HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2023-11-09T14:21:59.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The history of Ireland: 11 milestone momentshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/the-history-of-ireland-11-milestone-moments/2019-02-05T09:00:54.000ZAn island people the Irish may be, yet the history of Ireland has never been insular or inward-looking. Instead, it is a story of a people profoundly aware of the wider world – its threats, its possibilities and its advantages.

In addition, while the English and British connection will always remain key to any reading of Irish history, an array of other powers, including Spain, France, the papacy and the United States, have left their mark on the nation. In its turn, Ireland has reached out to influence the world: playing a part in Europe’s bitter power struggles; influencing the evolution of British parliamentary democracy; and helping to shape the growth of the United States into a global superpower.

Here are just a few key moments that have helped to define the course of Irish history...

The coming of the gospel to Ireland

The spread of Christianity in fifth-century Ireland is inextricably linked in the public mind with the iconic figure of Saint Patrick: miracle-working missionary, canny politician and snake-banishing national saint. Yet the historical facts are rather different – for Christianity had in fact taken root in Ireland well in advance of Patrick’s mission. The Irish were in the habit of plundering the long western seaboard of Roman Britain in search of booty – and the first Christians in Ireland, therefore, were most likely Britons carried across the sea as slaves.

In AD 431, Rome dispatched a bishop to minister to these “Irish believing in Christ” – and this was not Patrick but the shadowy Palladius, an aristocratic Briton or Gaul who has been elbowed by Patrician hagiographers out of the Irish story.

The development of Christianity was fundamental to the evolution of an Irish cultural identity, led to the creation of such glories of early Irish art as the Book of Kells and the Ardagh Chalice, and helped to maintain the flame of learning and education in Europe during the chaotic centuries that followed the fall of Rome.

• Listen | Professor Jane Ohlmeyer discusses a new multi-volume history of Ireland and explains how the past continues to affect Anglo-Irish relations today

The arrival of Henry Plantagenet in Ireland

In the summer of 1167, a small band of Anglo-Norman adventurers sailed from  Pembrokeshire and landed on the County Wexford coast. Within two years, the Norse ports of Wexford, Waterford and Dublin had fallen; and the Gaelic Irish were mustering against these potent newcomers on the Irish political scene.

In October 1171, Henry Plantagenet – King Henry II – himself arrived in Ireland, anxious to underscore his authority, and to add this promising new dominion to his extensive Anglo-French empire.

• The King and his castle: how Henry II rebuilt his reputation

It was a seismic moment in Irish history, marking the establishment of the Lordship of Ireland: in effect, the first English colony. Three decades later, Henry’s successor King John lost control of Normandy – after which the attention of the English crown became even more focused on its Irish possessions.

The Lordship itself survived for almost 400 years – in the process enduring the ravages of a Scots invasion, the Black Death and an indigenous Irish resurgence – until Henry VIII proclaimed himself king in 1541, thus formally uniting England and Ireland under one crown.

The Plantation of Ulster

In the spring of 1606, a wave of Scots settlers – farmers, craftsmen, artisans – crossed the narrow waters of the North Channel and came ashore at the port of Donaghadee in County Down. This was the beginning of the Plantation of Ulster: a systematic British and Protestant settlement of the northern half of Ireland – which until this point had remained the most obdurately Gaelic and Catholic part of the country.

With the defeat of a Spanish expeditionary force at Kinsale in County Cork at Christmas 1601 came the definitive victory of English military power in Ireland – a fact emphasised by the ‘Flight of the Earls’ in 1607, when a large proportion of Ulster’s Gaelic aristocracy fled Ireland for the continent. The Plantation set the seal on this new order: by 1640, some 30,000 colonists had arrived in Ulster; and many of the remaining Gaelic landowning families had been expelled from their lands.

The Plantation represented the onset of a cultural cataclysm for Gaelic society, and marked the beginning of a chaotic and violent century in Ireland. Most significantly, sectarian tensions became an intrinsic aspect of life in Ulster – with consequences that continue to be felt to this day.

• Hugh O’Neill: Elizabeth I’s Irish nemesis

The sack of Drogheda

In August 1649, Oliver Cromwell and his New Model Army landed at Dublin. The Civil War in England had come to an end with the execution of Charles I, and Cromwell was eager now to settle affairs in Ireland, where anarchy reigned and the royalist faction retained significant support.

Cromwell marched 30 miles north along the coast to the royalist-held port of Drogheda. By 10 September, the town was surrounded; on the next day, its walls were breached, and there followed the dreadful sack of Drogheda, in which much of the town’s population – Catholics and Protestants, English and Irish – were indiscriminately put to the sword.

Later, the town of Wexford was similarly sacked, and by 1660, up to a quarter of the Irish population had died from the effects of war and disease. The events of these years help to explain why Cromwell, viewed in English history as a democrat, is remembered in Ireland as a genocidal maniac. One Englishman, however, fully understood the profound impact of the siege of Drogheda. Winston Churchill remarked that it “cut new gulfs between the nations and the creeds. Upon all of us there still lies the curse of Cromwell.”

The battle of Aughrim

The Battle of Aughrim was fought on the flat landscapes of County Galway in July 1691. It epitomised the final defeat of Catholic Ireland, and the beginning of an uncontested Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. The battle, however, was also part of a much larger geopolitical process that encompassed a ferocious struggle for supremacy in Europe between the French crown and a grand alliance of England, Holland and a cluster of other powers. William of Orange had usurped the British crown in 1689, forcing his father-in-law, James II, to flee to France and on to Ireland. As a result, Ireland became the scene of a series of battles, the ripples from which would be felt across Britain and Europe.

The Williamite Wars were fought at Derry/Londonderry, Enniskillen and on the fords of the river Boyne, where William emerged from the battle of the Boyne victorious in a clash with James. But it was at Aughrim that Ireland’s remaining Catholic elite, together with its French allies, was cut down in the boggy fields. Here, both the fate of the country and William’s hold on the throne were settled, once and for all.

• Your guide to the Glorious Revolution

An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland

Wolfe Tone stands as one of Ireland’s most compelling and charismatic national leaders. Born in Dublin in 1763, his political vision was sharpened as he watched revolutionary events unfold first in America and then France. He dreamt of a radical, non-sectarian Irish republic – and his 1791 pamphlet An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland was envisaged as a necessary first step, calling as it did for the emancipation of Ireland’s disenfranchised Catholic majority.

The pamphlet drew the attention of many: soon, the Society of United Irishmen was established in Belfast by a group of (equally disenfranchised) Presbyterian merchants and manufacturers who thrilled to Tone’s revolutionary vision. This was a moment when disparate elements in Irish society looked beyond the confines of sectarian politics and towards the politics of a wider world. Yet the failure of the Rising of 1798 – and the sectarian element that once more rose to the surface during that violent Irish summer – ensured that such a vision never became a reality.

Tone himself committed suicide in November 1798, while held in military custody. Two years later, the Act of Union bound Britain and Ireland even closer together.

Daniel O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation

By the 1830s, a new leader had emerged onto the national stage. Daniel O’Connell was as Catholic as Wolfe Tone had been atheist. His vision was of an Ireland in which Catholicism and national identity were folded into one; and he understood the importance of enlisting the mass of the population as a means of achieving his vision of the repeal of the Act of Union.

O’Connell probed the limits of constitutionality, appreciating how the threat of popular unrest could be deployed to achieve his ends. His Catholic Association, for example, rapidly became a disciplined mass movement working towards the initial goal of Catholic Emancipation. This duly came about in 1829, as the British government recognised the possibility of anarchy in Ireland – and took fright.

And yet O’Connell never achieved his dream of repeal. His legacy instead lies in the lessons he presented on the possibilities inherent in mass politics – lessons absorbed by observers abroad as well as at home. Furthermore, he never forgot the opportunities offered by a modern media and a shrinking world. After O’Connell, the Irish Question was debated not only in Ireland and in Britain – but with passion too in America.

The Great Famine

In September 1845, as the first potatoes were being lifted in fields across Ireland, word began to spread of a disease affecting the new crop. The potatoes were coming out of the ground rotten and putrid. Blight was spreading across the countryside. The famine would continue until 1849 – and its effects upon Irish society were cataclysmic.

Of a pre-famine population of some eight million, over a million died of hunger and famine-related diseases – and for Irish nationalists, it became a truism that “the Almighty sent the potato blight but the English created the famine”.

It was perhaps inevitable that the collective trauma brought about by the years of hunger would be distilled and heaped, in rage and grief, onto the heads of the British government. The truth was that government inaction, willfulness and incomprehension did indeed exacerbate the effects of the famine – although these facts did not, as claimed by many Irish nationalists, imply an intention to create famine in order to diminish Ireland.

A century later, the Irish population was still in decline. Emigration was a wound that simply could not be staunched, and the consequent growth of a vast Irish diaspora abroad changed for ever the relationship between Ireland and the rest of the world.

Fifteen leaders of the Easter Rising are executed

In the course of nine days in May 1916, 15 men were escorted from their dank cells at Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol to the stonebreakers’ yard on the edge of the prison to be executed by firing squad.

The men were leaders of the Easter Rising, which had exploded across central Dublin in late April. One of them, the labour activist James Connolly, had had his ankle injured by a sniper’s bullet and was executed while being strapped to a chair. The Rising had been defeated in a matter of days. Much of central Dublin was left shattered by fire, gunfire and bombardment, and most of the casualties of the fighting were civilians.

• Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising

As a result, public opinion was not especially supportive of the rebels – but the decision of the British authorities to execute the ringleaders proved decisive, altering the public mood overnight. The 15 men became heroes and political opinion was radicalised. The scene was now set for five tumultuous years that resulted in the end of British rule across most of Ireland, and the establishment in 1922 of the Irish Free State.

Bloody Sunday

On 30 January 1972, a civil rights march was winding slowly from the western suburbs of Derry towards the Guildhall Square in the city centre. Such marches were commonplace: since 1968, Northern Ireland had become accustomed to the sight of public demonstrations demanding equal rights for the province’s Catholic minority; and an end to Unionist-majority rule. On this day, however, the march ended in tragedy as British soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Soon, 13 men lay dead; a 14th died later of his injuries.

The army claimed that IRA operatives in the crowd had fired first, and the resulting public inquiry accepted this version of events. Bloody Sunday was by no means the most violent day of the Northern Ireland Troubles – but the fact that the 14 men had been killed by the forces of the state itself lent a ghastly distinction to the event. The effects of Bloody Sunday continued to be felt for years. Catholic public opinion was inflamed, and support for the IRA and other terrorist groups grew apace.

Thirty eight years would pass before a new British government inquiry exonerated the victims, finding that the army’s actions had been “unjustified and unjustifiable”.

The Good Friday Agreement

For many, a solution to Northern Ireland’s 20th‑century Troubles seemed impossible. The taproots of the conflict appeared sunk too deeply into a history of sectarian bitterness and economic rivalry, political differences were insurmountably great, and the wider context of grievance between the British and Irish states added yet further layers of difficulty to an already fraught situation.

