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is as though we need a revolution in the format, akin to th at which has recently
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD
Dr Simon Adams University o f Strathclyde Sadly, Six Wives is yet another offering on the Tudors, complete with
Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge unconvincing, cheap looking, historical reconstructions, presented by someone
Professor Richard Bessel University of York
Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter who is not an expert in that period (though dressed up in 16th-century
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen clothing) and which says nothing that we do not know already. For, despite the
Professor M artin Evans University of Sussex
Juliet Gardiner Historian and author
obsession with the Tudors, there are still new things to say. Why not offer such
Tom Holland Historian and author a series to an expert in the field, for there is no shortage: Suzannah Lipscomb,
Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South
Anna Whitelock, Susan Doran and many others are revealing new insights into
Dr Roger M e tta m Queen Mary,
University o f London the period. Still, as someone once said, who needs experts?
Professor Geoffrey Parker The other, better side of the BBC could be found in Lloyd Georges Revolution,
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston broadcast on Radio Four on December 3rd and available on iPlayer. A model of
London School o f Economics public history, the constitutional historian Peter Hennessy told the story of
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
the great political outsider, whose sheer charisma propelled him to the role of
Professor Ulinka Rublack PM during the First World War. It was a work of deep insight, w ith a range of
St John's College, Cambridge
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
competing interpretations and superb archival research, including the voices of
University o f London the Welsh Wizards allies and opponents and even his mistress, parliamentary
Dr David Starkey
secretary - and second wife - Frances Stevenson.
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University o f Exeter Occasionally, one sees equally adept history on BBC TV - David Olusogas
Professor Chris Wrigley Black and British: a Forgotten History is worthy of mention - though never on
University of Nottingham
BBCi, where the One Show school of vapid, talked-down history rules, obsessed
All w ritte n material, unless otherwise stated, by the two World Wars - and the Tudors. Is it any wonder that, when people
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reach for political analogies for our troubled times, they can venture no further
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2 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017

HistoryMatters
Political Debate Uzbekistan The Dollar East India Company
Pubs and Politics in Stuart England
Divisive political debate is nothing new. In the popular new alehouses
of the 17th century, it could end in fisticuffs - even death.
M ark Hailwood
POLITICAL DEBATE is eternally fract
ious. In w hat has been a politically
tum ultuous period it has become an
increasingly common assertion th at
we are witnessing a rapid deterioration
in the decorum of public and political
debate. Indeed, th e characteristic tone
o f such political discussion is now seen
as uncivil, divisive, insulting and even
threatening, a developm ent often
thought to be linked to the grow th
o f social media and th e image o f the
angry, isolated troll ham m ering away
at their keyboard. The anonym ity and
physical distance provided by digital
technology are seen to give rein to
anger and rancour.
It is self-evident, though, th a t
digital technology is not a prerequisite
for fractious interpersonal political
exchanges. Division and hostility
were, for example, rife in th e face-to-
face world o f 17th-century political
discussion.
It might be tem pting to assume
th a t politics was not th e stu ff o f every
day conversation for anyone outside
th e political elite in this period, but
historians have long since p u t this idea
to bed and shown th a t political aware
ness and engagem ent was high across
After evening prayer
the people would go
to Tippling houses,
and there talk of
matters o f the
church or state
S e ttin g th e
w o rld t o rig hts:
w oodcut o f a
ta v e rn scene,
English, 17th
cen tury.
th e social scale. The growth o f political
awareness and discussion in 17th-
century England - w hat we now call
public opinion - has been associated
w ith th e rise of the coffeehouse from
th e 1650s onwards, a place w here
urbanites could go to read th a t emerg
ing product, th e newspaper, and to
engage in caffeinated chatter over
th e state o f th e nation in a civilised
and rational spirit. But long before
th e coffeehouse came onto th e scene
both tow n and country dwellers o f all
classes had used another site o f liquid
refreshm ent as a place to gather and
debate politics: the pub.
Commonly known as th e ale
house, th e local pub had enjoyed a
period of growing popularity in the
century betw een 1550 and 1650,
w ith num bers more th an doubling
from around 25,000 to 55,000 - or
one alehouse for every 90 inhabit
ants o f England. Almost every village
would have had at least one such
establishm ent and part o f its appeal
was the opportunity to engage your
neighbours in political debate. This
was acknowledged by th e authorities
in both Church and State, who were
always uneasy about th e Tower orders
developing their own political views.
Charles I complained in th e 1630s
about th e proliferation o f th e common
peoples idle and discontented speech
es in their alehouses and th e Bishop of
Bath and Wells w rote to his king th at
on Sundays after evening prayer the
people would go to tippling houses,
and there upon their ale-benches talk
of m atters o f th e church or state.
W hat was th e tone o f these
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 3

philanthropist and even a pop star -
although one British journalist claimed
that the Uzbeks who did not buy her
album were threatened with torture
(unlike those who did, presumably).
Some thought of her as a potential
successor, not least since her father
indulged her whims, or at least was
willing to turn a blind eye. Karimova
seemed bulletproof as she built a
huge fortune, as US diplomats reported,
by bullyfing] her way into gaining a
slice of virtually every lucrative business'
in Uzbekistan and behaving like a
'robber baron'.
That was until she pushed her luck
too far. Somewhere, a switch had been
flipped. Karimova was no longer free to
do as she pleased; in fact, she was no
longer free at all. Two years ago, she
went o ff the radar. Little had been heard
of her or from her, until in 2016 news
came that she had been committed to
a psychiatric hospital by the new Presi
dent, Shavkat Mirziyoyev.
No one expected her to play a role in
the succession after her father's death
- too many bridges had been burnt. But
many assumed that she would at least
make an appearance. She did not. Her
mother and sister Lola led the mourn
ing of the lavish state funeral alone.
Karimova once strode the international
and national stage. No more. There is no
way back.
Jewel of the A similar story occurred 1,000 years
Empire: the ago in Constantinople. Capital of the
Hagia Sophia.
Byzantine Empire - the eastern half of
the Roman Empire that survived and
flourished after the fall of Rome itself -
the city was a cosmopolitan metrop
olis, by far the most populated city in
Europe, adorned with palaces, a giant
hippodrome and scores of churches, the
largest and most beautiful of which was
the cathedral of Hagia Sophia.
Back the wrong horse and the
consequences could be serious;
be the wrong horse and the
consequences could befatal
In 1081 a new leader took the
throne, a charismatic emperor named
Alexios Komnenos. Two years later, his
first child was born, a daughter named
Anna. She was precocious: fiercely
intelligent, independent-minded
and outspoken. Many wondered if she
would succeed her father one day,
especially after she married Nikephoros
Bryennios, an up-and-coming young
buck with ambitions of his own. People
gossiped about Anna, partly because
her siblings did not seem to have what
it takes and partly because she had
obvious leadership qualities. She was
as decisive as she was whip-smart -
HISTORYMATTERS
something that appealed to some, but
not to all: as with Hillary Clinton, some
people (mostly men) do not like a clever
woman. Anna Komnene was a know-
it-all, wrote one contemporary, who did
not care for her drive, her character or
her history writing (a text she wrote in
the 12th century, T heA lexiad, is a jewel of
medieval Greek).
For Komnene, the trouble began
in 1118 when her father was on his
deathbed after nearly 40 years in power.
Like Karimov, he had been relentless
in shutting down opposition. As eyes
turned to the succession, Anna tried to
seize her chance - in vain. Blindsided
by her brother, she was soon removed
from view, banished not to a psychiatric
hospital but to a convent where she
could indulge her interests in privacy,
out of sight and out of mind.
As far as we can tell, she spent the
best part of four decades in isolation,
albeit in a very comfortable residence
that included a bakery, a vineyard and
well-appointed buildings. She was not
happy about it, complaining frequently
in The A lexiad about the way she had
been hidden away from view and had
spent much of her life in isolation.
In her pomp, Anna Komnene had
attended meetings her father held with
leading generals, proffering advice on
what would be best for the empire;
she had stalked the corridors of power
along with her husband, a man whom
many expected to succeed Alexios on
the throne. Now she sat alone, thinking
of what might have been and writing
about how she missed the limelight.
Her husband, the other half of what had
once been Constantinople's most gilded,
connected and ambitious power couple,
spent tw o decades going through the
motions, kept away from his wife and
far from danger. He also took up writing
non-fiction, though w ithout the same
diligence as Anna, as his work was un
finished at the time of his death in 1138.
As the parallel stories of Anna and
Gulnara tell us, even the most powerful
woman is subject to the whims and
machinations of men and the princess
locked in a tower does not get the fairy
tale ending in real life.
Peter Frankopan is the author o f The Silk Roads:
A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015),
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 5
HISTORYMATTERS
How a Briton
Created the
Almighty Dollar
The choice of the dollar as the
international reserve currency was
controversial but practical.
Richard Hurowitz
THE SECOND WORLD WAR brought
about many epochal changes, among
them a complete reworking of the
international financial system. It was
at the founding of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank at
the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944
that the world formally recognised a
practical truth: the undisputed status
of the US dollar as the international
reserve currency. This moment is often
viewed as the ascendancy of the US
as the world's monetary leader at the
expense of Britain. How steeped in
irony, then, is the little-known fact that
the US has a British economist to thank
for the greenback's coronation.
As early as 1941, the US and Britain
began to consider a postwar economic
framework to avoid the monetary chaos
that had been a root cause of the Great
Depression and the subsequent rise of
fascism. The British effort was led by the
great economist John Maynard Keynes,
who envisaged a clearing union for
nations to settle currency imbalances. At
the heart of the system would be a new
international currency called 'bancor'.
Against the backdrop of the Second
World War, this utopian idea sounded
less extreme than it does today, cap
turing imaginations on both sides of
the Atlantic. Alternative names such as
dolphin, bezant, daric, unitas, unicorn
and orb were eagerly floated. Franklin
Roosevelt himself offered up demos
and victor. One wag even proposed
winfranks, in homage to the tw o leaders
of the free world.
As exciting as the potential birth
of a new global currency was, political
realities would win the day. Britains war
effort helped save civilisation but came
at the cost of its solvency. The US, by
6 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
contrast, occupied an economic posi
tion almost unique in history, represent
ing 40 per cent of the global economy.
American wishes at Bretton Woods to
create the postwar framework would
dominate. Given that the US Treasury
had to convince a sceptical Congress of
the wisdom of the International Mone
tary Fund, which was negotiated at the
conference, ceding sovereignty over the
currency to a supranational institution
was a non-starter.
Still, the US did wish to prove that
a collaborative international order was
possible and sought to negotiate a
framework palatable to Britain. Harry
Dexter White, the driving force on the
American side, hoped to cement the
supremacy of the dollar. But the US
assumed that a formal identification of
This moment is often viewed as
the ascendancy ofAmerica as the
worlds monetary leader at the
expense of Britain
their own currency as the official world
reserve would be too aggressive a
position diplomatically. When repre
sentatives of 44 nations arrived in New
Hampshire in July 1944, the US proposed
instead a vague euphemism: 'gold-con
vertible currency'. It fooled no sophis
ticated observer and Keynes called it
'idiocy'. Given its uniquely vast gold
holdings, the US had the only currency
Making money: realistically convertible into bullion. But
delegates at
the US delegation feared diplomatic
the Bretton
Woods disaster by trying to codify this fact.
Conference, Handling the issue at the con
1944 - ference for Britain would be Dennis
Robertson, the Cambridge economist
to whom Keynes delegated many key
negotiations, admiring his 'intellectu
al subtlety and patience of mind and
tenacity of character to grasp and hold
on to all details and fight them through'.
Robertson was present during the final
discussion of the IMF's charter when the
delegation representing British India
demanded that the US define what
exactly 'gold-convertible currency'
meant. To the amazement and delight
of the Americans, Robertson rose to
propose its replacement with 'gold
and United States dollars', effectively
crowning the dollar supreme. A giddy
White stayed up until three o'clock in
the morning incorporating Robertson's
proposal into the draft articles, The rest
is monetary history.
It is unclear what motivated Robert
son. He was, perhaps, like any good in
tellectual, merely stating the obvious: as
he later recalled, the world had been on
a de facto 'dollar standard' for 15 years.
The dollar was, in his view, a unique
currency, a rara avis. The journalist Ed
Conway believes it all a 'well-intention
ed error'. Keynes shared the view that
it was a colossal blunder, becoming so
livid when he found out about it that
the dispute led to a permanent strain
between the two men. But Robertson
was probably addressing a more paro
chial but urgent financial need: Britain
had run up enormous sterling debts to
its colonies during the war - particularly
India and Egypt - who now demanded
the right to convert the balances into
other currencies. The result would be an
immediate run on sterling (as happened
in 1947). Robertson believed that, by de
claring the dollar as the world's reserve,
the pressure would be off the pound
to allow convertibility, maintaining
breathing room to marshal the nation's
resources for another day.
The US may have gone from being
the world's largest creditor to one of its
largest debtors, and the dollar may now
be unmoored from its gold anchor, but
the dollar owes its dominant status in
large part to its friends across the pond
and the actions of a Cambridge don.
Richard Hurowitz is the publisher of the Octavian
Report and has written for the Wall Street Journal
and The Times.

India versus the
East India Company
Violence and expansion were integral
to the armed bureaucracy that played a
crucial role in the early days of Empire.
Jon Wilson
FROM THE BEGINNING the 'Governor
and Company of the Merchants of
London1- more commonly known as
the English East India Company - was
different from other companies. Instead
of coordinating the commerce of private
traders, as other contemporary corpora
tions did, the East India Company acted
as a merchant in its own right and used
force to assert its interests. It was an
armed bureaucracy, not just a federation
of merchants. As a result, it had a prickly
relationship with other traders and with
Asian rulers. It was that relationship
which led to war and conquest.
Historians often write as if the East
India Company began as a peaceful
trading concern, only becoming an
armed political force with the rise of
more aggressive, nationalist ideas in
the late 1700s. In fact, violence was
contained in its structure and culture
from the start.
The Company's employees - ship
captains, clerks and agents - were
allowed to trade on the side, building
small private enterprises, but their main
responsibility was to ensure a steady
flow of profit made its way to the firm's
shareholders. The Company jealous
ly used its monopoly to exclude rival
English merchants - called 'interlopers'
- from trade east of the Cape of Good
Hope.
Small groups of Company officers
scattered through India were paranoid
about their security and took every
minor slight from Indian rulers as well as
other European merchants as a major
challenge. In the 1680s, English officials
in Bengal were particularly anxious
that the Mughals had negotiated a
better trading deal with Thomas Pitt, an
'interloping' trader who later joined the
Company - and became grandfather
and great-grandfather to British prime
ministers. At the same time, Mughal
attempts to tax trade were treated as
a massive affront. Company officers
thought the Mughals had 'got the knack
of trampling upon us, and extorting
what they please' and imagined the sit
uation would only be resolved by force.
With the support of the newly installed
James II, 19 ships were sent from London
with six companies of soldiers to display
the Company's might.
The war of 1686-90 ended in
humiliating defeat. The fleet was scat
tered, with British officers and soldiers
eventually imprisoned or driven out of
Stronghold: Fort the province. In the west, at Bombay,
George, India's Mughal soldiers drove the Company's
first English
army into its fort 'with men enough to
fortress, by Jan
Van Ryne, 18th have eaten up all the Company's soldiers
century. for breakfast. Eventually, the English
HISTORYMATTERS
had no choice but to sue for peace. They
were only allowed to stay because the
Mughal regime thought that, once they
had been subdued, the English fleet
might make useful allies.
However irrational it might have
seemed, British officers often imagined
they had no choice but to attack or be
attacked even if, like in 1690, violence led
to defeat. Obsessed by the reputation
they would have when they returned to
England, few thought they could take
the risk of appearing weak in the face of
apparent Indian challenges.
But violence did not lead to con
quest at first because Indian states were
powerful and unified enough to block
the Company's aggression until the
1740s. The Mughal empire's capacity to
recruit and command armies centrally
declined in the early 1700s. But the
empire's authority was dispersed in
powerful regional bureaucracies, which
blocked the East India Company's
anxious advance.
It was the arrival of Persian and
Afghan invaders to India that changed
the political landscape. The great
Persian warlord Nader Shah ransacked
Delhi in 1739 and pushed Indias political
system into crisis. Battles between
political rivals in India's provinces made
the Company uneasy about its security
again, encouraging the growth of its
armies and forts. Conflict created an op
portunity for British officers to make a
fortune and a name for themselves. The
most famous was the Company clerk-
turned-soldier Robert Clive, who began
his military career fighting on behalf of
the ruler of south-east India, the Nawab
of Arcot, then as an ally of the Marathas.
During the 300 years of their political
presence in India, the fate of British
power always relied on Indian rulers and
elites. But the East India Company and
its successor in the British Raj fostered
a monopolistic and bureaucratic ethos
which made long-term cooperation
impossible and caused violence to recur.
Despite the protestations of its officers,
the origins of the Company that con
quered India meant British power there
was always unstable and fragile.
Jon W ilson is Senior Lecturer in history at
King's College, London. He is the author of India
Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos o f Empire
(Simon and Schuster, 2016).
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 7
Months
JANUARY 20 th 842
Death of the
Byzantine
Emperor
Theophilus
THE LAST iconoclast emperor was just
28 when he died of dysentery, still em
broiled in the conflict with the Abbasid
Caliphate that had dominated his reign.
With Theophilus, so too died the strict
ban on the veneration of icons that had
been a feature of Byzantine society on
and o ff for 116 years.
Theophilus'father Michael II was
a soldier from Amorium in Phrygia,
western Anatolia. Michael and his
colleague Leo V 'the Armenian' had
together overthrown Michael I Rangabe
(811-13), with Leo becoming emperor.
When their relationship soured, Leo
sentenced his former ally Michael to
death. Michael in turn conspired to have
Leo assassinated, succeeding in 820,
and became emperor himself. Born in
813, Theophilus, Michael's only son, was
made co-emperor in 821 and ruled out
right after his father's death on October
2nd, 829. Among his first acts was the
execution of his father's co-conspira
tors against Leo, a decision that helped
ensure his reputation as a champion of
justice. In Tim arion, a satirical dialogue
written anonymously in the 12th century,
Theophilus appears alongside the mythi
cal kings Aeacus and Minos as one of the
three judges in Hades who acquit the
eponymous protagonist.
The Byzantine Empire had long been
subjected to attacks at its borders, from
Vandals, Goths, Persians and, finally,
Ottoman Turks. Theophilus constructed
northern fortresses as defences against
Vikings and Magyars, but the biggest
threat he faced was the Abbasid
8 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
JANUARY
Caliphate, which had overthrown the
Umayyad Caliphate in 750. Constan
tinople had previously come to blows
with the Muslim Arabs. It had withstood
a siege from 674 to 678, when a peace
treaty was signed with the Umayyad
Caliphate. In 698 Arab forces ended
Byzantine rule in North Africa with the
capture of Carthage and, by 711, had con
quered much of Spain. After the volcanic
eruption that occurred on the Greek
island of Thera in 726, the success of the
Muslims was seen increasingly as a sign
of Byzantium's loss of divine favour. The
Muslim conquerors forbade the sort of
figurative art that decorated much of
Constantinople and adorned its currency.
jc u ro i*?
c^0-, {cu/jcinuoffy
G tp W * * V.'
Last of the icons: In the late seventh century the caliphal
Theophilus makes
authorities had denounced the vener
a proclamation,
ation and dissimulation of images and
the Scylitzes
Chronicle, nth icons as being in breach of the Second
century. Commandment. Support for this within
the Empire led to the 'First Iconoclasm',
banning the making or worshipping of
icons, which was instigated by Leo III in
726. Inheriting his fathers diluted version
of iconoclasm, Theophilus issued an
edict in 832 prohibiting every display of
image-worship and forbidding the use
of the word 'holy' before the names of
saints. The edict was enforced with sev
erity, with many iconophiles subjected
to torture.
So strongly did Theophilus adhere to
iconoclasm that his military defeats were
taken as a sign of its folly. Theophilus
personally led the army against the
Caliph Al-Ma'mun, who was expanding
into Anatolia. In 831 victory in Cilicia was
followed by defeat in Cappadocia
and peace was agreed following Al-
Ma'mums death in 833. Relations dete
riorated when Al-Ma'mum's successor,
Al-Mu'tasim, campaigned in Asia Minor,
defeating Theophilus at the Battle of
Anzen in 838. The Abbasid army then
marched on towards Amorium, the
birthplace of Theophilus' father Michael,
and the city fell after a 55-day siege.
The fall of Amorium was a severe blow
to Theophilus' reputation as a military
leader and shook his faith in the power
of iconoclasm. Thenceforth, he sought
practical explanations for failure. An
ability to learn from mistakes as well as
his patronage of scholarship (notably Leo
the Mathematician, on whom he con
ferred a school) were considered among
Theophilus' strengths as a ruler.
In 840, with his health failing, The
ophilus decided to combat the Arabs
in Sicily, where they had established an
emirate in 831. This was to occupy the
last years of his life and he sought assis
tance from the Frankish king, Theodosius
Babutzicus. Theodosius agreed to help,
but Theophilus was dead before Frankish
support could arrive. The official cause
was dysentery, possibly connected to
pagophagia, brought on by the excessive
consumption of snow or ice in order to
relieve the symptoms of gastric inflam
mation. He was survived by his wife,
Theodora, who soon revealed herself to
be an iconophile. She became regent to
Theophilus' successor, his son Michael III
'the Drunkard, who, despite his dubious
epithet, saw the abolition of iconoclasm
and a revival of Byzantine military power.
With Michael's success, Theophilus'
reputation suffered. His strict clamp
down on the veneration of icons, it was
thought, had held the Empire back.
JANUARY 10 t h 1917
William
Buffalo Bill
Cody dies
THE ULTIMATE entertainer, 'Buffalo
Bill' was as much showman as he was
frontiersman and helped create a
fantastical image of the Wild West.
Born to a farming fam ily on Feb
ruary 26th, 1846, Cody spent his early
years in Iowa, working in a variety
of short-lived jobs: joining parties
hunting for gold and riding for the
Pony Express. During the Civil War,
he was part of a group of anti-slavery
guerrillas in Kansas, which led to him
joining the Seventh Kansas Volun
teer Cavalry in 1864. As it expand
ed through the West, the railroad
company hired him to provide meat
for their workers, for which he killed
up to 12 buffalo a day. It was for this
th a t he earned the name Buffalo Bill'.
In July 1869 he m et the dime nov
elist Ned Buntline, w ho interviewed
him and w rote a serial for the New
York Weekly. Although titled 'Buffalo
Russian gain:
Afanasy
Lavrentievich
Ordin-Nashchokin,
17th-century
portrait.
JANUARY 30 t h 1667
The Truce o f
Andrusovo
is signed
build his legend.
King of the Wild
West: 'Buffalo Bill'
Cody, late 19th
century.
Bill, the King of Border M en and billed
as 'the wildest and truest story he
ever wrote', it was mostly based on
the life of 'Wild Bill' Hickock.
In 1872, following Buntline's sug
gestion, Cody made his first appear
ance in a play, The Scouts o f the Prairie.
For the next few years he switched
between scouting for the army,
guiding hunting parties and touring
in plays. On occasion his activities
BORN IN HUMBLE circumstances in
Pskov in the far west of Russia, near the
border with modern Estonia, Afanasy
Lavrentievich Ordin-Nashchokin (1605-
80) was schooled by his ambitious father
in maths and languages, which made
him a lifelong Germanophile.
He came to prominence negotiating
the Peace of Stolbovo of 1658, which
determined the Russo-Swedish border
following a war between the two coun
tries, during which he had established
a reputation as a military commander.
It heralded a Russian shift towards
the Baltic, which anticipated Peter the
Great's focus on the West. But his great
est triumph came in 1667 with the Truce
of Andrusovo between Tsarist Russia and
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
signed on January 30th.
it brought an end to over 13 years of
war, which began in 1654 when the two
regional superpowers clashed over the
vast territories between them, in modern
Ukraine and Belarus.
on the frontier - such as his role in
the death of Cheyenne chief Yellow
Hand during the Sioux W ar of 1876 -
became source material, helping to
O ff the back of his growing popu
larity, Cody produced his Buffalo Bill
Wild West show in 1883. Like a circus
w ith its attractions, it recreated
the Pony Express, Indian attacks on
wagon trains, sharpshooters and
parades of costumed groups on
horseback. Huge audiences came to
watch fantastic battles and dramatic
deaths, w ith performers playing it
up for the enthusiastic crowds. It
featured such personalities as Annie
Oakley and the Sioux chief Sitting
Bull, but Cody was its star attraction.
The show peaked a t the 1893
World's Fair in Chicago, where it
attracted six million people. Cody
continued to star in the show until his
retirem ent in 1912.
He died in Denver, where 25,000
people paid respects to his coffin and
was buried six months later in a steel
vault on Lookout M ountain overlook
ing the city. He remains synonymous
w ith the image of the Wild West.
The conflict had its roots in the 'Time
of Troubles', made famous by Mussorg
sky's opera Boris Godunov, when Russia
lost Smolensk, among other cities, to the
Commonwealth. Muscovy had regained
its territories by 1667, gains made official
in the Treaty. The West of Ukraine was
handed to Poland, while Russia was
given Kyiv, too, which it agreed to rule
for just two years, but in 1686 the deal
became permanent when Muscovy paid
the Poles 146,000 roubles.
The truce continues to resonate in
modern geopolitics. Ukrainians see it
as the devouring of their Cossack Het-
manate state by their tw o larger neigh
bours, the first of that country's many
divisions. Poles view it as the moment
when their then large and powerful
state was usurped by the emerging
Russian Empire as the region's dominant
player. Russian nationalists regard it as
a blueprint and justification for future
expansion, as evidenced by the recent
annexation of Crimea.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 9
 MEDIEVAL BISHOPS

