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The battle of Marston Moor: what happened?
Dominic Sandbrook explores the events of 2 July 1644 – the date that Oliver Cromwell's intervention in the battle of Marston Moor proved decisive in the English Civil Wars
At seven o'clock on the evening of 2 July 1644, Prince Rupert of the Rhine gazed out across the low-lying field of Marston Moor, just outside York. At his back were some 17,000 royalist troops, many exhausted after a long day's march. In front of him, across the fields, were the lines of his combined Parliamentarian and Scottish adversaries, at least 20,000 strong, their armour still glinting in the summer twilight. Rain was in the air; a thunderstorm was brewing. The king's nephew was anxious for battle, but perhaps it could wait until the morning. Hearing the Parliamentarian army singing psalms, he decided to call it a day and told his men to break for supper. Only moments later, the allied army struck. As thunder rolled across the moor, the Scottish and Roundhead allies began to stream down the gentle slope, picking up speed, adrenaline coursing through their horses’ veins. After years of stalemate, the great battle for control of the north, the decisive battle of the Civil War, was under way. Oliver Cromwell: the secret of his military genius At first it seemed that, as so many times before, Rupert’s forces would win the day. On the allied right, Sir Thomas Fairfax’s men struggled to get across the ditches between them and their royalist opponents, many falling under a hail of musket fire. Spotting the enemy musketeers, Fairfax wrote later, he decided “to charge them. We were a long time engaged with one another, but at last we routed that part of their Wing.” He turned to get back to his remaining men, “but that part of the Enemy which stood, perceiving the disorder they were in, had charged and routed them, before I could get to them.” As darkness drew in and the allied right crumpled, the royalists began to make headway in the centre, too. More than half of the Scottish infantry and many of the Parliamentarian forces panicked and ran; for a moment, it looked as though the day was lost for the allied cause. But salvation came from the left, where Lieutenant-General Oliver Cromwell commanded 3,000 cavalry from the Eastern Association, including his renowned Ironsides. Sweeping over the ditch, Cromwell’s men routed the royalists opposite and then regrouped for a second charge – a testament to their commander’s iron discipline, and a stark contrast with Rupert’s infamous recklessness. Scattering the royalist cavalry, Cromwell’s men then turned their attention to the infantry. And in the end, all that was left of Rupert’s army was a regiment of the Marquess of Newcastle’s men, the famous Whitecoats, who huddled in a small enclosure, holding off the Ironsides until their comrades could escape the field. Cromwell had turned a potential stalemate into victory. For the royalists, however, the day was lost. A few hours later, after darkness had fallen, their survivors straggled miserably into York. Listen | Mark Stoyle tackles popular queries about the Civil War, a conflict between Royalists and Parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles in the middle of the 17th century That evening in July was a crushing blow for the royalist cause. With the Marquess of Newcastle fleeing into exile, and Prince Rupert heading south to rejoin his uncle, royalist power in the north of England had been effectively broken. What’s more, while Cromwell’s star had never been higher, Rupert’s was entering a long decline. In the Parliamentarian camp, all was jubilation. “Truly England and the Church of God hath had a great favour from the Lord, in this great victory given unto us, such as the like never was since this war began,” Cromwell wrote that evening to his brother-in-law, Colonel Valentine Walton. “The Left Wing, which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince’s horse. God made them as stubble to our swords.” 10 great misconceptions of the Civil War For all his religious ecstasy, Cromwell had not lost sight of the dreadful cost of victory. His next lines had a very different tone. At least 4,000 men lay lifeless on the moor outside York, among them Walton’s son. “Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot,” Cromwell wrote sadly. “It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.” Yet he urged Walton to take comfort that his son was now with God. “There is your precious child full of glory, never to know sin or sorrow any more… He is a glorious Saint in Heaven; wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice.” This article was first published in the August 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine
A big day in history: Mary Ann Nichols becomes the first victim of ‘Jack the Ripper’ (31 August 1888)
On 31 August 1888, the body of a homeless women, brutally murdered and mutilated, was found in a Whitechapel backstreet. Here, as part of our 'big day in history' series, Dominic Sandbrook explores the discovery of Jack the Ripper's first victim, Mary Ann Nichols
As London’s bells rang in the last day of August 1888, rain was falling. It had been one of the wettest summers in living memory, and there was thunder in the air. On the horizon a fierce red glow seared the sky above Shadwell, where a huge fire had broken out in the dry dock. Some time between one and two o’clock that morning, a woman called Mary Ann Nichols, known to her friends as ‘Polly’, was thrown out of the kitchen of the shabby lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street, Spitalfields. Fate had dealt Polly a rough hand. A 43-year-old mother of five children, she was separated from her husband and now drifted from one workhouse to another, scratching a meagre existence from handouts and casual prostitution. Read more: Your guide to Jack the Ripper 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history The 10 worst Britons in history Short of the four pence she needed to pay for a bed in the lodging house, Polly once more found herself on the street. “Never mind,” she said, gesturing at the velvet-trimmed straw bonnet she was wearing. “I’ll soon get my doss money. See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” The implication was clear: she was heading back out to find a punter. An hour or so later, Polly was seen by one of her roommates on the corner of Whitechapel Road, clearly drunk. She had made her doss money three times over, she boasted, but had already spent it on gin and was off to make some more. That was the last time Mary Ann Nichols was seen alive. At 3.40am, a carter found her lying in the darkened doorway of a stable. Her throat had been slit and her body horribly mutilated. The murderer who would later be dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ had claimed his first victim. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and presenter. This article was first published on History Extra in August 2016
A big day in history: the first baby is born to English settlers in the Americas
Dominic Sandbrook explores how baby Virginia Dare was welcomed to the ill-fated Roanoke colony
In the summer of 1587, an English fleet sailed towards Roanoke Island, just off the coast of what’s now North Carolina. It was led by John White, a gentleman artist and friend of the Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Ralegh, who had been sent to establish a colony in the New World. Some 114 potential settlers accompanied him, among them his daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Ananias Dare, a bricklayer from London. On 18 August, in what must have been basic conditions, Eleanor gave birth to a daughter. The girl was christened Virginia, after the English settlement in North America – itself named after Elizabeth I’s sobriquet: the ‘virgin queen’. Virginia was the first child born to white English-speaking parents anywhere in the Americas. Read more: What happened to the lost colony of Roanoke Island? Tudors in America: how England’s New World colonies came into being (subscription) If her grandfather was delighted, his joy did not last. Only nine days after her birth, White sailed for England, hoping to secure supplies and support for his struggling venture. Delayed by storms and Spanish ships, he did not return for three years, landing – with a grim twist – on the date of Virginia’s third birthday. To his horror he found the settlement deserted, with no sign of life. The settlers, including his daughter and granddaughter, had simply disappeared. What happened to the settlers will surely never be known. Yet little Virginia has become a near-legendary figure in the US, celebrated with stamps, coins, bridges and parks. A popular folk myth holds that Virginia was adopted by Native Americans, magically turned into a white doe and then accidentally killed by a hunter. So whenever a white doe is spotted near Roanoke Island, locals maintain that it is the spirit of Virginia Dare. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and presenter. This article was first published in the August 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
Why has Britain decided to leave the EU?