Throughout the years of the Troubles, however, conversation and negotiation had continued – usually under deeply unprepossessing circumstances – and ultimately a political solution was indeed found. In April 1998, the Belfast or ‘Good Friday’ Agreement was signed, setting out a framework for future political progress in Northern Ireland. The key to progress had been the internationalisation of the discussions – and in particular the close involvement of the Bill Clinton White House in the protracted negotiations.

• Read more: 7 unusual historical sites in Britain & Ireland

The political process in Northern Ireland has continued to be dogged by failures of trust, communication and negotiation. But there is a sense that the past is now definitively past, and that there can be no return to the years of violence.

Neil Hegarty is the author of Story of Ireland (BBC Books, 2011) and Dublin: A View from the Ground (Piatkus, 2008)

This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]>Life with the lions: the Tower of London menageriehttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/life-with-the-lions-the-tower-of-london-menagerie/2011-06-28T14:46:35.000ZThe polar bear that fished in the Thames

To the people of London in 1252, a giant white bear must have been an unusual sight. The animal was a gift from the king of Norway to Henry III, and as such he was placed in the Tower of London menagerie that had been established to contain royal beasts by Henry’s predecessor, King John.

The bear was not always to be found in the menagerie, however. He had arrived in London with instructions that he be allowed to swim in the Thames while attached to a long cord. At this time the river was well stocked with fish and the likely intention was that the Arctic visitor could sustain himself with the bounty in the waters.

In the medieval period and beyond, the feeding of animals at the menagerie was something of a haphazard process. Without modern zoological knowledge, there was no guarantee that the inhabitants would receive the required nutrients and myths abounded about what they could and couldn’t eat. There was, for example, a popular misconception that ostriches could digest iron nails. In the 1750s one unfortunate bird died after consuming a nail (most likely thrown by a visitor) “that stopt its passage”.

The lion that killed the queen

Although a wide range of animals made their home at the Tower, it was always the lions that the menagerie was best known for. Representing one of England’s national symbols, the lions were, in the words of exhibition curator Dr Sally Dixon-Smith “a kind of living heraldry”.

They were closely connected with royalty as well, to the extent that lions were often named after the reigning king or queen of the period. A legend even arose that when the namesake beast expired then the days of the monarch were numbered. So when Elizabeth I the lion died in 1603, its keepers would not have been unduly surprised that the Virgin Queen herself passed away shortly afterwards.

Another legend was that the animals would become agitated if a woman came close by who wasn't a virgin. This surfaced in Tobias Smollett's 1771 novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker where a servant, Win Jenkins, was disconcerted to see one of the Tower's animals "roaring and bouncing" when her mistress walked up to it. Convinced that "my lady is as good a firchin, as the child unborn", Jenkins determined that "the lion oft to be set in the stocks for bearing false witness".

The badly behaved leopards

The menagerie was a popular visitor attraction ever since John II of France slipped a keeper three gold coins to see the lions while detained in the Tower in 1360. People came in their droves to see the beasts but, unlike visitors to modern zoos, they did so at no little risk.

Leopards seemed to be among the most frequent miscreants. Diarist Ned Ward recalled in 1699 how a leopard “loves not to be looked at” and would be liable to “piss on you”, if you came too close, with urine that “stinks worse than a polecat’s”. An 1829 book on the menagerie complained that one female leopard had “always evinced a particular predilection for the destruction of umbrellas, parasols, muffs, hats, and such other articles of dress as may happen to come within her reach”.

Some incidents were of a much graver nature. In 1830 a man called Joseph Croney had been hired to remove unwanted bones from the menagerie. One Saturday he was at work when a leopard escaped from its den and flung itself upon him.

The Times reported: "The poor fellow shrieked out in the most excruciating pain, and expected nothing but instant destruction." Fortunately a couple of keepers heard Croney's cries and came to his assistance, beating the leopard over its head until it relinquished its victim. Croney was taken to a surgeon and it was reported that despite being in "excessive agony", he was "considered to be doing well".

The tigers that fought a lion

While the tower's inhabitants could be a danger to keepers and the public, they also posed a risk to each other. During the reign of James VI and I, this was actively encouraged, with regular displays of lions being baited by dogs, bears, bulls and other ferocious beasts. The king even had a viewing platform installed to watch these blood sports.

Yet there were also occasions when animals accidentally came into contact with different species. Here too the consequences were predictably violent. In 1828 a secretary bird was left without a head after coming too close to a hyena, but the most shocking incident occurred a couple of years later when a keeper accidentally removed the barrier between a lion and two tigers.

Tigers, who had a long history at the Tower, were often given decidedly unthreatening names such as Will, Dick and Phillis. However when it came to a fight, even the king of beasts stood little chance. A contemporary wrote that “the various agitation, the roaring, howling, and shrieking, the signs of fierceness and horror of the other inmates of the Tower… surpassed all description”. The animals were eventually prised apart, by which point the lion had been fatally wounded.

The grizzly bear that outlived the menagerie

One of the most celebrated inhabitants of the early 19th-century menagerie was Martin, a grizzly bear presented to George III by the Hudson Bay Company in 1811. He arrived at a time when the menagerie was undergoing a period of decline but its fortunes were soon reinvigorated by an energetic new keeper, Alfred Cops, who was appointed in 1822.

Under Cops’s auspices, the collection of animals was greatly increased so that by 1828 it included three kangaroos, an African porcupine and over 100 rattlesnakes, among other creatures. The grizzly was still there, now going by the name of Old Martin. An observer related: “His size is far superior to that of any other bear that has ever been seen in this quarter of the globe; and his ferocity, in spite of the length of time during which he has been a prisoner, and of all the attempts that have been made to conciliate him, still continues undiminished.”

Yet the menagerie’s heyday would be short-lived. The Duke of Wellington had been made constable of the Tower in 1826 and he feared that the wild animals were impeding the fortress’s military functions. Furthermore, the Iron Duke was an inaugural member of the London Zoological Society, which had very different views about the way animals should be studied and displayed. William IV had little interest in the menagerie and was happy to allow Wellington to dismantle the centuries-old institution.

So it was that the royal beasts were transferred to the new London Zoo in 1831 and 1832, leaving a few of Cops’s own animals at the Tower until they too were removed three years later. Old Martin outlasted both the Tower menagerie and William IV, finally dying in London Zoo in 1838.

This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]>The sacrifice of Captain Kiddhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-sacrifice-of-captain-kidd/2011-06-25T15:50:59.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine

When the hangman’s rope snapped and a choking William Kidd fell to the ground beneath the gallows, he must have thought for a moment that he would be spared the noose. For the first time since he sailed from London six years earlier, he was literally being given a break. The reprieve was short-lived. The bound man was hauled back to the gallows, and a new rope was found. For Captain Kidd, notorious pirate and murderer, there would be no mercy. The irony of it was, just as he proclaimed from the gallows, he was an innocent man.

Even though he committed no crime, Kidd was forced to endure 18 months of solitary confinement, a thorough character assassination, a farcical show trial, and a botched execution. Kidd had become a dangerous pawn in the game of British politics – a man with the potential to embarrass or even bring down the government, tarnish the reputation of the king, and cause the downfall of his shadowy aristocratic backers.

Until recently, it was generally assumed he was guilty as charged. This has all changed in the past century, as historians have taken a fresh look at the evidence, and unearthed crucial documents that reveal that the trial was rigged against the unfortunate Kidd.

The call of the sea

His troubles began in August 1695 when he first arrived in London. Kidd was a respectable 40-year-old sea captain from New York, a man of family and property, with a reputation as a successful privateer. He was a Scot, born in Dundee, but as a young man he moved to New York colony, and since childhood had followed the call of the sea. By 1691 he commanded his own privateer, or ‘private warship’.

There was a big difference between a privateer and a pirate. In times of war, privateering licences were issued by governments, allowing captains to hunt down enemy merchant ships. In return the Admiralty kept a share of any plunder. In effect it was a form of legitimised piracy. Without the licence, you were a pirate.

In London Kidd met fellow New Yorker Robert Livingston, a wealthy merchant who had the ear of an English peer. After meeting Kidd, Livingston approached his acquaintance Lord Bellomont, hoping to get backing to build a privateer to hunt down Frenchmen and pirates in the Indian ocean. Kidd would be her captain.

Lord Bellomont sounded out four others in his circle. The five noblemen decided to put up £6,000 between them to build the ship, and to serve as a stake in the venture. Apart from the Irishborn Lord Bellomont, Kidd’s new backers were the Earl of Romney, the secretary of state the Duke of Shrewsbury, the future attorney general Lord John Somers, and the first lord of the Admiralty Admiral Edward Russell. All of them were leading members of the Whig government – men at the very heart of the English political establishment. In this period there were two political parties – the liberal Whigs and the more conservative Tories. When Kidd arrived in London it was the Whigs who held the reins of power.

The purpose-built privateer Adventure Galley of 34 guns was built in Deptford in just five weeks. Privateering licences were duly issued by King William but, unusually, the Admiralty wasn't to get its share. Instead the plunder went to the backers, save a percentage that was to be divided up among Kidd and his crew. Kidd's backers were to remain secretive about their involvement – and with good reason: this was a highly questionable arrangement, and one that could potentially reap a huge return. Kidd was playing for high stakes indeed.

In April 1696 Kidd left London for America, and six weeks later he was back in New York, where he recruited additional crewmen. He set sail in September, and all went well until he encountered a convoy of ships licensed to the East India Company, escorted by Commodore Warren of the Royal Navy.

Warren wanted to press some of Kidd’s crew, and so to protect his men Kidd fled in the night. When dawn revealed his departure Warren wrote a damning report to the Admiralty, describing him as a pirate. Based on no evidence at all, Kidd was a criminal in the eyes of the British authorities. Worse, the East India Company would repeat this slander in India.

For the next year, Kidd roamed the Indian ocean in search of prey, but despite his honest intentions the East India Company remained convinced he had ‘turned pirate’, and denied him access to their ports. His crew were frustrated, and mutiny seethed beneath the surface.

When Kidd encountered a Dutch ship the crisis came to a head. The ringleader of the mutineers was the gunner, William Moore. He wanted to ransack the Dutchman, and during the confrontation that followed Kidd hit the gunner on the head with a wooden bucket. Moore died of concussion the next day.

After that, things began to improve. In November Kidd captured a genuine prize, the Rouparelle, whose captain carried a 'pass' on behalf of French merchants, making her a legitimate prize. Then, on 30 January 1698, he hit the jackpot. Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant, an Indian ship carrying another French pass. Her hold was filled with silks, muslins, as well as gold, silver and jewels, all worth an estimated £75,000. That was enough to pay for the ship, pay off the crew, and still leave enough for Kidd's backers to double their money.

