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"War's greatest picture"? Inside the night St Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz
On 29 December 1940, a night of havoc broke bricks and mortar and claimed more than 160 lives. But it also created a moment that was used to bolster British spirit for years to come…
The Blitz had halted briefly over Christmas 1940, but on the evening of Sunday 29 December the Luftwaffe resumed bombing an already hammered London. The whistling sounds of incendiaries were first heard at 6.15pm, and for the next three-and-a-half hours more than 100,000 such bombs fell. The attack was so ferocious that one American reporter telegraphed his office with the words: “The second Great Fire of London has begun.” While most people huddled in shelters or Tube stations, an act that had become all too familiar, firefighters and volunteers tirelessly tackled the 1,500 or so blazes across the city. Dozens of buildings were utterly destroyed – but not one crucial landmark. Why did Churchill want to save St Paul's Cathedral? St Paul’s Cathedral was surrounded by smouldering ruins, while flames licked the edges of the churchyard. But Prime Minister Winston Churchill, recognising its importance to British morale, sent a message saying St Paul’s must be saved at all costs. The cathedral’s volunteer firewatchers, the St Paul’s Watch, spent the evening putting out the fires from the 28 incendiary bombs that rained down on the building, using stirrup pumps, buckets and sand. One crashed through the dome and lodged in the support beams – causing molten lead to drip down – before it finally fell to the stone floor. Yet, incredibly, the cathedral sustained no irreparable damage. By dawn, the fires had been brought under control by the exhausted firefighters, the ‘heroes with grimy faces’. The night had left more than 160 dead and around 500 injured. War's greatest picture? A couple of days later, once the photo had been cleared by the censors, the Daily Mail's front page featured what it dubbed "war's greatest picture". St Paul's was still standing and almost emerging, defiant, from the black smoke. It was taken by Herbert Mason from the roof of the newspaper's office, around half a mile from the cathedral. "The shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno," Mason later said. Indeed the photo, known as ‘St Paul’s Survives’, came to represent British resolve – the ultimate icon of ‘Blitz spirit’. This article was first published in BBC History Revealed magazine
Whether you were marrying lavishly like the royals or eloping in secret, Rebecca Probert offers six tips for the perfect Victorian wedding
Select the perfect partner For Victorians, finding someone of the right status and temperament was crucial. Love often came afterwards Choosing a suitable spouse was essential at a time when it was difficult to get out of a marriage. Before 1858, divorce was only available by private Act of Parliament; even after that date, adultery was the only basis for divorce, and wives had to prove additional aggravating factors, such as desertion or cruelty. Lonely hearts ads (typically put out by men) were increasingly likely to emphasise the desire for an attractive mate who would be a good homemaker. It was recognised that love, while important, might well develop after marriage. In Harriet Martineau’s 1839 novel Deerbrook, Dr Hope marries out of a sense of obligation but grows to love his wife, while Charlotte Brontë urged a friend to consider a proposal of marriage – even if she felt disgust for the man – if he had “common sense, a good disposition [and] a manageable temper”. While husbands and wives were expected to play different roles within marriage, society frowned on unions in which the differences between them were too great: marriages across classes were rare. When it came to age, most brides and grooms would have been in their mid-20s. Of those marrying for the first time between 1850 and 1899, the average age was a little under 26 for men and a little over 24 for women. By those ages, most working-class couples would have been in employment long enough to have built up some savings. Nevertheless, some married first and set up home later. The rector of Wortham in Suffolk described how one couple married and then lived separately while they saved up for a bed. Larger age gaps – and longer engagements – were more common among the middle and upper classes, where couples would defer marriage until the man had established himself in his profession and could furnish a suitable home. At 21, the writer Molly Hughes became engaged to 30-year-old Arthur, an aspiring barrister, but their marriage did not take place for another 10 years. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/GettyImages-73467086-f187248.jpg" width="3621" height="4902" alt="A bride and groom pose in a garden in the 1890s. Most first-time couples would have been in their mid-20s, but some did not wed until they were more financially secure. (Photo by F. J. Mortimer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="A bride and groom pose in a garden in the 1890s. Most first-time couples would have been in their mid-20s, but some did not wed until they were more financially secure. (Photo by F. J. Mortimer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> Choose where to tie the knot As the 19th century progressed, couples had more choice over where they made it official Around the time that Victoria ascended the throne, new laws came into force regulating how her subjects could marry. Up until then, all marriages had to be performed according to the rites of the Church of England, with only Jews and Quakers exempt. The Marriage Act 1836 made it possible to have a civil ceremony in a register office. The act also allowed nonconformist Christians and Catholics to marry according to their own rites, as long as they did so in a registered place of worship and with a civil registrar in attendance. And from 1856, non-Christian places of worship could also be registered for marriage. Despite the reforms, most couples continued to marry in an Anglican church. By 1900, such marriages still accounted for two-thirds of the total, with only one-sixth of couples choosing a civil ceremony. The fact that civil weddings took place in the actual office of the registrar may have put off many. One witness commented that he “never saw such a marriage in my life – there was no ring put on”. On the other hand, a civil ceremony did offer more privacy than one in church. Unsurprisingly, bigamists were twice as likely to choose a register office than was the norm. Listen | Lucy Worsley explores the life of Queen Victoria The laws governing who could marry remained unchanged by the 1836 act, however: girls could marry at 12 and boys at 14. Not that marriages under those ages were necessarily invalid. If the couple remained together once both had reached the legal age, the marriage was binding. Even when, in 1885, it was made a criminal offence to have sex with a girl under the age of 16, the fact that the couple were married was a valid defence. Anybody marrying under the age of 21 was encouraged to ensure they had parental approval. Those who falsely swore on oath that they were of age and had parental consent could forfeit any property they might otherwise have gained through their marriage. Parents had the power to forbid the banns of marriage for children under 21 – but there were plenty of ways of getting married without one’s parents knowing, including eloping to a parish where the couple were unknown. Pick your guests – wisely Some couples opted for grand events, while others chose to marry in secret When Jane Eyre declared, “Reader, I married him,” she reported that only the parson and the clerk were present at her wedding to Mr Rochester. Judging from the witnesses who signed real-life marriage registers, this was not that unusual. Some couples were no doubt marrying quietly because of parental disapproval. In Our Mutual Friend, Bella Wilfer creeps out of the house early in the morning to get married without telling her mother, although she does ensure that her father will be at the wedding. Higher up the social scale, weddings were expected to be more lavish affairs. The sexton who was called upon to witness one marriage thought the absence of guests very suspicious in the light of the superior social standing of the couple, and confidently recalled the details in the groom’s trial for bigamy seven years later. Some couples ended up sharing their special moment with complete strangers. At both Manchester Cathedral and St John’s church in the East End, vicars would routinely marry couples in batches to save time and money. Buy a special dress, if you can afford it The white wedding gown caught on in Victorian times – but for many, wearing a dress just once was unthinkable The white silk satin and lace dress that Queen Victoria wore when she married Prince Albert in 1840 was widely admired and set a trend. The Etiquette of Courtship and Matrimony reported in 1865 that fawn, grey and lavender were “entirely out of fashion”, although such colours were still suitable for widows or older brides. The novelist Mrs Henry Wood depicted an eloping bride worrying that her white dress would be a tell-tale sign, while in the 1890s the diarist Olive Garnett noted how her friend “looked lovely in regulation bridal attire”. For most, of course, a dress that would be worn just once would have been an unthinkable extravagance, and brides generally chose something that could be worn on subsequent occasions. This was made easier by the fact that wedding dresses were made to reflect the styles of the day, rather than a fairytale ideal. Over the course of the century, fashionable wedding dresses featured, in turn, crinolines, bustles and leg-of-mutton sleeves. After the wedding, they might be dyed a more suitable colour for everyday use. Lower down the social scale, practical considerations prevailed, with one account of rural weddings noting how the bride’s dress was “generally made of some serviceable material of a pretty shade”. Grooms attracted less notice, with their outfits becoming plainer over the course of the century. Class determined what kind of attire was appropriate, but the groom was not expected to stand out like his bride. Set the right date for the big day Changes in the world of work led to Victorians choosing spring or summer weddings Industrialisation and the move to less seasonally dependent work meant late spring and summer emerged as popular times to marry. But older patterns prevailed in rural areas that were still tied to the agricultural calendar. In Northamptonshire, for example, July (an especially busy time) was the least popular month to marry, while October was the most. Sunday – the one day of leisure for workers – was the most usual one for weddings, particularly in urban areas. Only in the middle of the century did the practice emerge of giving workers an extra half-day off each week, and Saturday became the most popular day. Until 1886, weddings had to take place between 8am and noon. These hours were then extended to 3pm to reflect both the working hours of the lower classes and the changing social habits of the upper classes. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/11/A345TA-61a8a76.jpg" width="5763" height="4199" alt="A wedding breakfast, depicted in 1897. Most couples enjoyed a celebration afterwards, usually at the home of the bride. (Photo by Alamy)" title="A wedding breakfast, depicted in 1897. Most couples enjoyed a celebration afterwards, usually at the home of the bride. (Photo by Alamy)" /> Throw a party and then escape on honeymoon Post-wedding celebrations and holidays became the norm as the 19th century progressed Most couples would enjoy some kind of celebration after the wedding, usually at the home of the bride. Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield hazily recalled “there being a breakfast, with abundance of things, pretty and substantial, to eat and drink” and that he made a speech “in the same dreamy fashion, without having an idea of what I want to say”. The option from 1886 of an afternoon wedding meant that parties also shifted to later in the day, with a dinner and possibly even a dance. The 19th century also saw the honeymoon become an established part of the process of getting married. For the wealthy, this might involve an extended tour of Europe. In Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester fantasises about taking the heroine “to French vineyards and Italian plains” in order to share with her the sights he has seen on his travels. Those with less money, or less time, might take a trip within the UK, with Scotland, the Lake District and the seaside being popular destinations. By the end of the century the expectation that the couple would have some time away had even percolated down to the upper working classes. In George Gissing’s novel Thyrza, his heroine, a hat-trimmer, is planning a “wedding holiday” after her marriage. Some honeymoons included visits to family and friends, but the usual expectation was that this would be a time for the couple to be alone together. As George Eliot put it, the aim was “to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other”. Honey mooning couples were thought to be easily identifiable by both their demonstrations of affection and their unfamiliarity with each other. For some unlucky couples, the honeymoon might for the first time expose a fundamental incompatibility. In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke’s visit to Rome with her aged husband proves a disaster, while John Ruskin’s reaction (or lack of it) to his bride, Effie Gray, resulted in their marriage being annulled. Professor Rebecca Probert teaches family law at the University of Exeter, and specialises in the current law and history of marriage, cohabitation, divorce and bigamy This article was first published in the Christmas 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
Class warfare: a day in the life of a Victorian schoolchild
Victorian schools could be ideological battlegrounds, where harassed teachers did their best against a backdrop of grinding poverty. Ellie Cawthorne and Susannah Wright study an era's education
The 4th of May 1899 was not a good day for the head-teacher of St Mark’s School in Leicester. Less than two weeks into her job, she recorded in her school logbook an incident that had begun with the caning of a boy for lying and disobedience. Revolting against his punishment, the boy had started “flinging himself about”, before kicking her and even threatening her with “a clasp knife open in his hand”. To make matters worse, the child’s mother had arrived at the school to castigate the head-teacher in “abusive and threatening language” before demanding that magistrates investigate the school’s conduct. While incidents like this led to lengthy logbook entries, most school days in Victorian Britain were not so dramatic. But daily life in the elementary school classroom was often a battleground between idealistic educationalists, governmental interlopers, struggling parents and hard-pressed teachers. Not to mention the children. Over the course of the 19th century, a patchwork of school systems operated across the country, and the experience of learning in one classroom could be very different from the next. Those who could afford the small fee might attend local parish or church schools. Another alternative, for those willing to embrace a more informal approach to education, were privately run ‘dame schools’ that operated out of local teachers’ homes. From 1833 onwards, child labourers were supposed to receive schooling from their employers under the Factory Act, while those found homeless or begging might be sent to tough industrial schools to learn a trade. Another option for those unable to fund their own education was schools established by charitable organisations. Most notable were the so-called ‘ragged schools’, formed in 1844 to offer free education to Britain’s poorest children. By the 1870s, there were around 350 such institutions across the country, which (in the words of Charles Dickens) “stretch[ed] out a hand” to those children “too ragged, wretched, filthy and forlorn to enter any other place”. For many of these children, just making it to school each morning was an achievement in itself. “I generally find the same parents frequently keep their children away from school on the most trivial and frivolous excuses,” stated the headmaster of Willow Street School, Leicester, in 1883. However, for many poor families, truancy was far from ‘frivolous’ – it was an economic necessity. A child attending school often meant the household losing an income. Records show that girls were more likely to miss school than their brothers – in families that couldn’t cope, they would be the first to be hauled back home to help out. Truancy levels also rocketed when seasonal work was available. Birmingham’s Floodgate Street School recorded a rise in absences over the Christmas period, when several students were found hawking “Xmas novelties” on the streets rather than in the classroom. Not having winter boots to walk to school in was another often-cited reason for absence. By 1880, however, the Elementary Education Act had made school attendance compulsory, meaning that specially appointed officers could slap parents with fines and even threaten them with prosecution. As such, attendance and punctuality became central components of ‘good behaviour’ – in 1892, the pupils of Floodgate Street who weren’t out peddling festive wares were rewarded for their good attendance with a trip to see the whale skeleton at Curzon Hall. Those who did make it to the school gates each morning were not necessarily ready to learn. Many children were on the ‘half-time system’, which allowed them to fit schooling in alongside work. This relentless schedule undoubtedly took its toll on young learners – teachers frequently recorded concerns about children arriving already exhausted after a long shift at work. Humanist FJ Gould (the self-described “most restless teacher in London”) recalled the boys at his school in Limehouse turning up “poor, ill-nourished and frequently shoeless”. National pride Bells marking the beginning of the school day rang at different times across Britain. With evening and weekend sessions employed to fit in alongside working hours, there was no universal starting time. At Hampton Industrial School in Middlesex in 1862, students arrived from 9am, ready for lessons in scripture to begin at 9.15am sharp. