History Today 09-2015

September 2015
Vol 65 Issue 9
New World Outcasts
From poverty in Britain to

life on the American frontier
Profits of Slavery
The cultural impact of

slave-owners wealth
UNHOLY WAR
The failed Nazi plan to mobilise the Muslim world
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editor Kate Wiles
Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte
Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

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Ohio State University
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London School of Economics
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The Australian National University
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St Johns College, Cambridge
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University of London
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Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
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University of Nottingham
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2 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015
FROM THE EDITOR

GENOA, LA SUPERBA, the former city-state that once rivalled Venice for control
of the Mediterranean, commands a magnificent, if precarious, position overlooking
the harbour which brought the Black Death to medieval Europe and honed the
seafaring skills of Christopher Columbus. Nowadays it is a grizzled working port with
a wonderfully claustrophobic, if graffiti-ridden, baroque heart. Like all Italian cities,
it has more churches and pallazi crammed with paintings Caravaggios, Veroneses,
Strozzis than it knows what to do with; but, more than any other place in la bella
Italia, it is and has long been a global city, as I found out on a visit in July.
The role of Columbus in shrinking our world, for better or worse, is well known,
but the story of the 19th-century Italians who followed him to the New World
primarily from Genoa is not. Their story is told with lan and humanity in the citys
wonderful Museo del Mare, constructed in the old docks, which have been given
new life by the architect Renzo Piano, a son of Genoa. In it, one enters the booths
where Italians, who remained impoverished despite reunification, were lured by
the call of the shipping companies that offered them the chance of a new life, for a
price, in the US, Brazil and Argentina, then a booming young country, full of promise.
We follow them to the ships barrack-style dormitories, separated by gender, the
women cramped together with their children, where disease spread rapidly among
the primitive sanitation facilities. We see the tables where they ate in shifts, without
knives for fear of violence. We embark with them to the coffee estates of Brazil and
the slums of Buenos Aires, as well as Ellis Island, New York, from where names such
as Sinatra, Scorsese, Ciccone and Coppola would resonate worldwide.
Genoas tale is not just one of export and emigration, but of imports and
immigrants, too. Among them were the Britons attracted to the city in the 19th
century, when it became an important coal station on the way to Suez. In 1893 a
group of them founded the Genoa Cricket Club, which in 1896 added the word
Foot-ball to its name, becoming the first football club in Italy, a nation which has
won the World Cup three times more than England. Its story is told in the portside
Museo della storia del Genoa (retaining the English spelling, Genova in Italian). To
this day, Italian football managers are addressed as Mister.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Forgotten Figures Literate Slaves Names Charles Rennie Mackintosh
David Nash
THE NOBLE BUT DEFEATED figure
treated unjustly by posterity is a
recurring feature of Britain and its
history, often appropriated as a tool to
accomplish political or cultural goals
in the contemporary world. Those who
entertain a developed sense of justice
want to see this side of history prevail,
actively representing it as a means of
preserving the cultures and principles these figures fought tirelessly to
defend. This fight to establish a new
historical truth inevitably pits the
romantic, enthusiastic, amateur historian against the apparently dispassionate and rational historian.
The most famous example of this is
perhaps Richard III, whose supporters
and their quest to rehabilitate his
image are well known. However,
another story about a forgotten hero
blends issues of historical truth with
identity: the story of Prince Madoc.
This Welsh prince apparently fled his
war-stricken home during the 12th
century and sailed west from modern
Colwyn Bay to discover America,
landing at Mobile, Alabama. According
to legend, Prince Madoc explored the
American interior and members of
his party intermarried into a Native
American tribe, the Mandans, bequeathing them both pale skins and the
Welsh language. In the years since,
his story has been in the possession
of a bewildering number of people
with different agendas and uses for it.
Professional historians have often felt
unwillingly dragged into the legend,
tending to dismiss it as fanciful and
lacking proof, and were poor value
among those who gazed wistfully at
the Atlantic. The most famous account
of the story comes from the great leftwing historian Gwyn Williams, who
used it to elaborate a wider history of
Welshness that encompassed both
the British Empire and exploration on
the eastern seaboard of America. But
to the Madoc legend was also almost a

touchstone of national identity among
Welsh descendants in the New World.
While professional historians hoped
they had banished Madoc, or discredited his legend as a skilled Tudor fabrication with its own purposes, they were
scarcely to have things all their own
way. Enthusiastic amateurs persisted,
claiming they had uncovered literary
evidence that predated the Tudors,
Subscription to the
Madoc legend was a
touchstone of national
identity among Welsh
descendants in the
New World
The Propaganda of
the Defeated
The quest for justice for maligned figures in
our past forces us to question the notion of
historical truth and objectivity.
Gone but not
forgotten: James
Graham, 1st
Marquis of
Montrose, by
William Dobson,
c.1636.
Williams also saw the story as doubleedged with its blind assertion liable to
make the Welsh a laughing stock. He
felt the Madoc legend had eclipsed the
history of the Welsh common people,
potentially turning them into a romantic Celtic sideshow. This element
also surfaced in Madocs adoption
by the Daughters of the American
Revolution, who erected a plaque
in his honour at Mobile as a way of
asserting a further connection with an
intriguingly Celtic origin. Subscription
while others said they could point to

suggestive archaeological evidence
uncovered on both sides of the
Atlantic. New ways of investigating
arrived with DNA testing, championed
by the Madoc International Research
Association, which hoped to provide
a clear and obvious link between the
Welsh prince and Native Americans.
Perhaps the latest attempt to take
possession of Prince Madoc and his
story was the campaign in his home
town of Colwyn Bay, which hosted an
exhibition in his honour. This offered
the twin lures of heritage tourists
from both sides of the Atlantic,
while bolstering Welsh independent
identities during the quest for political
devolution from Westminster.
Elsewhere the Montrose Society of
Scotland is a comparatively recent phenomenon that celebrates and seeks to
publicise the career of another noble
figure who inspired sympathy for the
manner in which he was defeated
and accepted his fate. James Graham,
the 1st Marquis of Montrose, was an
early signatory of the Solemn League
and Covenant, a pledge to gain
SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
increasing separation from the king,

Charles I, that escalated into outright
war. According to the account given
by the Montrose Society, the marquis
was sent north with a commission
to raise an army, which eventually
won a series of important military
victories against Covenanter armies
in a period that became known as the
year of miracles. However success
melted away and after defeat and
surrender Montrose went into exile to
Being a supposed victor in

historys great battles is no
guarantee of the survival of
your version of history
be courted by the new king, Charles
II, who was also negotiating with the
Covenanters behind Montroses back.
The Society states that the king knew
he was sending Montrose back to Scotland to a certain death and, perhaps
inevitably, he was duly arrested and
executed in Edinburgh in April 1650.
This story stresses the courage of a
man of gentility and learning, loyal to
a cause and individuals who manifestly appear not to deserve such loyalty.
Likewise it displays a morality tale
of loyal Scottish service betrayed by
the fickle and devious behaviour of
successive English kings who forgot
they were kings of Scotland as well.
The Montrose Society has also ensured
a last intriguing tinge, suggesting that
he should be regarded as a champion
of constitutional monarchy and a prototype for modern Scottish politicians
who might echo the sentiments of his
last words to the Scottish people from
the scaffold: God have mercy on this
afflicted land.
Several of these sentiments are
echoed in organisations devoted
to remembering the importance of
the Jacobite cause. Re-enactors like
the Charles Edward Stuart Society
bring bekilted troops to Derby every
year to commemorate the furthest
point in England reached by Bonnie
Prince Charlies troops. Alternatively
the Royal Stuart Society keeps alive
knowledge of the Stuart monarchy
and offers itself as the defender of
monarchy in opposition to republicanism. Perhaps most interesting of
all is an organisation called the Circle

of Gentlemen, claiming to have been
in existence since the Good Old
Cause was driven underground after
Culloden in 1745 and secretly working
for the defence of Scotland ever since.
As such, they also offer a counterpoint
to the hybrid identities created by
the modern world, suggesting that
the advent of multicultural society
has produced a need to hold onto old
values and traditions. Perhaps such organisations provide historical focus for
less articulate and conscious nationalist feelings that can otherwise appear
in every context in every place from
popular song, to the football terrace
and, most recently, the ballot box.
Being a victor in historys great
battles is no guarantee of total success
or of the survival of your version of
history. History always has hidden
stories to tell and it is also a hitherto
hidden story just how far enthusiasts
and professional historians have been
prepared to go in resurrecting some of
these. Defeated, marginal and forgotten figures hold a fascination for those
who believe history is about truth.
But such figures are also pressed into
service in the contemporary world to
shore up identities under threat or to
promote them in a time of potentially
advantageous change.
David Nashs book, Christian Ideals in British
Culture: Stories of Belief in the Twentieth Century,
is out now, published by Palgrave MacMillan.
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
Runaway
Reading
How did literacy encourage
slave rebelliousness after
the American War of
Independence?
Shaun Wallace
AS THE DUST settled and libertarian
rhetoric became increasingly muted,
the newly created United States of
America emerged as a republic whose
lifeblood was her educated and selfless
citizenry. Amid the promise and potential of the young nation, the survival of
slavery stood in stark contrast to the
rhetoric promoting liberty and equality
to all men.
Following the ratification of the
American Constitution in 1789, a plethora of legislation was enacted across
the United States promoting slave
illiteracy and curtailing slave mobility.
With an increasing awareness of slave
discontentment, slaveholders targeted
what they perceived as contributing to
that restlessness: instruction of reading
and writing. Suspicious of slave gatherings and paranoid that literacy could
spoil a slave, they recognised that
learned slaves who freed themselves
from the shackles of slaveholderimposed ignorance would be unsuited
to a life of perpetual servitude.
What if a slave understood the
moral arguments against their enslavement would they seek vengeance
against their enslavers? Would a literate slave transmit knowledge or inspire
discontentment among the wider slave
community for whom they held special
status? And was it a coincidence that
the leaders of well-known slave rebellions, such as Toussaint LOuverture,
Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner, were
literate slaves?
These were men, women and
children who defied the threat of
whipping, branding and even death to
learn to read and write. With the odds
stacked against them and slaveholder
rights to reclaim their property
protected by legislation such as the
Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850,
most escapes ended in failure.
HISTORYMATTERS
When faced with punishment,

division of family, a new owner
or poor working conditions,
hundreds of slaves chose to run
from their masters every year.
Slave runaway advertisements
in local newspapers were used
by slaveholders to try to retrieve
a runaway and, although rare,
advertisements for slaves who
could read and/or write reveal
the liberating effects of literacy
for slaves and the fears of many
slaveholders being realised.
The case of Prophet illustrates
this point. On first impression,
Prophet was a typical Georgia
runaway. He was a male slave
aged between 25 and 30 and
the property of John Ruppert,
who had purchased him from
Leonard Cecil. A discontented and
rebellious character, he escaped.
His owner valued him worthy of a
$10 reward, which was advertised
in the Savannah-based Georgia
Gazette on October 18th, 1792.
Well known in and about
Savannahs bustling multiracial
urban environment, his daily
interaction with the citys white
and black population and access to
newspapers and discourse was far
from the popular image of the isolated
slave toiling in the field as the sun set
on a rural plantation. On the contrary,
he was literate and learned. He was
empowered. Ruppert concluded that
it was now very probable that he
[Prophet] will pass for a free man, as
he can both read and write.
This was an explicit acknowledgment
that being able to read and write provided Prophet with the skills to learn more
and to transform his identity. Adopting
a new free identity, Prophet could cast
aside his slave status and manipulate his
surroundings for the accomplishment of
freedom, like other literate slaves who
endeavour[ed] to pass as free men.
Assimilated into society, he was free in
his own mind. Bodily freedom was the
final stage of transition from slave to
free man. In an attempt to preserve his
reputation, Ruppert could only attempt
to discredit Prophets likely account of his
enslavement, portraying him as a very
smooth tongued runaway who could
Freedom in
thought: the
poet Phyllis
Wheatley with
her autograph.
Woodcut, 18th
century.
tell a very plausible story.

In a similar fashion, Isaiah Wright and
Thomas Hamilton advertised for their
slave Hercules in June 1793. Regarded as
a notorious offender, the proof of which
he carried [by] the mark of a whip on
his back, Hercules was a 24-year-old
African-American, or country born,
A successful escape
required that a slave
have a combination
of astuteness,
adaptability and
practicality
runaway. Denied instruction, the young
slave had concealed his learning. He was
able to read remarkably well, which his
advertisers linked to him becoming very
artful and impertinent, and they believed
he would attempt to change his name.
Name-changing was a common sign
of slave empowerment and a challenge
to slaveholder authority. Conforming

to the artful slave type, a term used by
slaveholders pejoratively, Hercules had
developed skills that made him difficult
to control and was no longer the obedient servant his owners desired. They
placed a bounty of $10 upon his head,
wanted dead or alive.
Artfulness in a slaves character was
most often attested to a literate and
learned slave and was linked to excessive
knowledge and transforming their identities. In most cases, it was used to characterise slaves who could read; those
who had knowledge and imagination
and could interpret and subsequently
adapt to the world around them. They
were slaves who had developed a sense
of self and forged their own identity.
Rarely was artfulness used to describe
runaways who could only write, which
was linked to more practical qualities,
such as the forging of passes.
A successful escape required a combination of astuteness, adaptability and
practicality. It was imperative that the
slave be inconspicuous, often reinventing themselves during escape attempts.
Their slaves having escaped, slaveholders
used the advertisements to downplay
the consequences of their slaves literacy
and learning, portraying themselves as
still in control. Advertisers resorted to
pejorative phrases and deliberate vagueness in their description of the act of the
fugitives. Terms such as artful, pretends
or endeavours to be free or acquired a
pass deliberately masked the reality that
the slave had demonstrated empowerment, skill and agency.
Having acquired basic reading and
writing skills, literate scribes embarked
on learning while simultaneously moving
ever further away from the state of
ignorance their slaveholders desperately
tried to protect. Reading and learning
allowed slaves to understand the
immorality of their condition and many
resolved to become free. These slaves
had become free in their own minds
and began articulating a free identity for
themselves through reading and writing
which could only be realised by escaping
the slave system.
Shaun Wallace is an ESRC-funded PhD student

studying slavery in the American South at the
University of Stirling.
HISTORYMATTERS
A Noble Stone
Gathers No Moss
What names tell us about
Anglo-Saxon England.
James Chetwood
ALFRED THE GREATs illegitimate
grandson, King Athelstan, became
known to posterity by the epithet the
Glorious, which must only be a couple
of rungs below his grandfather on the
ladder of kingly sobriquets.
While Athelstans glorious nickname
was only applied posthumously, his
name, like most Old English names, was
a compound, combining two elements
words taken from the vocabulary of
everyday language. The first element
el- meant noble, while the second
element -stan meant stone. Athelstan
was, in name at least, a noble rock.
Such names were not the reserve
of royalty. In fact, this sort of name was
common among people of all ranks of
society across Anglo-Saxon England.
While the grandson of a king might
rightly have expected an illustrious life,
living up to the promise of his noble
names, the same could surely have not
been said for the multitude of future
cowherds and milkmaids across the
land who were given names marking
them out as noble beauties (elfld),
wise protectors (Eadmund) or powerful
wolves (Wulfweald). Perhaps being a
dear friend (Leofwine) was a more realistic aim for most parents.
While it is hard to tell exactly how
important the meaning of name elements were, it seems likely that people
were aware, to some extent, that names
carried some kind of meaning. Indeed,
one of the most famous, or infamous,
Anglo-Saxons is most often known to
us today as Ethelred the Unready, the
king who lost his kingdom to Cnut.
However, the name Ethelred signified
noble counsel. So, when his contemporaries labelled him elrd Unrd
they were not calling him unready, but
using the meaning of his name to mock
his lack of good counsel. Similarly, when
Archbishop Wulfstan entitled his homily
to the English people Sermon of the
Wolf to the English, he was clearly doing
so in the knowledge that the first part
of his name did not just sound like, but

signified, wolf. Surely it cannot be coincidence that rich, strong and beautiful
were used in names, where poor, weak
and ugly were not.
A feature of this naming system was
flexibility. There was a finite number of
elements, but they could be combined in
a multitude of ways. This meant that, in
essence, a name was created for, rather
than given to, each person. So, while elements could be repeated to emphasise
parentage and family links, there was
very little repetition of full names and it
would be unlikely that any two people
It cannot be coincidence that rich,

strong and beautiful were used
in names, where poor, weak and
ugly were not
within a community or family would
have the same name.
However, this compound naming
system was not universal and unchanging throughout the Anglo-Saxon
period. There was always significant
minority of simple names such as Tutta,
Babba and lle. And Old English names
rubbed shoulders with names of British
and Scandinavian origin. Indeed, one of
the most celebrated early Anglo-Saxon
Eelred rex:
silver pennies
bearing Ethelred
the Unreadys
name and
portrait, 10th
century.
kings, Cerdic, bore a name that is

thought to be a form of the British
Caradoc. In the century before the Conquest, Scandinavian names had become
so common in some areas that, not only
had names such as Toki and Gya been
incorporated into the naming stock, but
hybrid names had developed, creating
truly Anglo-Scandinavian names, like
lfcytel (combining Old English lf-, elf,
and Old Norse -kettill, cauldron). Scandinavian patronymic suffixes were even
added to perfectly Old English names
to mark parenthood at least in the
case of lfric Wihtgarsson, and his son
Wihgtar lfricsson. And we do not think
it in the least bit strange that the last
Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold,
bore a Scandinavian name, Haraldr.
It was not only outside influence
that had an impact on the English
naming system. Later Anglo-Saxon
society evolved and the naming system
evolved with it. New name elements
were introduced, such as God-, meaning
good or god, -cild, meaning child and
-sunu, meaning son, perhaps indicating
a greater emphasis on religion and
parentage than on glory in battle.
Name elements were shortened and
compound names contracted: lfsige
became Alsi, elgar became Algar
and Leofwine became Lefwin. We also
increasingly see names being copied
and passed down in their entirety, losing
some of their compound nature. This
went hand in hand with an increase in
popularity of a small number of names,
as people appear to have become less
interested in the individuality of a name
and perhaps more concerned in highlighting similarities with their friends,
neighbours and notable people.
With the Norman Conquest looming
large on the horizon, even more changes
were to come in the English naming
system. What we can say is that AngloSaxon personal naming was never one
static system, disconnected from the
world around it. It was an an everevolving reflection of society, responding to changes in language and culture
caused as much by developments in the
way English people lived their everyday
lives as by foreign invasion.
James Chetwood is a Wolfson Postgraduate

Scholar at the University of Sheffield, studying
medieval English naming.
HISTORYMATTERS
A Legacy and
a Love Story
Charles Rennie
Mackintosh,
c.1893.
Below: the
interior of the
Glasgow School
of Art before
the fire.
Behind the beautiful work

of the Father of Glasgow
lay a deep and lasting love.
Barbara Butcher
THE FIRE AT The Glasgow School
of Art in May 2014 destroyed the
magnificent library, devastating devotees of Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
particularly Glaswegians, who look
on him as the Father of Glasgow. It
did, however, introduce his work to
a wider community, many of whom
thought it was limited to jewellery
and designs destined to appear on
carrier bags and tea towels. In fact he
did not make jewellery, except one
piece, which he designed for his wife,
Margaret.
What is perhaps less well known
is the enduring love match of Charles
and his wife, Margaret Macdonald
Mackintosh. They met as students
at the old Glasgow School of Art in
1883. Little did they know that Charles
would one day be the architect of the
new Glasgow School of Art.
He was employed by the architectural practice of Honeyman and
Keppie which, in 1897, won a competition with his design for the new
Glasgow School of Art. Because he
was not a partner in the firm, Honeyman and Keppie took the glory. But by
then Mackintosh was already making
a name for himself elsewhere.
The couple were married in 1900.
Their home, which is now replicated
at the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow,
was both beautiful and functional.
Their collaboration in the design of the
famous Willow Tea Rooms, commissioned by a Miss Cranston, was a work
of art in itself. Meticulous attention
to detail was apparent, right down to
the teaspoons, china and the attire
of the staff. During those heady days
commissions kept them occupied and
in addition to the tea rooms Mackintosh designed Hill House for publisher
Walter Blackie. Margaret was well
known for her fabric designs and
paintings. By then Mackintosh had
and there was no doubt of their enduring love for each other. One of his letters
to her states: You must remember that
in all of my architectural efforts you
have been the half if not three quarters
of them.
In 1927 Margaret had to return
to London for six weeks for medical
treatment, leaving Mackintosh alone
and lonely in France. Mackintosh, who
was mildly dyslexic, wrote almost daily
to her, calling the letters his Chronycle, or
Chronacle. The letters were never intended for publication but, after their privacy
was breached and in order to preserve
their authenticity, they were published
in their entirety in 2001. Margarets
replies were never discovered.
From these letters we have a moving
insight into the enduring love between
Margaret and Charles. He tells her he
misses his chum and his lover and his
concern about her health shows that he
is worried as well as lonely without her.
This Chronycle seems to be full of fleeting
impressions and disconnected sentences but
anyone who can read their meaning would
find only three words I love you.
won prizes in Italy and Vienna, where he

met Gustav Klimt and other artists.
This talented couple seemed to have
the world at their feet but unfortunately
their work was better known on the
Continent than in Britain and by 1914
commissions had dried up and they
moved from Glasgow to Walberswick
in Suffolk. It was there that Mackintosh
executed exquisite botanical watercolours. This was during the First World
War and the local folk mistrusted the
man with the strange accent who
received mail from Vienna. Mackintosh enjoyed walking along the sea
front at night carrying a lantern. The
locals thought he was signalling to the
German fleet and reported him. He
was arrested and imprisoned while his
wife was away and it was only on her
return that she was able to convince the
authorities of their mistake.
By 1923 they were seriously impoverished and decided to leave England to
settle in France. Mackintoshs watercolours during this time show both
his love of nature and his architectural
perspective. During all their trials and
tribulations Margaret was by his side
Money was still a problem and he writes

on the thinnest paper he can find so
that the postage will not be so great,
injecting humour into the messages:
Writing lightly so that the weight of the lead
in the pencil will not cause extra postage.
Tongue cancer forced him to return to
London and he died in 1928, a disappointed and impoverished man whose
early promise had not been fulfilled,
partly due to the Great War and the
lack of commissions during that period.
Margaret died five years later and their
estate was valued at 88.16s 2d. It is
ironic that in 2002 the kimono-style
writing desk that he designed was sold
at Christies for 900,000 and in 2008
Margarets painting, The Red Rose and the
White Rose, sold at auction for a sum in
excess of 1,700,000.
In December 2009 a plaque was
erected in Chelsea to celebrate the
London years of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. His work can be seen at venues
across Glasgow and beyond.
Barbara Butcher is the author of The Other Canal

(Troubadour, 2011).
MonthsPast
SEPTEMBER
By Richard Cavendish
SEPTEMBER 12th 1940
The Lascaux
cave paintings
discovered
ONE OF archaeologys most exciting
discoveries was made by four French
teenagers and possibly a dog. Versions
of the story differ in detail, but Marcel
Ravidat, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel
and Simon Coencas came across a hole
in the ground in woods near the village
of Montignac in the Dordogne region of
south-west France. Whether they had
a dog called Robot with them and it
chased a rabbit into the hole is uncertain.
Another version has Ravidat finding the
hole on September 8th and taking the
other three back with him on the 12th.
There was a local story about a secret
tunnel that led to buried treasure and
the boys thought this might be it. After
dropping stones into the hole to get an
idea of how deep it was, one by one
they went cautiously down into what
proved to be a narrow shaft. It led down
15 metres (nearly 50ft) to a cave whose
walls were covered with astonishing
paintings. Marsal said later that going
down the shaft was terrifying, but the
paintings were a cavalcade of animals
larger than life that seemed to be
moving. The boys were worried about
getting back up again, but they managed
it using their elbows and knees. Tremendously excited, they promised each other
to keep their discovery a secret and
explored it again the next day. After that
they decided to show it to friends for a
tiny admission fee.
The news quickly spread and so many
people came to see the cave that the
boys consulted their schoolmaster, Leon
Laval, who was a member of the local
prehistory society. He suspected it was
a ruse to trap him in the hole, but when
he went cautiously down and saw the
paintings he immediately felt sure they
were prehistoric and insisted that no
Brief opening: a
tourist poster for
the caves, 1955.
one must be allowed to touch them and

they must be guarded against vandalism.
The youngest of the boys, 14-year-old
Marsal, persuaded his parents to let him
pitch a tent near the entrance to keep
guard and show visitors round. It was
the start of a commitment to the paintings which lasted to his death in 1989.
Word of the discovery reached the
Abb Breuil, an eminent prehistorian,
who vouched for the paintings authenticity. The sensational news spread
through Europe and the rest of the
world and in 1948 the family that owned
the land organised daily tours that eventually brought thousands of visitors every
year to see for themselves.
There were more paintings in
galleries that led off the main cave and
they confirmed previous discoveries,
which had showed that, unlike other

animals, the first human beings believed
in religion, magic and art. They buried
their dead formally with equipment for
another life and they may have believed
in a great mother goddess, the source
of all life. They seem to have had a deep
sense of the numinous, of something
outside human beings that is powerful,
mysterious and uncanny.
The paintings convey this. Dated to
about 15,000 bc, though they may have
been created over a longer period than
formerly realised, they show bulls of
the now extinct aurochs species, oxen,
horses and stags as well as arrows and
traps. Early humans were hunters and
one of the purposes of the paintings
may have been to bring about successful hunting in real life. There is a figure
of a man with a birds head, perhaps a
shaman, who carried out rituals in the
cave. Recent theories link some of the
paintings with constellations in the sky,
including the Pleiades and Taurus, or
connect them with ritual dancing, which
can induce trances and cause visions.
The thousands of visitors to Lascaux
did not mean to harm the paintings,
but they did, simply by breathing on
them. The occasional visitor fainted
because the atmosphere was so thick.
Condensation formed on the walls and
ceilings, moisture ran down the paintings and lichens and mould developed.
High-powered lighting added to the
damage and the paintings began to fade.
Lascaux was closed to the public in 1963
by the French minister of culture, Andr
Malraux, and only experts were allowed
in. A replica of the site was built close by
for the public in 1983 and draws 300,000
visitors a year. Efforts to halt the damage
to the original paintings are continuing.
In 2009 the French ministry of culture
brought close to 300 experts from many
different countries together in Paris to
consider ways to halt the deterioration.
Their recommendations were published
in 2011, but misgivings about the site
have not been allayed.
SEPTEMBER 6th 1715
The Jacobite
standard raised
at Braemar
JAMES FRANCIS EDWARD STUART,
later known as the Old Pretender, was
born in St Jamess Palace, London in
1688. His father, James II of England
and VII of Scots, was privately Roman
Catholic and his mother, Mary of
Modena, openly so. The next British
king would clearly be raised a Catholic
and a story spread among Protestants
that the real baby was stillborn and
another infant had been smuggled
into the queens bed in a warmingpan. It was not a promising start.
A Protestant rebellion drove James
into exile in France by the end of the
year. Mary of Modena had already
taken the baby there. Courtesy of
Louis XIV, they lived at the Chateau
de St-Germain-en-Laye while Britain
was ruled by William of Orange and
then by James IIs Protestant daughter Anne from 1701. James II died that
year and young James, now 13, was

claimed to be his rightful successor
as James III and VIII. In 1708, with
a French fleet, he tried to invade
Scotland, but was driven away by
English warships. When Anne died in
1714 Catholic claimants were barred.
James knew he might succeed her if
he turned Protestant, but he spurned
the idea and a German Protestant,
the first of the Hanoverian dynasty,
was crowned as George I.
John Erskine, Earl of Mar, now took
a hand. A Scottish peer, he lived in
London and was secretary of state
SEPTEMBER 28th 1865
licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries,

which though less prestigious than an
MD, or doctorate of medicine, would
entitle her to be a practising physician.
The Society shrank back in alarm, but
her father threatened to sue it and she
passed the exams in 1865. It then revised
Britains first
female doctor
ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON
was described in her time as a woman
of indomitable will who did not suffer
fools gladly. Her father was a prosperous
businessman in Aldeburgh in Suffolk,
who believed that girls should have as
good an education as boys and she was
educated at home with some teenage
years at a boarding school for girls.
When Elizabeth decided she wanted
to be a doctor, her father was supportive but her mother was horrified. Most
doctors and surgeons did not want
a woman joining their ranks. Nor did
medical colleges and her applications to
teaching hospitals and universities were
turned down. Sneaking in as a nurse at
the Middlesex Hospital in London failed
to work and she hit on becoming a
Highland fling:
the Earl of
Mar with the
Stuart standard,
20th-century
illustration.
Medical pioneer:
Elizabeth Garrett
Anderson, c.1888.
for Scotland. Although he assured

