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Rationing, school closures and 'Blitz spirit': how did people cope in WW2?
In a recent HistoryExtra podcast, Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the challenges of the world wars and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis. Read the full interview below
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our podcast Blitz spirit David Musgrove: Today I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Boff, who is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Birmingham. We’re going to be discussing how the government got the population on a war footing in the first half of the 20th century. First off – and it's quite a big question – but is there such a thing as the ‘Blitz spirit’? If so, what was it? And what do you think of it today? JB: The answer is yes, there was, in the sense that there was a level of popular consent for the war effort in the Second World War amongst the civilian population – even under the privations of the German air attack. The sort of myth, I suppose, is that there were all these jolly cockneys going around suddenly rolling out the barrel in the middle of air raids and never worrying – that everyone stuck together, pulled together, and together defeated Hitler. Now that sort of level of the myth is not true; that was a propaganda artefact designed for the consumption in the United States. There was a very famous film, many people would have seen it, London Can Take It! This was made by Humphrey Jennings and Quentin Reynolds and was designed to be exported to the United States in this very much ‘London can take it’ kind of mode. He said, for instance, “there's no panic or despair in London town, London can take it” – that was the climax of the film. Of course, it was important to convince the Americans that the British were not going to collapse as the French had just done, if there was to be any chance of getting American support in the war effort. The second aspect to the manufactured bit of the myth, if you like, is that it was also important for people outside of London – particularly in the autumn of 1940, when it was London that was really taking the brunt of the bombing from the Luftwaffe – that people outside London felt that they were involved as well. And also they didn't need to worry about morale in London. And so the Ministry of Information took the film London Can Take It!, designed for America, and rebadged it as Britain Can Take It! and sent it to cinemas around the country, to show what air raids were like and how it was possible to stand up to them. That kind of myth is the method that has been invoked a little bit recently, in the face of the virus pandemic that we’re currently facing. There are obviously some good parallels between 1940 and what we're up against at the moment. The enemy is unseen; there is no (or little) defence against that enemy; the risk is unquantifiable (you didn't know, if you were sitting in the east end of London, what the chances of you getting hit by a bomb was); and the duration of the Blitz was unknown, just as we don't yet know how long this virus is going to be affecting our lives for. Listen | Jonathan Boff explains how ordinary people coped with the privations of World War II and considers what parallels can be drawn with the current Coronavirus crisis On the other hand, I think there are risks in getting too married to this ‘Blitz spirit’ idea. There are risks, I think, first of all, because the reality was much more nuanced and complex than that myth suggests. The whole idea that one has to be singing into your milk bottles in the aftermath of an air raid... of course this is not what is considered necessarily – and it’s not what was perceived to be necessary at the time. It was accepted by the government that people would feel violated; they would feel angry – not just with the Germans but with the government for failing to protect them. But that's not the same as defeatism, and the British government was very careful to draw a distinction between the two. The other risk with the Blitz spirit is that the government can be complacent about the level of support it can expect. There was, of course, nothing essentially British about the British population’s reaction to the bombing in the First World War. The German population was subjected to much heavier bombing and was equally resilient, later in the war. And the response from the British population to the bombing was much more complex, much more nuanced, and much more conditional in their support for the war than would otherwise appear. The final danger, I think, with the Blitz spirit is that it sets an unachievable standard. This was something that was, I think, an issue within the Ministry of Information in 1940. They didn't want people in Coventry, for instance, to think that they had to be heroes necessarily; it was okay to be scared – that was an important message that they wanted to spread. I hope that certainly applies today; there are clearly things we can all do that can make life better for everybody, but that's not quite the same as us all being heroes. DM: That's very interesting. The Blitz was a particular moment of the Second World War. Your research covers both world wars wider than that. Was there anything in the First World War that was in any way comparative to that spirit? The conditions clearly weren’t the same in the First World War, but was there anything that was similar? JB: A little bit, yes. Although the risk of attack from the air (and the risk of civilians in Britain becoming victims of the war directly) was pretty small in the First World War compared to the second, the risks did come in particular ways. The first was for inhabitants of coastal towns being shelled by the German Navy. That caused a lot of outrage because the British Navy, of course, was considered at the time to be the strongest in the world. So how could it be possible that the Germans could come over and kill British civilians? The second way was from the air, and there were clear links here with the Second World War, and that did cause very strong public pressure on the government to do more to protect Britain (or London, particularly, which was the real target for most of the war). What should be done to protect the British population from air attack? And, indeed, airplanes were diverted back from the Western Front, for instance, to strengthen the defences and anti-aircraft guns were situated around London. I suppose there's a direct link that followed through in the sense that the air defence organisation that was set up in the Second World War was based, in many ways, on that which had been in operation in the latter years of the first. The other feed through from that was that the increase of power, speed and capacity of aeroplanes between 1918 and 1939 led to considerable fear on the part of the civilian planners, in all countries actually. about the possible dangers of aerial bombing – and the need to be prepared for it. Now that response was patchy in Britain; for instance, provision of shelters varied a lot from borough to borough; it was left as a local authority decision. So it was very patchy, but some thought had been given to it. When war was declared on the 3rd of September 1939, the hospital were emptied because people were expecting mass casualties from aerial bombardments – both with high explosive bombs but also by gas, of course. Now in the event, the gas never came. The ability of bombers in the early years of the war, at least, to deliver that kind of destruction from the air – that never materialized. But nonetheless, it obviously proved a severe risk to human life; about a quarter of all British casualties during the Second World War were civilian, compared with 1/100 in the first. DM: The situation today, with covid-19, is being described by politicians around the world as a war on the virus. We as a people are at war with the virus, which is clearly messaging that’s designed to enable those politicians to take some decisions that perhaps would be unpopular socially and economically – so not the things they would want to do in normal circumstances. Now in a blog post you wrote recently, you make the point that those decisions were also made in wartime in the 20th century and that there was a certain sense of enthusiasm, at that point, for drastic measures – real decisive action rather than business as usual. Could you tell me more about that? JB: To give you a bit of context here: when the First World War broke out it came like the covid virus; it was a bolt from the blue, no one was expecting it. The initial response on behalf of the government was, to some extent (and one can overstate this), to try and maintain business as usual. Britain saw its traditional way of fighting wars on the continent as basically paying allies to do so, while keeping the seas clear for trade and to generate the money that Britain would need to then pay her allies, rather than traditionally sending a huge army to fight on the continent of Europe. Now, in the event, Britain ended (up even in 1914 and 15) pursuing a twin track strategy of both fighting this economic war at sea and also preparing a huge land army. But nonetheless, the idea as far as possible would be to try and maintain some semblance of an ordinary economic and therefore social life. But it quickly became clear that the threat that Germany posed was going to require more than that. so over the course of the war you see a creeping mobilization of the war effort. The population as a whole had to pool in more and more resources to something much more of a total effect – and of course the assumption at the end of the First World War was that this will never be allowed to happen again. So when it became increasingly clear in the late 1930s that something like this was about to happen again, everyone kind of understood that you had to jump in with both feet. There was a level of preparedness that was important. But also when the worst came to the worst and the war actually started, you would actually need to throw the kitchen sink at the problem. And this was particularly emphasized because Nazism seemed an even more insidious political threat than the Kaiser had posed. Consequently when Chamberlain came into the war, in September 1939, and seemed to be pursuing a rather half-hearted policy both militarily and economically and in terms of the mobilization of British resources – that didn't go down terribly well, not least because it wasn't terribly successful. The results, as seen in the campaign in Norway in the spring of 1940, were pretty poor. As a result, he was kicked out and Churchill came in. There is a lot of myth making about Churchill, most of it started by him. When he wrote his memoirs, Chamberlain, of course, was dead. By the end of the war he was keen to emphasise – just as Lloyd George, the prime minister in the second half of the First World War had – the contrast between the vigour and dynamism with which with which they pursued the war with the earlier lackadaisical approach of Chamberlain and, in LLoyd George’s case, Asquith. Historians will pick apart the details of exactly how much ‘business as usual’ was being pursued – and exactly how much control and how much of a total war efforts Churchill and Lloyd George presided over in the second half of the war, but nonetheless – when you step back, one has to accept in both cases this intensification of the war effort from what their predecessors had been following. DM: Okay. So one of the challenges what we are facing now – and that we faced back in the wartime period – was the maintenance of morale for the general public when things got really difficult. So what sort of message did wartime governments employ to keep spirits up? Are there any parallels we should be looking at to our current situation. JB: There are two sides. The first is the spin: what can governments do to present the right narrative in the right way? In the Second World War, they unashamedly would have called it propaganda. We don't like using that word today but nonetheless that's what we're talking about, making people think things are going well and then there's the reality of the situation as well. Now in the Second World War, for instance, we have the Ministry of Information, which was formed early on, the job of which was to track domestic morale and also to help whenever with support overseas and domestically. So their headquarters were in the University of London – it's the one you see in all of the television drama that normally stands as a Nazi Party headquarters, something like that; Senate House in Bloomsbury, it's a very imposing building and it is that kind of architecture. People like George Orwell worked for it in the Second World War. They did a very good job, I would argue, on allowing the press to carry on censoring itself (rather than imposing a heavy-handed line-by-line censorship of the press) and building a partnership with the media to do that. So that’s the first point. The second point I would make is that they were pretty good at hiding bad news; they undoubtedly did that – they were vague about the location of air raids, for instance. In the national media they were vague about how many people and casualties there were; casualties were frequently described as “light medium” or “heavy” rather than in specific numbers. They were also quite good – and we've already discussed the Humphrey Jennings’s film, for example – as coming up with propaganda that would help motivate people. Now, in fact, the Britain Can Take It! Slogan, which came out in the autumn of 1940, was dropped by the Ministry of Information at the end of the year precisely because it was seen as patronising. This was a constant theme in a lot of the propaganda: don't patronise us, we can take bad news, what we can't take is lack of information. Brendan Bracken, who was minister of information in the Second World War and close confidante of Winston Churchill, said this is a people's war – the people must be told the news about the world because without them and their spirit we cannot achieve victory. So they were very alive to the need for good news flow, to put it in modern terms. They also understood that lack of information was worse than bad news. One of the guys who worked in the Ministry of Information, previously a newspaper editor, had an apt quote: he said “details kill the public distrust of vague announcements”. In other words, it's all very well letting out broad principles but what people want to know is – and as quickly as possible – is what specifically is going to be done and I think you can see that in the market’s reaction to the economic statements made about the Covid-19 crisis. DM: I should probably mention that we are recording this on Thursday 19 March, on a date when there has been some announcements about school closures in the UK. JB: I think that there are important things too on the reality of all this. When you look through the records of British morale during the British First World War… people aren't stupid. People weren't being hoodwinked; it wasn't enough to tell them a good story – people understood that things would go wrong sometimes. But they wanted overall to feel that the government was doing the best it could; that it had made what preparations it could; that it was coming up with an appropriate response; and that people were being involved in helping to find the solutions. So I think a really good example is when the Blitz began, in September 1940, huge numbers of voluntary organisations – St John's Ambulance, the Red Cross, people like that – all got involved in the relief effort. They were later taken over by government efforts, they started to step out again – but nonetheless people could be doing things that seemed helpful. The final point on this is that those who were hurt by the war, in terms of property damage or other losses, were told that they would be compensated. This is a particularly interesting point because in the autumn of 1940, the government is basically saying saying “if you lose your house as a result of any enemy action, we will compensate you – but we can't tell you how much that will be because we don't know how much money will have at the end of the war”. That didn't really assuage people's concerns very much, and of course it left people considerably out of pocket in the meantime. So in December 1940, the government passed a new ear damage bill which specified exactly what compensation would be paid and importantly it gave money upfront to people who had been affected by the Blitz (not the whole amount, but some). It also said if your income was less than £400 a year (so lower-middle class), then you would get everything back. There was a floor for the most vulnerable parts of society. DM: So it seems that details are really crucial for public announcements. Should we see these announcements that we're getting from leaders today as a good thing to maintain morale? Are they making sure that the public is being taken with them on the journey they need us to go to? JB: I think the Blitz is a good example. Although it didn't come as a complete surprise, nonetheless the government was not specifically prepared for it and the form it took. As a result there were severe problems with the response in the early months of the Blitz, but they got themselves worked out over time. On the other hand, there are things – financial markets are a good example – that need to be told sometimes we will do whatever it takes. Sometimes people need to know that there is a blank cheque in operation. DM: As schools close both in the UK and the US, there is a social dislocation that this imposes on the population, obviously a very live issue now. What parallels are there in either the First or Second World War and the public response to it? JB: Obviously there’s a slight difference, in the sense that schools were not closed in either world war because of a fear of spreading disease, as they have been today. But actually, there are some really interesting parallels with the Second World War. As many people will know, for cities that were in danger of air attacks the first plan for children in the event of war was that they should be evacuated to the countryside. Large numbers of children were evacuated, and the schools were also evacuated. For example, large numbers of schools were evacuated from West Ham, I think, to Oxford. But a lot of the children did not go: their parents didn’t want them to go, or they didn’t want to go. So, you had a situation where the schools were in Oxford and the children were in many cases still in the East End, and that caused severe dislocation. Many fathers were out at work and many of their mothers were also out at work, but the schools weren’t running. So the children were missing free milk and free meals, which were very important, particularly in poor areas. There were estimates that as many as a million children might have been effectively ‘running wild’ in London by the middle of September 1939. Increasingly as the war went on, and when the Blitz started [in September 1940], schools were being requisitioned for civil defence, and therefore were closing down. As many as two thirds of all the schools in London, about 60 per cent of those in Manchester, were closed down for that reason. Of course, many were bombed as well; something like 20 per cent of schools in London were damaged in the course of the war. In West Ham, for instance, where there was supposed to be 60 council schools, at the worst point there were only 16 of them open. Juvenile delinquency rates went through the roof – convictions for juvenile delinquency went up by a third between 1939 and 1941 – and generally, educational provision was badly disrupted. So, by January 1940, about a quarter of children in London were receiving full-time education; another quarter were having part-time education; and a quarter were being home-schooled, either in their own homes or perhaps in the homes of family members with sort-of wandering schoolmasters going around for an hour or so a day, marking homework and so on. And then probably about a quarter – something like 430,000 children – were getting no education at all. It was a serious problem. If you’ve ever seen the movie Hope and Glory [1987], there are some lovely scenes about what it was like to be a schoolboy in London during the Second World War. (I won’t spoil the ending by telling you what happens in the last shot.) By the end of the war (in some places), there were seven-year-olds at school who were unable to read and write as a result of the poor standard education they received. One of the consequences of that was the 1944 Education Act, the famous act which extended secondary education for free to every pupil in the country, up to the age of 15. It was planned to become 16, but that took longer. The historian Angus Calder has described it as the most signal measure of social reform that became law during the war itself; essentially, the most important gesture towards democracy in the 20th century. As a result of the crisis in education that occurred as a result of the war, everyone agreed that something needed to be done, and that bill, I think, was passed without division in the House of Commons. And so it was that major reforms were