On 23 June 2016, Britain voted narrowly in favour of leaving the European Union. In the aftermath of this historic decision, we asked five historians to offer their opinions – about the causes of the Leave victory and what it might mean for the country's future
The panel Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter who specialises in 20th-century international history, especially the Second World War. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian, writer and broadcaster who has presented a number of BBC TV series on postwar Britain, including a forthcoming history of the 1980s. David Abulafiais professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University. He is the leader of Historians for Britain, which argued for changes to Britain’s EU membership. Helen McCarthy is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London who works on modern Britain. She edits the journal Twentieth Century British History. Kathleen Burk is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London. Her interests lie in British and Anglo-American history. Were you surprised by the result, and if so, why? Richard Overy: I was not surprised as the result was always a strong possibility given the long history of populist hostility to Europe and the difficulty of finding a popular political language in favour of a European future. The narrow margin was also entirely predictable. Helen McCarthy: I was surprised because I believed the ‘safety first’ argument of the Remain side would resonate in the final days of the campaign and pull undecideds towards Remain. I underestimated the strength of anti-EU sentiment, even in relatively affluent parts of England, such as Essex, Suffolk and Surrey where many stand to lose a great deal in the recession which almost inevitably will follow Brexit. The result confounds the familiar logic of ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ – which has fitted so neatly with the evidence of general elections in recent decades. Do you see the Leave victory as more the result of short or long-term factors? Dominic Sandbrook: Clearly it’s a bit of both. It was close, after all. One very obvious short-term factor, for example, is the fact that Labour had such an extraordinarily unconvincing leader, which nobody anticipated even a year ago. But I also think this has been a long time coming. Public discontent about immigration has been growing for 50 years; so has the alienation of large swathes of formerly industrial working-class England. And I think it’s crucial to remember that England has a very long history of distrust and even hostility towards its European neighbours. In a sense, and though I’m sorry it happened, the nation’s verdict on 23 June was simply a reversion to our default setting. Kathleen Burk: In the long-term, Europe has frequently been an existential threat, from the French to the Germans to the Russians. During the Second World War, all othe countries in continental Europe, except Sweden, Spain and Switzerland, had been invaded, conquered and occupied; Britain had not, and faith in the state was not shaken. Then in the medium-term the widespread anger arising from the democratic deficit and the volume of regulations became increasingly intolerable. As for the short-term: social and economic chaos and the threat of a surge of migrants were alarming. The desirable policies of the EU, such as funding, were taken for granted, while the undesirable were all too public. David Abulafia: It’s a combination. The aggressive stance of the Remainers proved counter-productive – not that the Leave campaign always conducted itself wisely. The comments by Obama and others were also, I believe, counter-productive, not least because he won’t even be president when the UK leaves the EU. But we are also looking at the release of pent-up anger after so many years during which the public was not consulted about ‘ever closer union’ and ‘the European project’. Jean-Claude Juncker bears heavy responsibility; his refusal to compromise or to introduce democratic reforms left the PM with insignificant concessions. To what extent has Britain historically stood apart from continental Europe? HM: Britain has been closely engaged in all the major events and turning points of 20th-century European history, from the two world wars and the creation and work of the League of Nations in between, to postwar reconstruction and, since the 1970s, the European project. Certainly Britain’s historic relationship with Europe has distinctive features, but that’s true of all member states to a greater or lesser degree. I dislike arguments about how the English Channel, or victory in the Second World War, or the ‘special relationship’ with the US somehow makes it impossible for the British to feel truly European. Historians should use narratives to unpick complex processes of change and continuity in the past, not to shackle politics in the present and the future. DS: Any historian will tell you that we have a long history of entanglement with the continent: the Angevin empire, the Glorious Revolution, and so on. Yes, yes, we know all that. But the plain fact is that Britain has a long-standing self-image as an exceptional country, a cradle of Protestant liberty. Is that just a myth? Maybe. But myths matter. Perhaps even more importantly, we undoubtedly had an exceptional 20th century. Britain was the only major European country not to experience defeat, invasion, occupation, civil war or dictatorship. That meant that we had a unique attitude to the European project. Alone among the major European nations, we entered grudgingly and halfheartedly. Our neighbours hoped to escape their modern history. But many British voters saw no reason to join in the first place, because they had so few of those 20th-century scars. RO: Britain has never stood apart from Europe and it is an illusion to believe that it ever has. Britain (earlier England) has always been a part of the European order and has waged war and made trade in Europe continuously. Influences – cultural, economic, technological, intellectual – have flowed both ways for centuries. How far do you see the EU itself as having been responsible for Euroscepticism in Britain over the years? KB: Europe and the UK are different. They have different legal systems, different business cycles, different approaches to languages, different political cultures, different assumptions about the state. The foundation for Euroscepticism was there, providing a strong base for an increasing dislike of unacceptable interference by unelected institutions. DA: Very much so: the remote institutions of the EU, largely unaccountable, have generated Euroscepticism not just in the UK. The insistence on creating a ‘European identity’, based on a false notion that being European transcends national identities, has created an enormous backlash that has taken unpleasant forms, as in Hungary or France. The British public, with its milder political temper, has by and large avoided extremist positions, but the EU is now paying the price of its extraordinary arrogance, combined with impenetrable bureaucracy and corruption. Moreover, the European Court has stamped on national parliaments and supreme courts. RO: It is not the EU as such that has been responsible for Euroscepticism (a phenomenon by no means exclusively British) but the failure of national governments to make clear enough the nature of the union and the benefits derived from it, or to counter popular but ill-informed prejudice about the Union’s practices. Why do you think the result this time was so different from the Remain victory of 1975? KB: Forty years versus two years of experience. DA: Joining a loose trading association was one thing; being part of an increasingly monolithic United States of Europe would be quite another, and the concessions won by the prime minister simply did not go far enough to meet the worries of the British public. Had he managed to position the UK within a new Europe built around the old idea of a common market, he would have won the support of the vast majority of voters. DS: The answer’s very simple. Britain was at a low ebb in 1975, its confidence shattered after 10 years of terrible news. The empire had gone, the pound had been devalued; there had been five states of emergency in four years. Inflation was heading towards 30 per cent, and all the talk was of Britain being ungovernable. So Europe seemed a way out, a bulwark, even a panacea. If we had been better off in 1975, though – if we had been a more united, confident, prosperous country – I suspect the vote would have gone differently. So perhaps it is only a slight stretch to suggest that Britain was always likely to reverse the 1975 referendum once it recovered its self-confidence. How much do you think an awareness of history played a role in people’s voting decisions? HM: Some older voters seem to have been influenced by what might be described as a ‘myth of betrayal’ surrounding the 1975 referendum. In other words, they believed that they had been misled by elites promising access to a single market rather than membership of a nascent European ‘super-state’, and this second referendum presented an opportunity to settle scores. Some Leave voters also appeared to subscribe to a politics of patriotism rooted in a rather generalised but nonetheless historic notion of their nation’s ‘greatness’. This created fertile ground for Leave’s claim that the UK would thrive outside the EU, but barren soil for Remain’s more nuanced arguments about the merits of pooled sovereignty in an interdependent world. DA: For some people, I don’t doubt, there was some romantic notion of recovering an Olde England characterised by village cricket greens and so on, but I don’t think it counted for much. The debate was about the future, which is uncertain, to put it mildly. The recent history of the EU – stagnant growth, a disastrous common currency, the Schengen