George of his loyalty he was deprived
of his post. In August 1715 he got away
to Scotland, allegedly disguised as
a workman. Lowland Scotland was
staunchly Protestant, but the situation was different in the Highlands
and Mar convinced a number of clan
chiefs that Scotland faced enslavement by the English, if it did not act.
At a gathering at Braemar, west of
Aberdeen, he proclaimed James VIII
king of Scotland, England, Ireland and
France and raised the Stuart banner.
Mar led a large army, but he was
a useless general. He failed to defeat
government forces in battle and a Jacobite invasion of England also failed.
James Stuart arrived in Scotland in
December, but he was timid, indecisive and no leader. Mar and James
scuttled off to France in February 1716,
leaving their followers in the lurch.
Mar accepted a bribe from George Is
government (reportedly 3,500 a
year, over 1 million today) and stayed
quiet until his death in 1732. Rescued
by successive popes, James Stuart
lived on in palatial ineffectuality in
Rome until he died aged 77 in 1766.
its rules to keep women out.

In 1866 Elizabeth opened the
St Marys Dispensary for Women and
Children in the Marylebone area of
London, a hospital solely for women,
staffed solely by women, which drew
crowds of poor patients. In 1870 she obtained the University of Pariss first ever
MD degree for a woman and in 1872 her
Marylebone dispensary became the New
Hospital for Women. In 1871, aged 34,
Elizabeth married James George Skelton
Anderson, head of a large shipping firm,
who supported her belief in independence for married women. The barriers
were giving way and in 1874 she helped
to found the London School of Medicine
for Women, where she taught for years.
Elizabeth also supported the suffragettes. In 1902 she and her husband
retired to Aldeburgh, where she became
mayor in 1908, the first woman mayor in
Britain. When she died there in 1917 aged
81 her London hospital was renamed
after her in her honour.
SLAVERY
The Slave Trade,

an engraving by
J.R. Smith, late 18th
century.
A society built
on SLAVERY
The extent to which Britons were involved in slave-ownership has been

laid bare by a project based at University College London. One of its
researchers, Katie Donington, shows how one family profited.
HE LEGACIES OF British Slave-ownership project

has been based at University College London
since 2009. The project has digitised the records
of the Slave Compensation Commission. The
work highlighted the little-known economic process of
compensation that accompanied the abolition of slavery
in the British Caribbean, the Cape of Good Hope (both
1834) and Mauritius (1835). As part of the measures to end
slavery the government paid slave-owners 20 million in
compensation. This act created a bureaucratic record of
everyone who claimed property in people at the moment
of abolition. Working with these records, the project has
built up a biographical database of the recipients in order to
try to measure their impact on the formation of Victorian
Britain. Multiple research strands were identified cultural,

political, commercial, imperial, physical and historical so
that the project could examine the different spheres of
influence that slave-based wealth infiltrated.
The database offers a unique snapshot of who the slaveowners were at the ending of slavery. There were approximately 46,000 claimants, although not all of them were
successful in gaining compensation. Of the 20 million paid
out, nearly half of the money stayed in Britain. Unsurprisingly, some of the funds went to wealthy absentees, but the
flow of money also highlights the importance of another
class of compensation recipient: the British merchant. This
merchant class was a vitally important cog in the machinery of transatlantic slavery and yet little is known about
it. When it comes to the public memory of slavery, these

money men have attracted hardly any scrutiny. Barry Unsworth detailed the operations of the West India counting
house in his 1992 novel Sacred Hunger. Describing the maps
and ledgers and the markings in tidy columns, he remarked
on the ways in which these careful dashes and figures
represented the violence of abstraction. Far away from the
horror of plantation life, slaverys human face was subject
to a process of geographical and psychological distancing.
The suffering of enslaved men, women and children was
converted into hogsheads of sugar, puncheons of rum and
barrels of sticky molasses. Mercantile wealth derived from
the profits of the plantation was one important way that
slavery returned home to Britain.
AMONG THE thousands of entries in the database it is
possible to lose sight of the human stories that underpin
the records. In attempting to understand a history of the
magnitude of transatlantic slavery it is sometimes useful to
approach it through the individual. George Hibbert was born
in 1757 to a Manchester family that had made its money
as cotton manufacturers. The family supplied finished
cotton goods that were then shipped from Liverpool and
used to trade for enslaved people in West Africa. Georges
fathers generation had become increasingly involved with
the slavery business and in 1734 his uncle Thomas had left
for Jamaica where he settled, making a living as a slave
factor. Buying enslaved people directly from the ship and
selling them on to his plantocratic clients, Thomas made a
reputation for himself as the most eminent Guinea factor
in Kingston. During the 1760s the familys concerns in
Jamaica expanded; they became involved in credit finance
and bought sugar plantations and pens. The business was
run by a close-knit network of kith and kin, a feature that
was common to the most successful of the transatlantic
merchant houses.
In the late 1760s Georges eldest brother Thomas
returned from Jamaica, where he had learned his business from his uncle. Thomas set up a commercial house
in London from which he and his partners acted as sugar
merchants and plantation suppliers, as well as providing
credit to their associates in the colony. The Hibberts counted
some of the wealthiest men in Jamaica as their business
correspondents, including the planters Simon Taylor, John
Tharp and Nathaniel Phillips. George joined his brothers
George Hibbert by
Thomas Lawrence, 1811.
In attempting to
understand a history
of the magnitude
of transatlantic
slavery it is useful to
approach it through
the individual
SLAVERY
A West India
Sportsman,
published by
William Holland,
1807.
The extent of the Hibbert

familys involvement in
slavery is evident from
the sum they received in
compensation
firm in 1780 and quickly rose to become its senior partner.
While four of his brothers served their time in Jamaica,
attending to their uncle Thomas slave trading empire,
George himself never visited the island. Instead he became a
leading member of the London West India interest. He was
a regular attendee and sometimes chairman of the Society
of West India Planters and Merchants. He purchased the
seat for the rotten borough of Seaford, in Sussex, and served
as an MP between 1806 and 1812. He spoke at length in
defence of the slave trade during the parliamentary debates
in 1807. Eventually he achieved his lifelong ambition and
was appointed Agent for Jamaica in 1812, a position he kept
for nearly 20 years, only relinquishing the post when old age
and infirmity forced him to retire from public life.
The extent of the Hibbert familys involvement in
slavery is evident from the sum they received in compensation. Twelve family members received jointly the total of
approximately 103,000. As the head of the family counting
house, George received the largest single sum: 63,000. The
Hibberts made claims as trustees, owners-in-fee, mortgagees, judgement creditors, devisees in trust and executors.
Their ownership of enslaved people was based both on

plantation ownership and on the complex system of credit
relationships that characterised the West India trade. It
shows how long the campaign for compensation took
and demonstrates Hibberts vital role in the negotiations.
George himself had supported the principle of compensation from as early as 1790 when he gave evidence to the
select committee tasked with examining the slave trade. He
consistently argued throughout his career that investment
in the slave economy was legitimate and that respectable
people would be ruined without payment for their loss of
property. As late as 1833, just four years before his death,
he wrote to The Times newspaper to make his case.
Although Hibbert was an active member of the proslavery lobby in London, in order to consider the ways in
which the wealth generated through the slavery business
infiltrated the British economy, the following account
focuses on the private world he inhabited. George Hibberts
domestic life provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between the profits of slavery and the culture of
conspicuous consumption in Britain.
HE ASSOCIATION between Clapham, in the

south-west of London, and abolitionism particularly the Clapham Sect, or Clapham Saints, a group
of social reformers who included William Wilberforce has created a particular historical narrative and
identity for the area. Many of the buildings in which the
abolitionists lived, worshipped and worked proclaim their
inheritance proudly with plaques which draw the casual
passer-bys attention to this history. English Heritage Blue
Plaques and their forerunners, the London County Council

plaques, can be found adorning the walls of Holy Trinity
Church, where the Saints worshipped, at the Pavement,
which was the home of Zachary Macaulay, and at Broomwood Road, where William Wilberforce was based.
In 2007 Britain marked the bicentenary of the abolition
of the slave trade. Abolition was deemed a public history
priority and numerous activities were arranged around the
Clapham area. While critics of the commemorations dubbed
it Wilberfest, 2007 arguably gave historians, museums,
libraries, archives, galleries and community groups the time,
space and, importantly, the funding to investigate their
links with the history of the slave trade and its abolition.
This allowed people to recover so-called hidden histories
of their local area. The links that were turned up as a result
were striking in their diversity: a reminder that the local
and the global were deeply enmeshed in a period when commercial and imperial endeavours were creating a far more
interconnected world than had existed previously.
Situated in the abolitionist heartland for over 20 years
following their arrival in 1793, George Hibberts family
lived at Clapham Common Northside. George was joined in
Clapham in 1800 by his brother Samuels widow, Mary, and
her son, Samuel Junior, who was also a member of the Hibberts London West India merchant house. By 1812 Georges
brother William, a partner in the family firm, who had spent
time working for their uncle in Jamaica, had also moved into
the area, on the South Side of the Common.
The Hibberts were not the only residents on the
Common who had links to the slavery business, as a map
of 1800 shows. Instantly recognisable on the map is the
Wilberforce residence and living next door to it was the
Wedderburn family. The Wedderburns, like the Hibberts,
were a slave-owning family with interests in Jamaica, who
had also set up a London West India mercantile partnership.
A tutor of the young James Webster Wedderburn John
Campbell the future Lord Chancellor described how he
was bored to the point of resigning his post by the incessant
talk of the West Indies within the household.
Perambulation
of Clapham
Common, 1800,
showing family
residences.
N EXPLAINING THE PRESENCE of slave-owning families

on the Common it is important to recognise the character
of the area as it stood during the period; not solely as an
enclave for abolitionists but as a popular destination for
Londons successful merchants and bankers, who sought to
establish themselves in suburban villas on the outskirts of
the capital. Away from the threatening
and uncontrollable boisterousness
of the capital, but close enough to
make it accessible, Clapham provided
a happy medium, combining the conspicuous trappings of gentility with
the everyday demands of a working
merchant. Its draw for respectable
families was summed up by the novelist E.M. Forster, whose great-aunt was
Marianne Thornton, daughter of the
abolitionist Henry Thornton. Forster
wrote that:
The Clapham area had become civilised,
there was no danger from highwaymen,
the merchants and politicians who were
beginning to settle there could leave their
families in safety when they drove the
four or five miles to Westminster or to
the City.
That sense of security came not only
in the form of physical safety but also
from the moral and spiritual character
of its middle-class residents.
Before their move to Clapham,
George and his wife Elizabeth, the
daughter of Phillip Fonnereau, an MP
and director of the Bank of England,
had lived on Broad Street in the City.
The residence was a short walk away
from the Hibbert family counting
house on Mincing Lane; the noise,
smells and poverty of the fellow
residents of the nearby courts meant
the area was hardly the place for an
aspiring gentleman to keep a wife or
raise children. George had grown up in
Manchester, where his parents lived
in a dwelling house with warehouse
SLAVERY
Below: Wiliam Wilberforce,
by Thomas Lawrence, 1828.
Right: Holy Trinity Church,
Clapham.
space adjacent to the property. His mother and the children

would have been exposed to his fathers thriving business
but things would be very different for his wife and young
family: a reflection of the rise during the period of the
notion of separate spheres. After nearly ten years of marriage, with six children and their seventh expected, George
and Elizabeth left the City.
By this time George had attained a level of seniority
within both the counting house and the West India interest
and a suburban villa reflected his increased status within
Londons commercial society. A detailed inventory of the
house and land can be found in the 1820 advertisement for
its sale. The profits from Georges lucrative engagement
with the slave economy had clearly paid off; the advert described the house as a capacious and commodious family
abode. It boasted a 170ft approach to the front as well as
another elevated Frontage in a most beautiful situation to
the rear of the property, double coach houses and stabling
for four horses, a gardeners cottage, six servants rooms
and a servants hall, nine family bedrooms, 12 further rooms
for the familys use and an extensive 500ft garden that
stretched down to Wandsworth Road. The family rooms

give a glimpse into the comfortable existence of the young
Hibbert family. The three bedchambers on the second storey
were accessed via a grand double staircase on the first floor.
As the family rose in the morning to prepare for the day they
had the use of three dressing rooms. Their early hours might
have been passed in a cheerful Morning Room.
EORGE WAS AN avid collector of books and he

reached a degree of fame for his prized possessions. His collection included works printed by
Aldus, a collection of books printed on vellum,
a copy of the Gutenberg Bible and contemporary authors,
as well as a large number of texts on the West Indies and
slavery. An indication of the size and value of Georges
collection can be taken from an auction of his books which
took place in 1829: he sold 20,000 volumes over 27 days
raising 21,753, which he then invested in remodelling his
country estate. George was by no means an uninformed
fashionable consumer; his library was both a home for his
books and place in which he could work. His reputation
specially commissioned frieze by Henry Howard, The Fable of

Cupid and Psyche. Classical civilisation with its vast empire
and practice of slave-holding appealed to George; he used
examples from it to bolster his arguments during the slave
trade debates.
Guests of the Hibberts would have been encouraged
to take advantage of his extensive gardens. George was a
serious amateur botanist and he spared no expense in pursuing his passion. The building of a hothouse was testament to
his horticultural ambitions. The effect was captured vividly
by a friend, Dibdin:
Must I tell how the Alpine or Chinese roses, how the exotics from
America or Japan have given place to the delicious performances
to flowers whose bloom is perennial from the garden plots
of Spira, Jenson and Zarotus? Shall I lead you in imagination
to the Morocco (not azalea) bowers, and Russia
(not orange tree) vistos, of Honorio?
Georges activities as a merchant and his
involvement with shipping enabled him to
collect specimens from all corners of the
globe. He employed professional horticulturists, one of whom, James McFayden, went on
to become Jamaicas island botanist. Georges
botanical knowledge and connections
gave him the authority needed to be taken
seriously in new scientific ventures affecting
colonisation and trade; the Colonial Secretary
Robert Wilmot Horton sought his advice on
introducing the silk worm to Jamaica.
Top: a plaque
on Holy Trinity
in honour of
Wilberforce, who
worshipped there.
Above: the
Hibbert
almshouse,
Clapham,
opened in 1859.
for erudition created an alternative identity to that of

slave-owner and merchant, authorising his claims, or so he
might have imagined, to the cultural superiority which legitimised his ownership of lesser human beings. The house
then operated as familial, social and business space. In his
diary Georges brother Robert made multiple references
to business conversations which took place at the family
home. For instance in 1801, he wrote Thursday we go to
Clapham and dine with George, the new co-partnership
canvassed.
The Hibberts held large dinner parties, dancing and
theatrical performances. Georges brother Robert wrote in
his diary about balls he attended at the home in Clapham
and Georges commonplace book was filled with plays he
had written for the family to perform in the house. The elegantly fitted up drawing room, adorned with costly marble
chimney-pieces, was without doubt the centrepiece of the
Hibberts abode. The Reverend Thomas Dibdin described
the room and house in his Bibliographical Decameron, as a
Palace of Pleasure, gushing Oh the luxury of that abode!
The felicities which his taste and his well-replenished purse
impart! George was also an enthusiastic patron of art. His
cosmopolitan taste included examples of the Old Masters,
Italian, Dutch and Flemish prints and contemporary British
artists. The drawing room at Clapham was dominated by a
HE GARDEN reflected the needs

and ambitions of its owner; it was
paid for and stocked by commercial
endeavour but, while it might have
aspirations towards the rural idyll, it was
shaped by the demands of urban fashion.
George never visited the further reaches of Empire,
preferring instead to remain in Europe, but he did stock
his garden full of the flora and fauna of the imperial world,
creating his own botanical microcosm of the Empire in his
hothouse in Clapham.
Georges villa was situated in a prime location close
to Holy Trinity Church, where both the Hibberts and the
Saints worshipped. It was under the ministry of Henry
Venn, an ardent Evangelical and founding member of the
Clapham Sect, whose son John went on to become rector in
1797; he was also involved in the abolition movement. Holy
Trinity constituted a sacred space for the Saints; it was their
spiritual home, a place in which their beliefs were formed
and enacted. While there was no bar to the Hibberts using
the church as a place of worship, one must wonder how the
abolitionists felt about the presence of someone who was so
publicly opposed to one of their most treasured principles.
The social importance of church life can be read in a
series of disputes which broke out between George and a
Mr Dobree over who was the rightful claimant of a highly
desirable pew; while the trustees wished to allocate the
seats to Georges rival, he was able to prove his claim and
the pew was duly awarded to him along with a further
five seats at the back for his servants. The almost comical
round of musical chairs played by the great and good of
SLAVERY
Clockwise from right: the plant Hibbertia, named

after George Hibbert; Murillos The Marriage Feast at
Cana, c.1665-75, which belonged to him; a catalogue
of the sale of Hibberts book collection, 1829.
Clapham Commons Holy Trinity Church is indicative of the

importance of the familys visibility in the religious life of
the community.
Living a lifestyle which shadowed the Saints enabled
George to demonstrate to the abolitionists the ways in
which respectable middle-class families were supported
and maintained by an engagement with the slave economy.
Cultivating a genteel identity for himself was politically
useful. George noted in his diary in 1816 that: Mr. Wilberforce came to me in the House of Commons the other day
purposely as he said to thank me for being the only one of
his opponents who had treated him like a Gentleman.
ANGIBLE TRACES OF THE HIBBERTS can still

be found in Clapham: Georges first son, also
George, and his brother, William are buried in the
churchyard at St Pauls in Rectory Grove. They
share the graveyard with a number of African children. In
1799 Zachary Macaulay had brought the children with him
when he returned home after serving as the governor of
Sierra Leone. In the years following their arrival most of the
children died. They were interred in the same churchyard
as Georges son and brother. While the Hibberts grave has
lasted intact for over 200 years, nothing has survived to
name, mark or commemorate the African children.
Further down from St Pauls, on Wandsworth Road, is
the still operational Hibbert Almshouse. Erected by the
daughters of William Hibbert, Georges brother, the building
carries an inscription to the memory of their father, creating
a lasting reputation for William as a benevolent philanthropist divorced from his involvement with slavery.
The presence of the Hibberts in Clapham acts as a
reminder that slave-based wealth was not simply generated
and spent in the local areas we now associate most closely
with the slavery business. As the work of the Legacies of
British Slave-ownership project has demonstrated, the
Monument of the
late Thos. Hibbert
Esq, in Jamaica, by
James Hakewill,
1825.
profits of slavery infiltrated diverse geographic locations

and a range of sectors of the British economy including,
but by no means limited to, the cultural sphere. The house
in Clapham was filled with all the trappings of mercantile
gentility: luxurious furnishings, paintings and exquisite
objects, a library and a garden renowned for its rare blooms.
Abstracted in the elegance of the polite mercantile home,
the profits from slavery were domesticated and remade as
the signifiers of cultural connoisseurship, taste and status.
The traces of the history of slave-ownership can be found
throughout Britain. The weight of abolitionist memory
might have served to obscure that presence but it is only
one facet of the story of Britains involvement with slavery.
Claphams hidden history mirrors a wider national urge
to remember the celebrated role Britain played in emancipation, while simultaneously forgetting an uncomfortable
history of domestic participation. In order to move beyond
telling stories that suppress the memory of slave-ownership,
as well as remembering the Clapham Saints we must also
recognise the sinners. It is only through an articulation of
both sides of the history that Britain can come to terms with
its role as both enslaver and abolitionist.
Katie Donington is a Research Associate with the Antislavery Usable Past
project at the University of Nottingham.
FURTHER READING
Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slaveownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of
Slavery (Cambridge, 2010).
Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland,
Katie Donington, Rachel Lang, Legacies of British
Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of
Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2015).
ISLAM
German officers
and local leaders
in Cyrenaica,
Libya, September,
1942.
Muslims
in Hitlers
War
The Nazis believed that Islamic forces would prove
crucial wartime allies. But, as David Motadel
shows, the Muslim world was unwilling to be
swayed by the Third Reichs advances.
UNIS, DECEMBER 19TH, 1942. It was the day

of Eid al-Adha, the Islamic feast of sacrifice. The
retreat of Rommels army had turned the city into
a massive military camp. In the late afternoon, a
German motorcade of four large cars drove at a slow, solemn
pace along Tunis main road, the Avenue de Paris, leaving
the capital in the direction of the coastal town of Hamman
Lif. The convoy contained Colonel General Hans-Jrgen von
Arnim, commander of the Wehrmacht in Tunisia, Rudolf
Rahn, Hitlers consul in Tunis and the Reichs highest civil
representative in North Africa, and some other high-ranking Germans. They were to visit the Bey of Tunis, Muhammad VII al-Munsif, who had remained the nominal ruler
of Tunisia, to offer him their good wishes for the sacred
holiday and to show their respect for Islam. In front of the
Winter Palace of Hamman Lif, hundreds of cheering people
saluted the convoy; the Tunisian guard extended them an
honorary welcome. In the conversations with the monarch,
the Germans promised that the next Eid al-Adha, or Eid
al-Kabir as it is known in Tunisia, would take place in a time
of peace and that the Wehrmacht was doing everything it
could to keep the war away from the Muslim population.
More important than the consultations, though, was the
Germans public show of respect for Islam. Back in his Tunis
headquarters, Rahn enthusiastically cabled Berlin, urging
it to make full propagandistic use of the solemn reception
at the Eid al-Kabir celebration. In the following days, Nazi
propaganda spread the news across North Africa, portraying
the Third Reich as the protector of Islam.
ISLAM
The cover of
Der Islam, 1941.
At the height of the Second World War, in 1941-42, as