brought in after the war. DM: The big thing that is happening now is governments around the world are having to encourage people to make sacrifices, and they are doing it in the context of liberal democracies. What lessons can we learn from the wartime experiences that you studied to help those governments to do that? Or is it simply that you need to resort to illiberal methods to get people to do what they need to do? JB: There is a limit to volunteerism, undoubtedly. And in both wars, one did end up with greater levels of compulsion being applied. But nonetheless these are liberal democracies and popular support is important.There are three principles that need to be applied to that. The first is that the effort or sacrifice needs to seem in proportion to the threat – and it has to be seen to have a chance of success. So the government has to be seen to be doing all that can, and they have to explain to us why what we're doing is going to help and why it’s going to work. That is not just about spin; public opinion is able to work out the scale of the threat. Indeed, over the past week or so, the public has been ahead of the government in terms of its reading of the threat that we face from this virus. The second principle is fairness. People will do an awful lot – they will give up an awful lot, that's the experience of the two world wars as long as they feel that everyone is in the same boat. What they cannot abide is unfairness, in that regard. So I think that's really important; if you had unfairness with rich people, for instance, being able to buy more toilet roll than others – that causes aggravation and indeed it causes people to not comply. The third principle, I think, is this issue of providing hope for the future. Everybody knows that we are in a crisis and that the crisis has to be overcome in the short run, but, again, the lesson of the two world wars is that just saying we're going to go back to how things were before is not the right answer. So we have to come up with ways to think of a better word that we can have in the future. than the one we left behind as in the past. The First World War was largely fought by people who thought they were going to dial the clock back to how it been in 1913 – and what they found was, in the aftermath of the armistice, that was impossible. Therefore when the Second World War came along, it was those people who managed to highlight the need to fight not only to defeat natzism, but also to create a better world, who managed to capture the public imagination – and indeed to eventually win the general election of 1945. DM: One thing that didn't exist in the wartime period was social media. This is a big part of the conversation today – it's enabling mass discourse about things that are being asked of us. Do you think that changes how governments have to go about maintaining morale and imposing structures? And do you think the wartime government would have dealt with things any differently with social media than ours today? JB: I suppose there are two sides to that. Do I think the government ought to be censoring social media? Definitely no. I don't think they could, even if they wanted to. But I suppose the more complex question is to what extent is social media different from gossiping in the queue at the greengrocers in the past? I'm not sure that it is that different; people are always going to chat amongst themselves and rumours will always be flying around. Okay, social media can spread this a bit further than was previously the case – but it doesn't strike me as being qualitatively different, even if it is different, bar the speed with which things can move. In any sense, sensible people have always been cautious of rumours they heard in the greengrocers, just as people are sceptical about everything, I hope, they read on social media today. DM: I guess “loose talk, costs lives” shows that they were aware of the dangers of gossip in the greengrocers. On to a different question. Is there anything different between the national psyche of the people who lived through the wartime crises and people today? JB: It's an interesting question. In a sense, it's what historians are struggling with; they are trying to work out why people did the things they did in the past in the context of today's mindset. I don't see any reason why that should be the case, let's put it like that. The basic principles by which we live our lives are not markedly different; I'm thinking we’re broadly a Liberal democracy and we’re broadly humanist/Christian. Our societies and how we live are pretty similar, although the cultural makeup of the country has changed a lot since 1914 – and for the better. So I don't see why any of those necessarily have changed. I think it's very tempting and very easy for certain right wing tabloids to say we're not as tough as we used to be, where's British stiff upper lip? And that kind of stuff... but I think that's over emphasising the extent of stiff upper lip in the past and also underestimating the resilience of ordinary humans, with ordinary human values, today. We are very similar today to what they were in 1940 or 1914. There is some continuity. DM: Last one from me. if you were invited into Boris Johnson’s meetings, or into President Trump's war cabinet, and they said: what lessons can we learn from your research into the wartime experience? What would you offer them? JB: I think we should come back to the three principles I mentioned earlier. Proportionality of threat and the chance of success; the need for fairness; and the need to create a sense of travelling to a better future. There will also be minor details – one I thought about this morning was whether we should nationalise the banks or close the stock exchange? In 1914 they did close the stock exchange, but they didn't nationalise the banks. These are the questions of detail, but the main point is policy needs to have principles that people can buy into if we are to maintain public support. The principles are more important than the details. Listen to the full interview on the History Extra podcast here
Elma Brenner on medieval wellbeing: "People in the Middle Ages were absolutely focused on staying healthy"
In a recent episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, Dr Elma Brenner, Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist, talks to Dave Musgrove about medieval medicine, health and wellbeing. Read the full, unedited interview below...
Note: this is an unedited transcript of a HistoryExtra podcast, which you can listen to here. David Musgrove, Content Director at HistoryExtra: I’m here with Dr Elma Brenner who is Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist. She’s written a piece on medieval diseases for BBC History Revealed magazine, along with another piece she wrote a little while ago on medieval medicine for BBC History magazine, and that piece is now on our website. She also gave a lecture on disease and medicine in the Middle Ages as part of our free virtual Medieval Life and Death History Festival, which took place in May 2020. So she’s an expert on medieval medicine. We’re here at Wellcome Collection. So, Elma, first thing, you’d better just tell me about Wellcome, what it does and what it’s all about. Elma Brenner, Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist: Yeah, we’re in a remarkable place, it’s a biomedical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, that funds all kinds of amazing and important projects. As part of that charity, there is a public venue, Wellcome Collection, which is based around a phenomenal collection of library and archive materials dating from the early centuries AD right up to the present day. And including a number of really important medieval manuscripts. DM: OK, so what we’re going to talk about today is medieval medicine, broadly. We’re going to pick up on some of the themes that you’ve talked about in the feature that you’ve done. But before we do that, can you just define the general period and sort of geographical spread of your research? Where do you focus on? EB: So I focus on the period, really, towards the end of the medieval period, the centuries between, roughly, really just before the Black Death in the mid-14th century up till the very end of the 15th century. And I look at Europe, particularly at France and England. But it’s really important to think about the global side of the Middle Ages and the fact that we can study all parts of the world in that period. 7 facts about the history of medicine 6 women in science history you (probably) didn’t know about DM: OK, thank you. Now, we know of some horrible diseases that people suffered from during the period, and you’ve written about them in the feature, so plague, leprosy, dysentery, pox. We kind of have this view that medieval people were running the gauntlet of a horrible demise on a daily basis. I’m sure that’s not the case, so can you just sketch out the health landscape for us a bit, just give us a sense about the general tenor of health and medicine during the period. EB: Yeah, as you’ve said, there were some terrifying diseases that we’re able to treat today and that in the medieval period, people didn’t have the medical means to treat them. But, at the same time, it’s clear that people had many mechanisms to stay healthy and they lived healthy and incredibly fulfilled lives. You just have to look at cultural outputs – like books of hours or sculpture in churches – to see that people had a thriving, cultural landscape; they celebrated life and they lived life to the full. At the same time, they were aware of these diseases and of the dangers and one of the key things that they did was to try to live a balanced and healthy lifestyle to ward off sickness. So, the key thing was to try to avoid becoming sick in the first place. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/02/GettyImages-528863458-df0a051-scaled.jpg" width="2560" height="1899" alt="A miniature showing doctors visiting a sick man in the 14th century. (Photo by Gustavo Tomsich/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="A miniature showing doctors visiting a sick man in the 14th century. (Photo by Gustavo Tomsich/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)" /> DM: I find that fascinating and there’s a little quote that I’m taking from the feature that you’ve written: “Medieval people also believed that environmental factors and behaviour had an impact on health in terms of the quality of the air, diet, sleep and exercise.” That feels quite modern, doesn’t it? That feels like the concerns that we have today, you know, we’re always measuring how much sleep we get and how much exercise and how much fat we’re eating. So, they had the same concerns? EB: Absolutely, and it’s really strikingly modern to us, actually, that people were thinking about what happened to their bodies in terms of health. So, what went into their bodies and how their bodies experienced life, in terms of how much sleep they got, in terms of how much exercise they got. And really, what I find really striking is that these things make sense. So, there are also ideas that were both present in incredibly learned medical treatises by authors who wrote in Latin and Greek. But they were also held by people in small communities to whom these ideas trickled down, but also I think the common sense factor really played a big role. DM: We’ll come back to that. In terms of the medieval attitude to wellness, if that’s not an anachronistic term, one of the things that perhaps is a little different to now is the importance of the soul. And you make the point in your feature that perhaps the soul was more important than the body in terms of people’s understanding of their health and wellbeing. Tell me a bit about that. EB: That is something that is different from the way we live our lives today, certainly in Western Europe, most of us. I think we can safely say that most of us live in a very secular society and when we think about Europe in the Middle Ages, it is a deeply Christian society, although there were very important Muslim and Jewish communities as well. And in terms of the Christian context, there was a very big emphasis on preparing your soul for the life to come. And thinking about purgatory, a period when your soul would kind of be in transition and doing the requisite things to make sure that your soul achieved salvation. And this linked in to bodily health because people tended to think that when you became sick, this was a sign of some kind of intervention by God and so there must be something somewhat troubling going on with your soul. And so, it kind of made sense to primarily pay attention to what was happening with your soul. And then there was an expectation that naturally your body would then recover as a consequence. DM: And you talk a little bit in the feature about the use of religion and magic, I suppose, as cures, and you’ve got an example of sort of invoking saints to ward off demons. So, practically, what did people do to improve their soul health? EB: They did a number of things and this ranged from very orthodox religious worship to practices that were frowned upon by the Church, although interestingly were also practiced by some religious men and women as well. So, on the orthodox side, it was about prayer, it was about repentance and it was also about charity, so supporting charitable causes and showing your devotion in that sense. And on the less orthodox side, there were magical practices, particularly the use of healing charms, which were remedies based around appeals to the saints and to key religious figures, so Christ and the Virgin Mary and adopting ritualistic behaviour in connection with that. So, reciting religious words, inscribing them, possibly, on a piece of paper or a piece of parchment, attaching that to your body, or possibly putting it into a drink so that the words kind of melted into the drink and then you would drink it. And these were seen, these were seen as magical practices and, as I’ve said, many religious authorities did not condone them – but it’s pretty clear that they were very widespread. DM: So if you lived in a village, the local priest would have frowned upon that sort of behaviour if you were a local peasant and you drank a bit of manuscript with some words on? EB: I have to say it would depend on the priest. We see a real range of responses to this kind of thing and it’s clear that in some instances, priests were part of this system of magical religious beliefs. In other instances, you might find a manuscript, and we have a few of these here at Wellcome Collection, where there are magical remedies that have been very vehemently crossed out by someone. So initially they’d been written down because they were considered to be valid and important. Someone else came along, possibly after the Reformation, actually, and was deeply troubled by these and felt the need to erase the completely. DM: You mentioned the Reformation there, so does this attitude towards magic and magico-religious ceremonies change as the period progresses? EB: It does. After the Reformation they are bound up with the whole range of responses to Catholic ritual and there is the destruction of manuscripts and other kinds of artefacts that contain this kind of material. But it’s also clear that some of these forms of behaviour persisted; indeed they clearly persist right up until the 20th century in some instances. DM: And you also mention astrology and celestial observation. How did that figure in this part of the story? EB: This is another really key component for medieval medicine and it’s the idea that the movements of the planets, and particularly the phases of the moon, will influence the health of your body. And it’s to do with the way that blood pools within the body and the different zodiacal signs and a kind of linkage made between different signs of the zodiac and different parts of the body. And an understanding that at those particular moments in the calendar, it might be dangerous to treat that part of the body. Florence Nightingale: nursing by numbers 10 of the most surprising numbers in history DM: Was that a widespread practice; was everyone aware of these sort of zodiac signs and living their lives by them, in a way, or..? EB: It’s certainly clear that it was very widespread. It was also linked to overall understandings of the cosmos and the overall calendar of the year as well. So people’s attention to the seasons and their concerns about things like harvests. At the very end of the period, we do find expressions of concern by certain physicians about these ideas. So certain physicians were becoming sceptical, particularly if astrological beliefs might cause the delay in treatment of someone who had an urgent illness. A physician, at the end of the 15th century, might look at that situation and say, “I’m not so sure this is a good idea, I think we should intervene and treat them, regardless of astrology.” DM: Moving away from the soul and those aspects of it, if you actually did want to get some practical, medical treatment as closer to the way we understand it today, where would you actually go to get medical treatment? EB: This would depend very much on your socio-economic situation. So someone who was very wealthy would actually try to avoid going into a hospital. Hospitals were really there to cater for the sick poor, people who didn’t have any other option. A wealthier person would seek out the services of a medical practitioner. And that might be a physician who had been to university, it could be a surgeon who had more practical training and it could be other types of very, quite specialised practitioners such as people who specialised in areas like the pulling of teeth as well. DM: And monasteries? EB: Yes, absolutely. So monasteries were very important sites for medical knowledge and learning but also for medical practice. In terms of the knowledge side, because monasteries were sites for the creation and production of manuscripts and for education, real expertise developed among monks and nuns. And then they also, because of their community setting, because these were quite self-sufficient communities with a monastic infirmary, monks and nuns would become specialised in how to actually treat the sick and would have particular skills, like bloodletting. And this would permeate through into lay society, so into the parts of society outside the monastery. We know of a number of monasteries which offered services to people to come there and receive a particular kind of treatment. DM: OK, and so you talked about the socio-economic aspect to it. I imagine if you’re a high-ranking individual who’s ill, you would call upon the services of someone and they would come to you and you would presumably pay them. But if you were less exalted, you were just an every-day person, how would you access these medical resources? Who was the gatekeeper? Presumably you would have to pay, or would you not have to pay? EB: It’s likely that you would have to pay. There was a whole spectrum of medical practitioners, so you would be able to get hold of the services of someone that you could afford to pay. In certain instances, in a small, localised, community, quite often it would really revolve around the parish priest, potentially, who might, himself, have medical knowledge, who would have a network of contacts who would be able to come in. And it also might revolve around people in that community who had a number of areas of expertise. So you can think of, for example, the butchers trade. So a butcher might also have certain skills in barbary, in treating human bodies and performing certain things upon them, as well as obviously being able to engage with animal bodies as well. So it really depends upon the particular local setting. But the other important thing to mention is that in that kind of network of practitioners, women play an incredibly important role as well as men. DM: Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? What was the role of women in this process? EB: The most obvious role, which we know quite a bit about, was as midwives, so providing the expertise around childbirth and pregnancy. And that is the kind of knowledge that was learnt on the job. It wasn’t necessarily book learning at all, but that it was absolutely about expertise and it was absolutely about having a prominent place in the local community. Women also practised other kinds of medicine. So they were clearly involved in the process of bloodletting and also related practices like cupping, which was another way of kind of expelling corrupt matter from the body through the skin. 6 women in science history you (probably) didn’t know about 5 "bloody brilliant" 20th-century women DM: You’d better explain what cupping means… EB: Yeah, so cupping is something quite specific which is about applying a glass vessel and heat to the surface of the body and trying to draw out corrupt matter. And what’s really interesting is that there are manuscript illustrations of women engaged in this practice, so it does seem to be something that women did as well as men. DM: OK, and did that give a certain sort of level of agency and potency to women in local communities that they would otherwise not have had perhaps? EB: I think so. I think it’s an interesting one because clearly women would have been