Denied a safe haven in India, Kidd decided to head home. On the way though, he put into the pirate haven of St Mary's off Madagascar, hoping to capture a pirate prize. The pirate Robert Culliford was there with his ship, but by then Kidd's hurriedly-built Adventure Galley was rotten, and in no condition to fight. He was also short of men, as his two prize ships had become separated in a storm. When the ships finally appeared Kidd ordered his men to attack. Instead they mutinied, and most of them joined the pirate crew. Culliford sailed off in search of plunder. Kidd abandoned the Adventure Galley, and with 12 loyal crewmen he patched up the Quedagh Merchant and sailed for home, together with what remained of his plunder.

He reached the Caribbean in March 1699, and leaving the Quedagh Merchant there he sailed home to explain his actions. He took plunder with him, but as a precaution he buried it on an island in Long Island Sound. After meeting his wife he sailed to Boston to meet his backer Lord Bellomont, now the governor of New York and New England. When Kidd met him on 3 July the nobleman seemed reserved. The reason soon became clear. Three days later Kidd was arrested.

Standing trial

The problem was, Kidd had been so widely discredited by slander that his backers wanted nothing to do with him. Instead, Kidd was thrown to the wolves. Bellomont forced him to reveal where he had buried his plunder, and this was retrieved. Then, after six months of incarceration, Kidd was shipped to England to stand trial. First though, Kidd was expected to appear before the House of Commons, to answer questions posed by the Tory opposition. In London there was no doubt that Kidd was a pirate – the real question was whether his backers and even the king had encouraged him to go ‘a pirating’ on their behalf.

The answer would have to wait. When Kidd arrived in April 1700 parliament had just ended its sitting, and it would be almost a year before it reconvened. After an interrogation by the Admiralty, Kidd was thrown into Newgate prison. He would languish in solitary confinement for 12 months. Meanwhile the Admiralty prepared the case for his prosecution. When Kidd was given copies of the relevant documents, crucial evidence – those French passes – were withheld. The very cornerstones of his defence had been ‘mislaid’. Today they can be read in the National Archives. In the winter of 1700-01, Kidd wasn’t so lucky.

On 27 March 1701, Kidd was finally called before parliament. While he had been languishing in Newgate, elections had been held, and this time round the Tories were in power. After all that waiting the hearing was a disappointment for the Tories, who wanted Kidd to discredit their political opponents. Kidd steadfastly protested his innocence, and denied his backers had encouraged any wrongdoing. He was duly thrown back into his cell. The trial itself began on 8 May. Denied effective counsel, Kidd would have to mount his own defence.

What followed was a sham. The experienced Admiralty prosecutors opened with a murder charge – the killing of William Moore. Two of Kidd’s mutineers were produced – men who had recently been captured in the Americas – and they perjured themselves by claiming the assault was premeditated. If Kidd was guilty of anything, it was manslaughter, an action carried out to quell a mutiny. Instead he was found guilty of murder.

This was followed by five charges of piracy, beginning with the seizure of the Quedagh Merchant. Once again, the perjurers gave evidence. Kidd's request to delay the trial until the passes were found was denied. The case was rigged – even the prosecutor described Kidd to the jury as an "arch pirate, and common enemy of mankind". Kidd was again found guilty.

The trial continued the following day. By this time Kidd was refusing to play the game, saying: “I will not trouble this court any more, for it is folly.” Consequently he was found guilty on all three remaining counts. The judge went on to pass the death penalty. Only then did Kidd react, crying out; “My Lord, that is a very hard sentence. For my part I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.”

On 23 May 1701, William Kidd was hanged at Wapping. He died at sunset, and his corpse was tied to a stake, to let three tides wash over him, according to Admiralty custom. His bloated body was then taken by boat down to Tilbury, where it was squeezed into an iron cage. This was then suspended overlooking the Thames, as a grizzly warning to other would-be pirates.

After his death, the legend of Kidd 'the pirate' continued to grow. Lurid accounts of his 'crimes' were catalogued in Charles Johnson's A General History of Pirates in 1724, and he came to be regarded as one of the most notorious cutthroats in history.

It was only in 1910, when those elusive French passes were discovered, that the real story began to emerge. Over the past 25 years, fresh detective work has revealed the manipulation, perjury, rumour-mongering and deal-making that underpinned the whole affair. Above all, it finally revealed the names of the five lords who were his secret backers but – not wanting to be associated with an affair in which they had diverted money from the Admiralty in order to line their own pockets – sacrificed the sea captain on the altar of political expediency.

Three centuries later, in 2009, a Dundee seaman’s foundation declared they wanted to have Kidd’s case reheard in the Court of Appeal. Finally, Kidd might be given the chance to clear his name.

Angus Konstam is a widely published historian who has studied piracy in the early 18th century. He is author of The Complete History of Piracy (Osprey Publishing, 2008).

Timeline: The life and death of Captain Kidd

22 January 1654

Kidd is born in Dundee in north-eastern Scotland, the son of a sea captain who dies when William is still an infant.

16 May 1691

Kidd marries Sarah Oort, the richest widow in New York, and the couple move into a substantial town house on Wall Street.

10 April 1695

The newly built Adventure Galley sails from London, with Kidd in command. He sets a course for New York, to recruit.

30 January 1698

Kidd captures the Quedagh Merchant, which carries a French-registered cargo of textiles, gold, silver and jewels, valued at £75,000 (£9m today).

12 May 1698

When Kidd orders his crew to attack the pirate ship of Robert Culliford they mutiny, and most join forces with the pirates.

6 July 1699

Kidd is arrested in Boston on the orders of his backer the Earl of Bellomont, now governor of New York and Massachusetts.

9 May 1701

After almost a year in prison Kidd is found guilty of murder and piracy, in a rigged and one-sided two-day trial.

23 May 1701

Kidd is taken to Execution Dock in Wapping, and hanged on a specially constructed platform built by the Admiralty on the Thames foreshore.

]]>Where history happened: The Jacobiteshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/where-history-happened-the-jacobites/2011-06-19T13:51:58.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine

The Jacobite movement began with a single desire: to restore James II and VII to the throne. It was born out of the fallout of what some historians refer to as the Glorious Revolution – when the Catholic James II of England (James VII of Scotland) was dethroned and forced into exile by his son-in-law, the future William III and II – and became an underground movement in each of the kingdoms of England, Ireland and Scotland. However, although the Jacobites were united by a common desire to restore the Stuart line, each held their own agenda.

“The real powerhouses for the Jacobite movement were Scotland and Ireland,” says Daniel Szechi of the University of Manchester. “Many devoutly Protestant Episcopalian Scots were antagonised by the Williamite regime’s imposition of Presbyterianism, the Scottish form of Protestantism, on the Scottish Kirk, and this moved them towards what we might today refer to as ‘nationalism’. The Scots Jacobites wanted James II and VII’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart, crowned king, but as a ceremonial monarch only, along with other constitutional changes.”

The Irish, three-quarters of whom were Catholic, were equally opposed to William’s regime but wished to disconnect political control of Ireland from Westminster. English Jacobites – the least numerous – wished simply for the restoration of the Stuart dynasty.

Jacobite plots fed on discontent of all kinds, and were encouraged by James Francis Edward Stuart. In August 1715, John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, raised the old Scottish standard, gathered an army and recognised James as James VIII of Scotland (and James III of England). Jacobite forces were soon flocking to the standard and rebellions broke out in Dundee, Perth and Aberdeen. Government troops under the Duke of Argyll rushed to the scene and, in November 1715, met the Jacobites in a battle at Sheriffmuir in Perthshire.

Although the clash was inconclusive, Jacobite forces lost their faith in victory. Even the rather belated arrival of James VIII in December the same year did little to raise their spirits. As Scottish Jacobite forces retreated north, their leaders, including James, were forced to flee, rather ingloriously, to the safety of France.

However, while Jacobite troops were fighting in Scotland, expeditionary forces from the Highlands arrived in the Scottish lowlands to join with northern English Jacobites and strike into England. “The resulting battle of Preston was a resounding victory for the Jacobites,” says Szechi, “and a blow to the British forces.” Yet history was to repeat itself when the Jacobites suffered another crisis of confidence, finding themselves surrounded in Preston with no artillery or supplies. Their only choice was to surrender. Retribution on the rebels was swift but not as brutal as might be expected. Around 40 of the 1,500 prisoners taken were executed; the rest were sent to the American colonies and sold into virtual slavery.

The Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was to prove far more traumatic. As Szechi explains: “The interim years between 1715 and 1745 had seen more secret correspondence between the Jacobite underground in England and the French. And, with Britain and France on opposing sides in the War of Austrian Succession – which began in 1740 – an invasion of England seemed like a good idea.”

Unfortunately for the rebels, the plan never really got off the ground: French preparations for an assault on England in 1744 were wrecked by a storm, and the English Jacobites got cold feet about the planned uprising.

Yet Jacobite plans for an invasion of England weren’t shelved quite yet. The arrival of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie), the grandson of James II and VII, in Scotland in 1745 with a tiny force of men and just one surviving ship set the wheels of rebellion in motion once more. First landing in Eriskay in July 1745, Charles spent three weeks persuading Jacobite leaders in Scotland to rebel with him. Using every power of persuasion in his possession – including claims that he possessed written assurances from the English Jacobites that they would rise with them – Charles succeeded in raising an army, which seized Edinburgh and inflicted a resounding defeat on British forces at Prestonpans in September that year.

The victorious Jacobite forces marched into England, entering Manchester in November 1745 before moving on to Derby, buoyed by Charles’s promises that the English Jacobites would soon be swelling their numbers. In fact, just 200 men joined the rebel army in Manchester, and when Jacobite officers demanded to see the letters of support from their English counterparts, Charles was forced to admit that he had lied. The Jacobite council consequently refused to march on London and voted unanimously to return to Scotland.

“The irony of the situation,” says Szechi, “is that while the Scottish Jacobites were ending their invasion of England, the French were desperately pulling together an army to join them.” Instead, the Scots retreated to Falkirk where they successfully fought off another British army. Yet their situation was far from promising. A further retreat into northern Scotland culminated in April 1746 in Culloden, the final battle of the uprising, and saw the outnumbered Jacobite force decisively beaten. Even so, the survivors were willing to fight on.

In the end, it was Charles himself who called an end to the fighting, fleeing to France to raise a new army and leaving his troops without a leader. With the French now unwilling to help, the Jacobite cause looked doomed and the British forces wreaked their revenge on the Highlands in an act that has been referred to by some historians, including Allan Macinnes, as verging on “ethnic cleansing”. The Jacobites never rebelled again.

Words: Charlotte Hodgman. Historical advisor: Daniel Szechi of the University of Manchester.

Where history happened: 8 places connected to the Jacobites

Brixham Port (Torbay, Devon)

Where William of Orange began his invasion of England

On 5 November 1688, the Dutch prince William of Orange and 14,000 troops landed at Brixham, Torbay, for an invasion of England. William, who married James II and VII’s daughter and heir, Mary, in 1677, had been persuaded to invade the country by powerful English Protestants who were alarmed by James II and VII’s Catholicism. The arrival of a male heir, James Francis Edward Stuart (later hailed as James III and VIII), in June 1688 created a potentially enduring Catholic dynasty and effectively excluded Mary from becoming the country’s future Protestant queen. This provided a strong incentive for William’s invasion in 1688.

