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Singer, dancer, Nazi-fighter: how Josephine Baker became a WW2 heroine
Today she’s widely remembered as a risqué entertainer – yet she was also involved in many of the earth-shaking events of her era. On the 50th anniversary of Josephine Baker’s death, Anna Maria Barry tells the story of a true 20th-century icon.
She was the granddaughter of a formerly enslaved woman, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Martin Luther King Jr on the frontline of the battle for civil rights. She was a chorus-line girl who helped redefine black artistry in the US and Europe. She danced nearly naked, but cloaked herself in mystery to spy for the Allies. She brought comedy to cabaret, but undertook the most serious and dangerous tasks for the French Resistance. She wowed Picasso, Hemingway and, ultimately, all of France. On the evening of 30 November 2021, some 46 years after her death, the streets of Paris were thronged with dignitaries and onlookers watching as jazz-age superstar Josephine Baker was inducted into the Panthéon – the mausoleum in which only the most distinguished sons and daughters of France are laid to rest – becoming the first black woman to receive this honour. How did a scandalous American dancer of the roaring twenties come to be celebrated and commemorated alongside the likes of Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie? Listen | Greg Jenner and guests discuss Josephine Baker on an episode of BBC Sounds' You’re Dead to Me Inauspicious beginnings This remarkable story began in St Louis, Missouri in 1906, with the birth of Freda Josephine McDonald. Her mother, Carrie, seems to have been adopted by a formerly enslaved couple of African and Native American descent. Her father’s identity has never been decisively confirmed. The family was not wealthy. “We were all so very hungry and cold at home,” she later recalled, explaining that she started dancing to keep warm. At eight years old she left school to work as a domestic servant for white families, who did not treat her kindly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-56211819cmyk-9215d43.jpg" width="3438" height="2290" alt="Adorned with feathers for a show at Paris’s Folies Bergère music hall, c1925. Baker loved living in France, where racism was less overt than in the US. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Adorned with feathers for a show at Paris’s Folies Bergère music hall, c1925. Baker loved living in France, where racism was less overt than in the US. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> As a young teenager, Josephine was a fan of dance shows. She learned her craft dancing on the streets before working her way into a vaudeville troupe. At around this time, when she was just 13 years old, she married her first husband, an older man named Willie Wells. Because she was under 15, the wedding was not legal under Missouri law, though neither she nor her mother (who consented to the marriage) realised this at the time. Perhaps marriage appealed to Josephine as a way to escape the hardships of life at home. Whatever her motives, the union was turbulent and soon imploded – reportedly following Wells’ discovery that she had lied about carrying his child. While still only 15 years old, she married William Howard Baker; though she soon left him, and they later divorced, she kept his surname for the rest of her life. In 1922 or 1923 she joined the cast of Shuffle Along. First staged in New York in 1921, this groundbreaking musical revue had been the first Broadway show written, produced and performed by black artists. It was a smash hit, launching the careers of luminaries including Paul Robeson. In fact, it’s been credited with sparking the Harlem Renaissance – the flourishing of black American culture and politics that burgeoned in its namesake New York City neighbourhood during the 1920s and 1930s. Baker had a relatively minor part in Shuffle Along, appearing at the end of a chorus line, but found a way to stand out by making her mark with comedy. “Josephine milked her role as end girl for all it was worth,” wrote biographer Ean Wood. “She tripped over her own feet, she went knock-kneed, she crossed her eyes and she grinned her goofy grin, all the time dancing rhythmically and inventively around the music. Audiences loved her. And, of course, the rest of the chorus line hated her... she was getting all of the attention.” After opening night, one critic wrote of Baker’s performance: “One of the chorus girls is without question the most limber lady... Her name may be printed somewhere in the programme – if it is, I can’t find it – but it should be placed outside in lights. The knees of this phenomenon are without joints... I’ve seen nothing funnier.” Before long, everyone would know the name Josephine Baker. In 1925, Baker arrived in Paris. She had been booked to perform in the city by Caroline Dudley Reagan, a well-connected impresario who wanted to showcase the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance for French audiences. Baker’s first show in the capital was La Revue Nègre, staged at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, opening in October 1925. Baker made her entrance practically nude, being carried onto the stage upside down and wearing only a pink flamingo feather. She then commenced her frenzied dancing, leaping and shaking her hips – one minute contorting her body to mimic animal movements, the next letting out wild screeches as she did the Charleston and pulled comical faces to the beat of drums. Read more | Strictly shocking: the dances that shook the world “There seemed to emanate from her violently shuddering body, her bold dislocations, her springing movements, a gushing stream of rhythm,” one French critic observed. “It was she who led the spellbound drummer and the fascinated saxophonist... there was a wild splendour and magnificent animality.” Shocking and spellbinding Paris had never seen anything like it, and Baker’s performance sent shockwaves through the French capital. Before long, she was engaged for a residency at the famous Folies Bergère music hall, introducing the act with which she became synonymous: dancing in a skirt of bananas. In the 1920s, a craze for black culture was sweeping Paris. The First World War had brought African and black American soldiers to the city, and with them came jazz music and dance. Meanwhile, French artists were finding inspiration in African art and sculpture. For French bohemians, these cultural forms were excitingly ‘primitive’, representing a simpler way of life that some found appealing in the wake of the brutal conflict. Of course, this so-called ‘negrophilia’ drew on reductive and racist stereotypes about African culture and people. Josephine Baker’s role within this movement remains a matter of debate. Some argue that her performances reinforced prejudiced views: she played the stereotypical ‘wild savage’ on stage, while allowing largely white audiences to view the black female body as a sexual object. Others, meanwhile, suggest that these were the very prejudices Baker subverted on stage, rendering such stereotypes ridiculous with her physical comedy that incorporated silly faces and exaggerated movements – all while profiting handsomely. Read more | Forbidden dances and deadly marathons: 5 facts about the history of dancing Whatever her understanding of such debates, this sensational act catapulted Josephine Baker to wealth and fame, and earned her a place in history as the world’s first black superstar. She opened her own cabaret the year after her arrival in Paris, and indulged her great passion for animals by amassing an exotic menagerie. Baker could sometimes be seen walking along the streets of the capital with her pet cheetah, Chiquita, who wore a diamond-studded collar. Scores of French women emulated her short hairstyle, kept in place with ‘Bakerfix’ hair gel. Fashion designers fought to dress her and, when she went out in public, fans crowded around to request her autograph. She won many famous admirers, too. Ernest Hemingway described Baker as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw”, while an infatuated Pablo Picasso painted her – and dubbed her “the Nefertiti of now”. She also took up film acting, appearing in four major movies between 1927 and 1940. In person, Baker was warm, generous and down to earth. “Josephine, hospitable and unassuming, loves everyone she works with,” recalled her friend Marcel Sauvage, a French journalist who compiled her memoir from a series of interviews. “There is not one of her colleagues, young or old, for whom she will not be a trusted, attentive friend and often a form of salvation.” Between 1928 and 1930, Baker toured in 25 countries across Europe and the Americas. Though she was often met with screaming adulation, in some places religious groups petitioned against her. “In Vienna they rang all the city’s bells at full peal to warn the churchgoers that... the demon of immorality... had arrived,” she recalled later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/2F61MY7cmyk-407eed2.jpg" width="4040" height="2692" alt="Dancing the Charleston a the Folies Bergère. "The knees of this phenomenon are without joints," wrote one critic. "I've seen nothing funnier."" title="Dancing the Charleston a the Folies Bergère. "The knees of this phenomenon are without joints," wrote one critic. "I've seen nothing funnier."" /> Incorporating singing into her performances, around 1930 she recorded the patriotic song ‘J’ai deux amours’, which became her anthem. In this song, Baker sang of her “two loves”: her country, and the city of Paris. Baker’s assimilation into that culture was complete in 1937 when she married a French industrialist and became a French citizen. Like other black Americans, she felt a sense of freedom in a country without segregation and where racism was less overt. And she soon demonstrated her love for France in a far more impactful way. Celebrity spy Baker was appalled by the racist politics of Nazi Germany and, after the outbreak of the Second World War, realised that she was in a unique position to help. “I only asked for one thing, the smallest thing,” she said: “to serve the country to which I would always owe a debt of gratitude, even if I had to give my life.” Her celebrity status paved the way for spying. Baker had access to many influential international admirers, including ambassadors, politicians and military men. She courted them all, gathering intelligence that she passed back to the French, all while playing to perfection the role of naïve dancer – nobody guessed what she was really up to. On one of her first missions, Baker was able to leverage her friendship with Miki Sawada, the wife of the Japanese ambassador to France, to gather intelligence about Japan’s intentions. She learned that Japan did not plan to maintain a coalition with the Allies, as it had during the First World War – critical information that was immediately reported back to British authorities. Read more | Noor Inayat Khan: the daring life of the British WW2 ‘spy princess’ Her war effort didn’t end with espionage. Baker volunteered at a Paris feeding centre for Belgian refugees, and sent thousands of letters and packages to soldiers at the front. Before the war she had gained her pilot’s licence, and she used that skill to deliver Red Cross supplies in her private plane. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-862250888cmyk-2b29ce7.jpg" width="5068" height="3376" alt="Performing for troops and guests at the British Leave Club in Paris in May 1940, shortly before France was invaded by Nazi Germany. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Performing for troops and guests at the British Leave Club in Paris in May 1940, shortly before France was invaded by Nazi Germany. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> When France fell to German forces in 1940, Baker committed herself still more deeply to the cause, and began working for the French Resistance. She turned her grand chateau in the Dordogne into a centre for Resistance activities, and secreted a forbidden radio on the property. When Germans turned up to search the chateau, she bravely convinced them to leave. She also leveraged contacts to secure safe passage out of France for several Jewish refugees. In his 2022 book The Flame of Resistance, Damien Lewis details her wartime service, revealing how Baker received and passed on crucial intelligence via other members of the Resistance – including information about Luftwaffe signals and the location of German airbases. Working with Jacques Abtey, the head of French intelligence with whom she collaborated throughout the war, Baker made plans to smuggle this information into neutral Portugal, from where it could be passed to the British. Baker and Abtey – whose relationship developed into a romantic one – operated together, transcribing the intelligence onto her music scores in invisible ink. Baker approached the Brazilian ambassador – another useful acquaintance – to organise a dance tour of Brazil that would necessitate her travelling via Portugal, providing the perfect cover story for their mission. Abtey posed as her tour secretary, and the intrepid pair were thus able to travel to Lisbon and there hand over the intelligence. Read more | Mata Hari: exotic dancer, femme fatale, traitor and spy The cloak of fame That mission, like others she completed during the war – sometimes working alone – relied on Baker’s fame to serve as a cloak. On occasions she carried messages written in invisible ink and hidden in her luggage, but at other times she simply pinned notes to her clothes, trusting that nobody would dare to search such a celebrity. Her bravery was astonishing, and she was clearly prepared to risk her life for the cause. Realising that intelligence from Spain was scant, she took it upon herself to organise a tour of that country, during which she gathered information. She even managed to cultivate a friendship with Nicolás Franco, brother of the Spanish Nationalist dictator General Francisco Franco, drawing him into conversations that she later wrote up in her hotel room, smuggling the resulting notes out of the country hidden in her underwear. Then, from 1941, she based herself in Morocco, where she continued to work for the Resistance alongside Abtey. When she fell seriously ill there, she turned her hospital ward into an intelligence hub. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-541084299-cmyk-7dbe943.jpg" width="2348" height="1564" alt="Baker relaxes with her fourth husband, composer Joseph Bouillon, at Christmas 1956 with eight of the 12 children she adopted from various countries. (Photo by Getty Images)" title="Baker relaxes with her fourth husband, composer Joseph Bouillon, at Christmas 1956 with eight of the 12 children she adopted from various countries. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> Having recovered her health, she toured military bases relentlessly, delivering performances to boost troops’ morale. To do this, she travelled all over north Africa, often in dangerous circumstances. On one occasion she was forced to dive for cover as German bombers flew overhead; on another, she had to be rescued from the sea after the plane in which she was flying ditched. She refused to accept payment for this work. “I was singing for my comrades in arms,” she explained. “I wasn’t singing for money.” After the war ended, Baker visited Germany, where she performed for the survivors of a concentration camp. “While the poor souls there... waited to be transported out of the camp, someone needed to try and distract them, restore their hope, to console them, or at least save them first from despair,” she explained. “I volunteered.” Baker’s efforts during the war were recognised by French authorities, and she was later awarded the Resistance medal and the Croix de Guerre, as well as being made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. But her fight was not yet over. Raging against racism Travelling to the US after the war, Baker was incensed by the racism and segregation she experienced. “Tell me, what have we achieved?” she said. “I wanted to serve in the war, as best I could, against the Germans, because of their race policy. And that policy, I found it again, more insidious, more hideous, perhaps, among the people who claimed to fight against it.” Baker was outspoken in her disgust, writing articles, joining rallies and refusing to perform for segregated audiences. She spoke at the March on Washington alongside Martin Luther King on 28 August 1963 – the day on which he delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. “Without unity there cannot be any victory,” she told the crowd. “Continue on – you can’t go wrong – the world is behind you.” Read more | Mourning Martin Luther King Jr: the life and legacy of the civil rights leader After King’s assassination in 1968, his widow reportedly approached Baker to become the unofficial leader of the civil rights movement – but Josephine declined, believing that her children needed her. By this point, Baker had married for a fourth time, and back in France adopted 12 children from around the world, calling this mixed family her “rainbow tribe”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/shutterstockeditorial250030b-cmyk-6f4f9b3.jpg" width="1950" height="1299" alt="Baker joins 250,000 civil rights protesters for the March on Washington in 1963, during which she delivered a speech alongside Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo by Shutterstock)" title="Baker joins 250,000 civil rights protesters for the March on Washington in 1963, during which she delivered a speech alongside Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo by Shutterstock)" /> When financial trouble forced her to sell her beloved chateau in 1968, she was rescued by Grace Kelly, the American actor who had married Prince Rainier of Monaco the previous decade. Princess Grace – who had much earlier witnessed Baker’s outrage when staff in a New York restaurant refused to serve her because of her race – secured Baker a place to live in Monaco, where she stayed until the end of her life. “I’d like to die breathless, exhausted, at the end of a dance or a song,” Baker said, as reported in her memoir, “but not in the music hall.” That wish was granted. She died on 12 April 1975 in the middle of a critically acclaimed run of shows celebrating the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut. More than 20,000 mourners attended her funeral in Paris before she was laid to rest in Monaco, where she remains today. The coffin that was carried into the Panthéon in 2021 contained not her body but soil from various places that she had called home. You might say that she was a woman of all the world – a world she strove hard to keep free and fair. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/2MCT49C-cmyk-13476d5.jpg" width="2084" height="1388" alt="Josephine Baker is inducted into the French Panthéon in Paris in November 2021 – the first black woman to be accorded this honour." title="Josephine Baker is inducted into the French Panthéon in Paris in November 2021 – the first black woman to be accorded this honour. (Photo by AP Photo/Christophe Ena)" /> Anna Maria Barry is a historian and writer. Josephine Baker’s memoir Fearless and Free is now available in English, published by Vintage Classics. This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why?