paid for these services and that’s an important type of agency that they would have. I think it’s also really interesting to think about it in the broader context of women’s economic role and the fact that women did practice crafts and they did engage in certain professions beyond the realm of medicine. And that their situation is not always visible from the records or from manuscript illustrations but that they were definitely there, engaging in the economic landscape. DM: Now I imagine that you would only seek the services of any of these people if you were feeling particularly poorly. Is there any similar example to, you know, if I woke up in the morning with a headache, I would take a paracetamol, I would take some self-care. I imagine that your average person would look to self-care first, was that a thing that they could do at all? EB: Yeah, I think people absolutely were focussed on staying healthy and if they had an ailment that they felt they could treat themselves, then they would have done that. They would also have drawn upon their family and community network and, in particular, they would have been able to get hold of remedies that they could treat themselves with. Particularly from apothecaries who were the pharmacists of the day, but also from household production of medicines. And late-medieval manuscripts tells us quite a bit about how medicines were produced and a sense of ingredients and processes that could be done in the kitchen. And so it would make sense to try to do that yourself rather than to pay someone else to do that for you. 7 bizarre cases in the history of medicine Medieval medicine: killer or cure? DM: And how effective were most of these remedies? Because we have this sense that, you know, medieval medicine is basically just a bunch of quack cures of things which have no scientific basis and would do more harm than good. Did these things work? EB: I think in many, many instances they did. And it’s really interesting to look at the ingredients of the remedies and to think about what we know today about the ability to treat illnesses. So one particular ingredient that comes up a lot is honey, which is definitely there to sweeten unpleasant-tasting medicines but we also know today that it has wound-healing properties and antiseptic properties. And so I think, you know, that’s just a small example of something that was an ingredient that we know today has an effective mechanism. And so I think we can say that a lot of the remedies did work. Certainly not all of them and certainly it’s really interesting to think about remedies that have incredibly convoluted or exotic ingredients. Theriac is a good example of that, which was a very kind of, a kind of cure-all medicine of the later Middle Ages that anyone who could, wanted to get hold of, particularly against plague. And it’s not clear that that would have worked. But it would have, we can also think about the placebo effect as well, which obviously is impossible to measure, but it’s something we can also think about today with some of the remedies that we take on a day-to-day basis like paracetamol. You know, that you take it, you’re reassured that you’ve done something and you start to feel better. Listen | Simon Bowman of the Royal College of Physicians discusses how the work of doctors has changed since the time of Henry VIII DM: Do we know what theriac was? What went into that? EB: It was a whole mixture of ingredients, some of which came from the East, so from outside Europe. It included things like snake’s venom to counteract poison, so a sort of like-for-like counteraction. DM: Are there any remedies or treatments that people took, that we are aware of, that we can say would definitely have been harmful? EB: There definitely are. Some remedies, for example, involve lead, which we know is not a good thing. For the treatment of the pox, which is roughly equivalent to modern-day syphilis, in the early decades of the 16th century, mercury was an ingredient which we again, know is not a good thing. Overall, however, the overriding impression you get if you’re leafing through the pages of a late-Medieval recipe compendium with lots of medical recipes is that these are plant-based remedies with a number of plants that we might use today in cooking, that we also know are actually ingredients for modern-day pharmaceuticals, that we don’t think would have harmed the body. So the overriding impression is that these wouldn’t have harmed people. You do get interesting, occasional law suits, actually, from the later Middle Ages, against apothecaries or physicians, sort of claiming that the remedy was harmful. So there is some evidence for that kind of thing, but not much. DM: And generally speaking, do you think, did medieval people believe in the treatments that they took or were advised to take? Did they believe that they had efficacy? EB: That’s a really interesting question. So, on the one hand, yes, because we see these remedies being copied numerous times and in the early decades of printing, from the end of the 15th century, we get printed compendia that were clearly selling very well and there were lots of different versions of them and they were kind of popular, kind of, self-help books. On the other hand, within those collections, you get multiple different remedies for the same ailment. So you might have something like excessive bleeding, which is a quite common thing that understandably was very alarming and you needed a remedy. You might have seven different remedies to try to counteract that, which suggests an awareness that it might not work. Which is an important difference, I think, from modern-day medicine when we tend to have complete faith in pharmaceuticals and we go and buy something over the counter and we’re confident that that will work, we’re not shopping around for a different version of aspirin, for instance. A different attitude in the Middle Ages where you might try several different things, you’re quite open-minded, you’re ready to see failure. So that’s definitely one for the surgeon and the surgeon will take a look at it and provide you with some kind of dressing that might be infused with various plant extracts. And also with extracts such as silver, which we know does have antiseptic properties. DM: We ought to take a moment to just stop and think about some of the more unusual treatments that we’re aware of, which you do flag up some of them in your feature. So just give us a taste of some of the things which we would consider very unorthodox nowadays. EB: Well, the most obvious one is bloodletting because that was something that was the kind of knee-jerk reaction, both to an illness but also actually to a concern to stay healthy. So on the one hand, if you became sick, the physician would say there is an imbalance of the humours inside your body. So these were four different fluids that were understood to exist and circulate in your body and they needed to be in balance for you to be healthy and any sign of sickness meant that they were, they’d gone out of sync, possibly they had become kind of corrupted, so you needed to get that humour out. And so you would bleed someone, possibly quite a large quantity of blood. On the other sort of side of things, if you were someone who had the means to kind of follow a regime to stay healthy, you would regularly have yourself bled in order to just keep the humours balanced. And we know that this certainly happened in monasteries as part of the monastic life. I think this is quite alarming to us, we can’t see any benefit to your health to remove a quantity of blood. We do know, however, that donating blood is not that dangerous, that you can go along and donate blood and you can step up and go home, as long as you drink some fluid, you know, you’ll be OK. It’s just it doesn’t quite fit with our understanding of what’s good for you. 6 weird inventions in history Pig-chickens, beavers’ tails and turtle soup: 8 weird foods through history DM: Yeah, OK, I gave blood last week and I’m still alive, so, yeah. What did they do with the blood that they let? I often wonder that, did they find any uses for it? EB: They, usually it was disposed of. So some medical ingredients of the magical kind, actually, might include a quantity of human blood, possibly. An interesting variant of this is the blood taken from the little finger of a child sometimes comes up as something that you would put into your magical remedy. Apart from that, I think it is disposed of. However, other human fluids, particularly urine, did have a range of functions. So urine had a range of industrial functions including in the production of parchment, which is quite interesting. DM: Talking about some of these more unpleasant diseases, the bigger killers that we mentioned earlier, the plague, leprosy, dysentery, those sorts of things. I have a sense certainly that if you got such a disease then your chance of survival would be pretty low. You kind of think that, you know, you’re basically a goner. You had an example in the feature of someone who survived the Bubonic plague. How widespread was survival from these more unpleasant diseases? EB: So it depended. The mortality rates are pretty shocking, particularly for the Black Death, so the very first plague outbreak that hit Europe in 1347 and lasted for about three years. And that is, in some localities, it’s pretty clear that about two thirds of the population perished, which is terrifying. At the same time, about a third did survive and there would be a range of reasons for this, to do with your resilience, I think, your kind of ability to ward off the infection. Also about preventive measures that you took. The most basic preventive measure was to flee, so just to get out of a place of infection or to get away from a heavily-populated area and go into the countryside. And that’s a remedy that persists right up until the 17th century that, certainly with the Great Plague of London in the 1660s, people are getting out of the city of London. So people did survive and there’s a range of reasons for that. Other types of epidemic, such as the English Sweating Sickness which, kind of, there were two or three of these outbreaks from the 1480s onwards. These are less devastating, they strangely sometimes seem to affect particular groups of people, the Sweating Sickness seems to have been linked to young men, we’re not sure why that is still. So, on the one hand, if it does affect you, that’s terrifying, on the other hand, you may survive it. And communities clearly did continue, there’s been fantastic work looking at the social and economic aftermath of the Black Death. The disruption is vast but there is continuity none the less. DM: And we’re talking today when there’s the coronavirus in China, and across the world, seems to be spreading with alarming results. One of the responses to that is quarantine. I wonder is there any such thing as the concept of quarantine in the medieval period that we’re aware of? EB: It really comes a little bit later, certainly than the Black Death. But by the beginning of the early modern period, so the 16th century, this is something that is happening. And it is, particularly in Italy, so in major Italian cities like Venice and Florence, there is a process of quarantine. But earlier on, I think really it’s about a kind of response on the ground that isn’t able to incorporate that kind of practice. I think there is an awareness that it spreads very rapidly among heavily-populated areas and that it would make sense to kind of separate the infected. One thing that does happen is about sort of separating, on a local level, kind of enclosing people in their houses does happen. And there is also interesting evidence about getting rid of material objects that might be contaminated. So particularly cloth that is kind of burnt or taken away to a remote place and washed many times, this kind of thing. But not quarantine as we would understand it today. DM: Who would have orchestrated those sorts of measures though? Because there’s no public health body that would have said: “Right, we need to burn all this cloth or we need to get people to move away.” Would that just have been on individual agency or would there have been anyone sort of actively suggesting community response? EB: This is where public health becomes a thing, and you can definitely see it, and it actually precedes the Black Death, interestingly. From the very early 1300s, town authorities are doing things. We’re not thinking necessarily of national responses and I think in the Middle Ages, we don’t have national measures in the way that we do today. And certainly, some parts of Europe were not united countries at all: Italy and Germany. But on a more localised level, civic authorities, or in the Italian case, communal authorities, which was kind of a whole region, were doing things. And they were particularly trying to enact measures to remove anything that was kind of filthy or foul-smelling from the city, that they associated with contagious illness. And with the spread of illness through, kind of, infected air. Forgotten science: 7 of the strangest scientific theories in history Nazi super-cows and defamed Gods: 7 strange and forgotten moments in history DM: Modern medicine, we’re able to cope with lots of difficulties and illnesses and I assume that in the medieval period, there were things that would have struck people down that today we’re able to survive. I’m thinking of infection specifically. How important was infection as a risk to people in the medieval period? EB: So that’s actually one of the core terrifying risks really that, again, today, I guess we have antibiotics so we’re confident that we can treat infections. At the same time, interestingly, some of the work of the Wellcome Trust is looking at resistance to antibiotics, something that is, you know, increasingly something that we’re concerned about today. But in the Middle Ages, people definitely understood what an infection was and the word fever is used. And it’s to do with heat, it’s to do with, if it is, you know, a wound that is kind of foul-smelling and hot, an awareness that that is something that’s infected. However, they did not have the knowledge that we have today about how infections are spread and how, again, the treatments to get rid of them. And so an infection could be deadly. The mortality of women following childbirth was usually to do with an infection that kind of took hold after childbirth, sadly. DM: I’m a fan of Twitter and, on Twitter, I follow a feed called the Medieval Deathbot, along with 87,000 other people, so it’s a popular thing. EB: Great. I need to follow that. DM: But it’s a curious thing which basically summarises the ways in which medieval people died as recorded in coroners’ rolls. So there’s lots of violent deaths and things like that but quite a few are from sicknesses of various sorts. So clearly, you know, there’s 87,000 people who have an interest in this, what is it, do you think, that makes us interested in medieval medicine and illness? Why do we have a fascination with this topic? It’s a bit gory? EB: I think it’s about our own vulnerabilities, actually, and I think an awareness that… I think the coronavirus is an example of this. We’ve got huge anxiety about that right now. I think an awareness that, yes, we’ve got an amazing kind of infrastructure of modern medicine that can help us with so many things. But, in essence, we’re all vulnerable and there are things that we, that medicine can’t help us with. And a sense that people in the past, who had so many more challenges, did a great job in surviving. So I think there’s a positive story there for us, actually, in medieval medicine. But also, I think, there is a fascination with the gory and the terrifying and things that are shocking as well and there’s a kind of drama to it that I think we all take an interest in. DM: OK, now I'm going to try some quick-fire questions. If I’m an average Joe or Jolene in Medieval England, maybe living in a town, not got much money but I’ve got some symptoms, I’m going to ask you what I might do. So let’s see if this works. EB: OK. DM: I’ve got a headache because I’ve drunk too much beer the night before. What might I do then? EB: I think you know what that is, I think there would be knowledge about alcohol drinking and I think there would be received wisdom, from you or your family, about resting and drinking fluid. I think you wouldn’t seek any type of medical treatment. DM: I’ve broken my leg when I fell off my horse. EB: You would find a surgeon. So that might be someone who had been university educated, it might be someone who was much more practice based. You’d find a surgeon and you would ask them what to do. And they might do something, actually. They would probably try to do something to reset the bone and they would kind of heavily bandage it. They might operate, that would be deeply risky. I think the key thing about that is that there was very, very widespread awareness that that kind of operation was hugely risky, an awareness of infections. And that it might be better not to do anything of that kind. And so, you might then have an issue about your leg and your mobility in the aftermath. DM: I’ve eaten something that doesn’t agree with me and I’m nauseous and having trouble at both ends, what might I do then? EB: You would seek some remedies to help you with that. So there could well be some knowledge that your parish priest holds, actually, and your parish priest may have a book of remedies and might be able to look something up for you. You might go to an apothecary, a pharmacist, to make up that remedy for you. And then you would follow the instructions, hope for the best. If you worsened and if you were very poor, you might have to go into a hospital and receive care there. DM: What about if I’ve just got toothache? EB: So you would, there would be someone fairly locally who was expert in matters concerning teeth. And this would be someone who was, it might be a surgeon, it might actually be someone who really was, that was their thing, they were specialised. Quite often those people were itinerant, they travelled around offering their services. You’d get their advice, they might extract it. Right, but you might have to hang around for a bit before someone turned up who could help you out? EB: Yeah, although depending on your contacts, your economic ability, you might be able to get hold of someone as well, I think. DM: Would there have been any sort of effective pain relief that someone might have been able to take in the intervening period? EB: Yes, alcohol was used. Alcohol was, yeah, really interestingly in the kind of 14th, 15th centuries, knowledge increased about distilling alcohol to make it purer and that was used as an anaesthetic. And opiates also existed and some of the remedies that we know about were clearly opiates and were clearly used for those purposes, among other uses. DM: Two more. I’ve got a cut on my arm that just won’t heal and is going a green colour and smelling badly. EB: So that’s definitely one for the surgeon. And the surgeon will take a look at it and provide you with some kind of dressing that might be infused with various plant extracts. And also with extracts such as silver, which we know does have antiseptic properties. However, there would be no way of totally, sort of, providing a sterile cleansing of your wound. There was also not the knowledge that that was necessary and so you might actually be quite worried about that. DM: OK, finally, I’ve got a sudden pain in my chest and I can’t breathe. So in modern parlance, I'm probably having a heart attack. Would I be able to do anything about that or is that going to see me off? EB: Not very much, basically. You would seek medical help and there would be, I think there would be knowledge about instances of this kind of thing happening, there would be knowledge about getting someone to rest or to, you know, lie down. I mean, if it went on for a while, they might even perform bloodletting but there would not be a surgical intervention of any kind. DM: Thanks. Thanks, Elma, that’s good, putting you on the spot there and asking you some difficult questions. OK, so finally, just to finish, you alluded to that in a previous answer, do you think there is anything we can learn from medieval approaches to health and wellbeing? You talked about sort of the more holistic understanding of living a healthy lifestyle, is that something we should be taking note of? EB: Yeah, I think, definitely. I think about prevention really. And obviously, this is something that we’re aware of in terms of, you know, the dietary causes of diabetes, the dangers of smoking. But really that you can help yourself a lot and also that your body will have ups and downs and your life will have ups and downs. And you may not, I think it’s interesting, I think there’s also a connection with ideas about happiness and wellbeing and that I think these are things that we prioritise hugely and I think they were definitely factors in the Middle Ages. But there was also a real emphasis in the Middle Ages on survival and on doing what you could to keep yourself a float. And that that resulted in resilience and in many instances in people leading long lives, actually. DM: We didn’t talk about this at all, and perhaps we should have, but the modern concern of mental health and mental wellbeing is obviously key to us. Was that a concept then, in the medieval period? EB: It was, definitely. And one of the factors that you were supposed to kind of take care of yourself, for your health, was your emotional state. So to pay attention to what was happening to your emotions and to kind of care for yourself, if there was something difficult going on. I think this is also where religion plays a role and this idea about taking care of your soul and about seeking help for that if needed, about the kind of support network that could help you. But there was an awareness of this and it was also undoubtedly seen as an illness, if you had mental issues going on, that was categorised as an illness. Listen to the full podcast episode with Elma Brenner here Dr Elma Brenner is Wellcome Collection’s medieval specialist. To watch Elma's lecture on disease and medicine in the Middle Ages, recorded as part of our free virtual Medieval Life and Death History Festival, which ran in May 2020, click here