N NOVEMBER 1164, at the height of his dispute with

Henry II, Thomas Becket crossed the Channel and went
into exile in France. Taking refuge at the Burgundian
Medieval understanding of the soul and the abbey of Pontigny, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave
body meant that a saintly life was a life of himself over to private devotions, adopting the lifestyle
physical restrictions. Katherine Harvey (though not the habit) of his Cistercian hosts. According to
the anonymous author of a 13 th-century verse life, Becket
explores the extreme suffering bishops put ate only the foods/ which were served to the convent/
themselves through, from weeping and plain foods without flavour. Soon, this restricted diet, in
celibacy to starvation and, sometimes, death. combination with a regime o ffasts and prayers/ vigils and
afflictions, began to take its toll and the archbishop fell ill.
Taking to his bed, he became so ill that he seemed likely to
die, until his confessor intervened and commanded him

The Perils by obedience/ that he begin to live differently. Through

changes to his lifestyle, including an increase in his food
intake, Becket was restored to health, able to sustain his
bitter struggle with the crown for a further five years.
Among the many dramas of Thomas Beckets life, this

o f PIETY episode seems relatively insignificant, no more than a brief

distraction on his inexorable march towards martyrdom.
Yet almost all of Beckets many biographers recounted
details of his strict regime at Pontigny, his consequent bout
of ill health and his ultimate restoration to strength. Fur
thermore, this is just one of many examples of the preoccu
pation with episcopal health that characterises medieval

A caladrius bird, w h ic h fo re to ld th e fa te s o f th e sick, o ve r a m an in his bed, fro m a 1 3 th -c e n tu ry copy o f th e 'Physiologus', D u rh am .

JANUARY 2017 HISTORYTODAY 11

MEDIEVAL BISHOPS
chronicles and biographical writings. Most of these texts
were written by members of the monastic orders, a group
whose attitude to medicine has often been assumed to be
somewhat negative. Yet a perusal of their writings reveals a
rather more complex reality.
Beckets biographers, and the biographers of those other
English saint-bishops whose cults flourished in the decades
surrounding his death, lived in a society which believed
that the health of the body and the health of the soul were
inextricably linked. Contemporary medical theory em
B ecket on his phasised the impact of the passions of the soul, including
sickbed a t
piety and the emotions, on physical health. Ecclesiastical
P ontigny, having
fas te d to o m uch.
authorities taught that doing the wrong things with ones
French, 13th body would imperil ones soul, while also acknowledging
ce n tu ry . that sin was among the causes of physical illness. An author
ffotfrtont a s tia ft lit ri? lo ftrc u ilc fl ftfetit ;>vSfiffltmirtrft otnoiiwf nitnto ttolttratiotmtuto-
It had been long-established that the
best way to master ones body was to
submit oneself to an ascetic regime o f
severe self-discipline
who wanted to understand the true nature of a cleric was,
therefore, obliged to consider not only his mind but also his
body. Consequently, medieval writings on saintly bishops
are full of passages designed to demonstrate the holy mans
absolute control over his body, which was forced to submit
to pious ideals.
By the 12th century, it had been long-established within
the Christian tradition that the best way to master ones
body was to submit oneself to an ascetic regime of severe
self-discipline. Fasting was one of the pillars of this life
style, not least because of the strong cultural connection
between gluttony and lust. The story of Adam and Eve
demonstrated that those who overindulged the former
appetite would soon fall prey to the latter, while medical
theory offered a possible remedy. Adherence to a restricted
diet would prevent the production of semen, which was
thought to be the product of completely digested food,
especially of rich foods such as meat and eggs. Any man who
sought to abide by the demands of clerical celibacy was thus
obliged to be extremely careful about what he ate.
Yet such food practices were not without negative
side-effects and it was widely recognised that long-term
fasting would damage health. This was a particular danger
12 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
for high-status individuals, whose dependence on fine food
and wine was not merely a form of conspicuous consump
tion, but also a concession to the delicacy of the noble con
stitution. This was such a serious concern that some theolo
gians argued against imposing food penances on high-status
individuals; instead they should say more prayers or give
extra alms. Given that every English saint-bishop of this
period was born into the upper echelons of English society
(most were from noble or gentry families; Thomas Becket,
the son of a wealthy London merchant was the humblest),
their adherence to a diet more suitable for a peasant would
inevitably damage their health.
ISHOPS WERE well aware of the dangers of over-
B restrictive diets for both body and soul and often
rebuked their subordinates for excessive fasting. Yet
several saintly bishops of the 12th and 13th centu
ries were themselves cautioned by associates, who felt that
their asceticism had become too severe. Beckets prede
cessor at Canterbury, Anselm of Bee (whose term ran from
1093-1109), followed a diet so strict that those around him
(including Queen Matilda) became concerned for him and
recommended that he give his body more nourishment. Yet
another archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund of Abingdon
(1233-40), spent the final year of his life at Pontigny, where
he reduced his diet beyond measure. Some of the monks
became seriously concerned for the well-being of their
guest and urged him to moderate his habits, reminding
him that various religious authorities (including Bernard of
Clairvaux) had cautioned against excessive fasting.
Many saintly bishops are said to have suffered serious
physical complaints as a result of their years of fasting.
Unsurprisingly, onlookers often remarked on their ema
ciated bodies: the monks of Worcester, for example, were
disturbed by the extreme weight loss of Bishop Wulfstan
(1062-95), who became so thin that his consecration ring
repeatedly fell off his finger. Robert de Bethune, Bishop of
Hereford (1130-48) suffered from fainting fits due to his
long years of fasting. It was also thought that long-term
fasting could damage the brain. This was apparently the fate
ofWalter de Gray, Archbishop of York (1215-55), who was
seized with a disease in the brain from daily fastings and
died soon afterwards.
Edmund of Abingdons friends worried that he would
suffer the same fate, but instead his abstention from even
water meant that both his hair and beard fell out. This
loss of hair could not be concealed from his doctors, who
discovered that he was also suffering from desiccation of
the bones and loss of bone marrow and concluded that his
serious ill health was caused by a lack of moisture. This
particular set of symptoms, being closely focused on bodily
dryness, reinforced the connection between fasting and
chastity, for how could a man so dried up produce unwanted
bodily fluids?
The digestive disorders from which several bishops
reportedly suffered were imbued with a similar significance.
Anselm of Canterbury fasted from his youth and grew so
accustomed to eating frugally that later in life his digestive
system was found to have constricted so much that it could
not have coped with rich food, even if he had wanted to
eat it. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln (1186-1200) spent decades
on a chilling diet, which so weakened the internal bodily
organs that, the natural heat being lessened, he suffered
discomfort from the coldness of the stomach and often also
from distressing forms of colic. These unpleasant symp
toms proved Hughs absolute control over his body. When
he realised that he was unable to perform his strenuous
episcopal duties without relaxing his fast a little, he confi
dently did so, for he knew that through his long mortifica
tion, [his body] was so much under control that there was
no cause to fear that it would rebel against its master.
While concerns about diet loom large in contemporary
commentaries on the episcopal way of life, many other
pious practices favoured by the medieval episcopate could
also have serious health consequences. Indeed, it was
widely recognised that the burden of episcopal office was
a significant one, especially for a man with a religious vo
cation. Anselm was a 6o-year-old Benedictine abbot when
William II appointed him Archbishop of Canterbury and
he protested vigorously against this promotion, citing his
The devil appears age and physical frailty as evidence that he was not fit for
over a man in his the role. Throughout his archiepiscopate he was allegedly
deathbed.French
struck by weakness of the limbs every time he was obliged
m iniature, c/1300.
to engage with secular matters. Similarly, Thomas Becket
was forced to take to his bed as a result of the annoyance
and vexation that he felt at the Council of Northampton,
shortly before he went into exile.
A bishops pastoral duties, especially those which related
to the sick and the dead, could also expose him to health
risks. In 12th-century England, there was something of a
fashion for charitable efforts directed at lepers. While the
majority of Christians contented themselves with almsgiv
ing and hospital building, the most devout went much
further. St Hugh of Lincoln was famed for his compassion
for the sick, which was demonstrated most powerfully by
his willingness not only to wash the feet of the leprous, but
also to kiss them and to touch their sores.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 13
MEDIEVAL BISHOPS

While Hughs pious enthusiasm for physical

contact with lepers left him at risk of contract
ing the disease, he did not actively seek to do
so. There are, however, a handful of stories in
which a saint actively tried to contract a disease.
When Edmund of Abingdon was approached by
a scholar with a fistula on his arm, he prayed for
the malady to be transferred to him. Not only
was his prayer granted but, miraculously, both
men made a full recovery and were not even left
w ith scarring from their shared illness.
Nor was the fatherly concern of the model
bishop limited to the living. A biography of
Hugh of Lincoln, written shortly after the
saint-bishops death, included a story concern
ing the rotting corpse of an obese abbot. In the
midst of an unusually hot summer, the smell
from the corpse was almost unbearable and
those who were obliged to attend the funeral
held incense or spices to their nose - all except
Hugh, who seemed oblivious as he conducted
the burial service. His servants, on the other
hand, were in a state of extreme anxiety, fearing
that their master might contract a serious inter
nal infection from the contagion of the bad air.
Even when the bishop remained within the
relative safety of his residences, his devotional
practices could pose a threat to his health.
Although fasting was the primary cause of
Thomas Beckets illness at Pontigny, his weak
ness was exacerbated by his nocturnal vigils.
Similarly, Richard Wyche, Bishop of Chichester
(1244-53), spent his nights in prayer and con
templation. When at last he slept, he did not lie
down, but instead propped himself up against tFrom theforce o f the disease and his great
his bed, snatching just as much sleep as was
necessary to survive. In the morning, he rose
fever and sweat, [the hair shirt] had eaten into
before daybreak in order to perform further his sides, almost to the intestines
devotions before celebrating mass. Given the
frequency with which holy bishops are reported
to have engaged in such practices, it is unsurprising that
they were often said to he exhausted.
A bove: The
M a rty rd o m of
HE HEALTH RISK POSED by prayers, vigils and

T
St T ho m as o f
masses was exacerbated by the tears which often C a n te rb u ry ,
accompanied them. The ability to weep while thus G erm any, 15th
ce n tu ry .
engaged could not he taught or imitated, but had to
R ight: A nselm
be granted by God. Such tears served as proof of Gods love o f C a n te rb u ry ,
for the holy man and had the capacity to wash away sins. 1 2 th -c e n tu ry
Thus bishops who had been granted the miracle of tears English m in ia tu re .
and who could (in some cases almost literally) weep buckets
were much admired and their tears would greatly enhance
their chances of being canonised. Less desirably, medical
wisdom suggested that they would also enhance their
chances of blindness and ill health. In the last year of his
life, Gundulph, Bishop of Rochester (1077-1108) suffered
from terrible headaches, which his biographer blamed on
his too frequent tears. His lifelong habit of weeping copi
ously as he prayed and celebrated mass ironically left him
with symptoms that forced him to reduce his devotions as
death approached.
Gundulphs fate was especially unfortunate given the
medieval emphasis on spiritual preparation for death,
14 HISTORYTODAY JANUARY 2017
which meant that pious individuals did their best to con
tinue ascetic practices even on their deathbeds. Thus, in his
last days, Hugh of Lincoln was encouraged to remove his
hair-shirt, but he refused to do so, even for an hour. When
his corpse was undressed, it was discovered that from
the force of the disease and his great fever and sweat, [the
shirt] had eaten into his sides, almost to the intestines.
Nor was Hugh alone in his attachment to his penitential
garments, as evidence presented during the canonisation
process ofThomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford (1275-82)
demonstrated. Members of the bishops household testified
that, although he owned his uncles hair shirt, he did not
consider it coarse enough for his own purposes. Instead, he
favoured hair belts, containing as many lice as a man might
hold in his hand, which he wore until his flesh was scarred.
Yet, unpleasant as the consequences of such ascetic
practices could be, from a medical perspective the most
serious health risk faced by medieval bishops came not from
lachrymose devotions or penitential garments, but from a
practice that, from the late 11th century, was imposed on
the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy: clerical celibacy. When
married clerics and their supporters argued that denying
priests their wives would force them into unmentionable
vices (such as masturbation, homosexuality or even besti
ality), they were not simply being petulant. Instead, there
was a sound medical basis for their claims.
Medieval understandings of the body were based on
the Galenic system of the four humours (blood, phlegm,
black bile and yellow bile). The key concept in this system
was the notion that health was based on the equilibrium of
the humours and illness the product of imbalance. In order
for good health to be maintained, the humours needed
to be kept in balance and this was achieved through the
expulsion of various bodily fluids, including semen. Regular
sexual intercourse was part of a healthy lifestyle for most
men and celibacy was potentially dangerous to health,
particularly for young men and those with a hot and moist
complexion. Long-term celibacy meant the retention of
excess semen, which would affect the heart, leading to
anxiety and depression, which in turn damaged other parts
of the body. A celibate man could expect to experience
symptoms including headaches and weight loss. For this
reason, numerous non-Christian medical writers, including
Galen and Avicenna, recommended masturbation (in mod
eration) as a way for celibate men to deal with the inevit
able build-up of semen in the body and thus to maintain
their physical health.
INCE THE SAINTLY BISHOP was allowed to engage
S in neither sexual intercourse nor masturbation, his
health was potentially in great danger, as suggested
by contemporary stories about bishops who were
advised to give up celibacy for the sake of their health.
In this situation, the less-than-saintly would follow the
doctors advice. Maurice, Bishop of London (1085-1107),
was rumoured to have been advised by his doctors to Took
to the health of his body by the emission of humours and to
have chosen to safeguard the flesh by endangering his soul.
Of course, the truly saintly bishop would prioritise the
health of his soul over that of his body. Thomas Beckets
doctor urged him to give up celibacy for the sake of his
health, but the saint disregarded the physicians advice.
Archbishop Thomas ofYork (1108-14) also refused to
comply with his doctors prescription of sexual intercourse.
Even when his friends smuggled a suitable woman into his
household, he continued to insist that he would die a virgin.
S t A n selm curing Similar stories circulated about Continental prelates. One
a p a tie n t w ho se French bishop vehemently asserted that he could not be
illness is show n
chaste and had not been so prior to his election as bishop.
as t w o w olves
After his consecration, he felt obliged to remain celibate
a tta c k in g him .
French, 15th and within a month his genital organs swelled up with an
ce n tu ry . immeasurable flatulence. Like Thomas ofYork, he was
JANUARY 2017 HISTORYTODAY IS
MEDIEVAL BISHOPS

advised to take a woman to himself but refused, preferring

to gain eternal life than to dishonour his office. The swelling
grew worse and within days he was dead.
Such stories of death by celibacy clearly held a great
deal of appeal to its opponents, since they raised awkward
questions about its attainability and the level of sacrifice
demanded from priests who were no longer allowed to
have wives. But the trend for such tales was also related
to another significant religious development of the 12th
century: the growth of interest in the humanity (as opposed
to the divinity) of Jesus and the saints, and an increasing
tendency for the devout to attempt to emulate them.

HIS INCREASING tendency to humanise the

T divine is perhaps most clearly reflected in contem

porary accounts of episcopal piety. Bishops who
wept as they celebrated mass did so because they
were intensely focused on, and moved by, Christs suffering
on the cross. Thomas Becket, reported one of his biogra
phers, was so caught up in the office of the altar that it
was as if he beheld Christs passion before him in the flesh.
Moreover, in weeping as he celebrated mass, the saintly
bishop was not only empathising with Christ, but also
emulating his tears of pain on the cross. By engaging in un
healthy practices such as tearful prayer and lifelong virgin
ity, bishops were demonstrating the Christ-like behaviour
which 12th-century Christians increasingly expected from
their churchmen.
This growing interest in the humanity of both long-
dead and contemporary holy men was reflected not only
in practice, but also on the page. In a remarkable autobio
graphical passage in his H istory o f the K ings o f E ngland, the
Benedictine monk William of Malmesbury (himself the
author of several biographical works about English bishops)
wrote about his extensive studies. He had read widely in
many areas, including medicine, but his favourite subject
was history, which adds flavour to moral instruction by Edm und Rich, became an important feature of the later medieval saints
imparting a pleasurable knowledge of past events, spurring A rchbishop o f life. It was not enough to know that a bishop had worn a
C a n te rb u ry .
the reader by the accumulation of examples to follow the hair shirt, or restricted his diet, or kept his vow of celibacy.
W o o d c u t fro m
good and shun the bad. By combining medical knowledge th e N u re m b e rg Such statements of fact had to be supplemented by graphic
with the study of recent history, William and his fellow Chronicle, 1493. descriptions of the physical and mental consequences of
authors were able to interpret the bodies and behaviours these practices, for this was how biographers demonstrated
of churchmen past and present and to reach a better that their subject had known suffering; even if he had died
understanding of these individuals. In this way, they could peacefully in his own bed. It is a testament to the power
establish who was a good bishop, who was a bad bishop and and prevalence of this model of sanctity in 12th-century
who was a saintly bishop. England that even the reputation of an archbishop mur
For monks such as William of Malmesbury, cases of dered in his own cathedral could be enhanced by a bout of
death by celibacy provided the ultimate bodily proof of near-fatal fasting.
the validity of an episcopal reputation for sanctity. The
K a th e rin e H a rv e y is a W e llc o m e T ru s t Research F e llo w in th e D e p a rtm e n t o f
willingness of these men to prioritise the health of the soul
H istory, Classics and A rc h a e o lo g y a t B irkbeck, U niv e rs ity o f London.
over that of the body and, if necessary, to cut short their
earthly life in order to gain the rewards of eternal life, was
the ultimate manifestation of a Christian ideal. While lesser FURTHER READING
mortals might succumb to bodily weaknesses, such as food, Robert Bartlett, W h y Can th e D ead D o Such G reat Things?
sleep and sex, the saintly bishop fought an ongoing battle Saints and W orshippers from th e M a rty rs to th e R eform ation
with his body and either won or died trying. And, while the ( P r in c e t o n U n iv e r s it y P re s s , 2 0 1 3 ).
outcome was important, so too was the battle, for it was in
John Guy, Thom as B e c k e t ( P e n g u in , 2 0 1 2 ).
his struggles that the bishop demonstrated the purity of his
mind, manifested in his determination to live a godly life. Linda Kalof ( e d .) , A C u ltura l H isto ry o f th e H um an Body in the
In an age in which, Becket notwithstanding, actual mar M edieval Age ( B lo o m s b u r y , 2 0 1 4 ).

tyrdom was rare, saints were identified not by their grue Andrew Jotischky, A H erm it's Cookbook: M onks, Food and
some deaths but by their exceptional lives. Consequently, Fasting in th e M iddle Ages ( C o n t i n u u m , 2 011).
descriptions of the tribulations of the ascetic lifestyle
16 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
 REFUGEES