Hitlers troops marched into Muslim-populated territories
in North Africa, the Balkans, Crimea and the Caucasus and
approached the Middle East and Central Asia, officials in
Berlin began to see Islam as politically significant. In the
following years, they made significant attempts to promote
an alliance with the Muslim world against their alleged
common enemies: the British Empire, the Soviet Union,
America and Jews.
Yet the reason for the Third Reichs engagement with
Islam was not only that Muslim-populated regions had
become part of the warzones but also, more importantly,
because at the same time, Germanys military situation
had deteriorated. In the Soviet Union, Hitlers Blitzkrieg
strategy had failed. As the Wehrmacht came under pressure, Berlin began to seek broader war coalitions, thereby
demonstrating remarkable pragmatism. The courtship of
Muslims was to pacify the occupied Muslim-populated
territories and to mobilise the faithful to fight on the side of
Hitlers armies.
German officials had increasingly engaged with Islam
since the late 19th century, when the kaiser ruled over substantial Muslim populations in his colonies of Togo, Cameroon and German East Africa. Here, the Germans sought
to employ religion as a tool of control. Sharia courts were
recognised, Islamic endowments left untouched, madrasas
kept open and religious holidays acknowledged. Colonial
officials ruled through Islamic intermediaries who, in
return, gave the colonial state legitimacy. In Berlin, Islam
was moreover considered to offer an opportunity for
exploitation in the context of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik. This
became most obvious during the Middle Eastern tour of
Wilhelm II in 1898 and in his dramatic speech, given after
visiting the tomb of Saladin in Damascus, in which
he declared himself a friend of the worlds 300 million
Mohammedans and, ultimately, in Berlins efforts to
mobilise Muslims living in the British, French and Russian
Top: Muslim
policemen in the
German colony of
Cameroon, 1891.
Left: a parade
at the end of
Ramadan, Uraza
Bairam, in
Kislovodsk,
October 11th, 1942.
empires during the First World War. Although all attempts

to spread jihad in 1914 had failed, German strategists maintained a strong interest in the geopolitics of Islam.
With the outbreak of the Second World War and the
involvement of German troops in Muslim-populated
regions, officials in Berlin began again to consider the
strategic role of the Islamic world. A systematic instrumentalisation of Islam was first proposed in late 1941 in
a memorandum by the diplomat Eberhard von Stohrer,
Hitlers former ambassador in Cairo. Stohrer suggested that
there should be an extensive Islam program, which would
include a statement about the general attitude of the Third
discrimination in the 1930s, following diplomatic interventions from the governments in Tehran, Ankara and Cairo.
During the war the Germans showed similar pragmatism
when encountering Muslims from the Balkans and the
Turkic minorities of the Soviet Union. Muslims, it was clear
to every German officer from the Sahara to the Caucasus,
were to be treated as allies.
Reich towards Islam. Between late 1941 and late 1942 the
Foreign Office set up an Islam program, which included the
employment of religious figures, most prominently the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, who arrived in Berlin
in late 1941. On December 18th, 1942 the Nazis inaugurated
the Islamic Central Institute in Berlin, which became a hub
of Germanys propaganda efforts in the Islamic world; the
party organ, the Vlkischer Beobachter, ran a headline promising, This War Could Bring Freedom to Islam! As the war
progressed and German troops moved into Muslim areas in
the Balkans and in the Soviet Union, other branches of the
Nazi state followed up on these policies.
ERMAN OFFICIALS tended to view Muslim populations under the rubric of Islam. An advantage
of using Islam rather than ethno-national categories was that Berlin could avoid the thorny issue
of national independence. Moreover, religion seemed to be
a useful policy and propaganda tool to address ethnically,
linguistically and socially heterogeneous populations. The
Germans saw Islam as a source of authority that could legitimise involvement in a conflict and even justify violence.
In terms of racial barriers, the regime showed remarkable
pragmatism: (Non-Jewish) Turks, Iranians and Arabs had
already been explicitly exempted from any official racial
German armoured
personnel carriers
in a Bosnian
Muslim village,
1944.
N THE GROUND in North Africa, in contact with

the coastal populations, army officials tried to
avoid frictions. As early as 1941, the Wehrmacht
distributed the handbook Der Islam to train the
troops in correct behaviour towards Muslims. In the Libyan
and Egyptian desert, German authorities courted religious
dignitaries, most importantly the shaykhs of the influential
Sufi orders. The problem was that the most powerful religious force in the Cyrenaican warzone, the Islamic Sanusi
order, was the spearhead of the anti-colonial resistance
against Italian rule and fought alongside Montgomerys
army against the Axis. In any case, Berlins promises to liberate the Muslims and protect Islam stood in sharp contrast
to the violence and destruction that the war had brought to
North Africa and the Germans ultimately failed to incite a
major Muslim pro-Axis movement in the region.
On the Eastern Front the situation was very different.
The Muslims of Crimea and the North Caucasus had confronted the central state ever since the tsarist annexation
in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Bolshevist takeover
had worsened the situation. Under Stalin, the Muslim areas
suffered unprecedented political and religious persecution.
Islamic literature was censored, sharia law banned and the
property of the Islamic communities expropriated. Party
cadres took over mosques, painted Soviet slogans on their
walls, hoisted red flags on their minarets and chased pigs
through their sacred halls. Still, Islam continued to play
a crucial role in shaping social and political life. After the
invasion of the Caucasus and Crimea, German military
authorities, eager to find local collaborators to stabilise the
volatile rear areas, did not miss the opportunity to present
themselves as the liberators of Islam. General Ewald von
Kleist, commander of Army Group A, which occupied the
Caucasus, urged his officers to respect the Muslims and
to be aware of the pan-Islamic implications of the Wehrmachts actions: Among all of the German Army Groups,
Army Group A has advanced the furthest. We stand at the
gates to the Islamic world. What we do, and how we behave
here will radiate deep into Iraq, to India, as far as to the
borders of China. We must constantly be aware of the longrange effect of our actions and inactions. Similar orders
were issued by General Erich von Manstein in Crimea. In his
infamous order of November 20th, 1941, which demanded
that the Jewish-Bolshevist system be exterminated once
and for all and which became one of the key documents
used by his prosecution at Nuremberg after the war, Manstein urged his troops to treat the Muslim population well:
Respect for religious customs of the Mohammedan Tartars
must be demanded.
In their attempt to control the strategically sensitive
rear areas, the Germans made extensive use of religious
policies. They ordered the rebuilding of mosques, prayer
halls and madrasas and the re-establishment of religious
holidays. In the Caucasus, they staged massive celebrations at the end of Ramadan in 1942, of which the most
ISLAM
notable was in the Karachai city of Kislovodsk. Under
Soviet rule, the Muslims of Kislovodsk had not openly observed Eid al-Fitr and the celebration became a key marker
of difference between Soviet and German rule. Attended
by a large delegation of high-ranking Wehrmacht generals,
it included prayers, speeches and exchanges of gifts; the
Germans had brought captured weapons and Qurans. In the
centre of Kislovodsk, a parade of Karachai horsemen was
organised. Behind the honorary tribune for Muslim leaders
and Wehrmacht officers, an oversized, open papier-mch
Quran was arranged, displaying two pious quotations
The attitudes of Nazi officials towards the

Muslim population cooled the longer the
occupation period lasted
in Arabic script. On the right-hand page there was the
shahada, the statement of faith: There is no god but Allah/
Muhammad is his Prophet (La ilaha illa Allah/Muhammadan rasul Allah). On the left was the popular Quranic verse
(61:13): Help [comes] from Allah/and a nigh victory (Nasr
min Allah/Wa fath qarib). Nailed above the Quran was an
enormous wooden Reich eagle with a swastika. In Crimea
the Germans even established an Islamic administration,
the so-called Muslim Committees. In the end, the hopes
for freedom among the Muslims of the Soviet borderlands
were shattered. The attitudes of Nazi officials towards the
Muslim population cooled the longer the occupation period
lasted. Ordinary German soldiers, influenced by propaganda
defaming the Asiatic peoples of the Soviet Union as subhumans, were not prepared for dealing with Muslims. Even
worse, after the German retreat, Stalin accused the Muslim
minorities of collective collaboration with the enemy and
ordered their deportation.
THE SITUATION IN THE BALKANS was different again.

When the Germans invaded and dissolved Yugoslavia in
1941, they initially did not get involved in the Muslimpopulated regions, most importantly Bosnia and Herzegovina, which came under the control of the newly founded
Croatian Ustaa state. The Ustaa regime, led by Hitlers
puppet dictator Ante Paveli, officially tried to court its
Muslim subjects, while murdering Jews and Roma and
persecuting Orthodox Serbs. From early 1942, however, the
region became increasingly engulfed in a severe conflict
between the Croatian regime, Titos Communist partisans and Dragoljub Draa Mihailovis Orthodox Serbian
etniks, who were fighting for a greater Serbia. The Muslim
population was repeatedly attacked by all three parties.
Ustaa authorities employed Muslim army units to fight
both Titos partisans and etnik militias. Soon, Muslim villages became the object of retaliatory attacks. The number
of Muslim victims grew to the tens of thousands. Ustaa
authorities did little to prevent these massacres. Leading
Muslim representatives turned to the Germans for help,
asking for Muslim autonomy under Hitlers protection. In
a memorandum of November 1st, 1942 they professed their
love and loyalty for the Fhrer and offered to fight with
the Axis against Judaism, Freemasonry, Bolshevism, and
the English exploiters. Officials in Berlin were thrilled.
As the civil war in the Balkans spun out of control, the
Germans became more and more involved in the Muslimpopulated areas. In their attempts to pacify the region, the
Wehrmacht and, more importantly, the SS saw the Muslims
as welcome allies and promoted Nazi Germany as a protector of Islam in South-eastern Europe. The campaign began
in Spring 1943, when the SS sent the Mufti of Jerusalem
on a tour to Zagreb, Banja Luka and Sarajevo, where he
met religious leaders and gave pro-Axis speeches. When
visiting the grand Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque in Sarajevo,
he gave such an emotional speech about Muslim suffering
Below: a damaged
mosque in North
Africa, 1942.
Bottom: German
soldiers talk to a
Muslim woman
in Mostar, Herzegovina, 1944.
that parts of the audience burst into tears. In the following

months the Germans launched a massive campaign of religiously charged propaganda. At the same time, they began
to engage more closely with Islamic dignitaries and institutions, as they believed that religious leaders wielded most
influence on the people. Muslims were formally under the
authority of the highest religious council, the Ulema-Medlis, and Nazi officials repeatedly consulted with its members
and tried to co-opt them. Many Islamic leaders hoped that
the Germans would help them found a Muslim state. Soon,
however, it became clear that the Wehrmacht and the SS
were not able to pacify the region; at the same time, the
German support for the Muslim population fuelled partisan

and etnik hatred against them. Violence escalated. In the
end, a quarter of a million Muslims died in the conflict.
AS THE TIDE of war turned against the Axis from 1941
onwards, the Wehrmacht and the SS recruited tens of
thousands of Muslims, among them Bosnians, Crimean
Tatars and Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia
mainly to save German blood. Muslim soldiers fought on
all fronts, they were deployed in Stalingrad, Warsaw and in
the defence of Berlin. German army officers granted these
recruits a wide range of religious concessions, taking into
account the Islamic calendar and religious laws, such as
dietary requirements. They even lifted the ban on ritual
slaughter, a practice that had been prohibited for antisemitic reasons by Hitlers Law for the Protection of
Animals of 1933. A prominent role in the units was played
by military imams, who were responsible not only for
spiritual care but also for political indoctrination. When
speaking to Nazi functionaries about the recruitment of
Muslims into the SS in 1944, Himmler explained that the
support of Islam had simple pragmatic reasons: I dont have
anything against Islam, because it educates men in this
division for me and promises them paradise when they have
fought and been killed in combat. A practical and attractive
religion for soldiers! After the war, many Muslims who had
fought in German units, especially those from the Soviet
Union and Balkans, faced gruesome retaliation.
HE GERMANS engagement with Muslims

was by no means straightforward. Nazi policies
towards Islam, as worked out by bureaucrats in
Berlin, regularly clashed with the realities on
the ground. In the first months after the invasion of the
Soviet Union, SS squads executed thousands of Muslims,
specifically prisoners of war, on the assumption that their
circumcision proved that they were Jewish. A high-level
meeting of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was held in the
summer of 1941, in which Colonel Erwin von Lahousen,
who represented Wilhelm Canaris, the
head of the Wehrmacht intelligence,
became embroiled in a fierce argument
with Gestapo chief Heinrich Mller, the
infamous Gestapo-Mller, about these
executions. In particular the selection
of hundreds of Muslim Tatars who had
been sent for special treatment because
they were taken for Jews, was brought up.
Mller calmly acknowledged that the SS
had made some mistakes in this respect. It
was the first time, he claimed, that he had
heard that Muslims, too, were circumcised.
A few weeks later, Reinhard Heydrich,
Himmlers chief of the SS Reich Security
Head Office, sent out a directive cautioning
the SS Task Forces to be more careful: The
circumcision and Jewish appearance do
not constitute sufficient proof of Jewish
descent. Muslims were not to be confused
with Jews. In Muslim-populated areas,
other characteristics, like names, were to
be taken into account.
ISLAM
N THE SOUTHERN BORDERLANDS of the Soviet Union,

however, Nazi killing squads still had difficulties distinguishing Muslims from Jews. When the Einsatzgruppe D
began murdering the Jewish population of the Caucasus
and Crimea, it encountered a special situation with regard
to three Jewish communities which had long lived closely
alongside the Muslim population and were influenced by
Islamic culture: the Karaites and Krymchaks in the Crimea
and the Judeo-Tats, also known as Mountain Jews, in the
northern Caucasus.
In Crimea, SS officials were puzzled when encountering the Turkic-speaking Karaites and Krymchaks. Visiting
Simferopol in December 1941, two Wehrmacht officers,
Oberkriegsverwaltungsrat Fritz Donner and Major Ernst
Seifert, reported that it was interesting to note that: A
large part of these Jews on the Crimea is of Mohammedan
faith, while there were also Near Eastern racial groups of
a non-Semitic character, who, strangely, have adopted the
Jewish faith. The confusion among the Germans about the
classification of Karaites and Krymchaks, which were, in
fact, both Jewish communities, was striking. In the end,
the Karaites were classified as ethnically Turkic and spared,
while the Krymchaks were considered ethnically Jewish
and killed. According to Walter Gro, head of the NSDAP
Race Office, the Karaites were excluded from persecution
because of their close relations with allied Muslim Tatars.
In the Caucasus, representatives of the Judeo-Tats, a
minority of Iranian ancestry, took their case to the German
authorities. The SS started investigations, visiting houses,
attending celebrations and enquiring into the customs of
the community. SS-Oberfher Walther Bierkamp, then
head of Einsatzgruppe D, personally visited a village of the
mountain Jews in the Nalchik area. During this visit, the
Judeo-Tats were extremely hospitable and Bierkamp found
that, aside from their religion, they had nothing in common
with Jews. At the same time, he recognised Islamic influence, as the Tats also practiced polygamous relationships.
Bierkamp swiftly gave the order that these peoples were
not to be harmed and that, in place of Mountain Jews, the
term Tats had to be used.
In other war zones, too, Nazi authorities and their local
helpers faced difficulties in distinguishing between Jews
and Muslims, particularly in the Balkans. The privileged
position of Muslims (and indeed Catholics) in the Ustaa
state seemed, to many Jews, to offer an opportunity to
avoid persecution. Soon, many tried to escape repression
and deportation through official conversion to Islam. In
Sarajevo alone, around 20 per cent of the Jewish population is estimated to have converted to Islam or Catholicism
between April and October 1941; given their circumcision,
many found Islam to be the easier option. In the autumn
of 1941, Ustaa authorities finally intervened, prohibiting
these conversions, and even those who had converted were
still not safe from persecution as it was race, not religion,
which defined Jewishness in the eyes of German and Ustaa
bureaucrats. Still, a number of converted and non-converted
Jews managed to flee the country disguised as Muslims;
some of them women and men wearing the Islamic veil.
Finally, the murder of Europes Gypsies involved
Muslims directly. As the Germans began screening the
occupied territories of the Soviet Union they soon
encountered many Muslim Roma. In fact, the majority of
the Roma in Crimea were Islamic. They had, for centuries,
In the southern borderlands of the

Soviet Union, Nazi killing squads
still had difficulties distinguishing
Muslims from Jews
Muslim women
return to their
ruined village
in the Bosnian
mountains, 1943.
assimilated with the Tatars, who now showed remarkable

solidarity with them. Muslim representatives sent numerous petitions to the Germans to ask for the protection of
their Roma co-religionists. Backed by the Tatars, many
Muslim Roma pretended to be Tatars to escape deportation.
Some used Islam. One example was the round up of Roma
in Simferopol in December 1941, when those captured tried
to use religious symbols to convince the Germans that their
arrest was a mistake. An eyewitness noted in his diary:
The gypsies arrived en masse on carriages at the Talmud-Thora
Building. For some reason, they raised a green flag, the symbol
of Islam, and put a mullah at the head of their procession.
The gypsies tried to convince the Germans that they were not
gypsies; some claimed to be Tatars, others to be Turkmens. But
their protests were disregarded and they were all put into the
great building.
In the end, many Muslim Roma were murdered, but as the
Germans had trouble distinguishing Muslim Roma from
Muslim Tatars, some an estimated 30 per cent survived.
During his interrogation at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen Trial, when asked about the persecution of Gypsies in
Crimea, Ohlendorf explained that the screening had been
complicated by the fact that many Roma had shared the
same religion with the Crimean Tatars: That was the
difficulty, because some of the gypsies if not all of them
were Muslims, and for that reason we attached a great
amount of importance to the issue to not getting into

difficulties with the Tartars and, therefore, people were
employed in this task who knew the places and the people.
Muslims in the Balkans, too, were affected by the
persecution of the Roma, as there were many Roma of the
Islamic faith. When the Germans and their Ustaa allies
began persecuting the Roma population, they initially also
targeted the largely settled Muslim Roma of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the so-called white gypsies. In the summer
of 1941 Muslim Roma complained to the Islamic religious
authorities about their discrimination. A delegation of
leading Muslim representatives petitioned the authorities that Muslim Roma should be considered part of the
Muslim community and that any attack on them would be
considered an attack on the Islamic community itself. Eager
to court Muslims, Ustaa and German officials eventually
excluded Muslim Roma from persecution and deportation.
When launching their pro-Muslim policies, German
bureaucrats had not considered that the (religiously
defined) population group (Muslims) they tried to win
as allies could overlap with (racially defined) population
groups (Jews and Roma) that were to be persecuted.
In the last months of the war, holed up in the Berlin
bunker, Hitler lamented that the attempts of the Third
Reich to mobilise the Muslim world had failed because
they had not been strong enough. All Islam vibrated at the
news of our victories and the Muslims were ready to rise in
revolt, he told his secretary, Martin Bormann. A movement
could have been incited in North Africa that would have
spilled over to the rest of the Muslim world. Just think
what we could have done to help them, even to incite them,
as would have been both our duty and our interest!
In the end, German attempts to find Muslim allies were
less successful than the strategists in Berlin had hoped.
They had been launched too late and had clashed too often
with the violent realities of the war. More importantly, the
Third Reichs claims that it protected the faithful lacked
credibility, as most Muslims in the war zones were aware
that they served profane political interests. The Germans
also failed to incite a major Muslim uprising against the
Allies. Although tens of thousands of Muslims were recruited into the German armies, in the end the British, French,
and Soviets were more successful in mobilising their
Muslim populations: hundreds of thousands fought in their
armies against Hitlers Germany. From French North Africa
alone, almost a quarter of a million Muslims enlisted in de
Gaulles forces, taking part in the liberation of Europe.
David Motadel is Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and
Research Fellow in History at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge and the author of
Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Harvard, 2014).
FURTHER READING
Top: SS recruits from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1943.

Above: German soldiers and Muslims in Sarajevo after the fall
of Yugoslavia, 1941.
David Motadel, The Muslim World in the Second World

War, in Richard Bosworth and Joe Maiolo (eds.), The
Cambridge History of the Second World War, Vol. 2: Politics
and Ideology (Cambridge, 2015).
Marko Attila Hoare, The Bosnian Muslims in the Second
World War: A History (Hurst, 2013).
Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The
Berlin Years, 1941-1945 (Vallentine Mitchell, 2011).
InFocus
The Crystal Palace

Resurrected
HE CRYSTAL PALACE RISES AGAIN on Sydenham

Hill, south of London, in 1853-4, one of a series
of photographs taken by Philip Henry Delamotte.
After housing the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde
Park the structure has been sold for 70,000 to the new
Crystal Palace Company, which is employing 7,000 men
to re-erect its identical, standardised cast-iron sections
and create the surrounding gardens. They will then cover
the sections once more in glass, using, as before, glazing
wagons whose wheels run along the gutters, carrying the
glaziers, their tools and materials. The area in which the two
stovepipe-hatted men stand is called the open colonnade,
since it has a roof but no glass in the iron side-frames.
The Palace cost 150,000 in 1851 but by the time work
at Sydenham was complete, 1.3 million had been spent,
some 800,000 over budget. It now had five rather than
three floors and curved-roof transepts north and south to
accompany the original central one, which itself had been
added to avoid having to cut down three large Hyde Park
elms, in response to a public outcry. Much of the extra
expense was down to the elaborate gardens with their
terracing and fountains (12,000 jets of water in all), statuary, maze and (inaccurate) life-size models of dinosaurs.
There were also two 284-ft-high brick water towers
designed by Brunel. Inside there was a concert hall, complete with vast organ, and Pugins original 1851 fine art
Medieval Court was now joined by Egyptian, Greek,
Roman, Pompeian, Moorish, Byzantine, Renaissance,
Indian and Chinese ones, full of plaster casts of sculpture
collected round the world by Owen Jones.
The expensive grounds were the brainchild of the great
gardener Sir Joseph Paxton, who had first come up with
the idea for the Palace, based on the Giant Stove, the huge
greenhouse that he had built for his employer, the 6th
Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth in the 1840s. The ridgeand-furrow roofing system, which can be seen clearly at the
top of the photograph and in the background forming the
curved transept roof, was a particular invention of his but
it never really caught on; it was not until the 20th century
that the Palace came to be seen as a model of what could be
done in the way of a functional, modular glass-and-metal
structure. Predictably the architectural establishment
at the time was jealous of him for his originality and his
success. Once the thousands of workmen were finished
at Sydenham, Paxton arranged for them to go out to the
Crimea and build roads for the army besieging Sevastopol.
Later he was very much the driving force behind the
The extra expense was down to the

elaborate gardens, statuary, maze
and (inaccurate) life-size models of
dinosaurs
building of the Thames Embankment and the West-East

sewer alongside it, when not designing country houses for
the Rothschilds in England and France.
The Company never really recovered from the overspending at Sydenham, although Londoners flocked for entertainment and relaxation via a specially built railway line
to this, the first theme park. On Sundays, the one day when
the working man might have come with his family, it was
closed. It still had two million visitors a year, with concerts,
rallies, mass meetings, and Brocks firework displays every
Thursday. The Company finally went bankrupt in 1909 and
the Palace was then bought for the nation, only to burn
down in 1936.
ROGER HUDSON
XXXXXXXXXX
| STAMBOLISKI
Aleksander
Stamboliski and
the Bulgarian
Contract
Bulgaria suffered a swift and devastating defeat in the First World
War, due, G.D. Sheppard argues, to its peasant leader-in-waitings
shrewd use of propaganda.
BULGARIA WAS THE last country to enter the First World
War on the side of the Central Powers, in 1915. In 1918 it
became the first to capitulate. Bulgarias sudden military
collapse was significant in that it both presaged and probably
hastened the defeat of its more powerful allies, Germany
and Austria-Hungary.
After three years of trench stalemate in Macedonia, a
multinational Entente force launched the Vardar offensive
on September 14th, 1918. It swept through the Bulgarian
lines, putting its army to flight, leading to the countrys
capitulation within two weeks. The war was over within two
more months.
With the opposing forces on the front at roughly equal
numbers, the Bulgarian armys collapse of 1918 has until
now been attributed largely to war-weariness, poor morale
and a shortage of food and clothing. It turns out that there
may be more to its poor performance than that. Two British
officers, prisoners of the Bulgarians, were witnesses to an
act of shrewd political propaganda by a man waiting for his
chance to seize power, Aleksander Stamboliski, the charismatic leader of the peasants party, the Bulgarian Agrarian
National Union (BANU).
Fearless, barrel-chested and black-haired, Stamboliski
was born in a Bulgarian village in 1879 to a peasant farmer of
ten hectares. Running away from home to gain an education, he joined the newly formed Agrarian Union and began
to develop its political ideology, neither socialist nor communist but dedicated to furthering the lives of his fellow
Balkan peasants. It placed Stamboliski and his party at odds
with the countrys ruling faction, headed by Ferdinand I, a
Viennese-born aristocrat elected tsar in 1887.
In the Balkan war of 1912, in alliance with its neighbouring states, Bulgaria had revolted against the long rule of the
Ottoman Empire. The Balkan allies expelled the Turks from
much of the peninsula. This success, however, was short

lived, as the fledgling states began warring among each other
over disputed territories, Macedonia being chief among
them. In 1913 Bulgaria was out-manoeuvred and defeated by
Serbia and Greece. In a short space of time Bulgaria had won
and then lost the coveted Macedonia.
The fighting of 1912 and 1913 had cost Bulgaria dearly in
both lives and money and the government of Ferdinand was
not keen to become embroiled in the resulting war between
the great powers. For a year Bulgaria remained neutral,
courted by both sides. In October 1915, however, Ferdinand
was eventually persuaded to join the Central Powers with
the promise of regaining Macedonia. Stamboliski, an opponent of the war with Entente sympathies, had the temerity
to quarrel violently with Ferdinand over the issue and was
imprisoned as a result.
Prison gossip
Initially the war went extremely well for Bulgaria. Attacked
on two fronts, Serbia was rapidly overrun and Macedonia regained. Too late to be effective, Entente forces were shipped
in via Salonika and sent north towards the Macedonian front
in an effort to meet up with their Serbian allies. Outnumbered, British troops were badly mauled in the snow and
rugged terrain and forced to retreat to the Greek border.
Among those wounded and taken prisoner by the Bulgarians in December 1915 were two young British lieutenants,
D.J. Cowan and R.G. Howe. Somehow escaping death by
frostbite or disease, they spent the next three years making
increasingly audacious attempts to escape. Incurring the
fury of their captors for doing so, they were punished by
transfer from one Bulgarian prison camp to another. The
regimes varied greatly: one camp was little more than a
typhus-ridden killing ground. But throughout 1918 the two
Barrel-chested:
Aleksander
Stamboliski, 1900.
XXXXXXXXXXX
It was common talk that the men

definitely did not intend to carry on after
the three year limit had been reached
friends final place of captivity, in the north-central town of
Sevlievo, was far from being a prison. Entering into a gentlemens agreement with the local commander, they were
given virtual freedom, provided they agreed to not escape.
Both men had a gift for languages and, with Cowans previous experience as a medical student, they set up their own
dental practice, mainly pulling rotten teeth. This peculiar
captivity afforded them a perhaps unique position to hear
intelligence from all stratas of society.
After the wars end and their release both men joined
the British diplomatic service. However, they rarely again
met and it was quite separately that they wrote of what they
had heard among Bulgarians during the year of 1918. In 1931