Why did Shakespeare have such a profound impact on the United States? This was the question at the heart of a recent HistoryExtra podcast with James Shapiro. Read the full interview below
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our podcast Shakespeare and America Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Is there a moment or a particular staging of a play that inspired you to write this new book on Shakespeare and America? James Shapiro: There was a moment and there was a production. The moment was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and that November, I woke up, that November morning, I woke up and realised that living in my blue bubble, in New York City, I misunderstood something fundamental about my country and I realised that I had better get to work figuring out what that was. And having spent the past quarter century or so investigating London in Shakespeare’s day, two years really, 1599 and 1606, I had ignored my own nation and turned about face and have spent the last few years trying to grapple with that. And, as far as the production is concerned, about a month after the election, Oskar Eustis, who’s the Artistic Director at the Public Theatre in New York, where I advise Shakespeare productions, called me in and told me that he would be doing a production of Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, 50,000 New Yorkers line up to see this free every summer. And he told me that it would star a Trump look-a-like as Julius Caesar. And that production, which frames my book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, really was galvanising for me. 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about William Shakespeare 8 places that shaped the life of William Shakespeare ME: I mean, obviously Shakespeare is someone that we usually associate very much with England and with English culture. In what ways is it far more important and pivotal in US culture and politics than we might expect? JS: In its own day, I have great confidence that Shakespeare’s work spoke to Elizabethan preoccupations. But in many ways, he speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than he does to English ones. And I’m not exactly sure why, that’s one of the mysteries that I wrestle with in investigating this. But America embrace Shakespeare as its national poet even after breaking with England in 1776 and he’s never really had a rival here, as the one writer everyone in America reads. We don’t read him the same way but we all read him. And one of the things that I learned while writing this book is America’s Shakespeare is not England or Britain’s Shakespeare. Certain plays, Othello in particular, take a distinctive political and social meaning here that they don’t in England, and the opposite can be said to be the case for works like Twelfth Night, which matter in terms of class in the UK in the way that they don’t in America. Listen | James Shapiro considers why Shakespeare has had such a profound impact on the United States ME: And how far back through, in American history, can we trace this link? JS: The link between Shakespeare and America goes back to pre-revolutionary times when Hamlet’s famous lines, “To be or not to be,” were appropriated by both those who wanted to get rid of the British and defenders of the British in America. And by the time the second president of the United States, John Quincy Adams was installed, we had presidents grappling with Shakespeare. Adams rewrote a speech from Henry V to show how a foreign power might use its influence to put a sympathetic president in the White House. And that’s just mind-blowing in light of what’s going on between Russia and Trump today. So Shakespeare becomes a way for Americans to grapple with social and political issues that are not easily spoken about or confronted. Americans are really bad at speaking about the things that divide us, race, immigration, politics, the cultural gulf that is enormous right now. And Shakespeare, time and again in American history, has been a way of speaking to those concerns. ME: You mentioned Othello there and obviously race. In what way did that play help people frame or view that particular issue, I suppose? JS: One of the primal sins of America is slavery. Ira Aldridge, in the 1820s, could play Othello on the London stage. But over a century would pass before Paul Robeson could do the same on Broadway. So Othello really is a litmus test of American values and attitudes towards race and miscegenation and has been for our entire history, sometimes in mind-boggling ways. In ante-bellum America, in the south, the slave-holding south, where people named their slaves Othello, it was one of the most popular plays in theatres. And it has been and continues to be a lightning rod for differences about race, about colour-blind casting, about miscegenation in American culture. ME: Can we trace the ways in which that’s changed across the centuries then? JS: I’d like to say that it has changed but one of the more surprising discoveries that I made in the book was writing about the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams, who was one of the great abolitionists of his day, fiercely opposing slavery to the point that he received death threats for that. And he opposed the expansion of slave states, fought to defend slaves in the Supreme Court, he was really a hero of that movement. None the less, he couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of a black man touching or sleeping with a white woman. Now, he kept the most extensive diaries perhaps in American history and wrote widely on a range of subjects. But he never ever discussed miscegenation or, as it was called at the time, amalgamation. Except for when he turned his attention to Othello. And that occurred after what may be the worst dinner party in recorded history. He was seated next to Fanny Kemble, the superstar English actress who was touring America at the time. And Adams spent the evening mansplaining Shakespeare to her, including an account that Othello, which he called disgusting and he didn’t realise it, but she would publish a book about her American travels that included this conversation, somewhat guardedly. And he retaliated by writing a pair of essays in which he said that Desdemona, for falling in love and marrying a black man, who smothers her to death, got what she deserved. And later, in another account of this conversation, Fanny Kemble writes that in describing this, Adams actually used the N word instead of negro to describe Othello. And it’s extraordinary because he’s one of the liberal heroes. Yet, even he is using the N word and repulsed by miscegenation. So we have not come as far as we might imagine in this country, on the left, or on the right, when it comes to race relations. 5 facts about Shakespeare’s Globe theatre The Globe theatre fire of 1613: when Shakespeare’s playhouse burned down ME: It’s so interesting that Shakespeare, right back to its very formative days in America was kind of shaping and being part of political discourse like this, I had no idea. JS: In truth, I had no idea either. Like most Shakespeare professors, I’m an Anglophile and my attention has always been focussed on Shakespeare’s age. And it is something that we don’t really think a lot about in Shakespeare studies. So a lot of this material was fresh to me and I think will be fresh to a lot of others and will force us not only to grapple with the different ways in which Shakespeare matters, that he’s not so much universal, as read everywhere, which is not the same thing. And it’ll also, I think, force Americans to grapple with the reality that the problems we’re facing in this country do not stem from one political leader but are baked into our nation’s history and Shakespeare makes clear whether you’re talking about attitudes towards manliness or cultural divisions over immigration. These issues have long been with us, even if they are buried beneath the surface, Shakespeare allows us to see them. ME: On the subject of immigration, what does the Tempest tell us about America’s relationship to that particular issue? JS: You know, that’s a good example of a play that, in late 19th century, had a lot of productions and performances in Britain but very few in the United States. And the Tempest only came into prominence in the United States, really, in the aftermath of the Second World War. Except for a moment in the early 20th century when we were wrestling with immigration. And Shakespeare was really critical to immigration debates at that time because he was imagined to be Anglo-Saxon, and that very concept or invention if you will, of the category of Anglo-Saxon, itself dates from the first decade of the 17th century. So Shakespeare dates from that story, the Anglo-Saxon origins of the people living in the British Isles. But Shakespeare’s Tempest also became a way in which, and I should follow that up by saying, in so far as America was believed to be an Anglo-Saxon nation, that large numbers of immigrants pouring into the United States, from Eastern Europe, from Italy and Sicily and Bulgaria and Lithuania, all these countries that were not Anglo-Saxon, led those who had been here, who came from England and Ireland, and Scandinavia to a lesser extent, to insist that Shakespeare be used as a stick to beat these new immigrants into line or as a way of excluding non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants into this country. So when Donald Trump speaks of, even as recently as last week, a travel ban that excludes Ireland and the UK, it goes right back to that moment, a century ago, where we drew a line between Anglo-Saxon nations and European ones. The Tempest, to get back to your question, figured in this debate because Caliban was a stand-in for the unwashed immigrant. And even the most progressive readers of Shakespeare at the time, such as those behind this extraordinary 1916 production starring a cast of thousands of immigrants and a handful of professionals actors called Caliban, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, by Percy MacKaye, used that masque-like performance to urge immigrants to be acculturated into, if you will, Anglo-Saxon American ways. So the story of immigration is, in a way, inseparable from Shakespeare and, of course, the efforts in Caliban to show the acculturation of Caliban failed because he’s shown repeatedly to be a potential rapist and a threat to society. So even when people were trying to make the case that immigration was OK, the use of Shakespeare made it clear that if we’re looking at it through the lens of the Tempest, it was not OK and immigrants should be kept out. And in 1924, legislation was passed along race-based lines to end large-scale immigration to the United States. ME: Oh. Thank you so much, this is amazing. Heading back a bit in time, what was Abraham Lincoln’s relationship with Shakespeare like and how was his life story shaped by this character, I guess? JS: Abraham Lincoln is a representative American figure from the 19th century in many ways, and the greatest president our country has been blessed with. Lincoln had almost no formal education but like tens of thousands, really millions of others in the 19th century, he had access to very few books and one of them was a Shakespeare-infused reader. There were 23 selections from Shakespeare in the volume that his step-mother brought when she moved into their log house on the prairie. And Lincoln memorised these great Shakespearean passages and spent much of the rest of his life reciting Shakespeare to anyone who would listen. He didn’t see a Shakespeare play until the last two years of his life, at which point he was hooked and went almost every week to see something in Washington theatres. But for him, Shakespeare became central to his, not only his intellectual life but his emotional life. So that, while as President of the United States during the Civil War, he read Shakespeare all the time. And he was a melancholic depressive figure and he tended to drift to the darker passages in Shakespeare, to Claudius’s guilt-ridden speech for killing a brother in Hamlet, during this war between brother and brother. Or to Macbeth’s dark musings. So the great, great irony of Lincoln’s obsession with Shakespeare, and he was, without question, the finest reader of Shakespeare in American history bar none, the irony is that his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, son of a great British actor, brother of Edwin Booth, the star [unclear 0:19:57.1] of the American stage, who would act in a production of Julius Caesar months before he assassinated Lincoln, knew just where to find Lincoln on that fateful April night in 1865, where at Ford’s Theater, he shot Lincoln dead, leaped onto the stage and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis,” thus always with tyrants, imagining himself to be an American Brutus. So the story of American political history is fully woven into the story of Shakespeare. ME: Something else your book really interestingly explores is how Shakespeare can help us understand gender relationships in American history. What insights does his work offer into that particular issue? JS: We are really bad in this country about talking about gender. Gender fluidity, manliness, people walk away from those kind of conversations. And my book turns to this issue again and again. First and most markedly in the mid-19th century, at a time of manifest destiny, when a notion of aggressive manliness, think of Donald Trump a swagger, a desire to take over whatever you can grab, supplanted an older model of manliness associated with the Founding Fathers and, if you will, with a kind of subdued, quiet, earnest, hard-working, sober English manliness. And that had implications for how you did Shakespeare. So at this time, no man could really play Romeo very effectively because he had to be, in the words of the play, effeminate at some moments, and then a great swordfighter, killing Tybalt and others. And, as it turned out, the only people who could really play him well were women. So the mid-19th century in America, and to some extent in England as well, was the great age of female Romeos like Charlotte Cushman. Flip it around, and look at men trying to play various roles. The best example I can give is, from the same year that Charlotte Cushman was starring was Romeo in England and then in America, half the United States army was gathered on the Mexican border to precipitate the Mexican-American War, one of the bloodiest in our history. And while the men were waiting, they were drinking, carousing, fighting, brawling. The officers decided to build a theatre and stage Shakespeare, Othello first of all. And there were only men in this encampment, they had to find somebody to play Desdemona. They found an actor named Theodore Porter, and not an actor really but an officer, to play the Moor [unclear 0:22:57.4]. But they couldn’t find the right person to play his Desdemona until they found a slim, girlish officer named Ulysses S. Grant, who as it turned out, they all acknowledged, look great in a dress. And Grant had a chance to rehearse the role of Desdemona and one of the great, for me, moments in American history, is the future hero of the Union forces in the Civil War, that defeated slavery, and the future 18th President of the United States, at this moment, saw the world through the eyes and in the dress of a white woman in love with a black man. So again and again, Shakespeare allows us to see how these complicated issues of gender work. As it turned out, Porter just couldn’t play Othello against Grant and they had to bring in a professional actress from New Orleans, which tells you something about the male anxiety about same-sex desire or relations. So that too figures in that story. And the book goes up through Taming of the Shrew in Kiss Me, Kate, that great American musical of the 1940s, which was written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. All those Rosie the Riveters who had obtained economic independence during the war, now were told to go back and be the submissive housewife. And Bella Spewack wrote a brilliant, brilliant musical script that explores just this tension, pushing it up against Shakespeare’s fairly toxic play, Taming of the Shrew, which ends with female submission to male authority. So it’s not easy talking about these issues and Americans keep turning to Shakespeare to allow them to negotiate and unpack them. ME: Thank you, that was amazing. Are there any other Shakespeare plays, or stagings of Shakespeare plays that stand out for you particularly, as showing us moments in American history or that we’ve not talked about previously, do you think? JS: I think one of the most significant is the film version of, again, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare in Love. And that film was created in 1998, by the early months of 1999, maybe one out of ten American adults had seen that film. And it speaks to the Shakespeare Americans wanted to believe in. But there was a problem with that film. Its first script, by a screenwriter named Mark Norman, dealt exclusively with a Shakespeare who was heterosexual, who discovers that he’s fallen in love with another man and is reconciling himself to that. Harvey Weinstein, who is now in prison for rape, didn’t like Norman’s script and brought in the extraordinary Tom Stoppard on rewrite. And Stoppard is the most gifted, living playwright, I think, in the world right now. But he understood that he had to supress what he called that gay theme and move the play in a different direction. And it’s not easy telling the story of Shakespeare in Love because Shakespeare’s married and this is an adulterous affair and Americans don’t really like adultery. None the less, Stoppard figured out a through line to this story. And one of the things that I write about is the pressure he and the director of this film were under, from Harvey Weinstein, to change the ending, so that the character played by Gwyneth Paltrow, so brilliantly in this film, would have been turned into Shakespeare’s mistress, given occasional roles in exchange for being around for sex, had Harvey Weinstein had his way. So again and again, in the course of this book, I try to explore the ways in which Shakespeare, in large and small ways, tells us something that was going on in American history, that was right below the surface, and that Shakespeare helps us see clearly now. ME: Thank you so much. Two final questions and we are done. If you could somehow travel back in time and witness a moment from your book, or perhaps a particular staging of a Shakespeare play, is there one that you’d particularly like to see? JS: Wow, that’s a wonderful question. I would probably like to see that production in Corpus Christi, Texas, with Grant rehearsing the role of Desdemona. To me, that’s one of the signal moments in American history, almost impossible to wrap one’s head around. We have no recordings of it, nobody described what that process was like except for 50 years later or so, and that would have been, for me, an extraordinary event. That, perhaps, and seeing Kiss Me, Kate staged for the first time on Broadway. ME: Amazing, yeah. And finally, how would you like your book to change the way people view Shakespeare’s importance in American history specifically? JS: I got my understanding of American history through text books in junior-high school and high school. And the story that I was taught is at odds with the story that emerged in the writing of my book. So, yes, this is a book that people interested in Shakespeare will want to read but it’s also an alternative history of the United States. And as we are convulsed, at the time of this pandemic, by so many forces, economic and social and political, we would do well to understand what are the fault lines in this culture, so that we can pull together and move forward. But unless we understand some of the darker forces circulating in American history, that are still with us, we’ll be ill-equipped to do so. Listen to the full podcast with James Shapiro here James Shapiro is professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University Matt Elton is editor of BBC World Histories Magazine
Coronavirus: what might we learn from pandemics in the past?
