1974) and in my own book, The
Rise of Labour (1988), arguing
that the trade union base of
Labour, when faced with industrial conflict, was more interested
in winning support than establishing social harmony during
strikes. Since then, the debate
has widened to incorporate
the views of David Howell, Bill
Lancaster and Duncan Tanner, all
of whom have raised the issues
of regional and local variations
in the growth of Labour and
suggested that its success was not
inevitable.
Labours victories since 1900
have been fitful. Two minority
governments in 1924 and 192931, under Ramsay MacDonald,
brought barely the most modest
of social and political changes
and much venom from those
who considered him a traitor.
However, David Marquands
biography, Ramsay MacDonald
(1977), represented him as an
honest socialist driven by his
commitment to the 19th-century
values of statesmanship and national responsibility in the face of
the horrific economic crisis that
emerged after the Wall Street

Crash of 1929. The complexity
and permeability of Labour
politics at this time has been
developed further by John Shepherds monumental biography
of George Lansbury (2002) and
by David Howells commanding
MacDonalds Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922-1931 (2002),
which examines Labour politics
as it varyingly operated in the
Independent Labour Party, the
trade unions and other sections
of Labour. This multi-layered
reappraisal of Labour politics is
also particularly evident in Britains Second Labour Government
(2011) edited by John Shepherd,
Jonathan Davies and Chris
Wrigley. Through these works
we have begun to understand the
immense difficulties of minority
Labour governments that were
Why did the Labour

Party emerge in the
early 20th century
to replace the
Liberal Party? Has
Labours forward
march been halted?
fractured by disagreement, overwhelming economic difficulties
and unemployment costs.
Labour achieved success with
the Clem Attlee governments
of 1945 to 1951, creating the
modern welfare state and the
National Health Service; further
success in the Harold Wilson
and James Callaghan era of 1964
to 1970 and 1974 to 1979 and
once again under Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown between 1997
and 2010.
However, the nature of British
politics has changed and, apart
from the recent erosion of the
welfare state and the NHS, there
has been a retreat by Labour
from the commitment to the Old
Labour policies of public ownership to the embracing of capitalism within a wider framework,
which increasingly eschews
public control and is represented
by New Labour. This may have
been driven by Labours lengthy

periods in opposition between
1951 and 1964, 1979 and 1997
and since 2010. In these wilderness years there were a flurry of
books and articles published on
the theme of Must Labour Lose?
and The Future of Labour, following Eric Hobsbawms Marxism
Today article The Forward March
of Labour Halted (1978). One
dominating theme has been
the declining role of the trade
unions, whose control of the
Labour Party, as secured by the
1918 Constitution, was eroded in
the 1980s to a third of the vote
in the leadership election to one
that was indirectly successful in
the election of Jeremy Corbyn
as leader in 2015. The broader
reaction against trade union
domination has been captured in
the extensive writings of Chris
Wrigley and John Shepherd in
Crisis? What Crisis?: The Callaghan
Government and the British
Winter of Discontent (2013),
which deals with the industrial
conflict of 1978-9 that saw uncollected rubbish accumulate in
the streets and corpses unburied
as roughly one and a half million
workers went on strike. It still
resonates in British politics and
public rhetoric.
As class politics appears to be
less relevant in British society
now with the structural decline
of the large industries and their
blue-collar workers along with
the waning of trade union
power we have recently been
reminded in Martin Pughs iconoclastic Speak for Britain: A New
History of the Labour Party (2010)
that Labour never truly became
the party of the working class; it
skilfully adapted its message to
the established local and regional
cultures of the Liberal and Tory
traditions and became emasculated by Blair. Pughs suggestion
that Labour has a tendency to
choose the wrong leader and to
hang on to him too long is an
interesting reflection in the light
of the result of Labours recent
leadership election.
Only time will tell whether
or not this means that Labours
forward march has been halted.
Keith Laybourn
The Maisky Diaries
Red Ambassador to the Court

of St Jamess 1932-1943
Edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky
Yale University Press 632pp 25
IVAN MAISKYs extensive diaries

have been unearthed from the
Russian archives and edited by
Gabriel Gorodetsky, an expert on
Soviet relations with the West.
This abbreviated, one-volume
edition of the diaries will be
followed by a full three-volume
one and is intended presumably
for the general reader. They will
be attracted by the colourful
character sketches and the
excellent range of photographs
and cartoons that illuminate
both the book and the era, even
if some of the diplomatic discourse is rather too detailed and
repetitive.
Maisky cultivated
a wide range of
contacts ... from the
Webbs and Bernard
Shaw, to Churchill,
and to Lloyd George
Maisky was a protg of
Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet
foreign minister in the 1930s,
and his standing in the Soviet
hierarchy waxed and waned
with that of his patron. Although
a loyal communist, Maisky was a
pragmatist rather than an ideologue and was an Anglophile.
He was thus an ideal choice as
the new Soviet ambassador to
Britain, for, in the wake of Hitlers rise to power in Germany,
Stalin wanted to create an antiNazi front in partnership with

the western democracies. Thus
Maisky set out not to engage in
subversion or class war, but to
hobnob with the British establishment, including royalty. He
cultivated a wide range of contacts, from intellectual socialists,
such as the Webbs and Bernard
Shaw, to senior Tories, such
as Churchill and Eden, and the
elder statesman, Lloyd George.
His pen portraits of these and
other leading figures are often
vivid and sometimes insightful.
The diaries also shed light on
the social milieu of informal
diplomacy; a world in which,
although men were dominant,
women were often present and
sometimes vocal.
The value of the diaries with
respect to Anglo-Soviet relations
is more difficult to assess. The
entries sometimes conflict with
the account Maisky gave in
his own memoirs, though that
may be partly explained by his
precarious political position
during the Cold War era. Even in
the 1930s Maiskys influence on
Soviet policymaking was limited
and the failure to effect an
Anglo-Soviet alliance led to the
Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, which
took Maisky completely by surprise. The German invasion
of Russia in 1941 gave a new
warmth to Anglo-Russian
relations, but that was soon
undermined by Britains failure
to launch a second front against
Hitler. Maisky was recalled to
Moscow in 1943 and then sidelined. The importance of his contacts with British politicians and
diplomats is also questionable.
He was never close to Neville
Chamberlain but the confidant
of dissidents such as Churchill,
Eden and Lloyd George.
Maisky was also never close
to Stalin and he probably survived the purges unlike some
of his embassy staff because
of his personal links with the
British elite. In his diaries he
predictably praised Stalin and
the Communist regime yet he
was more at home in the gentler
world of British politics.
Roland Quinault
REVIEWS
King John
(Mis)Remembered
The Dunmow Chronicle,

the Lord Admirals Men, and
the Formation of Cultural
Memory
Igor Djordjevic
Ashgate 216pp 60
HISTORICAL REPUTATIONS rise

and fall, but King John has had
more of a rollercoaster ride than
most across the centuries. Reviled
in his own day and throughout
the rest of the Middle Ages, he
was unexpectedly rehabilitated
during the Tudor period because,
like Henry VIII, he had defied the
pope. Protestant propagandists
blamed Johns problems on papal
machinations against him and
dismissed his evil reputation as
a fabrication of biased monastic
chroniclers. Since then historians
have veered between these two
poles, some condemning Johns
moral turpitude, others praising his
administrative ingenuity and so on.
Igor Djordjevic is concerned
with the evolution of the kings
reputation in the late 16th and
early 17th centuries, following the
publication of John Stows The
Chronicles of England in 1580. Stow
included in his book a fragment of
an early 14th-century chronicle
written at Dunmow Priory in
Essex, which attributed the conflict
between John and his barons to
the kings lust for Matilda, the
daughter of Robert fitz Walter,
the leader of the Magna Carta
rebels. According to the Dunmow
Chronicle, when Matilda rejected
the kings advances, he had her
poisoned with a boyled or potched
egge. This story was quickly taken
up by playwrights and players