Cowan wrote via the Foreign Office to the British official
war historian Cyril Falls, then compiling his second volume
of the Macedonian campaign. Cowan summed up what
Bulgarians everywhere had told him:
Our contract with the Germans is for three years and for three
years only. And at the end of that time we will be replaced on
the front by German troops and the Bulgarian army will be
demobilised to its peace-time strength.
Cowan added: It was common talk not advanced as a rumour
but as a statement of fact ... In early September 1918 I was told ...
that the men definitely did not intend to carry on after the three
year limit had been reached.
Cowan could not recall the precise date that was fixed in
the minds of the soldiers, but thought it may have been
somehow linked to Bulgarian mobilisation (variously recorded as September 22nd or 24th, 1915) and more or less
| STAMBOLISKI
XXXXXXXXXX
coincided with the Vardar offensive (September 15th-29th,

1918). He had no doubt that the bulk of the Bulgarian army
simply left the front with the intention of returning home.
Overthrown: the
crowd at Sofia
following the coup
that deposed
Stamboliski, 1923.
Rise and fall

Despite Cowans keen offer to discuss the matter, he and
Falls appear not to have met. In his 1935 volume Falls makes
only the briefest of references to rumours of a contract and
attributes them to gossip of the rest-camp and dugout: this
despite the fact that Falls also records an incident where
retreating Bulgarian officers had explained to the mayor of
a town near Strumica that the troops had anticipated the
contracts end by three days.
Nor did Falls mention Cowan also explaining that he
had initially presumed the contract to be a piece of Entente
propaganda. Staying on in Bulgaria for a further six months
after his release and serving with military intelligence, he
had learned that it was not so. Nor did Falls refer to Cowan
returning as a diplomat to Sofia in 1929, where he was told
by Bulgarians that the contract story had stemmed from the
by then dead Stamboliski.
Falls may not have dealt with the contract so lightly had
he consulted Cowans fellow prisoner, R.G. Howe. In retirement in the 1970s, Sir Robert Howe wrote an unpublished
autobiography describing his rise from the son of a Derby
rail-worker to becoming governor-general of Sudan. He also
described hearing in 1918 of the contract. The soldiers had
the same answer, he explained: Always the same, do we
know when the war will end, it will end next September.
Always the same word contract.
But Howe had yet more evidence to supply. Remarkably,
he also described meeting Stamboliski himself at the royal
palace in Belgrade in early 1923, only months before the
Bulgarian leaders assassination. After defeat in the First
World War, Ferdinand had abdicated in favour of his son.
The Agrarian party had swept to power on a tide of popular
support and Stamboliski had become prime minister. In
Belgrade Howe queued with other foreign diplomats waiting
for an audience with the visiting Bulgarian leader:
On being introduced I spoke to him in my best Bulgarian and he

expressed surprise. We had a long talk and I told him something
of my experience as a prisoner of war and I told him about the
contract. He smiled hugely and said You are quite right I did
that, and he told me how he did it. In prison he concocted the
story of the contract and through his agents in the party spread
it throughout the army.
Howe noted: As an example of psychological warfare this
has seemed to me without parallel. He made a good point.
Stamboliski knew the wants and desires of his own people
absolutely; the overwhelming majority of Bulgarians were
peasant farmers who cared little for war or politics. Appealing to their desire to return home, the contract was a simple
and yet masterful piece of propaganda.
Beset with economic problems, crippling war reparations and surrounded by internal enemies, Stamboliskis
peasant government proved short-lived. In June 1923 he was
overthrown, tortured and killed by, among others, IMRO,
a Macedonian terrorist group who considered him a traitor
who had signed away Bulgarian territory as the price for
peace. Today, however, Stamboliski is something of a Bulgarian national hero. The tiny house in which he was born
is preserved as a museum. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the
decades of Bulgarian conflict and political turbulence that
followed his assassination, knowledge of the contract and its
hidden origins almost died with him.
Propaganda for peace
Just how important was Stamboliskis contract in Bulgarias
capitulation? By the summer of 1918 the Bulgarian army
was in a parlous state and in no position effectively to resist
a concerted attack. But it is often said that morale is all
important in war and the evidence produced here indicates
that a widely held belief in the contract had indeed
undermined the Bulgarian armys willingness to continue
and was a significant factor in the countrys defeat. As to
the human cost, though many Bulgarian soldiers were
killed in retreat, there can be little doubt that more lives
would have been lost on both sides had they held their
ground and fought. Another result was Bulgarian territory
escaping much of the ravages of invasion. An ignominious
defeat also ensured the end of Ferdinands reign, another
Stamboliski aim.
But what of the contracts impact on the wider conflict
in Europe? At the time of Bulgarias capitulation its allies
were already in full retreat on all fronts; so the Macedonian
front cannot be said to be a deciding factor in the First World
War. Although it was the catalyst of the Great War, the
Balkan conflict had rapidly become a sideshow. Nonetheless, Bulgarias sudden fall left its neighbouring ally Turkey
isolated from Germany and Austria-Hungary and placed an
even greater pressure on the governments of the Central
Powers to seek an armistice; having your allies capitulate at
a time of crisis cannot fail to have an effect. During this late
period the war was still inflicting huge numbers of casualties
(as many as 10,000 on the final day). If the contract and Bulgarias sudden exit hastened the end by a only few days or
weeks, an evidenced assertion, then it probably prevented
many thousands of further deaths.
G.D. Sheppard is a civil servant based in London.
MakingHistory
Poorly paid and treated with contempt, the plight of early career researchers in the humanities is
the result of a systemic betrayal of a generation of academics, argues Mathew Lyons.
The great betrayal

SUPPORTERS OF THE status quo in
higher education are about as common
as authentic autographs from Abu
Qatada. Yet I am not sure many of
those who have attacked successive
governments for the short-sightedness of their policies are aware of how
systemic the problems are.
Let us look, for example, at those
at the very beginning of their careers.
One of the great pleasures of my
role as a public historian is getting to
meet PhD students and early career
researchers in both History and the
broader humanities. Their intelligence,
creativity, ambition, energy and dedication is extraordinary and leaves me,
for one, deeply humbled.
It also leaves me acutely aware of
my good fortune in having been born
a couple of decades earlier, because
today it takes a brave person to
undertake postgraduate study in the
humanities and then to seek a career
in academia without the security of
a private income, or rich parents, or,
more commonly, both.
Increasingly, early-career researchers are offered only poorly paid ninemonth teaching contracts. They
receive little or no support from their
faculties. Indeed, in many cases they
are essentially non-people within the
faculty, denied access to office space,
telephones, email addresses and all
the other facilities one might take
for granted in any other organisation.
They are offered no career development or pastoral support either.
Naturally, because many if not
most academics disdain teaching
themselves, these young historians
receive little or no pedagogical
training. Which is doubly a shame,
because most are far more committed
to providing a high-quality education
to their students than many of their
supposed superiors.
These people represent the future

of the academy, if there is such a
thing, but not only are they invisible
within their faculties, they are invisible within academia. They appear
to be and often are invisible tout
court to administrators and academics
alike, who prefer to pretend they do
not exist, because to admit there is
a problem might require them to do
something about it.
Frozen out:
bikes parked in
Cambridge.
To what end has such a

system developed? No end.
That is what is most
contemptible about it
As with the introduction of
student fees, there is something
deeply nauseating about a generation
which benefited from free education
to degree level and generous support
into postgraduate study denying
precisely those same opportunities to
their children. This is not a new phenomenon. There are none who guard
their position in society so jealously as
the nouveau riche.
By the time the second term of

the early-career researchers contract
begins their minds will be focused on
gaining the next nine-month job. It is
an intellectual environment in which
publication, that perverse desiderata
of todays academic world, becomes
almost impossible. Never mind the
fact that publication in a good journal
can take up to 18 months.
Again and again, talking to earlycareer researchers, I hear the same
stories. Four moves in five years. Five
moves in seven. Young academics
are expected to uproot repeatedly,
often internationally, too, in order
to maintain the hope of a career. For
most, this is destructive of their personal lives and their ability to develop
research that will help them progress.
For some, who have families or other
dependents to care for, it is impossible.
Then there is the money. As a Univerity and College Union survey recently revealed, over 40 per cent of higher
education and further education staff
on short-term or zero-hour contracts
have struggled to pay bills. Some
30 per cent earn less than 1,000 a
month. This is in a sector where the
average senior academic salary in the
UK for 2013-14 was 82,545 for men
(women averaged 10k less). It is a
sector in which the amount spent on
administration 4.7bn dwarfs that
spent on the humanities at 0.9bn.
To what end has such a system
developed? No end. That is what is
most contemptible about it. To save a
little money, perhaps. More generally,
to satisfy some well-paid administrators and civil servants that all is well,
when all the evidence that cannot be
fed into Excel spreadsheets suggests
that the opposite is true.
Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh
and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).
SCOTLAND
Why were there

no Levellers
in Scotland?
The Humble
Petition of Jock
of Braid, English
engraving on a
Scottish theme,
1648.
Laura Stewart asks why popular politics has been largely absent from studies
of the Scottish revolution of the 17th century, yet is thought crucial to our
understanding of the Civil Wars in England and Wales.
HEN A SCOTTISH HISTORIAN gives a

lecture on what was formerly known as
the English Civil War, one of the questions
students ask is: why were there no Levellers
in 17th-century Scotland? For some Scottish historians, this
can be irksome. It looks on the surface to be une question
mal pose: it tells us little about early modern Scottish
society and not much about Levellers to ask why a
phenomenon that was seemingly unique to England did not
make an appearance somewhere else. The question speaks
to that now outdated determinist historical narrative, still
commonplace in popular histories and on television, in
which the putatively democratic and secularising ideals
espoused by the Levellers foreshadowed Englands emergence as the first modern society. By failing to produce any
Levellers, 17th-century Scotland demonstrated that it was
an essentially backward society, whose people had to await
the liberating effects of full union with England before

acquiring the wherewithal to stand up to their over-mighty
magnates and tyrannising clerics.
The question also touches one of the assertions of the
new British history that flourished at the end of the 20th
century. If the Civil Wars were a single integrated crisis, as
John Morrill has averred, it would be reasonable to assume
that the unprecedented intermingling of peoples that
occurred in this decade also included some cross-fertilisation of ideas. Londons printing presses were churning out
material that could have been accessed almost as readily by
the inhabitants of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, as
those of York, Norwich and Bristol. Could the radical ideas
expressed in English publications have taken hold north of
the border? After all, Scotlands history, culture, politics,
religion, social structures and institutions, although
distinctive, shared broad similarities with Englands.
SCOTLAND
More importantly, Scots could read English publications
and vice-versa. Yet important recent work by, among
others, Philip Baker and Eliot Vernon, Michael Braddick
and Rachel Foxley, suggests that the distinctively English
historical narratives that underpinned the radical ideas of
this decade the Norman Yoke, Magna Carta, the Common
Law tradition represented by Edward Cokes Institutes, the
Petition of Right would have made them difficult for Scots
to appropriate. The unilateral decision made by Englishmen
in January 1649 to execute the man who also happened
to be Scotlands king and the subsequent conquest of the
country by Cromwells New Model Army further tarnished
English radicalism north of the border. This is evidenced by
responses to the introduction of religious toleration. Many
Scots probably went to gawp at English preachers who, like
Conservative Cabinet ministers today, were an intriguing
novelty in their midst, but most ultimately opted to remain
with their own congregations.
E MIGHT nonetheless ponder why 17thcentury Scots do not appear to have developed their own radical agendas for law
reform, expansion of the franchise and
religious change. Nearly 40 years ago David Stevenson
wrestled with this matter in what remains the definitive
political study of Civil War Scotland. His conclusion was
that the deferential, hierarchical nature of Scottish society
obstructed the emergence of popular radical movements.
The power that Scotlands feudal landowners wielded over
their tenants, in combination with the control exerted by
presbyterian clerics over their parishioners, not only prevented the Scottish people expressing new ideas, but also
inhibited them from thinking them. Although Stevenson
demonstrated that a revolution had taken place in Scotland
by 1641, he suggested that it was limited by two facts: it was
fundamentally religious in origin and constitutional rather
than socio-political in nature. There was simply no space
in Scotland for the emergence of the kind of secularising,
democratising movements that were regarded in the 1970s
as essential aspects of the revolution in England.
It is unlikely that hitherto unknown cells of Scottish
radicals are waiting to be discovered. This does not mean
that there is either nothing to find or to be gained by investigating popular political engagement. On the contrary, one
of the exciting things about studying the Civil War period is
that, as in England, we can see how a political crisis opened
up opportunities for ordinary people to shape public events.
Both men and women took part in the Prayer Book riots of
1637 and thousands of people signed the National Covenant
of 1638. What was the significance of their participation?
Were they simply instruments wielded by the nobles and
clerics who would come to dominate Scottish politics?
THE SCOTS STARTED the Civil Wars. Charles I, trying too
hard to complete James VIs unfinished work of bringing the
Scottish church into line with the English model, sought
to impose a Prayer Book on a Protestant people who were
convinced it was but one step removed from the Roman
Catholic Mass. Riots ensued. When the combination of
popular disturbances and a public petitioning campaign
failed to have the desired effect of persuading Charles to
drop his plan, the organisers of these events were forced to
raise the stakes. The 1638 Covenant, by banding the Scottish
An illuminated
copy of the
Scottish
Covenant, signed
around
September 1639
to mark the
defection to the
cause of Lord
George Gordon,
son of the Royalist
peer, the Marquis
of Huntly.
people together with one another and with God, aimed to

mobilise popular support and make good the claim that
defence of true religion was not a cloak worn by a seditious
faction, but the profession of a nation united. Charles preferred the first interpretation. Emboldened by the fact that
he could call upon the resources of his other kingdoms, he
began preparing a military solution to the Scottish problem.
Waging war on his own people turned out to be a fatal miscalculation: it not only galvanised the Scots behind the fight
for national self-preservation, but also divided the English.
Many were persuaded that, at a time when Catholic armies
were on the march in Europe, the king of Britain had better
things to be doing than attacking godly Protestants who also
happened to be his subjects.
One of the most (in)famous images of the Prayer Book
riots is that of the legendary Jenny Geddes hurling her
three-legged cutty stool at the clerics who led the ill-fated
service in Edinburghs main church of St Giles. Although
Jenny was almost certainly the mythical creation of a
later period, the prominence of women in these events is
well-attested to in contemporary sources. It has been suggested that the inspiration for the legend was a real woman
called Barbara Hamilton, wife of John Mean, an Edinburgh
merchant and opponent of royal religious policy. (Scottish
women usually kept their own names after marriage; taking
the husbands name follows English custom.) The disturbances of July 23rd were not the only example of crowds
taking to the streets and low-born women continued to
be eager to express their opinions. In the summer of 1639,
James Gordon, Lord Aboyne, second son of the royalist
Marquis of Huntly, failed to make himself sufficiently
inconspicuous on a trip to Edinburgh and was attacked by a
group of female assailants. Women were taking advantage
of what Natalie Zemon Davies describes as the licence
that patriarchal societies grant to the unruly woman: by
windows were stoned by a crowd that despised him for supporting the Prayer Book, there was no significant damage
done to property. Scots were not noted for being especially
law-abiding, so this is surprising and suggests significant
differences in popular behaviour on either side of the
border. In the 16th century, Scotlands towns often became
battlegrounds for feuding noblemen and their retinues.
Periodic violent uprisings, as well as localised disorders,
were a hallmark of the later 17th century. Why the Prayer
Book crisis seems to have been peculiarly free from serious
violence is a complicated matter, but several important
features can be noted. The authorities in Scotland had no
soldiers to command and Royalist nobles proved unwilling to challenge Covenanter crowds by summoning their
retinues, thereby reducing the likelihood of escalation;
the beautification of churches that English puritans found
offensive and reacted against with iconoclastic fury, had
not advanced far in Scotland by the time the Prayer Book
was rolling off the presses; the deployment of women at
the forefront of crowds may have been a tactic designed to
inhibit men from resorting to force.
flagging up the failure of men to maintain order and do

their duty, such women reinforced expectations regarding
gender roles. This kind of behaviour convinced men of
otherwise different political persuasions Covenanters and
Royalists that matters might be getting out of hand. One
defender of royal authority, Sir James Balfour of Denmilne,
counselled one Covenanter lady to desist from unwomenlyke attempts to influence politics and endeavour to learn
some humility. It seems unlikely, given what we know of
female activism at this time, that she heeded his advice.
The odd thing about the crowd violence of the Prayer
Book crisis is that it was not, in fact, very violent. Some
crowds, such as the throngs that greeted the arrival of the
kings commissioner, James, Marquis of Hamilton, at Leith
in June 1638, demonstrated strength and resolve through
their peaceable, albeit implicitly threatening, behaviour.
There were neither fatalities, at least until soldiers confronted one another on the field of battle in 1639, nor
judicial executions of low-born scapegoats. This contrasts
with crowd activity in London, where deaths, accidental
and intentional, occurred. With the possible exception of
the house belonging to the provost of Edinburgh, whose
Top: a silver medal

with an image of
Charles I struck
at the Edinburgh
Mint, 1633.
Above: The
Arch-Prelate of
St Andrews is
attacked while
reading the new
Prayer Book, 1637.
O WHAT WERE THE crowds doing? It seems that

certain politicians and public figures were being targeted by people whose aim was to humiliate rather
than harm. How did the crowds know when to take
to the streets and whom to attack? Word of mouth must
have been important, but it is difficult for historians to trace.
Sermons galvanised people with rousing rhetoric about the
imminent triumph of the forces of the Antichrist: All the
Pulpits of Edinburgh ... did ring with bitter invectives, one
royalist publication complained. Satirical verses and polemics also circulated unhindered around the country.
Crowds often went after individuals who were already in
possession of unenviable reputations. Degrading episodes
at the hands of the common sort, recounted through gossip
and tavern tales, then provided valuable material for the
satirists. The people most likely to suffer in this way in the
late 1630s were the bishops. An account of the events of
July 23rd, 1637 included a vivid description of the Bishop
of Edinburgh, David Lindsay, soiling himself so abundantly
when confronted by an angry crowd that he warded off his
attackers with his stinking smell. One of Scotlands most
important politicians was also subjected to unwelcome attention. The Lord Treasurer, John Stewart, Earl of Traquair,
had chosen to absent himself from what became the disastrous first reading of the Prayer Book in Edinburgh. One
wit composed a handful of gleeful little anagrams about
Traquair that seem to have circulated in 1640. Variations on
his name were rearranged to emphasise his untrustworthiness: Johne Earle of Traquaire / Ho a varrie effronted lyer.
It was the involvement of ordinary men and women
that made the politics of the late 1630s so dangerous. The
politics of the 1640s did not continue in this vein and there
is one particular factor that explains why: the Scottish Covenanters, unlike the English parliamentarians, were able to
create a stable and legitimate government. In other words,
there was no Scottish civil war: the insurrection led by
James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, in the mid-1640s was
destructive, but he never established an opposing regime
by setting up a Scottish equivalent of the royalist capital
at Oxford. Of crucial importance in making the transition
from oppositional faction to governing regime was the
SCOTLAND
suppression of popular political activity. This is the context

into which the 1638 National Covenant needs to be placed:
it was both a product of the creative political strategies of
the late 1630s and a vital component in their containment.
OVENANTING was not unique to Scotland. The

practice of people bonding with one another and
with God had parallels in England and on the
other side of the Atlantic. The 1638 Covenant was
printed on Dutch and, later, English presses and translated
into French, Dutch and Latin. It became the underpinning
for the 1643 treaty with the English Parliament that
brought Scotland into the war against Charles. Known as
the Solemn League and Covenant, it was disseminated
throughout the kingdoms to people who professed to be
of one reformed religion and committed to the pursuit of
religious uniformity. Historians have, therefore, been right
not only to follow Morrills example, by placing the Covenant into its British context, but also to investigate the role
of the Covenants within an English culture of subscription
and oath-taking. It is surely a curiosity, then, that we know
so little about the act of taking the Covenant in its country
of origin. How was it received by the people in the pews and
what can this tell us about popular political engagement?
Wenceslaus
Hollar's A Map and
Views of the State
of England, 1642-49
compares Britain's
situation to that
of the civil war in
Bohemia.
I do not mean to suggest that the Covenant has been

neglected. As a text, it is so well known as to justify the
appellation iconic, although it is debatable whether most
of the members of what is now an avowedly secularist
society know what is in it. The 1638 Covenant is not, in
fact, a single document, but a compilation. It is based on the
1581 Negative Confession, to which the new Covenants
authors added two further sections: a contract between
God, king and people, bolstered by a tedious but important
list of acts of the Scottish parliament and general assembly
of the church (its highest governing body); and an oath
for the preservation of the true reformed religion and
Scotlands liberties, laws and estates. It is fair to say that
the long-running debate on whether the Covenant should
be regarded as radical, or conservative, or a radical
document written in conservative language, has long since
been exhausted. That such an interpretative burden has
been placed on such a short document is testament to the
studied ambiguity imposed on the authors by the volatile
political situation then prevailing in Scotland. Significantly, the words presbytery and episcopacy are nowhere
explicitly mentioned in the Covenant. Scotlands church in
the early 17th century was governed by bishops and their
status in law something distinct, it must be noted, from
The High and

Mighty Monarch
Charles, an
engraving by
Cornelius van
Dalen, with
Edinburgh in the
background, 1633.
perceptions of their legitimacy was almost unimpeachable. Debate raged in Scotland during 1638 over whether the
Covenant was compatible with episcopacy. The argument
was settled decisively in favour of the presbyterian interpretation at the end of the year, when the Glasgow General
Assembly, having first kicked the bishops out of the church,
appended a coda to the Covenant known as the Glasgow
Declaration. Whatever the intentions and beliefs of those
who took the Covenant prior to the Assemblys ruling, the
Covenant thereafter was a definitive statement that God
thought the best reformed churches should be presbyterian.
LTHOUGH HISTORIANS have primarily been

interested in the Covenant as a printed text, it
is important to remember that, for most people,
their first and primary interaction with the
Covenant was oral they would have heard it being read to
them. There was a visual aspect, too. Some Covenants, by
their size and quality, seem to have been intended for public
Many records mention the tears of great

joy shed by people in the congregation
as they swore the Covenant
display in parish churches. Beautifully and painstakingly
copied out by hand, sometimes with illuminated lettering,
these Covenants were often produced on expensive and
durable vellum rather than paper. Many people would have
been unable to read the document in its entirety, but the
signatures of the countrys leading nobles, sometimes set
apart or placed in roundels to give them emphasis, would
have been recognisable when pointed out to them. They
would have seen the signatures of the people who led their
own community appended underneath. At the other end of

the scale, many more Covenants were printed cheaply and
plainly in the smaller quarto format for domestic use and
private contemplation. It seems plausible that some people
were passing covenants around their friends and family to
create their own covenanted community in miniature.
The circumstances under which the Covenant came
into being are vital for understanding how such a legalistic
document came to underpin the disruptive, schismatic and
periodically violent covenanting movements that emerged
in Scotland during the later 17th and 18th centuries. Two
factors are of particular importance. Few scholars have
commented on the fact that the Covenant was disseminated around the country before it had been sanctioned by
either parliament or the general assembly. From whence,
therefore, did its authority emanate? This was a contested
issue. Presbyterians were aware, furthermore, that their
attempts to legitimate the Covenant risked enhancing
its potential for generating instability. It was distributed
around the country and signed by many thousands of people
who, it seems, represented a broad cross-section of society.
There was a danger that individuals and congregations
would come to believe that the Covenant was legitimate
precisely because it had been approved by the people and
some Covenanter propaganda was ambivalent on this point.
Surviving copies seem to overwhelmingly display the
names of male householders. In many places, it seems,
servants, apprentices, youths, the poor and women were
not invited to put their names to the Covenant. Scottish
subscribers to the Covenant appear not to have been as socially diverse as English subscribers to the 1641 Protestation
Oath. However, the absence of signatures does not mean
that all these people were excluded from taking the Covenant. Signings were preceded by what was arguably a more
important event: swearing the oath. This was a communal
performance in parish churches, framed by an explanatory
sermon by the minister. It is clear, at least in some places,
that the entire parish community, including men, women,
and children, was explicitly and intentionally involved,
perhaps in direct emulation of a biblical passage about
covenant-swearing: the Old Testament book of Nehemiah,
referenced by the co-author of the Covenant, Archibald
Johnstone of Wariston, speaks of wives, sons and daughters
taking an oath to walk in Gods law with knowledge and
understanding. The emotional intensity of these occasions, as parishioners stood alongside their family, friends
and neighbours with their hands upheld, must have been
inspiring to some but daunting to others. Many records
mention the tears of great joy shed by people in the
congregation as they swore the Covenant. Tears were significant, for they were taken by the godly as a sign of what
Johnstone of Wariston termed the extraordinarie influence
of Gods Spirit upon frozen hearts. It would have been
difficult for individuals who were opposed to, or doubtful
about, the Covenant to express negative sentiments in
such an atmosphere. These performances were intended to
give greater meaning, significance and context to what was
otherwise a dry and unexciting document.
On the one hand, the experience of swearing the Covenant was empowering. For the first and perhaps the only
time in their lives people who were not considered fit to
serve in the most menial of public offices were being asked
to give their consent to a constitution in both church and
SCOTLAND
The Murder of
Archbishop Sharp,
John Opie's
depiction of the
killing of the
Archbishop of
St Andrews by
militant
Covenanters
in 1679.
state. More significantly it conferred spiritual authority

on the congregation. Since they had initially taken the
Covenant, without the sanction of either parliament or
general assembly, the people convened as a congregation
could be regarded as the source of its authority. This idea
would be important for the Covenanters of the Restoration era. Those who considered themselves bound to
the Covenant concluded that they were not obligated to
obey either the newly re-established episcopal church,
which had denounced it, or the secular powers when
they attempted to compel in matters of religion. These
people staged acts of resistance when their presbyterian
parish ministers were replaced by episcopalians and took