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School in London, the school day started when the “doors shut at nine o’clock”. According to an 1845 timetable, each morning there began with “prayers and singing”, swiftly followed by “catechism with analysis and scripture proofs”. Religion was a key element of every school day. Expectations of biblical knowledge were high – unattainably so, critics thought. FJ Gould bemoaned having to interrogate “half-starved” children on complex theological questions, while Dickens criticised ragged schools for “presenting too many religious mysteries and difficulties to minds not sufficiently prepared for their reception”. Religious wellbeing was not the only moral instruction children were expected to take away from their lessons. As fears spread that urbanisation and industrialisation were breaking down the social bonds of Britain's communities, schools were seen as a way to re-civilise the next generation, teaching them lessons of cleanliness and discipline that they could carry back to their homes. 'Readers' intended to aid literacy contained patriotic and imperialistic messages. One of the books found most frequently in elementary classrooms was HO Arnold-Forster's The Citizen Reader. First published in 1885, it extolled to children "the duties owed by British citizens to their country, their countrymen and themselves", warning that those "who really love their country, and are truly proud of its great history, will be particularly careful not to do anything by which it may be dishonoured". The classrooms in which these lessons took place varied as much as the schools themselves. In the early 19th-century, many schools were run on a monitorial system – in which all children were massed in one large hall, to be taught in small groups by older pupils. By the middle of the century, classrooms as we might recognise them had begun to emerge. Classes of up to 40 pupils were not uncommon, and sizes could stretch to 80 during staff shortages. As there were no set ages for entering and leaving the education system, classes would be organised according to ability, rather than age, in a system known as ‘standards’. If possible, girls and boys would be separated (gendered entrances were a common architectural feature in purpose-built schools), but resources often simply didn’t extend far enough. When it came to health and safety, many classrooms would not have won over Ofsted. Inspectors commented on overcrowding, poor heating and a lack of ventilation. In 1843, Charles Dickens visited Field Lane Ragged School in Clerkenwell, and found "two or three miserable rooms upstairs in a miserable house… The close low chamber, in which the boys were crowded, was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable." What Dickens saw that day left such an impression on him that he wrote an appeal in The Daily News for better school funding. Community centres By 12pm, pupils at the Central Boys’ School and Hampton Industrial School were ready for lunch. With schools generally placed in the centre of communities, pupils would usually be given a long lunch break (up to two hours) in order to head home for food. Although free lunches were not provided on a national scale until the early 20th century, food would sometimes be donated by charitable organisations, or even teachers themselves. This demonstrated the important welfare role that a school could play in a poor community. Social reformer Charles Booth declared that “each school stands up from its playground like a church in God’s acre ringing its bell”. When the girls of Hampton Industrial School returned to the classroom after their lunch break, a monotonous afternoon stretched out ahead of them – devoted entirely to needlework. Vocational subjects were mainstays of industrial schools. These would often be divided according to gender – while girls studied sewing and later cooking, boys might be offered commercially orientated drawing, or woodwork. At the National Society’s Central Boys’ School, afternoon lessons resumed at 2pm, and had a more academic bent, including “reading miscellaneous books”, “writing on slates”, and “arithmetic from blackboard”. Alongside religious studies, the ‘three Rs’ were the backbone of most school programmes. While idealistic reformers preached the benefits of literacy and numeracy for personal development, other theories were swirling beneath the desire to educate the next generation. From the mid-19th century, much of the discussion around elementary schooling focused not on opportunities for children, but on Britain’s industrial capacity. Commentators fretted that European competitors were gaining the upper hand, and one way of countering the threat was to produce a better-skilled workforce. In 1870, industrialist WE Forster introduced the Education Act in parliament by declaring: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity.” The act extended funding for school building and aimed to guarantee school places for all children aged between five and thirteen. All of these lofty governmental ambitions had a direct impact on life in the classroom. From 1862, government grants were offered for each child who passed an inspection in reading, writing and arithmetic. In this 'payment by results' system, schools could receive an extra eight shillings per child who passed – a financial reward that had a direct impact on teacher salaries. Critics accused the new system of fostering a frenzied culture of exam obsession, as well as over emphasising the three Rs. Parliament debated the 'overpressure controversy', and medics were called in to assess the physical and mental state of overstretched pupils. Writing to The Schoolmaster newspaper in 1880, FJ Gould admitted: "When one of my backward boys died of bronchitis a few weeks back I felt a measure of relief, for his death would make one failure the less." He later reflected: “The test was applied to all children alike – clever, average or crass. Hence the teachers worried, bullied, caned and ‘kept in’ after school hours. Scholars and teachers were miserable. To the souls of millions of children, this system brought a slavery as grim as the bodily slavery introduced by the industrial revolution of the 18th century.” One method of raising classroom standards was to enforce stricter discipline. The stereotype of corporal punishment in the Victorian school is all too familiar. Take the hypocritical schoolmaster Mr Brocklehurst in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, advocating his teachers to "punish her [Jane's] body to save her soul", or Nicholas Nickleby's sadistic Mr Squeers, who relentlessly persecutes the boys under his charge before receiving a highly cathartic comeuppance. Yet while physical punishment of children was both legal and widely accepted at home and even in the street, these literary depictions of schools terrorised by merciless cane-wielding masters were not universally accurate. In fact, overuse of corporal punishment was seen as a sign of failing to maintain classroom control. One headmaster in 1887 wrote that a staff member who was over-zealous with the cane had "great obstacles to overcome in class", and from the 1890s, it became standard practice to record all punishments in a book, to be checked by inspectors. Teachers noted that the most effective forms of punishment were often non-physical, especially those that involved an element of 'naming and shaming' – whether that meant a child wearing a dunce's hat or a sign around their neck. Fascination and boredom By the 1890s, reforms to the restrictive ‘payment by results’ system meant that those wishing to broaden the minds of their young charges could increasingly afford to venture into subjects such as geography, science and history. Much like today, whether these lessons would inspire fascination or boredom was largely down to the teacher. While inspectors criticised a master at Slater Street School in Leicester for delivering lessons “taken from the syllabus with little lively instruction”, others like FJ Gould attempted to inspire their pupils with storytelling and excursions to museums and galleries. Lessons at the Central Boys’ School reached an end at 4.45pm. After more prayers and singing, books and slates were collected and the boys sent on their way. By the time they left the public school system for good, pupils aged 12 (the minimum leaving age from 1899) and above were expected to reach the ‘fourth level’ – requiring them to write dictated phrases with fewer than three spelling mistakes, read with fluency and expression, recite eight lines of poetry and answer maths problems. For many children, however, it was not the academic lessons that stayed with them the most. As Arthur Goffin, a typesetter’s son born in 1879, recalled: “We were taught direction and guidance, and acquired soundness, contentment, control and stability... [Our teacher] had always something beyond the textbook for us, and drove his lessons home by unforgettable anecdotes and stories... I can recall so many things [my teachers] said which I realised in later life have helped me in different ways.” Ellie Cawthorne is staff writer on BBC History Magazine. Dr Susannah Wright is a senior lecturer in education studies at Oxford Brookes. This article was first published in the March 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
The two sides of George IV: is his wretched reputation deserved?
George IV was cultured, urbane and generous. Yet he trashed his reputation with his weakness for women, wine and spectacular self-indulgence. Two centuries after he became king, Stella Tillyard introduces the two, contrasting, sides of a little-lamented monarch
At the end of January 1820, Charles Greville, young man-about-town and future clerk to the Privy Council, was enjoying the good life at the Duke of Bedford’s luxurious estate of Woburn in Bedfordshire. He “shot the whole week”, he recorded in his diary, “and killed an immense quantity of game”. The solemn news that demanded his close professional attention was more laconically reported. “On Sunday last, arrived the news of the king’s death,” he wrote, adding without comment: “The new king has been desperately ill. He had a bad cold at Brighton, for which he lost 80 ounces of blood; yet he afterwards had a severe oppression, amounting almost to suffocation, on his chest.” So George III was dead, and the British crown passed to his son George IV, who, at only 57 years old, was almost too broken down to receive it. Greville was to spend many hours in the company of the new king, but he never came to like him. Ten years later, on 16 July, the day after George IV's funeral, Greville noted, as if he had never known him: "Nobody thinks any more of the late king than if he had been dead 50 years, unless it be to abuse him and to rake up all his vices and misdeeds." The august Times newspaper ran a leader the same day declaring with relish that: "There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased king," and asked rhetorically: "What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? If George IV ever had a friend – a devoted friend – in any rank of life, we protest that the name of him or her has not yet reached us." George IV’s reputation was thus poor when he acceded to the throne in 1820, poor when he vacated it in 1830, and has not really recovered since. Part of the reason for this is the fact that he was held in low esteem both by his chief executor, the Duke of Wellington, and by his niece, Queen Victoria, who disapproved of his spendthrift ways, his morals and his laziness. The duke destroyed many of George IV’s personal possessions and, presumably, as much of his private correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, that he could get hold of. As for Queen Victoria, she hung onto the best of his paintings, porcelain, silver and furniture, but sold off or junked what she didn’t like. Few of George’s acts as king and, before that, regent (when George ruled as a proxy for his father, who had been declared irremediably mad) are remembered. In the absence of George’s jottings and sketches, his plans for interiors and his vast and expensive wardrobe, his private world and emotions are difficult to reconstruct. And so it was left to Victoria, and the age to which she gave her name, to fill the vacuum and seal George IV’s terrible image in the eyes of the British people. Victoria, who acceded to the throne seven years after George’s death (following the brief reign of William IV), set out to be everything her uncle was not: a successful and long-lasting monarch; a devoted spouse with a large brood. As if that wasn’t enough to eclipse him, his father, George III, was another hardworking monarch (before he succumbed to mental illness), faithfully married for 57 years and the father of 15 children. Read more about the young Victoria's struggle to gain the throne Although George was undoubtedly the architect of his own lowly reputation, he was also unlucky in the time and circumstances in which he inherited the throne. In 1820 he was an ailing man without a direct heir or family. Estranged from his wife, with his only daughter dead in childbirth, he was obese and dependent on alcohol and laudanum. Lackadaisical at the best of times about business, at the end of his reign he became more a hindrance to the governance of the nation than a symbol of its greatness. Refined tastes But this bleak picture is only part of the story. George IV was also a man of charm and taste, probably the last British monarch to display any real feeling for good painting, innovative architecture and eclectic design. He could be gracious, was naturally socially adroit, and skilled at putting visitors at their ease. His instincts were always on the side of kindness. He was playful with children and generous to his sisters, was unafraid of sentimentality and hated cruelty towards animals. When George was king, he shrank at any discussion of the execution of criminals, which he had to approve, and always preferred leniency. “It not unfrequently happens that a culprit escapes owing to the scruples of the king,” an observer noted. Had he not been who he was, his acquaintance Lady Holland wrote, “he would, I am persuaded, have been a most amiable man”. Unfortunately, George was a prince – both Prince of Wales and Prince Regent – for a very long time, and it was this accident of birth, about which he could do nothing, that defined his life. A very few years after his birth on 12 August 1762, George would have become aware that he was different from the long line of brothers and sisters who followed him. He was the heir to the throne, and subject way beyond his childhood not just to the conditions of the 1701 Act of Settlement that laid down the relationship between the crown and the executive, but also to his father’s whims and strictures. The Act of Settlement precluded him from marrying a Catholic, while the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 forbade him from marrying anyone without his father’s permission before the age of 25. By the time he was 23, in a spectacular enactment of the multi-generation Hanoverian hatred between kings and heirs, George had done both. Listen | Acclaimed historian and author Antonia Fraser discusses her book The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights 1829 Emotional neglect George’s relationship with his father began to unravel at a very young age. He was removed from his family as a young boy and set up in Kew Palace under the eye of a harsh governor, Lord Holdernesse, and several tutors. By the time George was a teenager, the combination of an unremittingly severe regime, subservience and emotional neglect had produced a rebellious, self-regarding young man, one disinclined to the efforts required of his position as the future king. This set him on an inevitable collision course with his father, who voiced a disapproval and disdain that the prince soon returned. The king “hates me”, George told his friend James Harris a few years later, adding: “He