(including the Lord Admirals Men
of the subtitle) and became the
basis for a cluster of dramas about
King John in the late Tudor and
early Stuart period. The Dunmow
account is far from a new discovery, but Djordjevic explores its
impact in detail and charts the
way it was fused with the tales of
Robin Hood.
There are two main problems
with this book. The first is the
authors style, which makes it a
heavy slog from the outset: for
example, I studied the various
early modern interpretive communities that derived from the texts
they read about their national past
meanings relevant to them in their
present to explain to themselves
what made them who they were
and what it meant to be English
but modern scholars are an
even more distinct interpretative
community of readers of the same
texts because they overtly and
unabashedly inscribe meanings on
them.
The second is that Djordjevics
book suggests he essentially shares
the opinion of Tudor writers for
whom John was a king who simply
received a bad write-up, as well
as their disdain for the contemporary chroniclers of the kings reign.
Djordjevics analysis suggests that
he may not have read the original
sources in sufficient detail. For
example, at the start of chapter
one, Reclaiming John from the
Monks, we are told there is no
need to revisit the works of Roger
of Wendover and Matthew Paris.
However, later writers, such as Sir
Richard Baker, whom he suggests
was inventing scurrilous material
about John in the 17th century,
were actually copying Wendover
and other chroniclers more or less
verbatim.
Djordjevic may feel justified in
this attitude towards John because
he finds it in the work of modern
historians, but the authors he cites
are almost exclusively historians
who wrote in the mid 20th century
and who preferred royal administrative records to the testimony of
chroniclers. The actual consensus
among scholars writing in the past
20 years is that John was indeed a
terrible king, who failed precisely
because of his cowardice, cruelty

and sexual predation. The story
told by the Dunmow Chronicler,
while clearly much improved,
echoes a well-informed contemporary writer, the Anonymous of
Bthune, who says that Robert fitz
Walter fell out with John because
the king tried to force himself on
his daughter. Since fitz Walter, far
from being a perennial rebel, had
little or no quarrel with John before
1210 and only minor material
grievances, the possibility of a real
personal animus against the king
cannot be dismissed as medieval drivel. Here, however, stories
about Johns sexual harassment
are dismissed as fabrications and
even well-attested examples of individuals being starved to death on
the kings orders become alleged
atrocities.
The repeated assertion that
John was a much-maligned
monarch detracts from what
might otherwise have been an
interesting work of scholarship.
Pace Djordjevic, it was not the
17th-century playwright Anthony
Munday who damaged Johns
reputation by forever branding
him as an attempted rapist and
tyrannical homicide. That damage
had been done by the king himself.
Marc Morris
Medieval Women
Deirdre Jackson
The British Library 200pp 20
WHAT IS WOMAN? Mans

undoing is the unequivocal,
opening expression of the Life of
Secundus, translated from Greek
into Latin by Willelmus, at the
Abbey of St Denis in 1167 and
much reproduced throughout
the Middle Ages. Through her
analysis of manuscript books
associated with women (as

commissioners, readers,
authors, inspiration for and
subject matter of written
works), Deirdre Jackson
provides yet further evidence
that the lives led by medieval
women were more positive and
more interesting than
Willelmus would have us
believe.
Most medieval
women did not
simply balance,
precariously,
between pit and
pedestal, hostage
to their inheritance
from Eve and
the unattainable
standard of the
Virgin Mary
Ever since Eileen Powers
pioneering study, Medieval
English Nunneries, c. 1275-1535
(1922) and her series of lectures
on medieval women (not
brought together and edited
by M.M. Postan until 1975),
scholars have sought to provide
insight into the reality of medieval womens lives. Following
in this tradition, Jacksons book
reaffirms that most medieval
women did not simply balance,
precariously, between pit and
pedestal, hostage to their
inheritance from Eve (lascivious, deceitful, garrulous) and
the unattainable standard of
the Virgin Mary (forever chaste,
silent and obedient).
Medieval Women examines
womens sexuality, marriage,
motherhood, learning, spirituality, literary patronage and
work, illustrated by texts and
images in manuscript books
that date from the 12th to the
15th centuries.
The chapter devoted to
work includes portraits of
women performing a variety of
occupations: in addition to the
ubiquitous spinning, women
REVIEWS
are seen gathering the harvest,
selling meat, performing acrobatics and making the very
books in which these portraits
have been preserved. Clemence
of Barking, Christine de Pizan
and Eleanor of Castile, Queen of
England (1241-90), who employed two scribes and an illuminator to make manuscripts
for her, are three of the many
named women who feature in
Jacksons book. Her examples
of women as commissioners,
owners and readers of books
are drawn largely from the
upper echelons of society and
this is perhaps inevitable considering access to literacy and
the high cost of bespoke book
production in the Middle Ages.
As with Jacksons earlier
work, Marvellous to Behold: Miracles in Illuminated Manuscripts
(2007), Medieval Women is lavishly illustrated with 120 colour
plates taken from manuscripts,
the majority of which are held
by the British Library and whose
beautiful illumination attests
to their being high-status
artefacts.
As Deirdre Jackson reveals, a
book was a treasured possession, into the fabric of which a
woman might have an image
of herself depicted. In times of
crisis, such as childbirth, medieval women turned to saints
and the Virgin, sometimes
recording the births of their
children in their books. Women
taught their daughters to read,
often from the very books of
hours that they had commissioned, using these books
to instil not only love of God
and the Virgin but also that
of the written word. Jackson
concludes: Among the most
personal possessions, manuscripts are also among the most
eloquent.
By turning the leaves of
Jacksons beautiful volume,
readers today can gain access to
a range of medieval books that
still speak to the lives of the
medieval women who commissioned, owned, read and, in a
number of cases, are portrayed
within them.
Sue Niebrzydowski
EXHIBITION
Stukeley illustration: an Iron Age druid wearing
a Late Bronze Age gorget a people and an object
800 years out of sync.
In 18th-century scholarship, Celtic essentially meant not-Roman, so all prehistory was
Celtic and so, too, was early Medieval Ireland.
In 1707, as England annexed Scotland, the
linguist Edward Lhuyd employed the term Celtic
to convey the deeper ancestry of the Atlantic
western languages, as opposed to the impact of
Roman/Saxon/Norman on English to the east.
By the 19th century, Celtic Studies grew, conflating prehistory and early histories, to produce
a pan-European culture of some 2,000 years; a
Celtic mixing-pot. This has become a problem
for archaeologists, who increasingly see time in
generations and prehistoric social groups covering roughly the size of our counties; a scale also
found in the linguistics of the Atlantic coast.
As an Iron Age archaeologist, I teach
the Celts as a series of layers through
which to excavate. A colleague, John
Collis, uses lenses to show how each
era has skewed our understanding.
So we peel off the Enlightenments
re-imagining, the anachronism of early
Medieval Irish laws and the hearsay of
later Roman political histories.
We acknowledge contemporary
Classical texts as anthropologies of
pre-Roman Iron Age people. Ultimately, we turn to the archaeology, the
science of it. We study their art, their
architecture and agriculture, their
burial traditions, piecing together a
Celts: Art and Identity
modern understanding of the many
British Museum, London. Runs until January 31st, 2016
communities that dwelt in Europe
before Rome.
This exhibition enables us to experience
Snettisham hoard, all beautifully displayed. We
also learn of warrior identity and of the powerful Iron Age art, revealing the visceral shift of early
Christian forms, and the impact of Renaissance
woman of Waldalgesheim. We are awed by the
Gundestrup cauldron (inset); before a neat study and Enlightenment thinking on modern Celtic
of late Iron Age British art: its horses, boars, bulls identities, establishing that Celts were, and have
and the culture clash of Rome. There is a sense of become, different things in different places, at
different times.
tangible difference as we move through into the
We find hints at a time depth for modern
art of the early Christian period.
Celtic identities: the language survival; the
The second hall is about discovery. We learn
genetic map, with England so separate from the
that the British Renaissance involved a redissmall clusters on the western peninsulas; the
covery of the Celts; a romantic Celtic revival is
survival of La Tne art styles in the bits of Britain
beautifully evoked by J.H. Foleys marble statue
least influenced by Rome, beyond England. The
of the very noble Caratacus.
past is hugely relevant.
In the 18th century we find the time depth
We are so familiar with large-scale history
of our prehistoric past to be rather confused; at
and identity, nation state-sized grand narratives;
this time it was believed that the world began
yet this exhibition begins successfully to unin 4004 bc. In the 1740s William Stukeley had
tangle the detail of Celtic art styles and British
Caesars Iron Age druids at Stonehenge, with a
identities. It is academic communication at its
Bronze Age palstave and Roman sandals pieces
very best. Book your ticket.
of history separated by 2,300 years. We find the
Rachel Pope
modern Arch Druids breastplate modelled on a
THE NAME CELTS, OR KELTOI, was left to
us by the ancient Greeks, who, along with
the Romans, used it to refer to various people
in non-Mediterranean Europe; a catch-all for
groups who were different. It remains a catchall term for the people of pre-Roman Iron Age
Europe (800 bc-ad 43). More specifically for
their La Tne art style, surviving as an insular
British form down to c. ad 200.
Celtic is also a series of languages; an early
form of Christianity and related art-style; and a
modern political identity. Celtic is all of these
things; unravelling the various strands of the
Celtic knot is no easy task.
The first hall of this exhibition is a wonderful
experience: finding the animals and faces in early
La Tne art; discovering the astonishing skill of
the gold work; the beauty of the Thames shields;
the full range of the torcs (neck-rings) from the
REVIEWS
Agents of Empire
Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and