to the fields in the thousands to hear sermons preached in
favour of the Covenant. Some individuals, notably Richard
Cameron, author of the 1680 Sanquhar Declaration, took
these arguments further. Cameron asserted that, because
Charles II had reneged on the Covenants he had taken in
1650, with conspicuous bad grace, he had broken with
God and was therefore a tyrant. Although unable to get
at Charles, for whom one spell in Scotland had been more
than enough, radical Covenanters did succeed in assassinating the erstwhile Covenanter, James Sharp, Archbishop
of St Andrews, in 1679.
THE COVENANT, HOWEVER, also imposed limitations

on popular political agency. The manner in which the Covenant was taken reinforced its commitment to collective
obligations over individual rights. There was no Magna
Carta-style mention of the rule of law. Its emphasis on a
national community, ordered according to a strict social
hierarchy headed by propertied men, was complemented
by the Calvinist insistence that sinful people must submit
to the authority of the church. By endorsing monarchy, the
Covenant made itself incompatible with republican rule
making compromise with the English regicidal regime all
but impossible after 1649. Both the text and the manner
of swearing it committed people to a constitution within
which there was no scope for reform of the franchise. Men
with titles and land continued to run the show in Covenanted Scotland.
During the later 17th and early 18th centuries, the
Covenant became identified with popular political and
religious radicalism. Abandoned by the nobility, who
were encouraged by the Restoration regime to blame
the Covenant for Cromwells usurpation, and the
church, which had disowned it at the Restoration
and did not seek its renewal when Presbyterianism
was reinstated in 1689, the Covenant was sustained
by communities populated by agricultural workers
and the rural poor. It is notable that one of the first
serious enclosure riots in Scotland, occurring at the
late date of 1724, was accompanied by the drawing up
of a covenant. In the heyday of the imperial British
state created by the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707,
when Jacobitism had ceased to be either a threat or
a useful vehicle for expressing political discontent,
the Covenant found new significance. Harnessed by
those seeking to advance civil and religious liberty
in a specifically Scottish historical context, the Covenant
was useful because it could represent national distinctiveness without conjuring up resistance to the English in the
manner of William Wallace and Robert Bruce. This appeal
to Scotlands past sought to mobilise popular resistance,
not against the union, but in favour of political and social
reform within it.
that chimes with current social mores. The Declaration

portrays the Scots as an emphatically Christian people, but
one more interested in preserving the homeland from the
predations of the English than waging holy war.
Morrill has advocated placing the Covenant in its
British rather than exclusively Scottish context,
particulalry in relation to the 1643 Anglo-Scottish Solemn
League and Covennant. Although some English presbyterians were committed to the Solemn League, it is evident
that the Covenants never captured the English imagination in the same way as in Scotland. This is because the
political nation described in the Covenant is Scottish, just
as the reformed polity imagined in the Agreements of the
People is clearly English. The religious reformation envisaged in the Covenant had explicitly been enacted through
Scottish institutions and had delivered a type of church for
which even English presbyterians showed limited enthusiasm. Similarly, the Covenant is neither a Scottish Agreement nor a Magna Carta and we should not
expect it to be. Scotland did not somehow
lack Englands traditions of liberty, but
developed its own interpretations of what
that word meant.
This should prompt us to think about why
the political cultures of two countries joined,
in various forms of union for over 400 years
and with so much in common, should have
remained politically distinct. This question
has never been more pertinent. Although the
Scottish electorate rejected independence in
2014, it has been widely acknowledged that
the campaign in favour of maintaining the
Union failed to articulate a positive vision
for modern Britain. Many historians have
observed that the success of the British state between the
mid-18th and early 20th centuries was its ability to accommodate a wide degree of diversity among its constituent
parts. This is a lesson we need to relearn. Paul Lay noted
in History Today in May 2015 that few people realise that
what was once called the English Civil War ... was actually
sparked by events in Scotland. Even fewer know why the
Scots rebelled first against Charles I or what it was they
sought to achieve. Greater public understanding of the
historical factors that created the UKs diverse political cultures is a necessary first step to accommodating difference
within a revitalised union. The Covenant is not now an inspiration for any modern democracy, but it is important to
the story of why Scotland has never been fully assimilated
into a unitary British state.
The Covenant
was useful
because it could
represent national
distinctiveness
without conjuring
up resistance to
the English
TTEMPTS TO make the Covenant speak for

the modern democratic nation have been less
successful. As recently as 2013, the Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, tabled a motion in the
Scottish parliament stating that the Covenant had aimed
to affirm the right of the people to worship according to
conscience and not [the] kings regulation. Fraser asserted
that the Covenant was a defence of Scotlands religious
freedom and underpinned modern values of equality, compassion and justice. This interpretation is difficult to square
with the Covenants hostility to Catholicism, always the
Covenants greatest weakness. A self-consciously secularist
society, still emerging out of the long shadow cast by sectarianism, tends to prefer the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath.
Composed in order to demonstrate Robert Bruces kingly
credentials to the Pope in the wake of the Wars of Independence, this document was neither seen, nor intended
to be seen, by the vast majority of the Scottish population.
(It was not translated out of Latin until 1689.) Its attraction
to modern Scots, apart from rousing words about freedom
and holding rulers to account, is a woolliness about religion
Laura Stewart is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History at Birkbeck

University of London. Her book Rethinking the Covenanting Revolution will be
published by Oxford University Press in January 2016.
FURTHER READING
Allan I. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629-1660
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms,
1637-49 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
David Stevenson, The Scottish Revolution, 1637-1644: The
Triumph of the Covenanters (John Donald, new edn, 2003).
OUTCASTS
Convicts from Newgate
Prison being taken for
transportation, c.1760.
IRGINIA, IN 1755, WAS ONE OF THE jewels in the British

Crown. Prosperous, well-populated and claimant to huge territories beyond the Appalachian mountains, it was only natural
that the colony should serve as a staging ground for the forces
sent to oppose French troops in the American theatre of the Seven
Years War. Just before marching west toward Fort Duquesne, in what
is now Pittsburgh, the army of General Edward Braddock assembled in
the Potomac port of Alexandria to gather supplies, determine strategy
and join forces with colonial militia groups. Fort Duquesne survived
the Braddock expedition, only to be destroyed in 1758 and Fort Pitt
to be constructed in its place. Yet, regardless of their military record,
Braddocks troops seem to have left consternation in their wake, not
among the French, but among their friends back in Virginia. Despite
the fact that they were sent to defend their fellow British subjects,
the regulars did little to endear themselves to the locals. John Carlyle,
whose home Braddock chose as his headquarters, recorded how the soldiers used us like an enemy country calling us the spawn of convicts
[and] the sweepings of the gaols. Carlyle, a Scottish-born merchant in
his mid-thirties, was a prominent landowner of unquestioned loyalty,
serving as a militia officer in wartime and a Fairfax County judge in more
peaceful days. As a law-abiding subject of George II, Carlyle was deeply
offended at the soldiers behaviour, adding that the comments from
his countrymen made their company very disagreeable. If a leading
citizen in this flourishing little riverside town had such an unpleasant
experience, one wonders what might have happened further west in
the rougher, hard-living frontier settlements.
Similar perspectives could be found across the Atlantic in the upper
levels of British society. Samuel Johnson reportedly told an acquaintance
14 years later, in a now-notorious quotation: [Americans] are a race of
convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of
hanging. Johnson, one of the most widely respected English writers of
his day, did little to conceal his negative views of the colonists, irrespective of their geographic or economic origins. On a different occasion,
Empire of Outcasts
Britains American colonies were widely thought to be peopled by
miscreants and desperate villains. Rachel Christian describes the
reality for those who found a new, precarious life across the Atlantic.
OUTCASTS
he also remarked that a man of any intellectual enjoyment would
find emigration intolerable. Any person in his right mind, according to
Johnson, would unhesitatingly decline to go and immerse himself and
his posterity for ages in barbarism. Strictly speaking, the comments
of both Braddocks soldiers and Samuel Johnson are inaccurate, yet
they reveal what might be termed the underside of migration to the
nations colonies. For over two centuries, thanks to a mixture of philanthropic and judicially mandated resettlement plans, the Empires
outlying possessions were viewed by many at home as a haven for
all sorts of unwanted (often lower-class) citizens, a kind of dumping
ground for outcasts of various backgrounds. Nowhere is the source of
this perception more clearly revealed than among the territories of
the Atlantic world.
The miscreants-as-colonists notion originated generations before,
when England, faced with a rapidly growing population, sought to
counteract the resultant increase in unemployed vagrants through
legislation. By the middle of Elizabeth Is reign the number of homeless
Englishmen had grown large enough to become a nuisance to society,
at least in the eyes of the government. So in 1572 Parliament enacted
the first of what are now termed the Elizabethan Poor Laws. Together
with legislation passed in 1597, 1601 and additional post-Restoration
The Empires outlying possessions

were viewed as a dumping ground
for outcasts of various backgrounds
revisions, the statutes codified the treatment of Englands less fortunate. Those needing charity were made charges of the jurisdiction in
which they last had legal habitation and all able-bodied people were to be
taken up and imprisoned until the next court term could determine their
future employment. Separate provisions were made for the elderly and
physically infirm. The workhouses, which Charles Dickens Ebenezer
Scrooge so heartily endorsed before his change of heart in A Christmas
Carol, were a later addition to the parish charity system, but were still
ultimately a product of this effort to see all those capable of it engaged
in some sort of productive labour. Not until the 19th century did the
Poor Laws undergo fundamental changes, thanks in part to
social commentators such as Dickens. In the meantime, the
semi-criminalisation of unemployment only contributed
to prison overcrowding and placed added stress on existing
institutional poverty assistance resources. The implementation of the Elizabethan Poor Laws, as well as later policies
arising from them, would directly contribute to the perception of colonists as indigents and societal outsiders.
N ADDITION TO punishing the rogues, vagabonds, and

sturdy beggars with which England found itself troubled, the Poor Laws outlined methods for the training
and bringing up of beggars children, under care of the
parish they called home. As with the strictures placed on
their adult counterparts, the laws were intended to ensure
the young unfortunates eventually found a useful place in
society. Taking into consideration the triple goals of alleviating strains on institutional charity, disposing of unwanted
residents and helping populate the colonies, administrators quickly
seized upon the idea of sending some of the children across the Atlantic.
Christs Hospital in London, an establishment chartered in 1553 under
Edward VIs charitable auspices, implemented one such scheme. In
accordance with its benevolent purpose, after receiving several years of
standard grammar school education, former bluecoats were expected
to serve a normal apprenticeship term with a respectable tradesman.
Top: The Shooting of General Braddock

at Fort Duquesne, Pittsburgh, 1755, by
Edwin Willard Deming, 1903.
Above: a beggar is tied and whipped
through the streets, c.1567.
Right: Carlyle
House, residence
of John Carlyle
in Alexandria,
Virginia.
Surviving records prove emigration was a viable option for

inhabitants ready to begin the next portion of their lives.
While the majority of graduates seem to have remained in
England, beginning in the early 17th century Christs sent a
number of boys and a tiny minority of girls as well overseas
to complete their apprenticeship.
It is unclear what ultimately became of many who left
Christs for the colonies. With no clear migratory trend, their
destinations ranged from Hudsons Bay to various islands in
the West Indies. It is also unclear whether their purchasers
were always as respectable as organisers might have hoped,
although some were without doubt men of standing in their
communities. The first experimental group nine boys and
one girl dispatched through an agreement between the
schools board of governors and representatives of the Virginia and Somers Isles companies was sent to Virginia
and Bermuda in piecemeal fashion in 1617, 1618 and 1619.
Virginias transfer to Crown administration in 1624 meant the
idea was effectively abandoned, except for a couple of boys
whose sailing seems almost to have been an afterthought.
With an increasingly precarious royal government at home,
the practice slowed even further, entirely stopping during the
upheaval of the Civil Wars. Those who were sent were kept
far away from the uncertain political loyalties of the North
Atlantic mainland, landing instead in Bermuda and Barbados.
A return to peace saw society and its transport networks
stabilised and the governors of Christs, taking a cue from
their forebears, chose to resume indenturing their charges in
the colonies. They did so with enthusiasm. After Charles IIs
Restoration in 1660 the number of charity children leaving
London accelerated dramatically and peaked during the 1720s,
when more than 150 former students sailed from England.
(These figures are large for emigrants from Christs, which
then housed only a few hundred pupils of all ages, but always
paled in comparison with overall emigration rates for each of
the destinations.) After disembarking in their new homes, the
children around 14 years of age, as was typical for apprentices of the day were placed in households of varying importance and economic means. A few were fortunate enough
to have relatives already living in the colonies. Dozens arrived in the
Chesapeake, joining thousands of other articled workers of all ages
and occupations flooding into the region. Samuel Smith, who finished
school in 1691, was taken by William Edwards, then serving as clerk of
the Virginia Council. Several other prominent citizens of the era seem
to have followed Edwards example, including the eldest William Byrd,
a well-known political figure who served on the Virginia Governors
Council. At least one of Byrds two apprentices may have sailed on the
same ship as Smith, since they were released from Christs together.
The boys schoolmates and their successors went north to Canada, as did
John Lewis, sent to Nova Scotia and bound to Joseph Gerrish, a naval
storekeeper, in 1759 and south to the Bahamas, where Maynard Kingsley was taken in 1725 and articled to Governor George Phenney. Even
the tiny volcanic island of Montserrat became a destination. Generally
speaking, boys such as Smith and Kingsley, who served well-known
political figures, probably fared well. The masters and ultimate fate of
numerous other Christs children are unknown.
mong all of Britains former colonies, one in particular is

forever linked with 18th-century poverty and social outcasts.
Georgia, chartered in 1732, was originally administered by a
committee of 20 philanthropically minded trustees. Unlike
New South Wales, founded more than 50 years later as an outlet for
known criminals, Georgia was supposed to serve as a home not for
OUTCASTS
Men and women moved

from poverty in their
homeland to a difficult life
on the frontier
convicts, but for those Poor Subjects [who] are through misfortunes and
want of Employment reduced to great necessities. Based in part on the
views of founder James Oglethorpe, as expressed two years before the
granting of the charter, early Georgia was supposedly a debtors colony
begun specifically to relieve those incarcerated under the draconian
financial laws of the day. But, by the time Oglethorpe and his group of
114 initial settlers landed at Yamacraw Bluff on February 12th, 1733,
the notion of assisting debtors had largely been abandoned. Probably
not a dozen people who had been in jail for debt ever went to Georgia,
wrote E. Merton Coulter in his 1960 book, Georgia: A Short History. The
debtor legend has proven to be firmly entrenched: Mark Jones and Peter
Johnstones History of Criminal Justice (2012) includes in its chapter on
the American colonies the statement that many Georgia transplants
had been released from debtors prisons. A large number of todays
scholars of early Georgia, like Coulter, express doubts regarding the
widespread implementation of the original relief plan. Perhaps the
shift was due to prospective debtor-emigrants inability to obtain from
their creditors permission to leave England. Whatever the cause, the
first British Georgians were necessitous families who had previously
been a burden to the public charge, even if they were never actually
imprisoned. With their passage, livestock, farming implements and
other supplies purchased through charitable contributions, these men
and women moved from poverty in their homeland to a difficult life on
the frontier. One wonders if many of their acquaintances in England
thought of them as anything more than so many names removed from
the list of parish poor.
George II, for his part, thought of more practical functions in granting the new colonys charter, such as providing a buffer between the
Native Americans and Spanish in Florida and the British planters in
South Carolina. The whole Southern Frontier continueth unsettled
and lieth open to Native Americans, he complained in Georgias 1732
founding document, referring to the Savages who had laid wast [sic]
with Fire and Sword during the Yamassee War just a decade and a half
earlier. It did not take long to find suitable candidates to inhabit these
outlying buffer settlements. In January 1736, with the active support of
the trustees, a group of Highland Scots founded Darien, in Georgia, then
dangerously close to Spanish territory in Florida. We will beat them out
of their fort in the event of an attack, one colonist is said to have assured
someone who expressed fears for his safety. An interesting attempt in
1757 to entice more settlers reflected continued interest in debtors,
this time motivated more by empty lands than by charity. Hoping to
make their still-underpopulated province attractive, Georgia politicians
enacted a statute was enacted assuring debtors that their property would
be free from seizure if they chose to settle the colony. Unsurprisingly,
Top: Christ's Hospital, London in the 18th century.

Above: a bluecoat boy, a scholar of Christ's Hospital,
by John Downman, 18th century.
the measure was revoked by the Crown. A steady stream of non-British

immigrants provided a more reliable source of new residents; often
these individuals were German-speaking members of various Protestant
sects persecuted in their homelands. While many of the first settlers
were members of the deserving poor who found themselves in financial
difficulties, the success of Georgia as an alternative to English prisons is
questionable at best, given its dramatic and rapid shift in focus towards
its new role as a buffer between South Carolina and the Spaniards and
the comparatively high percentage of religious refugees from other
European states.
ESIDES charity children and the deserving poor the most unwanted element of British society was shipped overseas as well,
usually to the chagrin of the colonies elected to receive them.
Found guilty of what were then considered hanging offences,
prisoners were effectively deported from locations throughout Britain
throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Upon arrival overseas, they were
bought and sold, joining the labour force as indentured servants. Among the first records of transported criminals is a 1618 report that Ambrose
Smith, sentenced for theft, is of able body for employment in Virginia or the East Indies [sic]. It is
not clear to which destination Smith was taken, if
indeed he was actually taken at all. Another 1618 thief, John Throckmorton, was permitted to leave England after a desperate plea from his grandmother convinced both the Kings Council and the council of the Virginia Company to give the teenager a second chance. A document obtained
from the lord mayor, enumerating what the miscreant was innocent of
(murder, burglary, highway robbery, rape, or witchcraft), demonstrates
the authorities interest in keeping hardened criminals away from the
kings far-flung dominions. Tellingly, in referring to Throckmortons
Territorial
divisions in
North America,
published by
T. Stackhouse,
1783.
banishment, it also makes clear that even at this early stage the punishment was literally viewed as a form of exile, even if Virginia was
technically British property. Throckmorton was released from Newgate
and left London almost immediately. He survived until 1625, though
his further whereabouts are unknown.
As the boundaries of the British Empire expanded so too did the
options for disposing of prisoners. Scots captured by parliamentarians
in battle in 1650 were dispatched to New England, although the crime
for which these men were transported was more a question of opposing politics than moral transgressions. Other such captives were later
packed off to the Caribbean. Barbados, in the process of developing
an agricultural economy centered on sugar cane, rose to prominence
as the recipient of unwilling immigrants at this time, eagerly seeking
new workers for the cane fields, which were already acquiring a
OUTCASTS
The Island of Barbados, by

Isaac Sailmaker, c.1694.
ghastly reputation. Barbadians quickly came to prefer African slaves

over white servants, but other colonies with different labour needs
were not so selective. Meanwhile, the trade in persons such as Smith
and Throckmorton increased dramatically, to the alarm of many Britons
who had emigrated of their own volition. Virginia, long since removed
to the control of the Crown and rapidly growing tired of being forced to
accept the mother countrys miscreants, wailed about the great number
of felons and other desperate villains sent hither. In 1670, fearful of an
increasing belief that we are a place only fit to receive such base and
lewd persons, the colonys council prohibited further importation of
convicts. King and Parliament promptly ignored both the new law and
subsequent efforts to stop the prisoner trade. Pennsylvania attempted to
levy a tax on incoming criminals in 1722 and 1729, but the governor received explicit instructions from London not to enact the statutes. New
Jersey, Maryland and Jamaica also tried to follow suit, only to receive
the same official censure from London.
The idea of judicial transportation, like that of apprenticing charity
children overseas, was rooted in efficiency: relieve pressure on domestic
institutions, remove those who had no clear place in society and help
populate the colonies. Sentencing someone to sail in irons was also seen
as an act of clemency, at least for those people of influence to whom
mercy was a valuable moral consideration. All these elements were
firmly in place by 1700. But the most powerful impetus for convict emigration came in 1717, when the Piracy Act, also called the Transportation
Act, set the national standard of punishment for certain types of crime.
Despite its name, the law only partly dealt with piracy, being also intended as an Act for the further preventing [of ] robbery, burglary, and other
felonies, and for the more effectual transportation of felons. Under the
stipulations of the Act, transportation was codified as an alternative to
further penalising vagabonds domestically, as had been the standard
for decades with the Poor Laws and made a regular option for those
guilty of various degrees of theft, among other comparatively minor
transgressions. Political prisoners were not dealt with in the Piracy Act,
although some were transported according to separate proceedings; the
popular Gentlemans Magazine reported in 1747, for example, that more
than 1,000 rebellious Jacobites had been shipped off.
IN ADDITION TO providing a legal basis for their disposition, Parliament
also provided economic incentives for removing miscreants from their
native shores. Captains or other authorised individuals were typically
offered 3 a head to take these unwanted subjects overseas, an arrangement that, when added to the purchase price, resulted in a tidy profit
for the businessmen involved. From the year following the passing of
the Transportation Act, convicts flooded into the colonies at an exponentially greater rate. Though they never constituted an overwhelming
majority of all incoming travellers, modern estimates give the number
of prisoners who left the British Isles between 1718 and 1775 at more
than 50,000. To help put the total in perspective, this figure, although
Above: frontispiece of General James Edward

Oglethorpes Reasons for Establishing the Colony
of Georgia, published in London in 1733.
Below: portrait of Oglethorpe, by Samuel
Ireland, 1785.
large, is negligible in comparison with the number of Africans imported

during the same time period: more than 225,000 to North America
alone. Meanwhile, during a slightly shorter time span, at least 65,000
Germans landed in the single port of Philadelphia. Clearly, prisoners were a minority of immigrants. Regardless of origin, somewhere
between 60 and 80 per cent of the 50,000 were destined for Virginia
and Maryland, with the latter possibly receiving the greater number.
The men under Braddocks command may well have been thinking
of this recent dramatic upswing in convict arrivals when they made
themselves such a nuisance in Alexandria.
FTER PURCHASE, the duties of many sentenced labourers

typically resembled those of any other purchased servant,
potentially encompassing a variety of occupations and situations. Indentured people with the relevant skills were
popular as teachers and tutors, regardless of the circumstances under
which they had left their home country. No less a person than Augustine
Washington, according to a long-standing report, bought a convict to
serve as instructor for his young son, George, though the name of this
individual seems to have been lost to history. It was from this man,
whoever he was, that the future soldier and statesman received much
of his early schooling. Those who lacked educational skills could look
forward to seven or more years as, essentially, slave labour. The prospects for released convicts did not necessarily improve at the end
OUTCASTS
After Culloden:
Rebel Hunting, by
John Seymour
Lucas, 19th
century.
Many labourers spent long days in

Chesapeake tobacco fields. Around
half did not live to see the end of
their term
of their term. Whereas individuals who had bound themselves into
an indenture expected to receive some sort of compensation upon
completing their time, such as a small amount of land, the masters
of former prisoners were required to give nothing to their erstwhile
labourers. Arriving in a society that was hostile to them and put on the
market as one of the most inexpensive labour options available, many
spent long days in Chesapeake tobacco fields. Around half did not live
to see the end of their term.
Whether under sentence or not, the conclusion of the American
Revolution made several relocation options unavailable to the baser
sort in Britain. Instead of finding assistance in organisations seeking
to fulfill a charitable and patriotic duty, as had been the case with Georgias initial settlement effort or the governors of the Christs bluecoat
school, the impoverished free were more likely to seek other methods
of bettering their situation. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the Treaty of
Paris of 1783, which recognised the independence of 13 former colonies,
also rendered the kings criminal justice system legally unable to send
convicts to most of the Atlantic seaboard. Judges and Crown officers
looked elsewhere, turning to the South Pacific for the next large-scale
recipient of prisoners. Their search for a new removal destination led
directly to the idea of an entire penal colony, which was duly created and
would later be incorporated into Australia. Transportation to the various
remaining Atlantic territories would continue for some time to come.
Without doubt, the undesirable elements of society constituted
a large number of emigrants to all British territories in the 17th and

18th centuries. They were no longer welcome in their old home for
a variety of reasons: poverty, unemployment, homelessness, indebtedness. Tens of thousands more left under sentence of transportation.
These were the barbarous race of convicts and sweepings of the jails.
For many in Britain, it was easy to ignore the prosperous, law-abiding
subjects, as well as the honest poor, and think of colonials as merely
savage criminals. To inhabitants of the colonies, the steady flow of
disreputable persons only contributed to the poor perception of those
residing outside the home islands. No matter the scale of their crimes,
in different ways the convicts presence particularly stained the
reputation of the colonies in the eyes of those on both sides of the
Atlantic, extending the taint not just to the charity emigrants, unwanted in their own way, but also to those who had freely come of
their own means. A portion of the individuals pulled from the dregs of
society managed to make a positive contribution to their new homes,
acquiring property and enjoying productive lives after their release.
The rest are largely lost to history, drifting back into the obscurity in
which they once lived.
Rachel Christian was a graduate researcher at Florida State University.
FURTHER READING
Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America
(The Bodley Head, 2015).
Malcolm Gaskill, Between Two Worlds: How the English Became
Americans (Basic Civitas, 2013).
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to
1800 (Penguin, 2003).
XXXXXXXXX
SPAIN
Manuel
Cortes in
Hiding
Jeffrey Meyers on the neglected life of a
political idealist, whose 30-year ordeal, hidden
from the world, spans a period of momentous
change in Spain.
IN THE HILLS overlooking the Mediterranean, 20 miles
west of Mlaga, lies the village of Mijas, whose white cubist
houses and narrow cobblestone lanes attract thousands of
tourists. But, as Ronald Fraser observed in the superb but
little-known oral history, In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes
(1972), behind its tourist faade, Mijas today hides its past.
A barber and deeply committed socialist, Manuel Cortes