always did, from seven years old.” As if to spite his father, as soon as he turned 18 and was granted his own establishment, the prince began to pursue with great energy and pleasure the life of women, song and wine that his father most feared. The duties of the Prince of Wales were undefined, but, in practice, determined by the king. From the age of 21, George received a handsome allowance of £62,000 a year, and a household and establishment of his own in Carlton House on the southern side of Pall Mall. He was forbidden from leaving the country without permission or taking a military role, both of which he longed to do, and he was now in a very public way his father’s heir. George III expected him to act with the decorum his position demanded, especially in the matter of politics, where he was expected, if not to support his father, then certainly to stay out of the limelight. Matters were supposed to continue in this way until the king died. But in 1783, when the prince moved into Carlton House, his father was only 45 years old. Decades might pass before he inherited the throne. The burning question of the prince’s life was what to do in the meantime. The answer came quickly: George began to overspend extravagantly, on full-scale renovations to Carlton House, on furniture and art and on a spectacular wardrobe. He pursued enthusiastically all the amorous opportunities that money and rank put in his way, and infuriated his father by consorting with opposition Whig politicians, notably the brilliant and louche Charles James Fox. At Carlton House he shrugged off the disciplined use of the day and tepid evening entertainments. When he was to be found at home, it was often in his bedchamber, where he transacted both friendship and business. The memoirist Nathaniel Wraxall reported that visitors often found the prince in bed, “rolling about from side to side in a state approaching to nudity”. Early in 1784, when he was still 21, the prince met a twice-widowed Catholic, Maria Fitzherbert. Six years his senior, and extremely devout, Mrs Fitzherbert rebuffed George’s advances, driving him to frenzies of letter-writing and present-giving that culminated first in her fleeing to France to escape his advances, and then, when that failed, to his promising a marriage that he was in no position to offer. It went ahead, legal in the eyes of the Catholic church, doubly illegal (and therefore non-existent) in English law, a fact that would prove convenient to the prince some years later. Timeline: George IV's scandalous life 12 August 1762 Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of King George III, gives birth to the future George IV at St James's Palace. 15 December 1785 George marries Maria Fitzherbert in secret. The union is illegal on two counts: she is a Roman Catholic and he has failed to secure his father's permission to marry her. 8 April 1795 Having dismissed Maria the previous year, George marries his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick, in exchange for parliament paying off his debts. The marriage is a disaster and George soon tries – and fails – to divorce her. 7 January 1796 Caroline of Brunswick gives birth to George's only child, Princess Charlotte of Wales. Charlotte becomes the darling of the nation before dying, aged 21, shortly after childbirth in 1817. 1811 George becomes Prince Regent, ruling on behalf of his mentally ill father. 1815 George commissions John Nash to design a seaside residence for him. The result, completed in 1822, is the remarkable Royal Brighton Pavilion inspired by the architecture of India and China. 29 January 1820 George ascends to the throne as king following the death of his father. By now, he is obese and dependent on alcohol and laudanum. 1823 George gives his father's extensive library to the British Museum. Throughout his life, he is a prolific collector of art, a generous patron and a fine musician. 13 April 1829 Under huge pressure from his ministers, George gives assent to the Roman Catholic Relief Act, allowing Catholics to hold public office and sit in parliament. 26 June 1830 After teetering on the edge of death for months, George succumbs to a ruptured blood vessel. Rocky relationships With Mrs Fitzherbert installed in a mansion round the corner from Carlton House, the prince’s domestic life stabilised, though his eye continued to rove. By the early 1790s, after a crisis when the king was ill and the prince had been all too eager to take the reins of power, his relationship with both his father and the press was on the rocks. The only way to appease both was to get married properly, which would also release the funds to pay off his massive debts. In 1794, having already taken a new mistress, George dismissed Mrs Fitzherbert (though he left instructions in his will of 1796 that he be buried with his miniature of Mrs Fitzherbert round his neck) and the following year married his cousin Princess Caroline of Brunswick. This was another disaster, undertaken with scant regard for the people involved. From the first, the prince hated Caroline and claimed only to have slept with her three times. Although an heir, Princess Charlotte, was born from this brief flurry, George’s marriage only made everything worse. The public sided with the princess, the prince’s debts mounted again and the king continued implacable. Princess Charlotte’s death in childbirth, aged 21 in 1817, earned George scant sympathy, and even after Queen Caroline’s death shortly after his coronation, in August 1821, his public reputation rose very little. Through all this, though, as prince and then king, George remained a man capable of kindness, generosity and artistic discernment. In his youth he was a leader of fashion and style, and always insisted on the highest standards of tailoring and finish in every project he undertook. He was a fine musician and was capable of genuine admiration for singers and composers, counting it an honour, for instance, to play the piano accompaniment for Gioachino Rossini when the Italian came to Britain in 1823 to sing through arias from his operas. George was a generous patron to various institutions and gave his father’s extensive library in its entirety to the British Museum in 1823, a gift that resulted in the demolition of the existing museum and the building of a grand new neoclassical structure. Uncertainty and unrest: read more about the madness of the Regency period After music, the prince’s talents were best engaged by art and architecture. George IV was the last monarch who bought any decent art for the crown (much of which is currently on display in an exhibition at Buckingham Palace – see the end of the piece for more details). His collection of Dutch 17th-century painting, first hung in Carlton House and then divided between Buckingham Palace and Windsor, was of the highest quality. Though his alterations at Carlton House resulted in an overdose of grandeur without a controlling aesthetic, and the renovations at Windsor and Buckingham Palace lacked lightness, the construction and decoration of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton resulted in perhaps the only royal building that shows any genuine personal stamp and flair. George first took the lease of the house that turned into the pavilion in 1786, but it was only in 1815 that the plain house began its transformation under the architect John Nash. When finished in 1822, the pavilion stupefied and horrified visitors in equal measure. While one described the exterior as “taken from the Kremlin at Moscow”, the interior seemed to others an enchanted palace of light, with colours shifting through stained glass, and light glancing and twinkling from lanterns, mirrors, chandeliers and lacquered walls. Glittering objects filled the rooms: gilt conch-shells, silvered dragons and snakes, and gilded furniture. Everything was saturated with colour: deep reds, yellows, blues. Reformer to reactionary George IV was an immensely strong man but not even his formidable frame could withstand the decades of abuse to which he subjected it. On 26 June 1830, that abuse finally caught up with him and, after months of drifting towards death at Windsor Castle, a ruptured blood vessel sent him to his grave. Few lamented his passing – as the Times' leader-writer pointed out with stinging relish – yet George's reign may not have been the unmitigated disaster that it is widely portrayed to be. If George, the man, had two sides to him, so does his legacy. He was, for example, too averse to bureaucratic work to interfere much in the business of government – yet this very lack of meddling contributed to the solidity of the constitutional monarchy over which he presided. During his life, George undertook a political journey from reformer to reactionary. The French Revolution ended the sympathy he had once held for constitutional change, and the Napoleonic Wars and unrest in Ireland turned it to a firm hostility. But, as his reign drew to a close, George – under immense pressure from the Duke of Wellington – signed the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. This not only allowed Catholics to hold public office and sit in parliament, but also paved the way for the more wholesale changes to the franchise of the Great Reform Act of 1832. George IV may have, at times, appeared hellbent on wrecking the monarchy. But, in signing the act, he contributed to the piecemeal reforms that were handed out with just enough frequency to preserve aristocratic government and the crown itself. Stella Tillyard is an author and historian. Her latest book, George IV: King in Waiting, was published by Allen Lane in July 2019 This article was first published in the February 2020 edition of BBC History Magazine Explore more content from week one of our Regency course: Introduction to the Regency, with Dr Lizzie Rogers - watching time 10 mins Regency timeline: the key dates you need to know - reading time 3 mins The Regency era: everything you wanted to know - listening time 54 mins Regency inequality: the gap between rich and poor in Georgian Britain - reading time 14 mins The illness and decline of George III - reading time 10 mins
If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater?
Alfred the Great's achievements are dwarfed by those of his grandson Æthelstan. So why, asks Sarah Foot, is the former still venerated while the latter is overlooked?
Was King Alfred (reigned 871–99) really the greatest Anglo-Saxon king? Certainly he remains the best-remembered – even if it’s only for burning the cakes. But should it really be his grandson Æthelstan (reigned 924–39) – now largely forgotten – whom we celebrate as the most significant pre-Conquest monarch? Alfred was a highly successful military leader who, in a battle at Edington in AD 878, resoundingly defeated the Danish army that had almost conquered Wessex. In the ensuing period of peace he launched a programme of educational reform that transformed the use of English as both a literary and a governmental language. Yet Alfred only ruled the West Saxon people, and those in the western part of the Midland kingdom of Mercia not under subjection to the Danes. When he died (the sole remaining native king in England), the east Midlands, East Anglia and Northumbria all lay in Danish hands. View Green Video on the source website Who was Æthelstan? Æthelstan, on the other hand, was the first king to rule all England and laid claim to an imperial overlordship over the whole of Britain. His military prowess brought him direct authority over not just Wessex and Mercia, but the Danelaw (the name given to the area of northern England where Vikings settled) and the kingdom north of the Humber. Celtic rulers from elsewhere in the British Isles subsequently submitted to his authority. He crushed a rebellion of the Scots king in AD 934, attacking his realm with a land and sea force and ravaging as far north as Caithness. When Æthelstan defeated a combined Norse-Scots-Northumbrian force at the battle of Brunanburh in AD 937, a contemporary poem entered into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recalled: "Never yet in this island before this was a greater slaughter of a host made by the edge of the sword since the Angles and Saxons came hither from the east, overcame the Britons and won a country." Read more | Why can't we find the battlefield of Brunanburh? Foreigners also recognised Æthelstan’s status. He played a significant role on a European stage, forging alliances with royal and ducal houses across the territories of the former Carolingian empire through marriage and fostering arrangements. Scholars from Britain and abroad flocked to his court, bringing books, precious gifts and the relics of the saints (to which Æthelstan showed particular devotion). Alfred founded a dynasty. Æthelstan (who died childless) paved the way for that royal line (through his brothers and nephews) to govern all the English peoples via an effective administrative machine. When he died, an Irish chronicler lamented the demise of the “pillar of the dignity of the western world”. How can so great a king, once celebrated for his achievements, have fallen into such oblivion today? Æthelstan is a major figure in Netflix film Seven Kings Must Die, the final chapter of The Last Kingdom series, which explores the formation of England through lens of conflicted her Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Discover the real history behind the film: Seven Kings Must Die: how close to real history is it? Seven Kings Must Die ending explained: who are the seven kings? The Last Kingdom: what's the real history and how historically accurate is it? The real Uhtred of Bebbanburg: the historical inspirations for The Last Kingdom’s hero Bernard Cornwell on The Last Kingdom’s finale Why don't we remember Æthelstan? Alfred's posthumous reputation received a substantial boost from the profusion of literature that emanated from his court in the latter years of his reign – including the first version of the collection of year-by-year accounts of early English history we know as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. One of his circle, the Welsh priest Asser, also wrote a life of the king in the 890s, giving an unparalleled insight into his personality, his devotion to the saints, his practical and creative abilities and his attitudes to kingship. Texts translated from Latin into English at his court also included passages attributed to the king himself. By contrast, the reign of Æthelstan is ill-served with narrative sources; the Chronicle offers the sketchiest narrative of events in his reign, there is no surviving biography, nor any writing attributed to his own authorship. Creating a picture of him as a man as well as a royal figurehead involves piecing together information from a disparate range of sources (and a good deal of imaginative licence). Read more | Ælfweard and Æthelstan: were they rivals for the throne of Wessex? Even so, after his death, Æthelstan enjoyed considerable fame. The West Saxon Latin chronicler Æthelweard saw Æthelstan as a mighty king and drew attention to his victory at Brunanburh (still remembered in the late tenth century as the ‘Great Battle’). Æthelstan’s submission of the Scots and the Picts brought significant and lasting consequences: “The fields of Britain were consolidated into one, there was peace everywhere and abundance of all things, and [since then] no fleet has remained here having advanced against these shores, except under treaty with the English.” Æthelred the Unready (reigned 978–1016) called his eldest son Æthelstan – and worked through various Old English royal names before he thought to name his eighth son Alfred. St Cuthbert and the kings of Wessex Both Alfred and Æthelstan are associated with legends relating to St Cuthbert (bishop of Lindisfarne, d687). At his time of greatest need, before the battle of Edington, King Alfred supposedly received a night-time visitation from the saint, who promised him victory and a glorious future for his sons. If Alfred would be faithful to Cuthbert and his people, Albion would be given to him and his sons, and he would be chosen king of all Britain. Æthelstan – who claimed that very title: king of all Britain – showed great devotion to the saint’s shrine on a visit to Chester-le-Street in 934. He gave many precious gifts including a book containing Bede’s life of Cuthbert. The frontispiece to that volume depicts a double portrait of the crowned King Æthelstan presenting the manuscript to Cuthbert. Æthelstan's Norman reputation After the Norman Conquest, Æthelstan’s reputation remained strong. To Anglo-Norman writers, he stood out as the founder of a united English realm, and – perhaps more significantly in that era – as having successfully asserted his authority over his Celtic neighbours. William, a monk of Malmesbury Abbey where Æthelstan was buried, paid him particular attention, providing insights not found in any other source, possibly drawing on a now-lost tenth-century life of the king. In William’s hands, Æthelstan became not just a king to remember but one about whom there were many stories, even popular songs worth recalling and repeating. Various factors combined to diminish Æthelstan's standing in the literary imagination during the late Middle Ages. Legends about a heroic British king, Arthur, received