Spies in the Sixteenth-Century
Mediterranean World
Noel Malcolm
Allen Lane 604pp 30
THE MEDITERRANEAN, as a
world in itself or as a gateway to
other worlds, old and new, has
been much studied. For the period
covered by the book under review,
the 16th century, the classic study
was contributed by Fernand
Braudel. This was written from
prison and his treatment of the
Mediterranean during the reign of
Philip II is consequently rather
impressionistic. By contrast, and
from different circumstances, Noel
Malcolms study, Agents of Empire, is
anchored in a wide range of specific source materials, primary and
published, and reveals a considerable knowledge of areas of the
Mediterranean not often frequented by Anglophone historians.
Malcolms starting point may
appear rather unusual, from two
families originating from Venetian
Albania, the Bruni and the Bruti.
In his introduction, the author
apologises for a micro-historical
approach and it is true that some
micro-histories have emerged
from raids on little known archives resulting in challenging
worldviews usually compiled
from atypical Inquisition records.
However, the Bruni and the Bruti
lead the reader into a much wider
world and Malcolm handles its
and their stories extremely
well. Throughout, their careers
and family circumstances are
woven into the greater narrative.
In the 16th century, Albania existed
then, as now on a frontier

between Islamic and Christian
states and between Islamic and
Christian (Greek Orthodox and
Roman Catholic) religions. But
the frontier was a porous one;
espionage, negotiation, trade, the
exchange of prisoners, regional
politics between the divides of
East and West could flourish.
The Bruni and the Bruti, like
other families from marginalised areas of Europe, made their
way into a wider world and here
Malcolm takes his treatment onto
the wider stage of the Mediterranean. Each chapter encloses a
clear and compelling narrative
of such great events as the Siege
of Malta (1565) and the Battle of
Lepanto (1571), while alert to other
issues, for example the Ottoman
threat to south-eastern Italy and
Spanish ambitions in North Africa.
The coverage of key figures and
courts is well researched and clear.
But the author is always ready to
shift focus from a wider to a more
specific stage: the arming of a
Venetian galley, how completely
or incompletely did the Ottoman
Empire recover from Lepanto,
the nature of Venetian holdings
in Albania and Istria in terms of
strategy, population, government
and resources. He also discusses
the concept and aims of sea power
in the period, arguing that the
Mediterranean naval powers did
not seek Jutland-style confrontations, but rather used their fleets
to raid, acquire coastal cities and
strong points and to transport
armies. This may be to downplay
the contemporary appreciation of
sea power. Malcolms study draws
repeatedly on information on the
construction, arming, readiness
and movement of vessels and
navies.
Throughout, this study, or
series of studies, is informative
and thought-provoking, from
discussions of armchair strategic
thinking in the Vatican, to divisions
and unrest in the Balkans, to the
Venetian Republics ability to keep
punching (or rowing) above its
weight and whether the weakness
of some of its Balkan possessions
helped to prolong their place in the
Venetian stato di mar.
Agents of Empire includes a
useful and necessary Note on

Names, Conventions and Pronunciations, covering, for example,
the many changes over time
to place names. It also includes
some effective maps, though
given the geopolitical situation in
the Balkans Malcolm discusses,
a relief map would have been
useful. In all, this book greatly
enriches our understanding of
Mediterranean history on both
international and local levels. It
should also be recommended
reading for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its more
thoughtful representatives in the
Balkans and Middle East. Finally,
it should spur scholars to consult
the sadly neglected archives of
Koper (Capodistria) in the Biblioteca Nazionale della Marciana in
Venice.
John Easton Law
The French Historical

Revolution
The Annales School, 1929-2014

Peter Burke
Polity 198pp 20
Following Auguste Comtes call

at the end of the 19th century for
a history without names, the
Annales school started in Strasbourg, just after the First World
War, under the auspices of two
exceptional historians, Lucien
Febvre (an authority on the 16th
century) and Marc Bloch (a specialist of the Middle Ages). Both
men aimed at substituting what
the economist Francois Simiand
called the idols of the tribe of
historians (the political, the
individual and the chronological
idols), concentrating instead on

the synthesising of historical
patterns identified from social,
economic and cultural history.
Peter Burke retraces the
history of this rvolution intellectuelle, which saw the establishment of a problem-oriented
analytical history in the place
of a narrative of events that
had hitherto dominated the
discipline, and the introduction
of cross-disciplinary research
and practices aimed at covering
a wide range of human activities. Burke expertly explores the
history of the Annales conquest
of French academia, from the
founders who, surrounding
themselves with a group of
talented young scholars,
attempted to fight the Spirit
of Specialisation, to the Age of
Braudel, the Cultural Turn in
the 1970s and the New Directions taken by the movement
today before closing on its
worldwide impact.
Throughout this extremely
engaging book, Burke, who is
Professor Emeritus of Cultural
History at the University of
Cambridge, follows the historians and their important works,
weighing with lucidity their
contribution to this historical
revolution against national and
international contexts. In the
French context, the development of the movement was both
the result of favourable circumstances and of a genuine strategic endeavour: indeed, Febvre
and Bloch met in Strasbourg
at a time when the university,
only reclaimed by France after
the First World War, favoured
intellectual innovation and was
open to the exchange of ideas
across disciplinary frontiers. This
allowed them to explore their
common interest in historical
geography, a feature that was to
be the hallmark of the Annales
school and economic history,
which was reflected in the interdisciplinarity of the editorial
committee of the Revue des
Annales, created by Febvre in
1929. Once the movement was
established, academic recognition came in the form of a
chair for Febvre (1993) at the
REVIEWS
prestigious Collge de France,
and for Bloch (1936) at the Sorbonne, where the real strategic
enterprise started. Undeniably,
given the importance of Paris
to French intellectual life, this
move to the centre of French
academic life by the Annales
school was in itself a clear sign
of the movements success.
After the Second World War,
Braudel, with the publication
of his classic book, The Mediterranean, combining as it did the
study of the longue dure with
that of the complex interaction
between the environment,
the economy, society, politics,
culture and events (or geohistory, as he called it), established
him as the intellectual and
institutional leader of the movement. Thus started the Age of
Braudel, which saw the Annales
establish itself at the very
heart of the French academic
institution, as Braudel became
the president of the Jury of the
agrgation in History a competitive examination to qualify for
academic posts allowing him
to influence deeply the discipline. His presence and authority
remained extremely influential,
even beyond his retirement in
1972.
Despite Braudels achievements and charismatic leadership, the development of the
Annales movement in his day
cannot be explained solely in
terms of his ideas, interests
and influence. Post-1968, the
movement became fragmented
and, at the same time, too rich
to allow Burke to dedicate much
time to each individual historian
and their works, though he still
identifies a number of strong
developments, such as those of
quantitative history and historical anthropology. Nevertheless, this is an excellent survey
of a school that dominated
historical studies in France for
half a century, providing a fertile
ground for some of the most
innovative works, truly shaping
history as a discipline, as the
last chapter, dedicated to the
Annales in a global perspective,
amply demonstrates.
Nathalie Aubert
The History of Modern

France
Jonathan Fenby
Simon & Schuster 536 pages 25
How the French Think

Sudhir Hazareesingh
Allen Lane 426 pages 20
FRANCE, said Charles de Gaulle,

cannot be France without grandeur. The countrys recent history
suggests the great man was
nearer the mark when he moaned
how impossible it was to manage
a country of 246 different kinds of
cheese. Andr Malraux famously
observed: When the French fight
for mankind, they are wonderful,
when they fight for themselves,
they are nothing. Novembers
horrific Paris attacks by Islamic
terrorists, rightly, generated
much sympathy for the country.
However, will Frances current
President, Franois Hollande,
Malraux observed,
When the French
fight for mankind,
they are wonderful,
when they fight for
themselves, they
are nothing ... will
President Hollande
be able to show the
world how to deal
with one of the
foulest scourges of
our time?
be able to follow in the great

traditions of France and show the
world how to deal with one of the
foulest scourges of our time?
Against this background, these
two books could not be better
timed. Jonathan Fenby knows the
country well and argues that the
French have become prisoners
of their past. It can no longer
prosper because the country that
bequeathed the world exceptional
ideas such as Libert, galit, Fraternit has been outpaced by the rest
of the world.
Fenbys history starts with the
restoration of the monarchy after
Napoleons defeat at Waterloo in
1815 and ends with the murder of
the editor and staff of the satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo in January
2015. Such a huge accumulation
of facts can often be indigestible
but Fenby, skilfully, avoids this trap
with a narrative which has pagelength biographies of major figures
and important events, such as the
Paris Commune of 1871, in a diary
form plus a selection of choice
sayings of the last 200 years. This
includes the words used by the
actress Arletty, who lived with a
German officer in the Ritz during
the occupation, to defend her
collaboration: Mon Coeur est la
France, mais mon cul est moi.
Wartime collaboration is an
issue which the French are only
now, 70 years later, beginning
to examine, with the evidence
indicating that de Gaulle, who
led the resistance, was an artful
spin-doctor when presenting all
Frenchmen as having followed
his lead. Many, including JeanPaul Sartre, did nothing; Francois
Mitterrand, Frances first socialist
president, served the Vichy regime,
and some even helped send Jews

to their death.
Such contradictions should
come as no surprise, for even as
French thinkers at the close of
the 19th century expounded ideas
of universal idealism, France was
hugely expanding its colonial
empire on the grounds of the
right of superior races over inferior
races. These contradictions are
also the theme of Hazareesinghs
book, but he deals with French
ideas from Descartes the first
chapter is called The Skull of
Descartes to Derrida. Rousseau
also figures prominently and the
book is a marvellous primer for
students eager to learn about
French thought over the last
four centuries. It can, at times, be
dense. One sentence runs to 24
lines combining discussion of the
Acadmie Franaise with that of
the rock star Johnny Halliday.
However, Hazareesingh does
raise the question as to whether
the 21st century has seen the
closing of the French mind. His
most potent illustration of this
retreat from universalist concerns
is that in 2014 the French book
that grabbed world attention was
Thomas Pikettys study of global
capitalism, a book on economics,
rather than grand ideas. Like
Fenby, Hazareesingh has an eye
for detail. He reproduces the issue
of the monthly satirical magazine,
LHebdo Hara-Kiri, published just
after de Gaulles death in his village
of Colombey-les-Deux-glises in
November 1970. The headline on
the front cover read: Tragic Ball at
Colombey: 1 Dead. This was considered so objectionable that the
magazine was banned and turned
itself into Charlie Hebdo, another
impertinent reference to de Gaulle.
In many ways de Gaulle
emerges as the last great leader
able to mask the countrys
contradictions. But while Fenby
ends on a note of deep pessimism
about where France is headed,
Hazareesingh, despite starting his
conclusion by talking of Frances
loss of self-confidence, concludes
that the French will remain the
most intellectual of peoples and
continue to produce ideas that
enthrall the world.
Mihir Bose
REVIEWS
Fighters in the Shadows

A New History of the
French Resistance
Robert Gildea
Faber & Faber 608pp 20
PARIS! OUTRAGED PARIS!