crisis – was surely in some people’s minds, but it was strangely ignored in favour of vapid speculation about what ‘might’ or ‘could’ happen to the economy, security and so on. RO: It is difficult to gauge this, and historians would like to think it did. It mattered less for the Remain camp, though there was some sense that union was a better future given Europe’s bloody past. It mattered more for the Leave campaign because it traded on the myths of 1940 and Britain alone against the European threat. This was, of course, a complete distortion. Alone, Britain had no prospect of winning the war. Moreover the war itself had been about saving Europe from fascism, a commitment that tied Britain more to Europe, rather than less. KB: I cannot think that an awareness of history played much of a part: not even the Remain camp pointed out that the EU in its early guises was set up partly to balance and constrain Germany, bringing to an end 75 years of European civil war. DS: History undoubtedly mattered a great deal. Not, curiously, the kind of history written by historians, but a version of history that’s very deeply embedded in the popular imagination – the island nation, standing alone against a succession of continental bullies. In many ways it’s a myth. But through our popular culture, as much as anything, it’s so tightly woven into many Britons’ sense of themselves that there’s probably nothing historians can do to shift it. People can write as many books as they like about our European inheritance or the ‘invention’ of our national identity, but you just can’t change a nation’s character and assumptions overnight. How does this referendum fit into the history of British democracy? HM: Direct democracy in the form of referenda has not featured prominently in Britain’s modern political history. To the contrary, popular plebiscites were generally regarded as the mark of immature polities not yet sufficiently advanced to practise the art of representative democracy – of which the British were the supposed masters. Of course there is much Whiggish nonsense in this; arguably what this referendum has exposed is the lamentable state of political leadership in this country, which utterly failed to convey to voters the magnitude of what was at stake in a ballot of this kind. We’re witnessing the fallout of this failure in the regret subsequently expressed by many Leave supporters who didn’t think their vote ‘would count’. DS: In democratic terms, there’s never been anything like it. Personally I think it was the worst campaign in our history, with both sides reaching a terrible low. What’s also true is that the electorate have probably never rebelled so overtly (if narrowly) against the massed ranks of the political and economic establishments. I don’t even think the Labour landslide of 1945 comes close. But the referendum also represents something that few of us have really come to terms with – the eclipse of the idea of representative parliamentary democracy by a kind of populist plebiscitary version. Has a Leave vote shifted Britain’s historical trajectory? KB: The Leave vote appears to have shifted Britain’s historical trajectory back to that of 1970: 1971–2016 appears to have been an aberration. DA: It means we won’t be in at the kill when the EU disintegrates. Unless its leaders take the British vote seriously, recognising the strength of Euroscepticism across the Union, the EU is doomed. In the very long term, though, leaving the EU may well position the UK between the EU and the rest of the world, very much to Britain’s advantage as a trading nation. We have the chance to make connections across the globe that the EU has failed to pursue. So this is an opportunity that has to be seized enthusiastically. DS: I think this is the biggest turning point in our modern political history. Not everyone will agree, but I don’t think the elections of 1945 and 1979 were turning points; I think the changes they unleashed were always coming. But this is different, a real lurch into the unknown. Half a century after Harold Macmillan made our first bid to join, Britain seems to have definitively turned its back on the European project. Never before has our political future been so utterly unpredictable, and never before has our national destiny seemed so uncertain. HM: While some Leave supporters might welcome Brexit as a return to glorious isolation, in truth it marks a fundamental break with the liberal internationalist traditions present within British foreign policy throughout the century. Britain was a major architect of the League of Nations and a founding member of the United Nations, and, despite wavering levels of enthusiasm on the part of postwar British governments, has found in Europe a welcome source of global influence to compensate for the loss of its own superpower status. In 50 years’ time, how will historians look back on this result? RO: Historians will have many explanations for the outcome of the referendum, and a clear view of its consequences, which we lack. It is impossible to pre-judge, since historians are themselves deeply divided now over the issue. In 50 years’ time they are not likely to be less so. HM: Assuming Brexit actually takes place, historians will look back at the EU referendum of 2016 as the moment when Britain slipped from managed into unmanaged decline in terms of her global influence and economic muscle. Even – or perhaps especially – if parliament finds a way to prevent it, the referendum will mark one of the ugliest and most divisive chapters in the history of British democracy. Unless the Labour party finds a way to renew itself, historians might be talking about 2016 as the year in which a fundamental realignment took place in British politics favouring the far right. I sincerely hope I’ve got that one wrong. KB: I suspect that it will be looked back on as a dirty, dishonest, history-changing episode. Very few of the leading lights will have come out of it well. DS: It’s genuinely impossible to say because it depends so completely on what happens next. That’s what makes it so uncertain, and at once so exciting and so terrifying. We just have no way of knowing what Britain’s future relationship with the EU will look like, or even what the economic impact will be. We don’t even know whether Britain will exist as a political unit. Sadly, I think there’s a good chance now that it won’t, and that historians will look back on 23 June as the day that the United Kingdom died. DA: As another stage in the disintegration of the EU, coming on top of the failure of the Euro project and the mishandling of the very real refugee crisis. From that perspective, it is more a sharp tremor than an earthquake – one of a series of tremors whose effect will be cumulative. Even if we had voted the other way, disintegration would still be on the cards, though not quite so rapidly. And how will history remember David Cameron as prime minister? RO: He might well have been remembered as a reasonably successful premier, given the major problems the country has faced. But it seems inevitable that history will see him as the man who failed to stop the wave of populist revolt in Britain over Europe, and who may well have opened the way for the rest of the European right to follow suit. HM: As Lord North is remembered for losing America, Cameron will take his place in the history books as the premier who unwittingly led us out of Europe and, in all likelihood, ensured the secession of Scotland from the UK. It’s hard to recall any notable achievements, except perhaps the legalisation of gay marriage, which come anywhere near mitigating Cameron’s car-crash decision to call a wholly unnecessary referendum. DA: David Cameron has been a very capable politician, and at the peak of his career won considerable popularity. This was his big mistake politically – he didn’t expect to have to hold a referendum, because he didn’t expect his party to win enough seats to govern on its own. Then he miscalculated by not standing above the fray but throwing himself into bitter arguments that (on both sides) sometimes stretched the evidence and reason. So something of a tragic figure: a charismatic leader who gambled and lost. KB: He is likely to have joined Neville Chamberlain in the hall of those politicians whose political careers ended in a huge and incontrovertible failure of a policy of national and international importance. A lack of judgment, a lack of familiarity with the wider electorate and a focus on tactics rather than strategy did for him. DS: I think that until 23 June, Cameron was a good, solid, moderate prime minister. Certainly he handled the economy far better that most people predicted. But even I have to face facts. Nobody is going to remember him for anything but the referendum. I’m genuinely sorry to say this, but in the space of a few hours Cameron plunged from a well-deserved place in the top half of the prime ministerial league table to an equally well-deserved one in the relegation zone. He joins Chamberlain, Eden and Callaghan as men remembered, perhaps unjustly, for just one word. In his case, not ‘appeasement’, ‘Suez’ or ‘strikes’, but ‘Europe’. These answers were compiled by Rob Attar. This article was first published in the August 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
8 historical events that happened in June
From the death of Alexander the Great to Hitler's arrival in Paris, Dominic Sandbrook highlights notable events from history that took place in June