a substantial boost from the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth. While Æthelstan's martial success still gained approval, rumours first reported by William of Malmesbury that Æthelstan's mother had been a concubine and he was therefore illegitimate gained increasing currency. The mysterious circumstances in which his younger brother, Edwin, was drowned at sea in 933 (supposedly in an open boat without an oar), and Æthelstan's foundation of the church at Milton Abbas in reparation did him little good either. Æthelstan's literary reputation reached its nadir in the 14th-century poem, Æthelston, in which the eponymous hero comes across as a troubled and insecure king, struggling to achieve the moral authority to control his realm. At the same time, other pre-Conquest kings achieved equal or greater prominence. Attempts to make a saint of Edward the Confessor began soon after his death; he was canonised in 1161. Most problematically for Æthelstan’s cause, Alfred was frequently hailed as the first king to have held sway over all England. Orderic Vitalis, writing in the 12th century, first made that claim, which was energetically promoted by monks at St Albans including Matthew Paris, who went so far as to say that “in view of his merits Alfred was called Great”. King Henry VI even tried in 1441 to get Alfred “the first monarch of the famous kingdom of England” canonised, but without success. No one tried to make a saint of Æthelstan, even though he never married and had such a great reputation for piety in his lifetime. Watch | Michael Wood on the astonishing Æthelstan Neither great nor saint, Æthelstan's place in the popular memory started to slide as the reputation of Alfred increasingly eclipsed that of all Anglo-Saxon kings. Elizabeth I's reign saw an increasing interest in the history of pre-Conquest England; antiquarians collected early English manuscripts and began to publish Anglo-Saxon texts, including Asser's Life of Alfred. This helped to increase popular understanding of Alfred's qualities as a ruler and build his reputation as a scholar and statesman at the expense not just of Æthelstan but of all other Anglo-Saxon kings for whom no equivalent biographies survive. William Tyndale had claimed that Æthelstan commissioned an early translation of the Bible. But it was Alfred's promotion of English over Latin as the language through which to get closer to God that would resonate in the reformed English church, eager to find the historic roots of the Ecclesia Anglicana in the distant past. Alfred's reputation flourished further after the publication (in Latin in 1678, and in English in 1709) of John Spelman's Life of King Alfred, which promoted the king as first founder of the English monarchy. Prince Frederick (son of George II) and his circle of patriots enthusiastically evoked Alfred for his protection of English freedoms and his defeat of foreign enemies, on land and sea. Thomas Arne's masque Alfred, first performed for Prince Frederick in 1740, concludes famously with the anthem Rule Britannia. Thus, gradually during the 18th and 19th centuries, Æthelstan’s memory waned. Only the Freemasons remembered Æthelstan and celebrated him as their mythical founder in England, his ‘son’ (brother) Edwin the first English Grand Master. History books (especially those written for children) found much to celebrate in the deeds for which Alfred was famed, not just his victories over the Danes but his inventions – a candle-clock sheltering inside a horn lantern – and his supposed role in founding the English navy by having ships of a new, longer, design built to try and defeat the enemy at sea. Æthelstan vs Alfred in the national myth Æthelstan’s right to be considered the first king of all England seemed long forgotten, that epithet given either to Alfred’s grandfather (Ecgberht, d839) or more often to Alfred. Anglo-Saxon topics were popular among Victorian painters but neither Æthelstan nor his great battle at Brunanburh found visual commemoration in any picture exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1904; Alfred was however frequently depicted. It was Alfred who took the central role in the creation of a national myth of English and British origins; he became the archetypal symbol of the nation’s own sense of itself. The beginnings of political stability in Britain (which stood in marked contrast to the upheavals elsewhere in 19th-century Europe) went back to Alfred’s day. As Edward Augustus Freeman argued, Alfred was the most perfect character in history; no other name could compare with his. Nothing brings out the contrast between the two kings’ reputations better than the marking of the millennial anniversaries of their deaths. Thanks to uncertainty about the precise date of Alfred’s demise, his millennium was celebrated not in 1899 but in 1901. First planned in the aftermath of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, the celebration was to be a “National commemoration of the king to whom this empire owes so much.” Crowds travelled to Winchester on Friday 20 September 1901 to watch Lord Rosebery unveil Hamo Thornycroft’s massive statue of the king set in the Broadway, Winchester, before proceeding to Winchester Cathedral for a service with the massed choirs of southern English cathedrals, at which the archbishop of Canterbury preached. In stark contrast, a single notice in The Times of London for 25 October 1940 (buried under "Ecclesiastical News"), noted the supposed millennium of "Æthelstan the Great" (dating his death to AD 940, in error for AD 939). Lamenting that there might in happier times have been some celebration of this event, the correspondent remembered the king as the greatest and most munificent benefactor to St Paul's Cathedral in London, his donations making that cathedral the richest in England. Only with the revival of Anglo-Saxonism in the latter years of the 20th century, increased scholarly interest in the Latin and vernacular literature of England before the Conquest, and the critical editing of royal administrative documents, has Æthelstan begun to regain something of his former prominence. His reign lay at the source of many developments. First to unite the English peoples under a single authority, Æthelstan also accepted the submission of all the other rulers of Britain. Welsh kings attended regularly at his court, travelling round the kingdom with him. Æthelstan expressed his claim to hegemony over all Britain in a new language of imperial rulership and in visual symbols, most obviously his decision to wear a crown (shown on his coins and in the surviving portrait of the king giving a book to St Cuthbert). His sway over the whole island brought together under one rule peoples that had previously suffered significant political disruption and consequent social breakdown because of the Danish wars and Scandinavian settlements. Æthelstan created an efficient administrative machine to govern a dispersed realm, and directed much of his legal He created an efficient administrative machine to govern a dispersed realm BBC History Magazine activity towards the repair and renewal of this fractured and damaged society. “Very mighty”, “worthy of honour”, “his years filled with glory”, “pillar of the dignity of the western world”, “pious King Æthelstan”: each of these near-contemporary comments reflects aspects of Æthelstan’s achievement and personality. He deserves to be brought out of the shadows that have obscured his memory and celebrated as a key figure in the making of England – and, indeed, the forging of Britain. Where is Æthelstan remembered? Æthelstan supposedly visited Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire on his way to fight a major battle in the north and paused to pray for victory at the shrine of St John of Beverley (a prominent figure in Bede's History, and an early bishop of Hexham). On his return south, victorious, he refounded Beverley church as a collegiate community of canons and granted it land and a number of privileges including the right of sanctuary. Three monuments in the minster recall the king, including a life-size statue cast in lead in 1781 added to the screen at the entrance to the choir. Æthelstan stands holding a sword in one hand, and in the other the charter of privileges he had given to the town of Beverley. On the opposite side of the archway leading into the choir is a similar statue of Bishop John of Beverley. Outside the guildhall at Kingston upon Thames in Surrey stands a piece of grey-wether sandstone, believed to be the Anglo-Saxon coronation stone on which Æthelstan was crowned in September 925. The stone once lay in St Mary’s chapel in the town; when that was destroyed, it was moved to the market place, where it served as a mounting block. The Masonic order of Surrey led a campaign in the 1850s to re-situate the relic in a more formal setting, arranging for it to be moved in 1854 to its current location, mounted on a heptagonal base and surrounded by railings. Re-laying the stone involved appropriate Masonic ceremonies, including the sprinkling of the monument with corn, oil and wine. Where is Æthelstan buried? In the restored Norman abbey church at Malmesbury in Wiltshire, Æthelstan is commemorated by a late medieval tomb chest in perpendicular style, now in the north aisle. The king’s recumbent, full-length effigy lies beneath a heavy traced canopy. The original head has been removed and replaced with another of unknown date. Æthelstan was a generous patron of Malmesbury in life and chose to be buried there, near the tomb of St Aldhelm. In the 12th century, William of Malmesbury saw the king’s remains and remarked on his fair hair. During the Reformation his bones were lost and the tomb is now empty. Sarah Foot is Regius Professor of ecclesiastical history at Christ Church, Oxford. She is the author of Æthelstan: The First King of England. This article was first published in the July 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
Women's rights in the 20th century: what happened after the vote was won?
The vote was finally won for some women in 1918, but the battle for equality continued. Sarah Crook offers her thoughts on the hard-fought struggle for women's rights that followed
Asked for her address in the 1911 census, Emily Wilding Davison gave the unexpected answer “The House of Commons” – as indeed she was entitled to, for she had spent the night before hiding in a cupboard in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster. Just two years later, Davison would die after throwing herself at (or, arguably, under) the king’s horse, perhaps the most famous fatality in Britain’s move towards a more democratic politics. As these two actions show, women’s campaigns for equal rights in 20th-century Britain required courage, creativity and sacrifice. Not all sacrifices were as visible or as notorious as Davison’s, of course, and the work of black and working-class women has been critical to, and comparatively unsung, in feminist activism in 20th-century Britain. As we edge towards the centenary of women’s suffrage, we are provoked to look back and to ask what has been achieved, how, and for whom. Have “deeds not words”, the slogan of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, changed women’s lives across the last 100 years? Have women moved from the cupboard to the cabinet? Not exactly. While the 1918 Representation of the People Act allowed some women over 30 to vote, women were to wait a further 10 years for the passage of the 1928 Equal Franchise Act to attain the same voting rights as men. Although they did then achieve equal voting rights, they did not achieve the same levels of representation. It was not until six decades later, in the 1987 election, that women finally made up over 5 per cent of the Commons. Significant for another reason, 1987 also marked the election of the first black woman to parliament, Diane Abbott. The 1980s were not a decade of unfettered feminist progress, however. Margaret Thatcher, who ascended to the post of prime minister in 1979, was no ally to the Women’s Liberation Movement (which in 1978 she declared to be “too strident”). The movement, which had emerged from the student movement and the ferment of 1968, in turn viewed her as, at best, symbolic of female empowerment and, at worst, an enemy of it. Perhaps it is outside Westminster and inside lecture theatres that we can see more dramatic social change. When historian and writer Sheila Rowbotham joined Oxford in 1961 in a “beatnik uniform, sandals and black sweater”, she was not only representing the changing sartorial conventions, but joining an expanding cohort of female students. As historian Carol Dyhouse has noted, while only a small number of women had degrees in the early 20th century, this increased significantly during the 1960s and 1970s. These institutions would propel women not only into professional employment but also into a world of political engagement. Set against the backdrop of the political tumult of the late 1960s, a generation of women came of age when social norms were in flux, when the aspiration of domestic motherhood – itself only ever available to middle and upper-class women – shifted to make way for the possibility of alternative careers and lives. Equal recognition was not conferred by equal education or skills, however. When 850 women machinists at the Ford plant in Dagenham went on strike in 1968, pay gaps were widespread, and persisted even after the passage of the Equal Pay Act 1970. Meanwhile, in the Grunwick strike between 1976 and 1978, led by the working-class Asian woman Jayaben Desai, women had to fight for trade union recognition. Women were not going to be passive in the face of their oppression. Taking reproductive control Of course, the aspirations of women could only be fulfilled when women had access to – and control of – their reproductive health-care. Family size dropped dramatically across the century as women gained information about and access to birth control methods. Maternity and child welfare centres were established through the 1920s, seeking to extend practices from the middle classes to working-class women, although debate about reproductive control didn’t hit its zenith until the 1960s. In this decade, campaigns for the liberalisation of abortion law culminated in the passage of the Abortion Act 1967. While it was a male MP, David Steel, who introduced the bill to parliament, it was the work of women’s campaigning organisations such as the Abortion Law Reform Association that built momentum towards the change. Pointing to the dangers posed to women by backstreet abortionists, campaigners argued that access to legal terminations would not only save lives but would enable women to be better mothers to their existing children. Read more | The long fight over abortion rights in the United States The ability to choose to be a mother was enhanced by the introduction of the pill in the 1960s, after which sex became less risky for women. Sexual liberation was to be a central theme of the 1970s feminist movement, as the academic and writer Lynne Segal recalled: “In an affirmation of the sexual radicalism of the sixties, feminists in the early seventies took their own search for sexual pleasure very seriously.” Gay and bisexual women were also increasingly able to express their desires and identities, forming organisations that grappled with the discrimination facing their communities. They worked in groups that demonstrated solidarity with other movements, such as in Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, founded in 1984. Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history So how different are the issues facing women in 2018 from those faced by women in 1918? How recognisable would contemporary feminist activism be to the suffrage campaigners in the early part of the 20th century? The extension of the vote was not inevitable, but arose from a hard-fought campaign that made the issue inescapable, challenged social norms and drew women onto the streets. These days the streets are again being reclaimed as sites of feminist activism, and social media platforms are providing new locations of feminist consciousness-building (one can imagine that ‘#votesforwomen’ would easily trend on Twitter and that the glass from broken shop windows would have been captured on Instagram) around which new solidarities have been built. A look back at this century tells us that advances in women’s rights have rarely been easily won, and that just as these battles can be fractious, they can also be joyous. Deeds not words, indeed. Dr Sarah Crook is the Sir Christopher Cox junior fellow at New College, Oxford This article was first published in the February 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
How the battle for female suffrage in Britain was won
Did suffragette violence hasten victory? How critical to the campaign were the Pankhursts? And why did many women not want the franchise? Four expert historians – Jad Adams, Julia Bush, June Purvis and Fern Riddell – answer the big questions on female suffrage