Broken Paris! Martyred Paris, but
liberated Paris, Liberated by the people
of Paris with help from the armies of
France, with the help and support of
the whole of France, of France which
is fighting, of the only France, the real
France, eternal France.
Charles de Gaulles pronouncement at 5pm on August 25th,
1944 in the Htel de Ville, Paris
is one of most famous in French
history. With these words,
spoken with force and passion,
he wished to underline that Parisians had liberated themselves.
This is why he was so insistent
that French forces were the
first into Paris, even though as
General Bradley commented
wryly: Any number of American
divisions could more easily have
spearheaded our march into
Paris. But to help the French
recapture pride, I chose a French
force with the tricolour on their
Shermans.
De Gaulles speech was brilliant politics and instant mythmaking. After the humiliation of
four years of Nazi Occupation,
he knew that he had to project
a sense of national power and
unity through an image of
self-liberation, albeit one that
carefully avoided any sense of
revolutionary insurrection.
This mythology quickly took
root post-1945, leading to a
highly selective interpretation
of the Occupation period. In the
early 1950s, primary school textbooks made no mention of the

pro-Nazi regime led by Marshal
Ptain, based in the spa town of
Vichy, let alone how this regime
participated in the Holocaust.
Instead, the story was a simple
one. France fell in 1940 and then
the Resistance began, leading to
the Liberation in 1944; a seamless, heroic narrative that was
military, masculine and French.
The contribution of foreigners
within the Resistance or colonial
troops was ignored, while the
role of the Allied forces was
downplayed.
However, myth-making and
selective memory were not just
the preserve of the Gaullists.
Post-1945, the Communist Party
became the most powerful
political movement on the Left,
in large part because of its claim
to be the anti-Nazi Resistance
force par excellence. Yet, while the
crucial role of Communists was
undeniable, this image conveniently forgot how the NaziSoviet Pact of August 1939
meant that the Communist
Gildea places the

French Resistance
within the wider
international
ideological conflicts
of the 1930s and
1940s
leadership was initially ambiguous about the Occupation,
not entering fully into anti-Nazi
Resistance until the German invasion of the USSR on June 22nd,
1941. Similarly, although the
Communist Party maintained
that Communist resisters suffered the most from repression
hence the slogan the party of
75,000 martyrs this figure was
condemned as an outrageous
exaggeration by opponents.
One of the many strengths
of Robert Gildeas gripping new
history of the French Resistance,
Fighters in the Shadows, is the
way that he has cut through
this myth-making. He has gone
back to the historical sources,

drawing upon oral testimony,
memoirs and diaries to create
a bottom-up view that tells us
how the Resistance felt from the
inside. So we learn how resisters
coped with cold, hunger and
fear. We learn, too, about how
resistance activity produced a
spectrum of emotions, ranging
from joy and exhilaration
through to confusion and frustration.
Gildea is excellent on women.
Outlining why their participation was marginalised at the
Liberation, he puts them at the
centre of the story, explaining
how women of all backgrounds
became involved in intelligence,
propaganda, sabotage and
armed action. He is excellent,
too, on the role of foreigners,
such as Spanish Republicans,
Italian anti-Fascists and German
anti-Nazis, thereby placing the
French Resistance within the
wider international ideological
conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s.
Indeed, in one telling phrase,
Gildea ponders whether it is
more accurate to talk less about
the French Resistance than
about resistance in France. He
is also strong on the political
in-fighting within the Resistance. He clearly outlines how
de Gaulle won out over his rivals
despite the opposition of President Roosevelt, who thought
him a dictator in waiting.
This, though, is very much
a political and military history.
There is little on culture. There
is no real engagement with the
role of underground poetry
and literature or the clandestine press, all of which were
crucial in creating alternative,
Resistance identities. Equally,
more needs to be said about
the Resistance as a reassertion
of imperial power, which led to
the clampdown on Moroccan
nationalists in early 1944, as well
the incredibly violent repression
of Algerian nationalism in May
and June 1945. However, this is
still a major contribution to the
historiography of the French
Resistance in particular and
Resistance studies in general.
Martin Evans
Terrains of Exchange
Religious Economies of
Global Islam
Nile Green
Oxford University Press 288pp 25
IN 1902 the Reverend Henry

Smith went to Aurangabad in the
princely state of Hyderabad on
behalf of the Church Missionary
Society of Birmingham and the
souls of Aurangabads Muslims.
In five years of street preaching
and distributing Urdu pamphlets,
Smith failed to win a single
convert. Instead, he stimulated
a Muslim revival in the city by
attracting competition from the
Ahmadiyya Jamaat.
As Nile Green explains in his
enthusiastic and enlightening Terrains of Exchange, what happened
next is a case study in the religious economy whose currency is
not salvation but social power.
The Jamaat, founded in 1889
by the entrepreneurial Punjabi
messiah Mirza Gullam Ahmad,
adopted the print technology,
organisational methods and
outreach strategies of its Christian
competitors. Supported by Hyderabads Muslim rulers and businessmen, the Jamaat pushed the
Reverend Smith out of the market.
By 1920 the Jamaats franchises, riding the waves of a global
economy, were propagating its
mishan (mission) to auto-workers
in Detroit.
Meanwhile, back in Hyderabad,
the Christian missionaries targeted
a new market: low-caste Hindus.
Religions may insist on the separation of the holy and the profane,
but the modern history of religion,
Green shows, cannot be separated
REVIEWS
from the impure workings of
industrialisation and empires.
Green traces a three-phase
cycle, from the 18th to the 20th
centuries. In the first phase, British
missionaries exploited the presence of the East India Company to
launch evangelical imperialism in
Bombay and other communications hubs. This created a middleman class of upwardly mobile
Indian converts. The number of
converts was low, but its catalytic
effects and social repercussions
were immense. The Christian
onslaught triggered the creation
of local markets. In this second
phase, self-strengthening groups
like the Jamaat internalised the
Christian critique of Islam, adapted
the Christian missionaries marketing techniques and promoted
its brand as the true Islam. In the
third, post-imperial phase, impresarios of Islam exported these
adaptive hybridizations westwards as authentic traditions. Yet
the reform programme, whether
sectarian or liberal, was an inherently modern market product.
Economics is the dismal
science, Carlyle said, because it
excludes the unpredictable inner
life and emphasises a fiction of
rational choice. The religion-asmarket model possesses explicatory power: all history is written
in the shadow of the present and
our present of firms and markets
can certainly comprehend a past in
those terms.
Sometimes, though, Greens
model works too well and we
lose a sense of the living reality he
seeks to describe: when farmers of
faith cultivate good harvests from
their rich terroirs, the manure
is laid on a little too thickly. Yet
Green does not claim to describe
the changes in the inner lives of
believers, only the creation and
functioning of religious institutions and their integration into the
world system. Greens speciality is
Islam in South Asia, but similarly
complex processes can be seen
among Hindus, Zoroastrians
and Muslim Middle Easterners.
Integrating religion with social and
political history, Terrains of Exchange
digs deeply into the meetings of
East and West.
Dominic Green
CLASSIC BOOK
DAVID LOWENTHAL published a pioneering
re-enactments, ephemera, apologies for actions
study of attitudes to the past in 1985, under the
taken long ago, the effects of ageing (on both
title, borrowed from L.P. Hartleys novel The
artefacts and people) and, of course, heritage,
Go-Between, The Past is a Foreign Country.
on which the author has written extensively
Lowenthals study, which dealt in turn with
elsewhere.
Wanting the Past, Knowing the Past and
The text has been expanded to include discusChanging the Past, defined its subject in broad
sions of events, objects and institutions that did
terms, viewed it from a dizzying variety of
not yet exist in 1985, from Downton Abbey, cited
angles and drew on a wide range of sources,
four times, to the World Wide Web. The academamong them novels, films, newspapers and caric world has also changed in the last 30 years.
toons, as well as books and articles by historians,
Since the first edition appeared, historians have
anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers and been taking much more interest in memory and
psychologists. The author, a former professor of
in changing attitudes to the past: witness studies
geography, was revealed as a polymath, perhaps
such as Raphael Samuels Theatres of Memory
one of the last of this endangered species,
(oddly enough, absent from Lowenthals biblihis omnivorous curiosity making a splendid
ography), Franois Hartogs study of regimes of
exception to the growing specialisation that
historicity, Mark Phillips on historical distance
he continues to lament.
and the massive seven-volThe book was a cornucopia,
ume enterprise directed by
but the information did not
Pierre Nora, Lieux de mmoire
simply spill out, it was sub(1984-93). More important,
jected to a tight organisation.
the wider world has changed,
Readers were enticed by the
with the fall of the Berlin
authors crisp, witty writing,
Wall and the spread of anxiety
the rhetorical power of his
about the environment,
lists and of the accumulation
terrorism, immigration and so
of quotations. (One imagion. Indeed 1985 may now be
nes Lowenthal shuffling his
viewed as a foreign country, at
record cards in order to place
least by younger generations.
these quotations in the most
One might have expected
effective order.)
this revisit to have more to
The Past Is a Foreign Country
say about the effects of the
has become a classic. All the
digital revolution, both in
same, Lowenthal has decided
bringing us closer to the past
to revise it. The new version
and in alienating us from it.
The Past Is a Foreign
is much more than a normal
One might also have expected
Country Revisited
second edition, though
a discussion of the differDavid Lowenthal
something less than a coment ways in which the past
Cambridge University Press 676pp 22.99
pletely new book. The new
becomes foreign, sometimes
version is half as long again,
gradually and sometimes with
its 610 pages of text replacing 412 in the first
unnerving speed, after 1789, for instance, or
edition, while the original three parts and seven
after 1918. However, even a book of more than
chapters have been increased to four parts and 12 600 pages has to leave something out.
chapters. The footnotes are stuffed with new
Despite its size and the variety of its themes,
The Past Is a Foreign Country Revisited remains a
reader-friendly book. The volume may be heavy
but the author has a light touch. Whatever the
theme, it is discussed with a sharp sense of irony
and paradox. Lowenthal writes about traditions
of revolution and about preservation as a form of
destruction. As he wryly notes: Tom Keatings
forged Constables are themselves forged as
Keating originals. The new final chapter on imreferences from an extraordinary variety of
proving the past reveals the author in his best
sources, from academic journals, such as
form. It gives ample scope for his sardonic
Ecological Economics, to the Horrible Histories
humour and for his critique of the foibles,
TV tie-in pack. The topic is defined in still
fashions and follies not only in the past but also
broader terms than before and moves with
in our time.
ease from the psychology of memory to school
Peter Burke
textbooks, science fiction, museums, forgeries,
Lowenthal gives a not only