Tens of thousands of British and German servicemen died on enemy soil during the two world wars. What happened to their remains, writes Tim Grady, tells us a great deal about the two nations’ evolving relationship after the conflicts
Thousands of people lined the streets of Edinburgh in October 1939 hoping to catch a glimpse of the day’s big event. Finally, the sound of an RAF pipe band could be heard, and a slow-moving funeral cortege came into view. Once safely inside the city’s Portobello Cemetery, a military chaplain gave a poignant eulogy to the assembled crowd, and local dignitaries laid wreaths for “two brave airmen”. Although rarely on this scale, such scenes were repeated time and again during the Second World War. What marked this ceremony out as somewhat different, however, was that the flags on the coffins were not Union Jacks, but Nazi swastikas. The mourners in the Scottish capital were well aware of this. After all, they had come to witness the burial of two Germans killed in a battle over the Firth of Forth five days earlier. International law stated the enemy needed to be “honourably buried”, but a grand military funeral was never a part of the deal. If it was not a question of legality, then, what had encouraged such fanfare in Edinburgh? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-78953429-752aa2d.jpg" width="2684" height="1788" alt="Paying respect at the British Military Cemetery in Hamburg in 1957, a site where more than 2,500 Commonwealth troops are buried." title="Paying respect at the British Military Cemetery in Hamburg in 1957, a site where more than 2,500 Commonwealth troops are buried. (Photo by Getty Images)" /> The real motive, it seems, was to be found over in Nazi Germany. During the first days of the conflict, several British airmen had lost their lives in a series of audacious RAF raids on Germany’s North Sea ports. Determined to showcase an honourable side, the Nazi regime staged its own elaborate funerals in the coastal town of Wilelmshaven, Lower Saxony. A naval band, floral tributes and military pallbearers were all present as the British dead were laid to rest. After the Germans had thrown down this mortuary gauntlet, the British clearly decided they had little option but to follow suit. These funerals shed light on an important, though largely overlooked, aspect of the two world wars: the enemy dead. During both conflicts, enemy soldiers and civilians lost their lives on the British and German home fronts. Roughly 2,700 Germans died in First World War Britain and around 4,500 in the second conflict. When it came to British deaths in Germany, the numbers were even higher: 6,500 in the Great War and more than 25,000 from 1939–45. Us and them Both societies have been very good at commemorating their own wartime losses. Such concerns have rarely stretched to the lives lost from the other side – perhaps for understandable reasons. Yet behind every enemy funeral and every enemy grave also lies a wider history of loss, grief and broken families. During the Second World War, the majority of enemy deaths on the home front occurred in the air. The impressive funerals in Edinburgh and Wilhelmshaven were for airmen who were shot down in the skies over Britain and Germany. The balance of deaths in the First World War, however, where air combat played a much smaller role, was very different. In this earlier conflict, the largest number of enemy deaths occurred in PoW camps. But even then, given the vast size of the British and German camp networks, the numbers were still small. Read more | "How I fell captive to the Germans": the experience of First World War PoWs Accidents, sickness and disease were the most common causes of mortality in PoW camps. One of those to suffer such a fate was 26-year-old Friedrich Borutta, a German prisoner originally from industrial Bochum. As a PoW, he ended up in Kinlochleven, a community just south of Ben Nevis. According to a Red Cross report, Borutta was “killed instantaneously” in October 1916, when he “was struck on [the] head by a portion of a hut” as a storm ripped through the Kinlochleven working camp. Some months later, in March 1917, another young German, Eugen Baumann, died in Middlesbrough. A lump of metal “the size of a man’s fist” struck his head while he was labouring away on a massive slag heap. What proved even more deadly for PoWs in both countries was the global influenza pandemic of 1918–19. The tight confines of the camps offered the virus rich pickings. Yorkshire’s Skipton camp was among those to feel the full force of the disease: 47 men lost their lives in little more than three weeks. Read more | Spanish flu: the virus that changed the world Over in Germany, the influenza pandemic was also a killer, but so too were the poor sanitary conditions that reigned in many camps. One of the very worst places to be held was probably the Wittenberg camp, where typhus started to spread during the first half of 1915. But it was the German response, or lack of it, that caused the greatest problems. Fearing they would become infected, the guards effectively abandoned the camp, only passing basic supplies through the border fence. At the peak of the typhus epidemic, the men were living in squalor, “alive with vermin” as a UK parliamentary committee reported. The “horrors of Wittenberg” left 60 British and 400 other PoWs dead. A duty of care Regardless of how the enemy died in the two world wars, the British and German authorities faced the same issue. With every death, they inherited another body that required some form of burial. One option was to create special cemeteries reserved solely for the enemy dead. However, this required time, effort and money, all of which were in short supply in wartime. Nonetheless, a handful of new cemeteries were developed, including one in Wittenberg for the typhus victims. In Britain, new PoW burial grounds were built for the Stobs camp in the Scottish borders and the Park Hall camp near Oswestry, where a large memorial mound cast a watchful shadow over the 109 German graves. A second option for the burial of enemy bodies – which became by far the most common approach – was to make use of existing cemeteries. After all, there seemed little reason to create a brand new burial ground if there was already plenty of space in nearby parish churchyards or in municipal cemeteries. The recovery and burial of a German bomber crew who had lost their lives in Withyham, Sussex in 1941 was fairly typical of the process. The aircraft, a Heinkel He 111, was returning to base from a bombing raid over London when a British fighter attacked. Two crew members bailed out and another three died as the aircraft smashed into the ground. Some “not identifiable” remains, as the police report put it, were pulled from the “burnt-out machine” and subsequently buried in Withyham parish churchyard. A fourth German – one of the men to have bailed out – died on the way to hospital in Tunbridge Wells and was then buried in the town’s municipal cemetery. During the two world wars, the burial of the enemy in local cemeteries, such as Withyham and Tunbridge Wells, occurred time and again. Sometimes it was just the odd grave that appeared. In King’s Lynn, for example, the remains of Frank Zielenski, another victim of the influenza pandemic, lay quietly in the town’s main cemetery, surrounded by ordinary family graves. In other burial grounds, the enemy had a much greater presence: Manchester’s Southern Cemetery contained 154 German dead from the First World War, later joined by eight servicemen from the Second. Simmering anger After the two conflicts, more than 700 different British cemeteries contained enemy graves. There is no accurate number for Germany, but given the scale of death, the numbers must have been even greater. Eighteen-year-old Donald Stephens died in Landshut, north of Munich in September 1918, a matter of weeks before the end of the war. Buried in the town’s wooded cemetery, Stephens rested inconspicuously alongside German family graves. He was far from alone: fallen British soldiers lay scattered in hundreds of cemeteries in the heart of local German communities. Coming face to face with a dead enemy was certainly less threatening than confronting a live one. Perhaps for this reason, local people rarely put up too much of a fuss when their vanquished foe was carried to the grave in their own communities. One Dorset woman watching the burial of a German PoW in First World War Dorchester captured the sentiment of many people. “I only hope that in Germany they treat our men as well and pay as much respect to those who die,” she shouted out as the coffin was carried to the grave. However, not every funeral passed off without anger being expressed. The strongest complaints were generally reserved for airmen killed in bombing raids. In Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, according to a police report, the vicar found himself “threatened with a riot” after he agreed to the burial of “German murderers” in September 1916. The 15 men in question were the crew of a raiding German airship that had been shot down in flames in neighbouring Cuffley. Meanwhile, one Newcastle resident was so incensed at the scale of a German funeral held locally that he vented his anger in the press. “It is time we treated these men for what they are: cold blooded murderers,” he raged. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/2PYX95Acmyk-9f36fa4.jpg" width="3487" height="2323" alt="The respect shown in Edinburgh may have been related to events in Wilhelmshaven when RAF men were shot down during a raid over Germany in September 1939. Here, a German naval dean delivers a speech at the funeral. (Photo by Alamy)" title="The respect shown in Edinburgh may have been related to events in Wilhelmshaven when RAF men were shot down during a raid over Germany in September 1939. Here, a German naval dean delivers a speech at the funeral. (Photo by Alamy)" /> As the Allied bombing of German urban areas intensified, any empathy with dead or dying enemy airmen also quickly faded. In Nazi Germany, people’s anger sometimes went far beyond a letter to the local newspaper. When a Lancaster bomber hit the ground in the tiny village of Schlalach, south of Potsdam, in 1943, there was very little left of the “badly burned” crew. Yet the attacks still continued. Some local workers took the corpses to the village churchyard, where they threw the bodies into a mass grave, imitating “the noise of falling bombs” as each body hit the ground. Commemorating the enemy In both 1918 and 1945, when the fighting finally stopped, wartime societies, militaries and economies were gradually demobilised. Yet, while the living could slowly return, the dead remained overseas, scattered in local cemeteries from Aldershot to York and Aachen to Xanten. But what was to happen to these enemy graves post-conflict? Unsurprisingly, many of the bereaved were desperate to have their loved ones’ bodies brought home. Elizabeth Stark’s circumstances were particularly sad. In September 1918, her son James had succumbed to wounds while being held in Cologne. A few weeks later her husband also died. She then made it her mission to “get their boy’s body home” to Dundee. Despite years of campaigning, she eventually had to admit defeat. Her husband’s headstone in Scotland contains a dedication to their son, but his body remained in Germany. Read more | The war grave warriors While discussions over the possible repatriation of the enemy dead rumbled on, the graves themselves started to enjoy a second life. This came down to having a presence. People found it difficult to ignore the enemy, when their graves were still in the midst of communities. One Suffolk soldier, Willie Read, had perished in the influenza pandemic and lay buried in the town of Rüthen. A local farmer, who had employed Read, promised his family he would keep the grave “in proper condition”. Sometimes, local people included the enemy in their early war commemorations. The 14 German dead in Birmingham’s Lodge Hill cemetery, for example, were treated the same as the neighbouring British war graves. On Armistice Day during the 1920s, wreaths were laid on both sets of graves. It was, the German embassy proclaimed somewhat optimistically, a “sign of the growing mutual understanding between the nations of Europe”. With local communities taking such a close interest in the care of enemy graves, direct contact between the former foes often followed. One of the most poignant stories emerged on the south coast of England, where 11 German airmen of the Second World War lay buried in Poole’s Parkstone Cemetery. Frau Koch, the widow of Horst Gündel, one of those killed, made regular trips to the cemetery postwar. On one of these visits, she ended up in conversation with a local man. The pair kept in touch and a warm friendship developed. They exchanged letters and Christmas cards, arranged flowers for Gündel’s grave and their families stayed together on holiday. New resting places Yet these warm relations were not to last. While the British and Germans were busy bonding over the enemy war graves, the authorities started to plot a very different future for the dead. Both sides eventually decided to move their graves from hundreds of scattered sites to a far smaller number of new military cemeteries, which gathered together the fallen on foreign soil. On paper, there was a lot of logic to such plans. It brought each country’s dead together for the first time – and, of course, centralising the graves also cut down on maintenance costs. The knock-on effect, however, was that once the graves were gone, the bereaved no longer needed to visit communities that had once cared for the dead. And thus, these early relations slowly fizzled out. The enemy graves vanished from the cemetery landscapes at different times. The British moved first, exhuming all their dead in Germany in two large waves, one in the mid-1920s and one in the late 1940s for the Second World War graves. These were massive operations. The exhumation teams often covered hundreds of miles in a day, moving tens of bodies each time. “With such enormous distances,” as one of the gravediggers later recalled, “our lives seemed to revolve round transport.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/2K0E696-d3a6f04.jpg" width="3776" height="2516" alt="General Maximilian von Herff is among those whose remains lie at Cannock Chase. As head of the SS Personnel Main Office from 1942–45, he worked closely with Heinrich Himmler. (Photo by Alamy)" title="General Maximilian von Herff is among those whose remains lie at Cannock Chase. As head of the SS Personnel Main Office from 1942–45, he worked closely with Heinrich Himmler. (Photo by Alamy)" /> Yet, while the British dead were gradually moved, there was no such progress with the scattered German graves. This was not for a lack of trying. The problem for successive German governments was that, as the vanquished power, they had less control of the graves in Britain. It was only in 1959 that the situation finally changed: a new international treaty gave the West German state permission to exhume all German graves on British soil. The West Germans welcomed this development as a sign of rehabilitation. Of course, this rather overlooked the fact that many of the German dead had led anything but normal lives. On the one side were unsavoury characters such as Maximilian von Herff (1893–1945), a Waffen-SS general who had died after suffering a stroke while being held as a PoW in Cumbria. On the other side were the graves of refugees who had fled the Nazis and been interned, only then to lose their lives in wartime Britain. Such complexities were of little concern when the gravediggers set to work. The Germans moved all of their dead to a new military cemetery on Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, matching the British who had developed four cemeteries for their First World dead (in Berlin Stahnsdorf, Cologne, Hamburg and Kassel), with 11 more added after the second conflict. Today, the enemy dead lie quietly in these vast cemeteries, all beautifully tended by the British and German war graves commissions. Few now remember that the enemy graves were anywhere other than on Cannock Chase or in one of the British cemeteries on German soil. In Edinburgh, Poole or Wilhelmshaven, there is no longer any sign of the enemy. Their graves, now long gone, had once been a prompt for British-German reconciliation and a reminder of shared losses, even of crimes committed. Without the enemy in the way, the British and Germans have been free to concentrate on constructing national, rather than shared, narratives of the two world wars. Tim Grady is professor of modern European history at the University of Chester and author of Burying the Enemy: The Story of Those Who Cared for the Dead in Two World Wars (Yale University Press) This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Liquor, loot and death on the high seas: 5 things you (probably) didn't know about the history of pirates
Sophie Nibbs shines a light on the murky world of the bandits who marauded the high seas in the 17th and 18th centuries
1. Pirates followed strict rules Despite their fearsome reputations, these maritime bandits often signed up to stringent codes of conduct. Bartholomew Roberts (1682–1722), a well-known and brutal Welsh pirate, enforced rules for his crew, aiming to ensure that things ran smoothly on board. He issued a ban on gambling, which was likely to spark conflict, and lights were to be put out at 8pm. Anyone who wanted to stay awake and continue drinking after that time was required to do so on deck. Read more | The most famous and despicable pirates from history The code also dictated that each member of the pirate crew should receive a fair share of the loot. Meanwhile, compensation was paid for injuries, encouraging a sense of loyalty and fairness. The first article of his code states that: “Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.” Anyone found to have violated the rules could find themselves marooned or even killed. It was often down to the rest of the crew to decide on a fitting punishment for a fellow pirate’s crimes. Listen | Dr Rebecca Simon responds to your questions on the 17th-century golden age of piracy. Plus, how accurate are pop culture portrayals of pirates? 2. They didn’t make captives walk the plank Pirates dealt with their captives in various practical or brutal ways – killing them outright, enslaving them or marooning them on deserted islands. Sometimes those captured would be spared if they had useful skills or a high ransom value. In common with many of the dramatic or fantastical ideas we hold about pirates today, the myth of enemies being made to walk the plank seems to have its roots in Captain Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), a collection of biographies detailing the lives and dramatic tales of infamous characters. Its mysterious author – thought by some to have been Daniel Defoe but who was more likely newspaper publisher Nathaniel Mist – blended historical accounts with heavily embellished storytelling. Read more | Q&A: Was walking the plank a real pirate punishment? Such myths were picked up by other writers who helped cement them in the public consciousness. Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, wrote of the brutal – albeit mythical – practice in Treasure Island (1883). “His stories were what frightened people worst of all,” recounts narrator Jim Hawkins of the “seaman with the sabre cut” who drank in his father’s inn. “Dreadful stories they were – about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/BAL3784207cmyk-54b1083.jpg" width="4016" height="2675" alt="A 19th-century illustration possibly depicting Chinese pirate Zheng Yi Sao. Perhaps the most successful buccaneer of all time, at one point she commanded more than 1,800 ships." title="A 19th-century illustration possibly depicting Chinese pirate Zheng Yi Sao. Perhaps the most successful buccaneer of all time, at one point she commanded more than 1,800 ships. (Photo by Bridgeman)" /> 3. Women were pirates too There are records of several women who became highly successful pirates, defying societal norms of their time, though some codes contained articles that banned women on pirate ships. Two of the best-known female buccaneers of the early 18th century, famed for their courage and combat skills, were Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Captain Johnson explained that, in order to be accepted onto the crew of Captain ‘Calico Jack’ Rackham, “they both went through the usual formalities of pirates, and dressed in men’s clothes, for the more concealment of their sex”. When captured in 1720, both claimed they were pregnant and were spared the death penalty. Calico Jack received no such leniency, and was hanged in Jamaica. Another legendary female pirate was Zheng Yi Sao (c1775–1844), sometimes known as the ‘pirate queen’. Considered one of the most successful pirates of all time, at the height of her power she commanded more than 1,800 ships in the South China Sea. In 1810, she negotiated her surrender with the Chinese government – a very rare way for a pirate’s career to end. She saw out her retirement running a gambling house in Guangzhou (then Canton) until her death at the age of 69. Read more | When pirates ruled Asia's waves 4. Not every pirate flag sported a skull and crossbones Pirate flags, sometimes known as ‘Jolly Rogers’, were intended to strike fear into the hearts of victims, encouraging them to surrender. While the skull and crossbones is the most iconic design, alternatives featured weapons, hourglasses and bleeding hearts – all symbols of danger and death. If the crew raised a red flag, it indicated that blood would be shed. In a letter from 1724, Captain Richard Hawkins wrote that “[They] hoisted Jolly Roger... in the middle of which is a large skeleton with a dart in one hand, striking a bleeding heart and in the other an hour glass... when they fight under the Jolly Roger, they give quarter, which they do not when they fight under the red or bloody flag.” Read more | Did all pirates fly the Jolly Roger? Another tactic was to sail under the flag of a neutral or friendly nation. Their identity masked, pirates could get close enough to attack a target ship, catching their victims off guard. They sometimes waiting until the last minute before raising the Jolly Roger. 5. Many pirates were former navy sailors Several pirates served as navy or merchant sailors before being driven to piracy by poor wages, harsh conditions and a lack of opportunities after conflicts ended. Compared with legitimate posts, piracy offered better pay, freedom from oppressive hierarchies and a share of any loot. Unlike on naval vessels, pirate crews were often democratic, electing captains and dividing treasure based on skills and contributions. Some pirates also came from captured ships. Prisoners, particularly skilled sailors, were sometimes given the option to join the pirates rather than face execution or abandonment. Adopting this recruitment strategy enabled pirate ships to build experienced and loyal crews. There are also examples of pirates who had formerly been privateers, issued a licence or ‘letter of marque’ by the British government authorising them to attack and capture ships from enemy nations. Some privateers, such as Captain William Kidd, saw opportunities to make vast fortunes, and seized ships they were not permitted to take. As a result, the government in London declared Kidd a pirate; he was captured, found guilty of piracy and hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping in 1701. Read more | Hunting pirates: how piracy’s golden age came to an end Sophie Nibbs is a curator of exhibitions and interpretation, currently at Royal Museums Greenwich. A new exhibition on the history of pirates opens at the National Maritime Museum, London on 29 March. This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case
Turi King led the verification team that worked on Richard III’s rediscovered remains. Here, on the 10th anniversary of the king’s reburial service, she reveals how science finally solved a 500-year-old cold case
History isn't often made in car parks. Yet in the early autumn of 2012, something remarkable was in the air – or, should I say, under the ground. On Wednesday 5 September, 13 years ago, an archaeologist and osteologist called Jo Appleby could be found crouching over a skeleton in what had once been the medieval church of the Greyfriars in Leicester – now an unremarkable car park. Jo was clad head-to-toe in white overalls, wearing a face mask, and giving the human remains below her every last drop of her attention. The reasons for Jo’s great care would soon become all-too evident. The skeleton over which she crouched had lain under the soil for more than 500 years – and it would yield one of the most remarkable historical discoveries of the 21st century. Jo could tell a few things about the skeleton as she, bone by bone, brought it into the light. This appeared to be a male, with injuries incurred at or around the time of death – injuries that could have been sustained in battle. He was aged in his twenties or thirties. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/03/GettyImages-160632583cmyk-7409349.jpg" width="4400" height="2355" alt="Dr Jo Appleby points to an image of the skull of Britain's King Richard III, during a press conference at the university in central England, on February 4, 2013. (Photo by Andrew Cowie/AFP via Getty Images)" title="Dr Jo Appleby points to an image of the skull of Britain's King Richard III, during a press conference at the university in central England, on February 4, 2013. (Photo by Andrew Cowie/AFP via Getty Images)" /> Yet it was when Jo uncovered the spine – and noticed that it was curved – that, as she later told me, the hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end. Could this skeleton be the remains of Richard III, the monarch so famously described by Shakespeare as a “bunch-back’d toad”? It looked promising. But we had to prove it. Quiz | Richard III quiz: how much do you know about the last Plantagenet king? Our first priority was to lift the skeleton and bring it back to the University of Leicester for more extensive analysis. All the while, the media interest in the project to find Richard III was picking up pace – the press and public were captivated by the possibility of medieval England’s most controversial king residing in a car park. What we were about to announce at a joint press conference by the University of Leicester and the Richard III Society would send this fascination into overdrive. Yet we couldn’t let the media feeding frenzy distract us. While newspapers waxed lyrical about the sensational discovery of the ‘king in the car park’, we knew we just had to get our heads down and quietly and calmly get on with a rigorous investigation. Missing for centuries So how did we go about identifying these remains as Richard III? Well, let’s back up a bit. If you were to go missing, how would your family and friends describe you to a search team? Your loved ones would probably provide them with information such as your last known location, what you were wearing when you left home in the morning, your age, and your hair colour. The Richard III project was essentially doing the same thing – only it was attempting to solve one of history’s most famous missing person cases, and that person had been dead for more than five centuries. As in a modern case, we had a list of what was known about Richard that would help us identify him. The king’s last known location, as evidenced by historical documents, was in the church of the Greyfriars friary in Leicester, where he was buried after his death in 1485, having been defeated by Henry Tudor at the battle of Bosworth. More specifically, Richard was known to be buried in the choir, a high-status part of the church. Read more | Alternate history: what if Richard III had won at Bosworth? However, more than 50 years later, the friary had been torn down during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and the land had been sold off more than once and built upon. We knew the location of the friary precinct, but the precise whereabouts of Richard’s grave had been lost to history. Being a king, Richard’s birth and death dates were well known, so we knew he was 32 years old when he died. Shakespeare, in his plays, famously made him out to be a ‘hunchback’ with a limp and a withered arm. But Shakespeare wrote his play Richard III in the early 1590s, more than a hundred years after Richard’s death, so can only have been drawing on previous accounts of the king’s appearance, quite possibly tinged with Tudor propaganda. Read more | Have we completely misinterpreted Shakespeare’s Richard III? Only two of these accounts were from people who, it seems, had actually met Richard III: one of these, John Rous’s renowned Historia Regum Angliae, described Richard as having one shoulder higher than the other. So Richard having a spinal abnormality was a possibility. This gave us our list of characteristics to look for when identifying Richard. Crucially, we also had to put a number on how likely it was that the skeleton belonged to the king. We started by sexing and ageing the skeleton. This can be achieved by examining the bones. For example, men’s pelvises are shaped differently to women’s. And while it’s not possible to precisely determine age at death, an examination of the teeth, skull and ends of bones allows an age range to be specified. From this, Jo Appleby and the team determined that the skeleton belonged to a man, aged 30–34 years when he died. The fact that he was male was also supported by the presence of a Y chromosome, which is inherited down the male line. By examining the bones by eye – as well as using computed tomography (CT) X-ray scanning technology – the team, including forensic engineer Sarah Hainsworth, was also able to detect and examine 11 perimortem injuries (those sustained at or around the time of death). All of these were consistent with being made by weapons from the medieval period. Scans and a reconstruction of the skeleton confirmed the curvature of the spine and suggested that the right shoulder would have been slightly higher than the left. Something fishy What we eat and drink affects the make-up of the chemical elements contained within our bones and teeth. The study of this chemical mix is known as stable isotope analysis, and in this case showed that the individual had a high-status diet that had a strong marine (fish) component to it. Meanwhile, radiocarbon dating delivered a 95.4 per cent probability that the subject died between 1456 and 1530, bracketing the date of Richard’s death in 1485. While Jo and the team studied the individual’s bones, I carried out the genetic analysis of the remains. DNA testing has the potential to unlock the secrets of a skeleton, but there’s absolutely no guarantees: DNA degrades following death, and what remains is often too fragmented and damaged to analyse. Fortunately, with our Greyfriars skeleton, this proved not to be the case. So how exactly did we use DNA to link this particular skeleton to Richard III? DNA testing for identification purposes in this sort of case involves analysing the DNA from the remains and comparing it with that of a known, usually close, relative. But there was a problem: we didn’t have the remains of any of Richard’s close relatives to hand. The solution was to test against living relatives of the medieval king. Yet this approach threw up a further complication: Richard himself left no known living descendants. That meant that the DNA we needed would have to come from descendants of other members of his family. And, as mitochondrial DNA is found in the eggs that mothers generate to produce offspring, we required a relative whose relationship to Richard III was by an entirely female line. Fortunately, we already knew of one such person. His name was Michael Ibsen, and he was descended from one of Richard III’s sisters, Anne of York. Soon our researchers had traced another female-line descendant of Anne, a woman called Wendy Duldig, who also happened to be Michael’s 14th cousin, twice removed. We had our mitochondrial DNA comparators at the ready. Then came a breakthrough moment: those comparators showed a match with the Greyfriars skeleton. Interestingly, analysis of the Y chromosome, which is passed down through the male line, didn’t show a match to the living relatives we tested. However, I knew from my years of research in this field, that we might find what’s known as a false paternity, where the biological father is not the recorded father somewhere on the family tree: the genealogy says one thing, but the DNA tells you some- thing else has gone on! Read more | Rediscovering Richard III: the story of identifying a lost king Picking a winner It was now time to put that all-important statistical number on the likelihood of the skeleton being Richard. And to do that we turned to a method that’s widely deployed in forensic cases such as this: Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics is a way of calculating the probability of something, and updating that probability by bringing in various sources of data or knowledge. An example that’s often used is horse racing. Say you have two horses, A and B, racing one another. If you don’t know anything about either horse, you might conclude that the chance of horse A winning is 50/50. But what if we could add some more information here by counting how many times each horse has won when they’d been in a race against each other previously? What if you knew that, out of the 12 times these two horses have raced against one another before, horse A has won eight times (67 per cent of the time)? Well, knowing that, you’d say the probability of horse A winning is higher and the chance of horse B winning is only 33 per cent. Each new piece of information you add will change the likelihood of each horse being the winner. The beauty of the Bayesian method is that it allows us to combine all the evidence together into one calculation to get a statistical number of the likelihood of the skeleton belonging to Richard III. In that, we have only two possibilities: hypothesis 1 is that this is Richard III; the second is that it’s not Richard III. Remember we had our list of features to look for? Well each one gives us a new bit of evidence we can add to the mix and allows us to calculate what’s known as a likelihood ratio for hypothesis 1 (it’s Richard) versus hypothesis 2 (it’s not Richard). The first count was: how often do you find skeletons from individuals in high-status parts of churches who are male and aged between 26 and 35? It’s about 18 per cent of the time, if you want to know. We did the same for each category. We looked at the counts of how often you find skeletons with scoliosis in the medieval period, how often you find skeletons with perimortem injuries in high-status parts of churches, and the likelihood of the radiocarbon date (given that we knew the friary was built in the 13th century and closed in 1538). One piece of evidence that we didn’t throw into the mix was the stable isotope data that showed that this was a person with a high-status diet. We would expect anyone buried in a high-status part of the church to eat better than the vast majority of the population, so adding this to our calculations would, we reasoned, have unduly biased the statistics towards the skeleton being Richard. We also included the fact that the Y chromosome didn’t match. So, what did it all show? We were lucky enough to have David Balding, a world-famous forensic statistician, on the team calculating the likelihood ratio for us. And the results David produced were, I think it’s fair to say, pretty conclusive. Even with our conservative approach, the likelihood ratio was 6.7 million to 1 in favour of hypothesis 1. That translates to a probability of between 99.999 and 99.99999 per cent that these were indeed the remains of King Richard III. We were pretty excited with the results – and, I would argue, with good reason. Talk of the nation We all know what happened next. Media attention intensified further still. Richard III could soon be seen staring back at readers from the pages of some of our most successful tabloids. He was name-checked in Prime Ministers Questions. Rumour has it that he even became a popular topic of conversation in the nation’s pubs! Then, on 26 March 2015, the medieval king was reinterred in Leicester Cathedral in an extraordinary ceremony that was televised around the world. Yet not everyone was convinced. A handful of people (not one of them, it has to be said, a statistician or geneticist) still didn’t believe we’d found him. Quite often they would pick one bit of evidence (often the DNA) and say it wasn’t robust enough on its own. Or they would claim that the skeleton could have been one of Richard III’s female-line relatives. Read more | Richard III: latest DNA study ‘doesn’t prove bones belong to former king’ As part of our analysis, we constructed a family tree, tracing his female-line relatives going back several generations, out sideways and back down to Richard’s generation. By comparing this with historical information, we were able to show that these known relatives were either female (and so could be ruled out), or either too young, too old or too dead to have fought at Bosworth. Or they were recorded as not being at the battle. So the only person on that tree who could have been at Bosworth was Richard himself. Beyond this, given the rarity of the mitochondrial type, the chances of someone carrying it being alive around the right time, in the right age range, known to be killed in battle, have a spinal abnormality and be buried in the choir of Leicester’s church of the Greyfriars were vanishingly small. Our critics also seemingly didn’t realise that the beauty – indeed the entire point – of Bayesian analysis is that it allows you to combine all the strands to come up with a likelihood. To put it another way, if you were to go missing, people would describe you by such factors as your age, your height, your build and what you were last wearing. The police wouldn’t go on just one distinguishing characteristic, such as brown hair or blue eyes. Just as we did, they would identify you based on all the strands of evidence together. And the evidence was overwhelming that these were the remains of King Richard III. Ten years on, I confess I still have to pinch myself that I was even involved in the project. I’m so proud of all that was achieved. The team that carried out the planning, the excavation and the enormous amount of post-excavation work comprised a huge number of academics and non-academics all bringing their own expertise to the table to make the project the tremendous success it was. No one person could have carried out the project on their own. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts as we came together to solve this 500-year-old cold case. A blonde bombshell? What did Richard III really look like? Analysis of his DNA threw up some interesting possibilities, writes Turi King As someone who studied art history at university, I’ve long been aware that none of the portraits of Richard III date from his lifetime. In fact, the two earliest portraits left to us today weren’t produced until the early part of the 16th century, a generation after his death. One of these is now in the Royal Collection; the other, an arched-frame portrait, is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London. What’s interesting is that, though they were produced at roughly the same time, the portraits differ from one another. The Royal Collection painting shows the king with dark-brown hair (it’s thought that, at some point, the portrait was altered to change Richard’s eye colour from brown to grey). The arched-frame portrait, on the other hand, shows Richard with lighter-brown hair and blue eyes. I was intrigued to know whether science could help give us an indication of which of the two portraits most closely fit what the DNA could tell us. A former colleague of mine, Manfred Kayser, had developed forensic tests to predict someone’s hair and eye colour based on known variants in genes associated with pigmentation. While not an exact science, and certainly not something that could be used as part of the identification, I was curious as to what genetic analysis of these variants in Richard III’s DNA could tell us. After carrying out the sequencing, we compared Richard’s genetic makeup with a database that Manfred had compiled. This indicated a 96 per cent chance of Richard having blue eyes and a 77 per cent chance of him having blond hair. A word of caution: this would have been a childhood hair colour – and, as many people will have experienced themselves, hair can darken with age. However, our investigations do suggest that the arched-frame portrait in the Society of Antiquaries of London is likely to be the most faithful representation of the medieval king. Turi King is director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. In 2012, she led the verification team during the exhumation and reburial of Richard III. This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency
When radios first appeared in British homes in the early 20th century, one thing soon became clear: domestic life would never be the same again. Beaty Rubens tracks Britons’ reaction to this extraordinary new technology via seven cartoons.