Can the passing of the Representation of the People Act in 1918 – which, for the first time, gave some women the vote – be attributed to the suffrage campaign, the First World War, or other factors? Julia Bush: The suffrage campaign and the First World War both contributed to the timing and specific content of the 1918 act. However, it was probably inevitable that a century of democratisation, accompanied by growing government involvement in education and social welfare reform, would eventually encompass votes for women. Long-term, peaceful pressure from the organised suffrage campaign helped move this change slowly forward. The war, combined with prewar suffragette militancy, initially delayed suffrage legislation. But by 1917–18 it was generally accepted that serving soldiers had earned the right to vote. As a result, when legislation was passed in 1918, it enfranchised all men over the age of 21, and also gave the vote to women over the age of 30 who met a property qualification. Older women were included less because of their war work than because politicians hoped they would provide conservative ballast within the new mass electorate, reinforcing the stability of a society threatened by war and the spectre of Bolshevism. Jad Adams: The act was part of a wave of national enfranchisements that started in 1893 with New Zealand and which was largely completed by Switzerland in 1971. Britain was no pioneer. Seven countries had enfranchised women before Britain, and at least another seven enfranchised in the same year, 1918. The most important common factor in the enfranchisements of women was the re-evaluation of national identity in the face of catastrophes such as war, revolution or independence struggles. Old ideas had to be rejected and the nation reformed. This is what happened in Britain in the wake of the sacrifices of the First World War, with the granting of universal male suffrage and a limited franchise for women. June Purvis: Some historians claim that it was women’s war work during the First World War that won the vote, ignoring the fact that working-class women under 30 who staffed the munitions factories were not included in the 1918 act. Others suggest that the war itself made progress possible, with minimal involvement from suffrage organisations. Fear of a militant suffragette revival was a significant factor in the granting of the vote. The prewar suffrage campaign transformed women’s perception of themselves and the public’s perception of women. Read more | "Can we call the suffragettes terrorists? Absolutely", says Fern Riddell Fern Riddell: The act was passed partly due to the spectre of the return of suffragette violence. Having overseen the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)’s arson and bombing campaign before the war, Emmeline Pankhurst acted as a British diplomatic envoy to Russia in 1917. She persuaded the British government to send her to speak as one violent revolutionary leader to another. Russia granted female suffrage in July 1917, and it was clear that the intense violence of the WSPU, which stopped after the outbreak of the First World War, could begin again if British women did not get the vote. What did women feel the vote could bring them, long-term? JB: Women’s aspirations varied, then as now. Most suffragists hoped that the vote would improve their lives by increasing their autonomy, whether within marriage or as single women. However, the desire for individual self-fulfillment was often tempered, and sometimes submerged, by a strong sense of gendered responsibility. Middle-class women hoped that the vote would strengthen their role as carers and moral guardians within their own families and throughout the wider society of Britain and its empire. For poorer women, the vote also represented a route towards the economic security that was an essential underpinning for successful family life. Working-class suffragists realised that government legislation was needed to supplement trade union efforts to improve living standards. Read more | Cat and mouse: force feeding the suffragettes JA: Both constitutional suffragists and militant suffragettes believed the national vote was the key which would lead to a nation in which all the moral impurities of society were legislated away. The leading suffragette Christabel Pankhurst coined the slogan ‘votes for women and chastity for men’ and, in her book The Great Scourge and How to End It, promoted the franchise as a response to syphilis. Pankhurst believed that, if women had political power, men could be obliged to behave with the same restraint expected of Victorian ladies: having sex with only one person and then only after marriage. It was simplistic notions like this that appalled female commentators such as journalist Eliza Lynn Linton and led them to say that if women really thought they were going to impose polite drawing room manners on political life they had better not have the vote. JP: The lack of the vote was seen as the most significant symbol of women’s inferior status in society. Once the vote was won, it was felt that all kinds of inequalities that women experienced would be swept away. Has the role of the Pankhurst family been exaggerated in the fight for women’s suffrage? JP: No. Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the co-leaders of the WSPU, were charismatic and powerful speakers who, with their cry of ‘Rise up, women!’, encouraged thousands of women to demand their democratic right to the parliamentary vote in a mass movement unparalleled in British politics. JB: The role of the Pankhurst family holds unjustified sway within most popular representations of the suffrage movement and has also been exaggerated by some historians. The Pankhursts' iconic leadership repelled as well as attracted many contemporaries, and the escalating violence of the militant campaign made it impossible for the prewar government to ‘surrender’ to suffragist pressure. On the other hand, the glamour and excitement of the Pankhursts left an indelible mark on women’s history and on the history of popular protest. On the podcast | June Purvis considers the roles of Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst in the fight for women’s suffrage in Britain JA: The Pankhursts had a strong personal following, rather like the Booth family who founded the Salvation Army. Their message incorporated parades, a uniform, strict discipline, the expulsion of ‘heretics’, willingness to go to extremes and dominance by one family. All this went with a vibrant millennial message: effectively a promise of paradise if followers made sufficient sacrifices. But neither the Pankhursts nor the Booths originated the doctrine for which they expected such sacrifices. They marketed existing beliefs in a vibrant and eye-catching way. The Pankhursts did not create the women’s suffrage movement any more than the Booths created Christianity. FR: The Pankhursts have dominated the history of the suffrage movement in Britain, and also the history of the WSPU. Christabel Pankhurst orchestrated hundreds of arson and bomb attacks from Paris. But the stories of the women who actually carried these out have never been told. Their sacrifices are an integral part of the suffrage fight. These are the women we should be remembering on the centenary of the vote. How much popular support did the ‘votes for women’ campaign command in the years leading up to 1918? JA: There was widespread sympathy for the principle that at least some women should have the vote, and a general public acceptance that it would come eventually. That said, there was no enthusiasm. A favourable majority was secured in the House of Commons in 1897. There was no parliamentary time allotted, but the Conservative leader of the house, Arthur Balfour, said any further electoral reform measure would have to include women’s suffrage. As the proposition was an extension of Liberal ideas of democracy, it did not help that two Liberal prime ministers of the time, William Gladstone and HH Asquith, were both bitterly opposed to votes for women, despite their parties being generally in favour. JP: As with most progressive causes, there were more men and women opposed to women’s suffrage than in favour of it. It is estimated that nearly half a million women signed anti-suffrage petitions before 1914. The membership of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which included both men and women, was about 50,000 at this time. That of the WSPU, which was women only, was about 5,000 or less. JB: There are many ways of gauging support for the suffrage campaign, none of them very reliable. It’s important to acknowledge not only gender differences but also the variables of social class, region and religion. Suffragists and anti-suffragists both carried out primitive opinion polls, producing contradictory results to support their own campaigns. It seems likely that a ‘silent majority’ of men and women held fluctuating opinions, attaching less importance to the whole issue than politicians and campaigners but responding either positively or negatively to the polarising impact of suffragette militancy. So did suffragette violence help or hinder the campaign? JB: The First World War released suffragette militants from a political cul-de-sac of their own making. While a minority of women (and some men) were inspired by the bravery and determination of the most militant women, many others recoiled in horror from violence against property, which seemed likely to inflict eventual personal injury. It is clear that the prewar Liberal government was negatively influenced by suffragette violence. Prejudices against ‘irrational’ female voters were reinforced, and even those politicians who favoured enfranchisement were reluctant to respond to pressure exerted by suffragette extremists. FR: We haven’t paid enough attention to the sheer scale of the suffragette violence. During its height, in one month alone, there were 52 violent attacks including 29 bombs and 15 arson attempts on churches, railway stations, post offices, banks, newspaper offices and even MPs' homes. Until we fully comprehend the full impact of these actions, we can’t begin to understand what it did to the suffrage campaign as a whole. JP: Too much emphasis is given to suffragette violence and not enough to state violence against women campaigning for their democratic right to the parliamentary vote. Even when campaigning peacefully, suffragettes could be roughly handled by the police, imprisoned, or forcibly fed if they went on hunger strike. Forcible feeding was a brutal, life-threatening and degrading operation, performed by male doctors on struggling female bodies. Many of the women experienced it as a form of instrumental rape. Damage to property did not make the suffragettes popular but they always observed the strict orders of the WSPU leadership never to endanger human life. They did not kill or harm anyone. Since argument had failed to persuade an obdurate Liberal government to grant women the vote, some were prepared to adopt the violent methods that men had used successfully in the past when campaigning for their enfranchisement. Banned from attending Liberal party meetings and holding their own, the suffragettes were outside the constitution with no legitimate forms of protest. JA: Some things they did disgusted the public, such as the slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery. The suffragette who did this thought it would aid the cause, but the logic escaped art lovers. Starting fires in theatres and planting bombs in churches endangered lives. By the end of the campaign, the authorities feared that a suffragette would be seriously injured by members of the public outraged at their vandalism. On the positive side, in the early 20th century, suffragette violence kept the issue of votes for women on the agenda. It could otherwise easily have been subsumed under the furore over Ireland, labour unrest and German military expansion. When they were finally given the vote, how did women feel about not being granted an equal franchise to men? JA: The act of 1918 was a settlement with the people of a country that was still engaged in a major war. Britons had a lot to be concerned about and the issue of votes for women wasn’t high on the list. In this climate, supporters were happy that suffrage had been achieved, even if it was limited. You’ve got to remember that an equal franchise would have entitled more women to vote than men. That prospect was unpalatable to a lot of people so the compromise of offering the vote to some women over 30 was generally deemed acceptable. This meant that the women who had done most for the war effort – those under 30 – were excluded from the ballot. That very fact qualifies the idea that war work earned women the vote. JP: Both the suffragists of the NUWSS and the suffragettes of the WSPU had campaigned for votes for women on the same terms as it was, or would be granted to men. This did not happen with the 1918 act and both groups felt let down. However, they knew that the sex discrimination that had prevented all women from being granted the vote had been broken and that it would not be too long before women won enfranchisement on equal terms with men. JB: There was disappointment within the suffrage movement over the restriction of women’s voting rights in 1918, which related both to age and income. However, there was no public outcry. Instead, both suffragists and anti-suffragists turned enthusiastically to the task of organising newly enfranchised women and testing out their influence upon social reform agendas. The demand for an equal franchise was never silenced during the first decade of votes for women. Suffragists eventually found themselves pushing at an opening door, since only 10 MPs voted against the 1928 bill to give women the same voting rights as men. The vote was won, at least partly, because female voters had proved themselves harmless! How did people feel about New Zealand – then a British colony – giving the vote to women 25 years before Britain? JB: Suffragists drew inspiration from the enfranchisement of New Zealand women, and valued their visible support at many public marches and meetings. However, anti-suffrage women argued that the colonial New Zealand experience was irrelevant to the debate over women’s participation in Britain’s imperial government. A strong current of imperialism flowed through both suffrage and anti-suffrage campaigns, with an emphasis upon motherhood at its heart. British suffragists saw the success of New Zealand’s social welfare programme as evidence of female voters' potential to enhance imperial power. On the other hand, anti-suffragists believed that New Zealand’s healthy women and children proved the suitability of women for local government only. Social welfare was women’s business, while military and imperial affairs belonged emphatically to the male parliament at Westminster. JA: Feelings were mixed. From one point of view, the New Zealand achievement was seen to be the harbinger of widespread enfranchisements. On the other hand, what were colonials doing possessing a right that had been denied British women? It was particularly objectionable to society ladies like Millicent Fawcett that native women should be given the vote. Her position was now inferior, as she said, to “that of the Maori women of New Zealand who have more power in developing and moulding the future of the empire than we have in England. Why should the Maori women be in a superior position to that held by the women of England?” Why did it take so long for British women to get the vote? JA: Did it take that long? In Britain female ratepayers got the vote for municipal elections in 1869 – they would have to wait less than 50 years to receive the parliamentary vote. And that delay wasn’t due to rabid opposition but because where was no agreement on which women should get the vote. By the 1890s there was a majority for women’s suffrage in the House of Commons. A narrow franchise based on the ownership of property would primarily benefit the Conservatives in general elections; a wider franchise of ratepayers would benefit the Liberals. The breakthrough came when the NUWSS made a deal with the new but fast-growing Labour party in 1912 to support Labour candidates, particularly in seats held by Liberals with unsatisfactory records on women’s suffrage. JP: There are two main reasons. First, the two leading political parties – the Liberals and the Tories – sought party advantage from a female suffrage measure and could not agree on the grounds for such legislation. Second, for the major part of the 20th-century suffrage campaign, the Liberal Herbert Asquith, a staunch opponent of votes for women, was the prime minister. Even in 1920, he still expressed his contempt for female voters, describing the women on the voting register in Paisley, Scotland, as “a dim, impenetrable… element – of whom all that one knows is that they are for the most part hopelessly ignorant of politics, credulous to the last degree and flickering with gusts of sentiment like a candle in the wind”. JB: The length of the suffrage campaign is evidence of the depth of resistance from male politicians, sometimes linked to opportunist calculations about the electoral impact of female voters. Both male and female opposition to votes for women was fundamentally due to deep-seated views on separate gender roles and their importance to a stable and civilised society. Such views were reinforced by late 19th-century concerns over national and imperial strength, in an era of increasing economic and strategic rivalry among the world powers. Did women see any immediate changes to their lives as a result of the act? JA: Not really. As 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill pointed out– when, in 1867, he proposed votes for women in parliament – there was no justice in denying women the vote. It was an easy concession to grant because it would make no difference. He realised that women would vote with their families or class, rather than with their gender. And so it proved. JP: There was much more legislation that changed women’s lives after 1918 than before. On 21 November 1918, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Bill was passed, making women eligible to stand for parliament on equal terms as men. In doing so, it allowed women between the ages of 21 and 30 to stand for election to a parliament they could not themselves elect. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, in principle, abolished disqualification by sex or marriage for entry to the professions and universities, and the exercise of any public function. The following year, 200 women were appointed magistrates. Also in 1919, the Industrial Courts Act allowed women to sit on courts of arbitration on issues such as workplace pay and conditions. The 1922 Infanticide Act eliminated the charge of murder for a woman guilty of killing her child when it was shown that she was suffering from the effects of her confinement. Then, in 1923, the Matrimonial Causes Act relieved wives of the necessity to prove desertion, cruelty or other faults in addition to adultery as grounds for divorce. JB: An unprecedented amount of social reform legislation was passed during the decade after the 1918 act, but this does not prove a causal link. The social welfare agenda of the organised women’s movement was finally addressed during the 1920s, and women’s legal status also improved. However anti-suffrage women had always argued that male politicians could be persuaded to support their reform agenda without conceding the vote. Non-political women’s organisations continued to press effectively for policy reform, both before and after the vote was won. Meanwhile many former suffragists were disappointed by their failure to transform the male institution of parliament, and by the defeat of important campaigns to improve women’s employment opportunities. The panel June Purvis is emeritus professor of women’s and gender history at the University of Portsmouth. She has written extensively on the suffragette movement, including Christabel Pankhurst: A Biography (published by Routledge in January) Jad Adams is a fellow of the School of Advanced Study, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His most recent book is Women and the Vote: A World History (OUP, 2014) Julia Bush is a former senior lecturer in history at the University of Northampton. Her books include Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain (OUP, 2007) Fern Riddell is a historian specialising in sex and suffrage. She is a consultant on the BBC One documentary How Women Won the Vote This article was first published in the February 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
The Jarrow march: the lasting legacy of the 1936 protest
Do you hear the people sing? British politicians didn’t at the time, and yet, writes Stuart Maconie, the lasting legacy of the 1936 Jarrow ‘crusade’ can still be felt to this day
There are certain British place names that carry an enduring weight of meaning; a deep and sonorous ring, and not always a pleasant one. Hillsborough, Orgreave, Aberfan, Armagh… these are all places that have become synonymous with some great and profound emotion or event, woven into history through accident, struggle, tragedy, wickedness or bravery. Jarrow is another. In 1936, this industrial town in the northeast of England became, in the words of its MP, “the most famous town in England”; a byword for hardship and misery, but also for defiance, fortitude and dignity. Jarrow’s MP was Ellen Wilkinson, better known as ‘Red’ Ellen, a brilliant and passionate firebrand who later became a pillar of Clement Attlee’s post-war Labour administration as Minister for Education. But much of her lasting fame rests on her movements in October 1936, when she led 200 of Jarrow’s unemployed men 300 miles to London. The intention was to publicise Jarrow’s plight and to deliver a petition of 10,000 signatures to Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, pleading for help for their dying town in the form of a steelworks, or a similar shot in the arm. Baldwin refused to see them; the petition was taken from them by the Special Branch and then it vanished, and the aid the town needed was never properly given. But the Jarrow 'crusade' lives on as a remarkable, romantic, contentious piece of our social history. In Matt Perry's excellent, definitive historical account The Jarrow Crusade: Protest And Legend, he cites some of its varied legacy: "Five plays, two musicals, an opera, three pop songs, two folk songs, several paintings and poems, a short story, performance art, a mural, two sculptures, glassware, four television documentaries, four radio programmes, a children's story, a cuddly toy, a real ale, a public house, an election poster, street names, innumerable pieces of journalism and historical references and of course hundreds of often reproduced photographs." This list is probably not exhaustive, and to it I would add several exhibitions and thousands of citations in pop culture. It remains a central module of the GCSE syllabus and the Learn English Network. Jarrow may not always be remembered accurately – many think that it was a miners’ protest and explicitly sought to bring down the government. It was neither, but the name and the story have echoed down the decades since. On the podcast | Stuart Maconie reflects on the iconic 1936 protest against poverty and unemployment and offers comparisons with modern Britain A sinking ship Between 1851 and 1934, Jarrow was a centre for shipbuilding, and the town’s economy depended almost entirely on the yard of the “vain and vigorous” shipping magnate Sir Charles Mark Palmer. Unlike the paternalistic entrepreneurs of other 'company towns', Palmer was no Titus Salt, George Cadbury or Lord Lever. He gave his town little in the way of concert halls or public baths, nurseries, libraries or clinics. In her famous account of Jarrow's fortunes called The Town That Was Murdered, Wilkinson wrote: "There is a prevailing blackness about the neighbourhood. The houses are black, the ships are black, the sky is black, and if you go there for an hour or two, reader, you will be black … Sir Charles Palmer regarded it as no part of his duty to see that the conditions under which his workers had to live were either sanitary or tolerable." Life was hard in Palmer’s Jarrow, but in 1934 it became appreciably worse. With profits suffering from cheaper foreign competition and without any government protection, the bottom fell out of Jarrow’s shipping economy and Palmer’s yard closed. The town was plunged into an economic abyss. Eight out of every ten men became jobless. Child mortality rates soared to twice the national average. Houses were overcrowded and infested with vermin. To the misery of unemployment was added the humiliation and degradation of the means test, an invasive inquisition intended to determine whether the unemployed deserved any benefit. Mothers were checked to see if they breastfed their babies; if they did, their meagre benefit was cut. If one member of a family worked, the others would receive less. Thus families were forced to split up to avoid starvation. When JB Priestley visited Jarrow three years prior to the march, he saw a town ruined and a vision of urban hell on Earth. Read more | The Grunwick protests: remembering the 1970s strike for migrant workers' rights "Wherever we went men were hanging about, not scores of them but hundreds and thousands of them," he wrote in his 1934 travelogue English Journey. "The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the masks of prisoners of war. A stranger from a distant civilisation, observing the condition of the place and its people would have arrived at once at the conclusion that Jarrow had deeply offended some celestial emperor of the island and was now being punished. He would never believe us if we told him that in theory this town was as good as any other and that it's inhabitants were not criminals but citizens with votes." On their own The town attempted to fight back. When a delegation of Jarrow workers met with head of the Board of Trade, Walter Runciman his response to their requests for aid was that “Jarrow must work out its own salvation”, a remark described by historian Ronald Blyth as “the last straw in official cruelty”. Runciman’s chilly indifference and callous response “kindled the town”, according to Wilkinson. In July 1936, a packed public meeting agreed that the town should ask again for government help in the form of a new steelworks, but this time the appeal should be backed up by a petition. Signatures should be collected from Jarrow and beyond. When the meeting was debating what to do after this, an unknown voice in the crowded public gallery shouted: “Let’s march down with it.” Within days, plans were afoot to do just that. Hunger marches The ‘hunger march’ was primarily a protest phenomenon of the early 20th century. The term was first used to describe an event of 1905, but they became more popular and visible with the growing hardship of the 1920s and 1930s. Unemployed men and women would (usually) walk en masse from their home city to London, to protest and publicise their condition, and to ask for government aid. Many of these marches were organised by the Communist Party of Great Britain and were much more radically minded than the Jarrow march, which deliberately rejected the ‘hunger’ tag. 1905 Raunds to London The first hunger march: 115 unemployed army bootmakers from the Northamptonshire village of Raunds walked to London to protest at War Office complaisance in the undercutting of wages. The marchers, led by James ‘General’ Gribble, interrupted a speech on women’s suffrage and were ejected from the Houses of Parliament. They were given a heroes’ welcome by 5,000 of their townsfolk on their return, though. 1927 Rhondda Valley to London At a demonstration that became known as ‘Red Sunday in Rhondda Valley’, AJ Cook called for a march to protest about dire conditions after the General Strike. Miners from all over South Wales made up the 270-strong contingent, which enjoyed popular support, although the TUC, the press and the government were hostile, and women who knocked doors in the Rhondda to collect for the march were arrested. The marchers won some concessions over cuts in benefits. 1932 National Hunger March The Communist Party-led National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) was behind many of the hunger marches of the 1920s and 1930s. The 3,000 marchers, who came from the most economically depressed regions of Scotland, northern England and the Welsh Valleys, were met by a crowd of 100,000 on arrival at Hyde Park. The government mustered 70,000 policemen, who used force to stop the marchers’ petition reaching parliament. Serious violence ensued. 1936 Blind Hunger March The National League of the Blind had pioneered protest marches in the years after World War I, and though less well remembered than the Jarrow crusade, its 1936 march was an important stage in the fight for disability rights in Britain. A contingent of blind people led by GA Costance from Swansea trekked to a rally in Hyde Park, where they met blind marchers from other parts of the country, including Leeds and Manchester. The march was planned with military precision and in military style, which was appropriate since many of the men were veterans of World War I, and even the Boer War in one case. They would march in step, parade-ground style, to the beat of a drum and a harmonica band. There would be no drinking or rowdiness. Two medical students would accompany the marchers to monitor their health. Some 1,000 men applied to go on the march. Two hundred were chosen but, by the time of departure from Christ Church in Jarrow on 5 October, seven had dropped out – most because of ill health or family pressure, though one fortunate chap did so because he had found a job. Substitutes were ushered in quickly, though, including Billy Beattie: his wife was out when the march began, so he left a note on the mantelpiece saying he’d set off for London and would see her in a month. Most of the town turned out to see the men off and support was almost total, with a few minor dissenting voices. Councillor Isaac Dodds remarked: “I am not so ready as I was to support an ordinary march to London. I am willing enough to march, God knows, and there was a time when I would have suggested that we put the women and children on buses while the men of the town marched with the council at their head. But now I think we should get down to London with a couple of bombs in our pockets. Oh Christ, yes, I am perfectly serious. We should go down there with bombs in our pockets. These people of Westminster have no use for us anyway. These people do not realise that there are people living in Jarrow today under conditions which a respectable farmer would not keep swine. Do not put any limits on your demonstration. Get down there. And I think we should go to the absolute extreme.” Read more | Female activism: 10 remarkable protests from around the world March marshal David Riley was more conciliatory. He and the organising committee in general were wary of Jarrow’s endeavour being known as a hunger march and preferred to call it a crusade, a rather emotive and pious self-naming that intended to emphasise the saintly, admirable nature of the Jarrow men’s efforts, and disassociate them from the other hunger marches of the day, which were more expressly political. It was his idea to have the ‘crusade’ start from a church, to have it blessed by the town’s religious leaders and to give it that name. “At the time there was quite a number of [hunger] marches being held all over the country and they weren’t being too well received in many places,” he later wrote. Despite this emollience, the march found little support from its own kind. The Labour Party, led by the ineffectual and timid Ramsay MacDonald, washed its hands of the march, panicky about possible infiltration by communists and desperately keen to be seen as moderate. The Trades Union Council actually issued a circular denouncing it. The public response along the march’s 300-mile route was far better, growing warmer as the days went by and news of it spread. This was helped by a generally supportive press – encouraged by some very savvy dealings by the organisers, who set up a four-person ‘press group’ to liaise with local and national papers. Two Fleet Street journalists were ‘embedded’ within the march. And, in the same week that the crusade began, the BBC started its TV service from Alexandra Palace. Though little in the way of footage survives, the fact that the corporation and the Jarrow march’s ‘origin stories’ were so closely connected may explain why the BBC has given it extensive and sympathetic coverage in scores of documentaries and dramas. Jarrow's long tail: what is the legacy of the march? One marcher believed it had made “not a ha’porth of difference” to the town’s fortunes or its people, but the Jarrow crusade may well have affected the course and tide of history in subtle and pervasive ways that are not obvious from immediate results. Many think that the constant and largely supportive publicity for the Jarrow march, the effort and endurance of the men, and the focus on the plight of the town and conditions in industrial Britain, shaped new public attitudes into a desire for change. This national mood led to the Labour landslide of 1945 and thus to the setting up of the welfare state and the NHS, secular sacraments of modern Britain that are still part of our self-image and identity and still debated and fought over by modern governments. After a fairly cool greeting on their first night in Chester Le Street, they were welcomed more effusively in Ferryhill with cherry cake and an impromptu dance. By Leeds, they were met by a full-scale civic reception in the town hall (here, as in many other towns, it was Conservative councils who were most welcoming, perhaps to embarrass the indifferent Labour officialdom). In Leicester, the city’s cobblers worked through the night to mend the marchers’ boots. In Nottingham, they were given 200 pairs of clean underwear. Only occasionally, as in Market Harborough, did they meet with apathy or suspicion. They reached Marble Arch in drenching rain on 31 October 1936, tailed by the Special Branch. Prime Minister Baldwin refused to see them and the petition was hurriedly taken at the House of Commons. It’s never been seen since and no-one know where it is, or if it still exists. The men slept in drill halls and old workhouses, dined on beef paste sandwiches and broth cooked up in roadside tureens by their two cooks (one of whom, Cuddy Miles, was the grandfather of 1970s pop hit-maker John Miles). Along the way, several marchers dropped out due to ill health (one went back to Jarrow to have all his teeth taken out), but in the main spirits were high for the three week journey, kept buoyant by roadside well-wishers and whip-rounds, uniformly warm press coverage and the cheery rasp of their harmonica band. A plea on deaf ears There was just enough money in the coffers to buy each man a cheap suit to replace his worn clothes and a train ticket back to Newcastle. Though homesick for their wives and children and friends, it was not a prospect that they fully relished. For the three weeks of the march they had known purpose and camaraderie. They had also eaten better than they had in years, even on a diet largely of ‘butties’ and soup; most had put on weight. In Jarrow, all that awaited were long days of boredom and poverty. No new steelworks was ever built in Jarrow. A pipe plant opened a year later, dreamed up primarily as a face-saving ruse by Runciman, but it employed only 200 men and then only briefly. The last surviving marcher to have walked the entire route, Con Whalen, who died in 2003, gave his verdict. “It was a waste of time … but I enjoyed every step.” Stuart Maconie is the author of Long Road from Jarrow: A Journey Through Britain Then and Now (Ebury Press, 2017) This article was first published in the April 2018 edition of BBC History Revealed