a critique of the foibles,
fashions and follies of the
past but also in our time
REVIEWS
Fallen Glory
The Lives and Deaths of

Twenty Lost Buildings
From The Tower Of Babel
To The Twin Towers
James Crawford
Old Street Publishing 576pp 25
WHY ARE RUINS so attractive?

Vandals destroy beautiful buildings, yet aesthetes haunt the
remains with sighs of pleasure.
In the 18th century some romantics put up purpose-built ruins
in the grounds of their country
houses, even artfully constructing imitation stone grottoes
which housed ornamental
hermits clad in robes and long
white beards, real, living relics of
what had never been.
Crawford cites Sir Christopher Wren, who redesigned
and rebuilt St Pauls Cathedral
in London after the Great Fire:
Architecture aims at Eternity.
Vandals destroy
beautiful buildings,
yet aesthetes haunt
the remains with
sighs of pleasure
Perhaps, in part, it is this hubris
that we like to see tumbled
down in decay buildings are
like us merely mortal.
In this subtle, ambitious,
well-researched study, the
author considers the concept of
building in the widest possible
terms: moving chronologically
from the Tower of Babel (which
never actually existed ) to the
internet city on the World Wide
Web called Geocities which was

created in cyberspace only in
1994 and closed in 2009; he also
allows in as buildings the Berlin
Wall and the tent city of Ghengis
Khan at Karakorum. This is in no
sense an anthology of architecture but rather a series of
essays in cultural history, using
structures to explore social
and historical milieux from a
humanist perspective. It is the
people who built, lived in, destroyed, rediscovered, excavated
and rebuilt the buildings he has
chosen which stimulate and
sometimes infuriate Crawford.
This is certainly an ambitious,
wide-ranging enterprise and has
involved a great deal of research.
Some of the buildings have
vanished entirely the Bastille
in Paris, Kowloon Old Town
(demolished and now a park);
some are famous and have been
studied for years the Roman
Forum, the Temple in Jerusalem,
Mycenae in Greece; some are
very obscure the ruins of the
city of Madinat al-Zahra outside
present-day Crdoba or the St
Petersburg Panopticonprison.
Some I had never even heard of,
such as the Pruitt-Igloe public
housing development (1951-76)
a folly of over-ambitious
civic modernism in St Louis,
Missouri.
Crawford manages the
difficult feat of engaging each
of his chosen buildings with an
equal degree of passion and engagement: he does not seem to
have any favourites or dislikes,
though some of the personalities
come in for severe criticism. Sir
Arthur Evans who excavated and
rebuilt Knossos in Crete comes
in for censure.
This is a very personal study,
bearing the taste, judgement
and sensibility of the author on
every page. I found the essays
on buildings that I knew nothing
about more stimulating than
those about which much more
is known. Industrial ruins are
under-represented, as are the
religious. A gold-mining town
in the US or Australia and
the abandoned monastery at
Skara Brae in the Hebrides, for
example, would have given
In this ambitious,
well-researched
study ... the concept
of building ranges
from the Tower of
Babel to the
World Wide Webs
Geocities
Crawford much on which to
ponder.Distance is no object
with Crawford, though, as he
takes in Vilcabamba, the Inca
city in Peru, and Golconda, the
diamond emporium in India.
Sometimes Crawford gets
carried away. More on Knossos
itself and less on Evans for being
what he could not help being a
Victorian Englishman would
have made for a more balanced
read. At times the author
rambles and the book does often
feel over-long and under-edited.
A less indulgent publisher might
have reined him in to advantage:
sometimes less is more.
Robert Carver
The Oxford Illustrated

History of World War II
Richard Overy (ed.)
Oxford University Press 492pp 30
THE SECOND WORLD WAR still

looms large in Britains national
consciousness and rightly so. The
defining catastrophe of a 20th
century that was not short of
horrors, it was truly global in scale
and cost over 60 million lives.
The British view of the conflict
can still be remarkably parochial,
however, often barely raising its
gaze beyond Dunkirk, the Blitz and

D-Day. In part, it is this myopia that
the new Oxford Illustrated History of
World War II is seeking to combat;
as the editors introduction puts
it, to introduce a range of themes
that are less commonly found in
general histories.
The book succeeds rather well
in achieving this aim. Fourteen
chapters from a line-up of expert
academic contributors give it the
global scope that it requires and
each contributor is permitted
the space to provide a narrative
framework, develop themes and
challenge erroneous assumptions.
Importantly, too, given the books
populist ambitions, the majority
of essays are well-written and
accessible.
The breadth of the book is
impressive. One chapter, for
instance, sheds a welcome light
on the military pretensions and
shortcomings of Mussolinis Italy;
another engages in some timely
myth-busting in addressing the war
at sea. Richard Bessel, meanwhile,
looks at the vast and largely unexplored category of non-combat
deaths; the countless millions of
civilian lives lost, which are sometimes in danger of falling into the
background noise to the conventional narrative of the war.
Many contributors display impressive mastery of their subjects.
David Welch, for example, demonstrates his customary expertise in
analysing the huge field of wartime
art and propaganda, bringing
together British, Soviet, German
and American cultural output into
a concise, coherent whole. David
Edgerton, meanwhile, shows
similar breadth in analysing the role
of technological innovation in the
war; the influence of which he
suggests has been exaggerated.
Brilliant as ever, Richard Overy
anchors the book, somewhat
greedily, with three excellent essays
as well as an introductory chapter.
There are very few duff notes.
On the whole, then, the Oxford
Illustrated History is a thoughtful and
thought-provoking volume, which
succeeds very well in bringing
at least a taste of the wealth of
current Second World War scholarship to a wider audience. There is
much here to admire; not least the
REVIEWS
erudition of the contributors and
the eclectic and original selection
of photographs.
Nonetheless, there are a few
blind spots. Most egregiously,
Poland is strangely peripheral to
proceedings, not qualifying for a
chapter of its own and mentioned only in passing elsewhere.
Shamefully excluded from Britains
VE-Day celebrations in 1945, it is
perplexing to see that the country
for which London and Paris went
to war, the country divided by
Hitler and Stalin, the country
whose troops fought in every
European theatre in the Allied
cause and whose people suffered
one of the highest per capita death
rates is still being relegated to a
minor role.
The Soviet Union is also rather
short-changed. Of course, Stalins
USSR is covered by a number of
the books contributors, analysing
such topics as Soviet propaganda,
or the Red Army, or the economy,
within a comparative, multi-perspective framework. Yet it is still
surprising that the Soviet Union
was not given a dedicated chapter,
particularly when one considers its
central importance to the wider
European war a war in which
four out of every five German
soldiers died fighting the Soviets
as well as other controversial
aspects, such as Stalins aborted
collaboration with Hitler or his
countrys brutal treatment of its
own fractious minorities and liberated POWs.
Readers of this publication will
also be frustrated, one suspects,
by the lack of notes. If one has the
ambition of introducing serious
scholarship to a wider reading audience, it seems rather nonsensical
to omit any system of referencing
by which readers can follow up
quotes, statistics or points of interest. Having gone to the trouble of
assembling a cast of luminaries,
OUP should at least let them show
their sources.
There are a few shortcomings
to this new illustrated history,
therefore, but it is still an excellent,
concise and enlightening volume.
As such, it is a worthy addition to
the library of every student and
every scholar of the conflict.
Roger Moorhouse
The Battle for the Roads