William was warmly welcomed in south-west England, gathering supporters who marched with him through Exeter towards London. James II and VII and his army confronted William near Salisbury but the expected battle never happened: shocked by the defection of some of his closest allies, James suffered an apparent nervous breakdown, and fled to London. William and Mary were eventually crowned king and queen of England on 11 April 1689. A statue of William III now stands on Brixham quayside marking the spot where he allegedly first set foot on English soil.
 

City walls (Londonderry/Derry)

Where 12 apprentice boys made a stand

Following William's capture of London in 1688, James II and VII was forced to flee to France, but the battle for power was far from over. In March 1689, James II and VII sailed to Ireland full of hope that he could regain the throne with the help of his Jacobite supporters in France, Ireland and Scotland. Predominantly Protestant by religion, Londonderry’s townspeople did not take well to James sending a Catholic regiment to garrison the city and, as legend has it, 12 apprentice boys seized the initiative and slammed the city gates in the faces of the marching Catholic soldiers.

Derry successfully defended itself from the ensuing three-month Jacobite siege, which included a blockade of the city. The city walls, although not designed to withstand a long siege, held strong, despite being continuously bombarded by James’s forces.

Cannons and mortars caused a great deal of damage, mostly to the section between Bishop’s Gate and Butcher’s Gate, which received the brunt of the attacks. In order to reinforce the bulwarks, the city’s defenders used barrels filled with earth to replace the smashed parapets. Relief finally came on 28 July after the Royal Navy broke through the blockade and got essential supplies to the city. The Jacobites, realising they were fighting a losing battle, retreated, and the city was safe.

The Great Siege, as it is known in Ireland, is still commemorated on two occasions by the Apprentice Boys of Derry: The ‘Shutting of the Gates’ parade is celebrated in December and the ‘Relief of Derry’ parade is held in August. The city walls that defended Londonderry’s residents still stand and the keys to the gates are held in the city’s cathedral.

Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre (Oldbridge, Drogheda, County Lough)

Where the Jacobites were defeated by the Williamite army

The battle of the Boyne was one of the most crucial clashes fought during the Irish civil war between William and James (often referred to as the Williamite War or the Cogadh an Dá Rí – War of the Two Kings) between 1689 and 1691. James II and VII, who had already landed in Ireland, met William's forces at the river Boyne on 1 July 1690.

William, who was heading an army of 36,000 English, Scottish, Dutch, Danes and Huguenots (French Protestants), camped on the north side of the river. Meanwhile, James and his army of 25,000 – mainly Irish Catholics with some French regiments loaned by Louis XIV – took the south side. Although William’s plan to outmanoeuvre James’s forces by using a pincer-like technique failed, he still defeated the Jacobite army which retreated and regrouped beyond the Shannon to continue the war. James, however, fled to France where he lived in exile until his death in 1701.

The Battle of the Boyne Visitor Centre stands at the edge of the battlefield, and self-guiding walks are available through the core battle site, with orientation panels and maps located at various points.

Visit www.battleoftheboyne.ie

Aughrim battlefield, Galway

Where more than 7,000 lives were lost on the battlefield

Just over a year after the Jacobite defeat at the battle of the Boyne, the two armies came head-to-head once more in one of the bloodiest battles ever fought on Irish soil and one which effectively saw the end of the Jacobites in Ireland.

William was no longer in Ireland, having passed command over to Dutchman Godert de Ginkel. Having rejected an offer to surrender, the re-formed Jacobite force, under the command of Charles Chalmont, Marquis de St Ruth, met the Williamite army near the small village of Aughrim. The Jacobites put up a good fight and had the advantage of being able to choose the location of the battle. Indeed, the solid limestone plain where the battle was fought was surrounded by a bog, in which many of the Williamite army were caught and slaughtered. William’s camp eventually emerged victorious, but a total of over 7,000 lives were lost in the battle.

The Battle of Aughrim Interpretative Centre, situated in Aughrim village, overlooks the battlefield and offers guided tours and information for visitors.

Visit www.discoverireland.com

The Treaty Stone (Limerick)

Where the Treaty of Limerick was signed

Following its shattering defeat at Aughrim in July 1691, the crushed Jacobite army in Ireland was offered free passage to France in exchange for the surrender of the last Jacobite stronghold: Limerick.

Though he was effectively allowing the Jacobites to join England’s enemies on the continent, William’s acquisition of Limerick enabled him to free up resources in Ireland and return to the task of defeating the French. The Treaty of Limerick was made on 3 October 1691 and was signed on a stone in the sight of both armies at the Clare end of Thomond Bridge, according to tradition. The stone can still be seen and has rested on its current plinth since 1865.

Massacre at Glencoe memorial (Glencoe, Highlands)

Where more than 30 clansmen were murdered

By 1691, with expeditions north of the border successfully subduing the uprising, and rebel forces still reeling from defeat at the battle of Aughrim, the government was able to impose a ceasefire on the Scottish Jacobites. One of the conditions of the agreement was that Scottish clan leaders formally present themselves to government garrisons and submit themselves to the new regime.

James II and VII at this time was in France and his Scottish supporters were unwilling to agree to the ceasefire without his consent, so messengers were swiftly dispatched to France to seek his permission. James agreed, but with time against them and a delay of two weeks following arrests in London, many of the messengers were forced to ride flat out to ensure the clan leaders received their king’s permission to submit before the deadline. The MacDonalds of Glencoe, however, failed to receive the message in time and missed the deadline by a few days.

Determined to punish the rebels, government officials in Scotland decided to make an example of the clan and issued a commission of fire and sword. On 13 February 1692, government troops, led by Captain Robert Campbell, murdered more than 30 MacDonald men and boys in their own homes. Women and children were forced out into the Highland snows where many more perished.

Today, a memorial to what is commonly known as the Massacre of Glencoe stands in Glencoe village and an annual commemoration and church service marks the anniversary of the event every February.

Visit www.glencoe-nts.org.uk

Prestonpans battlefield, East Lothian

Where Bonnie Prince Charlie led his forces to victory

The battle of Prestonpans, the first significant clash in the third Jacobite rising, took place in the early morning of 21 September 1745 and was reportedly over in less than 15 minutes. The Jacobite army, led by James II and VII’s grandson Charles (Bonnie Prince Charlie), achieved a stunning victory over the British forces, with hundreds of government troops killed or wounded and some 1,500 taken prisoner as they fled the battlefield.

According to a contemporary source, government troops commanded by Sir John Cope – who was under orders to put down the Jacobite risings – were confronted by some 1,400 Highlanders charging through the early morning mist with “wild Highland war cries and with the bloodcurdling skirl of the pipes” – surely a terrifying sight to behold. Their defeat was a huge blow to government forces and meant that most of Scotland was now in the hands of Charles. Word reached London and panic ensued; Jacobite fortunes looked to be on the rise.

Much of the battle landscape still survives and can be seen from the top of a viewing mound at Meadowmill. Self-guided walks can be downloaded from the battle of Prestonpans website.

Visit www.battleofprestonpans1745.org

Culloden battlefield visitor centre (Culloden Moor, Inverness, Highlands)

Where the Jacobites fought, and lost, their final battle in just one hour

The battle of Culloden in April 1746 was to be the last of the Jacobite era and a bitter defeat for the rebels. After learning that the promised support from English Jacobites wasn’t going to materialise, the Scottish forces left Derby – to where they had advanced following their victory at Prestonpans – and retreated back into northern Scotland. Charles was furious but the Jacobite council had voted to return, unaware that the French were raising an army to help them. They were met by government forces under the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden where, outnumbered, starving and exhausted, they were defeated in just one hour.

Culloden Moor was boggy and the Jacobite forces were unable to strike quickly in hand-tohand combat, which was their preferred method of fighting. Around 1,500 Jacobites were killed or wounded and the survivors retreated into the Highlands. Clan leaders were keen to regroup and continue fighting, to try and force an amnesty from the government, but ultimately it was Charles who called an end to the rebellion, abandoning his army to try and escape to France just four days after the battle.

The aftermath of Culloden was brutal and bloody; the Duke of Cumberland determined to eliminate the Jacobite threat once and for all and the structures of Highland society were swiftly dismantled. Chiefs were deprived of their legal powers and clansmen of their weapons. Prisoners were taken, homes burned, women assaulted and civilians murdered. Jacobite estates were seized by the crown, and kilt and tartan were banned.

The battlefield can still be visited today and features a 20-foot cairn, erected by Duncan Forbes in 1881. Headstones lie on either side of the road through the battlefield, bearing the names of dead clan members, while information on the battle can be found at the visitor centre.

Visit www.nts.org.uk

]]>Barbarossa and Britainhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/barbarossa-and-britain/2011-06-18T19:52:44.000ZIt was one of the biggest cock-ups in modern history. By noon on day one about a quarter of the Red Air Force, over 1,200 planes, had been destroyed – many of them still sitting on their runways, wing to wing.

Operation Barbarossa, named for the legendary 12th-century emperor, began just before dawn on 22 June 1941. Over three million German troops surged into the Soviet Union along a front of more than one thousand miles. Hitler’s Panzers thrust through unprepared defences and curled, pincer-like, around shocked and leaderless Soviet troops: hundreds of thousands surrendered en masse. In Soviet Cold War military doctrine, Barbarossa was characterised as a surprise attack, yet the German build-up had been evident for months before June 1941. The real intelligence failure was not one of information but assumptions, and the errors were made at the very top – by the veteran Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Stalin had no illusions about the underlying enmity between Nazism and communism or about Hitler's appetite for living space in the east. He had tried to divert the führer westward against Britain and France through the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 but this apparently brilliant act of Realpolitik – which earned him Time magazine's accolade of 'Man of the Year' – boomeranged spectacularly when the Wehrmacht smashed the French army in May 1940. Although Britain still held out, Hitler was now free to turn east, years earlier than Stalin had expected.

Stalin could see what was coming but he got the timing all wrong. In 1938 Hitler had waged a war of nerves for months over Czechoslovakia, similarly in 1939 before he invaded Poland, and Stalin expected something similar in 1941. Desperately playing for time, he was determined not to give the führer any excuse to invade – hence his failure to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead Barbarossa began without warning. When General Georgii Zhukov phoned at 4am with the news, all he heard was heavy breathing. “Comrade Stalin,” he kept asking, “do you understand?”

Sunday 22 June 1941 was the start of a brutal struggle that took the German army to the gates of Moscow and deep into the Caucasus before ending up, in1945, in the ruins of Berlin. In the process, about 28 million Soviet citizens died, roughly one-seventh of the prewar population. In the siege of Leningrad alone more Russians lost their lives than the total British and American war dead put together.