Radio silence This double cartoon from 1923 laments the impact of the wireless on the art of conversation Listening to the radio today is so familiar an occupation that we easily forget it was once a new technology. Like most new technologies, early radio stirred massive public excitement but also fear about its disruptive potential. What exactly was radio – or ‘wireless’, as it was then called? Who was it for? Where would it happen? As the first ever form of home-based mass entertainment, anxieties ran particularly high about radio’s impact on the cherished traditions of domestic life. How, for example, might it affect conversation? Cartoons offer us a fascinating insight into how interwar Britons ad- dressed questions like these. In the first panel of this before-and-after cartoon from 1923, guests at a Victorian dinner-party are engaged in animated conversation. In the second, each of them is isolated in their own world, all interaction stifled as they listen to the radio. In the early days, problems with amplification meant that almost all listening was through head- phones, making them the must-have accessory of the 1920s, just as they are again today. Even the butler is wearing a set, on the verge of catastrophe as he stretches the wires to their full extent whilst carrying out his duties. These images represent a wealthy fictional gathering, but real-life versions were soon playing out in homes across the country. Radio uptake was sensationally swift: when broadcasting began in 1922, just 150,000 people were able to listen; by 1939 the number had risen to 34 million. Of course, such debates are not only a thing of the past, a forgotten feature of the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents. Switch the gadget to mobile devices and this cartoon could as easily be a commentary on the ‘lost art’ of conversation at the 21st-century family dinner-table. Is it a telephone, dear? Many older Britons were utterly befuddled by the strange new talking gadget in their homes Guglielmo Marconi patented wireless technology in 1896 but it would be more than a decade before the radio started making inroads into Britons’ homes. For many people, welcoming broadcasting into the domestic sphere could feel daunting, and attempts to understand how radio actually worked were often touchingly naive. Edith Davidson, wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, enquired in 1923 whether it was necessary to leave a window open while listening to the wireless. In these first years, bad reception didn’t help. One disappointed early adopter in Sheffield compared the babble emanating from his radio to “an insurrection in hell”. And even when reception improved, older people often found the new technology daunting. Many cartoons depict them talking back to the radio, attempting to correct it or scolding it for interrupting. The benign old auntie shown in this cartoon (which appeared in Radio Times in 1923) confusedly believes that her set is an updated telephone (the new technology of her youth). Hovering at the door, her nephew represents the first ever ‘wireless native’ generation. With such tech-savvy communication skills gaining currency, it makes sense to view the boy as a forerunner of the teenagers who listened to music on transistors in the 1950s and 1960s. Read more | Radio Times at 100: a "vivid running commentary" on a century of British life Early radio was soon enjoyed by all – including dear old aunties – but it was also beginning to play a role in a deeper generational shift. The babysitting service Was radio leading young mothers astray? The creator of a 1923 cartoon seemed to think it might be Broadcasting was soon almost like a household utility. It provided a news service and regular weather forecasts, the Greenwich Time Signal, individualised SOS calls, live running sports commentaries, religious coverage, music and talks on a vast range of subjects. It also provided company. Read more | Our series on the history of the BBC, from the rise of radio to the digital age As one housewife stated: “I know a woman who’s lost her husband and she was all alone, and she says with the wireless on she never feels lonely. It’s like having someone else in the room.” The Radio Times cartoon shown above is, though, rather more ambiguous in its message. A fashionably turned-out woman is just leaving the nursery on the arm of her equally debonair husband. At the last moment she turns to give a final instruction to the nursemaid who stands humbly next to her toddler charge: “Let the little darling listen to Children’s Hour, and then, when he’s had his supper, the Radio Dance Band can play him to sleep.” The woman’s nonchalant suggestion is clear: listening to the radio can now replace more traditional forms of childcare. Below the image, the caption asks: ‘WHAT IS HOME WITHOUT A RADIO?’ This is a provocative play on the title of a familiar Victorian parlour song, What Is Home Without a Mother? But is it claiming that the new technology has become a welcome domestic resource, or slyly suggesting that it provides an excuse for mothers to neglect their traditional household duties and go off dancing till dawn? The curse of casual sexism Housewives benefited hugely from the radio revolution. Yet the battle over misogyny hadn’t been won At a time when almost all married women stayed at home, daytime broadcasting proved a boon. One housewife from Manchester captured this in a 1929 letter to Radio Times. She described herself as “bursting with mental energy” but obliged to “stay close to work-a-day household duties”, before declaring that “the task of cleaning a kitchen went down a little better while listening to the intelligent observations of an intelligent woman”. A Bristol housewife explained that she would take her bowl of potatoes into the parlour in order to peel them to the accompaniment of the Daily Service: “That half hour doose me good.” Read more | Counter revolution: how the kitchen changed in the 20th century The 1929 general election was the first in which all women enjoyed the same voting rights as men. In preparation for this, a formidable female BBC editor and dedicated team of producers commissioned many talks on civic and political life. But even after equality had officially been won, casual sexism and deeply ingrained misogyny persisted, as numerous ostensibly hilarious cartoons reveal. The image builds on age-old tropes about who is really in charge in the home. It appeared in October 1928, three months after the passing of the Equal Franchise Act and is entitled How Laws Are Made. Read more | Women's rights in the 20th century: what happened after the vote was won? With breathtaking irony apparently lost on the editor and arts editor of Radio Times (both men), the text immediately above reminds listeners that an “interesting series of Tuesday Talks, entitled ‘Questions for Women Voters’, is to be continued at 7pm on 6 November by Professor Harold J Laski of the London School of Economics, whose subject will be ‘How Laws Are Made’.” Music for the masses? The wireless transported working-class Britons to a gilded world they had little hope of inhabiting With the manufacturers in over-drive, there was soon a wireless to suit every pocket. Only the super-rich could afford a ready-made set in a polished cabinet with its own amplifying horn, but a basic ‘crystal set’ was within the reach of most working people. After buying an annual licence (10 shillings, which could be paid by instalments into a savings club), there were no running costs, so day-to-day listening was free. However, democracy of access to broadcasting could not disguise the wide social and economic divisions in British society. This cartoon appeared in Radio Times only weeks after the General Strike – the great symbol of 1920s inequality. The scene is a large office, furnished in masculine opulence. In the foreground, a painfully thin charwoman has just pushed back the heavy carpet to clean the marble floor beneath. It is the look on her face that tells the story: a startled yet weary resignation at the absurdity of the words she is hearing broadcast from a conspicuously pricey radio-set: “We are now taking you over to the Savoy Hotel.” Popular music played by the resident bands of grand, metropolitan venues brought immense pleasure into millions of lives but it might also awaken other emotions. For example, a headline in the Birmingham Dispatch announced: “Crystal Set Irony – Savoy Band in Miner’s Hovel.” Radio broadcasting was increasingly playing a role in uniting the nation, but this cartoon is a poignant reminder that it might actually reinforce a sense of division between rich and poor. Royals in your living room How should Brits behave in the presence of monarchy? Thanks to the radio, this question took on greater urgency. It was the ‘Year of the Three Kings’. In 1936, George V died, Edward VIII abdicated and George VI assumed the throne – all in 12 turbulent months for the royal family. The BBC covered all three events extensively, but bringing monarchy right into listeners’ homes inevitably provoked new questions of etiquette. Read more | The death of King George V – and why his doctor hastened his demise Was it necessary to stand for royal broadcasts and the national anthem (as happened in cinemas and theatres)? Was it permissible to eat and drink during the more solemn moments of the coronation? It would be a mistake to imagine that all listeners took such broadcasts as seriously as the stern paterfamilias in the cartoon, whose wife meekly questions the need for the family to behave as if actually in the presence of royalty. Real listeners to the coronation allowed themselves to wonder about more humdrum issues: what did the king and queen do for food all day and how did the troops lining the route of the procession relieve themselves? As one Londoner reported: “We couldn’t quite hear the words of the ceremony and some of the phrases sounded like ‘Gawd blimey’ and ‘swelp me bob’. We all joined in mock interpretations and there was much laughter.” At the same time, a more subversive brand of radio comedy was gaining mass appeal. Programmes such as Band Waggon mocked the more solemn pretensions of broadcasting itself and played on another intimate but virtual relationship – that of listeners in their homes and comedians in Broadcasting House. This so-called ‘radiogenic’ comedy (comedy particularly suited in style or content to the medium) was as important as royal broadcasting in the coming of age of radio as an art-form in its own right. The wireless goes to war In 1939, radio truly came of age: relaying world-shaking events to a nation battling for its survival. Less than a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, this eloquent cartoon appeared in a special ‘Home’ number of Radio Times. It blends Broadcasting House with an image that has something of the modest suburban home, something of the cosy country cottage. Hens cluck in the yard, long johns flap on the washing line. A comfortably plump man strides home to his wife who is waiting under a pergola. Above and behind her, like benign sentinels, stand the statues of Prospero and Ariel. Wisteria climbs between curtained windows towards the iconic clock and rooftop transmitter. The text that appeared below the cartoon stated that “when all is said and done, broadcasting, with all its elaborate mechanism, is aimed at the home”. It also imparted the message that, if wireless was consumed in the same way as theatre and cinema – ie outside the home – it might be grander, more imposing and more sophisticated. However, it would also be less intimate and friendly. Unashamedly romantic in flavour, this image represents the British way of life under threat. Skies are darkening overhead. War is coming. And that war would mark the end of the first phase of British radio and the beginning of the second, when the nation gathered around the wireless-set, eager for information, education and entertainment. News was to prove the key offering. Just before the war, a Welsh grocer memorably commented: “The news is, for me, the very special feature... My wife releases me from the shop counter for the 6 o’clock news... I wouldn’t miss the news. I’ve even neglected the bacon machine for the news.” Not even 20 years old, and very far from perfect, the radio set had earned its place in the home. Beaty Rubens’ new book, Listen In: How Radio Changed the Home, is published by Bodleian Library. A free exhibition with the same name is running in the Weston Library, Oxford until 31 August. This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The triumph of the Anglo-Saxons: how the kingdom of Mercia powered the rise of England
Battered by the Vikings, outshone by King Alfred, Mercia has long been painted as the also-ran of the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet, writes Max Adams, this mighty Midlands kingdom was at the very heart of the emergence of England.