I ODAYS WAVE of desperate asylum seekers fleeing

The First T the Middle East and North Africa is sometimes seen
as a return to the late 1940s, when millions were
set adrift by the unprecedented violence of the Second
World War. Yet the opening chapter in this age of refugees
came not in 1945 but in 1939, with the exodus ofSpaniards
fleeing the newly installed regime of Francisco Franco.
La Retirada, the retreat ofSpaniards at the conclusion of
the three-year-long Spanish Civil War, purged the country
of half a million republican sympathisers. But, if their flight
was unlamented in Spain, they were no more welcome
in France. The icy reception by the government of France
Franco's 1939 victo ry in th e Spanish would be swiftly followed by the callous treatment of other
Civil W ar saw half a million refugees anti-fascists: Germans, Austrians, Poles, Hungarians and
Jews, among others.
head north to France. They would By late October 193S the elected republican government
of Spain was in dire straits. The government had just 17,000
followed by m any m ore in a decade of rifles to defend Catalonia, the last bastion of the Republic.
disaster, w rites Larry H annant. When Barcelona fell on January 23rd, 1939, hundreds of

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18 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
thousands of soldiers and civilians, fearing Francos wrath,
fled as quickly as their exhausted limbs could move them to
the French border.
As they made the perilous trek over the Pyrenees, the
Spaniards might have hoped that after three years of war
they had survived the worst. They were disappointed. If war
was hell, exile in France was hell in a colder climate.
Under the Popular Front government, which came to
power in 1936, France had officially acted as neutral, but
stood in unofficial solidarity with the government in Spain.
But in June 1937 the administration of socialist Leon Blum
fell to conservative demonstrations, terror and intrigue
and the incoming Radical government, with Edouard
Daladier at the helm, regarded the Spaniards as dangerous
reds who threatened to destabilise an already politically
fragile country.
Ill-prepared for a mass influx of refugees and preoc
cupied with an unpredictable Adolf Hitler, the French
government forced hundreds of thousands of Spaniards into
squalid camps scattered across southern France. The exiles
were interned in 15 improvised sites, some just barbed-wire
enclosures laid out over Mediterranean beaches, lacking
shelter and sanitary or cooking facilities. In the first six
dismal months, 14,672 refugees in these reception centres
died from malnutrition or dysentery.
NE OF THE MOST notorious of the camps that
O served as a makeshift holding pen was the Camp
de Rivesaltes, which clung to a windswept
semi-desert near Perpignan. Built in 1938 to acclimatise
troops to arid conditions, the camp was hastily reconfigured
to take in Spanish refugees. For the 8,000 men, women and
children in it, Rivesaltes was only a slight improvement on
the exposed beaches of the camps at Saint-Cyprien, Argeles-
sur-Mer and Le Barcares.
If they lacked adequate food, accommodation and
medicine, the refugees there found they had an abundance
of another amenity: French guards. Were up to our ears in
gendarmes, complained one refugee. The supervision was
so pervasive and perverse that they spied on us when we
had a bowel movement.
Another exile recalled that the guards treated us like
dogs; they robbed us; they beat us; they pushed us around.
For them we were just a bunch of undesirables whom they
needed to get rid of as soon as possible, but only after, of
course, they had bled us dry.
Little wonder that one of the Spanish artists who graph
ically captured the exiles misery, Josep Bartoli, portrayed
French guards as morbidly obese martinets in fancy uni
forms supervising stick figures of half-dressed inmates.
Taunted and ill-treated, the refugees understood that
the object was to force them back to Spain. In despair, some
complied. On return they were greeted at the border by the
Guardia Civil, then sent to prison or, in some cases, execut
ed. By December 1939, just under 200,000 Spaniards and
others who fought in Spain remained in France.
If Rivesaltes could be generously labelled a reception
camp - one of several euphemisms used to disguise their
true function of internment - another notorious prison at
Vernet deserved the description assigned it by writer Arthur
Koestler: the worst in France.
Initially, the Vernet camp, some 50 kilometres from
Spain, was used to detain the most militant of the foreign
combatants who had fought in the International Brigades,
including members of the anarchist Durruti Division and
communists from Germany and Austria.
Six months later they were joined by another wave of
anti-fascists. When Germany declared war on September
1st, 1939, France turned sour on another group of the three
million exiles living in its midst. Over the previous six years
these outcasts had fled Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the
authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
Arthur Koestler was one of them. Born in Hungary,
Koestler had been a member of the Communist Party of
Germany from 1931 to 1938, before leaving it in disgust on
hearing of Stalins Moscow show trials. During the grim
summer of 1939, as Europe hung on tenterhooks over
who might be Hitlers next victim, Koestler was lying low
in southern France. He was supposed to be writing what
would become the best-selling anti-communist novel, Dark
ness at Noon. But it was hard to keep his mind on fiction.
Any sense of calm, he wrote later in his memoir The Scum o f
the Earth, was drowned by a tide of xenophobia [sweeping]
over France with morbid rapidity.
As one of the hated foreigners with dubious political
sentiments, Koestler was arrested a month after the war
began and interned at the Vernet camp. At the time, he
thought the conditions were even below the level of Nazi
concentration camps, though 30 of the men in his barrack
could make the comparison with greater authority: they
had all suffered periods of imprisonment at Dachau, Ora-
nienburg and Wolfsbiittel.
If somebody screamed at night in our barrack, we knew
he had dreamt of the Gestapo. And, regaining conscious
ness, he recognized with relief the smell of the rotting
straw of Vernet, Koestler caustically observed.
One hut at the camp, nicknamed the Leper Barrack, was
made up of 350 veterans from Spain. They were remnants
of the International Brigades - once the pride of the Euro
pean revolutionary movement, the vanguard of the Left.
Koestler recalled that even the most wretched in the other
hutm ents looked upon these with a mixture of horror and
dismay. None of them possessed a change of shirt or socks,
and [they] went about naked under a thin and ragged jacket.
The barrack was infested with vermin and disease.
Compared with these ravaged souls, even with internees
in his own barrack, Koestler was fortunate. Influential
friends in England put pressure on the French government
and after three months at Vernet he was released. Koestler
was one of the last to reach freedom. As he related a week
after France capitulated to Germany on June 22nd, 1940,
the Gestapo made its first visit to the Vernet camp. What
a find for Himmlers black-clothed men! Three hundred
thousand pounds of democratic flesh, all labelled, alive, and
only slightly damaged.
HE FRENCH DEFEAT further swelled the concen
T tration camps, with political opponents now being
joined by those deemed to be untermenschen. In 1942
Marshal Philippe Petain, collaborationist head of the Vichy
government, began to co-operate with the Nazi regimes
campaign of mass extermination. Jews, Roma, political
dissidents and Spanish Republicans were transferred
from French internment to the concentration camps of
Germany, Austria and Poland, where they were forced into
slavery, then slaughtered. Almost 5,000 Spanish Civil
JANUARY 2017 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y 19
REFUGEES
The defeat of fascism in 1945 allowed
millions o f displaced people to make
their way home. The Spanish refugees,
however, could not do so
War veterans were killed at the Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria.
Some Spaniards were able to leave the camps in France
under extraordinary circumstances, by, for example, agree
ing to volunteer for the French Foreign Legion in North
Africa. There, they later joined up with Allied units to help
fight the Axis forces.
Other Spaniards returned to the anti-fascist struggle via
another route. In late 1939, given the alternative of contin
ued internment or deployment in semi-militarised work
brigades, about 60,000 opted to aid the French military.
20 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2 0 1 7
Most were assigned to help strengthen the Maginot Line
in north-east France. When the Phony War ended in May
1940 with a massive German offensive, Spanish Republi
cans from the work units took up the first acts of sabotage
against the occupiers. Their Spanish comrades in Vichy
France, skilled in guerrilla war from the campaign against
Franco, escaped imprisonment and helped to form maquis
units in south-western France.
Resistance in the camps also took on artistic forms.
The Catalan artist Josep Franch Clapers had fought against
Franco in 1936. But along with hundreds of thousands
of comrades he found himself in French sojourn camps
in 1939. Throughout the year he spent in two camps he
sketched and painted hundreds of images to document the
inhuman conditions imposed on the Spaniards. After the
war, a show of his work was mounted in Paris.
HE DEFEAT OF FASCISM in 1945 allowed millions
T of displaced people to make their way home. The
Spanish Civil War refugees, however, could not do
so. Their country would remain in the grip of Franco until
his death in 1975. Of the 500,000 Spanish refugees in
France in 1939,160,000 remained in 1962.
At least they were no longer in camps. Ironically, the
space was needed for refugees from Frances failed war
to keep Algeria in its empire. When the eight-year war of
independence ended in 1962, over 90,000 Harkis - Algeri
ans who had fought with the French military against the Al
gerian National Liberation Front - sought refuge in France.
Astonishingly, the camp at Rivesaltes was pressed into
service and between 1962 and 1964 some 20,000 former
soldiers and their dependents were kept in conditions every
bit as primitive as those of two decades before.
Although France encouraged Algerians to remain loyal
to it, when the war was lost the government had no plan
to accommodate the Harkis in the metropolis. For years,
it did not recognise any right for them to stay in France as
residents and citizens. An apology of sorts was offered to
the Harkis in 2012, when President Nicolas Sarkozy recog
nised Frances historical responsibility in abandoning and
interning Harki Algerian veterans.
Spaniards who were interned, even those who fought for
France in the Second World War, are still waiting for a word
of acknowledgement of the sacrifices they made. The writer
Jorge Semprun, a Spanish refugee, had joined the French
Resistance and was captured by the Germans in 1943,
surviving for two years in Buchenwald concentration camp.
In the closing weeks of the war he and other prisoners had
armed themselves and helped to defeat SS units controlling
the camp. After VE Day, waiting for a repatriation bonus in
a Free French government queue, he was denied and told
simply: Youre not French.
Larry Hannant is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of History at
the University ofVictoria, British Columbia.
FURTHER READING
Helen Graham, The Spanish C ivil War: A Very S hort
In tro d u ctio n (O xford U niversity Press, 2005).
Arthur Koestler, The Scum o f th e E arth (M acm illan, 1941).
Jorge Semprun, Literature o r Life (Viking, 1997).
 REFUGEES

A n g e l S a n z -B r iz
(c e n tre ), w h e n h e
w a s t h e S p a n is h
c o n s u l- g e n e r a l in N e w
Y o rk , J a n u a ry 1963.

THEANGEL
O F BUDAPEST
A d ip lo m a t r e p r e s e n t in g F r a n c o s S p a in a n d h is a c c o m p lic e , a n It a lia n
F a s c is t, b e c a m e u n lik e ly s a v io u r s o f J e w s s t r a n d e d a m id t h e h o r r o r s o f
t h e H u n g a r ia n c a p it a l d u r in g t h e S e c o n d W o r ld W a r , s a y s R o b e r t P h ilp o t .

N THE AUTUMN of 1944, the fate of Budapests Jews from the Vatican, Sweden and the Red Cross, Hungarys

D hung in the balance. Six months previously, uncertain

of the intentions of their hitherto loyal Axis ally, the
Germans had occupied Hungary, bringing with them the
grim machinery of the Final Solution. Within weeks, Adolf
Eichmann, one of the principle architects of the Holocaust,
had overseen the deportation to Auschwitz of 437,000
Hungarian Jews living in the countryside.
As Eichmann now eyed the capitals 150,000 Jews,
reports from four death-camp escapees arrived in the west,
bringing with them confirmation that the Nazis were mur
dering the Hungarians they had deported. Under pressure
leader, Admiral Miklos Horthy, ordered the Germans to halt
the deportations. Frustrated, Eichmann left Hungary.
For the Jews of Budapest the reprieve was to prove
temporary. In October, Horthy was ousted, the fascist
Arrow Cross seized power and Eichmann returned to the
city. You see, he told the Hungarian Jewish leader, Rudolf
Kastner, I am back again. You forgot Hungary is still in
the shadow of the Reich. My arms are long and I can
reach the Jews of Budapest as well.As Eichmanns willing
Hungarian executioners murdered Jews on the banks of
the Danube, thousands of others were forced by the
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 21
 REFUGEES
A b o v e : G io rg io P e rla sca in th e 1940s.
R ig h t: H u n g a ria n o ffic ia ls v ie w
th e b o d ie s o f Je w s m u rd e re d in
th e c o u rty a r d o f H o h a n y T e m p le ,
B u d a p e s t, 1944.
Germans to head west on death marches.
For many, it was already too late. For the rest, with any
semblance of official protection now totally absent, the as
sistance and sympathy of individual Hungarians, the clergy
and foreign diplomats would determine their survival. Of
those neutral states still with diplomatic representation in
Hungary, some, such as Sweden and Switzerland, might be
expected to offer help and most did.
Few, however, placed much faith in Spain. Despite
its neutrality, General Francisco Francos support for the
Germans, who had helped bring him to power in the civil
war, was barely concealed and his lack of sympathy for
their victims was all too apparent. On coming to power,
Franco had barred Jews from entry to Spain (although
the country later largely turned a blind eye to those who
crossed the Pyrenees, as long as they used the country only
as a transit route to Portugal). Indeed, when the Sephardi
(the descendants of Iberian Jewry, some of whom held
Spanish papers) were threatened following the German
invasion of Greece, Francos foot-dragging contrasted
poorly with the efforts made by fascist Italy to rescue
Italian Jews from harms way.
22 HISTORYTODAY JANUARY 2017
Francos rise to power began 80 years ago with the out
break of the Spanish Civil War. That he managed to weather
the international opprobrium directed at Spain following
Hitlers defeat for a further three decades is, perhaps,
less surprising than the fact that the dictator would later
attempt to trum pet his regimes alleged role in rescuing
Jews from the Holocaust. His propagandists would later,
for instance, make the grossly exaggerated assertion that
50,000 Jews had been saved thanks to its efforts.
HE CAUDILLO HIMSELF could lay little claim to as
T sisting those endangered by the Final Solution. But,
as the final, tragic chapter of the Holocaust unfolded
in Hungary, one Spanish hero did emerge.
Unlike that of Oskar Schindler - the German business
man responsible for rescuing Polish Jews who was the
subject of Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List (1994) - Angel
Sanz-Brizs story has not received the Hollywood treat
ment. But Spains Schindler was responsible for the rescue
of over 5,000 Budapest Jews from near-certain death.
Angel Sanz-Briz was an unlikely hero. A supporter of
Franco who had enlisted in the Nationalist army during
 Left: monument to Raoul Wallenberg,
Gothenburg, Sweden.
Below: Jewish men being executed by
the Danube in Hungary, 1945.

the civil war, Sanz-Briz was the Spanish charge daffaires in
Budapest. Giorgio Perlasca, his accomplice, was an Italian
Fascist who had volunteered to fight for Franco, having
previously served in Mussolinis invasion of Abyssinia.
As elsewhere, when the Germans marched into Hungary
Spain did little to help the countrys imperiled Jews. Unlike
Sweden, for example, whose response was to send the
humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg.
Taking charge at the Spanish embassy as special envoy
to Budapest in the summer of L944, Sanz-Briz decided to
act. He joined Swedish, Swiss and Portuguese diplomats in
signing a strongly worded protest organised by the Papal
Nuncio against the deportation of Jews. Instructions from
Madrid urging a less robust approach arrived too late to
restrain him.
In response to an appeal from Budapests Jewish leader
ship, he issued 200 passports and around 1,500 transit visas.
To those unable to escape abroad, the diplomat offered
1,900 documents on embassy writing paper, which provided
them with the protection of the Spanish government.
Such protection required more than just a piece of paper,
so Sanz-Briz began to rent houses and apartments in which
to place the Jews he had rescued. With the Spanish flag
flying over them and signs declaring Ex-territorial buildings
belonging to the Spanish Embassy, these properties offered
safe havens from the atrocities being perpetrated across the
city on a daily basis by the Arrow Cross. Among those Sanz-
Briz sheltered were 500 Jewish children, who had been
offered refuge by Jews in Morocco (then under Spanish
rule) at their own expense. With the Germans refusing to
allow them transit to Spain (from where they would head to
Morocco), the children were stranded in Budapest.
The buildings were overcrowded, with people living in
stairways. Some flats housed 50 people, with as many as
28 living in a single room. Sanz-Briz, recalled one survivor,
was a typical Spanish gentleman, who frequently arrived
at the apartment block in which she and 1,000 other Jews
sheltered with two embassy cars hlled with food.
But, as Sanz-Briz well knew, he was playing a dangerous
game. The number of Jews to whom he had offered protec
tion far outnumbered the quota for Spanish Jews that had
been negotiated with the Hungarian authorities. Sanz-Briz
had attempted to outwit them by a simple trick: turning
the agreed number of people into family units and then,
JANUARY 2017 H ISTO R Y TO D A Y 23
 REFUGEES
as he later explained, multiplying [it] indefinitely by never
issuing a Spanish passport or document with a reference
number over the agreed figure.
Unsurprisingly, suspicions were aroused and the build
ings under Spanish authority were subject to raids by Hun
garian militias. When they were raided, Sanz-Briz would
rush to the scene to remonstrate. He usually prevailed. If
he was too late, he would pursue and rescue those ejected
from his buildings and sent on forced marches to Germany;
on other occasions, he would drive to the Austrian border
in an attempt to intercept Jews being deported. Anybody
amongst you have anything to do with Spain?, he would
ask. Even the ability to speak a few words in Spanish was
enough for him to offer protection.
S THE TERROR MOUNTED, Giorgio Perlasca, who
A had spent much of the war as a representative of a
meat company purchasing food for the Italian army
but was now concerned for his fate, decided to use the fact
that he had fought for Franco to gain a Spanish passport.
He found the Spanish embassy besieged by Jews begging
for assistance and immediately offered to help. With few
other staff and having ascertained that Perlasca did not seek
payment, Sanz-Briz placed him in charge of the Spanish safe
houses. His daily visits helped to assert Spains authority
over the buildings.
Perlascas role was to become crucial when, as the Red
Army advanced towards Budapest in late 1944, Sanz-Briz
was ordered home. Without authority, he turned the
embassy w ith its passport forms and other official docu
mentation, over to Perlasca. Taking the Spanish name Jorge,
the Italian convinced the Hungarians he was the new charge
daffaires. If I hadnt said that, they would have taken every
one away, he later suggested, before denying that he had
24 HISTORYTODAY JANUARY 2017
Ir o n s h o e s o n t h e
D a n u b e , a m e m o r ia l
t o t h e m u r d e r e d Jew s
o f B u d a p e s t.
done anything heroic. AH I did was tell a bunch of fibs.
With Budapest descending into anarchy, those fibs
- and Perlascas continuing effort to protect his charges -
represented the difference between life and death for many
Jews. When the Arrow Cross stormed one Spanish building,
a young Hungarian Jewish boy recalled, suddenly out of
nowhere Perlasca appeared. Bluffing, he threatened to
cable Madrid and report the violation of Spanish territory,
warning the commander that the resulting damage to
Spanish-Hungarian relations would rebound upon him per
sonally. Stories circulated that Perlasca had even shouted
Spanish territory at Eichmann as he pulled two young
Jewish children into the embassy limousine and sped away.
Apocryphal or not, Sanz-Briz and Perlasca showed enor
mous personal bravery, as the fate of Wallenberg - abducted
and murdered by the Soviets when they captured Budapest
in early 1945 - attests. Sanz-Briz, who resumed his diplo
matic career after the war, did not live to see his actions ac
knowledged in 1990. But the Jews of the Hungarian capital
needed neither officialdom nor Hollywood to tell them of
the heroism o fthe Angel of Budapest.
Robert Philpot is w riting a book about Margaret Thatcher's relationship with
Britain's Jewish community.
FURTHER READING
K r y s z t ia n U n g v a r y , B a ttle fo r B u d a p e st: 100 Days in W o rld
W a r ll (I.B. Tauris, 2011).
P e r c y P ie r ik , H u n g a ry 7955-1945 - The F o rg o tte n Tragedy:
G e rm a ny's Final O ffe n sive s D u rin g W o rld W a r II (A s p e k t, 2015).
C e c il D . E b y, H u n g a ry a t W a r: C ivilia n s a n d S oldiers in W o rld
W a r ll (P en n S tate, 1998).
 O ut /
A t o f the
The beginning of another year provides Eleanor Parker w ith an opportunity to reflect on a
meditation on time that combines exquisite Old English poetry w ith early medieval science.
HE BEGINNING of a new
year prompts reflections on
time. Early medieval histo
rians and scholars were fascinated by
the calculation of time and one of the
most attractive insights into how they
understood it is an Old English poem
which survives in one of the manu
scripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It
is usually known as the Menologium,
though one might more poetically call
it The Beauties of the Year, since that
is really its subject.
The poem moves through the
calendar year, month by month, feast
by feast, finding something to praise
about every season in the traditional
language of Old English poetry. It
marks saints days, the 12 months, the
two solstices and equinoxes and the
beginning of each of the four seasons,
which are dated to the days halfway
between each solstice and equinox.
Every significant date or season
receives its own brief lyrical descrip
tion. The beginning of summer, for
instance, falls on May 9th and brings
sun-bright days, with warm weather;
meadows swiftly bloom with blossom,
and joy mounts up throughout the
earth among many kinds of living
creatures.
A few lines later, the poem extols
the summer solstice (midway through
the year and exactly midway through
the poem): the jewel climbs up into
the heavens highest in the year,
brightest of stars... The fairest of lights
likes then to gaze longer upon the
earth, to move more slowly across the
fields of the world.
This is an exquisite combination
of Old English poetry and medieval
science. It serves a practical function
by reminding the reader of important
dates in the calendar, but its purpose is
not primarily functional; more impor
tant is the relationship the poem ex
plores between the interlocking cycles
of the year, between the seasons and
sacred time. The poem begins with
Christmas (not January 1st) and opens:
Christ was born, glory of kings, at
midwinter. After proceeding through
the year, it ends with Christmas, too,
reflecting the medieval understanding
of the meaningful link between the
astronomical and sacred calendars:
Christs birth takes place in deepest
winter, at the solstice, because it is a
victory of light over darkness.
What fascinates about this poem is
not only its praise of the glories of the
natural year, but the fact that it was
preserved in one of the manuscripts
of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the
invaluable vernacular record of Eng
lands early medieval history. What
was the reasoning behind putting
these two texts together, making the
Menologium serve almost as a preface
to the Chronicle? The Anglo-Saxon
This poem embodies a
profound relationship
between history, poetry,
science and theology
Chronicle also begins with the birth of
Christ, but it locates the event not in
reference to the season of midwinter
but to a historical era: its first entry
reads: Octavian ruled 56 years, and in
the 42nd year of his reign Christ was
born. From that similar starting point
^
the two texts follow their divergent
courses, reckoning their different
kinds of time.
When this manuscript was made,
around the middle of the 11th century,
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had been
continuously kept up for about 150
years. A reader could look back over
the centuries of history it records,
year by year, telling of wars, famines,
invasions and the deaths of kings. To
run your eye down the years
listed in the Chronicle is to see at
a glance the vagaries of history,
the great tally of years making a
single human life seem tiny by
comparison.
Turning to the poem puts all
this into a different persp
ective. Instead of recording
hundreds of years, it tells of just
Cutting and one: a yearly cycle, which is constant,
loading wood: regular, sacred and beautified. For
from an
many medieval historians, thinking
Anglo-Saxon
calendar page for about time - what time is, and how we
July, n th century. measure it - was an integral part of the
study of history and the Menologium
hints that the record of years enumer
ated in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to
be read in the light of this understand
ing of the years sanctified cycles.
This poem embodies a profound
relationship between history, poetry,
science and theology, which is far from
a modern conception of the past, but
which still has something to offer at
the beginning of a new year. It sug
gests that thinking about history also
involves appreciating what does not
change, what remains constant at the
most fundamental level of human ex
istence. It provides a way of reflecting
on our experience of living through
time, shaped as it is by seasons and
holidays and the calendars which give
coherence to our years on Earth.
Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog
at aclerkofoxford.blogspotco.uk.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 25
 GEO. E. READ, In c .
T H E ORIGINAL AND LARGEST

SUBDIVIDERS OF TH E
BEVERLY HILLS FOOTHILLS

BCVt* o % -
STREET MAP 5 ^
W IT H A K E Y T O T H E H O M E S O F 7 ^

M OTION PICTURE CELEBRITIES '

A N D O T H E R . N O T A B L E S

C O M P IL E D D Y J.F S U L L I V A N . S A L E S M A N A G E R . Sc J A C K C O N A N T , A S S IS T A N T S A L E S M A N A G E R .O F

GEO. E. READ, INC.