Yet Russia’s war is still poorly understood in Britain and the west. Epic battles such as Stalingrad and Berlin have become celebrated but, for the most part, the eastern front remains a sideshow to our familiar story of Dunkirk, Alamein, Normandy and Arnhem. Yet Winston Churchill had no doubt that Russia’s survival was vital for Britain in the dark days of 1941 and 1942.

Britain’s new friend

On the day Barbarossa began Churchill spoke on BBC radio, reiterating his detestation of communism but insisting that any enemy of Hitler was Britain’s friend. Or, as he put it more colourfully to an aide: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” His justification was partly moral – Hitler was “a monster of wickedness” – but he warned listeners that there was a “deeper motive” than mere “blood-lust” behind the führer’s unprovoked attack: “His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles,” which could be mounted with impunity once the Soviet state had been destroyed.

Today we assume that the Battle of Britain had been decided in 1940 but Churchill wasn’t so confident in 1941. On 1 July he told President Roosevelt in a top-secret telegram: “I am asking that everything here shall be at concert pitch for invasion from 1 September.” British intelligence reckoned that the Russians would survive only three to six weeks against the army that had sliced through France.

We now know that, although the Germans made it to the outskirts of Moscow (marked today by a monumental tank-trap), Russia survived the onslaught of 1941. In retrospect it’s tempting to assume that Hitler’s Wehrmacht would inevitably meet the same fate as Napoleon’s Grande Armée – overwhelmed by the vastness of Russia and by the country’s greatest military supremo, ‘General Winter’.

But the story of 1941 was repeated the following year. Stalin believed that the successful counterattack outside Moscow in December 1941 presaged the disintegration of the invaders. Predicting “the total defeat of the Nazi forces in 1942,” he ordered massive offensives all along the front. His Hitler-like hubris exposed and exhausted his army, laying it open to new German offensives from May 1942.

This time Hitler followed his instinct, avoiding Moscow and driving south-east into the Caucasus. Again the Red Army reeled back. Despite Stalin’s frantic order “Not One Step Back” – brutally enforced by blocking battalions – the encircled Soviet troops surrendered in droves.

Although today our eyes tend to focus on Stalingrad, what worried Churchill and Whitehall in the summer of 1942 was the possibility that the Wehrmacht would thrust on to Iraq and the Persian Gulf, threatening Britain’s oil supplies. If that happened, neutral Turkey would probably throw in its lot with Hitler, maybe allowing a link-up with Rommel’s Afrika Korps which was steamrollering towards the Suez Canal. The rampaging Germans might even join forces with the Japanese, to threaten India from the west as well as the east.

Nightmares perhaps, but all too vivid in the fevered atmosphere of that summer. In 1941 Russia’s collapse would have exposed the British Isles to the Nazi war machine; in 1942 the whole British empire seemed in jeopardy.

This was why Churchill made an epic trip to Moscow in August 1942. Stalin had been demanding a Second Front – a cross-channel attack to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. Having concluded even before the disaster of the Dieppe Raid that this would be a suicide mission, Churchill believed he had to give Stalin the bad news face-to-face – and then sweeten it with a confidential briefing about the landings planned as an alternative in Morocco and Algeria. But he and his key military adviser General Sir Alan Brooke also wanted to make their own assessment of whether the Caucasus would hold. Brooke, in particular, was far from confident, judging that the door “seemed to be wide open for the Germans to walk through” into the Middle East.

These are now the forgotten ‘what ifs’ of the Second World War because Hitler never made it across the Caucasus mountains. Instead he was sucked into the epic battle in the cauldron of Stalingrad which turned into a monumental disaster, one that could not be concealed from his people. Having trumpeted the imminent conquest of Stalingrad, the Nazi media suddenly had to admit that the German Sixth Army had surrendered. For Germans, writes historian Ian Kershaw, “Stalingrad was the greatest single blow of the war” – a psychological as well as a military turning point.

The battle of Alamein – the long-awaited victory of British empire forces over Rommel’s Afrika Korps – had been fought a couple of months earlier, in November 1942. But Stalingrad was a much greater conflict, involving nearly two million men, not 300,000, and it mattered more in the overall balance of the war. To make the point in another way: in the three years between June 1941 and June 1944, from the opening of Barbarossa until D-Day, 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army.

So the battle for Russia was vitally important for Britain and its empire. Just how important for the outcome of the war compared with other factors remains a matter of debate among scholars. For instance, Britain might have gone under without American financial aid via Lend-Lease, which covered more than half of its balance of payments deficit during the war. On the other hand, if Britain had succumbed in 1940, the Second World War might have turned out very differently for Russia and even America. And the British and American bomber offensive, whatever its impact on German production and morale, forced Hitler to divert much of the Luftwaffe to home defence, so denying vital air cover to his armies in the east as well as the west.

The debate will go on but it is clear that Operation Barbarossa, which began so dramatically 70 years ago this month, deserves a central place in any reckoning. And that raises a larger point about the way our country marks the great anniversaries of the Second World War. As we commemorate the heroism of British veterans – in the Battle of Britain or the Battle of the Atlantic, in the deserts of north Africa or the mud of France and Germany – we should remember our allies as well. Seventy years on, we need an international perspective on this truly global war.

Professor David Reynolds's books include In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (Penguin 2005). His film Uncle Joe, about Stalin and Churchill, will air on BBC Four in June.

Five key moments in Russia’s war

From terror in Moscow to triumph in Berlin

1) The battle for Moscow was a close-run thing. Panic gripped the capital in mid-October 1941 – and Zhukov's successful counterattack in December was only possible because Stalin knew, from agents in Tokyo, that Japan would remain neutral. This enabled him to move fresh divisions from Siberia.

2) Stalingrad is now a byword for heroism: holding the city was vital for Russia's war. But Zhukov's counterattack around the rear of Hitler's Sixth Army was equally important, not least because Stalin – hitherto a bungling meddler – had finally learnt to let his generals fight in their own way and their own time.

3) Kursk in July 1943 is rarely remembered in the west, compared with Stalingrad but this was the biggest tank battle in history. And Soviet victory marked the beginning of the Red Army's inexorable drive west. Stalingrad turned the tide; Kursk opened the floodgates.

4) Bagration was the Soviet offensive in Belarus, launched in June 1944. In the west it is overshadowed by D-Day, which took place two weeks earlier, but it was at least as important. In a month the Red Army advanced 400 miles to the edge of Warsaw.

5) The battle for berlin was a gut issue for Russians. Three army groups blasted through ferocious German resistance in three weeks. While Stalin stripped the city of its wealth, his soldiers were free to loot and rape. Berlin was payback time for all that the Soviet peoples had suffered from the Germans.

Britain and Russia’s war

Stalin had dug his own hole and Britain could do little to help

Soviet-era historians, guided by the regime, took a fiercely nationalist view of the ‘Great Patriotic War’, playing down the contribution of Russia’s allies. But it is now clear that American and British aid amounted to ten per cent of Soviet GDP in 1943 and 1944 – a not insignificant contribution.

Much of this assistance was shipped hazardously in some 40 British convoys to Russia’s Arctic ports, costing 92 merchant vessels and 18 warships. So serious was the sea and air threat from the Germans that Churchill stopped the convoys on several occasions in 1942 and 1943 – much to Soviet anger.

But Stalin never understood the importance of the Royal Navy and the merchant marine to the survival of Britain, an island empire. Similarly, he and his generals tended to underestimate the challenge of mounting a ‘Second Front’ on the beaches of France, sometimes comparing a crossing of the English Channel to vaulting over a big river such as the Dnieper.

In the summer of 1942 British opinion polls regularly indicated 60 per cent support for an invasion of Hitler’s Europe that year to aid “our gallant Russian allies”. But the public did not appreciate the weakness of the British army, which had to be invented as a major fighting force almost overnight after the fall of France. It took years to mobilise and train effective combat troops, not to mention producing supplies and equipment, especially good tanks. And the US army had started to gear up for war a year later than Britain.

So ‘Second Front Now’ was an easy slogan but very hard to deliver. Churchill was probably too wary about crossing the channel. Even in June 1944 he feared another Dunkirk. But an invasion of France in 1943 could easily have been a disaster.

Russia’s war mattered vitally to the British but there was little that Britain could do to decide the outcome. Stalin had dug his own hole in 1939-41; he then had to dig himself out of it, at a huge cost to the peoples of the Soviet Union.

Discover more learning from week one of the HistoryExtra Academy course on D-Day and the Normandy Campaign

Video lecture: The Decision, with Taylor Downing – watching time 11 mins Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings? – reading time 8 mins Podcast: D-Day: everything you wanted to know – listening time 54 mins When and why did the US get involved in WW2 – reading time 9 mins

This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]>Why didn’t the Allies march on Berlin in 1918?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-didnt-the-allies-march-on-berlin-in-1918/2011-06-18T19:44:51.000ZSunday 29 September 1918 was the day the Allies broke through the Hindenburg Line. In February 1917 the Germans on the western front had withdrawn to a series of positions named after characters from Wagner’s operas. They were designed to be as formidable as the military engineers could possibly make them.

The central sector, opposite the British in Picardy, was the Siegfried Stellung or Siegfried position, known to the Allies as the Hindenburg Line. In five great attacks between March and July 1918 the Germans had advanced 50 miles or more westwards from the Line, menacing Paris, the Allies’ lateral railways, and the channel ports. But between July and September they were expelled from these conquests, and between 26 and 29 September the Allies launched four co-ordinated attacks from Flanders to the Argonne. This was the biggest battle of the First World War, and the piercing of the Hindenburg Line marked its climax.

The breakthrough was accomplished by north Midland troops of the 46th Division in the British Fourth Army. They were a competent but not an elite force. The German positions in this sector ran along the Saint-Quentin canal, a waterway 35 feet wide between brick-faced walls 10 feet high. Protected by dense layers of barbed wire and machine guns to the west and by artillery on the east bank, it lay at the centre of six lines of defences. In 1916 or 1917 such a position would have been impregnable. But now it fell in less than a day. The key to success – apart from the demoralisation of the German troops – was an extraordinarily intense and accurate bombardment, 126 shells per minute raining down on each 500 yards of German trench for a period of eight hours. The infantry attack began at 5.50am and by 8.30 the Staffordshires were over the canal, using collapsible boats, mud-mats, scaling ladders, and lifeboats from channel steamers. By 3.30pm they were three miles beyond; by 3 October they were into open country. This Allied achievement was one of the most striking of the war.

Yet it was only one among many. On 15 September Allied forces in the Balkans had begun another offensive that forced Germany’s partner, Bulgaria, to conclude a ceasefire. On 19 September British empire forces (mainly Indian and Australian) began an advance that encircled and destroyed the Turkish armies in northern Palestine at the battle of Megiddo, before driving on into Syria.

On the western front itself, Germany could no longer hope to take the offensive or to hold even the strongest defensive line. On 26–28 September the Ypres salient, territory which the British had taken three months to conquer in the terrible third battle of Ypres in 1917, was recaptured by the Allies in two days. Their advancing forces now faced a beaten army.