Alfred and Bede. There are the two figures who tower over the first half-millennium of the history of Anglo-Saxon England. There’s a reason for that, of course: they wrote this history. The Venerable Bede chronicled the conversion to Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons and the triumph of the kingdom of Northumbria over its southern foes up to about 730. As for King Alfred, it was during his reign that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle documented the rise of Wessex and his own stunning victory over the Great Viking Army in the ninth century. Seen through the prism of those writings, Northumbria and Wessex very much dominate the stories we tell about the Anglo-Saxon world before 900. When we think of the great milestones of early English history, we invariably think of the two kingdoms that occupied the northern third and south-western corner of what’s now England. Read more | Alfred the Great and Edington: how the King of Wessex became great So where does that leave the third great kingdom of the Anglo-Saxon era – Mercia? Without a chronicle to match those produced by Bede and the scribes of Alfred, Mercia’s story can be pieced together only in fragments, like odd strips of film left on the cutting-room floor of history. Largely for this reason, the kingdom that dominated swathes of south-central Britain from the end of Roman rule to the unification of England has been relegated almost to a footnote. Yet when these strips are assembled, they reveal a truly remarkable story – one every bit as thrilling and consequential as those of Wessex and Northumbria. From obscure origins, in the early seventh century Mercian warlords began to assert their independence from their neighbours, and went on to dominate English politics, culture and trade. By the eighth century, they were making waves in continental Europe; one even styled himself Rex Britanniae: King of Britain. And they lie at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon history. To fully appreciate why Mercia became such an early medieval powerhouse, you first need an understanding of the landscape from which those ruling warlords emerged. Mercia’s heartland was the modern-day English Midlands, a region that’s geographically blessed. It is framed by three great navigable rivers – the Trent, Severn and Thames – and by many other waterways that run into the Fens. The two major Roman Roads known as the Fosse Way and Watling Street intersected here, connecting the region with ports and former Roman towns. Extensive fertile plains, tracts of woodland, workable deposits of clay, iron, lead and salt and downland for pasturing sheep were natural assets to be exploited. Listen | Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: everything you wanted to know Medieval powerhouse Through the earlier Anglo-Saxon period, a number of disparate peoples farmed this land: tribal kingdoms such as the Wreo-ansætan in the north-west; the Hwicce along the Severn and Avon valleys; Middle Anglians in the centre; the Pecsætan of the Peak District; and smaller peripheral communities including the Spaldingas, Gyrwe and Sweodora fringing the great Fens draining into the Wash. The first warlord to bring these peoples under the banner of the Myrcna rice – the ‘kingdom of the border people’ – was the heathen Penda. He rose from obscurity in the first half of the seventh century, perhaps among the Hwicce, to win victories against first a West Saxon king and then, in alliance with the Welsh, against King Edwin, the Northumbrian who first converted his people to Christianity in 627. Mercia on the map: The Anglo-Saxon powerhouse spanned a swathe of central Britain Edwin’s successor, Oswald, recovered Northumbrian fortunes across the best part of a decade, and in 642 brought his army into Mercia to take on Penda. That proved to be a terrible mistake: Penda’s forces destroyed Oswald’s army and dismembered his body, mounting the Northumbrian king’s head and arms on poles at a place that came to be known, in grim irony, as Oswald’s Tree – Oswestry, now in Shropshire. The following decade, Penda came close to conquering Northumbria itself, but Oswald got his revenge – or at least his family did. In 655, Oswald’s brother, King Oswiu, killed Penda and 30 of his warlord allies in a bloody battle on the river Went in Yorkshire. Despite this reversal, Penda’s sons and grandsons became Mercian kings. They converted to Christianity, founded churches and forged alliances with their neighbouring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms – Wessex, East Anglia, Kent and Northumbria – while maintaining historical friendships with Welsh kings in the west. Such alliances were uneasy, and didn’t always hold. In the 670s, a long-running turf war with Northumbria over control of the ancient kingdom of Lindsey, with Lincoln at its heart, was decided definitively in Mercia’s favour after a battle on the Trent. Trading places Mercian expansion south to the Thames continued over the next few decades. Initially in the kingdom of Essex, London came under Mercian control around 670. By the beginning of the eighth century, merchants had established trading settlements in four of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at places such as York, Ipswich and Southampton. Soon, London itself had become a centre of Mercian royal ambitions, a nerve-centre of trade and a powerful bishopric. Successive kings granted land and privileges along the Thames to their ministers, bishops and abbots, installing their own officials in the old Roman provincial capital. With Britain’s heartlands open to trade along the Trent, Thames and Nene, and a proliferation of productive monasteries strung out along them, Mercia’s rulers oversaw an economic boom. Archaeologists have latterly been able to uncover a sophisticated side to life in the Mercian countryside. Excavated settlements show increasing signs of careful planning and of specialisation in areas such as dairy, textiles, leather-working, iron and lead-working. Increasing quantities of silver coins were minted by kings’ moneyers; when they turn up in excavations or through metal-detecting, they are telltale signs of otherwise unsuspected trading sites, often where Roman roads cross important rivers or ancient trails. Place names, many of which were in the process of forming in the eighth century, offer more clues. Those containing the element burh (a defended royal settlement) surrounded by clusters of ‘functional’ -ton names such as Charlton, Eaton and Burton show how royal administrators were active in planning a network of royal estates controlling strategic locations. Such clusters occur in the Trent Valley – for example, at Tutbury (‘lookout fort’), with Burton and other telltale names close by. Boosting productivity Like Bede’s Northumbrian kings, Mercia’s ruling elite encouraged churchmen and women to improve the productivity of their estates. They commissioned Latin scribes to write down their laws and draw up their charters – acting, in a sense, as a civil service. Their now-literate poets began to record their verse, their genealogies and their epic legends in English and Latin. Mercian rulers also employed the services of sages, healers and prophets. One such, Guthlac – from a noble Mercian family, who lived as a hermit in the malaria-ridden fastnesses of the western fens at Crowland – played a telling role in a turning point in Mercian history. It was triggered by the death of Penda’s last grandson, King Ceolred, in 716. Penda’s dynasty had dominated Mercia for almost a century, but was now placed in peril by the emergence of a youthful prince – Æthelbald, a cousin of Ceolred, who had exiled him to East Anglia. Having secured the endorsement of Guthlac, Æthelbald returned to Mercia and seized the throne – which he held for an astonishing 41 years. In Æthelbald’s reign lie the beginnings of a revolution in Anglo-Saxon royal administration. For 20 years, he carefully avoided warfare with his neighbours, investing instead in the soft power of patronage, and promoting wealth through trade. Lundenwic, the trading settlement that grew up on the Thames foreshore at Aldwych, became – in Bede’s words – “an emporium for many nations who come to it by land and sea”. Æthelbald brought the former kings of the old tribal lands into his council, feasted and honoured them, and presented gifts of imported luxuries in exchange for their loyalty. He granted bishops in London, and his most favoured royal monasteries, exemptions from tolls in his ports – a generous tax break in return for their everlasting prayers and support for his policies. Increasingly, Æthelbald used the ‘booking’ of rights and privileges by charter to engineer lucrative contracts, and to monumentalise Mercian culture in the landscape. A charter dated to 716–17 records that the king gave the church of Worcester “a certain portion of ground on which salt is made” at Droitwich for the construction of three salt houses and six furnaces, in exchange for six furnaces in two salt houses on the north side of the river. Such was Æthelbald’s power that in a charter of 736 he styled himself Rex Britanniae: King of Britain – a latter-day emperor. Mercia was now the most powerful English kingdom, and the wealthiest. By the end of his reign, Mercian rule probably extended from the rivers Don and Mersey in the north to the banks of the Thames in the south, and from the Severn to the western fringes of the Wash. International espionage The all-conquering king didn’t have everything his own way, though. In 745, Boniface– the English bishop of Mainz on the Rhine – wrote a letter to Æthelbald, asking him to allow a ‘messenger’ – part ambassador, part man of business, part spy – to travel freely throughout Mercia. To make his proposal even more attractive, the bishop also sent a hawk, two falcons, two shields and two lances “as tokens of affection”. Æthelbald accepted Boniface’s offer, but may have come to regret that decision. Soon Boniface was writing him another letter – this one fizzing with excoriating accusations that the king had been fornicating with nuns rather than taking a lawful wife. This scandalous intelligence had, of course, been gathered by his ‘messenger’. Nonetheless, Æthelbald bequeathed his almost equally long-reigning successor, Offa, a powerful state apparatus and the bones of a social contract for governance. It was an impressive legacy, and Offa built on it further, forging a fearsome reputation. Even King Alfred’s own chronicler conceded: “There was in Mercia in fairly recent times a certain vigorous king called Offa, who terrified all the neighbouring kings and provinces around him, and who had a great dyke built between Wales and Mercia from sea to sea.” Offa faced his own challenges, however. He had come to power in 757 after a brief but bloody civil war on Æthelbald’s death. In the following decades he faced rebellion in Kent, frequent Welsh raids, and ongoing conflict with Wessex for control of the upper Thames Valley. Nor were Mercia’s kings immune from the caprices of natural disaster: a great pestilence in 759, and a terrible winter in 763–64 were followed by a summer of drought in which “many cities, monasteries and vills [rural settlements]... were suddenly laid waste by fire”. London was largely destroyed; it was rebuilt, burned again in 798, and rebuilt once more. In 839, it was “an illustrious place”. Early medieval kings lived their lives on the hoof, travelling with their warbands, counsellors and household between royal estates where they would consume the surplus of the land, dispense judgment and gifts and move on. So Offa must have seen such devastations for himself, but he was above all a man of energy – a builder rather than a destroyer. His great dyke project fulfilled many functions, including demarcating a zone of control buffering Mercia from Welsh raids, enforcing his rule among formerly independent peoples, and creating a conspicuous monument to himself – long remnants survive to this day. Listen | BBC Radio 3's The Essay: Anglo-Saxon Portraits, episode on Offa, King of the Mercians Other substantial engineering achievements included watermills at Tamworth and Hereford, and a magnificent timber caisson bridge across the Trent at the village of Cromwell in Nottinghamshire. There were very likely trading wharves at London, probably Northampton and at key sites along the Trent near Newark. The age of Æthelbald and Offa saw something very like the first industrial revolution in the English Midlands. Offa is almost unique among Anglo-Saxon kings in elevating his wife, Cynethryth, to a status that nearly matched his own. She a royal counsellor and witnessed Offa’s char- ters. We cannot say how influential she was in their private conversations, but we know something of her wealth and resolve. She was ceded a prestigious and lucrative religious house at Cookham on the Thames; excavations have shown that it was a successful trading site as well as a convent of nuns. This early medieval power couple also planned a dynastic legacy. In 787, the new archbishop of Lichfield, Hygeberht, formally consecrated Offa and Cynethryth’s son Ecgfrith as his father’s heir. Then, in about 790, Charlemagne sent an envoy to Mercia with terms under which Offa’s daughter Æthelswith would marry the Frankish king’s son Charles – in diplomatic terms, a condescending favour towards his Anglo-Saxon counterpart. Offa’s impertinent counter-proposal – that Ecgfrith should marry Charlemagne’s daughter Bertha – triggered a diplomatic row and trade embargo lasting several years. The row was resolved, but no marriage took place. And after Offa died in 796, his son reigned for less than a year before following him to the grave. In any case, a tidal surge of historic change had already crashed against Britain’s shores. Three years earlier, in 793, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded ominous portents, telling how fiery flashes in the sky were followed by a great famine and then violence when “the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter”. Reflecting on this disaster, the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin, asked if this marked the beginning of some greater suffering. It did. The era of Mercian supremacy would not survive the Viking Age. Power cut From the turn of the ninth century, Mercian power headed gradually into retreat. This process was accelerated by the rise of a formidable West Saxon dynasty under King Ecgberht, which asserted its own overlordship in the Mercians’ Midlands heartlands. Things got even worse in the 860s when the Viking Great Army invaded Britain and conquered East Anglia. From there they were increasingly able to deprive Mercian kings of control over the east Midlands, eventually leaving them with just a rump territory south of Watling Street and north of the Thames. The Mercians weren’t finished quite yet, though. Their heyday may have been behind them but they still had a role to play in the evolution of England. When King Alfred conceived a network of defensive burhs to protect his kingdom from Viking attack, he looked to existing Mercian models. When he wanted to revive learning among his people after the defeat of his Viking adversaries, it was to Mercian scholars that he turned – among them Plegmund, who may have helped the king translate important books from Latin into Old English. In his greatest military victory over the Vikings – at Edington in 878 – Alfred relied on a Mercian king’s army for its decisive support. And the Mercian towns recovered by his children from Viking control – Nottingham, Derby, Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester and others – were the productive bedrock of later Anglo-Saxon England. Read more | Alternate history: what if Alfred the Great lost to the Vikings at the battle of Edington? In short, the legacy of the Mercian realm underpinned the success of Alfred’s children and grandchildren in forging the kingdom of England – which went on to be one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in early medieval Europe. It couldn’t have done it without Mercia. Marvels of Mercia: 5 must-see sites from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom Border control: Offa’s Dyke, Anglo-Welsh border The exact date of construction of this extraordinary feat of royal vision and manpower has still not been established, but no one seriously doubts that it was the work of King Offa. It was studded with strategic look-out points facing into Wales and patrolled by burh-weards – military stewards. Tracing the 177-mile-long Offa’s Dyke Path, now a National Trail, provides a spectacular and rewarding lesson in Mercian history. House of the holy: All Saints’ Church, Brixworth, Northants England’s finest surviving Anglo-Saxon church was constructed in the 790s, perhaps by King Offa’s son Ecgfrith. The basilican form, its walls pierced by double-tiered Romanesque arches decorated with terracotta Roman tiles laid on edge, still gives a sense of Mercian ambition, monumentalised in the Midlands landscape. An annual Brixworth lecture celebrates Mercian history and archaeology. Candy-twist crypt: St Wystan’s Church, Repton, Derbyshire The early eighth-century minster at Repton was the burial place of kings. The superb mausoleum, surviving as a crypt with narrow arches and candy- twist columns, is perhaps the most atmospheric monument to the great age of Mercia. In the ninth century, a Viking army turned the churchyard into a fortress, with the church as its gatehouse, and buried fallen warriors here. Salty miracle: Droitwich Spa, Worcestershire Droitwich may be England’s oldest continually operating industrial settlement. Romans extracted rock and brine famous for its salt concentration – 10 times that of sea water. Mercian kings owned salt furnaces here, and Droitwich salt was traded as a valuable commodity across England and beyond. The town museum, and excavated sites by the canal, reveal a fascinating history. Royal capital: Tamworth, Staffordshire The modern street arrangement of central Tamworth still preserves something of the original layout of the fortified Mercian capital, with St Editha’s Church at its heart. King Offa held royal councils here, and a ninth-century watermill has been excavated near the river Anker. The story of Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians – who revived Tamworth as a royal capital in 913 – is told among exhibits displayed at the castle. Timeline: The rise and fall of Mercia Fifth century AD: 'Anglo-Saxons' arrive in Britain - Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe - as recorded by Bede (pictured), writing in 731. c626: The warlord Penda unites tribes of south-central Britain to rule the Myrcna rice (‘kingdom of the border people’) or Mercia. He defeats King Edwin of Northumbria at Hatfield Chase in 633, and kills that ruler’s successor, Oswald, at Maserfield (possibly Oswestry) in 642. 655: King Oswiu of Northumbria avenges his brother Oswald’s death, killing Penda and his allies. Nonetheless, Penda’s sons and grandsons rule Mercia, defeating their north-eastern rivals in 670, and taking control of London. 716: Penda’s grandson King Ceolred dies, and his cousin Æthelbald returns from exile in East Anglia to claim the Mercian throne, endorsed by the influential hermit Guthlac. Ruling for 41 years, Æthelbald launches the transformation of Anglo-Saxon royal administration, industry and trade. 757: After a civil war following Æthelbald’s death, Offa becomes king of Mercia. Over his four-decade rule, he claims the upper Thames Valley from Wessex and repels Welsh raids, building a huge defensive dyke along his western border. 797: Offa’s heir, Ecgfrith, dies after having ruled for less than a year. The resulting period of Mercian decline coincides with the rise of the West Saxons under King Ecgberht and the onset of Viking raids. 865: The Viking Great Army invades England and then, from its initial base in East Anglia, pushes west to take control of most Mercian territory. 878: King Alfred defeats the Vikings at Edington; his greatest military victory relies on a Mercian king’s army. 918: Mercia is annexed by Wessex. Nine years later it is incorporated into the new kingdom of England ruled by Æthelstan, grandson of Alfred the Great. Max Adams is an archaeologist and author. His new book, The Mercian Chronicles: King Offa and the Birth of the Anglo-Saxon State AD 630–918, is available now, published by Apollo. This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
A medieval mystery: the green-coloured children found in an English village
In the 12th century, two strange children suddenly appeared in a Suffolk village. Why, the villagers wondered, were they completely green? The story of the otherworldly children of Woolpit has long been treated as folklore – but, as John Clark explains, the tale may not be as fanciful as it seems...