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26 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017

 ALPHABETICAL KEY TO CELEBRITIES
27 A kin, M ary,
525 N . B e d fo rd D riv e.
104 A n d e rso n , A rc h W . (B a n k e r)
704 N . C a m d e n D riv e.
30 A rb u c k le , R osco o C. (D o ris D e a n e )
525 C a n o n D riv e .
53 A rc h a in b a u d , G eorge, D ire c to r,
603 N . L in d e n D rive.
100 A sh er, E . M. (B a n k e r),
772 N . L in d e n D riv e.
74 B a ra , T h e d a ,
622 N . A lp in e D riv e.
120 B a rry m o re , L ionel,
802 N . R o x b u ry D rive.
60 B easley , O. N . (B a n k e r),
613 N . C am d en D rive.
101 B e a u m o n t, H a r r y W . (D ire c to r),
1002 N . B e v e rly D riv e.
164 B eery . W alla c e ,
C o rn e r D o h e n y R o a d a n d S u n s e t.
I l l B e n n e tt, E n id ,
BEVERLY TERRACE.
170 B en so n , A m os,
M o u n ta in D riv e a n d S u n s e t.
158 B e v e rly H ills H o tel,
1200 S u n s e t B o u le v a rd .
12 B e v e rly T h e a tre ,
W ils h ire a n d N . B e v e rly D riv e.
103 B lue, M onte,
716 N . C am d e n D riv e.
204 B o ld t, C h arles,
1500 B e n e d ic t C an y o n R o ad .
8 B o s w o rth , H o b a rt,
219 N . D o h en y D riv e.
169 B o sw o rth , H o b a rt,
H ille r e s t R o ad .
74 B ra b in , C h a s. J . (T h e d a B a r a ) D ire c to r,
622 N . A lp in e D rive.
205 B ro w n , C la re n c e , (D ire c to r),
1022 T o w e r R o ad .
27 C arew e, E d w in , (M a ry A k in ), D ire c to r.
525 N . B e d fo rd D riv e.
26 C h ad w ick , H elen e,
513 N . R o x b u ry D riv e.
210 C h a lia p in , F eo d o r,
BEVERLY ESTATES.
207 C h a p lin , C h a rle s S p en cer, ( L ita G rey )
1103 C ove W a y .
52 C h an ey , L o n ,
604 N . L in d e n D riv e
168 C h ris tie , B ro th e rs ,
S u n s e t B o u le v a rd .
80 C h u rc h . R . F . (B a n k e r),
606 N . M ap le D riv e .
82 C lifford, K a th le e n ,
614 N . P a lm D rive.
114 C lifford, R u th ,
720 N . F o o th ill R o ad .
76 Cody, Low ,
609 N . M a p le D riv e.
150 C o n sig n y , E u g e n e F . (B a n k e r),
916 N . R o x b u ry D riv e.
70 C onti, C a p ta in A lb e rt de.
608 N . R e x fo rd D riv e.
183 Cook, Ted,
B E V E R L Y C R EST.
215 C onw ay, J a c k ,
BEVERLY ESTATES.
83 C ro sla n d , A lan,
626 N . P a lm D riv e.
198 D a n a , V iola,
BEV ERLY CREST.
6 D a rlin g . W illia m S., ( D ire c to r),
216 N . M ap le D riv e.
154 D av ies, M arion,
1700 L e x in g to n R o ad .
31 D illon, J o h n F r a n c is (E d ith H a llo r),
526 N . C a n o n D riv e . [D ire c to r.
172 D o heny, E d w a rd L . S r.,
501 D o h e n y R o ad .
173 D o h en y , E d w a rd L . J r.,
BEV ERLY CREST.
165 D u ra n t, R . C.,
M o u n ta in D riv e a n d S c h u y le r R oad,
2 E d d y , H e le n Je ro m e ,
202 N . C a n o n D rive.
200 E llio t, E d w a rd , ( B a n k e r),
C o ld w a te r C a n y o n R o ad .
208 F a irb a n k s , D o u g la s (M a ry P lc k fo rd )
E n d of C ove W ay .
107 F e rg u s o n , H e le n R.,
710 C re s c e n t D riv e.
10 F i r s t N a tio n a l B an k .
B e v e rly D r. a n d S a n ta M o n ica B lvd.
29 F Itz m a u ric e , G eorge. ( D ire c to r).
516 N . B e v e rly D rive.
4 F lo o d , J a m e s J., (D ire c to r),
315 N . F o o th ill R o ad .
3 F ly n n , E m m e tt,
244 S . C re s c e n t D riv e.
102 F o r r e s t. A lan,
707 N . R o x b u ry D riv e .
115 F ra n k lin , S id n ey , (D ire c to r).
717 N . P a lm D r.
1G7 F re d e ric k , P a u lin e ,
503 S u n s e t B o u le v a rd .
79 G allo w ay , F . K ., ( B a n k e r),
614 N . M ap le D riv e .
73 G e ra rd , C a rl ( E th e l G re y T e rry ).
610 N . A lp in e D riv e.
201 G etz. M ilto n E ., (B a n k e r).
1009 N . B e v e rly D rive.
119 G ibson. E . R., (H o o t)
814 N . B e d fo rd D rive.
179 G ilm ore, E a rl,
BEVERLY CREST
185 G illespie, F ra n k , 235 N iblo, F re d (E n id B e n n e tt), D irecto r,
C rescen t a n d L ex in g to n . BEV ERLY TERRACE.
218 G ilb ert, Jo h n , 28 N o rm an d , M ablo,
BEVERLY E STA TES.
C am d en a n d C a rm e lita .
57 G illin g w ater, C laude, 34 O a k m an , W heeler,
[D ire c to r. 604 N . B ed fo rd D rive. 512 N . R ex fo rd D rive.
158 G ish, L illian, 113 Oldfield, B arn ey ,
B ev erly H ills H o tel. 708 N . F o o th ill R o ad .
7 G ordon, H u n tley . 55 O liver. C has. A., (R u th L aw ),
112 N . P a lm D rive.
G06 N . R o x b u ry D rive.
222 G ore, A. L 180 O v ia tt, Ja m e s,
BEVERLY ESTATES. B E V E R L Y C R E ST .
223 G oulding, E d m u n d , 11 P acific E le c tric R . R . S ta tio n ,
BEVERLY ESTATES. S a n ta M onica B lvd. a n d C an o n D rive.
168 G ra n t, E . J. 67 P e rry , K a th r y n (M rs. O w en M oore).
The lap
906 N . A lp in e D rive. 615 N. C re sc e n t D rive.
186 G reen, B u rto n , 117 P e te rs , H o u se,
1601 L e x in g to n R oad. 806 N . C am den D rive.
206 Griffith, C orrine, 208 P lc k fo rd , M a ry (D o u g las F a irb a n k s ),
1003 S u m m it D rive. E n d o f C ove W ay.
230 G riffith, R aym ond, 118 P re v o s t, M arie,
BEVERLY TERRACE. 810 N . C am den D rive.
31 H allo r, E d ith , 153 R ay, C h a rle s (C la ra G ra n t),
526 N . C anon D rive. 901 N . C am d en D rive.
77 H a rg re a v e s , R ic h a rd L., (G race B ry a n ). 1 R ead , Geo. E ., Inc.,
Beverly Hills
629 N. M aple D rive. 467-469 B e v e rly D rive.
118 H a rla n . K e n n e th , (M ario P re v o s t), 197 R ead , Geo. E ., Inc.,
810 N . C am d en D rive. B E V E R L Y C R E S T O F F IC E .
33 H e a th c o te , F . W .. (B a n k e r), 178 R ead , Geo. E ., (R esid en ce),
522 N. C re sc e n t D rive. B E V E R L Y C R E ST .
155
227
184
H eilm an , Irv in g H.,
1600 L e x in g to n R oad.
H e n ry , C arl,
BEVERLY TERRACE.
H o lt, M rs. J a c k ,
35
182
58
R e in a c h , E d w ard .
509 N . A lp in e D rive.
R ev ier, D o ro th y ,
BEV ERLY CREST.
R ob erd s, Ja so n ,
Street Map,
224
224
BEV ERLY CREST.
Ince, M rs. Thos.,
BEVERLY ESTATES.
Ince. E s ta te o f T h o m as,
157
160
616 N. B ed fo rd D rive.
R ob in so n , H . W . (P re s. J . W . R obinson
1008 E ld en W ay.
R ogers, W ill,
[C o m p an y . 1926
925 N . B ev erly D rive.
199
D iaz D orados.
Jo se p h so n , J u lie n ,
162 R osso n , A rth u r. (D ire c to r), UNLIKE MODERN star maps, aimed at
1005 N. R ex fo rd D rive.
188
BEV ERLY CREST.
Joyce, W illia m B.,
107 R u ssell. W m . F., (H elen F e rg u so n ) tourists intending to sightsee, this map
710 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
72
1004 E ld e n W ay.
K an e , A r th u r S.,
54 S a n te ll, A lfred, (D ire c to r), was produced as a piece of promotion
601 N . R o x b u ry D rive.
102
626 N . A lp in e D rive.
K eato n , B u ste r,
225 Schenck, Jo sep h , for a residential development by George
BEV ERLY TERRA CE.
152
1004 H a rtfo rd W ay.
K e rry , N orm an,
176 S c h ra m , P e te r C., E. Read in 1924. His plan was to market
910 N . B ed fo rd D rive. BEV ERLY CREST.
220 K irk w o o d , J a m e s (L ila L e e ), D irecto r. 174 S ch u y ler, W a lte r, Beverly Hills as the home of the stars at a
D oh en y a n d S c h u y le r R oads.
151
BEVERLY ESTATES.
K yne, P e te r B.,
101 S e b a stia n . A. H ., (P ro d u c e r), time when cinema was changing the face
713 N . R o x b u ry D rive.
51
909 N. B ed fo rd D rive.
L a n d is, Cullen, 81 S edgw ick, E d w a rd , J r., (D ire c to r) of celebrity.
613 N . P a lm D rive.
606 N . W ald en . D rive.
108 S e ite r, W illiam A., (D ire c to r). By the mid-i920s, studios were pro
78 L a P la n te , L a u ra , 718 N . R ex fo rd D rive.
620 N . M ap le D rive. 36 Seitz. Geo. B., (D ire c to r). ducing their own maps with directions
25 L a sc a lle , W ard , 520 N . F o o th ill R oad
55
516 N . W a ld e n D rive.
L aw , R u th ,
226 S h eeh an , W infield, R., to their stars homes, cultivating the idea
BEVERLY TERRACE
220
606 N . R o x b u ry D rive.
L ee, L ila, (J a m e s K irk w o o d ), D ire c to r,
59 S h ip m an , L y le T ayo, of celebrity and encouraging fans to see
622 N . C am den D rive.
211
BEV ERLY ESTA TES.
L ee, R o w la n d V.,
50 S nell, T hos. T., (B a n k e r), them as icons. As Hollywood grew as the
620 N . W ald en D rive.
232
BEV ERLY ESTA TES.
L ew is, G eorge,
69 Snow den. E a r l F ., (B a n k e r), centre of celebrity, stars began investing
625 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
233
S u m m it o f A ngelo D rive.
Lloyd, H a ro ld (M ild red D a v is),
209 S p au ld in g , S. M., in property there, making their homes
C ove W ay .
177
1225 B e n e d ic t C an y o n R o ad .
L loyd, H a ro ld , C o rp o ratio n ,
68 S tan ley , F o rre s t,
604 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
symbols of their ascendancy and, thus,
BEV ERLY CREST.
187 L o m b ard , H a r r y D.,
107A S te a rn s, F re d e ric k K im b all ( E s ta te of)
722 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
tourist sites. Expert on celebrity, Martin
105
1006 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
L o n g y e a r, W . D., (B an k er),
110 S tre lin g e r. S e th W . P.,
708 N . R ex fo rd D rive.
Kaplan, has compared the trip to see a
721 N . B ev erly D rive. 56 S tro m b e rg , H u n t, (P ro d u c e r),
62 L u b itsc h , E rn s t, (D ire c to r), 616 N . R o x b u ry D rive. celebrity home to a religious pilgrimage.
616 N . B ev erly D rive. 181 S teu erle, L o u is F.,
75 L y o n s, E ddie, B E V E R L Y C R E ST .
With the introduction of photography
605 N . E lm D rive. 159 S w an so n , G loria,
216 L y tell, B e rt, 904 N. C re sc e n t D rive.
and the moving picture, the notion of
BEVERLY ESTATES. 32 T a y lo r, S am , (D ire c to r),
156 M cC arty , W a lte r G., 528 N . C re sc e n t D rive. celebrity changed from notable figures
L e x in g to n a n d C rescen t. 73 T e rry . E th e l Grey,
9 M cK im , R o b ert, 610 N . A lpine D rive. to film stars. Mary Melton, writing for
433 N . P a lm D rive. 231 T hom son, F red ,
231 M arlo n , F ra n c e s,
B EV ER LY TERRA CE. B EV E R L Y T E R R A C E . the Los Angeles Times in 1996, said: The
61 T o rre n c e , D avid,
65 M acL ean, D ouglas,
618 N. R odeo D rive. maps to the stars homes are as much an
624 N . C an o n D rive.
66 T u rp in , Ben,
219 M acL ean, D o u g las,
BEVERLY ESTATES. 602 N . C an o n D rive. archaeological dig as an atlas. They show
112 Ullm&n, S. G eorge,
106 M ay, T h o m as, (V. P . T h e M ay Co.).
712 N . C an o n D rive.
701 N . F o o th ill R oad. who has enduring fame and who was big
228 V alen tin o , R udolph,
171 M eyer, B en R., (B a n k e r),
D o h en y R oad. BEV ERLY TERRA CE. in the moment but whose reputation has
64 M ills, M arily n , 214 V idor, K ing, (D ire c to r),
606 N . B ev erly D rive. BEVERLY ESTATES. not endured. Achieving a spot on a star
121 M iller, P a ts y R u th , 217 V idor, F lo ren ce,
808 N . C re sc e n t D rive. BEVERLY ESTATES.
map has become a sign of having made
203 M ix, Tom ,
1010 S u m m it D rive.
68A W ag n er, Bob, (F lo re n c e W elch ),
608 N . C re sc e n t D rive.
it. Notable names on this map include
67 M oore, Ow en, 5 W a lth a ll. H e n ry B.,
615 N . C re sc e n t D rive. 414 N . R odeo D rive.
Charlie Chaplin (207 in the key), Buster
158 M oore, Tom , 189 W h ittie r, M ax, ( E s ta te of),
B e v e rly H ills H otel. 1001 S u n s e t B o ulevard. Keaton (202), Rudolph Valentino (228)
206 M orosco, W a lte r (C o rrin e G riffith), 234 W ilson, C arey.
1003 S u m m it D rive. 1003 N . B e n e d ic t C anon R oad. and Gloria Swanson (159).
229 M u rra y , Mae, 109 W ilson, L. A.,
BEV ERLY TERRA CE. 716 N . R ex fo rd D rive.
116 N agel, C o n rad , 218 W itw e r, H . C.,
715 N . P a lm D rive. BEV ERLY ESTATES. Kate W iles
63 N eg ri, P ola, 221 W ra y , J o h n G riffith,
610 N . B ev erly D rive. BEV ERLY ESTA TES.
JANUARY 2017 H IS TO R Y T O D A Y 27
JAPAN

R e g e n t S tre e t, L o n d o n

vS |

Christopher Harding profiles Natsume Soseki, Japans

Charles Dickens, whose visit to London at the turn of the 20th
century suggested ways of successfully combining western
industrialism w ith Japanese Spirit.

28 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017

C ET UP, GET UP! Lying on the ground sweating and bleeding
next to his bicycle - that machine, as he ruefully referred
to it - his cycling instructor heckling from the sidelines, the
young Japanese professors short stay in London had finally
turned from slow-burning tragedy into farce.
Natsume Soseki had no interest in cycling, the latest fashionable
craze to hit London at the turn of the 20th century. He was there to
deepen his understanding of English literature, spending what little
money the Japanese government had given him for his short trip on
books, on modest board and lodging and on tuition from the Shake
speare scholar William James Craig. To find himself hurt and humiliated
on, and mostly off, two wheels, at various locations from Lavender Hill
to Clapham Common was irrelevant to the task Soseld had set himself.
Only later in his career would Soseld realise and appreciate what he
had learned in London. His major discovery was that his opinions on
English literature were no less valid than those of similarly educated
Englishmen; he could and should grow out of borrowed opinions - those
Top le ft: R e g e n t S tre e t, London, c.1900. Top rig ht: M a in S tre e t,
Y o shiw ara, Tokyo a t th e sam e tim e . Inset: N a ts u m e Soseki, c .ig io .
glued-on peacock feathers, as he put it - and commit himself instead
to his own intellectual and even moral path. There had been a range
of formative humiliations similar to Sosekis tussle w ith the machine
in which he had little interest but with which he was forced to forge a
relationship: policemen tutting, passers-by breaking into laughter or
ironic applause at the wobbling moustachioed Asian man on the bicycle,
one man abusing him as Chinkwhen Sosekis erratic manoeuvrings put
him in peril. Encounters with boarding-house landladies, at turns cold
and overweening, helped complete the effect of a melancholy immer
sion in the social and architectural landscape of modern London, which
turned Soseki from a shy, run-of-the-mill teacher of English literature
into the man who was to become known as Japans Charles Dickens.
Soseki was born Natsume ICinnosuke, in the city of Edo in 1866. It
would soon become the epicentre of a great and, to this day, unfinished
experiment. Japans old Shogunal order had collapsed. In its place a
youthful cadre of mostly middle-ranking samurai was determined to
build a strong, technologically advanced and outward-looking polity. In
desperate need of a figurehead, they hustled the young Emperor Meiji
from Kyoto all the way to Sosekis city of Edo - now renamed Tokyo.
From Japans first prime minister, Ito Hirobumi, to the military
leader Yamagata Aritomo, these young samurai are celebrated today
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 29
JAPAN
rc ",
TON
Above: C o ve n t G arden fr u it and v e g e ta b le
m a rk e t, London, 1900s. R ight: N a k a m is e -d o ri
leading t o t h e Senso-ji te m p le , Tokyo, 1900s.
as modern Japans founding fathers. In the span of a few years they gave
the country a constitution and a legal system, world-beating businesses,
such as Mitsubishi, the most powerful economy in Asia and (for a time
at least) its most respected armed forces. Japan went from being next
after China on European colonialisms To Do list, to signing treaties
and pacts with global players. It suggested serious respect and - almost
- equality. Through to the 1940s, Japanese leaders liked to say that their
country was modernitys beacon in Asia.
It was a bold experiment and the fate of Sosekis generation was to
furnish its first guinea pigs. While modernity in the West was a natural
stage of development upon which fans and critics alike reflected from
within, for the Japanese it was a foreign object, to be examined with
circumspection and from all angles before decisions were made about
whether and how it might be right for Japan.
There was considerable pragmatism in this process. A group of Jap
anese leaders had set out in the early 1870s to explore modernitys
3 0 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y JANUARY 2017
y f y1
ffff' 1 ypp11 ijfjT
jM
I w i 7
greatest hits and misses. Their fact-finding mission visited major
cities in 12 countries: Chicago, Washington and Boston; Liverpool and
London; Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin; St Petersburg, Stockholm, Rome
and Vienna. They returned with clear ideas about which models of life
within the modern world they thought fit for Japanese consumption.
Education should be done the American way, they argued. For industry
and Japans new navy, it had to be Britain, right down to the portraits of
Nelson, which soon adorned the walls of Japanese naval academies. For
the police: France. For political institutions: the heavily circumscribed
model of democracy offered by Bismarckian Germany. Hirobumi was so
impressed by the great Prussian statesman that he even started holding
his cigar the way Bismarck did.
In this way, models were chosen and tweaked. Impressive though
the Paris police undoubtedly were, for a city like Tokyo, whose transport
was still underdeveloped and whose rapidly growing population was not
entirely to be trusted, a network of koban - small police huts housing
one or two officers - was added to the model so that city dwellers could
more easily get hold of a police officer, or vice versa.
Right from the start, leaders hoped to distinguish modernisation
from westernisation. One of the most influential new popular slogans
 - a key means by which Japans government and bureaucracy tried to
reach and shape the people - was Western Technology, Japanese Spirit.
The first half of this was a broad ambition, but at least it had the virtue
of clarity. The Japanese government brought in westerners to provide
training in everything from engineering to psychiatry, while sending
young Japanese, such as Soseki, to study abroad on sustained and highly
specialised versions of the earlier fact-finding mission. The most enthu
siastic modernisers toyed with English as a new national language and
even with a policy of intermarriage with westerners, in case there was
something in the blood which explained the gulf between western
scientific and cultural achievements and what Japanese critics regarded
as their own embarrassing backwater of a society.
Japanese Spirit was an altogether different matter. It was supposed
to function as the special glue that bound together a population in times
of rapid change and painful personal and financial sacrifice and was
especially important where that population, as was the case in Japan,
had been used to thinking in terms of village, city or region rather
than nation. Japanese returning from abroad noted that, in the West,
flag-waving nationalism and Christianity provided two different but
complementary sorts of glue. What might work for Japan?
NEW EMPEROR was paraded around the country, sug
gesting in his divine person and role as family head of the
nation both the flag waving and the feel of a community whose
identity and purpose transcends the visible and the everyday.
People did not immediately take to him: police had to be called in to
encourage the masses to take to the streets for his birthday festivities,
while at the same time ushering protestors - on issues ranging from
the emperor system to the appalling conditions endured by workers in
many of Japans new industries - off the streets and occasionally into
jail cells for suspected treason or breaches of the peace.
In later years, a less confected but more dangerous Japaneseness
would coalesce around the countrys military, following a series of
stunning victories, from the defeat of China in 1895 to the sensational
success of Admiral Togo - the Nelson of the East - in seeing off the
Russians in 1905. Into the 1930s, a new generation of Japanese, who had
not known the national insecurity of the recent past, exaggerated this
militarised ideal o fJapanese spirit, incorporating an often xenophobic
critique of modernity. Some influential voices in the armed forces even
lobbied not to receive the latest military technology, on the basis that
spirit trumps hardware every time. ^
JANUARY 2017 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y 31
JAPAN