Uncertainty may dominate the news, but Britain has survived difficult times before, as this 2008 article from Derek Wilson shows. Here, he nominates five years that saw the greatest tests in our history
If there is a commodity every politician would love to be able to bottle, it must surely be the "feel-good factor", that sense of wellbeing that Voltaire lampooned so effectively in Candide with the philosophy of Dr Pangloss: "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". Ironically, it is our confrontational political system that helps to ensure that, like the end of the rainbow, that blessed state of universal satisfaction remains elusive. Any party in opposition devotes itself to playing on the discontents of sections of the population in order to rubbish the claimed achievements of the party in power. They know that they can rely for emotional backing and votes on the much more substantial “feel-bad factor”. Thus, for example, education and the NHS will remain contentious subjects as long as there are people with unhappy experiences of hospitals and schools. It was President Hoover who observed pessimistically, but I believe correctly, that consumer-led capitalist democracy produces “constantly moving happiness machines” controlled by their autocratic desires and expectations. 9 of the worst monarchs in history Such reflections led me to ponder the question, “What times were there in British history that were really bad?” Can we identify any “no hope” years? It soon became obvious that I had to remove several possible candidates that might immediately thrust themselves into the spotlight. For example, years in which there were national disasters, such as bad harvests, or civil war did not necessarily meet the criteria. They did not affect all sections of the population (one man’s famine is another man’s increased profit) and calamities, such as the Blitz, often brought out the best in national character. Distant and not disastrous I also had to be wary of events that historians have dubbed “important”. The arrival of William of Orange to expel James II in 1688 was the last successful invasion of our shores and was pregnant with political consequences but how was it perceived by the majority of contemporaries? Did they really care very much who wore the crown in distant Westminster? Read more | How glorious was the Glorious Revolution That for me was the crucial point: what years saw such a concatenation of disastrous events that most people were driven to despair? Having, very subjectively, of course, compiled a shortlist of five anni horribile (I use the term "year" loosely because events and movements do not fit conveniently into calendar units), just for fun I decided to select a "winner". My "judge's choice" will probably surprise many readers and irritate a few but I hope it will provoke all into reflecting further on what it was like to live through crisis years. The human race, and our particular chunk of it, is remarkably resilient, and focusing attention on times that have seen us at our lowest ebb also highlights our ability to overcome catastrophe and pluck hope from the jaws of despair. AD 60: Rome stamps down on the British rebels When Nero became emperor in AD 54, he seriously considered withdrawing his legions from Britain. The Roman conquest of the island had been underway for a decade and had been very heavy going. The tribes, sometimes acting in concert, had inflicted some humiliating defeats on Roman forces and were continuing to harass the invaders. An official divide-and-rule policy was not proving strikingly successful. Nero decided to strengthen the Roman invasion forcefully, because, according to the historian Tacitus, he did not want to be outdone by his predecessor, Claudius. His decision had a shattering effect on the people of Britain. Read more | Everything you wanted to know about Roman Britain – but were afraid to ask Suetonius Paulinus, who was sent to lead the advance, was a no-nonsense soldier with a reputation for fighting in mountainous terrain. This was important because north Wales had been identified as the main centre of British resistance. Anglesey was the site of the principal druidic shrine, a haven for fugitives and a source of anti-Roman propaganda. The druids were drawn from the upper echelons of tribal society. They were scholars, priests, poets and judges, who preserved and passed on ancient laws and legends. The concept of nationalism is anachronistic in first-century Britain but the druids seem to have been a unifying force, providing a powerful ideological basis for resisting the alien Roman culture. The druids had been a respected element of society for generations. For the AD 60 Britons, it must have seemed that the druids had always been there. To strike at them, Suetonius knew, would be to demoralise the whole population. Tacitus has left a vivid description of the confrontation of cultures: The enemy was arrayed along the shore in a massive, dense and heavily-armed line of battle, … Women, dressed in black like the Furies, were thrusting their way about in it, their hair let down and streaming, and they were brandishing flaming torches. Around the enemy host were druids uttering prayers and curses, flinging their arms towards the sky. The Roman troops stopped short in their tracks as if their limbs were paralysed… by this extraordinary and novel sight. However, in the end, exhortations from their commander and an exchange among themselves of encouragement not to be scared of a womanish and fanatic army broke the spell. They overran those who resisted them and cast them into their own flames. Subsequently a garrison was imposed on the defeated enemy and the groves sacred to savage superstitions destroyed. While Suetonius’s men were harrying enemies in the West, a bigger rebellion broke out on the other side of the country. The underlying reason for the revolt led by the Iceni and Trinovantes of East Anglia was the insensitivity of the new regime. Claudius’s officials had created client kingdoms, seeking to co-operate with tribal rulers, and Suetonius treated the Britons with contempt born of fear. He and his men were trying to hold down a large hostile population from a few fortified settlements with the support of client chieftains on whom they could not completely rely. Suetonius’s response was to enforce his authority ruthlessly. Read more | The Roman invasion: whose side were the Britons on? Boudica rebels Pushed too far, several of the tribes rebelled. Under the leadership of Queen Boudica of the Iceni, they overran Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium and Verulamium (St Albans). They cut to pieces a sizeable contingent of the Ninth Legion and moved west, a disorderly host exhilarated by success, and gorged on booty. Read more | Alternate history: what if Boudica had defeated the Romans? Suetonius concentrated his hastily-gathered force of some 10,000 legionaries in a tactical position, perhaps somewhere near Nuneaton. They were horrendously outnumbered, probably by more than ten to one. The battle, when it came, was hard fought and lasted for hours. It was brute force against discipline and superior weapons. Eventually, British ranks buckled. No accurate casualty figures are possible but Tacitus’s estimate of 80,000 Britons killed in the fighting is probably not too great an exaggeration. Survivors may have wished that they had fallen in battle for Suetonius’s reprisals over the ensuing months spread death and destruction through the land. AD 60 qualifies for my list because it left a people, not just humiliated, cowed and conquered, but deprived of their own laws, their myths and legends. 1349: The Black Death stalks the land Any short list of disastrous times must feature the Black Death of 1348–50. The plague, which assumed bubonic and pneumonic forms, landed in Bristol from the continent in the summer of 1348 and spread rapidly along trade routes, reaching London in autumn. The natural reaction of people in smitten areas was to flee, which hastened the spread of infection. Ironically, the Scots unwittingly rushed to embrace it. Armies crossed the border to take advantage of England’s weakened state and the soldiers carried the disease back with them. Read more | Were medieval people cleaner than we think? By the end of 1349 the plague had reached all mainland regions and had crossed to Ireland. When the pandemic was over in mid-1350, it had carried off more than 30 per cent of the population of these islands. Contemporary records bear pitiful testimony to widespread shock and distress. The suffering of the afflicted, the grief of survivors and the sight and stench of unburied bodies beggars imagination. The shattering of national morale was all the worse because the Black Death came at a time when England was riding high in Europe. Under the leadership of the belligerent, youthful Edward III, impressive victories had been won over the French and the Scots. After the battle of Crécy (1346) and the capture of Calais (1347) troops arrived home laden with booty and it was said that no woman in the country lacked for some graceful gown or valuable trinket. Edward actually celebrated while the plague was at its heights, by forming the Order of the Garter. Read more | Edward III: the family man It is almost inconceivable that the lords and ladies who celebrated at lavish banquets and tournaments could be unaware that all around them the social fabric was falling apart. They seem to have been as indifferent to the suffering of the people as most of us are to the impact of HIV/Aids in Africa, even though, as the Italian writer Boccaccio observed, “many valiant men and fair ladies breakfasted with their kinsfolk and supped with their ancestors”. View oEmbed on the source website In an age when all manner of diseases were rife and life expectancy among the lower orders was in the mid-thirties, perhaps the piecemeal reports reaching the royal court did not seem to be all that catastrophic. King and Parliament thought they could legislate their way out of the crisis. Faced with a mobile labour force of peasants leaving their manors and demanding high wages from employers desperate to have their flocks tended, the government enacted the Statute of Labourers in 1351 ordering people to return to their masters on pain of imprisonment. But the effects of the Black Death went further than the undermining of feudalism and the emergence of a wage economy. People in distress looked immediately to those whose job it was to help them – the parish clergy and the members of religious orders. Many men and women of God went about their work heroically among the sick and dying, but there were many more who fled the pestilence and left their flocks to die without the benefit of masses. English heresy Ironically, the dearth of clergy after 1349 led to many unsuitable men being hastily ordained, with a concomitant fall in moral and educational standards. Small wonder that anticlericalism became a feature of national life and, before the end of the century, fed into the “English heresy”, Lollardy. Even if people were not lured into false belief, they tended to embrace a morbid scepticism. The Dance of Death became an increasingly familiar painted image. Read more | Kill or cure? 10 medieval medical practices and their effectiveness The Black Death challenged the traditional certainties on which society rested. People inevitably asked why it happened. Was it a divine punishment? Did it presage the end of the world? Was it all the fault of the Jews? Britain managed to avoid the worst excesses of persecution and wild apocalyptic preaching that hit the continent nor was there the kind of religious revival which often followed major disaster. On the contrary, looting, prostitution and profiteering became commonplace in Britain and went, largely, unpunished. It was not just human bodies that were destroyed by the plague. 1536: Tyranny leads to persecution and revolt In October William Tyndale, the Protestant reformer, was burned at the stake with these words on his lips, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”, and the people of Lincolnshire rose in revolt claiming to deliver the same king from his Protestant councillors. This was the year the Reformation storm, building up for a decade, finally burst. Angry that the Pope, a foreign potentate, could determine the fate of the Tudor dynasty by refusing permission for him to divorce and marry again to sire a male heir, Henry VIII had been happy to give some encouragement to the small, but growing and influential Protestant minority. He had used Parliament to cow the clergy, break with Rome and have himself proclaimed head of the Church in England. None of these events impacted greatly on ordinary parishioners. Traditional practices and beliefs throughout the land remained unchanged and conventional Catholics were, doubtless, reassured by the seeking out of Protestant "troublemakers" (Foxe's Book of Martyrs lists 180 men and women who burned or were forced to recant between 1527 and 1535). In 1536 everything changed. Read more | Henry VIII’s savage Reformation With Henry the personal and the political were always intertwined. In January he had a serious tiltyard accident and for several hours his recovery was despaired of. The shock had psychological repercussions. Always belligerent and determined, the King now became vicious and intractable to the point of paranoia. Made forcefully aware of his mortality, he untangled himself from his marriage to Anne Boleyn, who had failed to provide him with a male heir. The Queen and her alleged “paramours” were executed in May. This reassured those of the political elite who hated Anne for her Protestant sympathies but, as Thomas More had warned, Henry was like an unpredictable lion whose claws could lash out against anyone. Read more | Tracy Borman reveals Henry VIII’s final ‘kindness’ to Anne Boleyn Anger and suspicion He now showed that “head of the Church” was no empty title. In March an Act was passed dissolving all religious houses with an annual income of less than £200. As well as the distress caused to the small communities of monks and nuns, anger and suspicion were aroused among their neighbours, who suspected that this was the thin end of a land-grabbing wedge. Their suspicions deepened when commissioners were sent out to assess the wealth and spiritual condition of the remaining monasteries. Then, in July, Parliament passed into law what were ironically called Articles of Faith to Establish Christian Quietness. Among its clauses was one condemning superstitious and idolatrous practices. When Henry was warned that these measures would stir unrest, he responded by forbidding all preaching for three months, which closed the lid on boiling discontent. Read more | Henry VIII: confident young king or insecure son? Feelings ran particularly high in the North and the East Midlands. The last straw was the arrival of the King’s tax gatherers in September. Rumours spread that the officials had come to remove church treasures. In Lincolnshire angry mobs, egged on by priests, raised the standard of revolt and took the King’s men prisoner. The Lincolnshire rebellion was nipped in the bud by a show of force, but trouble had spread across the Humber and most of the North was up in arms. York, Hull and Pontefract were soon in rebel hands and 30,000 “pilgrims” were encamped. It was all over by March 1537 but that should not lead us to conclude that this revolt, the Pilgrimage of Grace, was anything less than a serious inflammation of the body politic. The rebellion embraced nobles, priests, merchants and peasants and they had sympathisers at court. The army Henry sent against the rebels was outnumbered and the dissidents only dispersed on receiving Henry’s promises of pardon and redress of grievances (which he had no intention of keeping). Henry was apoplectic with rage at the traitors. When the Duke of Norfolk reported that 74 rebels had been hanged he demanded to know why there were not more. The year 1536 revealed to the people that they were governed by a tyrant. It began a period when ancient customs were banned, churches despoiled, clergy and laity imprisoned and executed. But regimenting faith was beyond even Henry. The seeds of change he sowed could only produce fruits of division, bitterness, anger and confusion. 