During 1918 the western front had witnessed a dramatic reversal of fortunes. After Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power, Russia had left the war in March, signing the peace of Brest-Litovsk. Although Germany kept hundreds of thousands of occupation troops in the east, it moved even greater numbers to France and Belgium and for the first time achieved a numerical advantage on the western front, enabling it to unleash a succession of offensives. These attacks, however, cost the German army more than a million dead, wounded, and captured, and after July it lost another three-quarters of a million. Such losses could not be made good. From August, tens of thousands of German soldiers surrendered every month, and tens of thousands more deserted or failed to return from leave.

Meanwhile the Allies built up a massive numerical advantage because the Ludendorff offensives created an emergency and obliged the Americans to accelerate their transatlantic troop shipments. American service personnel in France totalled only 220,000 in March 1918 but by November they exceeded two million, and in the final weeks they fought two major battles: at St-Mihiel and on the Meuse-Argonne.

American assistance had become indispensable, but British and French forces still held most of the front and inflicted most of the damage on the enemy. Both – especially the French – were very tired, and by 1918 the British were sending out boys of 17. But the Allied armies were better and more heavily equipped than in previous years, and more skilled in using their weapons. They enjoyed superior logistics (partly because Britain and America had supplied the French railways with personnel and rolling stock) and for the first time they possessed the advantage in intelligence, repeatedly surprising their opponents.

The Allies also operated hundreds of tanks whereas the Germans had only a handful (though tanks were a useful rather than a decisive weapon, progressing at little more than walking pace and highly vulnerable to artillery fire). Air superiority contributed to the intelligence advantage, and aerial observation and photography enabled the Allied artillery to silence the enemy guns. Combined with the ‘creeping barrage’ – a curtain of fire moving close ahead of advancing infantry – these methods enabled the Allies to overwhelm the German defences, and endowed them with a superiority to which the Germans had no answer.

This being the case, why did the Allies agree to a ceasefire, even though on 11 November their armies had yet to reach the German border? The answer is less military than political, and is bound up with the rise to prominence of the United States, a power with an isolationist tradition that had declared its neutrality in 1914. It entered the war in 1917 because of German attacks on Allied and neutral shipping and a clumsy German attempt to ally with Mexico. Yet President Woodrow Wilson continued to suspect his new partners – Britain, France and Italy – of imperialism, and his suspicion was reinforced when the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties concluded between the European Allies and Tsar Nicholas II.

Wilson therefore distanced himself from the Allies when in January 1918 he set out a moderate and idealistic peace programme in his Fourteen Points, including his proposal for a League of Nations to secure peace after the war. The United States described itself not as an Allied but as an ‘Associated’ Power, retaining the right to conclude a separate peace.

Essential to the calculations behind Germany’s ceasefire appeal of 4/5 October was the hope of splitting Wilson from the harder men: David Lloyd George in London, Georges Clemenceau in Paris, and Vittorio Orlando in Rome. The Germans applied not to the Allies collectively but just to the American president, requesting a ceasefire linked to a peace based on the Fourteen Points. They combined their appeal with a stage-managed democratisation at home, a new government under Prince Max of Baden being established that pledged itself to constitutional reform.

Wilson had not made ‘regime change’ in Berlin an explicit objective, but he had described Wilhelm II’s autocracy and the German military as obstacles to peace. And at first it seemed he was responding as the Germans hoped he would. Without consulting the European Allies he began a public exchange of notes, proceeding while the fighting continued. By 23 October it appeared that Washington and Berlin had agreed on a peace based on the Fourteen Points, leaving the European Allies out in the cold. Wilson now asked his partners if they too would agree to end the war on this basis. A conference held in Paris from 29 October to 4 November between the Allied prime ministers and Wilson’s envoy, Colonel Edward House, would determine the response.

The cost of war

Wilson had seized the chance to act as an arbiter, seeking to railroad both sides into accepting American terms. Although the American commander, John J Pershing, urged that the victors should demand unconditional surrender, and some of the opposition Republican party wanted to fight on to Berlin, the president had many reasons for calling a halt. One was financial: the war was costing far more than originally expected, and now that a huge American army was stationed overseas it had to be paid for in francs and in sterling.

More significant for Wilson, the Republicans were heading for success in the mid-term Congressional elections. He had not realised, he told House, “how war-mad our people have become”. Indeed, if the war had continued into 1919 his domestic support would have crumbled. In addition, he feared that too complete a victory would weaken his leverage over Britain and France. Yet Wilson was less naïve than the Germans supposed, and he had no intention of simply granting Berlin a breathing space. He insisted that the Allied commanders must decide the ceasefire’s military and naval terms. Once the Germans had accepted this crucial point, not just Wilson’s cabinet but most of American public opinion rallied round in supporting his judgement that further bloodshed was unnecessary.

To understand the armistice, we must therefore see it as partly a political and partly a technical arrangement. At the Paris conference the European Allies accepted most of the American political programme but they set the military conditions. Compromise was assisted by the play of personalities. Wilson sent House to represent him, and perhaps due to their friendship he failed to provide clear instructions. House was more of a fixer, more conciliatory than the president: he got on well with the Allied premiers and was eager to please. Conversely, Orlando, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George distrusted each other too much to form a united front. Lloyd George could live with the American programme except for Point Two – the ‘freedom of the seas’ – which threatened Britain’s right to impose blockades and therefore its maritime supremacy. Clemenceau and Orlando gave way, and the Allies agreed to a peace based on the Fourteen Points minus Point Two while reserving their right to demand reparations: a hint of trouble to come. With some justice, House reassured a sceptical Wilson that this outcome was “a great diplomatic victory”.

The armistice’s technical clauses conveyed a different impression. The British admirals demanded and eventually obtained the handover of all of Germany’s submarines and its most modern warships. The American admirals would have preferred them not to go to Britain, but a compromise of detaining them in a neutral harbour proved unworkable.

Rapid withdrawal

On land the lead was taken by the French marshal Ferdinand Foch, who in spring 1918 had been appointed Allied commander-in-chief. He ignored Pershing’s demand for unconditional surrender and the surprisingly moderate views of the British commander, Sir Douglas Haig. Instead Foch insisted that the Allies must occupy Alsace-Lorraine (lost by France to Germany in 1871) and the territories on the left bank (west) of the Rhine and bridgeheads east of the river. He set a schedule for withdrawal so rapid that the Germans would have to abandon most of their heavy weaponry.

Allied troops would also occupy all the territory where France had ambitions (Clemenceau hoped not only to regain Alsace-Lorraine but also to establish French-dominated buffer states in the Rhineland) and Germany would be militarily crippled. House accepted Foch’s conditions, probably in return for Clemenceau agreeing to the Fourteen Points, and although Lloyd George thought the scheme excessive, it was his turn to be left isolated.

In short, the armistice reflected the balance of power between the victors. Britain, France and the USA all made vital contributions to Germany’s defeat. The European countries needed American money, supplies and troops, but the USA needed British shipping, and equipped its soldiers with French-built aircraft, tanks and guns. No single one of the three was dominant, and all three needed to agree before the war could end. If fighting had gone on into 1919 the Allies would certainly have invaded Germany, but the British army was so short of manpower that it would have had to suppress perhaps one third of its divisions, and Jan Christiaan Smuts warned his colleagues in the war cabinet that America “would dictate to the world”. Foch wanted to end the fighting before France’s influence ebbed. Wilson feared the European Allies would gain in bargaining power; they feared the reverse.

By early November Germany had lost its allies and was exploding into revolution at home (see ‘Germany’s Plight’ box). Now that neither the German, French, British, nor Americans saw political advantage in fighting on, statesmen and generals in all four countries asserted that doing so would be a waste of lives. They displayed a humanitarian concern that previously had been absent. Ironically – or so it was argued in retrospect – the decision to stop the war was premature, and by making it easier for Germany to try again, meant that millions more lives were lost a generation later. If the Allies had carried on for a few weeks more the German revolution would have cut off supplies and visited disaster on the German army, which instead marched home in good order. These circumstances helped the Nazis to insinuate that Germany had not really been beaten, and defeat resulted from a ‘stab in the back’ on the home front.

Yet the issue is not so simple. It is facile to suggest that after the Second World War the peace was more enduring because this time Germany had been invaded and occupied. Many other factors contributed to post-1945 stability, including the willingness of Britain, America and the Soviet Union to maintain troops in central Europe for 40 years, as well as American economic assistance via the Marshall Plan.

In 1918, by contrast, Wilson wanted a League of Nations but no lasting occupation or economic commitment in Europe, envisaging that American private investors would finance reconstruction. Moreover, the military and naval terms of the 11 November armistice were so severe that Germany was in fact rendered helpless, and obliged to accept the humiliating terms of the Versailles peace treaty in June 1919. In turn, those terms so curtailed its armed forces that it could not start another major war, and provided for the Rhineland to remain occupied for at least 15 years and to be demilitarised in perpetuity.

The real undermining of the peace came when the Versailles disarmament and security provisions collapsed without resistance once Hitler challenged them. That collapse, however, was far from being made inevitable by the victors’ decisions in 1918.

David Stevenson is professor of international history at the London School of Economics. His book With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 was published by Penguin last month.

Germany’s plight

Why the losers were forced to accept a ceasefire on any terms available

In Germany by 1918 the army high command (Oberste Heeresleitung or OHL) had enormous political influence. The chief of the General Staff was Paul von Hindenburg, but much of the brains and energy in the military leadership came from first quartermaster-general Erich Ludendorff. The precondition for Germany to seek a ceasefire was for Ludendorff to lose faith in the possibility of victory, which effectively he did after suffering a breakdown at headquarters on 28 September and demanding an immediate ceasefire.

The trigger for this was the news that Germany’s ally Bulgaria was seeking an armistice; but the underlying reason was that Germany had failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough during its offensives of March–July and was now relentlessly being pushed back towards its borders, while army discipline was breaking down.

Once Ludendorff pressed for a ceasefire, Hindenburg rapidly agreed, as did the civilian government and Emperor Wilhelm II. The request was accompanied by the formation of a new government under Prince Max of Baden that included the Catholics and Social Democrats. It was hoped that this “revolution from above” (the phrase of foreign minister Paul von Hintze) would head off revolution from below and saddle the leftwing parties with co-responsibility for defeat. In Ludendorff’s words: “They will sup the broth that they have cooked.”

After the ceasefire request went out on 4/5 October, this strategy of damage limitation – of extricating Germany from a lost war on as favourable terms as possible – broke down. The Americans and Allies demanded more rigorous terms than Ludendorff had anticipated. He tried to row back, arguing that the war could be continued after all, at least for several months. The government reviewed the situation and decided to continue negotiations. Ludendorff lost all credibility with the politicians, and on 26 October Emperor Wilhelm dismissed him.