For Soseki, Londonsfog conjured a vivid visual and

emotional sense o f what modernity had done to England
and was now doing to Japan

OSEKI WAS AMONG THOSE who lampooned the jingoism of from scholar and amateur diarist, via the small but snowballing surprises

S tabloid takes on Japanese spirit at the time of the Russo-Japan

ese War. Admiral Togo possesses the Japanese spirit, and the
local fishmonger has it as well, he wrote. Swindlers and mur
derers also have the Japanese spirit. Since it is a spirit, it is always blurry
and fuzzy; there is no-one in Japan who hasnt had it on the tip of his
tongue, but theres no-one who has actually seen it.
He was satirising a poor answer to a very good question, one with
which his whole life was to be intertwined: 'what is modernity doing
to we Japanese?
London provided answers for Soseki. What is modernity doing to
us? took on a lived, minute-by-painful-minute specificity, becoming
what is London doing to me? A doubt and unease that he had felt at
Tokyo Imperial University, where he studied English Literature and,
to a lesser extent, the secondary school where he later taught it, now
seemed to enter Soseki in the form of profound culture shock and a
thoroughgoing challenge to his whole sense of himself. Natsume has
gone mad, ran one short missive home from a Japanese visitor to him
around this time.
Sosekis sojourn in London lasted from 1900 to 1902: he later recalled
the crowds along the cortege route at the funeral of Queen Victoria, the
trees laden with human fruit. But across even this relatively short span
of time Sosekis moody, impressionistic writings show a man moving
and disappointments of the sensitive traveller, to someone possessing
and putting to eloquent use an outsider persona. Upon his return, one
of the Wests greatest modern cities, then modernity itself and finally
modern Tokyo and Japan, were experienced as places that could never
entirely be thought of as home.
For Soseki, Londons fog conjured a vivid visual and emotional sense
of what modernity had done to England and was now doing to Japan.
Settling as far as the eye could see, it created a landscape in which the
colour, energy and rich detail of human life was smudged, suppressed,
even obliterated and out of which, in its place, modernitys pointless,
lifeless artefacts rose in relief to be freeze-framed in damp gloom:
I jumped out o f bed, lifted the curtain over the windowfacing north
and looked out at the street. The whole scene was blurred ...the garden
contained nothing but useless ornaments. Motionless and melancholy,
everything seemed to be set in ice.
The neighbouring garden looked just the same. It had a pleasant lawn,
and when the warm spring arrived, a white-bearded old man went out
there to enjoy the sun. He always had a parrot with him perched on his
right arm, and he p u t hisface so close to its beak, that it looked as i f he was
about to be pecked. The parrot beat his wings and squawked incessantly.
When the old man did not appear, a young girl, hitching up the hem o f her

32 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017


Above: Emperor
Meiji, c.1880.
Right: Tokyo, 1890.
Left: Battersea
Reach from Lindsey
Houses, a London
scene by James
W histler, 0.1864.
long dress, constantly ran a lawnmower over the grass. This garden, still
so clear in my memory, was now swallowed up by thefog, and there was
nothing to distinguish it from the boarding house where I was staying,
disused and deserted, with the houses all in one unbroken line.
Soseki recalled being trapped alone in the dank dining room of that
boarding house, which the sunlight never seemed to enter, as the lady
of the house made her entrance:
[She was]fa r beyond any fe m in in ity ... All the human weaknesses -
bitterness, envy, obstinacy, rigidity, doubt - m ust have taken a delight in
playing with that face to give it that ill-favoured appearance... Turning
her black eyes towards the narcissi withering in the glass vase, she [said]
that England, a cold and cloudy country, was not a pleasant place to live.
No doubt she intended to point out to me that in this country even the
flowersfailed to bloom.
Soseki felt sorry for the Londoners around him as he was hustled and
bustled along the citys streets by faster, taller counterparts:
Everyone walking along the pavement overtook me - even the women.
Placing their hands on their waists and slightly raising their skirts, they
hurried along with their high-heels tapping the pavement so sharply
that they seemed to be in danger o f snapping. I f one observed the faces
attentively, one noticed that they all had a strained expression. The men
looked straight ahead, the women did not let their gaze wander to either
side, and all were resolutely proceeding towards their chosen destinations.
Their lips were tightly closed. Their eyebrows were so closely knit that they
almost met in the middle. Their noses seemed to stick out and their faces
stretchforwards as i f to keep ahead o f the steps which bore them one after
the other to their respective destinations.
He found himself propelled by this crowd into a building with a high-
domed ceiling. From up the stairs he could see, this time below him,
Londons sea of humanity:
White, black, yellow, blue, violet, red - all the different colours undu
lated together in the distant background like the watery movements o f
the ocean, like tiny multicoloured shells o f wonderful beauty. At that
moment, the spectacle suddenly vanished, giving way to a darkness that
spreadfro m the enormous cupola to the innermost depths. The people
present, who could be counted in thousands, were swallowed up in the
darkness. Everyones existence, w ithout exception, was effaced by the
extreme darkness, and they became as voiceless as if the shadows and
shapes had disappeared...
When I became conscious o f an actual glimmer o f light, I was
able to make o u t... a range o f opaque colours.
Yellow, mauve, dark blue... All o f a sudden, the
mist disappeared. Far off, on an expanse o f
greenery stretching out by the sea, sparkling
under the hot rays o f the sun, a handsome young
man came in sight, wearing a yellow tunic and
accompanied by a beautiful woman enveloped in
a violet robe w ith long, billowing sleeves... She
sat down in a marble seat in the shade o f an olive
tree. The peaceful sound o f the orchestra came
across the distant sea, its thin notes continuing
without a pause.
The whole hall trembled at the same time. They
had not disappeared in the darkness. In this darkness
they were dreaming o f Greece, which was all sweet
ness and light.
Soseki had attended a performance of Shakespeares Twelfth Night, set
in the ancient Balkan coastal region of Illyria. It was the mirror image of
modern Tokyoite yearnings for some other Japan. Just as use in English
of the word bucolicrocketed upwards during the rapid industrialisation
of the middle of the 19th century, so in Japan artists and psychothera
pists, ethnologists and philosophers busied themselves from the t88os
onwards with fantasies of idylls elsewhere.
These often took the form of variations on a theme of a simpler past,
collective values and a physical environment untouched by noisy ma
chinery, purposeless rush and architecture of inhuman scale. Time itself
could be remade. It would no longer be something linear, measured in
tasks or in the tick-tock of the now ubiquitous clock. Instead, it should
be cyclical, like the seasons. For Japans first and most famous ethnol
ogist, Yanagita Kunio, such time ought to be capable of (re)shaping
the whole mentality of a Japanese folk, who would live well without
progress or productivity or international competition, or any of the
other modern concerns urged on them by politicians and bureaucrats.
But just as Soseki lambasted the sloganeers Japanese spirit, so he
had little time for such archaic fantasies. For him, modernity was not
an unwanted western gift that could simply be returned. Nor was it a
state of affairs either to be enjoyed for its opportunities or resented as
a corruption of an earlier form of life. What he seemed to see in that
JANUARY 2017 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y 33
JAPAN
London theatre was that to be modern was to learn to live with being
simultaneously pulled in a variety of directions: hungry for the future
yet attracted to the past; living and working collaboratively with others,
in ever larger conurbations and institutions, yet anxiously concerned
with oneself as the ultimate, most meaningful unit of being. In short,
to be modern was to learn to live with a kind of homelessness.
By the time he arrived back in Japan early in 1903, Soseki had an
idea of a possible way forward. His observations while in London - of
himself as well as the population and its conditions of life - persuaded
him that the anxiety he constantly felt in the pit of my stomach came
from a tendency in Japan to believe that the countrys mission to become
modern involved reaping the harvest of decades worth of cultural and
technological change in the West rather than attempting to sow its
own crop. Just as Japanese science was accused, usually by Japanese
scientists, of taking up existing western technologies without doing
the sort of fresh science that might yield real innovation, so for Soseki
Japans encounter with modernity had failed to inspire and invigorate
the country. It had burdened it with a facsimile of western moderni
ty, which threatened the sanity of people like himself who tried to
accommodate themselves to it. Sosekis early conviction that he could
do little better than learn and repeat Englishmens opinions on English
literature was revealed to be an outcome of this much deeper malaise in
Japan. Sosekis proposed way forward was to learn to find ones centre
of gravity not in borrowed ideals or in others, but in oneself, and then
to strive to make this individuality the source of how one lived and
worked in the world. Speaking to students in t9i4, just two years before
his death, Soseki warned his young audience that this was the only way
to find a sense of true belonging in the modern world. It would be the
most delicate of balancing acts. This new generation was accused in
the Japanese press of forgetting its sense of duty to family and nation,
turning instead to private cultivation, to the use of poetry to inspire and
document inner exploration and to the development of a finely honed
aesthetic sense as the ultimate goal in life.
Soseki cautioned his students against being cajoled into doing
everything for the sake of the nation: What a horror, he wrote, if we
have to eat for the nation, wash our faces for the nation, go to the toilet
for the nation! But equally he urged them not to mistake contemporary
talk o fego and self-awareness for true individualism. The former in
volved centring ones life and work on oneself, turning ever inwards; the
latter involved centring ones life and work in oneself, turning outwards
34 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
w ithout losing ones balance. These two forms o f self-centredness
could not be more different.
OSEKI GAVE HIS SPEECH at the same time that his greatest
S work of fiction was published. If the speech sketched a way
forward for Japans urban young, his novel Kokoro (The Heart
of Things) traced its traumatic near-impossibility in practice.
The novel follows a young man as he is about to graduate from Tokyo
University. He becomes friends with an older man known only as Sensei
- teacher - who appears to be a comfortably off man of leisure, but is
revealed through the relaxed, open joyfulness of the younger man to be
living an isolated and purposeless life. For reasons unknown, he visits
a certain graveyard once per month.
This relationship and everyday life in Tokyo gradually draws the
young man in and away from his rural parents. Returning home to his
dying father, he realises just how little he now has in common with his
relatively unschooled mother and father. Only his fathers last moments
bring a brief restoration of intimacy, punctuating the young mans dis
tanced disdain.
While at home, he receives a letter from Sensei, into whom
he has until now seemed rapidly to be turning. The letter tells
the story of Senseis youth. Cheated of his inheritance by a selfish
uncle, he moved away to Tokyo and took rooms in a boarding
house, where a childhood friend, K, came to stay w ith him.
When K told Sensei that he had fallen in love with the daughter
of the boarding-house owner, Sensei rushed to undermine his
friend and to propose marriage for himself. K took his own life,
plunging Sensei into long years of melancholy: over the darkness
in his cheating uncle, his discovery of the same in his own heart
(a feeling heightened during his visits to Ks grave) and the sense
that modern life corners people into living such lives.
The letter from Sensei to the young man makes up the final
portion of Kokoro. It turns out to be a suicide note: the year is
t9i2, the Meiji Emperor has died and the subsequent (real-life)
suicide of fidelity undertaken by General Nogi Maresuke gives
Sensei the final push he needs to make a long-planned act of
atonement for his friends death.
Kokoro puts Sosekis words to those students in a new light:
not so much advice about how to live life but a notice of suffer
ing to come, only partially open to mitigation. Where Japans
leaders had once examined modernity from without, Sosekis
own generation had lived it from within: pulled in all those dif
ferent directions - towards the past and future; outwards in relation
ship, inwards into an isolated, claustrophobic absorption. Where those
leaders had sought desperately to steer clear of the social fall-out from
modernisation - the poverty and slums they hurried through in that first
grand tour of the West - it was left to Soseki to document the psycho
logical fall-out. First-hand witness to modernity and (auto)biographer
of its casualties, satirist of easy solutions and curator of his countrys
conscience then and now: all these things, seeded in London, created
for Japan its very own Charles Dickens.
Christopher Harding is Lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh.
FURTHER READING
Natsume Soseki, The T o w e r o f London and O th e r Stories
( P e te r O w e n , 2 0 0 4 ) ; Kokoro ( P e n g u in C la s s ic s , 2 0 1 0 ).
Van C. Cessel, Three M odern Novelists: Soseki, Tanizaki, K aw abata
(K o d a n s h a A m e r , 1993).
Edwin McClellan, 'A n I n t r o d u c t io n t o S o s e k i', H arvard Journal o f
A sia tic Studies 22 ( H a r v a r d U n iv e r s ity P ress, 1959).
Copyright of History Today is the property of History Today Ltd. and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.
 VICTORIANS

Fallen Women
Attitudes to female sexuality in the 19th century were rigid and unflinching and those
who failed to conform were ostracised and persecuted. Victoria Leslie compares how
fallen women were portrayed in the arts with the real stories of those who fell.

HE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL (w hich continues today as th e Christina Rossetti. The Foundling m others, like th eir fictional coun

T childrens charity Coram) had a long history o f improving the

lives o f children. Established by th e philanthropist Thomas
Coram in 1739 in response to th e num ber of abandoned chil
dren left to die on Londons streets, its purpose was to take in and
provide for children whose mothers were unable to care for them . Orig
inally th e hospital accepted any child in danger o f being abandoned,
but demand was so great th a t a ballot system had to be introduced. This
was to change in the m id-i9th century, w hen th e hospital restricted its
entry to illegitimate children only, focusing its admissions criteria on
th e moral integrity of the unmarried mother. In order to secure a place
for her child, a womans good character had to be established and her
respectability judged by the all-male hospital comm ittee.
The fallen woman became an enduring figure in art and literature,
w ith an array o f campaigners and reformers keen to fight her corner and
raise social awareness, including w riters such as Charles Dickens and
terparts, were also required to tell th e story o f their fall on applying to
the hospital, detailing how they had been compromised in order to gain
admission for their child. These women had to reconcile th eir stories
to those th a t were expected o f them by th e hospital com m ittee and
w ith
those th a t were being told tim e and again in th e literature and visual
culture o f th e time.
The Victorian period was obsessed w ith defining and celebrating the
idealised form o f femininity. Coventry Patm ores poem The Angel in
the House, published in 1854, defined th e perfect woman as pious and
self-sacrificing. Likewise John Ruskins essay O f Queens Gardens, first
published in 1865, defines man as th e doer, the creator, th e discoverer,
th e defender, whereas womans rule should be confined to the sphere
o f domesticity, her skills limited to sw eet ordering, arrangem ent and
decision. Women were supposed to be nurturers and helpmates, to be
obedient and dutiful and, above all, virtuous.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 35
VICTORIANS
T h e T ho m as C o ram F oundling H o sp ital, by Richard W ilson, c.1746.
This was only one half of the dominant ideology, a dichotomy that
presented women as either virgins or whores. The fallen woman,
however, was notably different from a prostitute, the distinction being,
according to the social historian Lynda Nead, that she had once been
respectable but had dropped out of respectable society. Possession of
sexual knowledge outside of the institution of marriage was seen as a
threat to the established norms and the fallen woman was especially
dangerous, because she had known respectability and had chosen to
disregard it. She was therefore a deserving target of societys rage and
persecution, regarded as a social pariah, especially if she bore the proof
of her shame, her illegitimate child. In all likelihood both mother and
child would end up in the workhouse or on the streets.
There were many cautionary tales of the fallen woman and her
downward spiral in the art of the period. Though she was a contentious
subject, owing to the fact that the fallen woman was defined by her
sexual identity, there was a place for paintings that reasserted moral
values. Paintings such as Richard Redgraves The Outcast (1851) and
Dante Gabriel Rossettis The Gate o f Memory (1864) depict women on
36 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
the periphery and could be seen as vehicles to keep girls on the straight
and narrow. In both these paintings, the fallen woman is framed by a
doorway, representing her crossing of a moral threshold and departure
from respectable society. One treatment of this theme had a particularly
powerful impact at the time, telling the story of a married womans
transgression and the subsequent ruin of her middle-class family.
Augustus Leopold Eggs 1858 trilogy, Past and Present, begins by depict
ing a grave-faced man holding a letter, a love letter perhaps, intended
for his wife, who lies imploringly at his feet. In the background, their
daughters turn to see what the commotion is about; the house of cards
they are building is toppling, as their lives soon will be. The house stands
on a French novel, suggestive of the immoral foundations their world
is built upon, while a painting in the background depicts Adam and
Eves expulsion from the Garden of Eden, further emphasising a loss
of innocence. The Fall of Man, like the wifes fall, is due to eating the
forbidden fruit, though, in the biblical story, Eve is acknowledged as the
bigger sinner. References of this kind reinforce the idea that women are
inherently weak and prone to temptation.
 Thefallen womans recurrence in art shows that, while these women
were shunned and overlooked, society was fascinated by their cases
HE FOLLOWING TWO PAINTINGS show th e consequences of
T a woman rejecting the security and sanctity o f domestic life by
giving in to her own sexual desires. The second painting depicts
the two daughters, now grown up, in significantly diminished
lodgings from their once affluent middle-class family home. One daughter
gazes out o f the window into the night sky, while th e other weeps into
the elders lap. The suggestion is th a t th e m others sin has ruined the
prospects o f her daughters who carry this stain, preventing them taking
their proper place in society. In fact, in th e 1839 Custody o f Infants Act,
a woman convicted of adultery was prohibited from seeing her children
for fear o f th e immoral influence she m ight assert over them . The final
painting o f th e trilogy illustrates th e end o f th e story, as th e unfaithful H arriet Fuller wrote:
wife crouches beneath th e Aldephi arches by th e Thames - a h aunt for
beggars and outcasts - her illegitimate child in her arms. The presence of
the river in the background is symbolic; many fallen women comm itted
suicide by drowning them selves in the Thames.
There were mixed opinions about the suitability of the trilogy when
it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. Egg never managed to sell these
paintings in his lifetim e. Though such depictions challenged public
attitudes and notions o f propriety, th e fallen w om ans recurrence in
art and literature shows th at, while these women were shunned and
overlooked, society was fascinated by their cases.
The w om en w ho petitioned th e Foundling Hospital also had to
engage in a process o f storytelling, along w ith other rigours demanded
by the admissions procedure. This included a form, references to estab
lish a womans good character and an interview in which she would have
to discuss the personal details o f her relationship with the childs father,
referred to as a criminal conversation - though only one party ever
faced recrim inations for th e so-called crime. D eterm ining a womans
T h e second p a in tin g in A ugu stu s Leopold Egg's Past and Present trilo g y .
respectability was param ount and th e w om en who came to th e Found
ling Hospitals doors were judged from th e off: th e hospitals porter
made notes about their appearance and dress and w hether he thought
they were respectable. Many w om en were turned down because their
stories did no t hold w ater w hen investigated further, or because they
received negative character references.
Their stories make hard reading and, in many instances, describe
w hat is unambiguously rape. Sarah Farquhar, for example, was drugged
until she lost consciousness, though never suspected w hat had hap
pened to h er u n til she found h erself pregnant. Many o f th e stories
presen t young, naive w om en, misguided by m en. The em ployer o f
Harriet Fuller has lived with us as a servant between six and seven years,
during all which time her conduct has been correct and good, excepting
her having been drawn into the commission o f sin and disgrace by a man
who took advantage o f her credulity.
Fuller was n o t alone. Many o f th e p etitions speak o f betrayal at the
hands o f th e m en they trusted, o f promises o f marriage th a t tu rn to
abandonm ent w hen pregnancies are revealed. Annie Culver w rote that
th e father o f her child accepted th e paternity but had no intention of
supporting her: he told me to drown myself and th at he would help me
to do so. In literature many fallen women were lured by drowning: a
literal fall th a t carried the symbolic power of water to wash away sins.
The disgrace of having a child outside o f wedlock put unbearable
pressure on these women. Sarah Farquhar wrote that: My first thought
was o f self-destruction and this I attem pted twice but was miraculously
prevented. The stigm a o f being a fallen w om an m eant th a t many of
th em refrained from telling anyone o f th eir situation, some seeking
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 37
VICTORIANS

T h e th ir d p a in tin g
in Egg's Past and
Present trilo g y .

confinement for the duration of their pregnancy with the hope that they
would be able to resume their lives as before, providing the Foundling
Hospital admitted their child. Were it not for the admission process,
which demanded women disclose their stories, it is likely that such
tales would never have been told. Sexual transgression was not a topic to
discuss openly and the shame would have been so extreme that silence
and secrecy were the preferable outcome for everyone involved.
W hether the stories tell the tru th of the matter is impossible to
know, though the petitioners were undoubtedly aware of the Hospital
criterion and of social expectations regarding womens roles. What the
stories omit is female sexual desire. The idea of women possessing a
sexual appetite ran contrary to the dominant ideology, which presented
man as active and woman as passive. The petitions that were successful
spoke of sexual intercourse occurring just once ora few times under the
assumption that they would soon be married. Women who confessed
to living with the father of their child for a period of time, such as Jane
McNamara, had their petition rejected. Women had to be seen as victims
of male lust, if they were to hope to climb back into respectable society.
HE FALLENWOMAN was a particularly 19th-century concept,
for divorce,fo r custody o f their children. Reactionaries at home and
abroad saw this small rebellion loom large and wanted women back in
theirplace.
The idea that gender roles needed to be re-established and reinforced
to counter a potential feminist threat accounts for the proliferation
of literature and art on the subject. But Nead suggests that the fallen
woman fits into another, more distant story altogether. Among other
things, mutinies in India in 1857 threatened notions of empire. Impe
rialism was justified because it was believed England was a superior,
Christian nation. But looking inward, debates arose about the laxity of
moral values at home. Changes needed to be made and these had to start
at a domestic level. The mothers of a great nation like England had to
be respectable, chaste and above reproach. Women who deviated from
this archetype threatened the foundations of British society.
The sad fact is that the mothers of this story never got to be mothers
at all. The only socially acceptable outcome for an unmarried pregnant
woman was to give up her child. With regards to the Foundling Hospital,
relatively few children were ever reclaimed by their mothers. This is the
real story of the fallen woman and of the children they gave up so that

T asserts the historian Margaret Reynolds. Women have departed

from respectable norms in other periods but were never perse
cuted quite so severely as in the Victorian age. So why did the

why were they treated so harshly? Nead suggests that paintings such
as Eggs Past and Present, which responds to the Matrimonial Causes
both child and mother could have the hope of a future.