As Covid-19 dominates the news, read our interview with Laura Spinney (author of Pale Rider, an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic known as Spanish flu) from the HistoryExtra podcast. In the interview, Spinney draws historical parallels with other pandemics in history and asks what we might learn from disease outbreaks in the past
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Coronavirus – a historical perspective Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories Magazine: Obviously, Coronavirus is something that’s hitting a lot of headlines at the moment. Why does it strike such a chord, why are we so afraid of pandemics? Laura Spinney: Well, I think it’s something very primitive in us really. I mean, we’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease, plagues if you like, to use a more kind of ancient and Biblical term, since we settled down in kind of semi-permanent settlements, since we started farming, that is, about 10, 12,000 years ago. And, you know, these diseases that kind of adapted to big groups of densely-living people, we call them the crowd diseases, and they kind of evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So it’s been a kind of arms race for a very long time, they know us very well and unfortunately because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to be a step ahead. They can just mutate and adapt and, you know, they’re just wherever we don’t want them to be before we can do anything about it and we’re seeing that again now. In some ways, there are many aspects, I think, of a pandemic which don’t change over time. There are many that do but there are many that don’t and those are the ones that speak to our, obviously speak to our most ancient fears. ME: And, of course, it’s natural for humans to look back at past examples of a similar thing to see if there’s any parallels or any lessons that could be drawn. Do you think there are particular pandemics from history that are most useful to look at in terms of parallels or is it just not a useful exercise generally? LS: No, I do think it’s a useful exercise, I just don’t know why we immediately rush to pick the worst possible example. Given that the Spanish Flu, or the not Spanish Flu, we should really call it the 1918 Flu, was pretty much forgotten for most of the last century, even though it killed a staggering 50 to 100 million people, the fact that we’re now, everybody’s talking about it, that’s the only parallel we can draw is somewhat ironic. I mean, if you just think about flu pandemics because obviously we’ve had pandemics of other diseases, although flu does tend to be considered the disease that lends itself most easily to pandemics, we have had three flu pandemics since 1918 and none of them killed more than about four million people. The last one we had was sometimes considered rather anti-climactic, if that’s not a politically-incorrect thing to say, given that lots of people died nevertheless. But 600,000 people died in the 2009 H1N1 pandemic which is considerably less than in any other pandemic. So there are other kinds, other leagues of pandemics that we could be comparing it with and that we’re not. Why was the 1918-19 pandemic known as Spanish Flu? Portraits of a plague: the 19th-century pandemic that killed 12 million people ME: So is there a more useful historical parallel to draw? LS: Well, that’s the killer question, isn’t it? The thing is, there’s so much we don’t know about this bug yet. We don’t know, for example, exactly how lethal it is. And the other problem is that we don’t really know how lethal, for example, the Spanish Flu was, for different reasons. We don’t know how lethal this current one is because we don’t have very much data yet. So you might have seen a figure floating around of a case fatality rate of 3.4%, which refers to the proportion of people who catch the Covid-19 infection who go on to die of it. The number that’s often quoted for the Spanish Flu, for example, case fatality rate is 2.5% but it’s a very, very, very controversial figure because the numbers are so vague. I mean, we think that probably 50 million people died but there was no form of reliable test at the time so we can’t be sure about that and that just throws all the numbers out. So it’s really difficult to make the historical comparisons, even if you have accurate data now, which we don’t. So on both sides of the equation, if you like, it’s a moving target. ME: The other side of this, of course, is although we may not be able to draw historical parallels with a specific pandemic, there is something perhaps to be gained from how people dealt with them or how they reacted to them at the time. Are there useful parallels in terms of that? LS: Yes, there are. So we would obviously love to have a vaccine against Covid-19 now but we don’t and we may have to wait a year to 18 months for that. They had no vaccine at all in 1918. Or rather, they did make vaccines but they were useless, pretty much, because they were essentially vaccines against bacteria in the respiratory tract whereas, as we know, flu is a viral disease. So in terms of that, we are much advanced compared to 1918. But we don’t have that vaccine yet. We so have anti-viral drugs for treating the sick and we do have antibiotics which will be useful for treating the bacterial complications that may cause pneumonia in some cases, as they did also in 1918, interestingly. But the only thing that actually stops people falling sick is the vaccine and we won’t have that for a while. So what do we have? We have strategies of containment, strategies that are collectively known as social distancing. And those are surprisingly unchanged since 1918, or even since much, much before that. I mean, they’re basically things like quarantine, isolation, wearing masks, although masks have always been debateable. It depends on the pathogen but once again, it’s looking like they may not be as effective as we hoped they would be. And hand washing is another thing. Basically, any kind of barrier technique that keeps the sick and the healthy apart and therefore reduces disease transmission. Because it’s looking pretty much now, at this stage, with the WHO having declared the pandemic, that it was a pandemic yesterday, as if containment is not going to work very well, if at all. And so what the governments are moving to now is more a sort of delay tactic, which will push off the peak of the epidemic, hopefully, until later in the year, towards the summer. And what everyone’s pinning their hopes on is that this bug will be a sort of seasonal bug, a bit like flu, and will kind of recede when the warm weather comes. At the very least, they want to push off that peak while the health systems are already coping with many other winter respiratory conditions and so try and lessen the burden on them. But basically, whether you delay or whether you contain, as long as you’re before the sort of mitigate stage, which is where Italy and South Korea and Iran are, you know, they’ve got widespread community transmission and they’re just trying to treat everybody and, you know, reduce morbidity and mortality as much as they can. We’re the step before. But essentially the techniques for delaying that peak of the pandemic are pretty much the same as containment and they all involve social distancing. So that’s where we are, and that’s a long-winded way of saying that historical parallels are useful there because the techniques for containment were the same in, for example, 1918 or 1957 when we had another flu pandemic, or 1968 or 2009 and today, they’re all the same. ME: To what extent does today’s transmission of the panic or of the media coverage of this epidemic compare to that of 1918, say? LS: Well, I think it is different. I mean, fake news is not a new phenomenon, fake news is as old the hills. But, you know, with the advent of the internet, the speed and the volume of both information and fake information that we can transmit have just, you know, been amplified to an extraordinary level. So we’re dealing with the disadvantages and the advantages of that. In 1918, you know, most people read the newspapers, that’s how they got their news, so it was a slower medium. And then, on top of that, there was a war on, at least for the first part of the pandemic and so you had things like wartime censorship interfering with things. And many countries, at least at the beginning of the pandemic tried to suppress the information that they had this illness spreading in their populations because they didn’t want to supposedly lower morale of their populations while everybody was concentrated on the war effort. And of course, that slowed down, you know, even if they had had techniques for dealing with this disease, it would have slowed down any response beyond any hopeful stage. Because one of the key things you need to do with an epidemic is to stop it or to contain it as early as you can. Because you get this kind of exponential growth in cases at the beginning because everybody is susceptible to this bug. ME: I’m really interested in the other social forces that might have changed since earlier pandemics. Organised religion, for instance, seemed to have played a big role in the past but doesn’t so much today, is that right? LS: Yeah, I think so. And I think that also has a positive negative aspect to it. So for example, to start with the positive, in 1918, doctors were pretty useless in the sense that they had nothing in their medicine cabinets really to offer, apart from aspirin. In fact, the people on the sort of conventional medicine side who were the most useful were nurses. They’re the only ones who can make any difference between life and death by keeping patients warm and hydrated and so on. But because doctors really had nothing to offer and because they were nevertheless, in many cases, very brave and, you know, in the front line and falling sick in droves themselves and often dying, others had to step into the breach and perform that kind of, if not doctor, then nursing role. And very often you saw it was priests and nurses and, you know, other people from the main faiths, or even the lesser faiths. So on the positive side there was that. "Far too little, too late": what happened when Spanish Flu hit Britain a century ago? Could flu really kill thousands again? On the negative side, because I think organised religion was much more powerful, they could have a nefarious effect on the messaging occasionally. I mean, you would always hope that the powerful leaders and the powerful influencers will, you know, coincide with the message that reinforces the public health message. But that didn’t always happen. So I can give you the example of Zamora, which is a town in north-western Spain, which was and in fact still is, very pious Catholic city. And there was a very charismatic, very influential bishop there at the time who basically just defied the provincial authorities. And at the height of the pandemic, in the autumn of 1918, ordered his flock into the churches to pray for forgiveness for their sins, which he insisted was the cause of this terrible punishment, divine punishment. And so everybody crowded into the churches and made their prayers to St Roch, who is the patron saint of pestilence and plagues. And that meant lining up to kiss his relics, everybody kissing the same relic. And Zamora went on to record one of the highest death rates from that flu in the whole of Spain, if not in the whole of Europe. So, you know, very kind of clear effect there. And I think today, you know, you do see the effect of religion but it’s very kind of marginal. So there are reports of people in the Iranian shrine city of Qom licking the shrine defiantly. And we hear that some of the early clusters in South Korea came from churches. But, generally speaking, there has been much less of an effect of organised religion, I think. ME: Is that the mechanism by which people in the past would have found out about pandemics or would they have learnt about it from another source? LS: I mean, I think that if your community leader was also your religious leader, that was quite often the way you found out about it, was probably also the source you looked to for guidance and how to live through this terrible thing and how to mitigate it, if possible. Of course, there were much higher levels of illiteracy in the world at that time, even in the supposedly advanced countries. And so that was much more of a feature, literate people obviously read newspapers but that wasn’t necessarily the most common means of information moving around, no. ME: Another way in which the world is different today is that it’s much more globalised and much more interconnected. Do you think that makes it much harder or even impossible to contain or stop such pandemics as this? LS: Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it? I mean, as soon as the WHO declared, because the WHO declared a pandemic yesterday but it had already declared a global health emergency on the 30th of January. And, you know, that was the step that unlocked its maximum resources and powers for dealing with this disaster. The word pandemic, it depends who you ask, did it matter that declaration yesterday? I think the WHO made it because it was worried that people were being too complacent and not acting in time, and previously they were trying to avoid panic, which is also counterproductive. But they declared a global health emergency on 30 January and, at the same time as they did that, they basically put out the advice not to close borders because we know it doesn’t work, we’ve learnt it over and over again through previous pandemics. And many countries promptly did exactly that. And now what they’re finding is that the virus is inside their countries and they are less than prepared for it. So not only did it not help, I think, it also meant that they were more on the back foot when it came to actually beginning testing and detecting and all the rest of it that goes into good containment which, you know, maybe it’s too late for that anyway. So are we globalised, of course we are. There was no commercial, there were no commercial air flights in 1918 and so the fastest people got around was by steam ship or train. And now, you know, a person and the germ they’re carrying, can travel round the world in days, if not hours. And, you know, we’ve seen the lightning speed with which this germ has got around the world. And so I think, I don't know, you know, perhaps we could have slowed it down but we also know that screening at entry and exit points is less than completely effective. Not only because there’s a question over whether people may be infected and asymptomatic but mainly because there’s an incubation period, which is on average three to five days, can be up to 14. So that means people can be infected but they’re not yet showing the symptoms and if they’re travelling across a border in those three to five days, then fever screening, temperature screening won’t pick them up. Spanish Flu: the virus that changed the world 10 facts about the Black Death ME: You mentioned national borders there, and alluded earlier to the idea that Spanish Flu got that name, and perhaps we shouldn’t call it that. What does that name tell us about this part of the story? LS: So it’s called the Spanish Flu because when it first manifested itself in the Northern Hemisphere spring of 1918, the world was still at war and the belligerent nations, which already had flu within their boundaries and they included the US, Britain and France, kept that information out of their newspapers, they were censoring them. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the stated goal, or the later stated goal being to protect the morale of their populations. And so even their populations weren’t necessarily aware that there was flu in their midst. Spain, on the other hand, was neutral in the war and so didn’t censor its press and so when they had the first cases there, in the spring of 1918, they reported them. And so it seemed to the whole world, including the Spanish, including people in the other countries that were already infected, that this disease was rolling out from Madrid. And the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, was among those early cases, he went onto recover, but his case sort of lent it a great deal of visibility. Of course, it’s unhelpful. One of the few certainties we have about that pandemic is that it didn’t start in Spain, we actually don’t know where it did start but we know it didn’t start in Spain. And the Spanish felt, and to a very great degree were, stigmatised by it. In 2015, the WHO put out guidelines for how to name a disease and I think the motivation for that was mainly to avoid this kind of stigmatisation, this kind of kneejerk naming of a disease after the place it appears to first manifest itself, or the sector of the population or the animal it first appears in. because remember, 2009, H1N1 flu was initially called swine flu. You could think about AIDS which was initially called gay-related immune deficiency and stigmatised the homosexual community, unhelpfully for everybody, including heterosexuals, who nobody thought about how it might be being transmitted in that community. Meanwhile homosexuals were getting stigmatised for being the ones who transmitted it, so it was unhelpful to everybody. The swine flu name was unhelpful in many ways, for example, the Egyptian government ordered the slaughter of the country’s swine herd, which was mainly the property of the minority of Coptic Christians in that country, so their local economy was wiped out in one stroke. And in fact, by the time it was in humans, it was a disease that was being transmitted from human to human so it made no difference either. And in fact, to go back a little bit further in history, that swine flu was given to pigs by humans in 1918. So it came back from pigs to humans in 2009, you know, ironic historical reprisal. So naming doesn’t help. And this time, I think, it’s really interesting and one of the small things we can applaud ourselves for is that we have not given this outbreak a stigmatising name. It’s not the Chinese Flu, it’s not the Pangolin Flu, it’s Covid-19, which may sound mundane but it’ll do the job. ME: Do you think the responses to this particular pandemic in various parts of the world tell us about historical situations in those countries or historical pandemics in those countries? LS: So one of the things that public health experts are absolutely clear about is that the best way to impose a public health, a set of public health measures is not to impose them in the authoritarian way that the Chinese did. But if you can possibly manage it, to have people complying with you voluntarily, because you’re much more likely to be able to contain that disease that way. People don’t like to be told what to do. But if you want people to comply with you voluntarily two things are needed. The first is they have to be properly informed about the threat they face, so that they understand why you’re asking them to do these things and to restrict their normal lives in certain ways. And the second thing is they have to trust the authorities, they have to trust that those authorities are acting in their collective interest. And the thing is, that if that trust isn’t there when the pandemic breaks out, then it’s too late to build it. So I think you could look, for example, at the case of South Africa in 1918, where as in many other countries, when the epidemic arrived, doctors and scientists scrambled to produce a vaccine. Again, as I mentioned earlier, the candidates, the vaccines they developed were fairly, uniformly, useless because they were against bacteria and not the virus. But they launched a national, a nation-wide vaccination campaign and white South Africans dutifully lined up to get the vaccine and black South Africans basically boycotted it. Because white, the predominantly white doctors had never shown much interest in their health before and they couldn’t understand why they were doing so now. And there were rumours that circulated in the black population that the doctors were trying to kill them with their long needles. So, you know, that’s a very clear and graphic illustration, I think, of how if the trust is not there, if you don’t believe that the authorities and the doctors coming towards you in their white coats are acting in your interest, then you will not do what they want you to do, certainly not voluntarily. ME: The Spanish Flu destabilised social and political orders for decades, do you think that that is possible in this case? LS: Well, yeah, it’s certainly possible. You can already see the economic damage it’s doing and people have a tendency to look at their governments after some terrible disaster and to hold them responsible for what happened. So, you know political consequences are also possible. And then when you’ve got the two things together in concert, if the economy suffers then the politicians are likely to be blamed for that as well. Of course, the politicians are doing their best to shift the blame. I mean, you saw Mr Trump’s announcement yesterday that he was restricting travel to the United States from Europe with the heavy suggestion that Europe had somehow mismanaged the disaster in the same way, or just as badly as the Chinese had, to, you know, reproduce his narrative. Whereas the plain fact of the matter is that the disease is already in the United States, there have been reports that they haven’t been testing for it properly. So the problem is very much theirs as much as it is Europe’s. But Mr Trump has decided to play a political game with it and I’m sure that’s not unconnected to the fact that there is a presidential election coming up this year. Listen | Catharine Arnold explores the story of the Spanish Flu outbreak that caused devastation across the globe a century ago ME: Finally, what lessons do you wish that we would learn from the past, but don’t, and why do you think we don’t learn from them? LS: Well, I think the lessons we should learn in a very general sense are to try and, because we go through this cycle of panic and complacency. So we panic when it happens, when we should think calmly and rationally and just do, you know, what the experts tell us to do. And then when it’s passed, we immediately forget about it and become complacent again and don’t do any of the long-term things that the experts ask us to do. So for example, when the WHO declared its global health emergency on 30 January, it even took that opportunity to repeat a message that it’s been saying for a long time, which is we need to invest in the long-term in better health infrastructure in the poorer parts of the world, because when a pandemic strikes, we are only as safe as our least-safe place. So, you know, we should be doing things like that, when the pandemic passes, which of course it will, eventually. Will we remember to do that? I very much hope so. I think this pandemic is throwing up other things which are really interesting which we should take on board and discuss when it’s passed, how to fix to so they’re not weaknesses again. I can mention two. I mean, I think the first is how we get our news out. The fake news problem. A lot of young people have said to me the problem is that good information is behind paywalls where as fake news is free. The assumption there is that they shouldn’t have to pay for the information and I think older generations were used to paying for their news but that’s not the expectation with the internet anymore. So we desperately need a new business model, we’ve been talking about that for a while in news circles but I think this pandemic has really thrown it into relief how important it is that we have ways to get quality information out there and that people know which is which. So that’s one thing. And my list is not exhaustive, by the way. Another thing that I think is really interesting is that it’s showing up the weaknesses in our various health systems, national health systems. So the problem in the United States has been that lots of people have been excluded from testing and from care, and not just for this pandemic but this pandemic is really highlighting that. A lot of people were not getting access to Covid-19 testing when they needed it. And of course, you can’t control an outbreak of disease if you don't know who’s got it and who they’ve been in contact with. On our side, in Europe, where we have more socialised medical healthcare systems, which by the way, were the kind of fruit of the 1918 pandemic, when they realised how important this was. Our systems tend to be paid for indirectly by taxes or insurance, national insurance schemes and we get our healthcare free at the point of delivery. So that means that, in theory, anyone can get tested for Covid-19, assuming the tests are available. There have been some reports that they haven’t been but that’s another problem. But the problem is that our health systems are completely overloaded. They are arguably no longer fit for purpose. They were built for much smaller and much younger populations and they’re struggling to support older and bigger populations and not doing very well. So we may have to have a rethink on our side about how we fund our health systems and how we adapt them, going forward, for a different kind of population. So those are just two things that I think that we could be thinking about in the long term, once this pandemic passes. Listen to the full podcast interview with Laura Spinney here Matt Elton is the editor of BBC World Histories Magazine Laura Spinney is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer
Secrets of a 20th-century Jewish family: Hadley Freeman on her book House of Glass
In a recent HistoryExtra podcast, Hadley Freeman spoke to our deputy digital editor Elinor Evans about her quest to uncover her family’s history through some of the most tumultuous events of the 20th century. Read the full transcript here...
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Hadley Freeman on a 20th-century family history Elinor Evans, deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra: We are talking today about your book House of Glass, which is an account of some members of your family through the 20th century. How did you come by their stories? Hadley Freeman: I grew up hearing these vague stories – for example, I would hear about my great-uncle Alex and how he managed to escape from a train to a camp, and I would hear that my grandmother had come from France to America to escape the war. So I always had this idea that there was a story in the background, and they all died by the end of the 1990s – which was just when I graduated from university – and I sort of had this idea of just writing about my grandmother – a very melancholic, elegant figure. I knew there was something – I didn’t know what that was, or if I would fictionalise it, or even if there was a story – but I spent five years ‘dicking around’ trying to make some enquiries into what her life might have been like. Then I went to her old apartment, which my father’s younger brother lives in, and he hadn't thrown anything away of hers, which was very lucky for me. I was just going through her closet, because I had this idea that I might write about her relationship with clothing, and I found this shoebox filled with letters and photos and photo albums – and other keepsakes that didn't make any sense. And then, at the bottom, this drawing by Picasso – and that was kind of it. That was 2006. So I had these dots that I was trying to join, and I couldn’t figure out how to join them. And then eight years later – eight years after me travelling around the world going through archives in all kinds of places around the world – my uncle found, among my grandmother’s belongings, this unpublished memoir by my great-uncle Alex. This was my line connecting the dots; I could now make the story and I was able to fact-check everything. That’s how it came about. EE: I would love to talk about these sources later, because how you came to find out about them was so fascinating. But first can you introduce our readers to your grandmother and her siblings in a bit more detail? HF: Of course. So my grandmother was one of four, and they were all born in Poland. In the 1920s, they all moved to Paris to escape the Polish pogroms – and they changed their names to Henri, Jacques, Alex and Sara. Henri was very tall, very handsome, very stylish and very brilliant – he was a brilliant engineer. Jacques was very passive, very quiet – he lived a lot like his father did and in photos looked a bit like a young Adrien Brody. He was a poor tailor, like a lot of Jewish immigrants. Alex was this incredibly bombastic, very charismatic, 5ft 2 couturier – and a very successful couturier. And then the youngest was Sara, my grandmother, who was this very beautiful, delicate young woman who loved art and painting. EE: You just mentioned they all grew up in Poland, until a certain point. Can we talk a bit about their upbringing and the violence that informed the rest of their lives? HF: So they all grew up in Chrzanow, which is 18km from Auschwitz and is actually the sister town. It was very typically Jewish; my grandmother would always compare it to the film Fiddler on the Roof. It was 56 per cent Jewish at the time, and it had a big Jewish marketplace. They were very, very poor; their father was incapable of earning any money – and so the children grew up very poor, very hungry. But they had a very happy childhood - they had a whole bunch of cousins living around the corner, there were at least seven of them. And then World War One started, and everything became very bad. Their neighbours, the Catholic Poles, suddenly turned against them. The country became very nationalistic, as poverty rose. Once the country was liberated, the country turned on the Jews and blamed them for Poland’s troubles. And then Chrzanow was the first town in Poland to suffer a pogrom, which was when Catholics and townspeople would tear through the town and kill Jews, attack Jews, ransack their houses, ransack their shops. One of my Grandmother's memories from childhood is this pogrom when she had to hide under the bed with her mother and her brothers. Alex, her closest brother, ran out when he was 12 years old to fight against the pogrom – and he saw people he knew (including his brother’s teacher, a close friend of the family, and people who bought sewing machines from his father, and their neighbours). This completely changed him forever – he never trusted anybody ever again. And it also made him a real fighter. And these pogroms eventually drove them to Paris – which was actually a very good thing. If they’d stayed in Chrzanow, they would all have been sent to Auschwitz. In Chrzanow now, there are no Jews at all. This is kind of amazing because it was such a Jewish town. The pogroms saved their lives. EE: Before we go any further ahead with your family’s story, you visited Poland as part of the research for this book. What was that experience like? What was it like digging into this history? HF: Poland was actually the last research trip I did. I went to Chrzanow and Auschwitz in March 2018; the first trip I did was in March 2001 and the last in March 2018. I had really put it off, partly because I didn't want Auschwitz to overshadow the whole book, and also because I was dreading going. I knew this was going to be a really depressing trip – and it was, but in ways I hadn't expected. First off, Chrzanow itself is a really pretty town and we found the street where my grandmother and her siblings used to live and right around the corner was this anti-Semitic graffiti, which was incredible to see and an amazing validation of my grandmother and her brothers’s decision to leave. And then we went to Auschwitz, which was really eye-opening. I expected, obviously, it to be sad – but it was sad in ways that I hadn't expected. The Law and Order party, who are in charge of Poland, have been really focused on changing the narratives around World War II – and insisting that Poland was purely a victim in World War II and had no culpability. Various members of the government have said things like “Auschwitz-Birkenau needs to stop focusing on foreign narratives” (by which they mean Jewish narratives), and that “the camp should really focus on the Polish suffering there”. It’s true that some 75,000 Polish people were killed in Auschwitz, which is terrible, but more than a million Jews were. If you go to Auschwitz now, and take the official tour, you really only see where the Polish people were killed; you don't get a sense of where the Jews were murdered. And obviously the Polish people did suffer terribly; the Germans considered the Polish as unmentionables – but the fact was that Poland was an incredibly anti-Semitic country – it’s why my grandmother and her brothers left – and a lot of the Polish helped the Germans kill Jews. It is actually a crime now to state this in Poland – that the country has any culpability. If you say this, Polish government ministers have said things like: “Oh this is just the Jews being embarrassed that their ancestors went so meekly to the camps”. In fact, the Polish were pointing out the Jews to the Germans – and killing them, and killing Jewish children, too. So I was really surprised at the camp by that – and I spoke to people from the Holocaust Educational Trust afterwards – and they said how much it's changed in Poland, in just the past five years. If you went five years ago, you would get a very straightforward narrative; if you go now, then the focus is really on Polish suffering. Probably the most amazing thing is when you leave Auschwitz. There is this gift shop in the car park, with all this ‘I heart Poland’ stuff – and I wrote about it in the newspaper after I visited in 2018. I then received these angry tweets from Auschwitz on Twitter about it, saying “this is not our gift shop, this is the local municipality” – and I thought, “oh my god there's something quite funny about being told off by Auschwitz on Twitter”. This, in itself, is a Jewish joke – as if the gift shop wasn’t a Jewish joke – the idea of being shouted at by Auschwitz on Twitter! The fact that it is the local municipality’s gift shop just makes it even worse; this is the local government saying: “You know what makes me want to buy an ‘I heart Poland’ mug? Going to Auschwitz!” So it's very strange how that narrative works, and it's a really interesting contrast with France. France is really coming to terms with its culpability, after having denied it for so long. It started to admit how bad it was in the 90s – and how much it collaborated with the Germans – and now there are sort of monuments around the various concentration camps in France. Whereas in Poland, it’s as if there is a real aversion to it admitting its culpability. EE: That idea of culpability and collaboration plays such an important part of your family story. But if I can pick up on what you said about narrative – you already mentioned a key source for your book was Alex. There's obviously a challenge there, with that narrative, and the way that was created. What can you say about Alex’s story? HF: When my uncle found Alex’s memoir and sent it to me, my dad did say: “Don't take this too seriously. Alex was always a big braggart, and no one ever really trusted anything he said.” So I went to it thinking: “This can give me an outline, but I don't know if I can trust it!” Also, I am not a historian. I didn't