(1905-91) was mayor of Mijas during the last year of Republican government in Andalusia. His wife Juliana, whose
bitter pragmatism contrasts with his generous idealism,
described their separation just before Francos Fascists
occupied the village in February 1937:
Ill never forget that moment, not if a hundred years pass over
me. Never. I can feel the pain now as I felt it then ... having to
say to him, Go. Not knowing whether I would ever see him
again, and the people saying, Theyre coming, theyre killing as
they come.
He rushed up the coast toward Almeria with thousands of
other refugees.
When Cortes secretly returned to Mijas after the Fascist
victory in 1939, the terrified Juliana told him he would
be shot, if he surrendered. A denuncia, signed by three
witnesses and easy to obtain in those times of rabid hatred,
was sufficient to secure an execution. Most of the notable
survivors had either fled into exile or become bandits in the
sierra, but Cortes decided to wait for a regime change or an
amnesty that would make it safe to reappear. He waited for
30 years until 1969, from the age of 34 to 64. His story is
a unique combination of personal and historical narrative,
in which the dynamics of his secret family life merge with
his vivid recollections of the most momentous years of
modern Spain from the fall of the monarchy to the end of
the Civil War as it was lived by the rural working class.
Contact at last:
Manuel Cortes
having come out
of hiding, April
17th, 1969.
| SPAIN
sate for her poor tuition in the classroom. He had to watch
her wedding while crouched at the keyhole and lamented:
For a father not to be present at his daughters wedding
thats a sad thing to happen to a man. When grandchildren
came, they too were schooled in silence and were never
told the real name of their abuelo. Though he was able to
share a bed with Juliana, and wanted to have another child,
he could not have one. Julianas pregnancy would have been
scandalous for her and perilous for him.
His first hiding place was a cramped

hole in the wall near the entrance of
his foster-fathers inn
Cortes lived alone with daughter Maria and wife Juliana,
who thought only of his welfare and safety and supported
the family for three decades in times of great hardship. He
feared betrayal, but remained hidden and undiscovered. His
first hiding place, where he lived for two years, was a hole in
the wall near the entrance of his foster-fathers inn, where
many people came and went all day. His shoulders touched
the walls, he was unable to move about and could only come
out late at night when everyone had gone to sleep. Eventually, Juliana who had begun by selling eggs and built a
prosperous business of taxis and trucks bought her own
house. On a dark, rainy midnight, Cortes, disguised as an old
woman, shuffled down the street to his new hideout where
he had the upstairs floor. But he was still in constant danger
of discovery and his old political enemies put pressure on
the Guardia Civil to subject the ever-silent Juliana to frightening late-night interrogations in their barracks.
Cortes fought boredom by keeping busy and by trying
to recreate a semblance of normal life under extreme
threats and pressure. He occupied himself by looking at the
outside world through the narrow crack of his curtained
windows, listening to radio broadcasts, reading newspapers
and pulp fiction, preparing illegally gathered esparto grass
for weaving into baskets and espadrilles, playing with his
daughter and, later, with her children. Forced into passivity
and completely dependent on Juliana, he sometimes felt
like a child. Though he had once tutored younger boys after
school, he lacked the patience to teach Maria and compen50 HISTORY TODAY AUGUST 2015
Village of goats:
Mijas, October
1969.
Constant danger
Cortes experienced many terrifying moments: he was seen
by children who luckily did not know who he was; Juliana
was almost trapped by a blackmailer. The Guardia searched
the house, not for him but for illegal esparto grass that
Juliana threw off her roof and into the neighbours patio;
and the eight-year-old Maria threw vegetables into a pan of
hot oil which suddenly flared up, setting the outdoor brushwood roof on fire and almost burning down the house. Just
in time, a friend pulled down the post of the roof and the
whole thing collapsed and lay burning on the ground where
they could put it out. Cortes also had some serious medical
problems. He had to tear out his own decayed teeth with
pliers with only white wine as an anaesthetic. When he had
a fever, Juliana treated him with penicillin and learned how
to give him injections. When he developed an agonising
pain in his left side Maria took to her bed, simulated his pain
and got the necessary medicine from the doctor.
Cortes oral narrative reveals the contrasting stages of
his life. He recalled his childhood poverty and youthful
years of oppression, when the landlords exploited the peasants and the mayors ate all the taxes. He described his own
short but effective term as mayor of Mijas, bringing electricity and telephones to the village, building a new road to
the coast and beginning agrarian and educational reforms.
He rescued religious objects from the burning churches
and personally prevented the massacre of brutal right-wing
landlords by marauding anarchist militias.
Even in his moments of despair Cortes was too proud
to give himself up. He hoped for the best, followed the
progress of the Second World War and awaited his fate. If he
had been caught in 1939 he would have been shot; later on,
he would have been imprisoned and eventually released.
Granted an amnesty in 1969, he emerged to find the world
he knew had disappeared. Tourists had brought enormous
prosperity to the region, the older men had left the land
and the young ones lacked political awareness. But the
village was jubilant at his return his seeming resurrection
which seemed to symbolise the healing of old wounds.
Manuel Cortes showed great fortitude when trapped
and faced with the unremitting danger of discovery, but he
never gave up hope. His personal narrative bears witness to
his suffering and speaks for all victims who sought justice
against oppression. Juliana exclaimed: Politics brought
us nothing but slavery and ruination. But he maintained,
my convictions will remain till I die. His legacy is exemplary: nothing less than the patience, devotion, loyalty
and courage of the ordinary man, which transcends the
violence of contemporary politics.
Jeffrey Meyers is the author of Impressionist Quartet (2005) and Modigliani
(2006). His Robert Lowell in Love will appear in January 2016.
ISAIAH BERLIN
One of the most brilliant intellectuals of his age,

Isaiah Berlin voiced impeccably liberal views.
Yet, asks Antony Percy, were his political beliefs
compromised by some unsavoury associations?
The
UNDERCOVER
Egghead
Isaiah Berlin,
2005.
ISAIAH BERLIN
IR ISAIAH BERLIN is seen by many as the consummate British intellectual of the 20th century. A
Russian Jew born in Riga, he witnessed the bookends that enclosed what was arguably that centurys
most significant phenomenon: the Russian experiment
with Communism. Fiercely critical of any totalitarian
government, he popularised the notions of positive and
negative liberty, revisiting and elaborating upon them in
academic discourse, and arguing for the virtues of a society
that accepts and endorses plurality of values. By revivifying
a line from the Greek poet Archilochus, which contrasted
the unitary vision of the hedgehog with the more nuanced
perspective of the fox, Berlin shed new light on a whole
host of historians and thinkers and brought new insights to
a non-academic audience. More a historian of ideas than a
philosopher, Berlin dazzled with his wide reading, his rich
examples, his lively anecdotes and his dry humour.
Yet a paradox remains about Berlins broader career
beyond academia, where he undertook a number of roles
in the sphere of propaganda and intelligence-gathering
that can be described under the blanket term of political
warfare. While undeniably a member of the intelligentsia,
he constantly maintained that he never had anything to
do with intelligence. For example, in a memoir about his
uncle, L.B. Berlin, he writes:
'The enemy
always assumes
the colour of his
surroundings', a
satire from the
Soviet magazine
Crocodile, 1937.
Needless to add, I never worked for any intelligence organisation, British or any other, at any point in my life, and had
no contact with such bodies, when I was a
British Embassy official during the war or at
Chaim Weizmann chairs a
any other time.
This is an astonishing claim: Berlin left
behind much evidence to the contrary
and occasionally would even boast of
his secret contacts. Such denials do not
therefore do justice to the actions that
he pursued in a number of causes: some
open, some clandestine, some official,
some personal. Berlins desire to conceal
such initiatives suggests that he may have
felt discomfort when he recounted his
memories to his biographer towards the
end of his life.
discussion on plans for a Jewish

university in Palestine, 1938.
BERLINS ACTIVITIES can be assigned to

five major categories. First, he gathered
information from sources in the Soviet
Union between 1935 and 1956. Second,
he acted as a spy and emissary for Chaim
Weizmann, later first president of Israel,
and the Zionist movement in the late
1930s and early 1940s. He expressed a
desire to go to Moscow in 1940 (when
the Soviet Union was an ally of Germany) and presented
this plan as a plot in letters to family and friends. He also
conspired with Guy Burgess, a member of the Cambridge
Five, and Harold Nicolson to secure a posting to Moscow on
secret government business, ostensibly as a press attach,
but plausibly as a pretext to reach the US to take up private
causes. Lastly, he worked as a propagandist for British
Security Coordination in New York and later interpreted
political events for the British Embassy in Washington.
Berlins writings rely on a familiarity with the literary
climate of the Soviet Union that could be gained only by exchanges with members of the intelligentsia in that country.
Yet he did not travel there frequently: after an abortive
effort in 1940 he visited for a few months in 1945, ostensibly for government-sponsored research that did not turn
out as planned, and again more briefly in 1956. On these
occasions, he incurred the wrath of Stalin and, after the
dictators death, the KGB, by making unauthorised visits
to literary figures such as Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak. In 1956 his distant relative Efraim Halevy, who was
works, which appears on the Berlin website maintained

by Henry Hardy. Written by Berlin to his father, with a
presumed date of autumn 1935, it appears to respond to a
number of questions from Mendel about Britains probable
response to European events, specifically about threats
from Mussolini and Britains guarantees to France. The
letter from Mendel that this item responds to has
apparently not survived, but why Mendel should
have developed a sudden interest in the broader
political climate in Europe immediately after
his return from Moscow and why such a request
was made in writing as opposed to being offered
in a friendly domestic chat is puzzling. In 1940
the Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky informed
his interrogators from MI5 that all visitors from
trade delegations, especially those with relatives
still in the Soviet Union whose safety could
be threatened, were questioned when in the
Soviet Union. Mendel Berlin would have been an
excellent medium via his son to All Souls College,
where the British intelligentsia mingled with the
countrys leading politicians. It is possible that
the NKVD applied pressure on Mendel to provide
intelligence on British preparations and intentions concerning the impending conflict.
later to become head of the Israeli secret service, Mossad,

accompanied him on a furtive visit to Berlins Aunt Zelma.
In addition, his father, Mendel, had been accused of spying
(Stalin treated all such foreign representatives as spies and
unauthorised contact with members of the Soviet citizenry
was illegal) during an enigmatic visit to Moscow in 1935.
Mendel, whose British naturalisation documents describe
him as a timber-exporter, was reported to be in Moscow but
escaped his minders to visit his brother, Lev. The unfortunate Lev was later arrested and tortured, accused of being
complicit in the so-called Doctors Plot against Stalin in
1952. The brothers were suspected at this time of being
links in a chain, passing information illegally to Berlin,
although whether this was true is not clear.
Ancillary to this aspect of Berlins intelligence-gathering
is an extraordinary letter, not yet published in the printed
Guy Burgess, 1950.
HE PEAK OF Berlins enthusiasm for

the Zionist cause was reached in the late
1930s following a meeting with Chaim
Weizmann, about whom he frequently
wrote in terms of idolatry in his letters. Arie
M. Dubnov concludes that Berlin was used by
Weizmann as an inside informer, placed in a
strategic position close to the British elites nerve
system. Berlin used his connections with Oxford
to pass on information he gleaned about British
plans for Palestine, such as the composition of
the Peel Commission, announced in August 1936.
During the eventful year of 1940 such concerns
dominated Berlins thinking. His move to the US
in that summer is frequently reported as an accidental by-product of his aborted trip to Moscow,
but Berlins clear desire to return to Europe to see
Weizmann and his pretence that the job offered
to him in the office of British Information Services was not permanent or binding may reveal that
his long-term interest was as much to help the
Zionist cause as to contribute to the war effort. This conclusion has recently been confirmed by items in the diaries
of David Ben-Gurion, later to become Israels first prime
minister. Ben-Gurion records a meeting with Berlin in New
York, just before Berlin set sail for Lisbon in October 1940,
in which they discussed promises of material support from
the Soviets and planned strategies for reporting back to the
Labour Party politician and theorist Harold Laski in Britain.
Berlin may have contacted Laski on his return to the UK,
but a more significant event was a visit he paid on Weizmann on November 6th, when he expressed his eagerness
to counteract the anti-Zionist propaganda that other
government representatives had issued while in the US. The
Weizmann papers show that Berlin had managed to persuade the British Embassy in Washington of the necessity
of appointing a special representative for Jewish affairs.
ISAIAH BERLIN
In a way, this was the position that had previously been
offered to Berlin. He did eventually work for the British
Embassy, but not until early 1942 when the US had entered
the war and his propaganda role with British Security
Coordination was no longer required. By this time, the need
for his skills was one of a more general nature: broadly surveying the American political scene rather than providing a
specifically Jewish perspective on it. Yet Berlin continued to
pursue his private goals. His undercover work continued; he
admitted to his biographer, Michael Ignatieff, that, during
the summer of 1943, on hearing of a joint Anglo-American
plan to issue a statement condemning Zionist agitation he
leaked the details of it to American
Zionists who were thus able to
forestall and cancel the announcement.
Efraim Halevy would later pay
tribute to Isaiah Berlins contribution to the state of Israel. In the
Seventh Isaiah Berlin Annual
Lecture, delivered in Hampstead
on November 8th, 2009, he said:
Shaya, as we called him, was not
a neutral bystander as history
unfolded before our eyes. He was
often a player, at times a clandestine one, as when he met me in
the 1990s to hear reports of my
many meetings with the late King
Hussein of Jordan and his brother
Crown Prince Hassan, who had
been his pupil at Oxford. Berlin
was a far more active negotiator on
behalf of the Zionist cause than he
ever admitted and his dealings with
prominent Jews in Palestine, Great
Britain, the US and the Soviet
Walter Krivitsky
Union placed him in a pivotal posibefore the Dies
Committee,
tion in the years before the Israeli
Washington DC,
state was founded.
The episode of this abortive journey to Moscow receives

mainly routine treatment in the various histories and
biographies of its key characters. As Michael Ignatieff
tells the story, on the basis almost exclusively of Berlins
conversations with him, the facts are briefly stated though
a little bizarre. Early in the summer of 1940 Guy Burgess
surprised Berlin by bursting into his rooms at New College
asking him to accompany him on a trip to the Soviet
Union. Burgess, who was at the time working for D Section
of MI6 responsible for sabotage and subversion was
probably anxious to make contact with his spymasters after
Moscow had carried out a purge of the London station. He
1939.
BERLIN REVEALED in several

letters written during his time of
inactivity in the US that he wanted
to get to Moscow. This longing
apparently preceded Guy Burgess
approach to him and even his professed desire to help with the war
effort, perhaps over-unctuously articulated in a letter to his All Souls colleague, Lord Halifax.
For example, in one of his most revealing letters, to the
Communist Party member Maire Gaster, written in January
1941, Berlin refers directly to more sinister goings-on. He
describes his role to her as a courier with a bag, suggesting
that his function was to import secret material into the
Soviet Union. He colours his account of the aborted trip
to Moscow with the extraordinary phrase a plot in which
even Mrs Fisher [the wife of H.A.L. Fisher, Warden of New
College] assisted. He repeats to his parents his continuing
desire to get to Moscow, despite the objections of British
diplomats and, very curiously, reports that the Russians,
mainly in the person of Constantine Oumansky, the Soviet
Ambassador, are still eager to see him execute his mission.
Shaya, as we called him, was not a neutral bystander

as history unfolded before our eyes. He was often a
player, at times a clandestine one
had persuaded the Ministry of Information that Berlin, a

native Russian speaker, should be appointed as press officer
to the newly appointed ambassador at the embassy in
Moscow, Stafford Cripps. Berlin and Burgess left Liverpool
for Moscow via the US but never completed the journey.
In Washington, Burgess received the news that he was to
be recalled to London and was fired by MI6 on his return.
Meanwhile, Cripps refused to sanction Berlins presence
in Moscow: the Foreign Office belatedly got wind of the
whole scheme and scrapped it. Berlin, apparently not a
government employee like Burgess, was left to pursue his
own devices and eventually found an influential position
assisting the British propaganda effort in the US.
URTHER RESEARCH has shown that this account is

probably a travesty of what really happened. Berlin
himself gives multiple, conflicting accounts of the
events of that summer. To begin with, evidence
provided by John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge Five,
and Tom Driberg, a friend of Burgess (not normally the
most reliable of chroniclers, but in this case there seems no
reason for them to lie) suggests that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Berlin had been on intimate terms
with Burgess and had mixed with him socially on frequent
occasions. Second, Burgess claims that his mission to
Top: Soviet ambassador Constantine Oumansky, Washington DC, 1939.

Above: Lord Halifax (left) with Maxim Litvinov, the Jewish Soviet
ambassador, who was replaced as foreign commissar by Molotov,
following the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939.
Moscow was driven by MI6s need to exchange intelligence

with that departments Soviet counterparts must be seen
as completely spurious, given Burgess role and reputation,
and the timing of the event at the height of the Nazi-Soviet
Pact. Much more likely is that Burgess, as the ringleader
and chief courier of the group of Oxbridge-educated Soviet
agents, was anxious to inform his masters (who had
withdrawn any contacts in London out of fear that their
network had been compromised by recent defections)
that the group was still willing, active and committed,
and to advise them of the recent MI5 interviews with the
Soviet defector, Walter Krivitsky. It is possible that Burgess
wanted Berlin to accompany him as interpreter in Moscow
to ensure that his messages to his Soviet handlers were not
distorted. Krivitsky, who had been specially brought over
under conditions of the highest secrecy from the US via
Canada, had come close to identifying Cairncross, Maclean
and Philby to his MI5 interviewers. Having conferred with
his fellow moles, Burgess seems to have been the point-man
who was determined to set the NKVD on Krivitskys trail.
Other evidence suggests that Burgess and Berlin
were engaged on a shared D Section mission. Bickham
Sweet-Escott was then an officer in D Section and later in
SOE (Special Operations Executive), the group into which
D Section was folded after Churchill re-organised the
security services. In his 1965 book, Baker Street Irregular,
Sweet-Escott identifies Berlins mission to Moscow as one
engineered by D Section, strongly suggesting that Berlin
had been recruited by the same Colonel Grand for whom
Burgess was the chief ideas man. Burgess may have come up
with a scheme to deliver propaganda to the Soviet Union,
one that was listened to with sympathy. Astonishingly,
Harold Nicolson, in sections of his diaries that are unpublished, records that both Burgess and Berlin knew before
they left that their mission to Moscow would not take
place, presumably because of the disbanding of D Section
just before they were due to leave. Yet they were nevertheless both able to embark on their ship to the United States.
IT CANNOT BE PURELY COINCIDENTAL that, as soon as
he had spoken in Washington DC to another member of
the Oxbridge spy network, Michael Straight, Burgess was
called back to the UK. His mission to Moscow was no longer
required. Straight was then able to tail Krivitsky and alert
his contacts at the Soviet Embassy in Washington to Krivitskys movements. In March 1940 Burgess made a trip to
Paris with the writer Rosamond Lehmann on the spurious
pretext of working with Paris radio. He absented himself for
a while. Lehmann, who was the lover of Goronwy Rees, an
Oxford don and another Soviet agent, guessed what he was
up to: trying to visit his contact at the Soviet Embassy, on
this occasion probably delivering the news of the interrogations of Krivitsky.
Krivitskys fate was sealed. Once Trotsky had been
assassinated in August 1940, he was next on Stalins list. In
a classic set-up of falsified suicide, he was found murdered
in a Washington hotel in January 1941. Berlin is silent
on all aspects of Burgess enterprises during this period,
claiming, for instance, that they never discussed his plans
during their long sea journey across the Atlantic. Every
other prominent figure who ever worked at all closely with
Burgess during this time is similarly evasive or deceptive
about their associations with him. Most extraordinarily,
ISAIAH BERLIN
despite this clumsy adventure with Burgess, Berlin was

never called in to be interviewed by Special Branch after
Burgess later defection.
Berlin claimed that his work in New York was for an
entity described as British Information Services, newly
set up as part of the Ministry of Information. Yet this group
shared offices at the Rockefeller Center with the multipurpose department known as British Security Coordination
(BSC), an amalgam of MI5, MI6 and SOE interests in the
Americas. No personnel were wasted; their task was propaganda, to assist in gaining the support of the US for the war
effort and the countrys eventual entry into the conflict on
the side of the Allies. At first Berlin presented his employment there as a surprise, as something he undertook
reluctantly. Yet research indicates that his appointment
may have been hardwired. In particular, Berlin was probably
a close acquaintance of, and collaborator with, Alexander
Halpern, a dominant and central figure in BSC, but one who
tried to keep his involvement in British intelligence secret
until his dying day.
ALPERNS KEY ROLE for BSC was to organise the

acquisition and control of a radio station in Boston,
WRUL, that was used to subtly disseminate British
propaganda. Halpern had a history of allegiance
to British interests: a member of Kerenskys government
before the 1917 revolution in Russia, he had been a legal
adviser to the British Embassy in Moscow and had worked
for British intelligence after he arrived in the United
Top: the Rockerfeller Center, 1939.

Above: Isaiah
Berlin's BIS
identity card.
Kingdom. He, too, was employed by D Section and his interest in radio as a medium for influencing opinion dovetailed
with Burgess expertise in broadcasting and propaganda.
As a Russian Jew, he also had close cultural and ideological
affinities with Berlin. Cairncross records him and his wife, a
famed beauty of notorious pro-Soviet sympathies, holding
salons in London late in 1939 at which other academics and
future intelligence agents mingled with Berlin and Burgess.
Yet Berlin claims he never knew Halpern until his name
was mentioned to him by one Istorik in New York in 1941.
Berlin wanted to hide his involvement with Halpern; he
clearly felt that there was something dishonourable about
any ties to British intelligence before the war.
At the end of 1941 Berlin transferred to Washington,

in his words, to take charge of political surveys. While
performing a well-appreciated job informing the British
government of the realities of the American political scene
throughout the remainder of the war, Berlin continued his
private work as a Zionist emissary.
Berlin was involved with a secret document called
Casual Sources. The historian Verne Newton has reported
that the British Embassy in Moscow wrote up a report of
casual sources (contacts considered treasonous by Stalin),
a report that was kept under the tightest secrecy. Reference
was made to it in an exchange between the Foreign Office
and the embassy in Moscow. This was noticed by John W.
Russell, a press attach who had served in Moscow and was
now supervised by the spy Donald Maclean in Washington.
Russell sent London a cable, almost certainly
cleared by Maclean, asking that he and Isaiah
Berlin be provided with a copy of the Casual
Sources report. We make this request partly
out of idle curiosity, partly out of a genuine
need to keep abreast of developments in
the U.S.S.R., the cable pleaded. The Moscow
Embassy and the Foreign Office refused
because of the danger. Maclean then intervened, promising that it would not get into the
hands of the Americans and the Foreign Office
finally relented. The report no doubt ended
up in the hands of Stalin. When questioned by
Verne Newton, Berlin gave an evasive and unsatisfactory response, claiming he never knew
of the existence of such a document.
HY WAS BERLIN so coy about

his intelligence activities? After
all, supporting the war effort
was a highly respectable pursuit
for many Oxbridge dons, many of whom would
have liked to have written about their various projects had
it not been for the Official Secrets Act.
Some evidence suggests that, before he became prime
minister, Churchill attempted to forge a secret backchannel to Stalin, maybe prompted by his meeting with
Burgess in 1938, that could have involved Cadogan, Nicolson, Cripps and Laski, even, and then Berlin, Oumansky
and Ben-Gurion. This strategy may have been adopted to
help the Jews in Palestine, as well as to build a relationship
with Stalin, even though the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in force.
In May 1940, at a time when Churchill was manipulating
Hitler to make him believe that the country was divided,
that Churchills, leadership role was at risk and that Britain
was ready to sue for peace, Burgess and Berlin may have
been used to convey orally a highly confidential message
to Stalin or his ambassador, Oumansky that the process
was a feint. As the Battle of Britain began and Churchills
Why was he so coy about his

intelligence activities? After all,
supporting the war effort was
a highly respectable pursuit for
many Oxbridge dons
Cartoon by Pont
(Graham Laidler)
in Punch,
November 1940.
position as prime minister became more secure, the need

for secret negotiations presumably waned. Any possible
relationship may also have been jeopardised by the Soviet
annexation of the Baltic States in the middle of June 1940.
The episode in May 1941 when Deputy Fhrer Rudolf Hess
landed in Scotland also alerted Stalins suspicions. Given
the highly sensitive nature of such communications, those
privy to them were no doubt especially tight-lipped about
their involvement, especially after Burgess unmasking as
a Soviet agent. Such a scenario could help explain Berlins
constant denial of any intelligence dealings.
It is also possible that propaganda and deception conflicted with his intellectual beliefs. He wished to maintain
the faade that, as a leading intellectual, it was beneath his
dignity to deal in such underhand exploits and he may have
regretted some of his more dubious relationships. He also recognised a clash between the
British government and the goals of Zionism,
which had led to him being disloyal to his
adopted country.
Berlin was a man of the Left. He was a New
Dealer and enthusiastically welcomed the
Labour Partys win in 1945. Yet he was a hesitant converter of ideas into political philosophy. As Noel Annan wrote, in Our Age (1990):
He did not pronounce on public issues. No one
could say what his views were on trade union
reform, the balance of payments, university entrance or the poverty trap. He remained marginal
to the central issues of any region of national life.
Despite the claim to the contrary made by the
Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn, there is no
evidence that Berlin was ever a Soviet agent:
he was more like his friend Victor Rothschild,
a man of influence who could be manipulated and who sometimes performed dubious
activities under his own initiative. He was a consistent
critic of totalitarianism, but it was not clear where his brand
of social democracy drew the line. His life thus contained a
central paradox. As an aesthete and intellectual, he enjoyed
the comfortable liberal life of the Oxford common room
and the London salon and felt accepted in this privileged
circle. Yet his impulses towards egalitarianism and social
justice led him to favour some socialist causes, as well as
the less liberal aspects of the Zionist movement and, maybe
out of a sense of friendship, to maintain allegiance to
questionable characters past their sell-by date. Ultimately,
his lack of candour over his intelligence activities reflects
an uneasy conscience over his contribution to the shaping
of the century.
Antony Percy is studying for a PhD in Security and Intelligence Studies at the
University of Buckingham.
FURTHER READING
Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan Books,
1998).
Gary Kern, A Death in Washington (Enigma Books, 2003).
John Lukacs, The Duel (Ticknor & Fields, 1991).
Verne Newton, The Cambridge Spies (Madison Books, 1991).
REVIEWS
Richard Weight is enthused by early 1960s Britain