5 June 1832: Angry Parisians man the barricades Paris, 1832. In the Tuileries garden, the young writer Victor Hugo was strolling by the river when he heard gunshots: trouble was brewing in the working-class district of Les Halles. Hugo went to investigate. For 15 minutes he hid behind a pillar and watched as the king’s soldiers fired on republican rebels. At last the battle moved away, giving Hugo the chance to make his escape. It was a moment that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Some 13 years later, he began work on a novel set in Paris during those tumultuous June days: Les Misérables. Today, thanks to the success of the musical and film versions, Les Misérables is by far Hugo’s best-known work. Many people assume that it is set during the French Revolution. In fact, the insurrection at its heart was a two-day uprising against the Orleanist king Louis-Philippe, which ended in failure. The June Rebellion was triggered by the food shortages of the late 1820s, a devastating cholera epidemic and the death of the popular general Jean Lamarque, who had become a hero to the working classes of Paris. At his funeral on 5 June, republican demonstrators rallied the crowds, waving red flags and calling for “liberty or death”. The mood turned ugly, and by the evening rioters had taken control of much of central and eastern Paris, throwing up the barricades that play such a key role in Hugo’s novel. It was all for nothing. The army stayed loyal to Louis-Philippe, and by morning the uprising had lost momentum. At the Cloître Saint-Merri, the last demonstrators were surrounded by the king’s troops. By nightfall it was all over. 26 June 1541: Francis Pizarro meets a bloody end over dinner Francisco Pizarro died as he had lived, sword in hand. Pizarro, who had defied the odds to bring down the Incas and conquer modern-day Peru for the Spanish, was almost 70 years old. As governor of New Castile (as Peru was then named), he had spent years locked in a bitter feud with a rival conquistador, Diego de Almagro. In 1538 Pizarro had had Almagro executed. But now the latter’s son – also Diego – wanted revenge. Pizarro was dining in his palace in Lima when Almagro burst in with about 20 armed supporters. Most of the old man’s guests fled, but Pizarro stood his ground, reaching for his sword from where it hung on the wall. According to one account, he struck down two would-be assassins and ran a third through. While he struggled to draw out his sword, however, Almagro’s men stabbed him in the throat. Lying on the palace floor, Pizarro shouted: “Jesus!” The last thing he ever did was to draw a cross on the ground with his own blood and kiss it. The most ruthless conquistador of the age was dead. Pizarro’s body was buried in Lima Cathedral, but it was not until 1977 that building workers found a lead box, bearing the inscription: “Here is the head of Don Francisco Pizarro Demarkes, Don Francisco Pizarro who discovered Peru and presented it to the crown of Castile.” Forensic scientists reported that the skull was broken by numerous violent blows – perhaps a fitting end for a man steeped in violence. 23 June 1940: Hitler crows over Paris It was about 5.30 in the morning when Adolf Hitler’s plane landed at the edge of Paris. Three large Mercedes cars were waiting to take the conqueror into town, and the Nazi dictator knew exactly where he wanted to go first – the opera. As he told his minister, Albert Speer, Charles Garnier’s neo-baroque opera house was his favourite building in Paris. And now that the French capital had fallen to Germany’s all-conquering army, Hitler had the chance to live out a dream. Hitler’s tour of Paris on 23 June 1940 – the only time he visited the city – was one of the greatest days of his life. France lay prostrate at his feet, the shame of 1918 finally avenged. As he toured the city, posing for pictures by the Eiffel Tower, he discussed plans for a victory parade. Yet he concluded that it was a bad idea: “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren’t at the end yet.” To Speer, the Nazis’ chief architect, Hitler waxed lyrical about the beauties of the French capital. But he was determined that Germany could do better. “Berlin,” he said later, “must be more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will be only a shadow.” Hitler’s visit was astonishingly brief, and by nine in the morning he was already heading back to Germany. “It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris,” he told Speer as they drove back to the airfield. “I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today.” Speer himself was struck by his master’s mood. “For a moment,” he wrote later, “I felt something like pity for him: three hours in Paris, the one and only time he was to see it, made him happy when he stood at the height of his triumphs.” 26 June AD 363: A Persian spear fells Rome's last pagan emperor In the spring of 363, the Roman emperor Julian invaded Persia. Having ruled Rome for less than two years, he felt that he needed to prove himself to the troops on the empire’s eastern frontier. And what better way than by taking on their age-old enemies? On 5 March, around 60,000 Roman troops marched out of Antioch (near modern-day Antakya in Turkey), led by the emperor himself. At first everything went smoothly, and by mid-May Julian had crossed the Tigris and was outside the Persian capital, Ctesiphon. But then things began to go wrong. Harassed almost daily by Persian attacks, Julian ordered his army to retreat north, and at a minor engagement on 26 June, the worst happened. Julian had thrown himself into the fray, wrote Ammianus Marcellinus, a historian on the emperor’s military staff, “when suddenly a cavalry spear, grazing the skin of his arm, pierced his side and fixed itself in the bottom of his liver”. The wound did not at first seem serious; Julian’s personal doctor washed it with wine, then tried to stitch up the organs. But the bleeding continued, and it became obvious that the emperor was failing. As he lay dying, wrote Ammianus, Julian “entered into an intricate discussion with the philosophers Maximus and Priscus on the sublime nature of the soul”. This seems a bit unlikely. It was inevitable that the last non-Christian emperor would get short shrift from Christian writers, so Ammianus, a fellow pagan, was probably gilding the lily. “At last,” the historian went on, “the swelling of his veins began to choke his breath and, having drank some cold water, which he had asked for, he expired quietly about midnight, in the 31st year of his age.” 16 June 1883: 183 children crushed to death in concert tragedy The poster for Sunderland’s Victoria Hall seemed wonderfully enticing. “On Saturday Afternoon at 3 o’clock,” it said, “the Fays from the Tynemouth Aquarium Will Give a Grand Day Performance for Children – The Greatest Treat for Children Ever Given.” There would, it added, be prizes, “a handsome Present, Books, Toys, &c”. When Mr and Mrs Fay took the stage on 16 June 1883, an estimated 2,000 children were packed into the concert hall. What followed was a tragedy of heartbreaking proportions. At the end of the show, an announcer declared that children with specially numbered tickets would get a prize on the way out. Meanwhile, performers began handing out treats to children in the front row. Many of the 1,100 children in the gallery rushed towards the stairs, worried they were going to miss out. At the bottom, however, they found a narrow door, bolted to allow only one child through at a time. As more children stampeded down the stairs, a crush began to develop. Parents rushed to help, but could not get near the door. Children started falling, bodies piling up near the door. By now it was obvious that a terrible disaster was under way. In all, 183 children died that day, some as young as three. In the aftermath, legislation provided for better emergency exits, with doors opening outwards, not inwards. Queen Victoria sent a heartfelt letter of condolence quoting the words of Jesus: “Suffer little children to come unto me... for such is the Kingdom of God.” 18 June 1178: Monks witness an extraordinary lunar event On 18 June 1178, Gervase of Canterbury heard an extraordinary story. Gervase, who had been ordained by Thomas Becket, spent much of his time compiling a detailed chronicle of English history. But nothing could have prepared him for the account reported to him that night by five fellow monks. Some time after sunset, the monks had noticed something extraordinary in the sky. “Now,” Gervase wrote, “there was a bright new moon… its horns were tilted toward the east; and suddenly the upper horn split in two. From the midpoint of the division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out, over a considerable distance, fire, hot coals, and sparks. Meanwhile the body of the moon which was below writhed, as it were, in anxiety, and to put it in the words of those who reported it to me and saw it with their own eyes, the moon throbbed like a wounded snake.” This extraordinary sight, he noted, “was repeated a dozen times or more, the flame assuming various twisting shapes at random and then returning to normal. Then after these transformations the moon from horn to horn, that is along its whole length, took on a blackish appearance. Today, many lunar experts believe the monks had been watching the formation of the moon’s enormous Giordano Bruno crater, named after an Italian philosopher. It was probably created by the impact of an asteroid or comet, which would explain the burst of molten matter seen by the monks – though they, of course, had no way of understanding what it was they had witnessed. 11 June 323 BC: Alexander the Great dies after drinking binge Alexander of Macedon, master of the world from the shores of the Adriatic to the mountains of Afghanistan, spent the early summer of 323 BC in Babylon. Only a year before, his troops had persuaded him to turn back from a planned invasion of India. But already he was planning new conquests, hoping to strike at the heart of Arabia. On top of that, the 32-year-old king was pressing forward with his plans to integrate Persians and Macedonians, even urging his officers to take Persian wives. And then, some time around the beginning of June, disaster struck. Accounts of Alexander’s death differ widely. The most popular, told by the historian Plutarch, holds that he was taken ill after a drinking session with his friend Medius of Larissa. In the next few days, Alexander developed a fever. Although he managed to put in an appearance before his worried troops, his condition worsened until he could no longer speak. At last, some time in the night between 10 and 11 June, he died. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/06/0-0ad19c5.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Mourners lament the death of Alexander the Great in this 14th-century copy of a fifth-century Armenian manuscript. Did he fall prey to typhoid, malaria or poison? (Alamy)" title="Mourners lament the death of Alexander the Great in this 14th-century copy of a fifth-century Armenian manuscript. Did he fall prey to typhoid, malaria or poison? (Alamy)" /> Since so many Macedonian rulers fell victim to assassination, speculation has long surrounded Alexander’s death. Many historians have suggested that he may have been poisoned by rivals within the Macedonian elite or by officers outraged by his Persian affectations. The true explanation may be more prosaic. In the festering heat of summer in Babylon, the hard-drinking Alexander may well have succumbed to typhoid or malaria. His death had a shattering impact. Within weeks the Macedonian empire was already falling apart, as his officers began to carve out their own rival dominions. Even Alexander’s sarcophagus, hijacked and taken to Alexandria, became a weapon in the civil war. “I foresee great contests,” he is supposed to have said, “at my funeral games.” He was right. 4 June 1989: Hundreds die in Tiananmen Square By the beginning of June 1989, Tiananmen Square, in the centre of Beijing, was packed with demonstrators. After weeks of mounting protests, with students and dissidents at the forefront, the Chinese communist government had declared martial law and sent some 250,000 troops to the capital – but still the crowds refused to disperse. On 2 June party leaders, including the country’s effective leader, Deng Xiaoping, agreed that it was time to crack down. Tiananmen Square, they agreed, must be cleared, so that “the riot can be halted and order restored to the capital”. The following evening, 3 June, troops and tanks thundered into the centre of Beijing, as state television warned residents to stay in their homes. By about 10 o’clock, reports were emerging of bloodshed at major intersections on the roads into the city. Inside Tiananmen Square, some 70,000 people stood and waited. Then, just after midnight, the first armoured vehicle appeared from the west. Some students threw stones and bricks, while others tried to prevent them; it was vital, they said, that their protest remained non-violent. What followed remains the single most controversial moment in China’s recent history. In the early hours of 4 June, the army cleared the square by force. Government officials initially claimed the action resulted in no deaths – later revised to about 200; other estimates suggest that as many as 1,000 people lost their lives. Either way, the result was the same: the protesters had been defeated. One image, taken the next day, captured the terrible drama: a photograph of a lone man, holding two shopping bags, standing in front of a column of tanks. Who he was, and what he was doing, remains uncertain. At the time, there were rumours that he was arrested and dragged before a firing squad. We may well never know. Other notable June anniversaries 29 June 1613 When a cannon misfires during a performance of Henry VIII, accidentally igniting the theatre’s thatched roof, the Globe Theatre in Southwark burns to the ground. 3 June 1937 In a chateau near Tours, the Duke of Windsor – formerly Edward VIII – marries Wallis Simpson. His brother, George VI, forbids his other brothers from attending the nuptials. 7 June 1494 Spain and Portugal agree a treaty to divide the New World between them, carving up the newly discovered Americas along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. 9 June 1934 The world’s most famous duck, Donald, makes his first appearance in the short Walt Disney cartoon The Wise Little Hen, based on the fairy tale of The Little Red Hen. 27 June 1358 Following the Treaty of Zadar, the Republic of Dubrovnik throws off Venetian rule and comes under the protection of Louis I of Hungary. 25 June 1978 In San Francisco, the artist Gilbert Baker designs a hippie-influenced rainbow flag with eight stripes, to be flown during the city’s Gay Freedom Day Parade. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and regular presenter on BBC television and radio. This article was first published in the June 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
8 remarkable historical events that happened in May
Dominic Sandbrook highlights noteworthy events that took place in May in history... This article was first published in the May 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
The torched city burns as thousands of imperial troops pillage Rome on 6 May 1527, as depicted by a 16th or 17th-century Italian artist. (AKG) 4 May 1926: The General Strike fails to paralyse Britain To many people, the first full day of the General Strike on 4 May 1926 represented a turning point in history. After years of mounting tension between employers and unions, particularly in the coal industry, the Trades Union Congress finally ordered its members out. On that first morning, docks, factories and rail yards across the country stood empty and silent. Conservative newspapers warned that this would mark the beginning of a Bolshevik revolution. In Blackburn, one man later remembered, his family “sat in silence in the kitchen, holding their breath, waiting for the revolution to begin”. Across the country, a strange sense of unreality took hold. With public transport having ground to a halt, the roads were packed. “The mill chimneys ceased to smoke and the wheels ceased to turn,” one woman in Manchester wrote afterwards. “The pavement and even the roads were crowded with pedestrians and the drivers of private cars offered lifts with surprising generosity.” Reports of fighting came from the docks, while the government deployed troops to escort food convoys. Yet the widely predicted class warfare failed to materialise, and the General Strike never evolved into a revolutionary uprising. Indeed, compared with turbulence overseas, it turned into a bit of a non-event. By the time it fizzled out nine days later, King George V – who had upbraided his Conservative ministers for their attitude to the strikers (“Try living on their wages before you judge them”) – considered it a tribute to British unity. “Our dear old country can be well proud of itself,” he wrote in his diary. “It shows what a wonderful people we are.” 6 May 1527: The army of the Holy Roman Emperor sacks Rome In the early 16th century, Italy was a dangerous place to live. Torn apart by endless wars between the French king, Francis I, and his bitter rival, Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, the peninsula had become a byword for massacres, plunder and rapine. But nothing made a greater impression on the European imagination than what happened on 6 May 1527, the day the imperial army hurled itself on Rome. The sack of Rome was never part of Charles V’s plan. His troops had already beaten the French; the problem was that funds had run short – so the imperial army’s commander, the Duke of Bourbon, had effectively lost control over his own men. Only by promising them loot from the capture of Rome did the duke manage to prevent a full-scale mutiny. And so it was that on 6 May, at least 20,000 imperial soldiers began their assault. Disastrously, the duke, wearing his trademark white cloak, was shot and killed almost immediately – and any semblance of discipline disappeared. What followed was an orgy of plunder and vandalism as the imperial army swept aside the feeble resistance and rampaged through the city. Inside the Vatican, the Swiss Guard made a desperate last stand as Pope Clement VII escaped to the Castel Sant’Angelo. They were slaughtered where they stood, their captain cut down in full view of his watching wife. Meanwhile, imperial troops were ransacking churches, tombs and cemeteries. In all, at least 12,000 people were estimated to have been murdered. “The Germans were bad,” said one churchman. “The Italians were worse; the Spanish were the worst.” 6 May 1840: The Penny Black revolutionises communications in Britain Rowland Hill had a vision. While a small boy in Kidderminster, he had watched in embarrassment as his mother scrabbled for money to pay the postman. By the 1830s, Hill, now a teacher and social reformer, was determined to push through a change that he believed would transform the Post Office into a force for progress: universal penny postage, paid in advance. By May 1840, Hill’s scheme was up and running. As he explained, people would prove that they had paid by using “a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the bringer might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter”. He enlisted the Royal Mint’s chief engraver to create a memorable image – a picture of Queen Victoria. Today we know his creation as the Penny Black. The first stamps went on sale on 1 May, and the system came into operation five days later. One schoolboy recalled that he did not “fancy making my mouth a glue pot,” while the newssheet The Town ran a saucy poem: “You must kiss our fair Queen, or her pictures, that’s clear. Or the gummy medallion will never adhere. You will not kiss her hand, you will readily find But actually kiss little Vicky’s behind.” The Penny Black was an instant hit. Within a week the presses were working round the clock producing 600,000 stamps a day. The stamp had become an icon, a symbol of national pride: an image of Britannia itself. The world’s first adhesive postage stamp was the brainchild of teacher and social reformer Rowland Hill. (Mary Evans) 14 May 1264: Montfort crushes Henry III’s hapless army at Lewes In the long list of royal catastrophes, the battle of Lewes holds an especially ignominious place. Like his father, the ill-starred John, Henry III had spent decades feuding with his barons while attempting to raise money. In particular, he found himself pitted against the ruthless Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who was determined to uphold the principles of Magna Carta and secure more power for England’s magnates. Both sides had begun preparing for war in the early 1260s, but it was not until 14 May 1264 that their armies clashed in earnest. Montfort had cornered the royal army in the Sussex town of Lewes. The night before battle was joined, the barons’ leader slept not a wink, preferring instead to give his time “to divine offices and prayers and exhorting his men to make sincere confessions”. Montfort need not have worried. When battle commenced the following day, the royal troops’ lack of discipline proved fatal. Though the king’s son, the future Edward I, led a stirring cavalry charge that broke his enemy’s left wing, he was unable to rally his men back to their positions. In the confusion, Montfort’s men crushed the rest of the king’s army. Henry himself – who was almost 50 years old – fought bravely, but to no avail. By evening, he and his son had retreated to Lewes Priory, and the following day they formally surrendered to Simon de Montfort. It was one of the most humiliating moments in Plantagenet history. 