even do history A-Level. I did history of art, I'm sorry. So I knew I'd have to triple check everything, because I felt very insecure about my historical knowledge – and I wanted to make sure that everything was accurate. I didn't just want to write just about family anecdotes. But the amazing thing was everything Alex wrote, I factchecked and it turned out to be true! So Alex’s story really is incredible. He was this poor Polish immigrant who arrived in Paris when he was 14. He worked his way up through the couturiers to open his own couture salon at 20, which is insane. He did this all independently with no backers – and he succeeded. By the time the war started, he was in his late 20s. He joined the foreign legion (because he was still a Pole, he couldn't join the French army). And in the foreign legion he was part of the Narvik campaign, before France fell to the Germans, and he was awarded a bronze star for his bravery. Then France fell. He then went to Britain to join up with Charles de Gaulle and the free French. But then he wanted to get back to Paris to rescue his mother and his brothers. He went back to France, but he could only get into the south of France. He then opened a salon in the south of France and was living there with a man – a friend, maybe a lover? We really don't know. He was living this really glamourous life. I should also mention that when he was working in Paris as a couturier, his draftsman was Christian Dior. Another draftsman was René Gruau, who became one of the most famous fashion illustrators of the 20th century. They were in the south of France with him – so he was living this kind of high life in the south of France. But then the south of France fell, and the Germans invaded Nice. One night, Alex was arrested at a nightclub after he made a bit of the scene. The orchestra in the nightclub started playing German music. And in a scene straight out of Casablanca, Alex stood up and said, “you should play something else”. And the Germans came and arrested him. They put him on a train to Drancy, which was a concentration camp in France from where prisoners were then sent to Auschwitz. While he was on the train, he saw a hole in the roof, and he got his friend to pick him up – and he punched through this hole and jumped out of the train. He was then rescued by railway workers, who were communists, who hid him in a pile of manure when the Nazis came looking for him. They knew the Nazis were too vain about their uniforms to go through manure to look for him. From there, he made contact with someone – I later found out who – who then got him hidden in a place in the Auvergne. He hid in this house for a year with his friend, another fashion designer. So Alex always told me that he escaped from the train - and I thought “how does one prove that?” And it turns out that you can prove it pretty easily. You just prove the record of who got on the record and who got off. He definitely got on the train – you can see the records – and he definitely didn't get off the train, the record was in Paris. I went down to Nice to go through the records and he definitely got on. One of the great French Holocaust historians has written a lot about Nice, in particular, and he said there were 93 people who escaped from the train – and Alex is one of them. So, he definitely did escape from the train. When I figured out he did definitely escape from the train, myself and this wonderful historian who helped me through the book (he’s called Daniel), made contact with various resistance experts in central France (because we knew the train had to go through central France because it was going from Nice to Drancy) to see if they had ever heard stories about some Jewish fashion designer who escaped from a train! It was a real shot in the dark, but incredibly somebody got back to us – this man called Robert, who runs a resistance museum in the Auvergne. He said there is this woman ere who remembers this Israelite who came and stayed at her parents’ house – I think it's your uncle. So Daniel and I went off to the Auvergne, and we went to this little lady's house. She lives in the middle of the woods. I just thought: “This is ridiculous!” I can't believe I've been working on this for 20 years, at this point, and there I was sitting in a little house in the middle of the woods. I thought “this is crazy”. So we're sitting there, and she's very sweet – she comes out and she has all these photos… they are photos of Alex at the house! So this is her parents’ house, and she showed me the attic, where he was hidden, and the hidden staircases. I said to Robert: “Was it the resistance that brought Alex here?” And he said: “Oh no. It was an officer in the Vichy government who had a daughter who had been a client of Alex’s – and he helped Alex.” That whole story I found really fascinating because we think of Vichy as just basically analogous to the Nazis – and some of them were, definitely. But actually, there are a lot of people in Vichy who were just really old-school French Catholics. And yes, they didn't like the Jews – but it was because they wanted to protect the sanctity of French culture. It wasn't that they wanted France to be German, on no level. If there were Jews around who had fought for France, as Alex had done, then they were happy to protect them. I think that's a really interesting dynamic in the Vichy-Nazi alliance. There was another man who was in charge of the ‘Aryanisation’ of businesses in France – which basically means taking the businesses away from Jews. He helped Alex open a salon in Cannes; he gave personal permission for Alex to open his salon in Cannes. This is bonkers, it’s like the home secretary saying that some local business can open a newspaper shop. But because Alex had won a bronze star at Narvik, he stepped in and said yes. Three months after that, he was kicked out by the Nazis – and they installed this guy called Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who then got his own infamy later. This is perhaps going off on a tangent, but his daughter became a psychotherapist in Britain. I didn't want to put this in the book, but she then caused other damage. Melvynn Bragg has written about his familial connection to this, because his late wife was a patient of Darquier de Pellepoix’s daughter – and he knew the damage she caused in Britain. It’s really fascinating, and you can go down so many different paths, but I really had to keep a narrow focus when I was writing the book ( and also I obviously didn't want to intrude on Melvyn Bragg’s family story). So it’s interesting, all of these shifting alliances within the government… and how they affect the people. Alex was protected, essentially, by two people in Vichy (who suffered for it later). Anyway, he survived the war. He was doing resistance activity while he was in the Auvergne. After the war, he went back to being a couturier. He stopped in the mid-50s and became an art collector and gallerist – and became the great friend of Picasso, in particular. That’s how the Picasso was in my grandmother’s shoebox. EE: If we could go back to France, a little. If we go back to your family’s initial settling in Paris after they emigrated. What do their experiences tell us about the lives of Jewish people in France at the time? HF: When I went into this, I didn't know anything about what Jewish life was like in between the wars. I worried that this is my ignorance – but it turns out that this is something that isn’t covered in any specialist books and it's incredibly sad. So many Jews from Eastern Europe were coming to Paris. Paris, Warsaw and New York – these were the centres that Jews were running to, to get away from the pogroms. Warsaw was in some ways to close to where the pogroms were happening, whereas New York was too far away. So Paris was the logical choice and suddenly Paris and France were getting this huge influx of Jewish immigrants. The reaction of France and other Jews already living there was really interesting. At first, France was delighted because they needed a workforce; they had lost many men during World War One. And then the Great Depression happened, it bit into France. As happens when there's economic trouble; immigrants are blamed. Suddenly Jews are being blamed for taking jobs; Jews were suddenly being restricted in certain professions. Immigrants were suddenly being treated with suspicion. The antisemitism that France had in the 19th century that had formerly abated started to flare up again. It's really hard not to think of parallels with certain right-wing factions (and maybe some left-wing factions) today, and how they talk about Muslim immigrants, when you read about how the Jewish immigrants were talked about 100 years ago. Even assimilated Jews in Paris were looking at these Jewish immigrants with the view that they were going to “drag us down – we’re showing that we can be bourgeoisie here and you’re here with your dark clothes, your curls and your stupid customs – this is dragging us backwards”. So that's always very interesting – and it's also interesting because the same thing was happening in New York, so the Eastern European Jews that went to New York, there was a similar antagonism with the assimilated Jews there (and also the American governments there). So what was happening in Paris was also happening in New York EE: Alex’s story is one that is essential to your narrative – it's a rip-roaring tale. Someone whose story wasn’t as successful (in terms of his memoir being published) was your grandmother's, but I found her story a really moving part of your book. Could you tell us a bit about her story? HF: I suddenly realised I gave away all the Alex's story! Well, the thing with my grandmother was that she was this very melancholic, very distant figure to me – but also someone who wanted something from me, at least it felt like that as a child – and I didn't know what it was, it scared me. I felt overwhelmed. The story of my grandmother is… I was actually writing her story and I was thinking “will anyone be interested in this?” And I’ve been so touched that so many people are. Because the truth is her story is one that is very common to women, and it's one that's not told a lot. I was really thinking of Dorothea in Middlemarch when I was writing this book, because, as George Eliot says, in Middlemarch the story of the hidden lives – the domestic, the pride of the feminine – these are stories that are not written about really. So, Alex’s story. For obvious reasons I was able to track this down in archives, because he was constantly being spied on by the Vichy. With my grandmother, on the other hand, she was the youngest child. She was often sick – she was in sanatoriums for pleurisy for a long time. She then got out in her late twenties and her life is just about to begin in Paris. She was probably about to get married. But Alex knew that the Nazis were coming (because he was involved with people in the art world, and he saw how the French art establishment was turning against Jews). He knew that France was not going to protect the Jews. He really tricked my grandmother into marrying this American guy, who was my grandfather. So my grandmother went up to America and spent her life is an unhappy housewife, really. I don't want to over-egg this. I don't want to make it sound like she was crying all the time. She made a life for herself: she had friends and she had two sons. It wasn't like my grandfather was a terrible person, but it wasn't the life that she wanted and she was always waiting for her life to begin. She wanted to go back to Paris, but she did not get that for multiple reasons – I will leave that for the readers to discover. Her story is one of emotion, whereas the men's stories are tales of action. And I think that's true for people up to relatively recently in terms of historical tales, because women were not allowed to do things; they were not going to war, they weren't working – so this is why women stories don't get told because it's very hard to research emotions. I was able to research emotions because I knew her; I knew her friends, children and the people that she talked to (so I was able to describe those emotions). It's hard. This is why women's stories don't get told. EE: I definitely felt that when reading it. I'm really interested in your experience while writing that story, looking at the sources. The phrase you used was “rummaging around in closets that have long been closed” – there is a peculiarity there for you. What can you say about that? HF: Even now I sort of think, “what have I done?” I've unleashed all of these photos on the world. Especially the oldest brother, Henri. He was a big photographer. I did not know what I was going to find out about him – I had no idea what he was doing, or his wife Sonia’s story, during the war. So I went to talk to his daughter, Danielle. I said: “Did your dad leave anything?” I was really expecting not very much, but she took me down to the basement and there were like four suitcases full of everything – receipts, memorandum, records of everything he was doing during the war. It was a sign of how unstable he felt that he believed he had to account for everything. He thought the Nazis were going to come back, and so he had to prove everything was in order. That may be why he also took hundreds and hundreds of photos. He was a great photographer, and he really felt very deeply in love with his wife, Sonia, when they met in 1941. He took so many photos and he was very attracted to her. There is this series of photos – and I still think “oh my god I can't believe I put that in the book” – and Sonia is kind of doing a little strip for him. She's wearing a jacket in one photo, and then in the next photo she’s taken the jacket off and she's wearing a vest top, and then the third she's lying on a bed with her legs akimbo. It is very sexy. I don't think they meant for these photos to be published. There's nothing shameful, but I do think “what have I done?” I don't know what they would have wanted to be known. I know Alex would have wanted his achievements to be known, although I don't think he would have loved his ex-employees speculating on his sexuality. But this is a full story and is trying to get the full human range of experience. I really hope I didn't do anything disrespectful. I knew almost all of them and I love them. But, of course, they will have been dead for almost 30 years, in some cases. They would not believe that people are interested in their stories; it would be a huge shock to them. EE: You just mentioned there – even with four siblings in the same family, there is a huge range of experience in all of their four lives. So what did you take from looking more broadly at these periods and atrocities through individual lives? HF: One thing that was really helpful; I spoke to another historian called John O’Cummings, who lives in Israel. I told him the story and said that I couldn’t figure out how to basically structure it – because there's so much. He said it's interesting because these stories seem to reflect the Jewish experience in the 20th century – and that was the final lightbulb moment! I’ve got it! Because you have Henri, who hid during the war; Jacques, who was captured; Alex, who escaped; my grandmother, who went to America; and then their siblings who were either killed or went to Israel. I was like “okay, this gives me the structure”. And it meant that the book wasn’t entirely rooted around World War II, which I didn't want it to be. I wanted it to go from 1901 to 1999. Their range of experience was fascinating. Also, like you said earlier, how much their personalities affected their outcomes is really fascinating to me. So, Jacques was very meek, and that did not work so well; Alex was this very defiant individualist, and he fought his way to life. It's amazing how much their temperaments determined their outcomes. EE: I wanted to talk about garments in your book. You mentioned that you came to this story initially thinking it would be about fashion. What role did garments play in this history for you? HF: Probably a lot, although I didn't really think about it. But definitely for the Glass siblings. Their father was very stylish, even though he was this poor sewing machine salesman in Poland. When I was looking for a book in this memorial in Paris, I was able to recognise Jacques getting on to a train to the concentration camp because he was dressed stylishly, while everyone else was dressed like a worker. For them, clothes were part of their identity. Certainly, when they moved to Paris, they wanted to emphasize their French identity by dressing in a very French way. So Henri would wear these three-piece suits; my grandmother would wear very Chanel-esque outfits. And Alex is obviously making these clothes – making French clothes – making very French exaggerated styles. So clothes for them was about fitting in, assimilating and leaving behind Polish ghetto. I just saw it in terms of identity, I didn't think of it as fashion – I never thought about the fashion thing – it was more of an expression thing. EE: What legacy endures from your family? After the Glass siblings died, my family drifted apart – we didn't stay in touch. Some of my cousins and I found each other again because we all happened to be working in the fashion industry. We hadn't known each other, although we might have heard of each other. But it’s funny that we went into fashion – our grandparents all worked in clothing, and then we all did too without consciously thinking about it. Obviously, we were influenced by our grandparents. Listen to the full podcast interview with Hadley Freeman here Elinor Evans is the deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra Hadley Freeman is an American British journalist based in London.