Joe Moran enjoys foodie time travel Juliet Gardiner admires perfect wives
Singer Tom Jones rides a

crane at BBC Television
Centre, 1971.
FROM SCARCITY to abundance is the phrase usually

used to describe the explosion
in the number of channels and
broadcasting bandwidth over the
last 60 years, from one television channel in Britain in 1950
to about 400 channels today.
However the same could apply
to the explosion in writing about
broadcasting history.
In 1957 the BBC decided it
needed its history to be written.
Partly this was because it wanted
to remind itself (and others) of
the values that underpinned the
institution when, for the first
time, its monopoly was broken
and it was facing competition
from ITV, which by the late 1950s
was resoundingly defeating the
BBC in the ratings game. Second,
it had just been through a bruising encounter with government
during the Suez Crisis. The director-general initially approached
Alan Bullock but he was too busy.
He recommended the young
Asa Briggs, an Oxford historian
who had been at Bletchley Park
during the war and knew that
institutions needed to keep their
secrets. A wonderful deal was
put in place whereby Briggs was
paid by the BBC, received access
to documents that no outsider
had ever seen, had an office in the
BBC, but would be totally independent and with the publisher,
Oxford University Press, would
SIGNPOSTS
History of British
Broadcasting
With the BBC Charter renewal in the news,
Taylor Downing recommends studies of the
institutions past, present and future.
retain editorial control. Two

volumes were initially intended.
What followed were five
authoritative tomes: The Birth of
Broadcasting (1961), The Golden
Age of Wireless (1965), The War of
Words (1970), Sound and Vision
(1979) and Competition (1995).
Briggs produced a history of an
institution and of the bureaucrats
who shaped the corporation.
His volumes follow how ideas
and policies emerged and were
defined by events. This ranges
across such issues as what radio
and later television technologies
to adopt, to what swear words
were and were not suitable; from
what was appropriate content for
Childrens Hour, to how to support
the wartime V for Victory campaign. The weakness of Briggs
histories is that they are about
people and policies rather than
programmes. The vast bulk of
the BBCs output, its actual radio
and television programmes, has
not survived. So Briggs history is
inevitably based on paper records.
It is not a cultural history. In this
sense it is very much of its time,
for cultural history hardly existed
when Briggs started writing and
the communications revolution
had yet to happen.
Since Briggs last volume was
published, many histories have
presented the BBC in terms of
its cultural contribution to the
life of the nation, such as David
Hendys brilliant, all-embracing
history of Radio 4, Life on Air
(2007) and Joe Morans Armchair
Nation (2013). Recently, Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian
has produced an excellent work
that roots the contemporary
struggles of the BBC firmly in
the story of its early days, in This

New Noise: The Extraordinary
Birth and Troubled Life of the
BBC (2015). Many others have
written on different aspects
of broadcasting history. There
is a six-volume history of ITV
(1982-2002) by Bernard Sendall,
Jeremy Potter, Paul Bonner
and others. But this is more
corporate and less compelling
than Briggs. There are also lots
of memoirs. Some are excellent
like David Attenboroughs Life
on Air (2002) and Jeremy Isaacs
Look Me in the Eye (2006), which
locate their own personal story
in the context of a dramatically
changing broadcasting landscape.
Palgrave Macmillan publish for
the BFI a series of TV Classics.
This reviewer has written one,
on The World at War (2012), and
there are volumes on Civilisation
(2009), Dr Who (2005) and The
Singing Detective (2007) among
many others. There is a growing
mass of academic titles for the
Pinkoes and
Traitors ... sums up
the enormous range
of the BBCs output
as the cultural
cornerstone
of the nation
expanding media studies market,
from analyses of TV news, to
studies of television drama.
So, after a gap of 20 years, it
is exciting to read the follow-on
to the Briggs mega history. The
series has a new author, Jean
Seaton, and a new publisher,
Profile Books. The book was
delayed for more than a year as
lawyers pored over it, concerned
about its treatment of Jimmy
Savile among other issues. But
it was finally published this year
as Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC
and the Nation 1974-1987. Seaton
comes from a fine media history
pedigree at the University of
Westminster (which in its earlier
existence, as the Polytechnic
of Central London, encouraged
much pioneering work on media
studies). She is also a known and

outspoken supporter of public
service broadcasting.
Seaton has a totally different style to Briggs. He wrote
as he would about a Victorian
city, as a largely chronological,
conventional history. Seatons
approach is thematic and
cultural, including topics such as
the political coverage of Northern
Ireland, David Attenboroughs
Life on Earth, the Charles and
Diana Royal Wedding, the role of
women in the BBC and the corporations link with the security
services, when 40 per cent of all
staff were vetted by MI5.
Seatons book has already
become controversial and has
been attacked for a host of factual
errors that let it down. Melvyn
Bragg has called it distressingly
inadequate. The son of Alasdair
Milne (the first programme
maker to become top dog at the
BBC) has denounced the account
of the sacking of his father as
DG. Much of Pinkoes and Traitors
is highly opinionated and, most
frustratingly, almost dateless. The
final chapter on Milnes demise
never once reveals in what month
and barely even what year, events
were happening.
Nevertheless, there is much
fine writing in the book that
sums up the enormous range of
the BBCs output as the cultural
cornerstone of the nation as it
got up and when it went to bed,
when it celebrated Christmas and
on an ordinary weekday evening.
The book is timely and, as the
debate about Charter renewal
takes off, it leads one to ask what
it is Britons want from the BBC.
Seaton is loud and clear on this.
The nation wants a broadcaster
that is national while remaining
independent from government;
that caters for all tastes including
the most popular while continuing to offer quality programming
of the highest international
standard; and an institution that
enables creative talent to flourish. In Seatons history the BBC
has a good champion. Let us hope
that those who have the future of
the BBC in their hands take note
of its past.
Taylor Downing
Modernity Britain
Book Two: A Shake of the Dice,

1959-62
David Kynaston
Bloomsbury 454pp 25
AFTER APPEARING at the

Stratford Royal in the hit 1960
musical Fings Aint Wot They
Used TBe, the press asked
Barbara Windsor if she would
be returning to the East End.
Are you kidding? she shrieked.
Im finished with all that tenquid-a-week lark. Im not in this
business for arts sake, you know
Im in it for the money.
The Cockney Carry On star
expressed the material aspirations that David Kynaston
brilliantly captures in this latest
volume of his history of postwar
Britain. His trademark trawl of
newspapers is analysed with
an empathetic outlook and a
readable style, so that A Shake of
the Dice takes the reader into the
daily fabric of British life.
In some ways, the Britain of
the early 1960s is unrecognisable
today. Although expectations
of marriage were growing,
most women still faced a life of
drudgery at home and at work.
Bingo, enabled by the 1960
Betting and Gaming Act, became
a female working-class craze, as
dance halls and cinemas were
converted for the fun of marking
cards to win prizes. It was a nice
change from sitting around the
house, washing, ironing, talking
to the wall, bingo fans in Tottenham told one journalist.
However, the worst of
todays Britain was also apparent in attitudes to immigration
from the colonies. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act was

passed in 1962 to limit the flow
of black and Asian citizens. Daily
Mail features on lazy, criminal
and hypersexual blacks bombarded bingo women and debutantes alike, casting principled
Labour opponents of the Act as
out-of-touch elitists.
Less toxic than this imperial
hangover, but no less tricky for
the Left, was the emergence
of todays consumer society.
Kynaston traces the arrival
of the supermarket then to
retailing what the Sputnik was
to transport. Supermarkets
were given a boost in 1964 by a
Conservative minister, Edward
Heath, who abolished resale
price maintenance (the pricefixing of goods by manufacturing cartels). This enabled heavy
discounting by giant retailers,
an act of proto-Thatcherite free
trade policy that, ironically,
put many small grocers like
Margaret Thatchers father out
of business.
Closing on a Sunday was
morally and socially right,
declared Robert Sainsbury in
1961, but his upright sabbatarianism was challenged by Jack
Cohen, who opened his flagship
Tesco store in Leicester that
year, promising keen prices and
greater choice. At the opening
Kynaston traces
the arrival of the
supermarket then
to retailing what
Sputnik was to
transport
ceremony the Tesco tape was
cut by another star of the Carry
On films, Sid James. It was USstyle capitalism in full flow.
Such was the appeal of
America that when pollsters
asked people about another
Heath initiative Britains first
application to join the nascent
European Union in 1961 55 per
cent said they would rather
be closer to the United States,
compared with only 22 per
REVIEWS
cent who said they would prefer
Europe.
Yet Kynaston shows that
behind the bluster Britons were
becoming more European.
Supermarkets may have been
an American invention but it
was they who began selling
Continental wine cheaply,
making a once middle-class
drink accessible to all. Supermarkets also piled high new
products such as Heinz tinned
Spaghetti Bolognese the
Exciting New Dish its strange
taste evoking an exotic Continent as yet out of reach to most
holidaymakers.
You never feel that Kynaston
is putting a cardigan around
your shoulders like some
chroniclers of postwar Britain,
which could still be a mean and
shabby place to live. He has the
courage to show all sides of the
dice being thrown, without ever
Kynaston has the

courage to show all
sides of the dice ...
that is the strength
of these marvellous
books
condescending to the workingclass people whose voices he
allows to be heard. That is the
strength of these marvellous
books.
The forthcoming volume on
the mid-1960s may be the most
crucial yet because, whatever
revisionists may argue, that was
the moment when the more
secular, cosmopolitan Britain
of today was forged. In January
1960, a Surrey teenager called
Jacqueline Aitken recorded in
her diary: I did the shopping
with Dad and youll never guess
what we bought! A RECORD
PLAYER! We bought Travelling
Light by Cliff Richard and Dad
chose a Mantovani long player.
What happened when teenage
taste turned to the Who and
James Brown should be at the
core of Kynastons next foray
into modernity.
Richard Weight
Perfect Wives in
Ideal Homes
The Story of Women

in the 1950s
Virginia Nicholson
Viking/Penguin 526pp 16.99
EXACTLY WHO were the perfect

wives of the 1950s? Were they the
drably dressed women still queuing
for food up to a decade after the
Second World War had ended? Or
were they sprightly looking females
in frilly pinnies, manically waving a
feather duster and serving up delicious meals to their husbands?
Following her probes into the
lives of women after the First
World War and their roles in the
Second, Virginia Nicholson moves
forward into a decade that has
only recently begun to receive the
attention it deserves. Sandwiched
between the privations and sacrifices of the 1940s and the affluent
excesses of the swinging sixties,
the fifties have long been regarded
as a dull decade, when Britain was
struggling to rebuild a devastated
and shabby country and face the
future, in the words of the Labour
Partys 1945 election slogan. For
many women they were years of
frustration at wartime gains lost,
whereas others nursed a profound
desire to return to the certainties of
their pre-war lives. But for both the
future was to prove circumscribed.
Women might have had the
vote on the same terms as men
since 1929, but for most that
was pretty well the limit of their
equality: working women were
paid much less than men and
despite the responsibilities and
sheer hard graft many had endured
in wartime, were still regarded
as submissive and inferior beings.
Educational opportunities were

limited. The 1944 Education Act
was supposed to give everyone
parity of esteem, but that is not
how it worked out. Many teachers
and parents had narrow expectations for girls whose destiny was to
be marriage, a home and a family,
with work just an interim measure
between leaving school and
walking down the aisle, rather than
a career. Just 1.2 per cent of women
went to university in the 1950s.
In many cases, a womans lot
seems to have hardly improved by
marriage. Imagining wives to be
fulfilled by having an easy-to-clean
Formica worktop and a twintub washing machine, husbands
could be harsh taskmasters, most
regarding running the home and
parenting solely as a womans responsibility, expecting meals ready
when they returned from work,
making all the household decisions
of consequence and largely continuing to inhabit a separate sphere of
pubs and football.
Nicholson stitches together
some telling interviews to support
this perception: the wife whose
husband confiscated her pearl
necklace until she learned not
to swear, the mother who wept
when her daughter called off her
engagement since she had already
purchased a set of wall-lights in
anticipation. However, she also
includes exceptions to the Stepford
Husbands
imagined wives to
be fulfilled with a
Formica worktop
and a twin-tub
washing machine
Wives stereotypes; Dora Russell
who organised a peace caravan
of women against nuclear war,
pioneers of birth control, the working-class girl who knew her looks
would get her out of the factory
and ruthlessly fought her way to be
crowned Miss Great Britain.
As ever, the perfect and the
ideal were a chimera, but frequently proved oppressive ones for
women in the 1950s.
Juliet Gardiner
The Gardens of the

British Working Class
Margaret Willes
Yale University Press 414pp 12.99
RUNNING FROM the 16th

century right up to the postwar
period, The Gardens of the British
Working Class traces the diverse
ways in which gardens and gardening have enriched the lives
of the ordinary people of Britain
through the centuries. The book
loosely follows a chronological
structure, tracing the slow
transition from gardening for
subsistence purposes primarily to obtain food but also to
cultivate herbs for medicinal
purposes to the growing of
flowers and the reinvention of
gardening as a leisure, rather
than useful, pursuit. Accessibly
written, beautifully illustrated,
and packed with fascinating
evidence, this book will be sure
to delight gardeners and social
historians alike.
While there is much here to
interest and entertain, there is
nevertheless a consistent difficulty in getting to material that
really tells us about the gardens
of the working class. In the
introduction, Willes promises
to turn to first-hand accounts
which express the thoughts
and opinions of people who are
rarely named, let alone heard.
But in reality the book makes
rather little use of autobiographical testimony; a missed
opportunity, particularly for the
period after about 1850 when
such sources become both more
abundant and more informative.
Indeed, it might be questioned
how much of the earlier part of
REVIEWS
the book is about the working
class, or ordinary, gardener at all.
Early chapters include fascinating discussions of medicinal
herbs, the introduction of the
potato and the development of
flower-growing and floral societies. It is hugely engrossing, but
only in part a story about the
significance of gardening to
ordinary Britons.
As Willes moves into the 19th
century, she moves into surer
territory. From a raft of different
sources, Willes pieces together
the uses to which labouring people put their cottage
gardens, usefully reminding us
that gardens were not simply
the preserve of the rural poor,
but an important element of
city life as well. Even in London,
many working families enjoyed
the use of a garden, at least
outside the crowded central
districts. Although vegetables
formed the mainstay of many
such gardeners, fruit and flowers
were often present, too; sometimes for resale, sometimes for
personal use and enjoyment. As
the general population became
ever more literate in Victorian
Britain, so a new form of how-to
literature aimed at the humble
gardener began to emerge.
Mass-produced, cheap newspapers such as Gardening Illustrated
could be bought for a penny
and contained tips and advice
for those with limited space
and limited means. It marked
the emergence of gardening as
a leisure pursuit, a trend that
continued apace in the 20th
century.
Above all, this is a book of
stories, pictures and vignettes.
Serious historians might want
to know more about the
number, size, spread and use of
allotments, but I imagine busy
gardeners will simply revel in
the detail Willes has amassed.
The Gardens of the British Working
Class leaves unanswered some
large questions about the role of
gardens in filling the plates and
tummies of the labouring poor
during the long period under
review, but it is sure to delight
anyone who likes to garden.
Emma Griffin
TELEVISION
Back in Time for Dinner
BBC2 (To be repeated from August 2015)

THE HISTORICAL makeover/reality television
show has been around since at least the turn of
the millennium, when The 1900 House gutted a
late-Victorian terrace in south-east London and
subjected a modern family to turn-of-the-century plumbing. That series spawned many sequels
and imitators: The 1940s House, The Edwardian
Country House, Victorian Farm, Edwardian Farm
and others. The format could be forgiven for
feeling a little tired. It did feel past its bestbefore-date in the recent 24 Hours in the Past
(BBC1), in which a group of celebrities became
Victorian minimum-wage workers sweeping
the streets and shovelling manure: a sort of
time-travel version of Im a Celebrity, which was
an endurance test for both the participants and
the viewers.
If you want to see how to do this type of
show right, though, catch up on Back in Time for
Dinner, first aired on
BBC2 this spring and
co-presented by food
historian Polly Russell
and critic Giles Coren.
It became one of the
channels most popular
recent programmes and
I can see why, apart from its simple but brilliant
title, nearly three million viewers tuned in.
On the surface, it was not so different from
the template first established by The 1900 House,
which was made by the same TV company, Wall
to Wall. The Robshaw family from North London
spent a summer cooking and eating the food
of every decade since the 1950s, from whole
dinners cooked in lard to microwaved meals,
with the producers remodelling their kitchen
and living room for each era.
The main thing the programme got right
was its choice of family. Brandon and Rochelle
Robshaw and their three children, Miranda,
Ros and Fred, were engaging and thoughtful
and up for the experiment without being too
Panglossian about it. They had twigged that

the point of the show was not the historical
dressing-up but to see how food acted as a lens
through which to read our changing values:
about the role of women, the invention of
cookery as middle-class pastime or the trade-off
between convenience and conviviality. They had
a nice line in one-liners. Salty weird jelly spread
on weird bread, was ten-year-old Freds verdict
on the bread and pork dripping diet of the 1950s.
Of the unloved National Loaf, English graduate
Brandon had the perfect analogy: In Henry V,
theres a bit where he talks about somebody
going to bed crammed with distressful bread,
and I kind of know what he meant.
Back in Time for Dinner did not entirely
escape a crucial methodological problem first
highlighted by the Supersizers strand, which
Coren also co-presented, namely that decades
are a retrospective construction of cultural
memory and people do not live by them. Not
everyone rushed out to buy fish fingers as soon
as they hit the shops and ate them in front of
the telly. History is not the zeitgeist; it is messy
and uneven and people within any era are living
life at different speeds. And yet the programme
implied that in the 1970s we were mostly
reading John Seymours Self-Sufficiency and
milking goats in our back gardens or using Delia
Smiths How To Cheat at Cooking to bluff our way
through dinner parties.
Yet the series largely succeeded in skirting
round clich because it got the minutiae right.
From somewhere, enterprising researchers
had managed to source 1950s Sutox beef suet,
freeze-dried Vesta
ready meals and a 1970s
dining table covered
in ceramic tiles. There
were nice, illuminating
details: we learned that
frozen vegetables in
1970s freezer stores
were sold loose, weighed and bagged (more
eco-friendly than today) and that in the 1980s
people who roasted chicken in the microwave
were advised to baste it with Marmite to make it
look appetisingly brown.
In popular histories of the recent past,
nostalgia often mixes with condescension. We
gaze back at our immediate ancestors and, like
colonialists wondering at the strange habits of a
remote tribe, laugh at their fashion crimes and
marvel at their naivety. Back in Time for Dinner
avoided this trap. How refreshing to see that
the Robshaws favourite decade was the one
now most berated for its politics and its style
mistakes: the 1970s.
Joe Moran
In the 1980s, people who

roasted chicken in the
microwave were advised to
baste it with Marmite ...
REVIEWS
Muslims of Medieval
Latin Christendom,
c.1050-1614
Brian A. Catlos
Cambridge University Press 650pp 65
ALTHOUGH [Muslims] do not

acknowledge a good religion, so
long as they live among Christians
with their assurance of security,
their property shall not be stolen
from them or taken by force; and
we order that whomever violates
this law shall pay a sum equal to
double the value of what he took.
This statement, proceeding from
the 13th-century Castilian law
code Siete Partidas, encapsulates
many of the complexities and
ambiguities that characterised
Muslim-Christian interactions,
collaborations and conflicts in Latin
Christendom during the Medieval and Early Modern periods.
One of the achievements of this
well-researched and exhaustive
book is that it challenges some of
the traditional historiographical
views of interfaith relationships
in frontier territories. First, it
overcomes the idea that Muslims
were a subjugated minority in a
predominantly Christian world
and considers them, instead, as
an integral and active part of it.
Second, it challenges stereotypical
views of unity by focusing on the
heterogeneity which characterised each ethno-religious group.
Political, commercial and social
networks involving Muslims and
mudjares (free Muslim subjects)
created security and stability for
most of them. However, within the
same region and during the same
period, Muslim soldiers, diplomats,
peasants, jurists, intellectuals or
craftsmen, among other categories, did not always behave and

interact as a coherent group.
Catlos chose an intimidating
title for an extremely ambitious
book. The result is an intense and
yet coherent reading, enriched
by numerous source extracts, a
comprehensive and up-to-date
engagement with international
historiography and a useful
glossary. The first part takes the
reader through a chronological
narrative of the static diaspora
to which Muslim communities in
Latin Christendom were exposed
from the 11th to the 16th centuries.
The second part is thematically
structured and reconsiders many
of the key stages discussed in
part one, focusing instead on
their representations and related
historiographical debates, as well
as on their legal, administrative,
economic and social implications.
Thanks to an impressive range
of archival sources proceeding
mainly from Iberia (with relevant
distinctions between the crowns of
Muslim experiences
under Latin rule
proved extremely
diverse in time and
across multiple
regional contexts
Castile and Leon, Aragon, Navarre
and Portugal), as well as from
southern Italy, Hungary, Lithuania
and the Crusader States, Catlos
book examines the experiences
of Muslims and mudjares as individuals and communities, whose
fortunes were not always interdependent. Catlos suggests that fiscal
regimes and taxes paid by Muslims
did not mirror the entire range of
contributions that they provided
to Christian powers and this range
of unrecorded input might explain
why in some cases royal and seigneurial authorities supported different ethno-religious groups, even
against ecclesiastical impositions.
Certainly, but only partially, religion
defined identity and regulated
contacts and exchanges, while
acculturation, daily routines and
practices, law and custom,
economic and commercial

interests and, more generally,
realpolitik also played influential
roles. The laws issued in areas of
intense contact are also valuable
in understanding some of those
dynamics, especially since Muslims
were subjected to multiple jurisdictions, whose boundaries they
crossed at their convenience.
Even if the development of
economically and administratively
more stable Christian institutions
favoured attempts at segregation and control of economically
powerful minorities, it was only by
the 16th century that the Iberian
Peninsula the last stronghold
of Muslim communities in
Europe experienced an extreme
intransigent turn under Habsburg
domination. A dramatic policy
of expulsion was implemented
and, perhaps not surprisingly,
new concepts of race developed.
But Catlos view on the failure
of mudjarism is more nuanced:
It was a crisis of conveniencia;
a divergence of interests and
agendas, that left Islamic society
in the Iberian peninsula increasingly irrelevant, if not threatening,
anomalous, if not provocative.
Muslim experiences under
Latin rule proved extremely
diverse in time and in different
regional contexts. Fear of Muslims
as a potential fifth column persisted and undermined interfaith
relationships, especially when
extremist external movements
threatened the long-term
pragmatic dynamics that were in
place. While acknowledging the
limitations of his project, especially the lack of sources for some
areas and time periods, Catlos
successfully describes complex
historical and historiographical
landscapes. He encourages the
reader to revisit ideas of tolerance,
conversion and convivencia with
an awareness of the complexity of
such multiple interactions to avoid
questions badly put. The risk
would otherwise be that inaccurate or partial views will continue
to inform historically-led debates
on interfaith relationships in an
attempt to legitimise controversial
political discourses relevant to
21st-century society.
Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo
Empire of Tea
The Asian Leaf that Conquered

the World
Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton
and Matthew Mauger
Reaktion Books 328pp 25
TEA has at least five meanings:

the shrub, originally from China
(camellia sinensis); the shrubs
leaf; the commodity produced
by drying this leaf; the commoditys infusion; and the occasion
for partaking in this infusion.
Trade in tea has been a big
business, especially in Britain,
for three centuries. Today, it is
a very big business worldwide,
worth just over $40 billion. That
is about half the value of the
worldwide coffee trade. Yet tea
is imbibed in greater quantities
than coffee: its brewed volume
in 2013 was estimated at 290
billion litres, compared with 162
billion litres of coffee. No wonder
that the authors of Empire of Tea,
a stimulating and attractively illustrated history, call
their book the story of an Asian
cash crop, a necessary luxury,
utterly free of nutritional value,
shipped halfway around the
world, saturating a mass market,
inescapably foreign, indispensably British.
Outside China, the story
really gets going in the 18th
century, the period in which
Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton
and Matthew Mauger, who are
literary academics, specialise.
They quote James Boswells
beguiling verdict on Chinese tea
as a self-medication during a
period of convalescence in 1763:
Green tea indeed is a most
kind remedy in cases of this kind.
REVIEWS
Often I have found relief from it.
I am so fond of tea that I could
write a whole dissertation on its
virtues. It comforts and enlivens
without the risks attendant on
spirituous liquors. Gentle herb!
Let the florid grape yield to thee.
Thy soft influence is a more safe
inspirer of social joy.
In this period, beginning
around 1720, much of the tea
drunk in Britain was smuggled
to avoid exorbitant government
tax, which was also the cause
in 1773 of the Boston Tea Party
(though this name appeared in
print only in 1834). Customs and
Excise fought back. For example,
in 1735 two officers, protected
by five mounted soldiers, impounded 450lbs of contraband
tea in the Suffolk countryside
near Hadleigh. But on the way
to their custom house, they
were brutally attacked by 20
heavily armed smugglers on
horseback, who took away the
aforesaid Tea, they reported.
Only after the tea tax was
commuted to an additional
tax on windows in 1784 by the
government of William Pitt did
British tea-smuggling die away.
By then, the smugglers distribution channels had spread the
formerly city-based habit of tea
drinking throughout Britain.
The first Indian tea, from
Assam, was traded in London
only in 1839, two years after
Queen Victoria, on accession
to the throne, is said to have
commanded: Bring me a cup of
[presumably Chinese] Tea and
The Times! India quickly came to
dominate both British teadrinking and the popular view
of the tea trade with its colonial
plantations and dramatic races
between tea clippers. But as
the authors observe, these
aspects of its story were the
effect rather than the cause
of the widespread demand for
tea. Now excuse me if I stop,
to boil up the kettle, warm
the teapot, spoon in my late
mothers personal blend of
loose-leaf Assam Tips and Darjeeling and indulge my lifelong
love of this exotic, indispensable,
infusion.
Andrew Robinson
MUSEUM
Lion Salt Works
Marston, Cheshire CW9 6ES