16 May 1900: Mafeking is relieved The Boer War began disastrously for Britain. The autumn of 1899 saw one defeat after another, while at Mafeking, on the border between British-held Cape Colony and the Transvaal, some 1,500 British troops were surrounded by a far larger Boer army. On 12 October the telegraph lines were cut; four days later the first Boer shells landed in the dusty little town. Yet for more than 200 days, the defenders held out. Inspired by their commander, Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, they not only laid fake landmines and mounted daring diversionary attacks, but always made time for Sunday cricket matches. In Britain, the valiant resistance of the Mafeking defenders gripped the public imagination. By May 1900, with a relief column on its way, it seemed that everybody was waiting for news of victory. And, at last, it came. Late on the evening of 16 May, the defenders heard firing to the north. At about 7.30pm, seven British cavalrymen rode into the town. As they paused, tired and dusty, a passer-by said casually: “Oh yes, I heard you were knocking about.” The main relief column arrived in Mafeking just before four o’clock next morning. By then, crowds had poured into the streets, filled with unbridled joy. “One man tried to speak; then he swore; then he buried his face in his arms and sobbed,” wrote a watching reporter. But that was as nothing compared with the reaction back home: a week’s worth of hysterical rejoicing ensued, complete with street parties and fireworks. The defenders of Mafeking, wrote the author FT Stevens, “carried themselves like Britons of the old breed… and because they played the game and played up well, and played to the end, and by the will of God have won, we honour them and count the country richer this day for them.” 16 May 1703: Peter the Great founds his namesake city Even by the standards of Russia’s colourful history, the foundation of St Petersburg makes an extraordinary story. In May 1703, the dynamic young emperor Peter the Great had cut his way through Swedish forces to the Baltic coastline. His eye was drawn to a small island at the mouth of the river Neva where Finnish fishermen had built a few wooden huts. The story goes that Peter borrowed a bayonet to cut two strips of turf, which he laid in the shape of a cross. “Here,” he proclaimed, “shall be a town.” The first stone was laid on 16 May (27 May in the Gregorian calendar.) Whether or not this story is true, Peter’s ambition was astounding. The cold, marshy conditions could hardly have been less propitious, and he was still fighting the Swedes. Yet by the end of May his men had built a small log house for Peter, and by year’s end they had finished a great hexagonal citadel, the Peter and Paul Fortress, which still stands today. Yet the birth of St Petersburg did not come without a horrendous cost. The Swedes launched fresh attacks each year, but the biggest problems were caused by the conditions. Draining the marshes demanded almost superhuman effort; men poured into the site from as far afield as Finland, Siberia and Ukraine. They lived in primitive, crowded, dirty hovels; many died from dysentery, scurvy or malaria. St Petersburg, men said, was a “city built on bones”. But it endured. Indeed, nothing better symbolises Peter’s vision than the gleaming, soaring gold spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Work began on it in 1712; by the time it was completed in 1733, Peter was long dead. His city, though, lives on. This rather romantic depiction of the founding of St Petersburg was painted in 1838 by Alexei Gavrilovich Venetsianov. (Superstock) 24 May 1487: Lambert Simnel is crowned king in Dublin In the spring of 1487, Henry VII sat uneasily on his throne. It was less than two years since he had taken the crown by force at Bosworth, and he had already put down one Yorkist uprising. But then, at the end of May 1487, word reached Henry that the worst had happened. A Yorkist pretender claiming to be the young Earl of Warwick had been crowned king in Dublin, and an Irish army was on its way to England. In reality, as Henry knew perfectly well, Warwick was safely locked in the Tower of London. The imposter was a tradesman’s son, 10-year-old Lambert Simnel (though this name is doubtful). He had been groomed by a Yorkist priest called Richard Symonds, who put it about that Warwick had escaped from the Tower and was now under his guidance. The priest then sailed to Ireland and presented young Simnel to the lord deputy, the Earl of Kildare, who was no fan of Henry VII. Kildare was also not a fool, and almost certainly knew that Simnel was an imposter – but the prospect of playing kingmaker was too tempting to resist. On 24 May, Simnel was paraded through the streets of Dublin. At the Priory of the Holy Trinity, later Christ Church Cathedral, he was crowned king of England with a gold circlet borrowed from a statue of the Virgin Mary. Afterwards he was carried through the streets on the back of a giant Irishman, one D’Arcy of Platten. But the plot soon began to unravel. When the rebels met Henry’s forces at Stoke Field in Nottinghamshire, the result was utter disaster for the Irish troops. For little Lambert Simnel, though, there was a surprisingly happy ending. Showing unexpected mercy, Henry gave him a job in his kitchens. Simnel reputedly later became a falconer, dying peacefully in his bed during the reign of Henry VIII. Lambert Simnel is depicted as the ‘Knight of the Golden Tulip’ on a 17th-century playing card. (Bridgeman Art) 25 May 1895: Oscar Wilde is convicted Oscar Wilde’s decision to launch a libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused him of “posing somdomite [sic]”, was the most unfortunate he ever made. The trial opened on 3 April 1895 and almost immediately it was obvious that Wilde was in deep trouble. When the defence announced that they had found several male prostitutes who would testify that they had had sex with Wilde, the playwright dropped the case – but, even as he left the courtroom, the authorities were drawing up a warrant for his arrest on charges of gross indecency. At Wilde’s first trial, which opened on 26 April, the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Three weeks later, a second trial began at the Old Bailey, prosecuted by the Liberal government’s solicitor general, Sir Frank Lockwood. Wilde wrote later that Lockwood had issued an “appalling denunciation – like something out of Tacitus, like a passage in Dante, like one of Savonarola’s indictments of the popes of Rome”. This was an exaggeration: by the standards of the day, Lockwood’s closing statement was remarkably restrained. But it is easy to understand why Wilde was so distraught. On 25 May, the foreman announced the jury’s verdict: guilty. There were cries of “Shame!” from the gallery, and Wilde turned grey with horror. “It is no use for me to address you. People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them. It is the worst case I have ever tried,” said Mr Justice Wills, who sentenced Wilde to two years of hard labour. It was, he added, “the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgment it is totally inadequate for a case such as this.” Other notable May anniversaries 3 May 1849: In Dresden, Saxony, pro-democracy protesters launch the ill-fated May Uprising, often considered the last of the 1848 revolutions. After six days of pitched street battles, the revolt is put down. 12 May 1364: After winning approval from the pope, the Polish king Casimir III issues a charter for his country’s first higher education institution, the Jagiellonian University (shown below) – the second-oldest university in central Europe. 15 May 1982: Attacked by Argentine Skyhawk aircraft off the coast of the Falkland Islands, the British destroyer HMS Coventry is sunk. The attack takes the lives of 20 crew. 19 May 1536: Charged with adultery, incest and treason, Henry VIII’s second wife, the enigmatic Anne Boleyn, is executed at the Tower of London. 26 May 1805: Napoleon claims the title of king of Italy and is crowned with the medieval Iron Crown of Lombardy in Milan’s magnificent cathedral. 30 May 1966: NASA launches the rocket carrying lunar lander Surveyor 1; three days later, it lands on the moon (pictured below). It is the first American spacecraft to land on an extra-terrestrial body, paving the way for the moon landing three years later. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and broadcaster.