The children were green. There were other strange things about the boy and girl found in a Suffolk field on a summer's day in the middle of the 12th century, but it was their hue that was most striking. “In the shape of their whole bodies they were like other people,” wrote the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, “but they differed in the colour of their skin from all the mortal inhabitants of our world; for the whole surface of their skin was... a green colour.” The essentials of the story run as follows. In a field in Woolpit, a Suffolk village between Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, harvesters came upon two terrified children apparently emerging from a pit. Their skin was, in the words of Ralph of Coggeshall, “prassinus color” – the dark green of leek leaves. They were strangely dressed, spoke an unknown language, and did not understand English. The villagers quickly decided to make the pair somebody else’s problem. But, rather than taking them to the local landlord, the Abbot of Bury in Bury St Edmunds, they led the youngsters some 8 miles north to Wykes, the manor house of Sir Richard de Calne in the parish of Bardwell. Not much is known about Sir Richard, but he seems to have taken ownership of Wykes by 1135, and died around 1188. The de Calne family also owned various other properties in Suffolk and Essex. Sir Richard took in the children. They were clearly starving, but for some days they refused all the food they were offered. By chance, they then saw some fresh-cut bean- stalks being brought into the house, and gestured eagerly that they wanted the beans. A bystander had to show the children how to open the pods to extract the beans, which “they ate... with great joy, and would touch no other food at all for a long time”. Read more | Discover how folk tales have shaped British identities Feeling off colour The boy was sickly, and died soon after arriving at Wykes. But the girl, wrote Ralph, “becoming used to all sorts of food... totally lost her leek-green colour, and gradually recovered the ruddy appearance of her whole body”. Ralph associated the children’s green colour with their strange diet – and he wasn’t alone. William of Newburgh, an Augustinian canon at Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire who also chronicled the strange episode, agreed with this assessment. According to Ralph, who heard the story from Richard de Calne and members of his household, the girl went on to work as a servant at Wykes for many years. William adds that “She was not in the least different from women of our kind” and that, according to local sources, she eventually married a man in King’s Lynn and was still living there shortly before he wrote his History in 1198. This may sound like a fantastical story, but there are good reasons to think that the events described really happened. First and foremost, both Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh were respected chroniclers interested in ‘wonders’, and reported unexplained events alongside the more conventional history of their times. William included a chapter ‘Concerning green children’ in his Historia Rerum Anglicarum (The History of English Affairs), written around 1198. He based his account, he said, on reports from a number of trustworthy sources, and dated the episode to the reign of King Stephen (1135–54). Meanwhile, a chapter titled ‘Concerning a boy and a girl who emerged from the ground’ appeared in Ralph of Coggeshall’s Chronicon Anglicanum (English Chronicle). Though this was not completed until the 1220s, it incorporated text he had written much earlier and, in the case of the green children, information received directly from Richard de Calne. Familiar with strangeness In short, these two sources largely agree on what happened, and the well-witnessed story is detailed and convincing. Nevertheless, the sheer outlandishness of the tale begs more questions. What, for example, did those who met the children make of them? Were they shocked by the youngsters’ outlandish and alien appearance? Probably – but that reaction could have been tempered by a familiarity with strange sights and stories. The medieval village of Woolpit stood on a major road that linked the port of Ipswich with Bury St Edmunds, where annual trade fairs attracted foreign merchants to purchase English wool and woollen cloth. Another nearby road led via Thetford to the shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, a popular destination for pilgrims. Woolpit’s villagers must have been aware of ‘outlandish’ travellers on these roads. Yet the children, with their green skin and their diet of beans, were more ‘alien’. Was it possible they came from an ‘otherworld’? One story circulating in the 12th century told of the land of the Antipodes, reached through the Peak Cavern in Derbyshire, for example. Another recounted the experiences of a small boy in south Wales who, delving into a cave under a riverbank, visited a land inhabited by people “no bigger than pygmies” – a place of permanent twilight where the sun didn’t shine. Perhaps, as the children ate ordinary food and their green colour faded, some concluded that they were, after all, just normal people. However, once the children had learned enough English to respond to questions, their answers reinforced perceptions of ‘otherness’. The questions may have been leading, of course. Someone asked the children if the sun rose in the land from which they came. “The sun does not rise among our people,” they replied. “Our land... gets only the amount of light that among you precedes sunrise or follows sunset.” It was clearly a twilight – perhaps subterranean – otherworld. However, it was, the children said, a Christian place where St Martin was venerated – indeed, it was called ‘St Martin’s Land’. This must have puzzled the questioner – as it does later commentators, who identified St Martin’s Land variously as Fornham St Martin, just a few miles from Woolpit, or the planet Mars. Some have sought connections between St Martin of Tours and a Celtic cult of the dead. Facing such interrogation, the pair’s responses grew incoherent. Accounts of the reactions of children put under similar pressure in modern times warn us what to expect in response. For example, in the 1990s, social workers around the UK took children into care following rumours that they had been “ritually abused”by parents who were Satanists. As anthropologist Jean La Fontaine concluded: “Children can be put under pressure until they invent stories that support the allegations of adults and reflect their beliefs.” Moreover, the form in which their story has come down to us was clearly influenced by medieval concepts of a folkloric ‘other- world’. Ralph of Coggeshall, in particular, seems to have accepted the children’s otherworldly origins. Writing many years after the death of his chief informant, Richard de Calne, Ralph had time to elaborate the story in his own mind. He tells us, for example, that the children had followed some straying cattle into a cavern in their homeland, and became lost. After wandering for a long time, they emerged into bright summer sunlight in Woolpit. This is a deliberate reversal of a common motif in folk tales: a mortal follows an animal into a cave in our world and emerges in a fairy otherworld. As to how the story of the green children came to modern attention, we must thank pioneering folklorist Thomas Keightley, who included a translation of Ralph of Coggeshall’s account in the 1850 edition of his book The Fairy Mythology. This set the tone for the treatment of the story by modern authors – as a traditional folk tale, not history. The children had strayed from a fairy otherworld, and parallels should be sought in other traditional accounts of dealings with fairy folk. The green children’s story has been retold, reworked and reimagined as a ‘Suffolk folk tale’ by writers ever since. Listen | Hear more about the green children of Woolpit on an episode of the BBC Radio 1 series Scarlett Moffatt Wants to Believe Tales of wonders Academic historians have debated the motives of medieval chroniclers in including such tales of wonders (dismissed as fictions) in their otherwise factual histories. However, there have also been attempts to find a rational explanation for this story. This usually entails dismissing one or more incongruous elements as exaggeration or “contamination by folklore” – for example, the children’s claim to have come from a land where the sun never shone – and creating complex scenarios to explain what remains. Thus the children might have been strays from a Flemish immigrant family living in Fornham St Martin who became caught up in anti-Fleming violence. If one ignores Ralph’s claim that the children were ‘leek-green’ and assumes that they were merely so pale as to look greenish, then a medical cause might be possible: an extreme form of anaemia. One favoured explanation has been ‘chlorosis’ or ‘green sickness’ – a term no longer recognised by the medical profession, but used for anaemia in teenage girls in the 19th century. Or perhaps the problem was favism – a disorder causing a reaction to broad (fava) beans that leads to weakness, anaemia and jaundice, culminating in some cases in kidney failure and death. This genetic condition is today found chiefly in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. Medieval people’s interpretation of this still-puzzling occurrence in terms of a fairy ‘otherworld’ is surely similar to that of modern authors who have either sought ‘rational explanations’ or speculated about extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs. We explain the unexplained in terms of our own world view. But we should remember what the story was really about: two lost, frightened children, taken in by strangers, subject to suspicion, misunderstanding and misrepresentation – the fate of refugees and displaced persons throughout the world today. John Clark was formerly curator of the medieval collections at the Museum of London. His latest book is The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England (University of Exeter Press, 2024) This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Victorians’ cocaine habit: why 19th-century Britain couldn't get enough of the 'miracle' drug
In the 19th century, a magic new drug took the medical community by storm, riding a wave of scientific endeavour. But, writes Douglas Small, it wasn’t long before the dark side of this miraculous substance began to emerge
On a drab January day in 1890, journalist Marian von Glehn made her way through the "roar and rattle" of the City of London. Her destination, squeezed in among densely packed warehouses in the Moorfields district, was a massive, grubby, utilitarian building: the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital. Behind that unpromising facade, though, von Glehn was about to witness a miracle of modern medicine. Writing for The Leisure Hour magazine, she recounted seeing a small group of nervous patients gathering outside an operating theatre. Surrounded by powerful gas lamps, reflectors and rows of “coloured phials that would have delighted the eyes of a Dutch painter”, the hospital’s nurses began to drift quietly among their charges. Into the eyes of these patients, nurses dripped a “newly discovered... magic drug” – one that would “deaden and allay the pain” of imminent operations and “inspire their patients with courage and confidence”. The miraculous-seeming substance being administered was cocaine – and it soon captured the imagination of the Victorian public in a way that few other drugs have done, either before or since. Numb luck Cocaine was first isolated and extracted from the leaves of coca plants, traditionally cultivated on the slopes of the Andes, in 1855. It gained its well-known common name in 1860. However, the drug’s discovery initially passed largely unnoticed outside the specialised realms of organic chemistry. For the first few decades, one medical writer recounted, cocaine seemed to be nothing more than an “obscure [and] useless alkaloid”. Then, in 1884, cocaine came to the attention of medical professionals worldwide when Karl Koller, a trainee ophthalmologist in the eye surgery department of Vienna General Hospital, realised that applying the compound to the surface of the eye completely blocked any sensation of pain. That discovery heralded the advent of a completely new class of medications: local anaesthetics. For the first time it became possible to undertake pain-free operations without resorting to more dangerous – potentially fatal – general anaesthetics such as ether and chloroform. News of the breakthrough spread quickly. Henry Power, one of the presidents of the British Medical Association, announced excitedly to a meeting of members that: “In the discovery of cocaine, a new era seems to have dawned.” Across the Atlantic, the pioneering American neurologist Dr Leonard Corning told journalists that “Cocaine is almost as wonderful and important a discovery as electricity.” Amid the ballyhoo, the Royal London Ophthalmic Hospital became the first institution in the UK to make use of the new drug, starting in the same year that Koller made his discovery. Marian von Glehn knew that a report on this still-novel anaesthetic would fascinate her readers. “Such are the wonderful properties of the newly discovered cocaine, that the operating theatre is robbed of half of its terrors,” she wrote. That was the theory. And von Glehn found proof of its effects when, in the children’s ward, she was cornered by a six-year-old girl – nicknamed ‘The Chattermag’ (‘chatterbox’) by hospital staff – who had recently undergone a cataract operation. The Chattermag was delighted to have remained awake throughout her surgery, even addressing the operating surgeon himself at a critical moment: “I say, Mr doctor, aren’t you a-cutting of that thing in my eye?” she said. “I know you’re a-cutting of it out, aren’t you? And it don’t hurt one bit, and I don’t mind one bit – you tell me when it’s out!” Magic drug Within a few months of Koller’s discovery, cocaine was established, in the words of one weekly paper, as “the magic drug which takes from the knife of surgery its pain”. Fired by such an apparently epochal breakthrough, the medical profession began hungrily searching for new ways to make use of the much-lauded substance. The Dublin Journal of Medical Science claimed that cocaine had “secured a place in therapeutics which can scarcely be paralleled in the history of any other drug”. The Chemist and Druggist reported that “Our medical journals – almost in every issue – note some new application of cocaine, and prognosticate an unlimited utility for it.” In short order, cocaine became accepted as “an absolute necessity in every surgery and dispensary”, and its uses became “almost indefinitely multiplied”. Aside from surgical applications – in a development that seems incredible from a modern perspective – cocaine became the basis for a multitude of home remedies and day-to-day medications. It was, according to some medical authorities, the very thing to cure a cold or flu. Dr David B Lees of St Mary’s Hospital in London advised that “a 4 per cent solution of hydrochlorate of cocaine applied to the nose by means of a camel’s hair brush gives instant relief, and [can] suffice to completely arrest a cold with- out the aid of any other remedy whatever”. By the 1890s, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs, Wellcome & Co had launched a portable cocaine nasal spray for colds and flu that was “so small as to be easily carried in the waistcoat pocket”. Homespun remedies The ‘Home Notes’ sections of newspapers and journals encouraged readers to make their own “cocainised snuffs”, reputedly excellent remedies for hay fever and headcolds. One recipe called for three grains of menthol, 50 grains each of coffee and powdered sugar, and a grain and a half of cocaine. Peppermint extract could be added according to the user’s taste. If making snuff seemed too much bother, cocaine lozenges promised to “promptly check all sea-sickness, and sickness during pregnancy”, while cocaine pastilles could alleviate a sore throat. “If you are a Singer, Speaker, Preacher or Teacher, clear your voice with Buxton’s Cocaine Pastilles,” suggested one advert for a product costing “1 shilling and 6 pence a box”. Coverdale’s famous Cocaine and Menthol – “The Magic Tooth- ache Reliever” – was a less-pricey option, retailing for 10 and a half pence a bottle (postage included). Less-reputable sellers of patent medicines were also quick to recommend cocaine as a cure for “nervous debility” and general “weakness”. Brown’s Medical Company, based in Brighton, supplied an “astonishing” herbal tonic for restoring “life and vigour”, made with cocaine, powdered jurubeba (a nightshade from Brazil) and ignatia, derived from the seeds of an Asian tree. The product was, the company claimed, suitable for “either sex” but was best used to counter problems euphemistically referred to as “lost manhood”. Intoxicating beauty As its applications multiplied, cocaine also played a foundational role in the Victorian beauty industry. Local anaesthesia made the new field of cosmetic surgery practical in a way it never had been before. As early as 1887, it was possible for those with a sadly unfashionable “tip-tilted” nose to have the organ numbed with cocaine and resculpted into the “desired aquiline shape”. Electrolysis and hair removal also experienced a boom thanks to the new pain-relieving drug. Women who coveted the fashionably rouged complexion of the day might have a “delicate rose colour” permanently tattooed into their cheeks – using pigment infused with cocaine to quell the pain – while men were offered a rugged-looking and never-fading tattooed suntan. Newspapers assured readers that the tattooing wasn’t in the least uncomfortable, claiming that some clients “indifferently read a book during the process”. In a more practical application, the New York Fire Department briefly considered issuing cocaine eye drops to its firemen to protect those delicate organs and keep them “free from pain in the midst of heavy smoke”. The idea, however, quickly ran aground on the objection that “the danger of men acquiring the cocaine habit is so great as to overshadow all other considerations”. Sherlock Holmes' dubious solution The fictional detective's cocaine usage identified him as a man at the cutting edge of science. It may seem surprising, but Sherlock Holmes was one of the 19th century’s most famous users of cocaine. The Sign of Four, the second of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes novels, begins with the detective in his Baker Street rooms, injecting himself with a “7 per cent solution” of the drug. One evening paper observed, three years later in 1893, that “Many people derive their practical acquaintance with cocaine from the part it plays in the career of the renowned Sherlock Holmes.” Doyle had trained to be a doctor before turning to writing full-time, so was aware of cocaine’s