of Britain
Police, Motorists and the Law,

c.1890 to 1970
Keith Laybourn with
David Taylor
Palgrave Macmillan 256pp 60
TOWARDS the end of the 1950

film, The Blue Lamp, PC Andy
Mitchell, grieving for the death
of his mentor PC George Dixon,
stops a wealthy woman who
has almost knocked down a
man on a pedestrian crossing.
With her cut-glass accent she
brushes aside his gentle criticism
and challenges him: Havent
you anything better to do? One
of your own men shot down
in cold blood and all you do is
pester the life out of innocent
and respectable people. Im not
surprised all these murderers get
away with it.
This was a clich, no doubt,
but one that is often found in
different sections of the media,
as well as in the recollections of
police officers. It also lurks in the
background of Keith Laybourns
new book.
Laybourn sets out to trace
the history of the policing of
motor traffic in Britain from the
first appearance of the motor
vehicle at the end of the 19th
century, when it was essentially
a rich-mans toy, to the final
third of the 20th century, by
which time it had become the
favoured means of transport.
The motor vehicle led to the
virtual disappearance of pedestrians in many areas of the
highway and to a significant
shift in the relations between
police and public in Britain.
Policemen rarely had much to

do with the respectable classes
in the Victorian and Edwardian
years and certainly not much
concern with confronting and
disciplining respectable people.
This was changed with the
advent of the private car. It
was all very well for the police
to pursue bumptious young
men like Mr Toad but, early on,
motoring organisations were
formed to highlight the sorry
situation wherein the motorist
became a victim and to send out
scouts whose duty was to warn
association members of police
speed traps.
Laybourn describes the police
developing a policy of three
Es: Enforcement, Engineering
and Education. The three Es
are, presumably, Laybourns
own framework since he does
not quote any contemporary
reference to them and, while
prosaic, a short statement that
this is his way of giving form to
police policy over 70 or so years
might have clarified the situation (especially given the way
that students can misconstrue
things in print). Unfortunately,
there are several places where
a good E (for editor) might have
improved his text. Moreover,
he provides a singularly benign
version of Vic Gatrells concept
of the Policeman State; and
calling the Commissioner of the
City of London Police the Chief
Constable could raise a smile
more sorrowful than benign.
Such criticism is, perhaps,
churlish, since Laybourn has
drawn our attention to an
important issue, has chronicled
it over a lengthy period and
provided an argument with
which others can engage or will,
at least, be required to consider
when approaching the thorny
issue of policing the roads. No
doubt, however, for generations
to come people will continue to
demand tough policing and ferocious sentences for those who
drive carelessly and dangerously,
but will not consider their own
speeding, cutting traffic lights or
other foibles as either careless or
dangerous.
Clive Emsley
CONTRIBUTORS
Natalie Aubert is Professor
of French Literature at Oxford
Brookes University.
Mihir Bose is an awardwinning broadcaster, author,
and journalist.
Peter Burke is Emeritus
Professor of Cultural History at
the University of Cambridge.
Robert Carver is the author
of Paradise with Serpents: Travels
in the Lost World of Paraguay
(Harper Collins, 2009).
Clive Emsley is author of The
Great British Bobby: A History
of British Policing from the 18th
Century to the Present (Quercus,
2009).
Martin Evans is the co-author
(with Emmanuel Godin) of
France since 1815 (Routledge,
2014).
Dominic Green is the author
of The Double Life of Dr. Lopez
(Century, 2003) and Armies of
God (Random House, 2008).
John Easton Law is Reader
in History and Classics at the
University of Swansea and
former editor of Renaissance
Studies.
Keith Laybourn is the
Diamond Jubilee Professor of
History at the University of
Huddersfield.
Marc Morris latest book is
King John: Treachery, Tyranny,
and the Road to Magna Carta
(Hutchinson, 2015).
Roger Moorhouses book The
Devils Alliance: Hitlers Pact with
Stalin, 1939-1941 (Bodleys Head,
2014) has just been published in
paperback by Vintage.
Sue Niebrzydowski is Senior
Lecturer in Medieval English
Literature at Bangor University.
Rachel Pope is Senior Lecturer
in European Prehistory at the
University of Liverpool.
Roland Quinault is Senior
Research Fellow at the Institute
of Historical Research and the
author of British Prime Ministers
and Democracy: From Disraeli to
Blair (Continuum, 2011).
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Culture of Secrecy
I was interested to read Andrew
Lownies complaints about
the barriers to the release to
researchers of documents by the
Foreign and Commonwealth
Office and other UK government
departments (History Matters,
December). I have found similar
impediments here in the US. I
wrote to the Social Security department of the US Government
asking for a copy of the Application for Social Security Account
Number by an immigrant from
1948. When I received a copy,
the names of both parents were
deleted. This was distressing
because my subjects name was
not the same as the one he was
known by here in America. When
I appealed to the Social Security
Department to release his
parents names, I was told that
I would have to provide proof
of death for the parents. It is
my belief that they died in the
Holocaust but, since my subject
was born in 1917, the parents,
obviously, would be dead by now.
Using this argument, I appealed
again for the release of the
names. I was told that:
We have deleted the names of the

parents, however, as they may still
be living ... If you can provide proof
of death for both parents, and if
there is enough information for
us to determine that the proof of
death refers to the same individuals
shown on this document, we can
disclose this information.
My request was refused for the
second time and I was told that
I would have to wait until my
subject has been dead for 100
years.
Shelby Morrison
Orlando, Florida, USA
Clapham Boys
Catherine Fletchers illuminating article, A Society Built on
Slavery (September 2015), states
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
that most of the African children

at Zachary Macaulays school
in Clapham died there and are
buried in its churchyard. This
is the generally accepted view
and for this reason it is usually
claimed that the school was a
failure. The facts, however, do
not bear this out.
The African Academy operated between 1799 and 1806.
The view that it was abandoned
because of high mortality resulting from the British climate first
appears in the 1870s, in writings
by Henry Venn (born 1799) and
by the second Lord Teignmouth
(born 1796). Drawing on Teignmouth, in her 1900 biography
of Zachary Macaulay, Lady
Knutsford wrote that by the
end of 1805 only six of the poor
children remained alive. But
while Teignmouth did write that
the climate was fatal to many,
he did not write that the six
remaining in 1806 were all who
remained alive.
Macaulay had brought 20 boys
from Sierra Leone to be educated
in Clapham and four girls housed
in neighbouring Battersea. The
Clapham burial registers, which
the Rector John Venn kept in
meticulous detail, record burials
of four of the African boys,
three in 1802 and one in 1804.
A young Sierra Leone woman
aged 20 died in 1805. It has been
suggested that the winter of
1805-6 was unusually severe.
But in Clapham, burials between
November 1805 and March 1806
were actually fewer than in the
corresponding periods a year
before and a year after and
included no Africans.
Eighteen of the boys from
Sierra Leone were baptised,
ten of them in 1805. Bruce
Mouser, in his comprehensive
study of the Academy (African
Academy: Clapham 1799-1806,
published in History of Education, January 2004) states that a
group returned to Sierra Leone
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in November and December

1805. He identified four of those
baptised by Venn as later playing
prominent roles in or near Sierra
Leone. Four others not named in
the baptism register returned to
work within the settlement. He
concluded that nearly half the
boys returned. On his findings,
taken with the evidence of the
few burials in Clapham, I would
suggest that a majority of the
boys returned. By any measure,
Mouser wrote, the African
Academy was not a failure.
The Academy is an interesting case study in the relationship between British Christian
philanthropists and the Africans
they sought to benefit. There
are issues of success or failure
to be assessed, whether by the
standards of those who set up the
Academy or by the hopefully less
Eurocentric standards of today.
Dismissing the Academy on
grounds of high mortality, which
the records do not support, is an
unwelcome diversion.
Peter Jefferson Smith
Clapham, London
Indus Answers
Andrew Robinsons feature
(Lost and Found, December)
brought the Indus civilisation to
the attention of the UK public,
as it deserves to be. Robinson
has raised many unanswered
questions about the nature of
the Indus civilisation and its
intriguing contrasts with the
likes of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Such questions, the history of
discoveries since the 1920s and
their re-interpretations, make
this civilisation fascinating. Yet
while politicised claims of the
origins of Indian culture, race
and religion have falsified or
distorted evidence in India, the
article underplays painstaking
fieldwork, surveys, excavations
and significant new discoveries
since 1947 in Pakistan and India,
by archaeologists such as A.H.
Dani, Rafique Mughal, Kuldeep