V ictoria Leslie is a PhD student in English and Creative W riting at the University o f
fallen woman occupy such a central position in Victorian culture and
Chichester. Her novel Bodies o f Water, which explores the plight o f the fallen woman, was
published by Salt Publishing in 2016.

legislation of 1857 - allowing men to divorce their wives for infidelity

alone, while a husbands adultery had to be coupled with another mis FURTHER READING
demeanour - were part of a moral panic during which sexual and moral
Fallen W om en exhibitio n guide: h ttp ://fo u n d lin g m u se u m .o rg .u k/w p -
behaviour were perceived as the touchstones of social order. What was
co n ten t/u p lo a d s/2 0 1 3 /io /T h e -F a lle n -W om a n -e xh ib itio n -gu id e .p d f
this moral panic all about? Reynolds considers that:
Lynda Nead, Myths o f Sexuality: Representations o f W om en in V icto rian
It was partly a punitive response to proto-feminist claims of the late B ritain (Basil Blackwell, 1990).
18 th and early 19th centuries. Outspoken critics like Mary WoUstonecraft
Jeremy Paxman, The V ictorians: B rita in Through th e Paintings o f th e Age
in England and Germaine de Stael in France had written about the
(BBC Books, 2009).
needfo r womens education and independence,fo r employment rights,

3 8 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y JANUARY 2017
Copyright of History Today is the property of History Today Ltd. and its content may not be
copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for
individual use.
 AFGHANISTAN

In the post-Taliban era, Afghanistan SIR FRANCIS HUMPHREYS and two senior col

is seeking unifying national heroes

from its past. But, as David Loyn
explains, agreement on who should
be celebrated is hard to reach.
S leagues shot a snipe and a woodcock in a copse not
far from the British Legation in Kabul they called
Woodcock Wood. It was a poor bag, not helped
by the weather. The entry in the legation game book for
November 29th, 1928 recorded the first fall of snow this
season. It would be the last entry in the book until 1930.
Days later, 16,000 Afghan warriors descended on Kabul,
opposed to the reform programme of King Amanullah.
Humphreys spent the winter negotiating aid drops by the

Poster RAF and 80 evacuation flights out, including the depar

ture of Amanullah on January 14th, 1929. According to
the Pioneer newspaper, the king refused to leave his palace
without a British escort. Nothing would induce him to

Boys o f
come out unless the safety of himself and his ladies was
taken in hand by Englishmen, reported one observer. The
journey out was perilous. With the planes fully loaded, they
could not fly over the frontier mountains, but were forced
to navigate below the peaks through the IChyber Pass.

Afghan
Amanullah made an abortive attempt to reclaim power in
Kandahar, the countrys second city, later in the year, but
his years of reform were over. He had pushed too hard to
modernise his country.
Disputes over the history of this period are alive today.

History
On September 1st, 2016 Kabul saw the first gun battle
between rival militias since the Taliban took the city in
September 1996. They were fighting over the reburial of
Habibullah Kalakani, the Tajik warrior who ousted

jjjc 0

P o r t r a i t o f t h e a s s a s s in a te d

M u ja h id in le a d e r A h m a d
S h a h M a s s o u d , C h a r ik a r ,

A fg h a n is ta n .

JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 39

AFGHANISTAN

Amanullah, who had lain in an unmarked grave since his

death less than a year after he took power in November
1929. What made the incident even more remarkable was
that some of the gunmen were part of an unofficial private
army kept by the countrys vice president, Abdul Rashid
Dostam. Given Dostams power, the police were powerless
to intervene.
The standard western view of ICalakani was that he was
a bandit who seized power, ousting the reformist Aman
ullah and looting Afghanistans treasury, before being
gunned down by rival warlords. He is widely known by the
contemptuous nickname, Bacha-i-Saqao - son of a water
carrier - a reminder of his lack of noble birth. But his cult
has been growing in recent years, as the northern Tajiks, his
tribe, search for heroes from their past. His image is seen
increasingly on the streets, or stuck on the windscreen of
vehicles, jostling with the faces of other leaders, in a power
battle that pits different interpretations of Afghanistans
past against each other to determine its future. A stall in the
main bazaar in the centre of Kabul does a brisk trade selling
posters and flags showing the faces of revered past leaders.
This contest over history has filled a vacuum created by
the lack of political parties. Since the reform movements
of the 1970s, attempts by democrats to create functioning
parties have always been resisted or ignored by those in
power. The refusal of Daoud Khan to allow the emergence
of a constitutional opposition after he took over in a palace
coup in 1973 removed the pressure valve of informed
debate and led to a hardening of views against him, ending
in his violent overthrow in 1978. A year later Soviet troops
invaded the country. Similarly, after the fall of the Taliban
in 2001, President Hamid Karzai had little desire to see
political parties emerging, governing as an old-fashioned
tribal chief through patronage and mutual responsibility.
His successor, Ashraf Ghani, prefers to rule as a techno
crat and, even without organised political opposition, has
enough trouble negotiating with the chief executive
Abdullah Abdullah, his rival for president, locked as they are
in the power-sharing deal that broke the deadlock over the A shop in Kabul curricula have been problematic in a number of countries,
disputed 2014 election. w ith p o rtra its
such as Bosnia and Macedonia, while school textbooks in
o f M assoud and
D aoud Khan, 2016.
Pakistan tend to ignore the countrys shared history with
HERE IS LITTLE APPETITE in the Afghan parlia India. In Afghanistan, the study of modern history and

T ment for issue-based political groupings. Members

of the lower house, the Wolesi Jirga, should have
faced an election in 2015, but with no agreement
over electoral reform they remain in their seats. In the
interim, many use their position to block appointments
made by the president. This out-of-touch elite act in a way
that would have been familiar to the British official who
wrote of the 1929 revolution:
The sordid commerciality o f the sycophants and officials, the
general treachery o f all classes, the unscrupulous scheming fo r
power and wealth, portray an Afghanistan despicable and
unstable despite the veneer o f civilisation imposed on it by
Amanullah.
Western-imposed democracy is a pale mockery of the real
thing: in a reverse of the demand that there be no taxation
without representation, Afghanistan has representation
without taxation, where elected officials depend mainly on
western aid, rather than their electors.
Education has done little to combat this failure to
address the nations disputes over its past. Post-conflict
4 0 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y JANUARY 2017
international affairs stops in the 1970s. Students in human
ities in the countrys most highly regarded state-funded
institution, Kabul University, complain of being taught by
rote by teachers with little appetite for debate. The decline
in education began with the flight of 90 per cent of Afghan
istans professors in the months after the 1978 revolution;
it has never recovered. When I last visited a US-funded
Afghanistan studies centre at the university, based around
the magnificent collection of newspapers, pamphlets and
pictures given by the late American scholar of Afghan
history Louis Dupree and his widow Nancy Hatch Dupree,
there were no PhD students using the archive.
So what are the competing versions of history that
fill this political void? Many of the leaders who are most
revered are the Mujahidin warriors who fought the Soviet
invaders in the 1980s. The best known of these, and the
most frequently displayed, is the Tajik commander, Ahmed
Shah Massoud, the lion of Panjshir. He was killed two days
before 9/11 by a bomb concealed in the camera of an Arab
TV crew, which turned out to be al- Qaeda. Massoud was an
Islamic fundamentalist, beginning to agitate for a harder
 AFGHANISTAN
From independence to the present day
August
1919
Following
the end of
the Third
Anglo-Afghan
War, Britain
signs a treaty
recognising
Afghan independence.
Amanullah Khan becomes king
of Afghanistan.
February 1921
Amanullah signs a treaty of
friendship with Soviet Russia
and pursues a programme of
modernisation backed by Soviet
technology and money.
January
1929
Habibullah
Kalakani, an
ethnic Tajik,
launches a
revolt and
deposes
Amanullah.
Kalakani becomes ruler.
October 1929
Mohammed Nadir Shah,
Many of the leaders who Amanullah's former minister of
war, recaptures Kabul. Kalakani
are most revered are the is hanged on Novemberist.
Nadir becomes king, reversing
Mujahidin warriors who many of Amanullah's reforms.
fought the Soviet invaders November 1933
in the 1980s Nadir Shah is assassinated. His
son, Mohammed Zahir Khan
becomes king and reigns for four
line in the early 1970s, 20 years before the Taliban came on decades.
the scene. The French anthropologist, Olivier Roy, wrote
in 1985 of the way that Islam filled a gap left as state and 1934
other institutions collapsed: The resistance movement has Afghanistan joins League of
brought with it a strengthening of Islams role in shaping Nations.
the social order. Sharia made sense of chaos, but Afghan
society was coarsened by this process. In the refugee camps 1947
in Pakistan, where more than two million Afghans fled Creation of Pakistan.
during the fighting in the 1980s, membership of one of
the seven Mujahidin groups was an essential condition for October 1964
receiving a ration card: violent Islamic resistance became a The Afghanistan Constitution is
way of life and its martyrs are held in high esteem. put into effect, creating a new
Massoud is everywhere, with one of the capitals main parliament with ability to pass
intersections outside the US embassy named after him. legislation contrary to sharia law.
Mujahidin Day, April 28th, is a day of celebration for his
January 1965
The socialist People's Democratic
Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) is
founded.
July 1973
Former prime minister Sardar
Daoud Khan stages a bloodless
coup. Zahir, the last Musahiban
king, abdicates. Daoud abolishes
the monarchy and declares a
republic with himself as its first
president. Daoud attempts to
diminish Soviet influence on
Afghanistan.
April 1978
The PDPA seizes power in
the Saur Revolution. Daoud is
murdered. The PDPA establishes
the Democratic Republic
of Afghanistan with Nur
Muhammad Taraki as general
secretary.
September 1979
Hafizullah Amin replaces
Taraki, who is executed. Amin
is unpopular and opposition to
the communist regime grows.
Relations with Soviet Union
deteriorate.
December 1979
Soviet forces invade and
capture Hafizullah Amin during
Operation Storm-333. Babrak
Karmal is installed as general
secretary. The Soviet-Afghan
War between the Mujahidin
and the Soviet and Afghan army
begins.
1981/5
Seven Mujahidin groups emerge,
supported by the US, Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia.
1985
An estimated 50 per cent of the
Afghan population is displaced
by the war.
JANUARY 2017 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y 41
A F G H A N IS T A N
1986
The US supplies the Mujahidin
w ith Stinger missiles.
Septem ber 1987
Soviet-approved Mohammad
Najibullah Ahmadzai, former
head o f the brutal Afghan state
intelligence agency KHAD,
becomes president.
1988
Al-Qaeda, a m ilitant Sunni Islamist
organisation, founded.
April 1988
Geneva Accords signed between
Afghanistan and Pakistan
w ith Soviet Union and US as
guarantors. Soviet troops to be
w ithdraw n from Afghanistan by
February 1989.
1989
Soviet w ithdrawal from
Afghanistan. Afghan Civil War
breaks out between the PDPA
governm ent and the Mujahidin.
Decem ber 1991
Dissolution o f the Soviet Union.
Russian aid to Afghanistan stops
soon after.
1vi
April 1992
Fall o f the Moscow-backed
government in Kabul, after general
Abdul Rashid Dostam defects to
the Mujahidin, whose groupings
fig h t among themselves, reducing
the capital city to rubble.
1994
The Taliban form in Kandahar,
mainly by fighters disillusioned by
fighting among other Mujahidin
groups. They draw support from
Pakistan.
1996
Having taken control o f 90 per
cent o f the country, the Taliban
establish the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan. Leaders from the
Islamic State o f Afghanistan,
including Massoud, control the
42 HISTORYTODAY JANUARY 2017
north-east o f the country as the
Northern Alliance.
1997
Taliban recognised as legitimate
rulers o f Afghanistan by Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan and the UAE.
1998
Al-Qaeda is suspected o f bombing
tw o US embassies in East Africa.
The US launches missile strikes
against suspected Afghan bases of
Osama Bin Laden.
Septem ber 2001
Massoud, leader o f the main
opposition to the Taliban, is killed.
The 9/11 attacks in the US kill
thousands. Osama bin Laden, the
prime suspect, is known to be
hiding in Afghanistan.
O ctober 2001
US and British airstrikes launched
against Afghanistan.
N ovem ber 2001
The Northern Alliance enters
Kabul, pushing Taliban south.
Decem ber 2001
Taliban surrenders its last territory,
the province o f Zabul.
August 200 3
NATO takes control of
Afghanistans multinational
peacekeeping force, its first
com m itm ent outside Europe in its
54-year history.
D ecem ber 2 0 0 4
Hamid Karzai, interim head of
state, is elected president w ith 55
per cent o f vote.
Septem ber 2014
Ashraf Ghani becomes president.
D ecem ber 2014
NATO ends 13-year combat
mission in Afghanistan.
supporters. With the streets empty for a national holiday,
young men race around Kabul, weapons bristling from the
windows of Toyota Corollas, waving Massoud flags. Opposi
tion to this festival is seen as unpatriotic. Communists and
minorities, particularly Hazaras, keep their mouths closed
and stay indoors.
Other former Mujahidin leaders have their followers,
too, among them Abdul Rassul Sayyaf, who stood for
president in 2014, and Ishmael Khan, with his power base
in the west of the country, who was Sayyafs vice-presi
dential running mate. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun
thug whose speciality as a student leader in the 1970s
was throwing acid in the face of women with their heads
uncovered, recently negotiated a deal with the government
to come in from the cold, after opposing the US engage
ment until this year. His followers, too, display his picture.
General Dostam, the current vice president, whose follow
ers attempted to stop the reburial of Kalakani, is widely
displayed. Hazaras also show their heroes. This community
is increasingly wealthy and assisted in social progress by al
lowing women to work - almost all the female cadets at the
British-funded officer training academy are Hazaras. Both
Ghani and Abdullah have Hazara deputies and images of
war leaders such as Karim Khalili are displayed prominently
in Hazara areas.
HE DIFFERENCES dividing these former allies
T against the Soviet invasion are not over political
policy, but patronage. Government jobs, even
university lectureships, are handed out through
a careful balance of opposing tribal and jihadi interests,
in an effort to keep the state from blowing apart. Dostam
is powerful in the north and demands roles for his Uzbek
followers. Hekmatyar has solid support among the Ghilzai
Pashtuns, the sub-group of Afghanistans largest tribe, who
are strong in the east and straddle the frontier with Paki
stan. He has burnished his Mujahidin credentials by contin
uing to fight until now. Sayyaf has a following in Paghman
west of Kabul, with support across Pashtun lands, his
assumed name meaning one who is good with a sword. He
had contacts with extremist Arab fighters and is believed to
have facilitated Osama bin Ladens return to Afghanistan
in 1996, into an area then not yet underTaliban control.
He has also been named by human rights investigators for
several assaults on civilians, including the worst incident
of the civil war in Kabul in the early 1990s, a massacre of
Hazaras in the Afshar suburb of Kabul in 1993.
The head of the civil service, Nader Nadery, currently
attempting to reform the administration and open up re
cruitment, once ran the well-funded Afghanistan Independ
ent Human Rights Commission, which exposed violent
acts by former warlords, including the Afshar massacre. But
the men whose images are carried so proudly in the streets
of the capital won immunity from prosecution in the early
years of the Karzai government and have since succeeded
in entrenching their influence in a country whose modern
institutions are too frail to resist their power.
This is not the only version of recent Afghan history.
Support for Najibullah, longest-serving of the Soviet-backed
leaders in the 1980s, was once kept quiet. Shopkeepers
might keep a discreet picture of him in the back room,
which is now openly displayed. He is remembered as a com
petent, tough administrator, the sort of person Europeans
Massoud at prayer,
an image reproduced
on a carpet for sale in
Kabul's market, 2016.
might say made the trains run on
Divided Country time - if there were trains in Afghan
Afghanistans ethnic complexity istan. He stabilised Afghanistan after
is evident from the countrys taking office in 1985 and succeeded in
national anthem, which holding the country against the Mu
mentions 14 different groups. jahidin even after Soviet forces w ith
The lyrics, however, are in drew in 1989, losing power only in
Pashto, the language spoken by 1992 when Russia stopped giving him
the countrys largest group, the financial support after the collapse of
Pashtun, roughly 40 per cent the Soviet Union. He had little diffi
of the population. The Pashtun culty in recruiting volunteer militias
have traditionally controlled to defend Kabul, including womens
Afghanistan and borne the brunt brigades, opposed to the arrival of
o f foreign invasion. As such, Islamic fundamentalists from the
the Taliban is largely a Pashtun mountains. Attacks on womens rights
movement. They are also the did not begin with the arrival of the
second largest ethnic group in Taliban, but when the Mujahidin took
Pakistan, forging strong ties over after ousting Najibullah in 1992.
between the two countries. Open support for Najibullah in the
The Persian-speaking Tajik 21st century is not just the post-Talib
and Hazara are the second and an confidence of people in a more free
third largest Afghan groups, society; it is a reaction to the domi
respectively. The Hazara differ nance of the old warlords and support
from most other Afghans in for the aspiration that Afghanistan
practising Shia rather than might be better governed.
Sunni Islam. They have faced The appearance o fBacha Saqao,
discrimination for centuries. Habibullah Kalakani, onto this
crowded stage of historical figures
jostling for attention, has taken some
by surprise. It denotes increased frustration by the Shura-
i-nazar, the northern alliance, a mainly Tajik grouping
once led by Massoud. Its present leader is another former
Mujahidin warlord, Mohammed Atta, who governs Balkh
province, the wealthy northern gateway to central Asia.
He is openly hostile to President Ghani, but too powerful
to dismiss. The Shura-i-nazar are using Kalakani as a new
totem to combat the received wisdom that Afghanistan
cannot be led by anyone but a Pashtun. Kalakani was put
into an unmarked grave when his revolution was swept
aside less than a year after he took office by an army led by
the former commander of Amanullahs forces, Nadir Shah,
who then became king in turn - a Tajik stabbed in the back
by a Pashtun according to the Shura-i-nazar view of history.
The decision to move his grave was prompted by the
discovery in 2008 of Daoud Khans remains in a mass grave
with other family members who were killed with him in
the Saur Revolution in 1978. He was positively identified
and reburied with full national honours on a discreet hill
side in a military training area to the west of Kabul. If the
nation would honour the disgraced Daoud in this way, went
Tajik rhetoric, then they should look after their own.
The other person whose face is often displayed - and
more acceptable officially than the ad hoc windscreen
snapshots of the Mujahidin - is Amanullah, the reformist
king ousted by Kalakani. He can be seen on the walls of
police stations and army bases, dressed in grand robes, and
wearing an Afghan astrakhan hat, more revered now than
when he was alive, a reminder of a period of reform in a
country where stable progress remains elusive.
David Loyn is Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Departm ent o f W ar Studies
at King's College, London. He was BBC Afghanistan correspondent until 2015.
FURTHER READING
David Loyn, B u tche r and Bolt: Two H undred Years o f Foreign
E ngagem ent in A fgha nistan (Windmill, 2009),
Thomas Barfield, A fgha nistan: a C u ltura l and P o litica l H is to ry
(Princeton, 2012).
Angelo Rasanayagam, A fgha nistan: a M od e m H isto ry
(I.B. Tauris, 2005).
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 43
 CULLODEN

The Battle of Culloden, which vanquished for good Jacobite claims to the British
throne, is a much mythologised and misunderstood event. Murray Pittock cuts
through the fog of war to find out what really happened in April 1746.