reputation as a wonder drug. For many Victorians, cocaine wasn’t just a remarkable discovery; its almost unprecedented power to relieve pain seemed to symbolise the vast horizons of modern science and the incredible transformations that might yet come from scientific discoveries. For one journalist writing in Victoria’s golden jubilee year, 1887 – three years after Karl Koller discovered the drug’s anaesthetic properties – “the development of the marvellous cocaine” gave “practical” proof that “the years of Queen Victoria’s reign have been crowded with glorious life”. By giving Sherlock Holmes a cocaine habit, Doyle could quickly signal to readers that his hero was something new: a thoroughly specialised, scientific detective, working at the cutting edge of Victorian innovation. (Tellingly, though, cocaine use is absent from stories after 1904.) As Doyle described his hero in later years, “Sherlock is utterly inhuman, no heart, but with a beautifully logical intellect.” For Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes’s cocaine solution was a way to mark him out as the ideal problem-solver for the 19th century’s new “age of science”. This was far from an idle concern. Less than a year after Karl Koller’s transformative discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, the first reports of cocaine addiction began to appear in the press. In December 1885, a reporter for the Chicago Herald made his way through the cold and crowded city streets towards a “handsome” five-storey building on West Madison Street. The Washingtonian Home for Inebriates (a 19th-century term for those suffering from alcohol or drug addiction) could house 100 patients, but the reporter had come to see one man in particular. Dr Charles Bradley may not have been the world’s first cocaine addict, but he was the first to catch the public eye. Swept up in the excitement following the discovery of cocaine anaesthesia, he had begun taking the drug experimentally. Quickly losing control of his new habit, he had fallen into a “sad” and “piteous” state. His medical practice faded away to nothing, he became violent to his friends, wife and children, and he was consumed by alternately paranoid and grandiose fantasies. In the courtroom where he was committed to the Home for Inebriates, Bradley became suddenly frantic and rushed at the bench. “In an agony of despair,” he begged the judge “as a man and by God Almighty” to “try the cocaine” so that he might understand how wonderful it really was. Bradley struggled with his addiction for some years. By 1887, after a long interval of “acute mania, convulsions, and every dis- tressing phase of violent insanity”, he was reported to have been “nursed back to mental and physical vigour”. Despite his travails, though, he still believed in the benefits of cocaine. “With all your experience with cocaine, how do you regard it?” a reporter asked Bradley. “I think it is a grand drug, with remarkable properties,” he replied. “Scientists are only in the experimental stage with it.” When news of Bradley’s affliction broke – alerting the world to the problem of cocaine addiction – the British Medical Journal poetically noted that “this sweet rose of our therapeutic bouquet has its bitter thorn”. Bradley’s conflicting experiences reflected those of the Victorian medical profession more widely, and the question of how to balance the drug’s revolutionary uses in local anaesthesia with the threat of addiction began to come to the fore. Druggist’s Circular summed up the growing concerns: “Cocaine is one of the greatest blessings to mankind. But there is a dark side to the picture. It makes a good servant, but a poor master.” Master and servant Towards the end of the 19th century, doctors and journalists alike became increasingly vocal about how easily cocaine might “master” an unwary user. Jocelynne Joye, one of the star journalists of The Outlook magazine, cautioned her female readers about the dangers of becoming dependent on “stimulants” to get through the social season. She described a recent encounter at a fashionable party: “A lady was heard to offer a friend a tabloid from a small silver box – just as one might offer a cigarette to another – with the words, ‘Do have one dear – they’re only cocaine. Personally, I don’t know how I should get through the day without them’.” Health and medicine columnists echoed such sentiments. The well-known medical author William Gordon Stables cautioned his readers that, as powerful and effective as cocaine-based medicines were, “I almost dread recommending them, so terrible in its effects is the cocaine habit.” The summer of 1889 brought cocaine’s first celebrity casualty when Aristides ‘Jacques’ Damala, husband of the world-famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, succumbed to “overdoses of morphia and cocaine” in his hotel room on the Boulevard Pereire in Paris. A far more dramatic tragedy struck the small town of Manchester, Connecticut in 1896. Workers from the local silk mills often suffered from asthma and catarrh caused by the fine dust produced by processing raw silk. Seeking relief, many turned to a cocaine snuff sold by a local chemist. According to reports, the recipe was actually weaker than those regularly printed in newspapers, but strong enough to cause terrible problems for its users. By the time the issue was reported in newspapers, more than 40 people had become addicted to the mixture. Responding to growing concerns about addiction, Irish psychiatrist Conolly Norman observed that “Cocaine is probably the most agreeable of all narcotics, and therefore the most dangerous.” Yet, strange as it might seem today, such accounts of the dangers and harmful effects of cocaine did little to blunt popular enthusiasm for the drug. Among commentators who were aware of the potential addictiveness of cocaine in the late 19th century, the general attitude was that those who became addicted represented a relatively small number of tragic individuals, and that the benefits of cocaine as a therapy and as a ‘prestige’ drug for the medical profession needed to be balanced against that. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/02/2RGDYDC-3491ed5.jpg" width="5000" height="3331" alt="A British army dispensary on the western front during the First World War, when concerns about national health and morale prompted legislation to limit sales of cocaine. (Photo by Alamy)" title="A British camp with an open air medical dispensary on the Western Front during World War One." /> It was only in the wake of the First World War, and increased anxieties about national health and civilian morale, that legislation was introduced to limit the sale of cocaine in the UK. From 1884, doctors, journalists and legislators had wrestled with a dilemma: how to balance the promise of cocaine with its perils. The drug provides an object lesson in how scientific research can capture our imaginations and excite us with fresh possibilities – but also expose us to new and terrible risks. Douglas Small is a historian of medicine based in the UK, and the author of Cocaine, Literature, and Culture, 1876–1930 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) This article was first published in the March 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Celibacy barely merits a mention in the Bible. Yet, by the early Middle Ages, it was being celebrated as a shortcut to a seat next to God. Diarmaid MacCulloch explores Christianity’s long love affair with sexual abstinence
Christianity has always been a religion of family values, right? Not if you know anything about its history. For centuries, Christians valued celibacy – that is, abstention from sex and rejection of family life – well above wife and kids. Celibates, especially professed monks and nuns, would get to heaven more quickly than the married. It was possible to rescue married people from marriage if they made the turn into monastic life. Listen to this horrible tale from one of the leaders in early monasticism, the fourth-century monk John Cassian. In his book of instruction, The Institutes, Cassian reminisces about Patermutus (‘the silent father’), a wealthy man who wanted to embrace the religious life and brought his eight-year-old son along when he entered a monastery. The abbot was having none of this and, seeking to sever the biological bond, separated father and son in different institutions. Patermutus was then sadistically tested. He heard that his little son was “purposely neglected”, “clothed in rags” and left filthy, even randomly beaten until he cried, just to emphasise that the natural father should not intervene in this cruelty. The story shockingly culminates in a ritually enacted parody of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham offering his son Isaac for a sacrificial death. The abbot ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the river, and the pair were actually at the water’s edge before two strategically placed monks intervened to tell the father he had passed the test of loyalty to his new vocation. Like Isaac, the boy did not die, but now Patermutus had lost everything from the past. He was no longer even a parent. Cassian’s readers were expected to commend the tale of Patermutus and his little son, because Patermutus had become a celibate. From at least the fourth century, celibate men and women – hermits, monks and nuns who had rejected involvement in any form of sex – were seen as spiritually superior to conventional biological families which arise from the messy business of sexual relations. That remained so for the next millennium, especially in the western church. But why? Confronted with this question, it may seem reasonable to start by looking for clues in the Hebrew Bible or the Christian New Testament. But there’s little or nothing in either that provides a basis for monastic life or celibacy. Just the opposite. Judaism was, and remains, a religion where the family unit is central, and the first generations of Christians pictured in the New Testament do not seem to have been too different in their attitudes. Listen | Sex and Christianity: 2,000 years of love and fury Instead, it’s second-century Syria that provides the first sighting of the practice of celibacy, long after the last books in the Bible were written. Geography and the interaction between Christians and other faiths may provide clues as to where the idea came from. Syrians were the great entrepreneurs of the eastern Mediterranean. They traded west into the Roman empire, but also east, in India, central Asia, even China. What did they find in the east? Monasteries – communities of celibates, both Buddhist and Hindu. Syrian Christians may have noted a good idea, profited from it spiritually and exported it back home. Whatever precisely happened, once monasticism arrived, it was a huge success story. More and more Christians wanted to be monks and nuns because celibacy placed them as near as possible to the angels, God’s immediate servants. The angels were beings with a male character, but increasingly not so male as in the Bible (where you’d be well advised to lock up your daughters while they were around). If humans can be only “a little lower than the angels” (a phrase in the Epistle to the Hebrews), monks saw themselves as the nearest humans to the angels – male, but not too male. Abstinent fathers A complication arose in the fourth and fifth centuries, when two different classes of males thought of themselves as like angels: monks and eunuchs. Eunuchs were an important part of Christian society at this time: servants to emperors and empresses, and generals in the Byzantine empire. In the Byzantine church, several of the patriarchs (essentially archbishops) of Constantinople were eunuchs. Confusing things further, quite a few monks were also eunuchs. For ambitious young men, castration might offer a chance for career advancement under the Byzantine emperors. Monastic life expanded further when the Christian church allied with Roman imperial power, and celibacy became a personal choice in a society that otherwise offered limited choices to most people. Indeed, celibacy provided a chance for individuals to approach union with God by embracing a sort of living martyrdom at a time when actual martyrdom was no longer a possibility because Rome had inconveniently replaced persecution with financial subsidies. Two of the empire’s best-known early monastic leaders – Pachomios in Egypt and Martin of Tours in Gaul – were former soldiers. When they moved from one single-sex organisation to another – army to monastery – they drew on their experience of Roman military discipline to lead their communities in campaigns of prayer against the Satanic spiritual powers surrounding Christians. Wandering celibates Down the years, differences developed between eastern and western monasticism. Following John Cassian’s teachings, Benedict of Nursia (c480–c547, creator in Italy of the most influential of all western monastic orders, the Benedictines) condemned the eastern customs of two or three monks living together and monks wandering outside any one community. Both forms of celibacy remain common in eastern Christian monasticism, whereas it was the 13th century before the west reinvented a carefully controlled variety of wandering celibate known as a friar (frater, or ‘brother’). Most importantly, as monasteries became central to the life and culture of western Europe, the western church took a step unique in Christian history. It fused together two different vocations: celibacy and priesthood. This was part of a wholesale reconstruction of western society led by successive popes, especially Gregory VII (1073–85), who was both head of the church and a monk, in what’s often characterised as the ‘Gregorian’ reformation, or even revolution. Read more | Has there ever been a married Pope? Originally, very few monks had also been priests and most priests were married but, from the 11th century, Gregory and other western church leaders forbade marriage altogether to deacons, priests and bishops. The logic was that involvement in sex, even marital sex, brought impurity, and impurity threatened the distinctive calling of clergy to celebrate the mass. A radical divide now chopped western society into two halves: clergy and laity. As the modern historian Dyan Elliott pithily points out, the consequence here is that “a clerical celibate elite requires a copulating laity”, a logic that still shapes Roman Catholic theology of Christian marriage. Once again, ideas were mutating because, previously, Christian marriage could actually involve rejecting sexual contact. Between the fourth and the tenth centuries in both eastern and western Christianity, you will find stories of saintly husbands and wives, married celibates. One of the most popular of Anglo-Saxon saints, the high-born Abbess Etheldreda (Æthelthryth) of Ely (c636–679), was venerated even though she refused to have sex through two successive royal marriages. All this changed during the Gregorian revolution as marriage became not simply the only setting where procreation should take place, but was defined by procreation – and as much as possible. This notion is no older than the 11th and 12th centuries. In the 16th century, Martin Luther and his fellow Protestant reformers challenged this neat twofold vision of society by rebelling against what they saw as the corruption of the old western church. The chief symbol of this corruption was the celibacy of the clergy. Luther pro- claimed that clergy were no different from other humans – and, like other human beings, should be given the chance, indeed almost be required, to get married and procreate. Luther set an example by marrying a former nun, Katharina von Bora, enjoying a boisterously happy family life. As a result of the shift in thinking triggered by Luther’s Reformation, monasteries were dissolved. All over Protestant Europe, one can view their poignant ruins, as well as enjoy some of the great monastery churches that survived only because Protestants turned them over to use as parish churches. Visit Tewkesbury ‘Abbey’ in Gloucestershire or Dorset’s Christchurch ‘Priory’ to see how splendid their monasteries had once been. In both Reformation Europe and within Protestantism as it spread around the world, celibacy became regarded not just as second-best to marriage but, worse than second-best, a popish superstition. Clergy families once more took a leading role all over Protestant Europe. In fact, their presence in the community made role-models for other families. (Here, I should declare a vested inter- est. I come from one of those clerical families, indeed a clerical dynasty.) Read more | Sex and the (Vatican) City: a brief history of clerical celibacy Yet, once again, there was a reaction as the western church vigorously reaffirmed medieval attitudes to celibacy. The Council of Trent, which fleshed out the ‘Counter-Reformation’, Catholicism’s fightback against Protestantism, pronounced anathema (the most solemn curse possible) on anyone claiming that “the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy”. There was also an expansion in the forms of celibate life available to the faithful, courtesy of the emergence of Ignatius of Loyola’s Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. Founded in 1540, the society was from the off an international organisation that offered celibate men rigorous training. In turn, Jesuits offered elite lay families a broadly based and sophisticated education for their sons. Female celibate allies of the Jesuits, the ‘Ursulines’, performed a parallel service for girls. In countries where the Catholic church held sway, the ideas of the Counter-Reformation were in the ascendancy for two centuries. But then, in 1789, came the French Revolution. This particularly targeted priestly celibacy in a steadily more brutal campaign against the power of the old church. Clergy were hunted down for death, imprisonment or exile, and their only reliable safe course was to marry. When something of the old Catholic framework returned after 1801, the year Napoleon and Rome thrashed out a deal agreeing the status of the church in France, more than 3,000 members of the clergy, including around 1,000 monks and nearly 300 nuns, sought papal absolution for the ‘sins’ they had committed over the previous decade. In bewildering times, it’s likely many more chose not to reveal what they had done. Decline of the west Priestly celibacy was restored in the newly assertive Catholic church, but in the 20th century it faced new challenges, with many Catholic clergy or potential clergy hoping to see it made optional. Instead, Pope Paul VI reaffirmed its compulsory nature in 1967. Many priests renounced their public ministry to marry. In the west, numbers seeking ordination began an inexorable decline. Among Catholics in many parts of Africa, where marriage is considered de rigueur for everyone regardless of clerical status, the reaction was simply to carry on as usual and to look benevolently on Catholic priests who cherished spouses and