Bhan, J.P. Joshi, R.S. Bisht and
many others. Two examples are:
Dholavira, in the Rann of Kutch,
discovered in 1967, which had
a sophisticated system of water
reservoirs for its inhospitable
environment, and Gola Dhora,
unearthed in 2009 in Gujarat,
an abandoned industrial site
with a stash of shell bangles
ready for transport. Since the
1990s, excavations at Harappa,
in Pakistan, have discovered a
sequence of development that
confirms the civilisation was
unique to South Asia, with its
integrated, long-distance trade
network. Shereen Ratnagar has
put forward fascinating theories
about government and economy
in the Bronze Age, based on the
scarcity of copper and other
metals. She suggests only an elite
could have organised the procurement of bronze, but that the
state at this period, before full
market economies developed,
had inherent weaknesses, which
may have led to internal collapse.
This is discussed in two books,
one a series of lectures on the
decline of the civilisation that
critiques theories of environmental disaster.
Dilip Chakrabartis comment
on the state of Indus archaeology, quoted in the article, is
unfair. It survives and thrives.
Harappa.com is a website where
readers of History Today can find
papers and slideshows by scholars
cited in Robinsons article, as
well as in this letter. Meanwhile,
back in the UK it is high time
that the British Museum put on
a major exhibition devoted to the
Indus civilisation (it never has);
that television produced a whole
series on it; and that University
College London, which holds a
fine collection of Indus artefacts
in its store rooms, made them
accessible to the public.
Ilona Aronovsky
London
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Learning Lessons in the
Middle East
The end of Empire in the

Middle East signalled neither
permanent withdrawal nor the
end of Britains involvement in
the region, where, writes Peter
Mangold, fear and emotion
often run higher than in other
parts of the world. Spanning
the Battle of the Nile in 1798 to
the Iraq War, Mangold catalogues a history of British foreign policy
remarkable for its number of failures and considers what lessons
historians can offer those charged with forming policy today.
A Cure Without a Disease
Published in 1957, the Wolfenden Report was the culmination of a

three-year Home Office investigation into the twin problem of homosexuality and prostitution. The report concluded that homosexuals
cannot reasonably be regarded as quite separate from the rest of
mankind and damned those doctors who claimed to be able to cure
homosexuality. Despite this, throughout the 1960s gay men still sought
to change their sexual orientation. John-Pierre Joyce offers a history of
dubious treatments.
Triumph or Terror?
Octobers Prize Crossword
Was the French Revolution one of the greatest epochs in the history
of the modern West, or an example of ugly and unnecessary carnage?
The answer, says David Andress, depends on which facts you choose to
believe and the historical moment at which you consider them. Every
generation has imposed its own concerns onto the basic fabric of the
revolution argues Andress, as he attempts to trace its constantly
developing historiography, as reflected in the History Today archive.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The February issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the

UK on January 21st. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winner for November is Richard Selby, London.
EDITORS LETTER: 2 Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 Alamy; 5 Gamma-Rapho/

Getty Images; 6 John Frost Newspapers/Alamy; 7 Alamy. MONTHS PAST: 8 Alamy; 9 top
akg-images; bottom AP/Press Association Images. THE RACKET AND THE FEAR: 11 background
photograph Getty Images; inset Topfoto; 12 top Bridgeman Images; bottom from LSE Librarys
collections, ImageLibrary/1369; 13 and 14 Getty Images; 15 top Bridgeman Images; bottom
Popperfoto/Getty Images; 16 photograph by Albert Norman, courtesy Trustees of the Army Medical
Services Museum/Wellcome Images; 17 top Science Photo Library; bottom Getty Images; 18
LF/Lebrecht Music & Arts, courtesy of The Gurney Estate. ISIS AND THE ABUSE OF HISTORY: 19
Getty Images. A HIMALAYAN CHESS GAME: 21 top Topfoto; bottom Getty Images; 22 top
Collection of Brig. Rai Singh, courtesy of Squadron Leader Rana T.S. Chhina (Retd); bottom Collection
of late Martha Steedman/Patrick Hamilton; 23 top map Tim Aspden; bottom Popperfoto/Getty
Images; 24 top Getty Images; bottom Collection of late Martha Steedman/Patrick Hamilton;
25 Collection of Sem T.O. Tashi; 26 Courtesy of Hindustan Times. OUT OF THE MARGINS: 27 Cott
Tib B V Part I f.7 Bridgeman Images; INFOCUS: 28-29 Harry Dempster/Express/Getty Images.
ROMANCE AND THE ROMANY: 30-31 Estate of Sir Alfred Munnings. All rights reserved, DACS
2015. Photograph Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images; 31 top
Mary Evans Picture Library; 32 Bridgeman Images; 33 Sylvester Boswell courtesy Jeremy Harte;
Sam Smith Special Collections and Archives/University of Liverpool Library; Augustus John and
Arthur Symons Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Jack Cooper Museum of London; 34 Bert Hardy/
Getty Images; 35 top Bridgeman Images; bottom Steve Lewis/Getty Images; 36 Jeremy Harte.
GARLIC AND MAGNETS: 37 and 38 akg-images. THE GREAT MANIPULATOR: 41 Bettmann/
Corbis; 42 left Bridgeman Images; right Bettmann/Corbis; 43 top Bettmann/Corbis; bottom
Mary Evans Picture Library; 44 Courtesy Library of Congress; 45 top Alamy; bottom Bettmann/
Corbis. BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION: 46 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford/Bridgeman
Images. SHAMEFUL SECRETS: Bridgeman Images. A BATTLE OF GIANTS: 49 Bridgeman
Images; 50 top Bridgeman Images; Medal Bibliothque Nationale, Paris; 51 Bridgeman Images/
Bibliothque Nationale, Paris; 52 Muse de lArme/RMN Grand Palais/Pascal Segrette; 53 top
left Muse Cond, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images; top right Chteau de Beauregard/Bridgeman
Images; bottom Lebrecht Music and Arts; 54 Muse Cond, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images.
REVIEWS: 56 The Granger Collection/Topfoto; 59 The National Museum of Denmark. COMING
NEXT MONTH: 69 Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 The Love of Helen and Paris by Jaques-Louis
David; Kurt Vonnegut, 1972; Dants Inferno by Gustave Dor. Images Wikimedia/Creative Commons.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 Alamy. We have made every effort to contact all copyright
holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.
Pastimes
Amusement & Enlightenment
The Quiz
3 Used from the 13th to the 17th

centuries, Kings Evil was a term for
a form of which disease?
4 What, from the fall of the Roman
Empire until 1820, was only a
geographical abstraction?
5 Which legendary figure travelled
to Athens dressed as a man and
was elected as Pope John VIII in
c.855?
6 Who were the Cornovii?
7 Which 20th century writer
opined that History is merely a list
of surprises?
8 What did Parliament call the

most horrible and detestable vice
in 1562?
9 Where was devastated by a
fire on Black Thursday, February
6th 1857?
Lord Cobham and Walter Raleghs

plan to substitute who for who?
22 Which Anglo-American conflict
began with the shooting of an
animal in 1859?
11 Elm Farm Ollie was the first cow

to do what, in 1930?
23 What were the four olds that

Mao Zedong encouraged the youth
of China to destroy during the
Cultural Revolution?
12 Which late 18th-century fashion

fad shares its name with a shape of
Italian pasta?
13 What existed in England until
1580, Scotland until 1743 and
Ireland until 1770?
14 Where does the term yahoo
originate?
statesman derives from the word

for chickpea?
24 After which German adjective is

heroin named?
18 What name did Abel Tasman

give to Australia in 1644?
25 Used in the Anglo-Saxon period,

to what does rimilce refer?
15 According to the Ingimund Saga,

what did thelfld, Lady of the
Mercians use to repel Vikings?
19 Which English travel writer is

thought to have first drawn
attention to the Lake Districts
beauty in 1698?
16 Considered by some to be the

richest man who ever lived, Mansa
Mousa reined over which empire?
20 The Minoan civilisation was so

named by archaeologist Arthur
Evans after which mythical figure?
17 The name of which Roman
21 The Main Plot of 1603 was
ANSWERS
2 Whose face launched a thousand

ships?
10 Which American city was

founded by Antoine de la Mothe
Cadillac as a fur trading post in
1701?
1. Sparta
2. Helen of Troy
3. Tuberculosis
4. Italy
5. Pope Joan
6. An Iron Age Celtic people
7. Kurt Vonnegut
8. Buggery
9. Victoria, Australia
10. Detroit
11. Fly in an airplane
12. Macaroni
13. Wolves
14. Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels
15. Bees
16. Mali, c.131237
17. Cicero
18. New Holland
19. Celia Fiennes
20. King Minos of Crete
21. Arabella Stuart for James I
22. The Pig War
23. Culture, thoughts, customs, habits
24. Heroisch (heroic)
25. May, the month in which cows would
be milked three times a day
1 What did Adolf Hitler call the