The Iron Lady casts a long shadow but the decade she symbolises was shaped by immense forces far beyond her control, says Dominic Sandbrook...
The eighties. The decade of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the Los Angeles Olympics and the Chernobyl disaster; the decade of Michael Jackson and Madonna; mobile phones and home computers; Solidarity, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Tiananmen Square; the decade the Challenger exploded, the IRA bombed Brighton and the Berlin Wall came down. In Britain we remember the eighties as a uniquely conflicted and controversial decade, when event piled on event with dizzying speed: the years of Heysel and Hillsborough, Steve Davis and Daley Thompson, Duran Duran and Culture Club, Brookside and Blockbusters. In 1980 the economy plunged into the deepest recession since the Great Depression. A year later, Brixton and Toxteth saw the worst urban rioting in living memory. In 1982 Britain sent a task force to reclaim the Falkland Islands from Argentina. In 1984 the miners’ strike ripped communities apart and left scars that have never truly healed. And then, in the second half of the decade, came a succession of enormously controversial changes, from the privatisation of Britain’s utilities to the deregulation of the City of London, that fundamentally reshaped the landscape of our political and economic life, creating shock waves that reverberate to this day. It may have become a cliché of modern historical writing to give individual decades their own flavour, their own personality and their own legacy. But nobody, I think, would deny that the eighties mattered, or that this was a peculiarly distinctive historical moment, charged with tension and possibility. What’s also true, though, is that in Britain at least, the eighties have become identified with one individual above all. As prime minister from 1979 to 1990, Margaret Thatcher cast a shadow over almost every corner of our national life. Whether lampooned on TV sketch shows or lambasted in bestselling pop anthems, she was simply always there, the great she-elephant – as the Tory dissident Julian Critchley famously called her – lurking at the back of the room. When she died in 2013, the ensuing furore became a national event in its own right. “The woman who divided a nation,” read the Mirror’s headline. “The woman who saved Britain,” countered the Mail. And for page after page, commentators pored over the records of Britain in the 1980s – the country that, as almost everybody agreed, she had single-handedly defined. In many ways, though, all this seems remarkably old-fashioned. Scholars once wrote history books in which individual statesmen were seen as almost superhumanly influential, but such an approach has been out of fashion for more than half a century. When talk turns to, say, the fifties, few people think immediately of Sir Anthony Eden or Harold Macmillan. It would be perfectly possible to write a social or cultural history of sixties Britain while barely mentioning Harold Wilson at all. Indeed, even those two great titans of Victorian politics, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, now look less transcendently important than they once did. On my shelves there are heavy, monolithic histories of Victorian Britain, published in the last few years, teeming with social and cultural detail, in which Gladstone and Disraeli barely appear at all. Yet for the time being, eighties Britain is the last redoubt of the great man (or rather, great woman) school of history. The Iron Lady presses a button in Downing Street, and a factory explodes in south Wales. She pulls a lever, and a shopping centre miraculously materialises in Gateshead. She destroys Britain; she saves it. Between those two positions, there is no middle ground. Not long after Mrs Thatcher died, I had coffee with a television producer to discuss making a series about Britain in the 1980s. At that first meeting, I idly mused whether it would be an interesting experiment to write a treatment for the series in which the prime minister never appeared at all. At the time, with the headlines smouldering with passion about her historical legacy, the idea seemed at best eccentric and at worst downright deluded. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. We typically think of Mrs Thatcher as a woman who made her age, an Oxford chemistry student turned mad scientist, toiling feverishly in the laboratory before emerging, exhausted but triumphant, test-tube in hand. But of course she was no less a product of her times than anybody else. Even the Conservatives’ election victory in 1979, typically seen as the moment she fired the starting gun for the new age of capitalist competition, happened as much despite her as because of her. She was not remotely the country’s most popular politician in 1979, lagging well behind the incumbent prime minister, the Labour veteran Jim Callaghan. Indeed, she won in 1979 not because the country had been converted to her free-market message, but because floating voters wanted to punish the government and the trade unions for the disastrous Winter of Discontent, when public sector workers had walked out en masse in protest at Callaghan’s pay curbs. It is certainly true that Mrs Thatcher tapped a rich vein of aspiration and ambition among younger working-class voters. Her promise to allow voters to buy their own council houses, for example, propelled her to a stunning 11 per cent swing among skilled working-class voters – ironically, a social group who were very hard hit by the collapse of manufacturing in the years that followed. And it is true that very few of her Tory predecessors, with their cut-glass accents and tweedy personas, could have matched the grocer’s daughter’s appeal to ambitious suburban voters. But it is nonsense to suggest, as so many writers did after her death, that Mrs Thatcher “manufactured” or “unleashed” the power of ambitious individualism. That particular trend was already gathering pace even before she came to office. She knew how to appeal to it and how to profit from it, but she hardly invented it. There is a wonderfully revealing passage in the autobiography of Spandau Ballet’s guitarist and chief songwriter Gary Kemp, who was just beginning to make a name for himself in the first months of 1979 – at precisely the moment, in other words, when Mrs Thatcher was preparing for power. Born in 1959, Kemp (like so many working-class voters) had grown up in a narrow terraced house, with no indoor bathroom and a brick toilet in the yard. Yet now, like so many of his peers, he dreamed of a better life, a new world of comfort and style and material security. A few years later, after buying his first house in the early 1980s, Kemp gazed at the “church candles and interior magazines on the black enamelled coffee table… with a glass of claret in my hand and something light and choral on the stereo”, and felt a “strong sense of denying everything my family was”. But in that, too, he was absolutely typical; millions of other people in the mid-1980s felt exactly the same way. Did they take their cue from Mrs Thatcher? Were they merely lab rats, jumping to order as she pressed a button? I don’t think so. Many of them probably hardly thought about her at all. And no doubt many of them were not even Conservative voters. Gary Kemp, incidentally, always voted Labour. In fact, if you wanted to choose a woman who really captured the spirit of Britain in the 1980s, then you could do a lot worse than pick another keen Labour supporter. Like Margaret Thatcher, Delia Smith was an adept media performer, cutting a supremely poised and manicured figure as she lectured the nation in her precise, clipped tones. Like Mrs Thatcher, she appealed above all to middle-class homeowners in suburban Middle England. Indeed, for millions of viewers, it was ‘Delia’, rather than ‘Maggie’, who best incarnated the values that were so crucial to British social life at the turn of the decade. When she told viewers of her Cookery Course how to pronounce the word ‘lasagne’ or advised them about the best way to roll spaghetti onto a fork, she was appealing to precisely the same impulses – the love of domesticity, the enthusiasm for self-improvement – that propelled many voters into the Conservative column in 1979. In particular, both Delia Smith and Margaret Thatcher struck a chord with ambitious professional women who were now juggling home and career. “I too know what it’s like running a house and running a career. I know what it’s like having to live within a budget. I know what it’s like having to cope,” Mrs Thatcher told Nationwide’s audience in April 1979. In essence, this was Delia’s appeal too. Unlike the elaborate recipes beloved of TV cooks of the past, her concoctions were quick and simple, perfectly designed for people who were too busy to spend hours slaving over the stove. Perhaps revealingly, Delia saw nothing wrong with using tinned or prepared ingredients, and nothing wrong, either, with using the latest kitchen gadgets. Despite the collapse of industry