offspring. In Africa, significantly, vocations to the priesthood have continued to flourish. Meantime, Protestant hostility to celibacy and life in monastic communities took a long time to fade. But, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the ‘Anglican’ successor-churches of the Church of England across the world – both within and beyond the British empire – revived communities of monks, friars and nuns. Other churches have experimented with communities, welcoming celibates or exploring religious communal life. Think of the ecumenical Iona Community, established in 1938 when a team led by the Scots Presbyterian minister George MacLeod began the restoration of the island’s ancient abbey. Even while celibate numbers have fallen across the western world, these new developments show the continuing liveliness, and adaptability, of the ideal. Hospitality, always a basic principle of Benedictine monasticism, has blossomed into a veritable industry of monastic retreats and guides to spiritual direction. Fascinatingly, monasteries against what they saw as the corruption of the old western church. The chief symbol of this corruption was the celibacy of the clergy. Luther proclaimed that clergy were no different from other humans – and, like other human beings, should be given the chance, indeed almost be required, to get married and procreate. Luther set an example by marrying a former nun, Katharina von Bora, enjoying a boisterously happy family life. As a result of the shift in thinking triggered by Luther’s Reformation, monasteries were dissolved. All over Protestant Europe, one can view their poignant ruins, as well as enjoy some of the great monastery churches that survived only because Protestants turned them over to use as parish churches. Visit Tewkesbury ‘Abbey’ in Gloucestershire or Dorset’s Christchurch ‘Priory’ to see how splendid their monasteries had once been. In both Reformation Europe and within Protestantism and nunneries appeal to so many precisely because of their counter-culturalism: in a self-centred and materialistic world, they are devoted to what an ancient Greek philosopher called “that yonder”. For all the historical tensions over the role of celibate religious orders, monasteries and nunneries continue to draw us in – above all, perhaps, when we need a break from the hurly-burly of family life. Less sex, more power? How celibacy helped early Christian women find their voices Women were involved in the celibate enterprise as early as men. And in Christianity’s first recognisably celibate group – which appeared in Syria in the second century – we see celibacy offering female believers liberating opportunities. Syria was a pioneer in Christian music, and the involvement of women as well as men in public musical activity within the group radically infringed gender conventions in the Graeco-Roman world that women should keep silent in public. These proto-nuns were preserved from scandal by the holiness of their celibate state. That’s not to say, however, that early nuns didn’t run into tensions with conventional male society. They could face misogynistic hostility, even from monks worried about their own emotions. One Egyptian monk turned aside from the road to avoid meeting some travelling nuns. He was rebuked by their abbess, who pointed out: “If you had been a perfect monk, you would not have looked at us, and you would not have known that we were women.” Celibacy helped women find their voices in the medieval western church. While the growth of universities (all-male institutions) excluded women from scholarly study, they could continue their own explorations for God in ways that outflanked male theologians, through mysticism. Female mystics were far more ready than men to seize on themes of marriage and motherhood in expressing what they felt about their relationship with God, transforming the dependency assigned to women by medieval society. Visionaries recounted experiences like changing babies’ nappies. Adelheid of Frauenburg, a 14th-century Dominican nun, was reported as wishing to “remove her skin so it could serve as a nappy for Our Lord, her veins to be made into a skirt [for him]”. Sometimes such exuberant female constructions sound suspiciously as if designed to test out the embarrassment thresholds of senior male clergy. The delicate balance between spiritual freedom and male efforts to control it have remained a theme in female celibate life over the millennia. Diarmaid MacCulloch is emeritus professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford. His latest book is Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane, 2024). This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
A history of happiness: 5 life lessons from the past
What can history teach us about how to find joy? Katie Barclay shares five lessons from the past about the pursuit of happiness
1. Don’t bank on money alone The subject of whether wealth can bring true happiness has been passionately debated across the centuries. Money can’t buy you happiness, it’s often said. But did our ancestors agree? That depends on who you ask, and on how we define and measure happiness – something that has varied across time, cultures and languages. Is it just a state of mind, describing the way we feel? Or does happiness require us to be healthy, wealthy and wise? Interestingly, research has shown that wealth is actually a pretty good predictor of happiness, but throughout history people have cautioned against relying on material accumulation to achieve a blissful life. Historical studies of happiness have often been guided by the ancient Greek term eudaimonia, meaning the condition of living well – and societies and individuals able to live well enjoy more opportunities for happiness. Many ancient Greeks were, though, sceptical of the idea that happiness was achievable in this life, associating that state solely with the afterlife. In a (likely fictional) conversation in the sixth century BC, the legendarily wealthy Lydian king Croesus asked Athenian lawmaker Solon whether he had met anyone better off than him. Solon listed several men who lived honourable and sacrificial lives, dying for their people. When Croesus asked whether his own eudaimonia – his economic success and luxurious lifestyle – meant nothing, Solon replied that you could not judge whether a person was happy until they had ended their life well, emphasising virtuous living over material pleasures. The philosopher Democritus similarly argued that “both happiness and misfortune pertain to the soul. Happiness does not reside in cattle or gold,” advising people to put aside their worldly concerns. In contrast, 18th-century American revolutionaries placed the “pursuit of Happiness” at the heart of their vision for a new nation, writing it into the Declaration of Independence. With the rapid growth in wealth and available consumables, new pleasures could soon be purchased. Rich furnishings and cloths made homes warm and comfortable; food technologies that added salt, sugar and flavourings heightened the delights of eating; cheap clothing created new desires and fuelled aspirations. Deadly sins? Not everyone was happy about this shift in emphasis – and greed, gluttony and other excesses were deemed sins in many religions. But 18th-century philosophers such as Adam Smith encouraged people to worry less about the morality of luxury and instead embrace the benefits of trade and consumption. “Every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences and amusements of human life,” Smith argued. He thought that the ability to buy consumables was a good measure of wider social happiness. The following century, Karl Marx argued that capitalism encouraged people to hoard money rather than enjoy the fullness of life: “The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre, go dancing, go drinking, think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence etc, the more you save... The less you are, the less you give expression to your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the more you store up of your estranged life.” Capitalism, then, alienated people from their desires, reducing the possibility of a flourishing and happy life. 2. Adopt a healthy attitude Being in good physical health and living moderately have almost universally been seen as positives. Healthy living has long been thought to contribute to happiness. Advice for good health has remained remarkably consistent across the ages, often based on the second century physician Galen’s six ‘non-naturals’. People should drink water and eat nutritiously, take exercise and rest, breathe good air, sleep, manage bodily evacuations, and control the passions. Moderation was typically key: too much of a good thing was thought to have detrimental health impacts, so the history of health advice is typically also a story of self-control. Emotions such as happiness had a complicated role in the history of healthy moderation. How much happiness was too much? And when did such feelings themselves impact health? Laurent Joubert, a scholar at the University of Montpellier in the 16th century, wrote a leading treatise on laughter. He argued that “because being joyful and ready to laugh indicates a good nature and purity of blood, it thus contributes to the health of the body and of the mind”. His colleagues thought that laughter was an important counterpoint to labour, refreshing men after a long day’s work and the serious business of study and contemplation, and allowing women to express their ‘natural’ gaiety. Scottish doctor George Cheyne was more ambivalent in his writing on the functioning of the nervous system a century later. “Sudden Gust of Joy or Grief, Pleasure or Pain, stimulate and spur the Nervous Fibres, and the Coats of the Animal Tubes,” he argued, “thus both sudden Joy and Grief, make us breath short and quick, and make our Pulse small and frequent.” If these passions were sustained, over time they would “wear out, waste, and destroy the Nervous System”. To maintain health, people were urged to control their passions, experiencing happiness in small doses. A calm equilibrium might be preferable. Pleasure gardens How should one achieve a healthy life? Advice suggesting good air, rest and exercise pointed to rural living. The Athenian philosopher Epicurus established a school in his garden, which became a long-lasting symbol of a hedonistic life without pain. There he could concentrate on pleasure, the life of the mind and friendship. This choice of location was controversial because it rejected the social obligations of participating in political and civic life. Nature was also a prominent source of happiness for the Romantics of the 19th century. William Wordsworth, for example, described the “bliss of solitude” that “my heart with pleasure fills” in his poem on walking among daffodils. Read more | Jane Austen's tips for “health and happiness” 3. Play happy families Good relations were commended as key to happiness in religion and law. The role of families and strong social networks in maintaining happiness was emphasised to early modern Catholics, who were directed to view the Holy Family as a model to emulate. Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, “joyfully aided in childbirth, made peace, reconciled with love, [and] cleaned eyes with [her] medicinal and healing virtue”, preached the Franciscan Juan de Alvarado to his Mexican audience in 1736. Families who behaved similarly would enter into “happinesses without scarcity and happinesses that reaches the peak of good fortune”, claimed another Spanish-Mexican preacher, Iván Díaz de Arce, a century earlier. Early modern Protestants placed similar emphasis on the pleasures of family. In 1693, English minister Thomas Whitaker proclaimed that “dutiful, obedient Children” were “the Joy and Crown of their parents”. Some argued that, because children were naturally “inclined to Joy”, they offered an example of the ideal human condition. And the French mystic Pierre Poiret Naudé (1646–1719) thought that children showed the “final and perfective facultie of our Souls, which in effect were made for nothing else but to solace themselves in joy, in pleasure and contentment”. In other words, children provided a model for happiness. The happy family only grew in political importance, and in the 19th century the state was called on to ensure its maintenance. Seduction suits, in which men sued the lovers of their wives or daughters for their “corruption”, were available in law because the happy family was central to national security. In 1831, Irish barrister Charles Phillips explained in court that, before she eloped with her lover, one Mrs Guthrie had been the “organ and ornament” of her husband’s happiness. Phillips encouraged jurors to order significant compensation to reflect the “religion defiled, morals insulted, law despised, public order foully violated, and individual happiness wantonly wounded”. Joy in dark times Not all families were equally entitled to show happiness. Displays of joy by black families were used by some American anti-abolitionists to justify slavery and contest the political rights of the black population – if people were happy while enslaved, they did not need freedom. They were thus discouraged from behaving cheerfully in public. In 1931, American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston argued that to deny joy was destructive for black families: “Though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.” Hurston recognised that the expression of happiness, particularly within families and communities, was an important way through which people found the strength to survive. Later civil rights activists positioned joy as a political emotion that allowed black people living in a racist society to rejuvenate and find strength. 4. Find faith and fortune Major religions decree that living a virtuous life is the route to happiness. Throughout history, not every society has been convinced that happiness is within human control. Indeed, the modern English word derives from hap or happ, meaning fortune or luck in Middle English and Old Norse. Notably, the etymological link between luck and happiness can be found in most Indo-European languages, as well as further afield. The Chinese character for happiness is also that used to denote good fortune. In Korean, which long used the Chinese writing system, that character (bok) is pronounced very like the word for bat (obok); pictures of bats appear on many charms and gifts, representing both happiness and fortune. Achieving happiness was ultimately in the hands of the gods – but, with some luck, individuals might be able to attract their attention and solicit joy. Happiness has sometimes been construed as a form of blessing or even a reward for a life well lived. Most of the major religions have advocated pathways by which their adherents could live virtuously and, thus, might hope to achieve happiness. Buddhists promote the performance of good deeds, including giving generously and associating with wise people, as key to living happily. The highest form of happiness, however, is not an emotion at all. According to the canonical religious texts compiled in the fourth to fifth centuries, nirvana was a form of enlightenment marked by an absence of feeling. Happiness could easily become unhappiness, so reaching a state of nirvana meant moving beyond the possibility of suffering. Piety before pleasure Early Islamic texts promoted balance and self-control as central to a piety that should be practised in everyday life. Happiness was not a goal in itself, but was one of the emotions that contributed to virtuous living. Good Muslims should “rejoice” in “God’s favour and in His mercy” rather than in “what they have accumulated”, warned the Qur’an. Expressions of pleasure could also be immoral, and those who laughed at Muslim believers were considered sinners. On Earth, happiness might lead one away from God, as well as towards him. Ultimately, however, the afterlife was a place of complete satisfaction where “believers rejoice in what God has given them”. Virtuous living could be accompanied by joy but, just as importantly, it brought God’s favour in eternity. 5. Harness the power of words Nothing beats curling up with a good book for sparking delight. The life of the mind – thinking and learn- ing – has long been viewed as a pleasure, so of course reading has an important role in the pursuit of happiness. The 14th-century writer and Bishop of Durham, Richard de Bury, thought that “nothing... compared” to a library, and that any “follower of truth, of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or even of the faith, must of necessity make himself a lover of books”. Around the turn of the 18th century, English theatre critic Jeremy Collier wrote that books “help us to forget the crossness of men and things; compose our cares and our passions; and lay our disappointments asleep”. And, according to his biographer Sir George Trevelyan, historian Thomas Macaulay believed that reading was “a main element of happiness in one of the happiest lives”. Let’s be other people Books offer the reader the chance to enter into new worlds and to imagine themselves as other people, both of which were seen as contributing to the value of reading and to the joys of a life of the mind. The 17th-century Dutch-Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza rejected a life limited to basic survival or necessities, arguing: “When we say... that the best state is one where men pass their lives harmoniously, I mean that they pass a human life, one defined not merely by the circulation of blood... but mostly by reason, the true virtue and life of the mind.” To live a full and happy life, individuals need to be provided with the opportunity to think, read, fantasise and aspire. In the 1940s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow took up these ideas in his famous “hierarchy of needs”. Maslow was part of the ‘positive psychology’ movement that wished to move the field beyond thinking merely about mental illness, instead working towards supporting optimum wellbeing. Maslow thought that happiness could not be achieved if basic needs such as food, housing and family were not met. But to be truly satisfied, he believed, people also needed to fulfil their potential – and that meant attending to their desires, aspirations and fantasies. Happy individuals, he observed, were “lusty animals, hearty in their appetites, and enjoying themselves mightily”, able to move beyond themselves to help others, “capable of more fusion, greater love, more perfect identification” than most. To achieve this state, however, required a deep awareness of one’s values, dreams and place in the world – and, therefore, an active life of the mind. Listen | The history of happiness in an episode of Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 Katie Barclay is professor and ARC Future Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney and co-editor of The Routledge History of Happiness (Routledge, 2024)