first vlkisch state?
Prize Crossword
Set by Richard Smyth
ACROSS
1 Sport in which Akashi Shiganosuke
was declared champion in 1632 (4)
3 1920 novel by Sinclair Lewis (4,6)
10 Oxford village, home of the Atomic
Energy Research Establishment (7)
11 Sir Edward ___ (d.1673), English
naval officer (7)
12 James Pettit ___ (d.1797), historian,
author of A History of Great Britain from
Caesars Invasion to the Accession of
Edward VI (1794-5) (7)
13 West Yorkshire town, site of the
1460 Battle of Wakefield (6)
15 ___ Arent Gentlemen, 1974 novel by
P.G. Wodehouse (5)
16 Dutch port chartered in 1328 (9)
18 William ___ (b.1965), historian,
author of The Last Mughal (2006) (9)
21 We have used the ___ as if it was
a constables handbook Charles
Kingsley (5)
23 Indian kingdom seized by the East
India Company in 1849 (6)
25 Sir George ___ (1790-1866),
Greenwich-born engineer (7)
27 Donald ___ (190881), editor of
the Economist 1956-65 (7)
28 City declared the capital of French
Cameroun in 1922 (7)
29 And even I can remember/ A day
when the ___ left blanks in their
writings Ezra Pound, 1930 (10)
30 Mitsuye ___, subject of a 1944 US
Supreme Court ruling regarding the
treatment of Japanese-Americans (4)
DOWN
1 Huseyn Shaheed ___ (1892-1963),
prime minister of Pakistan (10)
2 Midlands village, site of memorial to
cyclists killed in the Great War (7)
4 Village in Gloucestershire (and a
1917 poem by Edward Thomas) (9)
5 They havent got no ___,/ The
fallen sons of Eve G.K. Chesterton,
1914 (5)
6 Playwright of the Roman Republic
(c.195-159) (7)
7 O ___! Full of sin, but most of sloth
George Herbert, 1633 (7)
8 The Pobble Who Has No ___, 1871
work by Edward Lear (4)
9 Mythical son of the goddess
Aphrodite and Anchises (6)
14 Italian writer, author of The Name
of the Rose (1980) (7,3)
17 George Macaulay ___ (18761972), English historian (9)
19 Henry ___ (1724-92), American
statesman imprisoned in 1780 (7)
20 1961 film by Akira Kurosawa (7)
21 Antony ___ (b.1946), author of
Stalingrad (1998) (6)
22 Jack ___ (b.1937), Marine Corps
aide to Richard Nixon (7)
24 Sir Hermann ___ (1919-2005),
mathematician and cosmologist (5)
26 Codename for the westernmost
landing beach in the 1944 D-Day
invasion (4)
The winner of this

months prize
crossword will receive
a selection of recent
history books
Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London
WC1V 7QH by January 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword
Six degrees of Separation

JONAS SALK
Jonas Salk
(1914-95)
Jane Austen
(1775-1817)
American medical researcher and

virologist, married Franoise Gilot,
the former lover of
English novelist, whose works

were championed by
Princess Charlotte
Augusta of Wales
(1796-1817)
Pablo Picasso
(1881-1973)
Spanish painter and sculptor who
owned a Dalmatian, as did
whose birth was supervised by
Michael Underwood
(1736-1820)
Greer Garson
(1904-96)
Anglo-American actress, who played
Elizabeth Bennett in the first movie
adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
English physician and surgeon, who

was the first person to give a clinical
description of poliomyelitis, a vaccine
for which was developed by
ENLIGHTENMENT
FromtheArchive
Enlightenment ideas have always faced resistance, but they continue to be relevant and are vital to
our understanding of the modern world, argue Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot.
Why We Should Defend the Enlightenment

DEFINING the Enlightenment, in
time, space and substance, has proven
challenging. Yet agreement does exist
about certain ideas that originated
or matured during this period, about
political and economic freedom, social
equality and the value of science, as
was outlined by Avi Lifschitz in the
September 2013 issue of History Today.
Such ideas have shaped history in
many ways, as potent forces, making
the Enlightenment not merely a
work in progress but a source for the
modern world.
Adam Smith laid out the foundations for modern economics and in so
What matters most to the

history of the Enlightenment
is its survival
From top: Scott L.

Montgomery and
Daniel Chirot.
doing stressed the need to expand a

freedom mostly lacking in his time.
He demonstrated how individuals able
to choose freely could create greater
prosperity than under the rule of
selfish, elite interests. Smith argued
that industry, not agriculture, brought
real wealth and that governments
should provide education for their
people, restrain the greed of the rich
and build infrastructure to advance
economic activity. Prosperity would
wither if individuals were shackled to
an autocratic system, ruled by a single
church or encrusted traditions.
That Smith sided with those who
built the first modern democracy is no
surprise. In turn, Americas founders
had to invent a lot that was new and
they used Enlightenment philosophy
as a guide. Two exceptional thinkers,
Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, were responsible for visions of
America that helped establish principles of democratic government, which
have remained in conflict ever since.
Jefferson favoured distrust of power,
a weak central government, small

military and entangling alliances with
none. Hamilton embraced state power
as a means to protect liberty and foster
a modern, industrial nation, because
liberty without prosperity is merely
a word.
In the immediate aftermath of the
Enlightenment, Charles Darwins scientific ideas began to alter, indeed to
form, modern concepts of life and its
history, concepts that then expanded
into nearly every conceivable domain
of intellectual activity. Through his
theory of evolution, which gave a
deep, secular history to all life, Darwin
redefined the organic universe and
the place of human beings in it, while
radically weakening the explanatory
authority of religion, in doing so
setting up a conflict that is now more
ferocious than ever.
Enlightenment ideas faced resistance from the beginning. For a time,
this was primarily religious and it
remains the case among conservative
Christians and Muslims, particularly
over Darwinian evolution. Rejection
of democracy originally came from
hereditary aristocracies and monarchies, but later reaction took the form
of extreme, populist nationalism that
denied individual rights, free thought
and markets in favour of charismatic
autocracy (fascism). We must acknowledge that this type of reaction, too,
has continued to the present, as is
apparent in Putins Russia, modern
China and a number of authoritarian
regimes in Central Asia, Africa and
elsewhere. Attacks upon liberalism as
a system that produces only feeble,
alienated societies are not hard to find
in todays world.
But the Enlightenment was itself
the source of fervid reaction. Partly
this came from western hypocrisy,
such as slavery in America, colonialism
and its denial of rights to large parts of
the globe or the extermination of indigenous societies by Europeans. The

misuse of Darwins ideas to promote
eugenics, appropriated by the Nazis to
horrific effect, was another egregious
example. We must recognise, therefore, the historical complexity and
dark quarters of the Enlightenments
legacy, even as we acknowledge its
incalculable importance.
Fortunately, the more positive
side of this legacy has proven strong
enough to survive and expand in a
global sense. Yet it is also true that this
side remains under attack at present
from an array of forces, including
radical jihadist movements, and the
fearful rejection of migrants and an
open society in many western nations.
The Enlightenment must be
viewed as far more than an academic
subject. There are powerful reasons to
teach and study its development and
ideas, for they are necessary to any understanding of the 19th, 20th and 21st
centuries. What matters most to the
history of the Enlightenment today is
not its definition but its survival.
Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, of the
Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies,
University of Washington, are the authors of The
Shape of the New (Princeton UP, 2015).
VOLUME 63 ISSUE 9 SEPT 2013

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January 2016

500 years of fact

Publisher Andy Patterson

Imperial project: British Empire Throughout the World, engraving, c.1890s.

FROM THE EDITOR

Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Total Average Net Circulation

2 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2016

IN THE TESTS designed to identify those of subnormal intelligence, I proved

Counter-terrorism Citron DS St Pauls in the Blitz Ravensbrck

Too Tolerant of Terror?

in 1892 and a device exploded prematurely near Greenwich Observatory

of denying entry to any foreigner who

deliberately using them to undermine

Spydom was held to be one of

main reason why they neglected the

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

French innovations in style

It was the DS styling that caused the

over 12,000 orders.

in a perfect fusion and the coachwork

Andrew Roberts writes on the history of cinema

dome, the caption asserted, the clouds

London likened to Wrens unrealised

Tom Allbeson is Lecturer in Modern History at

nationalities passed through it. Around

there was discouraged once the Iron

Anne Sebbas next book is Les Parisiennes: How

JANUARY 13th 1691

Believing in simplicity, wearing

were now holding regular meetings,

JANUARY 1st 1791

By way of Munich and Bonn the

JANUARY 27th 1966

she would pay at once, but the store

first concert early in March and it

The press leapt on the story, which

JANUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 11

There are strange hells within the

N A RAILWAY STATION near Lyon, in the early morning

The term shell shock was the invention

the army in France. He distrusted and disliked the military

depression, headache, giddiness, insomnia, nightmares,

the military ordeals creating such symptoms, there was

HE SHEER SCALE of the psychological problems

N THEIR ANXIETY to suppress the term

of the First World War. Some are realistically factual,

AFTER THE ONSET of trench warfare and stalemate in

How could an army

14 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2016

RIVATE IVOR BERTIE GURNEY (1890-1937) was

Above: Shelling the

JANUARY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 15

chorister and won a choral scholarship to the Royal

Ballad of the Three Spectres

ORRIES about his sanity grew

EWIS R. YEALLAND, a Canadian psychologist who

The man took part in the Mons retreat, the

HELL SHOCK in the Great War

Gurney was diagnosed

Yealland cites many other comparable

Stuart M. Archer is a former HMC inspector of history teaching, an author of

Today we are happy to participate in destroying the borders