and the surge in unemployment, sales of microwave ovens, for example, boomed during the early 1980s. “You are probably reading this sitting at home, maybe with your family around you. In the living room there is almost certainly a television set, probably a colour model. In the kitchen there is more than likely to be a washing machine and almost definitely a fridge,” wrote Mrs Thatcher in her new year’s message to the nation, published in the News of the World at the end of December 1979. It was a typically canny appeal, tapping ordinary people’s love of home and hearth, their enthusiasm for gadgets and appliances, their eagerness to keep up with the Joneses. But as the success of Delia Smith’s shows since the early 1970s suggests, Mrs Thatcher didn’t create this world. She inherited it. In many ways, in fact, our collective fascination with the figure of the Iron Lady can blind us to the deeper and much more important trends. Take, for example, one of the most controversial episodes from her time in office: the devastating recession of the early 1980s, which saw Britain lose roughly a quarter of its total manufacturing capacity, and the unemployment figures surge to well over 3 million. No fair-minded observer could, I think, deny that Mrs Thatcher’s stringent economic medicine, which saw the government adopt punishingly high interest rates and an exceptionally high pound to drive down inflation, took a terrible toll on our national economy. Yet even if some other prime minister had been in power – had, for example, Jim Callaghan called an early election in 1978 and been returned to office – there would still have been a global recession, and the government would still have been compelled to adopt strict policies to defeat inflation. In any case, British industry had been struggling for years. The 1970s had seen one high-profile casualty after another: coal mines, factories, steel works, car plants. Take Margaret Thatcher out of the equation: would the picture have been so different? I don’t think so. What all this reflected, I think, was a deeper historical shift with which we’re still struggling to come to terms. The 1980s was an era of seismic industrial change, in which the British steel and coal-mining industries, to name just two high-profile examples, were probably doomed anyway. Indeed, if you want to pick out one of the most influential products of the decade, then it was something often dismissed at the time as a children’s toy or a manufacturer’s gimmick – the home computer. One machine in particular, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, which was launched in April 1982 – the same month that Argentina invaded the Falklands – and sold for £125, caught the imagination of the public. Within a few years, Sinclair had sold more than 5 million Spectrums, an astronomical figure by the standards of the day. In fact, by the middle of the eighties, Britain led the world in home computer ownership, thanks partly to the success of local firms such as Sinclair and Acorn, but also thanks to the government’s enthusiastic promotion of computers in schools. And of course what these apparently primitive machines represented was nothing short of a social, technological and economic revolution. Computers created jobs, but they also destroyed them. The abandoned shops that you can see all over Britain today are the casualties of a revolution that began in the 1980s, driven not by politicians or ideology, but by technological change and consumer demand. So did Mrs Thatcher matter? Well, of course she mattered, but perhaps not as much as we think. One of the pivotal moments in our TV series is the IRA’s attempt to assassinate the prime minister at Brighton’s Grand Hotel on 12 October 1984, during the Tory party conference. We often forget just how close they came: not only were five people killed that night, but Mrs Thatcher’s bathroom was badly damaged, whereas her sitting room – where she was, characteristically, hard at work – was relatively unscathed. Had the terrorists succeeded, just five years into her time in office, it’s tempting to wonder how different Britain might be today. Perhaps the coal strike would have unfolded differently; perhaps privatisation would have ground to a halt; perhaps there would have been a reversion to collectivism, social democracy, heavy industry and the old consensus. But then again, perhaps not. The deeper trends – the rise of computers, the advance of globalisation, the decline of manufacturing, the ceaseless march of technological and cultural change – were surely irreversible. After all, what Britain experienced in the 1980s was hardly unique. Despite what we often think, almost every other industrialised western country went through similar changes in the final decades of the last century. Even in economics, where Mrs Thatcher is seen as a great innovator, other governments – notably those of Australia and New Zealand – were often there first. The story we tell in our series about Britain in the eighties, therefore, is one in which Mrs Thatcher is no longer the dominant character. She’s in it, of course, but a supporting part, rather than as the lead. It’s the story of some familiar individuals – Delia Smith and Roland Rat, Arthur Scargill and Derek Trotter, Neil Kinnock and Princess Diana – but the central characters are really the audience themselves. It was ordinary people, not the government, who made council house sales a success, who rushed to buy shares in newly privatised utilities like British Telecom and British Gas, who bought the first microwaves, video recorders and mobile phones, who tucked into Boursin, Perrier and Le Piat d’Or, and who queued in their thousands to get into the first British branches of Ikea at the end of the decade. Ours is a history of the 1980s driven not by events in Number 10 Downing Street, but by decisions made in millions of other Number 10s, Number 9s and Number 11s up and down the country. For the truth, of course, is that our politicians don’t make our history. We do. And if the world we live in today is the world the eighties made, then we only have ourselves to blame. Or to thank. I quite liked the eighties. Dominic Sandbrook is a historian and presenter. His books include The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination (Allen Lane, 2015). This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
In the March 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine, Dominic Sandbrook selects Plovdiv in Bulgaria as his favourite historical destination. HistoryExtra caught up with him to find out more...
Plovdiv (© Eric Nathan/Robert Harding) Q: When did you last travel to Plovdiv and why were you there? I last went to Plovdiv in 2000. I was there on holiday. My friend Simon and I went to Bulgaria for the Koprivshtitsa folk music festival. He went for the music, but I was really there for the kebabs. My wife refuses to go with me now because she is so sick of our Bulgarian holiday anecdotes. Q: Why do you love the location? For me, the magic of Plovdiv, and indeed of Bulgaria generally, is that it feels so natural and unselfconscious. The old town is beautifully preserved, but it doesn’t feel manicured or touristy. It feels a little bit like a backwater, which means that it’s relatively untouched by mass tourism, but in terms of historical sights and sheer atmosphere, it’s just as nice as somewhere in say, Croatia. Q: What top 3 sights would you recommend people visit while they are there, and why? Well, the Old Town has to be top of the list, because you really do feel as if you’ve wandered back into the last years of the Ottoman Empire. And the fantastically preserved Roman theatre, obviously. And as number three I would recommend a day trip to the Bachkovo Monastery, which is fantastically atmospheric. Q: During what period of its history would you most wanted to have visited Plovdiv and why? If nothing else, I think I’d give the Communist years a miss. It would have been fun to have seen the city in the 1880s and 1890s, when it had just rejoined an independent Bulgaria and the National Revival architecture was in its heyday. Q: Where else in the world would you most like to visit and why? I have a weird interest in the Eastern European borderlands, so perhaps some sort of road trip from the former East Prussia down through Poland and western Ukraine to the Black Sea would be great. Crumbling 19th-century architecture and tower blocks and derelict villages and unshaven men lurking vaguely near railway lines, that sort of thing. Perhaps more excitingly, though, I’ve always wanted to go to Peru: Cuzco, Machu Picchu, the usual drill. Next month, Lonely Planet's Tom Hall visits Northern Ethiopia. Share your tips for would-be travellers on Twitter (@HistoryExtra) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/HistoryExtra) Dominic Sandbrook recently presented Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction on BBC Two You can read Dominic's feature on Plovdiv in the March 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine – on sale from 26 February