OR TWO CENTURIES, British historiography poorly armed primitives sacrificing themselves with point

F has defined Jacobitism as primitive: first, it was

demeaned because of the very real threat it posed
to the Hanoverian state; second, because of the
role played by the Jacobite defeat in the creation myth of
the British Empire. It is no coincidence that this approach
began to founder in the 1970s, as the former imperial
state, which grew to maturity in part as a consequence of
the defeat of the Jacobites, took on a more fragmentary,
modern and multicultural existence. Yet the popular image
of the Jacobites, not least at the Battle of Culloden, fought
on April 16th, 1746, remains. Though the Jacobite armies
were well armed and decently led by officers familiar with
the courts of Europe, both British Whig history and Scot
tish patriot nostalgia relies on an image of them as dirty,
less nobility on the orders of an Italian princeling, Bonnie
Prince Charlie. That they are not remembered entirely with
contempt is due to the fact that all agree that they were
defending an ancient way of life.
Arguably no battle beyond living memory is remem
bered so powerfully and so falsely. On Culloden Moor, what
was in some ways the last Scottish army, with its Franco-
Irish and Scoto-French allies, sought to restore Charles Ed
wards father, James (known to his supporters as James III
and VIII), to a multi-kingdom monarchy more aligned with
European politics than colonial struggle. They were in many
ways more of a regular army than many have given them
credit for. Outnumbered but not outgunned, it was the
Hanoverian cavalry that proved their downfall. Archival

Blades not A f t e r t h e b a ttle :

bullets
Culloden M o o r
Looking Across the
M o ra y Firth, 1746,
e n g ra v in g b y H.
G riffith s , 0.1830.

JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 45

CULLODEN
research and recent battlefield archaeology of Culloden
demonstrate that it was not British artillery that brought
down kilted swordsmen as much as dragoon blades that cut
down Jacobite musketeers. The effect of flanking cavalry on
an over-extended infantry formation with little effective
reserve had been a constant in warfare for centuries and it is
the key to understanding what happened at Culloden. The
battle as it happened is much more interesting than as it is
remembered.
ISTORIANS HAVE LONG argued that the eventual
H field of battle was ill-chosen; that it gave the Duke
of Cumberland, commander of the British forces,
considerable advantages, especially for his artillery
and cavalry. This interpretation originates in a dispute
between the advocates of Lord George Murray, Charles
Edwards lieutenant-general, and those of John Sullivan,
a respected French regular, who was quartermaster and
adjutant general for the Jacobite army.
The first site, scouted by staff officers in retreat from the
Jacobite campaign south of the border, was near Dalcross
Castle, five kilometres east of the final battlefield. From
here, the Jacobites sought to defend the main road into
Inverness, which was Sullivans aim. But, two days before
the actual battle, Sullivan advised against it. It is easy to
see why he was wise to make that decision: the distance
between the two armies would leave them within effective
musket range of each other and it has been estimated that
the superior, highly disciplined firepower of the British
army could have killed or wounded as many as 300 Jacobites
a minute. Contesting a fire fight or adopting a defensive
position were not traditional Jacobite strengths, which de
pended more on the Highland Charge and mobile, individu
al sharpshooters picking off individual troops.
On the 15th, Murray sent his own party to examine
a site further west, near Daviot Castle, on the southern
bank of the River Nairn, two kilometres south-west of the
final battlefield. It was an odd choice for a general who had
complained that Jacobite food supplies in Inverness were
The Jacobite cavalry was woefully
deficient in regard to the numbers set
against the British
not being effectively distributed to his troops, as it was
some distance from the Inverness road and so could not
defend Jacobite access to the city. Murray was criticised for
his choice, that it looked like shunning the Enemy... at a
greater Distance from Inverness ... a great deal of Ammuni
tion and Baggage being left there. That judgment, ignored
by Murrays advocates, was surely correct. Instead, Sullivan
suggested a site one kilometre east of the final battlefield,
which covered the road into Inverness.
Of the three battle sites, Sullivans final choice was the
best. Its only disadvantage was that it was visible to the
Royal Navy in the Moray Firth and, given the high levels
of spring light in Scotland by mid-April, the movement of
the Jacobite army might have alerted government troops
at Nairn before the Jacobites were in position to attack.
However, due to the disorganisation of the Jacobite army
46 HISTORYTODAY JANUARY 2017
and the tendency of units returning from the night attack
to congregate a kilometre behind the lines near the Jacobite
headquarters at Culloden House, it was not the site on
which they finally deployed.
The next day, the 16th, the Jacobite army formed up
on a mildly convex site, where the left and right wings
were both mutually invisible. Rainfall levels and drainage
mean that such a site tends to drain to boggy ground at the
extremes of left and right, which would impede the speed
of the Highland Charge, so crucial to Jacobite strategy, and
the ability to attack the enemy flank. In addition, it is likely
that, to the extent that the farmland was well drained,
the land adjacent to it would be correspondingly wetter.
Sullivans view that the enclosures at Culloden House
and nearby Culwhiniac would provide protection from a
flanking attack was not ridiculous: he was probably think
ing of the French practice of deploying a mobile reserve
to reinforce the flanks. There were some signs of this at
Culloden, but there were too few in the Jacobite second line
to carry this out effectively. The Jacobite cavalry, though
its screen (a move used to obscure what lies behind it) on
the right held well into the battle, was woefully deficient
in numbers. The National Trust for Scotland battlefield site
covers a smaller footprint than it did for the combatants,
which has had the effect, as the archaeologist Tony Pollard
has observed, of reinforcing interpretations that marginal
ise or ignore the central role played by cavalry action.
HE INITIAL ARTILLERY exchange (the Jacobites
T possessed 85 pieces of artillery at its peak) lasted
for about nine minutes, maybe a little longer.
Some 30 to 90 rounds were fired from the British
armys cannon. When the 4th Regiment of Foot was
broken by the Jacobite advance, the breach was narrow and,
forming 20 or 30 deep to push through, the Jacobite infan
try could not bring fire to bear over a wide enough front.
In a three-minute struggle, five or six volleys from three
British infantry regiments sent a huge volume of ball into
both the remnants of the 4th and the Jacobite front, halting
the charge. The Jacobites returned fire: multiple ball holes
were reported in the clothing of at least one British officer.
As recent archaeology has demonstrated, the Jacobites fired
more ball per man than the British: isolated fire fights on
the flanks, forming into squares to screen the retreat and
the volleying of relatively intact units such as Lord Ogilvys
infantry regiment all played their part. But retreating Jaco
bite battalions, disorganised by soggy ground, poor visibility,
canister and musketry, were swept aside by a dragoon pincer
movement when their cavalry screen on the right gave way.
Culloden was always going to be a difficult battle for
the Jacobites to win, but the improvised nature of the final
site, the lack of any reserve and sufficient cavalry to build
on the protection offered by the obstacles on their flanks,
as well as the strength of the British cavalry and their use
late in the battle (not too early, as at previous encounters
at Prestonpans and Falkirk) made all the difference. In
remembering the Battle of Culloden correctly, we should
realise that the British armys most effective weapons
that day in 1746 were the cavalrys blades rather than the
infantrys bullets.
Murray Pittock is Bradley Professor at the University o f Glasgow and the
author o f Culloden: Great Battles (Oxford University Press, 2016).
 BRITAIN

HE REPRESENTATION of the People Act of 1918

T gave the parliamentary franchise to women - or at

least those women over 30 years of age who were
either occupiers of property with an annual rent
of 5 or over, or were householders, wives of householders
or graduates of British universities. This partial franchise
had been won by the suffrage movement after 70 years of
campaigning, but it would be another ten years before the
Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act of 1928
was passed, which enabled all women, like all men since
1918, to vote at age 21.
The winning of the parliamentary franchise energised
the activities of First World War womens organisations
and saw new associations proliferate across Britain. Local
Women CitizensAssociations (WCAs) began to spring up
across the country, reaching a peak between 1918 and 1930,
although there was a revival of womens activism following
the end of the Second World War. The earliest branches
were established in Liverpool and Manchester in 1913; the
Dundee branch held regular meetings until 2002.

After
The purpose of WCAs was to unite women as citizens
with a vote and to encourage and give voice to those who
had not previously been active in the politics of their local
communities. The Manchester and Salford branches, in
particular, had some noteworthy success in recruiting such

the
women to their ranks during the interwar decades, though

The winning of the

parliamentaryfranchise

Vote energised the activities of

First World War womens
organisations

was the leaders and organisers in cities such as Cambridge,

Cardiff and Edinburgh were often experienced in campaign
ing, having been active in the earlier suffrage movement.
Among their numbers were both those who had sought to

Won
Winning the vote for women
brought new energy to campaigns
for social and political equality.
Joanne Smith looks at the
remarkable flowering of womens
associations in Britain during the
20th century.
S u ffra g e tte s in prison u n ifo rm head to a
d e m o n s tra tio n in C helm sford, Essex d uring
a p a rlia m e n ta ry b y -e le c tio n in 1908.
obtain the vote by peaceful means and suffragettes who had
engaged in militant campaigns.
There is a debate among historians about what differ
ence the vote made to the development of such organi
sations. It used to be thought that, after the gain of the
partial and equal franchises of 1918 and 1928, a period of
stagnation and decline set in. Yet more recent accounts by
scholars, which examine the everyday activities and
campaigns undertaken by an array of womens organisa
tions, offer new perspectives. They argue that we need to
consider the activities of the movement more widely and
reflect on how activists saw their own roles. The WCAs
were engaged in a diverse array of activities and were effec
tive in bringing about improvements locally, as well as on
national and international matters. The womens move
ment did not, as was once thought, decline after the vote
for women was won.
The National Women Citizens Association (NWCA)
had been formed in 1917, just as women were on the verge
of winning the parliamentary franchise, and it sought
JANUARY 2017 HISTORYTODAY 47
BRITAIN

A membership
card for the
Womens Social
and Political
Union, 1908.

48 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017

to educate women so they could make the most of their
position as enfranchised citizens. It was organised by the
president of the National Union of Women Workers, May
Ogilvie Gordon, a distinguished palaeontologist who had
been the first woman to be awarded a science doctorate by
the University of London. Under her leadership, individuals
from womens societies were recruited and the proposed
name of the London-based
NWCA was adopted, with Helena
Normanton - who in 1922 became
the first female barrister to prac
tise in England - as its first sec
retary. The NWCA operated until
1974 and remained a fluid entity
throughout its existence: in 1947
it amalgamated with the National
Council for Equal Citizenship and
then, in 1949, with Women for
Westminster. Consequently, with
the increase in the size of the
national body, local WCA branch
es were organised into regional
federations. Not all WCA branch
es were the same. Though most
remained affiliated to the parent
organisation, some, including
those in Manchester and Edin
Women sought to use their status as citizens with
burgh, remained autonomous as the power of the vote to bring about improvements
some issues or campaigns, such
as those for equal pay or for a to the lives o f women
clean and cheap milk supply, were
best served independently from the central association.
Scotland, where legislation was often significantly different
from that of England and Wales, had its own needs, reflect
ing its singular political and legal culture.
Eleanor Rathbone, founder of the Women Citizens
Association in Liverpool and a prolific activist in the
citys political environment before the First World War,
epitomised this remarkable generation of campaigners.
The ubiquitous Rathbone united the citys philanthropic
and charitable organisations under the umbrella of the
Liverpool Council of Voluntary Aid in 1909, which sought
to enhance the provision of welfare services for women and
children throughout Merseyside.
Rathbone was also a key figure in the constitutional suf
Eleanor R athbone, frage movement. In 1896 she had served on the executive
c.1910. committee of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Soci
eties, playing an influential role for more than two decades.
When women became eligible to stand for election to local
city councils, Rathbone was one of the first women in Liver
pool to mount a campaign and was successfully elected in
1909. She served on the council until 1935.
After the partial franchise had been won in 1918, suf
frage organisations reformulated and reinvigorated their
campaigns. Rathbone became the president of the National
Union for Societies of Equal Citizenship, campaigning
for the vote on equal terms with men, which was finally
achieved in 1928. A variety of other issues were pursued
with notable success, including divorce law reform, widows
pensions and the equal guardianship of children.
Throughout the First World War, Rathbone had recog
nised the importance of the payment o fseparation allow
ances, the portion of a soldiers pay which was matched by
the government to ensure that the combatants dependants
were not left destitute, alleviating womens dependency on
mens pay. This led directly to the development of a peace
time model, which advocated the payment of an allowance
directly to the mother of children. Rathbone pursued this
vigorously when she was elected in 1919 as MP for the Com
bined English Universities, a position she held until her
death in 1946. Throughout the interwar years and during
the Second World War, Rathbone wrote a variety of public
ations advocating family allowances. She joined the Family
Endowment Society to promote the cause and, along with
help from prominent individuals such as the social reformer
William Beveridge and with support from like-minded MPs,
her campaign culminated in the passing of the Family
Allowance Act of 1945, the first time that British law ar
ranged for child benefit to be paid directly to the mother.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 49
BRITAIN

Throughout her life, Rathbone was also engaged in a

range of international causes and sought to improve the
social, economic and political position of women in colonial
countries. She campaigned against child marriages in India,
argued against the appeasement of Nazi Germany and
objected to the rise of the Franco regime in Spain. As a con
sequence, she became an expert on the plight of European
refugees. Rathbone pursued a number of different causes
throughout her life and was engaged in attempts to improve
the lives of German citizens at the end of the Second World
War when she died suddenly on January 2nd, 1946 at her
home in Middlesex aged 74.

OR MANY OTHER WOMEN their participation in

F organisations that pre-dated the WCA was a major

influence on developments postwar. Mabel Howell,
for example, who joined the CardiffWCA in 1921 as
its honorary secretary, had held the same post in the local
branch of the Cardiff and District Womens Suffrage Society
and had worked at the University Settlement of Wales,
Badge o f th e N a tio n a l U nion o f W o m e n 's S uffrage Societies,
formed in 1900 to encourage Cardiffs undergraduates to 0 9 0 8 .
work with the citys poorer citizens in providing useful
social and educational work. Similarly, Elizabeth Needham
joined the Manchester Women CitizensAssociation in
1915, becoming the organisations chair in 1921, and had
been active in the Manchester branch of the Ladies Public
Health Society, the Society for Womens Suffrage and the
Manchester Womens Liberal Council. In Scotland, the
Edinburgh WCA had prominent women, such as Sarah
Elizabeth Siddons Mair, who had been a leading figure in
the Scottish womens movement as president of the Ladies
Edinburgh Debating Society. She was also the founder of
the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of
Women and, from 1907, president of the Edinburgh Nation
al Society for Womens Suffrage.
From the mid-i9th century, women had participated in
creasingly in public life: by visiting and nursing the sick and
elderly, serving on school boards and as poor law guardians.
From 1907, following the Qualification of Women (County

Beginning in 1922 the ,

Manchester WCA mounted a
sustained six-year campaign
to challenge the bar on
married women teachers
and Borough Councils) Act, they could also be elected as
town councillors. It was not surprising that women sought
to intervene in the politics of their communities, as munici
pal authorities wielded significant power over the develop
ment of social policy, particularly in the inter war years.
Local Education Authorities throughout England and
Wales had demanded the resignation of women teachers
when they married, although this policy was relaxed to a
certain extent during the First World War, largely due to the
shortage of male teachers following military conscription
in 1916. It was rigorously applied again, however, during the
interwar period. Beginning in 1922, the Manchester WCA
mounted a six-year campaign to challenge the marriage
SO HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
 bar. It worked with similar organisations, such as the local
branch of the National Council of Women and the Equal
Citizenship Group, and garnered support from the Liberal
supporting Manchester Guardian. Pivotal to their success,
however, was a shift in the political composition of the
citys council when, in 1928, Liberal and Labour city coun
cillors worked together to defeat Conservative opposition
and rescinded the marriage bar against women teachers.
Women saw their exclusion from the workplace as a
contravention of their citizenship rights. Campaigns to
rescind the barrier were fought across Britain by many
like-minded organisations but patriarchal attitudes and a
backlash against the advances women had made during the
First World War made it difficult to achieve. It was not until
the introduction of the Education Act of r944 that this
policy was rescinded nationally.
In South Wales, the Cardiff WCA sought to improve
road safety and lobbied Cardiff Members of Parliament
to support the passing of the Road Traffic Bill in 1934.
A d e m o n s tra tio n by m e m b e rs o f th e W o m en 's S uffrage Societies, 1908.
Working in collaboration with the Pedestrians Association,
they sent repeated deputations to the local city councils
watch and public works committees throughout the 1920s
and 1930s, ultimately securing the provision of some road
traffic islands and traffic calming measures. International
issues were also a concern. In Cardiff there were close ties
to the peace movement following the outbreak of the First
World War and a representative from the Womens Interna
tional League for Peace and Freedom reported her experi
ences of the Peace Pilgrimage to the local branch.

KEY POLICY and aim of most WCAs was to

A increase the representation of women in political

office, although it was difficult for women to
be elected to town, city and borough councils,
since these were viewed by political parties as dry runs for
general elections. There was frequently overt opposition
to womens participation in local politics and they faced
serious challenges when trying to stand as independent
women citizens candidates as party politics often domi
nated. In Cambridge, however, the local WCA was able to
secure the election of its own independent women citizens
candidates. Throughout the interwar period the Cambridge
WCA was able to return a few of its candidates to the town
council, helped by the particular political environment of
the university city.

W omens Social and Political Union,

4. CLEMENTS INN. STRAND.

VOTES FOR W OM EN.

. TWO .
Public Meetings for Women
Will he held on Friday, I Oth May, 1907,
IN THE GRAND HOTEL. II IN THE PRIORY ROOMS.
Ai 3.30 p.m. || At 8 p.m.
BIRMINGHAM.
S p e a k e r :

Miss CHR1STABEL PANKHURST,

Mrs. NELLIE A. MARTEL,
Mrs. BAINES, and others.

A n n o u n c e m e n t fo r a public m e e tin g , B irm ing ham , M a y 1907.

JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 51

BRITAIN
N PARTS OF SCOTLAND, women were also active in
non-party organisations. In the Edinburgh WCA, women
campaigned for the extension of the parliamentary
franchise, for the appointment of women police and
probation officers, for improved child welfare services and
for improved standards of housing. Similar to the WCAs
in England and Wales, the Edinburgh branch was part of
an array of womens organisations and networks across
Scotland. They worked with a number of local, national and
international organisations; in their efforts to secure the
election of women to public office they campaigned with
the Society for Equal Citizenship, the Womens Co-op
erative Guild and the Womens Freedom League in the
Edinburgh Local Elections Committee. They also undertook
a range of other campaigns including, notably, the drive to
address the high levels of maternal mortality in Edinburgh.
Although similar initiatives were carried out across England
and Wales, the high rate of maternal mortality in Scotland
made it a special point of focus. Studies carried out by gov
ernments throughout the 1920s revealed that medical mis
management, poor housing conditions and general poverty
all contributed to the high death rates. The Edinburgh
WCA set up a maternity subcommittee to investigate how
the local authority could improve its health provision for
pregnant women and, in 1928, this enquiry was extended
to the rest of Scotland. It made several recommendations
to improve the management of maternity services and
suggested an increase in hospital and antenatal provision.
It also campaigned for health insurance for all women, not
just for those who worked outside the home, and for home
helps, free milk and free meals for women with children.
In the 1930s, it called for a national maternity service and
expanded its discussions and campaigns to include birth
control, abortion and sex education.
Winning the vote for women was not an end to demands
for emancipation; it was a symbol that enhanced and legit
imised the extension of womens activities in public life.
Women who joined WCAs engaged in an array of campaigns
and activities. In many instances they could be influential
52 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
Above: inside the
duplicating office
of th e Women's
Social and Political
Union, 1911.
Right: campaign
ers for an anti-
discrimination
parliam entary bill,
London, 1973.
and effective in bringing real improvement to the lives of
citizens across Britain. The Women Citizens Associations
that developed over the course of the 20th century were
part of the vibrant and dynamic array of womens organ
isations which developed once the vote was won and, as
such, deserve to be integrated into the history of the British
womens movement.
J o a n n e S m it h is S e n io r L e c tu re r in H is to r y a t M a n c h e s te r M e tr o p o lita n
U n iv e rs ity .
FURTHER READING
Susan Pedersen, 'Eleanor Florence Rathbone (1872-1946),
Oxford Dictionary o f National Biography (OUP, 2004).
Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics o f
Conscience (Yale University Press, 2004).
Esther B reitenbach and V alerie W rig h t, Women as
Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c. 1918-1939',
Women's History Review, 23, 3, May 2014.
P at Thane, 'Women and Political Participation in
England, 1918-1970', in Esther B reintenbach and
P at T h an e (eds). Women and Citizenship in Britain and
Ireland in the Twentieth Century (Continuum, 2010).
Portrait
THROUGHOUT his life, Naguib
Mahfouz felt caught between the
timelessness of Egypts ancient past
and the turbulence of its recent history.
intellect, with which mathematical
time was understood. It could only
perceive the unchanging and the discon
tinuous. It conceived of a process as a

o f the Even as a boy, he had felt it. Growing up

in a devout Muslim household in one
of Cairos oldest quarters, his childhood
had been shaped by the unchanging
sequence of unrelated moments. From it
sprang a closed morality. This was static
and rule-bound; it prioritised social
cohesion; it excluded others and sought

Author obligations of faith and overshadowed

by the legacy of the past. When he was
not studying the Koran, he was playing
war; and it invented gods to ensure
obedience to its dogmas. On the other
hand, there was intuition, necessary for

as a in the streets of al-Gamaliya, not fax

from Saladins Citadel, or visiting the
pyramids with his mother. But, though
it was easy to believe that he was insu
understanding duration. This did not
draw distinctions, but comprehended
the totality of whatever it perceived.
From it arose an open morality. This