While the Allies continued to advance on the western front, Germany lost its partners: Ottoman Turkey signed a ceasefire and Austria-Hungary broke up into its component nationalities. In Germany itself revolution broke out in early November after the navy attempted to sabotage the armistice negotiations by planning a suicide attack against the Thames estuary.

A socialist provisional government took over in Berlin while soviets (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) spread across the country and Wilhelm abdicated. These developments forced the new government and the army high command to accept a ceasefire on any terms available.

Timeline

The final year of the war

8 January

American president Woodrow Wilson announces to Congress his Fourteen Points peace programme

3 March

Peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers

21 March

Start of Operation Michael, the first of Germany's 'Ludendorff offensives', attempting to defeat the Allies before American troops arrive in force. It is followed by Operations Georgette in Flanders on 9 April and Blücher-Yorck in Champagne on 27 May

15/18 July

Opening of the second battle of the Marne. The final German attack is halted in Champagne, followed by an Allied counter stroke led by French and American forces. Germans are in retreat from now on

8 August

Opening of the battle of Amiens, described by Ludendorff as "the black day of the German army". British empire and French forces attack in Picardy and drive the Germans back from their March gains, taking thousands of prisoners

26–29 September

Four co-ordinated Allied attacks along the western front. On 29 September British forces break through the Hindenburg Line

28–29 September

German high command decides a ceasefire is necessary

4/5 October

New German government under Prince Max of Baden (pictured right) sends armistice request to Woodrow Wilson

29 October–4 November

Allied-American conference at Paris agrees on armistice terms

9 November

German revolution. Wilhelm II flees to Holland and is replaced by a socialist provisional government

11 November

Armistice signed at 5am and takes effect at 11am

This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

]]>Postwar squatters: a very British uprisinghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/postwar-squatters-a-very-british-uprising/2011-06-18T19:01:11.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

Housing, or the lack of it, is a theme that keeps cropping up in British history. With fears of the young being priced out of the market, and government efforts to cap housing benefit payments, the issue is still headline news.

Britain’s housing problems just after the Second World War were even more pressing than today, but in a very British uprising, many people solved their accommodation woes by taking matters into their own hands. During the summer of 1946, thousands of families, most headed by ex-servicemen, illegally occupied the military camps which were now lying disused.

Virtually no new houses had been built during the war. Most building workers were in the forces, while those remaining had laboured on projects deemed essential to the war effort.

The Luftwaffe, and later Hitler’s V-bombs, had destroyed tens of thousands of homes. Many damaged buildings had been hastily and inadequately repaired.

The war had also seen an upsurge in the birthrate. And now over four million men and women were being ‘demobbed’ from the forces and returning home.

Britain needed millions of new houses; it was a promise on every party’s manifesto in the 1945 election campaign. And it was an issue that threatened to overwhelm Attlee’s Labour government when it came to power in July of that year. Its massive housing programme was dogged by shortages – and frequent thefts – of building materials. Contractors also complained of being held back by excessive red tape and over-regulation.

Former arms factories were now turning out well-designed and high-quality prefabricated homes as a temporary measure, but they weren’t being produced in nearly enough numbers.

Already in 1945, some leftwing ex-servicemen tried their own solution, and with some success. The so-called ‘vigilante campaign’ saw a number of empty private properties being occupied by squatters in towns along the south coast.

People began to squat in empty military sites the following summer. The movement may well have started in Scunthorpe, where workers were moving in large numbers for jobs in the expanding steel industry, only to find there was nowhere to live.

Another early site to be occupied was at Vache Park, Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire. The army camp there had been earmarked for resettlement of Polish ex-servicemen, but a group of British veterans moved their families in first.

On 13 August 1946 The Times reported from Vache Camp: "The huts now occupied nearly all have inscriptions chalked on them, such as 'Taken by ------'. In each of them there was already a heavy deal table and a wardrobe cupboard. This cupboard has also been used by most families as a post for setting up a curtain to separate one corner of the hut for use as a bedroom. The remainder of the hut serves as living room and kitchen with the large fireplace as kitchen stove, for which dead wood from trees outside is abundantly available."

The idea spread across the UK – including Northern Ireland – with astonishing speed in the middle weeks of August.

Some buildings were high-quality brick or concrete places built for the British or American forces. Others were draughty, ramshackle and leaking; some had even become shelters for livestock. Few of the camps had water, sewage or electricity services.

For many people, even a derelict Nissen hut was preferable to having the whole family living in one or two rooms. Military huts provided plenty of space, and most could be made habitable easily enough.

Grabbing a hut

Tom Kirk, for example, came out of the army in 1946 after serving in north Africa and Italy and resumed his married life, living with his wife’s parents in Bristol. “They were very nice people, but I wanted my independence, and then there was this squatting all over the country…”

He grabbed a hut at a small camp to the north of the city and moved in with his wife Joan. "We were fortunate: there was a sink in there with a cold tap," he told BBC History Magazine. "I altered the hut to make it a bedroom and living room, and we had one of those round Soyer stoves. I was then working at the smelting works as a fitter's mate, and I got the welder to make me an oven, which we fitted on the top of the stove."

From newspaper reports and readers’ letters, it’s clear almost everyone sympathised with the squatters. Empty government property was seen as fair game; it was the government’s responsibility to provide housing, and government property belonged to the people anyway.

The newsreels and papers presented squatting as the Blitz spirit, as ‘make-do-and-mend’. It was part of the armed forces’ tradition of ‘scrounging’ or ‘liberating’ much-needed items.

Willing to pay

Key to public support was the insistence of all squatters that they were more than willing to pay rent. Many of the camps started out with management committees which collected money for this purpose. In any event, squatting was a civil rather than criminal offence; it wasn’t possible just to send the police in to eject them.

Quickly and quietly, the government pragmatically caved in. It set up regional committees to deal with the camp question. Where a site was needed, the committees were charged with instigating eviction proceedings. In the great majority of cases, however, management was devolved to local councils, which became responsible for providing water, electricity and sewage services, and for collecting rents (typically between seven and ten shillings a week). Most councils were delighted to co-operate as the squatters were taking pressure off council house waiting lists.

Then, in September the Communist party decided to raise the stakes. Communists in London organised the occupation of a number of privately owned (but empty) flats in the West End. The action was well organised and determined, and it scared the wits out of every property-owner in the land.

Even the normally staid Illustrated London News condemned these new squatters as "the dupes of Communist promises and the cat's-paws of the party's tactics".

The government acted quickly. Some ringleaders were arrested and charged with incitement to trespass, although they were treated sympathetically by the courts. The West End squatters were evicted, but quickly rehoused. A potentially serious threat to private property had been headed off. But the camps remained occupied.

By October, the vast majority of empty military premises – from anti-aircraft batteries with a hut or two, to extensive military hospitals and barracks – were occupied. The Commons was informed that across the UK over 46,000 people were living in 1,811 camps.

Most would leave within the next few years, as the house-building programme picked up speed and council houses became available. Yet, in a few places, good quality camp buildings were converted into permanent homes.

In most histories of postwar Britain the squatters’ movement hardly rates more than a few pages or a footnote. It’s almost completely forgotten, except by those who lived in the camps. But it was, briefly, part of the transformation of the country.

Eileen Milton has one of the best stories from that time. Eileen, her husband Bill and their three children, occupied a Nissen hut in what had been a PoW camp housing Italians. “I needed a clothes line, so one Sunday afternoon we all went to the entrance barrier pole, sawed it off, and then we all carried it back to the hut. And now I had a lovely clothes line!”

Eugene Byrne is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes answers for our Q&A pages.

]]>My history hero: Sir Alec Clegg (1909-86)https://www.historyextra.com/membership/my-history-hero-sir-alec-clegg-1909-86/2011-06-18T18:52:56.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

Sir Alec Clegg was the pioneering chief education officer of the West Riding of Yorkshire County Council for nearly 30 postwar years. A bespectacled local government administrator, Clegg was nonetheless a huge inspiration to teachers and pupils under his control. He placed enormous, if not overwhelming emphasis on the arts when drawing up the curriculum for the region and was the founder of Bretton Hall College, the West Yorkshire college specialising in arts and performance whose alumni include actor Colin Welland, comedian Mark Thomas and members of The League Of Gentlemen.

When did you first hear of Sir Alec Clegg?

He once visited our school. I was only about six or seven but I remember all the teachers turning up in their posh frocks. Mr Moody had a suit on! Mrs Hudson had this bright red lipstick! Then this little chap with glasses on came in. He was Alec Clegg – he wasn't Sir Alec at that point. He took away this book that I'd written called The Little Red Engine, which I'd cut out into the shape of an engine. They were all so proud. He produced this fantastic book called The Excitement of Writing in which he printed some amazing children's writing. He more or less said, not in so many words, that the children's writing was as important as Shakespeare or Dickens. You can do this. You can become Shakespeare or Dickens. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be doing what I do now.

What kind of person was he?

I think he was a very warm person. When he came to our school, people were attracted to him. He had a charisma to him and I think you get charisma from being completely sure of who you are. He looked like a bureaucrat – he wore a suit all the time. Normally your heroes are generals or sportsmen. They aren’t people who sit on committees.

What made him a hero?

He opened up so many things for so many people. He said: “All children can be creative. You’re from a pit village in Barnsley but you can be a writer or an artist. Your work and your ideas are as valid as anyone else’s.” Creativity was a huge plank of the curriculum. In my school in the village where I still live, we had string quartets and theatre groups visiting. The West Yorkshire Abstract Art van would come round every six months with some abstract art to stick on the wall. You’d write a poem at the end of your history lesson or your maths lesson. The arts in education wasn’t the cherry on top of the cake. He believed it was the entire cake.

What was his finest hour?

I think it was a lecture he gave at Bingley College of Education in 1974 called 'The Creativity of Children'. It was just before his retirement and the local government reorganisation that closed West Riding: [Reading transcript] "There is good in every child, however damaged, repellent or ill-favoured he might be." It's just a great lecture. I imagine teachers wept at it and rushed the stage. But that probably didn't happen…

Are there any parallels between his life and your own?

A lot of my life has been spent in workshops encouraging people who didn’t think they were creative. I’ve led writing workshops with people with mental health problems, people who can’t read and write, people with Alzheimer’s… That was through him saying that everybody can do it. I can’t just sit there and write. I have to go out and get other people going.

Is there anything you don't particularly like about him?

I’ve never thought about that. I wish he’d worn a suit less often. Excessive suit-wearing – it’s always a crime, isn’t it?

Ian McMillan was talking to Nige Tassell.

Ian McMillan is one of this country's best-loved poets. Aside from regular appearances on flagship BBC Radio 4 programmes like Today and Just A Minute, he presents The Verb, BBC Radio 3's Friday-night celebration of the written word. He is also poet-in-residence for both the English National Opera and Barnsley FC.