1812: War rages, revolution beckons Jane Austen was putting the finishing touches to Pride and Prejudice in 1812. Surely the year which saw the Bennets, Bingleys and Wickhams engrossed in their own jealous rivalries and petty snobberies could not qualify as an annus horribilis? What we may easily forget is that Miss Austen's romances are escapist literature and not social commentary. If they project a secure, structured, well-ordered society it is because their first readers needed the reassurance that such fiction conveyed. To take the most obvious example, we can read Jane Austen's entire oeuvre and find just fleeting references to the French wars, which Britain had been engaged for almost two decades. Read more | Romance and reality in Jane Austen’s world But that was not the worst calamity strike Britain in this doleful year. The Midlands and much of the North were revolt. "Sheer insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English history," wrote EP Thompson The Making of the English Working Class. The troublemakers called themselves Luddites, were organised in mobs and broke into textile mills to smash newly-installed machines. Commercial dislocation caused by the war had forced manufacturers to economise by laying off workers, cutting wages and installing machines that did the work of several artisans. Mill owners and their exploitation were the targets of angry, poverty-stricken demonstrators but the underlying causes of conflict were high prices and taxes (bad harvests drove the cost of a loaf of bread to its highest ever level) and also disturbing egalitarian ideas infiltrating from revolutionary France. The voting class demanded tough action. Yorkshire mill owner William Horsfall spoke for many when he declared himself willing to wade through Luddite blood to restore order. In the event it was his own blood that flowed when he was gunned down by an anonymous assassin. The Government panicked and brought in capital punishment for machine-breaking, but there was no end to the social upheaval. Read more | Where history happened: Luddites The political centre was in disarray. In the previous year George III had finally succumbed to illness and his indolent and unpopular son was vested permanently with full regency powers in February 1812. “Prinny” was lampooned by caricaturists, received sackfuls of abusive mail, and graffiti chalked on walls offered 100 guineas for his head. While the country faced war abroad and revolution at home the head of state devoted his energies to supervising plans for Regent’s Park and throwing lavish parties in Brighton. He was quite incapable of stamping his authority on a government riven by conflicts of personality and policy. Spencer Perceval had been prime minister since the end of 1809 but was frequently at odds with his own colleagues. On 11 May, he was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons. Many right-thinking people were horrified by this atrocity – but many more were not. When the assassin, John Bellingham, was brought to execution cheering crowds surrounded the scaffold and 5,000 troops had to be mobilised to prevent the incident sparking an insurrection. Widespread hostility Meanwhile, the war pursued its laborious and costly way. In Spain, Wellington was gradually wearing down the French defenders but final victory was still not in sight. Autumn saw Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign, the prelude to his eventual downfall, but the scale of the French disaster was scarcely known in London by the end of the year. By this time Britain’s military authorities had something else to worry about. On 19 June, the United States of America declared war on Britain. Not only was the nation now facing hostilities on two fronts, British possessions in Canada (where many families had relatives) were threatened. Worse still for morale was the fact that Britannia, which claimed to “rule the waves”, suffered some humiliating naval reverses. Britain in 1812 was a divided nation. Economic disruption was severe. The cutlers of Sheffield were working at half capacity. In Birmingham, 9,000 factory workers were laid off. There was anarchy at home and debilitating war abroad. The Government was bereft of leadership and the country was at an all-time low. We know that things did improve – war gave way after 1815 to prolonged peace; the Industrial Revolution rocketed Britain into world economic leadership, and programmes of reform began. But Jane Austen’s troubled contemporaries were not equipped with crystal balls. Read more | The capture of the Chesapeake: how the British Royal Navy rescued its reputation in the War of 1812 1937: Rudderless and depressed What was so cruel about this year was that, after a brief period of optimism for national and international affairs, hopes were dashed and people found themselves face-to-face with both economic collapse and war. Events that cumulatively undermined morale were intertwined and we can best understand the deepening mood of gloom by following them chronologically, starting shortly before the opening of our year, in October 1936. The main event making the headlines in this month was the Jarrow Crusade. Around 200 men from this shipbuilding town, where 68 per cent of the workforce was unemployed, marched by stages to Downing Street to demand jobs. They were greeted by cheering crowds everywhere and drew sympathetic support from all classes. Unemployment, the worst manifestation of the Great Depression, had actually been falling since 1932 but the national average still stood at 18 per cent with figures much higher in the industrial North and Midlands. Successive governments had attempted various solutions but recovery was painfully slow and, within a year, jobless numbers would increase again. All activists had their own “solutions” for Britain’s economic ills and another march held in this same month led to riots in London’s East End. Sir Oswald Mosley and his black-shirted British Union of Fascists paraded provocatively through the Jewish quarter. Read more | Who were the young people drawn to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists? The main events of November and December were symbolic, rather than illustrative of Britain’s decline. On 30 November, the magnificent Crystal Palace, built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, was burned to the ground. The disaster seemed to many to close the curtain on Britain’s economic world domination. A bigger shock occurred 11 days later. Edward VIII broadcast to the nation his decision to resign the Crown. The abdication crisis had been fought out in the press for several days – the Mail, Express and Mirror versus The Times and Telegraph. Readers debated who was behaving more disreputably, the King or the press barons. Fear of extremism So 1937 opened bleakly, and things didn’t get better. Domestic issues played more insistently with people than foreign affairs but no one could be unaware of the ominous changes disturbing the international scene. Ideologues pointed to the demons of communism or fascism as the reason for political and economic decline. The two systems were locked in armed conflict in Spain and 2,000 British left-wingers went off to fight in the civil war. Even the uncommitted majority were alarmed by news in April that German planes supporting General Franco had bombed the Basque fishing village of Guernica and its civilian population. The mounting belligerence of Germany and Italy (which had formed their Axis alliance in October) was pushing people towards thinking the unthinkable. Read more | Francisco Franco: is it accurate to call the Spanish dictator a fascist? The "unthinkable" was that the Great War, which most Britons could still remember, might not be the "war to end wars". Hopes of perpetual peace had been pinned on containment of Germany, general disarmament and the League of Nations. All three had proved broken reeds. A resurgent Germany refused to be constrained by the Treaty of Versailles (and many Britons supported it in the fight against the "greater menace" of communism). The British government had been forced to divert funds from economic recovery to rearmament. The Ark Royal was launched in April. Spitfires and bombers were rolling off the production lines as, more ominously, were gas masks. The League had shown itself to be toothless when faced by nations that flouted its rules. By 1937 Germany had walked out, Japan declared its intention to do so and Italy resigned before the end of the year. Disillusionment with politicians of all stripes was indicated in the general election of May when voting numbers reached their lowest level since 1923. Ramsay Macdonald and Stanley Baldwin who had, at least, been parliamentary figures of stature, both departed the scene. Leadership fell into the hands of mediocrities unable to raise the nation’s morale. The Government made no objection when Ireland (under the name of Eire) severed its last connection with the United Kingdom. The weary acceptance of inevitabilities numbed public consciousness and when, in August, news arrived of a second Wall Street crash there was a widespread feeling of “here we go again”. To most Britons it seemed that the ship of state was adrift without a rudder in seas that were becoming increasingly turbulent. What is the worst year in British history? These grim snapshots are like faded photographs in some old album. They speak to us of dislocated societies cut off from their past and fearful of their future. If I have to choose the worst, my vote goes to 1812 for two reasons. One is that so many things went wrong in that year, facets of life that affected all sorts and conditions of people. The other is that, like the plain wallflower at the dance, it has been out-dazzled by other events – the turning of the Napoleonic War, the gathering pace of Industrial Revolution and the apparent self-confidence of that society we see through the pages of Jane Austen. It is the historian's job to try to put the record straight. Derek Wilson is the author of Sir Francis Walsingham: Courtier in an Age of Terror (Constable, 2007) This article was first published in the February 2008 edition of BBC History Magazine
Karolyn Shindler introduces the palaeontologist Dorothea Bate, who climbed mountains, swam to remote caves and cheated starvation to discover a series of remarkable dwarf mammals
Even at four o’clock in the morning it was warm. The stars were just beginning to lose their brilliance, but it was still dark. Light would not come for at least an hour. But Dorothea Bate had just one thought: to reach her goal at the edge of the sea on the far side of the inhospitable Akrotiri peninsula in western Crete. It was a hazardous journey, by pony, of several hours, and even by 8am the temperature on that exposed, limestone terrain could be 30C or more. Bate had arrived in Crete on 5 March 1904, and for nearly five months the courageous 25-year-old had explored from one end of this long, mountainous island to the other. She was hunting for extinct fossil mammals to add to the collections of the Natural History Museum in London. She had no companions. Dorothea explored alone, hiring local men as guides or to do the heavy digging – or to set the gunpowder or dynamite when the only way she knew to get through a rock floor was to blast it open. So far she had discovered extinct species of dwarf hippos, no larger than a pig, extinct species of deer and the bones of an ancient species of full-size elephant. What she was desperate to find were the remains of the dwarf elephants she was sure must have once existed on the island, but had so far eluded her. This hot July morning was her last chance before she had to return home. Read more | Mary Anning: the woman who hunted dinosaurs So difficult was the going as she neared the sea that she left her pony and continued on foot. “Beastly hot and rough walking,” she noted in her diary, but in the blazing sunshine and with the heat of the rock coming through her boots, she struggled on. And finally, on the sea-battered shore of the Akrotiri, she was finally “well rewarded for this at last was the place I have been looking for”. Some weeks previously, Dorothea had been given a fossil dwarf elephant tooth (see illustration, right) which she had been told came from the area, and incredibly, here in the rock she “saw the imprint from where it had been broken off”. From “frightfully hard” rock she managed to extract specimens including molar teeth and sections of a tiny tusk – vital in identifying the species of animal. On her return to the Natural History Museum in London, the dwarf elephant was discovered to be a species new to science. It was named Elephas creticus Bate. Insects in the grass Dorothea Minola Alice Bate was born in Wales in 1878. Much of her childhood was spent observing birds or learning to identify insects near the river Teifi. When her family moved to the Wye Valley, she became fascinated by the small Ice Age fossils she found in the limestone caves there. In 1898, when she was just 19, Bate talked her way into a job at the Natural History Museum. This was a time when it was almost wholly a male preserve; women were not employed on the scientific staff until 1928. Dorothea was always an unofficial scientific worker, paid piecework depending on the number of fossils she prepared. Although not a member of staff, such was her ability that in 1924 she was appointed curator of Ice Age birds and mammals. Dorothea had charm, wit and intelligence – and absolutely no understanding of the word ‘no’. She was self-taught but the Natural History Museum was her university and her life. It was scientists there who encouraged her to explore the Mediterranean and it was Dorothea’s pioneering work that revealed the main extinct species of the islands. Doro thea’s adventures really began in 1901. With family friends, she travelled to Cyprus where she planned systematically to search for fossil mammals in the limestone caves of the island. She is thought to have been the first person, male or female, to do so, and her fossil collections – from Cyprus, Crete, the Balearic Islands, Malta and Bethlehem – are preserved in the Natural History Museum. She put herself at extreme risk during her excavations, contracting malaria in Cyprus, scarlet fever in Majorca and nearly starving in Crete. In west Crete, on being told of a bone cave inaccessible by boat, she climbed down the cliff, swam to the cave, excavated some fossil bones there, and swam back, carrying her geological hammer and bag containing her finds. She endured horrendous journeys by boat and rattling carts. She suffered dreadfully from travel sickness, slept in flea-infested hovels and yet, wrote the American archaeologist Edith Hall, whom she met in Crete in 1904, she “dresses well”. Quiz | How much do you know about historical women who changed the world? A goaty antelope In Majorca and Menorca, Bate discovered the remains of a small animal unique to those islands, which is so specialised there isn’t even a common name for it. She called it Myotragus, mouse goat. It’s a small goaty antelope, with extraordinary front teeth usually only found in rodents. It is a marvellous example of evolution, adaptation, survival – and extinction. She had a skeleton constructed from the splendid bones she discovered and today, for the first time in more than 70 years, it is on display in the Natural History Museum. What interested Dorothea in particular was what is now known as the ‘island rule’: that, on islands, large animals become smaller (dwarfing), while small ones become larger. Such was her expertise, it was said that if sufficient quantities of bony fragments were sent to her, then she could suggest not only the species but the climate and environment as well. In the last 10 years, there has been a resurgence of interest in Dorothea’s fossil collections. New research into her specimens has led to the little Cretan elephant being redescribed as the world’s smallest known mammoth – it was about 1 metre high. In 1948, when she was nearly 70, Dorothea became officer in charge of the Natural History Museum’s offshoot museum at Tring in Hertfordshire. It was her first managerial role, and her last – for she died three years later, aged 72. The archaeologist Anthony Arkell, with whom she was working at the time, wrote: “Her widely lamented death has robbed archaeologists and prehistorians of a palaeontologist whose co-operation was invaluable and knowledge unique.” Today, through the legacy of her collections and papers, Dorothea Bate’s unique knowledge – and spirit – survives, inspiring new generations of scientists. Karolyn Shindler is a former producer and editor at the BBC, and the author of Discovering Dorothea: The Pioneering Fossil-Hunter Dorothea Bate (Harper Collins, 2005). Listen again to an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series Natural History Heroes on Dorothea Bate This article was first published in the December 2017 edition of BBC History Magazine