Historian lated from times flux, he could see that

Egypt was changing around him. Over
the preceding 40 years it had embarked
on a process of rapid social and economic
The ideas of a French modernisation. Industrial development
philosopher provided the was spurred on by foreign investment,
new roads and railways were construct
great Egyptian novelist w ith a ed, educational reforms were implem
way of assessing the good and ented and scientific rationalism was
exalted. Political changes were in the
the bad in his nations past, air, too. Though Egypt was notionally a
writes Alexander Lee. British protectorate, liberal nationalism
was on the rise and, before Mahfouz had
turned eight, calls for independence had
spilled over into violent revolution.
T im e a n d m o r a lit y
As a young man, Mahfouz was torment
ed by the tensions between eternity and
change, openness and nationalism, rel
igion and modernity. But, while he was
studying at the University of Cairo, he
chanced upon a solution in the philoso
phy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941).
Two things caught his attention.
One was Bergsons understanding of
time. According to mathematicians,
time consisted of infinite homogenous
units. Though wholly independent,
M o ral q uandary: N aguib M a h fo u z in Cairo, 1989.
each moment was just like any other.
But Bergson believed this was wrong. It
was not how human beings experienced
time. He pointed out that we are only
conscious of our existence because we
perceive change. And we are only able to
NO.7 do so because each moment is connect
ed to, but different from, the next. Thus,
Naguib the time that each individual experienc
es (what Bergson called duration) was
was creative and expansive; it insisted
on no fixed doctrines; it was universal
and pacific; and it was mystical, rather
than dogmatic.
In his first novel, The Game o f Fates
(1939), Mahfouz combined Bergsons
idea of duration with Egyptian history
to reconcile the timelessness of ancient
monuments with the flux of exper
ienced time. The story takes place
during the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu
(d.2566 bc ). At its heart is Khufus
determination to impress his will on
eternity. He has already begun building
the Great Pyramid, both as his resting
place and as a monument for all time.
Having fathered many sons, he reasons
that the succession is secure. But one
day, a soothsayer foretells that none of
Khufus children will rule after him.
Instead, the son of a priest of Ra - born
that day - will assume the throne.
Khufu immediately sets out to thwart
the prophecy by killing the newborn
boy, Djedef. But the priest is forewarned
and sends his son to safety before the
pharaoh arrives. Unaware of what has
happened, Khufu kills a maids baby in
the belief that he is the priests child.
Shielded from his true identity, Djedef
is raised by the inspector of the pyramid.
He grows to become a superb soldier
and, after saving the crown princes life,
is made commander of the royal guard.
Later, he saves the pharaoh from an
attempted coup, killing the deceitful
crown prince in the process. Out of grat
itude, Khufu names Djedef his heir. On
his deathbed, however, Khufu discovers

Mahfouz not only heterogeneous, but also con

Born: December nth, 1911, Cairo, Egypt.
Died: August 30th, 2006, Agouza, Egypt.
54 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
tinually in flux, dependent on memory
and utterly unforeseeable. In turn, each
persons duration formed a small but
unique part of the wider continuum of
human duration.
The other was Bergsons understand
ing of perception and morality. There
were two kinds of each. There was the
the truth. He has unwittingly fulfilled
the prophecy. While the physical
remains of his reign will endure forever,
he sees that life is constantly in flux.
B e tw e e n p a s t a n d p re s e n t
If change was an inevitable part of
human life, this was not to say that
modernity should be welcomed with
open arms. Though initially sympa
thetic to the Wafd party, Mahfouz was
critical of liberal nationalism. In Thebes
at War (1943), he used Bergsons idea
of morality and the example of ancient
history to expose its dangers. Set in the
16th century bc , it tells of the Egyptians
struggle against the white skinned
Hyksos, who had ruled the north for
over a century. After many years of bitter
conflict, the Pharaoh Ahmose at last
liberates the country from the foreign
tyrants. But his victory is unedifying.
Although he has fallen in love with
Amenridis, a Hyksos princess, during
the campaign, they cannot be together.
Committed to narrow Egyptian nation
alism, he must forsake her. Though they
continue to write to one another, he
discovers that Amenridis views him as a
little more than a pygmy. The implica
tion was clear. Even if Egypt succeeded
in ejecting the British, the closed
morality on which nationalism was
based meant that it would not be any
more fulfilled.
Egypts best hope
was to strike a
balance between
past and present
by embracing an
iopen morality9
But nor did Mahfouz advocate taking
refuge in an unchanging past. Egypts
history should not be a haven. To his
mind, the backward-looking religious
dogmatism of the Muslim Brother
hood (founded in 1928) was as much
a manifestation of Bergsons closed
morality as the liberal nationalism it
opposed. This was dramatised in Khan
al-Khalili (1945). Set in the middle of the
Second World War, it follows the story
of a Cairene family that moves from the
modern quarter of al-Sakakani to the
religious neighbourhood of Khan
al-Khalili. But though they hope that
the nearby al-Hussein mosque will
protect them from German bombs, it
is no safer. The youngest son dies from
tuberculosis. His brother is forced to see
that the inflexible religion he adores is
just as vulnerable as the rational moder
nity he despises.
Under Bergsons influence, Mahfouz
came to believe that Egypts best hope
was to strike a balance between past and
present by embracing an open morality.
As he intimated in He Who Lives in the
Truth (1985) - a fictionalised historical
enquiry into the reign of the reforming
Pharaoh Akhenaten (d.1336 bc ) -
the intellect should surrender to
intuition; memory of the past should
inspire change for the future; dogmatic,
rule-bound religion should give way to
mysticism; and nationalism should yield
to an outward-looking cosmopolitanism.
Before th e th ro n e
By the time Egypt achieved its indep
endence, Mahfouz had realised that this
could not be achieved without sacrifice
and was not ignorant of the personal
tragedy this could entail. In the Cairo
Trilogy (1956-7) - an epic account of the
life of a Cairene family between 1917
and 1944 - he told of how a mother
and father are destroyed by grief when
their son, Fahmi, dies while agitating
for Islamic socialism during the 1919
revolution. But by exercising intuition,
rather than intellect - as Bergson had
urged - this could be put in its proper
historical perspective. While the finality
of an individuals death might seem
tragic, it could be seen that the sacrifice
contributed to alleviating the broader Key works
tragedies of modern life and to advanc The Cairo Trilogy: Palace
ing the development of human society.
Walk (1956), Palace o f Desire
It was against this standard that late
in his life Mahfouz judged Egypts polit (1957), Sugar Street (1957)
ical history. In Before the Throne (1983),
leaders from Menes to Anwar Sadat Accepting the Nobel Prize for Lit
were interrogated and allocated a place erature in 1988, Naguib Mahfouz
in heaven, purgatory or hell. Those like defined himself as the son of two
Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (1481-25 bc ), civilisations that at a certain age in
who embodied an open morality and history have formed a happy mar
enriched the whole nation with a crea
riage. The first was the 7,000-year-
tive outlook, were admitted to heaven.
old Pharaonic civilisation; the
Those like Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-
70), who embraced a closed morality
second was the 1,400-year-old
and put their own interests above the Islamic one. As someone from
common good, leading the country to the developing world he was, he
war, were sent straight to hell. Those asserted, a vessel coloured by
who meant well, but were overcome by what it contains. Mahfouz had
circumstances beyond their power, were written several novels before
consigned to purgatory. the 1952 revolution overthrew
Now that Egypt is again torn King Farouk, hastening the end
between the rigid Islamic fundamen of British occupation. He worked
talism of the Muslim Brotherhood and
for the government despite the
secular nationalism, it is worth asking
where history will place Egypts current
popularity of his books, many of
president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
which were banned in other Arab
countries on grounds of blasphe
Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the my. He was widely recognised as
Study o f the Renaissance at the University o f the Arab worlds most prominent
Warwick. His most recent book, The Ugly novelist on his death in 2006.
Renaissance, is published by Arrow.
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 55
R o b e r t C o o k o n U S p r e s id e n ts g r e a t a n d m e d io c r e D a n ie l B e e r c o n s id e rs a c e n tu r y
t h a t c h a n g e d E u ro p e C la re M u lle y o n th e w o r k o f th e S p e c ia l O p e r a tio n s E x e c u tiv e
REVIEWS
REFORMATION
The
Flawed
Reformer
Two new accounts of
Luther's life reveal the
complexities of the public
and private man, w ithout
flinching from his failings
and contradictions.
LYNDAL ROPERs superb new
biography of Martin Luther sums
her subject up beautifully: Luther
is, she notes, a difficult hero.
The German monk who rebelled
against both pope and Holy
Roman emperor; the theologian
who brought the message of
salvation by faith alone; and the
communicator who harnessed
the power of the new-fangled
printing press to create the
worlds first media storm, is the
man who today more than 60
million Lutherans worldwide call
the father of their movement.
Yet, for others, Luthers opinions
56 HISTORY TODAY JANUARY 2017
m a r t in L U T H E
renegade and m u m t i
on the Jews spring more readily
to mind, considered harsh even
by his own contemporaries
broadly antisemitic standards,
and disconcertingly prophetic of
what would happen 400 years
later under Nazism. If Luthers
On the Jews and Their Lies of 1543
is an undeniably chilling read,
his views on women (Let them
bear children to death) also
regularly raise modern eyebrows,
as does the venom with which
Luther attacked the robbing and
murdering hordes of peasants
who rebelled in 1525 in his name.
October 31st, 2017 is the 500th
R
martin
VISIONARY REFORMER
1C O T T
anniversary of Luthers posting
of the 95 Theses to the door of
the castle church in the Saxon
city of Wittenberg, as his first
real public protest against the
Church. One wonders just how
the numerous commemorative
events planned will ever do
justice to such an important yet
complex life.
It is, therefore, particularly
welcome to have two new
biographies of Luther appear
at a time when that legacy will
be under fresh scrutiny: Scott
H. Hendrixs Martin Luther:
Visionary Reformer and Lyndal
Ropers Martin Luther: Renegade
and Prophet. Both are by scholarly
heavyweights. Hendrix is Emer
itus Professor of Reformation
History at Princeton Theological
Seminary, having produced
numerous works on Luther and
the Reformation over the course
of his career. The Australian
historian Lyndal Roper is Regius
Professor of History at Oxford
and has written paradigm-
shifting studies on aspects of
the social, gender and religious
history of early modern Europe.
As one might expect from two
biographies of the same man,
there are clear areas of similarity.
Both scholars faced the deli
cious horror quickly discovered
by anyone who tries to work
on Luther: the sheer weight of
source material he left behind,
including 120 volumes of his col
lected works. Little wonder that
Roper notes that her biography
of Luther was ten years in the
making. Both scholars have pro
duced biographies that do, osten
sibly, what all biographies should
do, which is to take the reader
in an engaging and informative
way through the entirety of
Luthers life, from his upbringing
in Mansfeld, Saxony, as the eldest
son of a leading figure in the
local mining industry, through
to a rejection at the age of 22 of a
career in law for a life in a closed
Augustinian monastery in Erfurt.
Both then chart the development
of Luthers career as a Doctor
Luther is one of the
very few historical
actors about whose
personality and
inner life we do know
a great deal, even
down to his dreams
and his bouts of
crippling spiritual
torment and doubt...
Roper and Hendrix
offer impressive
biographies
of Theology at the University of
Wittenberg before the period of
high drama in Luthers life, from
his first statement against the
abuse of indulgences in 1517 to
his excommunication and obsti
nacy before Emperor Charles V at
the Diet ofWorms in 1521, where
he told the young ruler that my
conscience is captive to the Word
of God. I cannot and will not
recant.
Both Hendrix and Roper
also act as able guides through
Luthers numerous writings, the
seemingly endless controversies
in which he later became embr
oiled and his evidently happy
family life after his marriage to
the former nun Katharina von
Bora in 1525.
Where Hendrix and Ropers
biographies of Luther differ,
however, is in their approach to
this life. Hendrix takes the argu
ably more traditional approach,
basing his study on three secure,
if unsurprising, touchstones:
that Luther was neither a hero
nor a villain; that he was not a
reformer in isolation; and that
none of what happens in Luthers
life should be judged by modern
criteria.
Roper, by contrast, does the
exact opposite, drawing on the
modern psychological approach
es that have served her well in
previous work to delve beneath
what is already known of the ex
ternals of Luthers life to explore
his complex personality. Roper is
careful not to overplay her hand
here: she, more than anyone else,
is well aware of the potential
problems of such an approach,
but quite rightly notes, that of
all figures in the 16th century,
Luther is one of very few histor
ical actors about whose person
ality and inner life we do know
a great deal, even down to his
dreams and his bouts of crippling
spiritual torment and doubt.
We also know that Luthers
personality had a major impact
on the course of the Lutheran
Reformation and Roper makes
a persuasive case that links the
vicissitudes of Luthers relation
ship with authority figures in his
life to his reaction to events and
to the content of his theology
itself. The result is a challenging
and deeply stimulating study of
a major historical figure about
whom many hold an opinion,
but have often struggled to fully
understand. Together, Ropers
work, along with Hendrixs fine
if more conventional biography,
offer impressive contributions to
Martin Luthers ongoing legacy.
Elaine Fulton
M artin Luther: Renegade and Prophet
by Lyndal Roper
T he B o dle y H e a d 592pp 16.99
M artin Luther: Visionary Reformer
by Scott H. Hendrix
Yale U n iv e rs ity Press 36 8 p p 14.99
sm oothed n eg otiatio ns w ith
Mad Enchantment
Claude M o n e t and th e Painting
o f th e W a te r Lilies
by Ross King
B lo o m s b u ry 4 i6pp 25
A VISIT TO M o net's W ater Lilies
a t th e O ran g erie in Paris is a
profoundly m oving experience.
Surrounded on all sides by
w avin g plants and dazzling re
flections, th e visito r is im m ersed
in a w a te ry realm o f p ure light
and colour. This glorious cycle
o f paintings, a m em o rial to
th e First W orld W ar, is view ed
to d a y in m u ted light, filte red
th ro u g h gauze screens, in o rder
to enhance th e m ood o f calm
and so lem nity. H o w ever, as Ross
King relates in th is engross
ing history, th e p ath to w a rd s
co m p letion w as fa r fro m serene.
Failing eyesight, fo llo w ed by
loss o f colour d e fin itio n - th e
result o f a gruelling c a taract
o p eratio n - severely ham pered
M o net's progress and it w as only
posthum ously t h a t th e Grande
D ecoration cam e to fru itio n .
N o to riou sly difficult, w ith
a sh o rt tem p e r, M o n e t comes
across as a b rillian t y e t impossi
ble individual. R ecently w id o w ed
by th e d eath o f his beloved Alice,
he rails ag ain st th e w orld , refus
ing to receive m a n y o f th e artists
w h o m ake th e pilgrim age to his
hom e a t Giverny, bello w in g a t
his devo ted d a u g h te r-in -la w ,
Blanche Hoschede, and refusing
to hide his irrita tio n w hen
dealing w ith his long-suffering
eye d o c to r Charles C outela.
A long w ith his garden, food and
drink are his only pleasures.
Painting, th ou gh , is M o net's
obsession.
This book is a b o u t an
angry, to rm e n te d genius; it is
also a b o u t friendship. A p art
fro m M o n e t him self, th e m ain
c h arac ter w h o em erges is th e
g re a t French sta tes m an Georges
C lem enceau. Know n as 'the
Tiger', C lem enceau n o t only
engineered th e comm ission
fo r th e Grande Decoration, b ut
th e French s ta te w h e n M o n e t
(w h o m he nicknam ed th e
Hedgehog') failed to deliver. In
co n tras t to his antisocial and
irascible friend, C lem enceau is
show n as outgoing, brave and
fearless, surviving an assassina
tio n a tte m p t, m aking fre q u e n t
visits to th e fro n t line during th e
First W orld W a r and leading th e
French n ation to victo ry. By co n
tra s t, M o n e t used his position
during th e w a r to ensure th a t
he received regu lar supplies of
cigarettes, coal and petrol, w hile
th e rest o f th e n ation endured
shortages.
Monet comes
across as a brilliant
yet impossible
individual... This is a
book about an angry,
tormented genius,
and aboutfriendship
This scholarly sto ry o f
M o net's g re a te s t project is told
w ith tre m e n d o u s h u m o u r and is
filled w ith fascinating insights,
gleaned fro m correspondence,
new spapers, periodicals and a
p le th o ra o f o th e r sources. The
n a rra tiv e unfurls against th e
backdrop o f th e co n flict and
M o n e t's long and successful
career: his n eg o tiatio n s w ith a rt
dealers and collectors - am ong
th e m Kojiro M a ts u k a ta , w h o
b ou g ht M o n e t's paintings fo r his
Pavilion o f Pure Pleasure' - as
w ell as his friendships w ith lu m
inaries, such as G ustave G effroy
(a fe llo w g astron o m e and one
o f th e founders o f th e A cadem ie
G oncourt), th e a r t critic O ctave
M irb eau and th e a c to r and film
d irec to r Sacha G uitry.
F ra n c e s F o w le
JANUARY 2017 HISTORY TODAY 57
 HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
R evision Too Far
As Churchill scholars and family
members, we would like to
protest at Mihir Boses statement
that Winston Churchill wanted
to destroy Hinduism (A Hatred
for Hindus, December 2016).
From one admittedly intemper
ate remark reportedly made by
Churchill at dinner in February
i945, Bose has constructed
a completely unrecognisable
theory that Churchill wanted to
destroy a religion followed by
hundreds of millions of people,
several million of whom were
serving as volunteers in the
armed forces of the Crown at
the time.
In the same article it is incor
rectly stated that the journalist
Beverley Nichols was a Nazi
sympathiser, when in fact he
was a prominent peace activist
and, indeed, he is quoted criticis
ing Hitler and fascism. It is also
claimed that Churchill wanted
to convert to Islam, which is
untrue, and that he deliberately
lied to wartime US President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt about
the number of Muslims fighting
in the Indian army, without
giving any proof.
Churchill revisionism is a
very well-known phenomenon,
but we are surprised that as
respected a journal as History
Today should stoop to claiming
that Churchill ever wanted to
destroy the majority population
of a country that was the jewel in
the crown of an Empire to which
he was so dedicated.
D r L a r r y P. A r n n
M ic h a e l F. B is h o p
R a n d o lp h C h u r c h ill
P a u l C o u r te n a y
D r W a rre n D o c k te r
L a u r e n c e G e lle r
D r A rth u r H e rm a n
R ic h a r d M . L a n g w o r t h
A lle n P a c k w o o d
P ro f A n d r e w R o b e rts
C e lia S a n d y s
E d w in a S a n d y s
N ic h o la s S o a m e s , M P
66 H IS T O R Y T O D A Y JANUARY 2017
E m a il p .la y(s > h isto ry to d ay .c o m
P o s t to H is to r y T o d a y , 2nd Flo o r,
9 S ta p le In n , L o ndon W C iV 7Q H
N o b o d y 's Poodles
Rebecca Pyne-Edwards Banks
essay (Court of the Conscripts,
November) rightly indicates the
presence of First World War mili
tary service tribunal documenta
tion in archives. Although some
collections are well known, it is
still possible that more may be
discovered. Pyne-Edwards Banks
also helps to destroy the myths
that only conscientious objectors
could apply for exemption and
that local tribunals comprised
country gentry and local bigwigs
who dealt with cases in an arbi
trary manner.
Hitherto, most tribunal
history has been biased towards
conscientious objectors, giving
scant regard to those who
claimed exemption on other
grounds; the fiction continues
to the present: To keep the
army supplied [with men], if you
were a single man aged 18 to 4t,
not in a job essential to the war
effort, and were fit, you were
in the army, unless you could
show a conscientious objection
... [and appear before] the hastily
convened tribunals for objectors.
(Dan Snow, Voices o f the First
World War, BBC Radio 4, June
29th, 2016).
Local tribunal members were
confronted with the almost
impossible task of balancing the
armys needs with that of the
local community. The chairman
of the Stratford-upon-Avon
tribunal remarked that some
of the public claimed we had
let too many through; in other
words that the tribunal were
too lenient, concluding that the
tribunal membership would
gladly change places with any of
their critics (Stratford-upon-Avon
Herald, December 15th, 1916).
My research indicates that
local tribunals were rarely influ
enced by the military or external
authorities; they guarded their
independence fiercely. In late
October 1916 the members of
^ 0
the Warwick tribunal, aggrieved
when one of their decisions was
overturned on appeal, withdrew
their labour for a week. This may
be the only case of a tribunal
going on strike, but it shows they
were nobodys poodles.
P h ilip S p in k s
Stratford-upon-Avon,
Warwickshire
Im p o s in g Convoys
Malcolm Murfetts article (The
Sinking of Japan, December)
does not recognise that the
attitude of the Japanese navy to
the convoy system was far from
unique. In his book, On the Psy
chology o f Military Incompetence,
Norman Dixon points out that
both the British and US navies
resisted the use of convoys and
emphasised the role of the fleet
as an attack force. Dixon attrib
utes this to an officer psychology
which saw defensive strategies,
such as convoys, as passive and
unmanly.
The difference is that the
civilian governments of Britain
and the US imposed the convoy
system on reluctant admirals.
The Japanese military govern
ment did not do so, probably
because its members shared the
attitudes of its admirals.
M a r t i n J e n k in s
Plumstead, London
R eag an For Good a n d III
I would not dissent from Iwan
Morgans assessment of Ronald
Reagans achievements in ending
the Cold War (From the Archive,
December), though whether it is
the greatest achievement of any
US President since 1945 seems
doubtful when you consider,
for instance, Trumans creative
containment policy, which was
followed by all presidents for 40
years, or Johnsons epoch-mak
ing civil rights legislation.
Where Reagans presidency is
remarkable is in the example of
a mentally and physically declin
ing president in the nuclear age.
C o n n e c t w ith us on T w it t e r
t w it t e r .c o m /h is t o r y t o d a y
There have been other mentally
and physically incompetent pres
idents, notably Woodrow Wilson
after his stroke, but he did not
have access to nuclear codes. The
extent of Reagans Alzheimers
while in office is disputed but
there is no doubt his staff were
seriously concerned. This story
may attract more attention with
the recent election of a 70-year-
old president, whose mental
stability (unlike Reagans) has
already frequently been called
into question.
M ic h a e l H o r s m a n
via email
B rau d e l W as French
The letter from Anthony Kinder
in the October issue not only
repeats the falsehood that
Fernand Braudel was born in
Germany, but even crows that
[I]t is important that such errors
are identified and published,
otherwise these errors are just
allowed to continue.
How true! So let me confirm
that, as Alexander Lee wrote
in the original article (Portrait
of the Author as a Historian,
August), Braudel was born on
August 24th, 1902 at Lumeville-
en-Ornois, a village on the
French side of the post-i87t
frontier. Please do not allow
the error that Braudel was not
French to continue.
G e o ffre y P a rk e r
The Ohio State University
M a p M is ta k e
The map of Tenochtitlan
(October) has a mistaken
description of part of it. The
smaller map to the left of the
city map is the Gulf of Mexico,
not the Caribbean Basin, and the
tip of Cuba is its western tip, not
its eastern. Florida can be seen
clearly labeled, as is the Yucatan.
However, it is shown as an island,
rather than a peninsula.
S h ir le y F o w le y
W a te rlo o , Ontario, Canada