INVARIABLY, when one thinks of visiting
restored industrial sites of importance it is early
textile factories, coal mines and iron works
that come to mind. Salt hardly ever pictures in
Britains industrial heritage. However, it is hardly
an exaggeration to say that salt was one of the
most important industries in the north-west.
Before refrigeration and canning, salt was vital
for the preservation of food and as seasoning.
By the end of the 18th century salt had become
a fundamental ingredient in the production of
soap (soda), glass (soda) and textile bleaching
(chlorine). These developments eventually led to
salt from Cheshire becoming a leading vector in
the foundation and location of Britains chemical
industries in Widnes,
Runcorn and beyond.
As such the re-opening
of the Lion Salt Works
Museum is a welcome
reminder of this industrys importance to the
economic history of
Britain.
The museum is one
of only four historic
open-pan salt-making sites in the world. The
Works provide a wonderful lens through which
we see how salt has shaped the people, economy
and landscape of Cheshire and the surrounding
region. Indeed, it was salt that first fuelled the
rise of the port of Liverpool during the late
17th century and was also, subsequently, the
preferred ballast for ships involved in the slave
and textiles trade. Salt refineries were built in
Liverpool, Dungeon, Garston and Frodsham
Bridge during the 1690s. One of the first wet
docks in Liverpool, the Salt Dock, was built next
to what is now the Albert Dock as a terminus for
the trade in 1753.
There is nothing aesthetic about the Red Lion

Works but then, of course, it was not built for
attraction. In fact, the first thing that strikes you
about the wonderfully restored complex is the
temporary nature of the buildings. This can be
seen by the supporting iron railway girders that
are used to reinforce walls. It seems the owner of
the works, Henry Thompson, scoured the local
area for abandoned railways to obtain iron track
to reinforce his crumbling buildings. This quirky
but practical feature has been lovingly preserved
in the buildings restoration. Indeed, one of the
ironies is the now permanent nature of the salt
works. Mr Thompson would not believe his eyes.
As you walk towards the entrance you will be
struck by the formidable glass sides that climb
to the roof. Behind lies a shop and restaurant
and above a modern conference centre. Through
a combination of museum displays and stateof-the art interactions you are first introduced
to the history of salt-making in Britain. You
are taught about the geology of the Cheshire
area and its large deposits of rock salt. It is
through water running over this rock that brine
is created, which was originally pumped to the
surface by a steam engine (a Nodding Donkey)
that is still exhibited. It was precisely the continual evacuation of brine from beneath the surface
that led to the instability of the buildings and the
surrounding area of Northwich. The various land
collapses have now been filled with water and
created a whole new environment for wildlife
and vegetation.
It is when you get to the first Pan House that
the whole labour
process of saltmaking emerges; a
sense of the heat,
salty air, sweat and
sheer hard work
comes to life. You
first enter the Firing
area of the furnace
beneath the brine pan
that constantly had
to be maintained at the right temperature. You
then climb some stairs to a dark and atmospheric
iron pan being worked by lifelike models of salt
workers; steam is depicted by dry ice and the
customs of a bygone labour process are caught in
the background through the eerie sound of a folk
song. This was both gruelling and skilled labour,
since parts of the pan had to be kept at different
temperatures to produce different types of
salt. All the various tasks of the manufacturing
process are depicted. This museum will appeal
to a wide audience and is both educational and
entertaining.
William J. Ashworth
The Works provide a

wonderful lens through which
we see how salt has shaped
the people, economy and
landscape of Cheshire and the
surrounding region
REVIEWS
The Raj at War
A Peoples History of Indias

Second World War
Yasmin Khan
The Bodley Head 414pp 25
MORE THAN two million Indian

troops, the largest volunteer
army in world history, fought on
the Allied side from North Africa
and the Middle East to Malaya
and Singapore. But their role
was quickly forgotten, because
it did not fit easily with the postwar narratives of either British
or Indian political elites. Even the
idea of a South Bank memorial
to Indias war dead was buried in

British bureaucracy.
This book is written from a
subaltern studies perspective,
from the bottom up, rather than
focusing on political leaders.
However Khan makes no
attempt to impose a politically
correct, anti-colonial straitjacket
on her remarkably diverse cast
of characters, ranging from
the sepoys themselves to their
families, prostitutes, nurses and
cooks and then radiating out
to include the farmers, coolies,
shopkeepers, businessmen and
bureaucrats who made up the
civilian fabric of the Raj at war.
We hear about pervasive
racism, but also about how the
war broke down past barriers,
producing remarkable camaraderie under fire between Indian
sepoys and British tommies,
between officers and other
ranks. In India, as in Britain, Khan
convincingly argues that the
war was a great equaliser and
moderniser, making independence inevitable and laying the
foundations of the new Indian
state. It brought major opportunities for Indian manufacturing

industry, churning out military
and other hardware for the war
effort and huge war profits for
Indias business classes. Indian
cities grew rapidly and so did
jobs and prosperity for the urban
middle and working classes. In
the countryside, too, a job in the
army meant a full belly after a
decade of economic depression.
In a surprising parallel with
1940s Britain, the war brought
major expansion and modernisation of public health services.
The sepoys, says Khan, received
military healthcare they would
otherwise be unable to dream of
back home, including inoculations, malaria control and a
healthy diet supplemented with
multivitamins. But military
service also brought soaring
rates of venereal disease, with
wartime Calcutta recording
the highest rate anywhere in
the world. Faced with endemic
prostitution and illegal brothels, the Raj responded with
increased supplies of condoms
and slogans like Defeat the Axis,

Use Prophylaxis.
On a more sombre note, Khan
tackles the impact of wartime
profiteering and bungling on the
terrible Bengal famine of 1943,
but she is careful not to apportion blame and points out that
the famine happened on the
watch of an elected provincial
government. She is equally judicious about the failure of powersharing negotiations between
the Raj and Indias rival Congress
and Muslim League politicians.
Khans research has been
extensive and she combines it
with a gift for storytelling. She
is at her best and most original in bringing us the revealing
perspectives of witnesses other
historians might ignore: black
American GIs denied entry to a
racially segregated swimming
pool in Calcutta, sick and
orphaned Polish child refugees
sheltered by a kindly Gujarati
Maharaja, or starving Chinese
troops sent to India to be fattened up and trained.
Zareer Masani
REVIEWS
Another Darkness,
Another Dawn
A History of Gypsies, Roma

and Travellers
Becky Taylor
Reaktion Books 272pp 25
THERE ARE TOO FEW solidly

written, accessible books on the
situation of Gypsy, Traveller and
Roma (GTR) populations in the UK
and mainland Europe that contextualise their long, often tortuous
and highly contested histories. Frequently, these diverse populations
are identified simply as Gypsies.
Thus, although the cover of Becky
Taylors book, Another Darkness,
Another Dawn: A History of Gypies,
Roma and Travellers, uses images
(perhaps ironically) that play to
popular ideas of the romantic,
exotic and squalid/poverty stricken
Romani, it is a relief to find that
the text is far more sophisticated
and challenging.
Becky Taylor starts by exploring
the divisions between the ethnic
groups collectively known as GTR
or Romani people, explaining that
the popular categorisation of such
communities relies on a mixture of
recognition of ethno-linguistic and
cultural variations, as well as an
over-arching narrative of nomadism, spiced with presumptions of
criminality, artistic endeavour and
use of the dark arts. The trope of
travelling as a key characteristic
of GTR people is so common as
to lead to a frequent presumption
that Gypsies or Travellers who
no longer travel have lost their
ethnic and social identity. However
nomadism as a way of life for GTR
peoples is in sharp decline across
Europe as a result of harsh policies
enacted over centuries, which

have limited stopping places and
criminalised nomadic lifestyles.
At some points in history this
was on pain of death, enforced
through shooting horses used to
draw wagons or imprisoning and
deporting migrant or nomadic
Romani populations (even when
born in the country in which they
travelled).
Taylor and her team of research
assistants, whose work she
generously acknowledges, have
drawn together a vast amount of
literature, including the extensive
annals of the Gypsy Lore Society
journals and newsletters dating
back over 140 years, as well as
specialist books, administrative
reports and scholarly articles.
The result helps explain the wide
variety of contexts and social
milieus in which these populations
have lived and the contradictions
and challenges inherent in localised enforcement of centralised edicts and the influences of
changing normative constructions
of race, community and nationalism across Europe.
It is a relief to find
that the text is far
more sophisticated
and challenging
... [than] the
popular idea of
the romantic,
exotic and squalid/
poverty stricken
Romani
The densely-packed and
extremely well-referenced text is a
welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Romani studies, albeit
the sheer volume of materials
incorporated means that there is a
frustrating tendency to jump from
one well drafted, precise discussion
to another. Indeed, the attempt
to incorporate too much material
is my main criticism of this substantial introductory volume on
Romani historical studies. Thus, it
is less a history of its subject than
an engaging tour-de-force of
temporal political and policy practice across diverse localities; one in

which mechanisms for representing and reframing poverty, migration/ethnicity and non-normative
(that is, nomadic) behaviours are
represented through a body of
controlling, politically-driven practices addressed at diminishing the
threat of dangerous others.
However, Taylor presents a
subtly nuanced picture of European Roma, showing the everyday
lived reality of complex community relations, the impact of
inter-marriage and personal contacts, which alleviate what could
appear to be a relentlessly grim
picture of centuries of bureaucratic and legislative oppression.
Historical evidence, such as the
genocidal round-ups in the Iberian
peninsula in the 16th century and
the horrifying brutality during
the Nazi era, are contrasted
with examples of how individual
warmth, humanity and discretion
could subvert policy decrees and
the intent of rulers to create a
monolithic nation state.
The text perhaps relies too
heavily on existing publications by
key scholars, some of which are
relatively dated and fails to engage
fully with more recent historiographies of Romani peoples.
Indeed Roma scholars in Eastern
Europe are engaged in both deconstructing historical narratives
of their own people and accessing
first-hand hidden narratives by
dint of empathic shared histories. That said, this book is highly
suitable for the general reader
and students alike, who require a
clear grasp of the post-Enlightenment spread of nationalism and
the impacts of changing political
regimes on populations who are
outside normative constructions
of the good citizen.
The topical concluding chapter
and afterword emphasise the
recent resurgence of anti-Roma
rhetoric and violent racism in the
context of far Right political activities in Europe; resonating uneasily
with concerns about the recycling
of negative stereotypes, which
have pursued Gypsies, Travellers
and Roma for centuries and across
many lands.
Margaret Greenfields
CONTRIBUTORS
William J. Ashworth is Senior
Lecturer in History at the
University of Liverpool.
Taylor Downing writes on film
and television and is author of
several books, including Secret
Warriors (Little, Brown, 2014),
about scientists in the First
World War.
Juliet Gardiner is a historian
and broadcaster and a former
editor of History Today.
Margaret Greenfields is
Professor of Social Policy and
Community Engagement
at Buckinghamshire New
University and the author of
numerous articles on Gypsies
and Travellers in the UK.
Emma Griffin is Professor of
History at the University of
East Anglia and is the author
of A Short History of the British
Industrial Revolution (Palgrave,
2010).
Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo is
Senior Lecturer in Medieval
History at the University of
Lincoln.
Zareer Masani s most recent
book is Macaulay: Britains
Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley
Head, 2013). His previous books
include a widely acclaimed
biography of Indira Gandhi.
Joe Moran is a writer, lecturer,
and Professor of Cultural
History at John Moores
University. His books include
Armchair Nation: An Intimate
History of Britain in Front of the
TV (Profile, 2013).
Andrew Robinson is the
author of India: A Short History
(Thames & Hudson, 2014) and
nine other books on India.
Richard Weight is a
broadcaster and historian,
whose books include, Mod: From
Bebop to Britpop (The Bodley
Head, 2013).
HAVE YOUR SAY
Letters
Becoming Trotsky
I enjoyed reading the piece on the
assassination of Trotsky in 1940
(Months Past, August), although
I would have to disagree as to
why Trotsky became Trotsky
in terms of the origins of his
pseudonym.
In a partly autobiographical
essay, originally written and
published in the 1920s, Trotsky
stated that he himself chose this
name when filling in a forged
passport, fleeing from Irkutsk to
Samara in August 1902, stating:
I myself filled in the [relevant]
blank section of the passport,
using the name of the senior
prison warden from the jail in
Odessa.
Dr Steven J. Main
via email
Fog on the Tyne

Clive Emsleys article Cops &
Dockers (August) was an excellent description of the unlawful
practices carried out by dockers
throughout UK ports during the
Second World War. However, I
would like to correct one error.
Emsley refers in the text and photograph caption to Tyne Dock,
Sunderland. In fact, Tyne Dock
is situated between Jarrow (my
birthplace) and South Shields on
the River Tyne. Sunderland is situated approximately nine miles
from Tyne Dock and stands on
the banks of the River Wear.
David Rowe
Mold, Wales
A Special Relationship
In The Battle of Neuve Chapelle
and the Indian Corps (August),
Andrew Sharpe suggests that the
lack of recognition of the Indian
contribution to the Allied effort
in the Great War deserves to
be addressed. The views of one
veteran of that war may go a very
small way to do that.
In August 1914 my father
was junior subaltern in the 4th
Royal Irish Dragoon Guards and
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
was with the regiment when

it made the first BEF contact
with the enemy on August 22nd
at Casteau, near Mons. He was
wounded on the Marne three
weeks later and, until August
1918, he moved between hospital
and regimental duty. He was with
his regiment during the First
Battle of the Somme and would
certainly have encountered the
Indian cavalry in June and July
1916 at Querrieu, where British
and Indian cavalry waited for the
word to drive through the gap in
the German lines, which it was
hoped would have been made by
our infantry.
He did not comment on this,
but he told me of his admiration
for the Indian troopers. They
were, he said, issued with two
blankets, one for the trooper
and one for his horse. In the cold
winter nights of northern France
he recounted how many Indian
troopers would give both blankets to their horses and would
themselves share a single blanket
with a comrade.
One British officer at least was
proud to serve with such men.
Neil Munro
Wimbledon
Fatal Fallacies
In his piece on Listers introduction of antiseptic surgery
(Months Past, August), Richard
Cavendish repeats the widely
held belief that death rates were,
before its introduction, appalling. Most popular accounts of
surgery in the 18th and 19th centuries repeat this mantra, with
some suggesting that almost all
patients died. In fact, case fatality
rates were often considerably
lower than this. For example,
Robert Listons case fatality rate
at University College Hospital
in the 1840s was reported as 15
per cent, with the majority of
deaths being due to secondary
haemorrhage rather than sepsis.
James Simpson conducted a
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twitter.com/historytoday
countrywide survey of death

rates in 1869 and received over
5,000 replies; the overall case
fatality rate was about 10 per
cent. Smaller hospitals generally
had lower death rates than bigger
establishments and experienced
surgeons tended to do better
than their less experienced
colleagues, although not by very
much. Some individual hospitals,
on the other hand, did not do so
well. Thus in the 1850s, surgeons
at the London Hospital experienced a case fatality rate of 46
per cent, with most of the deaths
being due to sepsis. At Reading
Hospital, about the same time,
the rate was 42 per cent. Obviously there were blackspots or
poorer surgeons but it is wrong
to suggest that the outlook for
patients prior to the introduction
of antisepsis and anaesthesia was
uniformly bad.
Professor Tony Waldron
University College Hospital, London
Historians for Universality

The debate in the pages of History
Today between Professor David
Abulafia of Historians for Britain
and his critics has revealed an
interesting insight into how
historians interact with political change and contemporary
disputes, particularly regarding
Britains place in Europe, but also
in a more globally interconnected world. On the one hand is an
assertion of British exceptionalism, on the other a defence
of Britains European identity.
Both are supported by ample, if
somewhat obvious, references to
the countrys past.
Both cases are positively
argued, but are in fact reactions
to political changes with which
each side is uncomfortable and
that strike at the intellectual
context within which they have
framed their understanding
of British history. Historians
for Britain is concerned about
the putative dissolution of the
United Kingdom and the threat

to British identity posed by
European integration, while
its critics are alarmed at the
fragmentation of the European
Union threatened by the Eurozone crisis and attacks upon the
European idea from resurgent
nationalism. Meanwhile, all
historians of Britain, exceptionalists and Europeans alike, are
being challenged to relate their
studies to a growing emphasis
within increasingly international
universities on global history.
Simply, the contemporary
certainties which have contextualised British historiography since
the Second World War, namely
a United Kingdom within a
community of European nations,
are being challenged at home at
the same time that Britain (and
Europe) has to adapt to a materially and intellectually advancing
extra-European world.
Perhaps both Historians for
Britain and the Europeans are
too parochial. What is needed
is neither exceptionalism nor
Eurocentrism, but a history of
Britain, national, regional and
local, political, social, economic
and cultural, that retains the
particular experiences and practices of the inhabitants of Britain
and relates them to similiar and
dissimilar socities across the
world, without losing the sense
of identity felt by those who lived
in our nations past: not a British
or a European or a global history,
but a universal history.
This may require a revolution
in academic practices and
perhaps the next generation of
historians will prove to be the
revolutionaries who finally
decouple British history from
parochialism. In the meantime
we can offer up some slogans to
the cause: death to teleology,
long live the comparative and
vive la diffrence.
David K. Warner
Havant, Hampshire
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Coming Next Month

Englands Hollow Victory
Did Henry Vs death in 1422 save him

from confronting the painful truth
that his plans for a cross-channel
empire were unrealisable? Great
victories, says Gwilym Dodd, lead
commanders into self-delusion,
enticing them to pursue overambitious goals, Henrys unexpected
victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415 being a case in point.
Agincourt, argues Dodd, was lost by
the French rather than won by the
English and the victory encouraged
Henry to pursue a foolish foreign policy that would forge catastrophic
divisions within his kingdom.
The First Global Empire
Europe was astonished when, in August 1415, a Portuguese fleet

crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and stormed the Muslim port of Ceuta in
Morocco, one of the most important strategic strongholds in the
Mediterranean. What followed, writes Roger Crowley, was a 30-year
period when the nation whose population numbered only one million
and whose kings were too poor to mint their own coins attempted to
gain control of the Indian Ocean, world trade and destroy Islam.
The Bourbons Restored
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Julys Prize Crossword
Visiting France in 1815, the German poet Heinrich Heine found it a

wretched, desolate land where mankind is stupid. In the wake of the
humiliation at Waterloo, France suffered manifold social and economic
ills: there was widespread rural poverty and Paris was a seedbed of
revolt. It was against this backdrop, writes Jonathan Fenby, that le Dsir,
or the desired one, Louis XVIII, was restored to the throne and France
entered a new phase in its history, the legacy of which is felt today.
Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, In Focus, From the
Archive, Pastimes and much more.
The October issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the

UK on September 17th. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winner for July is Edward Phillips, Lowestoft, Suffolk.
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PERSEPOLIS
FromtheArchive
The monumental city of Persepolis was the pride of the Persian empire until its destruction by fire.
Richard Stoneman revisits its builders, Darius and Xerxes, and their role in its construction.
Persepolis: the Monument of Xerxes

IN HIS 1967 article on Persepolis, the
ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid
Persian empire, George Woodcock provided a vivid account of the building of
this monumental complex of palaces,
known to the Greeks as the Persian
city. He sees the master plan as that
of Darius I (r. 522-486 bc) but notably
underplays the role of his son and
successor, Xerxes (r. 486-465 bc),
in the completion of the complex.
Most notably, Woodcock credits
Xerxes with the building of the
Gateway of All Lands but
does not point out that
its erection completely
changed the direction of
approach to Persepolis.
Xerxes made his mark
on the plan of Persepolis
as soon as he took over.
How radical were the
changes? One scholar supposed that
the entire complex was a building site,
unusable as a palace, until the reign
of Xerxes successor Artaxerxes I, but
this seems unlikely. Xerxes blocked
Darius south entrance and created
a new north-western stair, which
Ernst Herzfeld, the excavator, called
perhaps the most perfect flight of
stairs ever built. Its shallow ascent
enabled the Persian court dignitaries
to ascend, without getting out of
breath or having to hitch up their colourful robes, to a grand entrance, the
Gateway of All Lands, through which
one still enters the complex.
The name is given by Xerxes
inscriptions: By the grace of Ahura
Mazda, this Gateway of All Lands I
made; much else that is beautiful was
done throughout Parsa which I did and
which my father did. In fact Gate is
something of a misnomer, since the
building has the form of a roofed hall
with a bench, in effect a waiting room.
The visitor, then as now, was greeted
by the massive guardian bulls that
flank the eastern doorway at the top of

the stairs. Inside, the cedar beams of
the roof were supported on columns
16.5m high; the walls were tiled with
designs of rosettes and palm trees.
The adjoining harem as it was
designated by the excavators bears
one of the longest of Xerxes inscriptions, which describes how Darius
chose Xerxes as his legitimate successor, as the greatest after himself. Its
layout suggests that it was residential
but there is no reason to suppose that
Darius chose Xerxes as

his legitimate successor,
as the greatest after
himself
it was really a harem as known from
the Ottoman Empire, this is simply extrapolation from the Greek report that
the Persian king had 360 concubines
(one for almost every night of the
year) and the assumption that Xerxes
only interests after being humiliated
by the Greeks were sex and architecture, here conveniently combined in a
single structure.
Next to the harem is the Treasury. This was built by Darius but was
extensively altered by Xerxes, who
cut off the western parts to make
room for the harem and created a
new entrance on the east side. In this
building was housed a vast archive of
clay tablets, written in Old Persian
and Elamite, dating from 492-458 bc,
and supplying a great deal of information about life in Achaemenid Iran.
(Several thousand more were found in
the northern fortifications.) Work on
these had scarcely begun when Woodcock wrote: they give information
on the rations and payments made to
some 15,000 individuals in over 100
localities. Presumably it was here that

Alexander discovered the treasure of
120,000 talents in gold and silver, all
of which he took away with him, a
task requiring quantities of mules as
well as 3,000 camels.
Why was Persepolis destroyed?
Woodcock offered two alternatives:
the traditional one, that it was burnt
as the result of a drunken revel led by
an Athenian courtesan, and the view
of some historians that it was an act of
policy, revenge for Xerxes destruction
of the temples of Athens in 480 bc.
It has become apparent that the fire
set by Alexander the Great in 330 bc
was particularly fierce in the buildings
erected by Xerxes, which seem to have
been singled out for destruction. So
the romantic legend of the drunken
revel should probably be laid to rest.
But in the 470s that disaster lay far
in the future. Xerxes could be proud
of his achievement. Me may Ahura
Mazda together with the gods protect,
and my kingdom, and what has been
built by me. Persepolis is Xerxes monument as much as Darius.
Richard Stonemans book, Xerxes: A Persian
Life, will be published by Yale University Press
in August 2015.
VOLUME XVII ISSUE 5 MAY 1967

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September 2015

New World Outcasts

From poverty in Britain to

The cultural impact of

Publisher Andy Patterson

From the city to

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Total Average Net Circulation

2 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

FROM THE EDITOR

Forgotten Figures Literate Slaves Names Charles Rennie Mackintosh

to the Madoc legend was also almost a

while others said they could point to

increasing separation from the king,

Being a supposed victor in

all is an organisation called the Circle

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

When faced with punishment,

tell a very plausible story.

to slaveholder authority. Conforming

Shaun Wallace is an ESRC-funded PhD student

of his name did not just sound like, but

It cannot be coincidence that rich,

kings, Cerdic, bore a name that is

James Chetwood is a Wolfson Postgraduate

Behind the beautiful work

won prizes in Italy and Vienna, where he

Money was still a problem and he writes

Barbara Butcher is the author of The Other Canal

SEPTEMBER 12th 1940

one must be allowed to touch them and

which had showed that, unlike other

SEPTEMBER 6th 1715

year and young James, now 13, was

SEPTEMBER 28th 1865

licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries,

for Scotland. Although he assured

its rules to keep women out.

The Slave Trade,

The extent to which Britons were involved in slave-ownership has been

HE LEGACIES OF British Slave-ownership project

10 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Britain. Multiple research strands were identified cultural,

it. When it comes to the public memory of slavery, these

The extent of the Hibbert

Their ownership of enslaved people was based both on

HE ASSOCIATION between Clapham, in the

Plaques and their forerunners, the London County Council

N EXPLAINING THE PRESENCE of slave-owning families

space adjacent to the property. His mother and the children

stretched down to Wandsworth Road. The family rooms

EORGE WAS AN avid collector of books and he

specially commissioned frieze by Henry Howard, The Fable of

for erudition created an alternative identity to that of

HE GARDEN reflected the needs

Clockwise from right: the plant Hibbertia, named

16 HISTORY TODAY SEPTEMBER 2015

Clapham Commons Holy Trinity Church is indicative of the

ANGIBLE TRACES OF THE HIBBERTS can still

profits of slavery infiltrated diverse geographic locations

SEPTEMBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

UNIS, DECEMBER 19TH, 1942. It was the day

At the height of the Second World War, in 1941-42, as

empires during the First World War. Although all attempts