]]>How the war was wonhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-the-war-was-won/2011-06-18T14:54:05.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

In January 1918, many thought a German victory in the First World War possible. Defeat and revolution had left Russia tottering and at Brest-Litovsk in March the Bolsheviks accepted harsh German terms. This allowed large numbers of German troops to transfer from the eastern to the western front. On 21 March 1918, the Germans launched the first of their spring offensives, devastating the British Fifth Army on the Somme. That day, 21,000 British troops were captured and the British pushed back, leading Viscount Ebrington to note in May: "I am where I was in March and April 1915 – little did we think we should be here now." Yet, six months later the Allies had won the war and Germany was suing for peace. How did this happen?

Q: What explanations have traditionally been offered for the German defeat?

A: Allied victory has been explained in two different fashions. Some accounts focus on Allied forces out-fighting the German army on the western front. Others emphasise, instead, the German internal crisis created by the strains of the war, specifically the Allied blockade of the country.

The latter approach has tended to predominate, and the extent to which the Allies bettered the Germans militarily has not received the attention it deserves, including among the victors. The Germans, in particular, preferred the ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend, attributing defeat to leftwing disaffection at home, an argument that was to be employed by the Nazis. Yet, in reality, the German forces in 1918 were defeated and dramatically driven back on the western front, in the very theatre where their strength was concentrated.

Q: So assuming that 1918 was very much a military victory, how were the Allies able to achieve this? Was it the impact of the Americans?

A: In April–October 1918, over 1,600,000 American troops crossed the Atlantic, transforming a German superiority on the western front of 300,000 men in March 1918 to an Allied one of 200,000 men four months later. This was the largest movement to date of troops across an ocean.

The Americans were fresh and well fed, and had the war continued longer, they would have made a crucial difference – not least as they would have been better trained and many would have been blooded. The knowledge that they would be a factor certainly helped stiffen Allied resolve and influenced the German Supreme Army Command. From July, when they formed part of the effective French-commanded Marne counter-offensive, the Americans made a difference to the fighting.

Q: What about developments in weaponry?

A: Artillery was very important. By 1918, Allied offensives were far more sophisticated than earlier in the war, featuring precise control of the infantry, massive artillery support, and better communications between the two.

German officers no longer felt they could rely on their units. For the first time, significant numbers of troops deserted

With 440 heavy artillery batteries in November 1918, compared to six in 1914, the British army had far more firepower to call upon too. British gunnery inflicted considerable damage on German defences. The use of the creeping barrage (where artillery fire advanced slowly in front of the troops) had developed appreciably, as had counter-battery doctrine, science and tactics.

Aside from artillery-infantry co-ordination, the British had successfully developed planned indirect firepower. In contrast to direct fire (which relies on a direct line of sight between the weapon and its target), the use of indirect fire depended on accurate intelligence including the extensive use of aerial photography as well as of sound ranging, surveying and meteorology. The use of artillery indirect fire has been seen as the birth of the modern style of warfare in that it signalled the advent of three-dimensional conflict. Artillery certainly emerged as the key element in after-action reports in 1918.

Q: One important weapon introduced in the conflict was the tank. How useful an innovation was that for the Allies?

A: The British and French easily out-produced the Germans in tanks, and their availability contributed to a strong sense that the Germans had lost the advantage. However, as was only to be expected of a weapon that had not had a long process of peacetime development, there were major problems with the reliability of tanks – and these were exacerbated by the shell-damaged terrain across which they had to operate. Many tanks broke down even before reaching the assault point, and in battle tanks rapidly became unfit for service. They were not yet a fast-moving mechanised force.

Q: Were there tactical improvements on the Allied side during the First World War?

A: Tactics were linked to technology, and the tactical dimension was important: more and better guns alone did not suffice. This dimension reflected the long-term development of training, organisation and equipment, one that began for the British in 1915 and gathered pace in 1916. The rapid infantry advance tactics that the British, like the Germans, employed in the latter stages of the war were linked to the development of more portable weapons, which could be carried forward by the infantry while still providing considerable firepower. Grenades, both thrown by hand and fired from rifles, were important, as were lightweight machine guns and mortars, and light artillery pieces.

The British also developed ‘deep battle’, in which they bombarded targets beyond the front, including reinforcements and headquarters. This development benefited greatly from aerial reconnaissance and air-ground support – all made possible by advanced and reliable aircraft, which were not available to the British before 1917.

Q: How did the Allied military leadership contribute to victory?

A: Command factors were significant to Allied success. There were mistakes in planning and execution but, by 1918 – alongside improvements in the effectiveness of staff work at the General Headquarters and at corps headquarters – British commanders had greater relevant operational experience than in 1916. The adoption of unity of command under Ferdinand Foch in the last few months of the war also greatly helped the Allies.

Q: How was Germany finally overcome?

A: By late October 1918, the continuation of the Allied advance indicated that this campaign was to be different from the others. Not only had the Allies overcome the tactical problems of trench warfare, but they had also developed the mechanisms and deployed the resources necessary to sustain their advance in the face of continued resistance, and across a broad front.

The Allies broke through successive German defence lines, and defeat hit German morale. This led to a loss of fighting resilience and of unit cohesion, a situation exacerbated by the increasing superiority of Allied forces. Large numbers of troops surrendered as the Germans were pushed back onto the defensive, and German officers no longer felt they could rely on their units. For the first time in the war, significant numbers of German troops deserted. On 26 October, German commander Ludendorff was dismissed. The German army had been beaten.

The Allies also defeated Germany’s allies: Bulgaria, Turkey and Austria. The first to go was Bulgaria, and its collapse showed how quickly an army could be defeated and how rapidly a state could give in. Launched on 15 September, an Allied attack on the Salonica front rapidly met with complete success. Allied troops were on Bulgarian soil by 25 September, and within days the Bulgarians were asking for an armistice. The news led Ludendorff, on 29 September, to also recommend an armistice. However his decision was probably more affected by Allied successes on the western front than events in south-east Europe.

Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter and author of The Great War and the Making of the Modern World. (Continuum, 2011).

]]>Ye olde travel guide: New Orleans 1858https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ye-olde-travel-guide-new-orleans-1858/2011-06-18T14:33:40.000ZThis article was first published in the June 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine 

When to go

A visit to cosmopolitan New Orleans is a vital part of any fashionable tour of the United States. Not for nothing is it called the Southern Queen. Enriched by its port and the steady flow of steamboats and cotton down the Mississippi river, the city has risen to an extraordinary level of prosperity.

But be warned: avoid New Orleans in the summer months like – or rather, because of – the plague. Yellow Fever is a constant threat, and recent epidemics have been particularly damaging. Almost 8,000 died in 1853 alone. And that’s not to mention the hurricanes that blow in on an all-too regular basis.

So why not travel in the spring, at carnival season? In (historically Catholic) New Orleans, Mardi Gras has always been a time of exuberant celebration, and the introduction last year of innovations like street parades and floats have reinvigorated festivities.

This is a city that delights in opulence and excess, and a proper sampling of its pleasures requires deep pockets

What to take with you/costs

There is nothing that can’t be purchased in New Orleans, so visitors need only ensure they are well supplied with money. This is a city that delights in opulence and excess, and a proper sampling of its pleasures requires deep pockets. Accommodation in the best hotels, for example, might run to five dollars a night.

Sights and activities

Even though the United States took possession of New Orleans from the French in 1803, there are times when you will imagine yourself in Europe. You will notice, too, that the city’s original French neighbourhood – and its inhabitants – remain quite distinct from the newer American parts of town.

Begin your visit with a walk on the steamboat levee, marvel at the scale of commerce, and wonder at the babel of languages and peoples on display (not least, the recent arrivals from Germany and Ireland).

Then, head into the French Quarter, with its distinctive balconies and courtyards, and visit the cathedral in Jackson Square, or the vibrant French Market. A promenade along Canal Street – the dividing line between the French and American districts – is a must: it boasts some of the best shopping in the United States.

At night, the city offers other delights. Its theatres are rightly famous, surpassed only in New York – and the opera, its French supporters argue, is the best in the country. Heading out of town, make time to visit the famous battlefield where, in 1815, Andrew Jackson foiled a British invasion.

Dangers and annoyances

Unfortunately, this modern Babylon is rich in hazards. Disease and disaster aside, the city has an unenviable reputation for violence and vice. Duels are common. Gambling parlours operate day and night. Alcohol is omnipresent, and prostitution is rife.

For a city famed for glamour, the cleanliness of its streets (not to mention its lack of sanitation) leaves a lot to be desired. And visitors who are unfamiliar with the institution of slavery may find that its cruelties rather overshadow the city’s pleasures.

Accommodation

New Orleans boasts some of the grandest hotels in the United States. Visitors seeking luxury have a choice between two rival establishments. The St Charles – "a palace for creature comforts", a recent visitor informs us – is the centre of social life in the American sector. The similarly lavish St Louis, based in the French Quarter, boasts a splendid rotunda under which much of the city's business is transacted. This includes slave auctions, a popular spectacle. Many will recognise this location from Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Those on a more modest budget will be well served by the city’s innumerable boarding-houses, where a room costs around ten dollars a week.

Eating and drinking

William Makepeace Thackeray recently declared New Orleans to be “the city of the world where you can eat and drink the most and suffer the least”. The city certainly offers something to delight the palate of any epicure. Restaurants abound, and the city’s cuisine, though clearly shaped by its French past, incorporates influences from all its diverse inhabitants. Try the gumbo – a local soup, nationally famous; sample a ‘cocktail’; and do your best to get a table at Antoine’s (established in 1840).

Getting around

While New Orleans is a walking city, no visitor should leave without taking the famed carriage drive along the Shell Road to the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. Similarly, visitors must board one of the city’s street railways and take a ride along St Charles Avenue, through the mansion-filled Garden District.

You should be aware, however, that the political situation in America remains unstable. The national division over slavery becomes increasingly bitter, and talk that the southern states might secede from the Union no longer seems frivolous. If secession and war do come to pass, then New Orleans, a place of tactical importance, will be a focus for military action. So make your visit now, to catch the Southern Queen in all her glory.

Thomas Ruys Smith is the author of Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, published by Continuum this month.

New Orleans today

In some ways, not much has changed in New Orleans. The French Quarter is still the Big Easy's distinctive heart and opportunities to eat and drink well abound. New Orleans certainly dances to a different beat from other American cities, and the sound of zydeco, Louisiana Creole folk music, continues to waft through the streets, even if it's joined by jazz, funk, indie and punk today.

Nightlife is a big draw, whether boozing on Bourbon Street or spilling out of a live music joint in the small hours. Mardi Gras is a spectacular reaffirmation of the city though there's a year-round festival calendar to complement the carnival.

In other ways, New Orleans has had to reinvent itself time and again. It's hard to write about the city without mentioning that least welcome of visitors, Hurricane Katrina, who smashed up much of the city in 2005. But visitors won't find a city feeling sorry for itself. The fortunes of New Orleans, like the Saints, its much beloved gridiron team, have risen again. And while areas like Fauborg-Marigny and the Garden District are full of heritage buildings, there's a keen sense of energy and revival about the city too.

Safe, friendly and exciting, New Orleans is still an unmissable and unique part of America’s past, present and future.

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