How do dictators seize power? The malevolent careers of eight 20th-century leaders explained
How do dictators gain power? In the latest episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Frank Dikötter talks to our deputy digital editor Elinor Evans about his new book How to Be a Dictator, which explores the malevolent careers of eight 20th-century rulers including Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini. Read the full, unedited interview below
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Dictators Explained Elinor Evans, deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra: Your book How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the 20th Century focuses on eight figures that many of our listeners will be familiar with. Could you talk about this ‘cult of personality’ and how it links these eight figures together? Frank Dikötter: The book does as it says it really; how to be a dictator. It traces every step these eight dictators take to seize power and stay in power for as long as they can. Some fail, some succeed. Adolf Hitler dies, kills himself. Stalin and Mao die in their beds. I believe that there are two main instruments that dictators use – one is terror and the other one is image. Now the terror, we know – the concentration camps; the secret police; the knock-on-the-door in the middle of the night; the atrocious crimes against humanity – but I think image, in particular the ‘cult of personality’, we tend to overlook a bit – even though if you look at the 20th century, literally hundreds of millions of people cheered their own dictators, even as they were led down the road to serve them. I thought that was rather striking; so the book does focus quite a bit as well on that cult of personality. I don’t think it’s a French phenomenon; I think it’s very much fear and image that go hand-in-hand. Now, why is this cult so important? Because I think there is a paradox at the very heart of modern dictatorship: people in an age of democracy are supposed to be sovereign – it is they who elect those who should represent them. But dictators go for a shortcut; they seize power, and once they do this, through violence, they realise that they must maintain it through violence – violence is a very blunt instrument. Of course they need the police; they need the praetorian guard; they need to rely on armed forces (torturers, spies, informers, you name it)… but the cult of personality helps a great deal. They must instil fear into the population at large, but if they compel ordinary people to acclaim them in public, they will last a lot longer. The second point about the cult of personality is not to do with the population at large; it’s to do with their inner circle. These people were not elected; in other words, they are – rather paradoxically – weak, they seize power, but by seizing power they run the risk that someone else might do exactly the same thing to them. There might be traitors in the ranks; there might be equally ambitious rivals – so it raises the prospect of a stab in the back. How do you keep control of your inner circle? Of course, there are many techniques – and I go through many of them with my eight dictators. There is manipulation; there are constant purges with people quite literally being dragged out and shot in the back; there is divide and rule. But again, the cult of personality works rather well. If a dictator can compel not only his allies but also his rivals to acclaim him, in public, it creates a very different sort of context. Most of all, with the cult of personality, there is a point since all of them have to acclaim the dictator in public, all of them become liars. When people lie, it becomes very difficult to find out who thinks what; it becomes very difficult to organise a coup because you have no idea who stands where. So in that sense, the cult of personality really makes everyone a captive. Listen | Historian Frank Dikötter discusses his new book How to Be a Dictator, which explores the malevolent careers of eight 20th-century rulers including Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Mussolini EE: Can you give us a quick introduction to the eight dictators who feature in your work? FD: Yes, I did it chronologically. I start with Mussolini – he’s very much the first one (not counting Lenin of course, with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917). He is the very first one to start his own cult of personality. Lenin is, of course glorified already while he’s alive but in particular after his death. So Mussolini really must be the first one in there, although one might say he’s only half a dictator – his image has to compete with that of the pope and of course the king. It will be the king who will have him arrested at the end of his career, so to speak. The second one seems reasonably straight forward – Adolf Hitler, how can you miss him? Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. All of these being the classic 20th century dictators. I’ve put Kim Il-Sung in there for North Korea. Now to some extent, he’s even faster or better than Mao in seizing control of his own country, imposing a dictatorship and promoting his own cult – which assumes huge proportions. I thought I had to take three figures who are not necessarily all that well known, but somehow, I think, shed light on the five big ones. One of these is Papa Doc (François Duvalier) in Haiti, and the second one is Ceaușescu, because he is truly utterly insane and probably the only one who truly believes in his own cult, believes he’s a genius, the genius of Romania. The final one is Mengistu. A few readers may have heard of him, but he’s one of the great mass murders of Africa (in Ethiopia). EE: Your first point obviously – you said that there’s no cult without that fear aspect – so how did these dictators foster their self-image alongside the brutality that came hand-in-hand with their regimes? FD: They work at it tirelessly, from the very beginning. Adolf Hitler works at his image, and, of course, also works at building up his own party from the very beginning – the early 1920s onwards. It is he who designs those garage-red flyers that attract new recruits; it is he who is behind the marches, the flags, etc. And, of course, he is behind his own image; he hires a photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, to produce photos that project sheer strength of character and iron determination. And again and again, he works at building up his own image as a charismatic leader. You can read Mein Kampf, for instance. In there, of course, is a very clear program: aggregate the Versailles treaty; get rid of the Jews, make Germany greater, invade the Soviet Union. But there are also many elements of the Hitler myth – you know, the voracious reader, the born orator, the unrecognised artist driven by destiny to save his people. So they spend a great deal of time ‘working at it’. Mussolini, by one account, spends pretty much half of his time projecting his own image as the omniscient, omnipotent, indispensable leader of Italy, on top of running about half a dozen ministries. So, again and again, with each dictator it becomes very clear that they are ultimately responsible for building up their own cult. They begin with a low-key approach and with every step that they increase the terror, they manage to compel people to acclaim them in public, to cheer them in public. And the key point here – coming back to what you said – is that the cult often is seen as brainless enthusiasm. But it's not about that; it's really about making sure that nobody knows who thinks what – so ‘fear’ at the very heart of the cult of personality. If you want to know whether there is a cult of personality, you go to a country and you find out whether you can find anyone who has anything negative to say about the man in charge. If the answer is no, you will know what a cult of personality is. I say ‘man’, because they are invariably men. Learn more about 20th-century dictators A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three’s war of words Rise of a dictator: how did Hitler gain power and become the führer of Germany? Podcast: how Mao shaped China Mao: the legend of the Long March EE: So, what about the people they ruled over, and possibly appealed to as well? What conclusions did you draw about them? FD: They are great actors. Dictators are great actors. In an unguarded moment, Adolf Hitler said that he is “Europe's greatest performer”. Mussolini thought of himself as a great actor. We forget, also, that ordinary people have to become great actors themselves; they have to chant on command; they have to parrot the party line; they have to invoke the slogans; they have to cry, cheer, shout… on command. There's a mythological point here; if it is a dictatorship, you don't know what people think. It's a very basic point. There's no good way in which we can find out what people really, quote unquote, believe under Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc. I'm not trying to say that these dictators have no supporters at all. The only thing I'm trying to say is that as a result of the cult, we don’t know who believes what. It’s very difficult to say who believes what. But again, there is plenty of evidence – in the case of Hitler, in the case of Stalin, Mao, Kim Un Sung and all the others – that there are always people who refuse to go along with this cult of personality – and they're the ones who will be arrested, interrogated, imprisoned or occasionally shot. So it is not just some bizarre ritual that operates under fear. Now the point here, really, about ordinary people is to make clear that the cult of personality is not designed to convince, or to persuade people that their leader truly is a great genius; no, the cult is there to destroycommon sense, to destroy reason, to sow confusion, to enforce obedience, to literally isolate individuals and crush their dignity. People have to self-monitor what they say and how they say it – and in turn they start monitoring other people. EE: You mentioned, as we’ve been talking, how they edited their own image and a massive part of this was control of the press… FD: Yes. In the case of Mussolini, he’s so obsessed with control that after a couple of years he is in control of about half a dozen ministries. It’s a dictatorship at every level; he will find time to change the colour of a women’s magazine in the 1930s. It’s the same for Duvalier in Haiti, which of course is a much smaller island, with a much smaller population. He will prescribe who can graduate; how Creole should be spelt; what people can read; which side of the road the cars should drive; it’s an extraordinary dictatorship down to every little detail. They’re obsessive, some of them. Now all of them realise that control of the press is important; that no good dictator will allow freedom of press to continue for very long. Infact, the very first act will be to close down publication houses and to eliminate, step-by-step, every single freedom. This happens in Germany within two or three years; it happens under Mussolini in about five six years… everywhere freedom of speech becomes the victim. These are replaced by massive ministries of propaganda. And these dictators – Stalin, Mussolini and Duvalier – do that very carefully; they scrutinize what happens. What is so interesting about Mussolini is that he replaces those in charge of propaganda every 3/4/5 years to make sure that he's the one who retains ultimate control of how his image is projected to the rest of the population. So the words of the dictator, whether it is under Hitler in Germany or Stalin or Mao or Kim Il-Sung, is everywhere and in every newspaper – there are posters everywhere. The voice of the dictator frequently, but not always, will pursue you wherever you go – certainly in the case of Germany, with loudspeaker pillars erected in cities and mobile ones taken to the countryside. Not so in the case of Stalin, who cultivates a very remote image – so you will rarely see him in the newsreels; you will very rarely hear his voice. He very deliberately cultivates an image of remoteness. But again, as I said, Stalin himself is a compulsive editor who will check everything that is said about him in the press; every photo must be censored and approved; every word attributed to him must be approved. So it's a great amount of work – they work very hard. It’s just not easy to be a dictator (just in case some of your listeners think that they might have a go at it); it demands a great amount of almost obsessive labour and I think, to be fair to, demands a good deal of talent. Some of them are very talented – and not just organisational skills. EE: Can you speak a little bit more about that? In many of these cases, whether it’s their natural state or not, a lot of these men do seem to have this charisma that they can turn on and off… FD: Well, one skill they have is that they are great actors. They can literally not just do it with foreigners, but with people who were quite close to them. I find it always amazing that after years of collaborating with Mao Zedong, the number 2 in charge just before the cultural revolution, Liu Shaoqi, still doesn't see how extraordinarily duplicitous his master really is. In terms of China, only one man really sees through it and that's Lin Biao, a general who was more or less eliminated when he dies in a plane accident in September 1971 – it puts an end to the role of the army in the cultural revolution. But Lin Biao writes, at the height of the Great Leap Forward (when literally tens of millions of people were worked, starved and beaten to death), Lin Biao writes that Mao is someone who will only take credit and he will not be criticised for anything; you must flatter him all day long. And then he writes in his own private diary that the Great Leap Forward is a “complete disaster”; Lin Biao clearly understands how duplicitous his master really is. It’s the same with Stalin. He’s very good at presenting this image of a man that is rather simple and quite approachable… they’re always very good at controlling their emotions. Neither Mao nor Stalin will react when somebody opposes them; they know how to bide their time; they know how to calculate – in a very cold manner – and they know how to strike like a cobra when they need to. Listen | Joshua Rubenstein discusses the dramatic events surrounding the death of Stalin, now the subject of a major film EE: Can we talk about the role of visibility in this self-curation, because there is often a desire, it seems, for dictators to portray themselves as humble, accessible ‘men of the people’ type icons – and you explore this in a number of ways. Can you talk about this? FD: Most of them – there are always common features, but you’ll always find an exception to the rule. A great many of them do cultivate this image of modesty. Hitler is not one of them. Duvalier, Papa Doc in Haiti, knows full well that when he presents himself as an electoral candidate in 1957 he has virtually no chance to succeed, because these elections are really nothing but a show piece organised by the military. So he assumes the air of a very unassuming country doctor, a man who wouldn't harm a fly, who is devoted to the welfare of his subjects. Of course, the moment he is granted power, with the protection of the military, he turns around and purges the ranks of the army. In the case of Stalin, it is slightly different. There is a paradox in the Soviet Union (and other communist countries), namely that the Soviet Union is supposed to be the dictatorship of the proletariat, not that one particular individual. It's ok for Hitler and Mussolini to make their own spar the guiding principle of their country; to put themselves at the centre of their own ideology. But not so if you are a Marxist Leninist. So how does Stalin get around this? By creating the illusion that it is not him, but rather the people who want to see him, the people who adore him; it is the population, the masses, who pays homage to him because he is the embodiment of the revolution. In the case of Stalin, there is another element to this. His main rival is Trotsky, from 1924-28 he spends his time plotting against Trotsky – who is finally isolated and expelled from the country. Once abroad, Trotsky starts writing about Stalin as a rather devious, underhanded, mediocre character. So what Stalin does is he invites a string of writers and journalists to visit him his office at the Kremlin – and what he does is he presents himself as a very plain, simple and ordinary man. So again, the way these dictators present themselves is extraordinarily calculated – all of them are literally acting. EE: You talk about this phenomenon that is a result of the curation of image, that when things start to go wrong within the regime, a lot of the population are still inclined to blame underlings, or the party – rather than the leader. How do we see that playing out in the figures featured in your book? FD: It’s one of the great advantages of the cult of personality that the dictator towers above allies and rivals alike. You must not forget that in the case of Mussolini – and in the case of Stalin, whose main rival was Trotsky (a far more well-known figure, a far better orator, a far better writer, a far better revolutionary than Stalin) –they have rivals around them. When Mussolini seizes power with his march on Rome in 1922, he is but one of several quite determined fascist leaders. So the cult of personality is a way to abase all of them, exploit their rivalries, and have them collaborate and common subordination – that’s the key here. EE: So as well as being reliant on many subordinates who supported their image, the figures in your book, there are crossovers and relationships between them. It seems that there is envy between dictators, they learn from one another’s mistakes – what can you say about that? FD: Ultimately dictators and students of power. And ultimately you can say that my book is a study of power; how to seize it, how to keep it, what to do with it. So what they will read might not just be, in the case of Marxist dictators, the classics of Engels and Marx. It might be anything, anything that helps them to study how to take power and how to keep it. As a result, of course, they observe each other; they are very interested in how others manage and how others fail. In the case of Mao – good old chairman Mao – he takes so much from Stalin, including Stalinism and the cult of personality, but believes that Stalin has failed miserably in spotting his nemesis: Nikita Khrushchev, who, of course, starts destalinisation in 1956, three years after the death of Stalin. Stalin's body is literally dragged out of the mausoleum – so Mao is determined not to meet the same fate. What is his answer? His answer is the cultural revolution. Since Stalin failed to spot Khrushchev as his enemy, Mao thinks let ordinary people hunt down anyone at any level within the party who might have harboured reservations about his rule. So this is the cultural revolution: people are pitted against people; ordinary people can denounce party members, all the way to the very top. In the end, it becomes an endless cycle of violence in which people are desperate to prove their loyalty to the chairman. And he reigns supreme; he feels secure enough at the very end of his life to somehow reign in the cult of personality. Was William the Conqueror a war criminal? The brutal story of the Harrying of the North 9 of the worst monarchs in history Shakespeare’s best (or worst) villains EE: Without wanting to trivialise the brutality of any of these regimes or people, there certainly are elements of the preposterous that come out in your book when you look at the incessant self-curation of this image. What can you say? Can you give some examples of how it descends into the ridiculous… FD: I think the more successful ones are the ones who were able to very carefully curate their own quotes and control it until the very end, without necessarily believing in all of it. Let me take Stalin; he is a compulsive editor. He will pour over newspapers, revise articles, look at how he is written and how he will be published. He literally is a gardener who will prune his cult of personality and cutback to allow it to flourish in good seasons, so to speak. The same is truth of Mao. At the very end of his life, he feels very secure. He allows the cult to be somehow cutback from the height of the cultural revolution. What I'm trying to say, is that all dictators very much teeter between hubris and paranoia; hubris because they are surrounded by sycophants or flatterers. In the end they tend to make all the decisions themselves, with fatal consequences for huge numbers of people. Stalin makes the mistake of signing a pact with Hitler, for instance. Hitler makes the mistake of invading the Soviet Union, which will be his downfall etc, etc. And the paranoia – hubris and paranoia – in the sense that they are constantly afraid of others. It doesn't help that they get older. At the end of his life, Stalin was probably more paranoid than ever, and continued the purges, ordering even larger statues of himself. But the point I'm trying to make is that some of them, the ones who tend to fail, in particular Ceaușescu, start believing in their own cult. I’ve no doubt that Ceaușescu (Romania), after a while, starts to believe that he is the genius that the people portray him to be. He’s got a never-ending insatiable appetite for more distinctions – university degrees and honours, he collects them very much like a stamp collector. He becomes a victim of the cult himself! I said earlier on that the cult is there to make the general population (and members of the inner circle) a captive. But Ceaușescu becomes a prisoner of his own cult – believes in it and fails to read the signs. He is very upset, very full of disbelief, that the population actually turns against him – he can't see it. EE: You mentioned this paranoia as a common theme in the fall of these dictators. Did you find any other commonalities with what brought these cults to an end? FD: The paranoia is of course there all along. In the case of Adolf Hitler, it is said of him that he has an instinct from the very beginning that tells him who he can trust and who he can’t. Of Mussolini, it is said he has a peasant’s suspicion of other people. All of them are extremely suspicious of others, in particular those that might stab them in the back. I think this is probably one of the great attributes of dictators – that they trust no one. In the case of Duvalier, and in the case of Stalin, and in the case of Mao, they prevail because they're happy to purge/punish/occasionally execute friends and foes alike. It helps a great deal; you should never trust the hand that feeds you, you should always turn against it. In Ethiopia, Mengistu is someone who is mentored by a general a mere year or two after the coup of 1974 against the emperor. Mengistu has a team sent to his mentor’s home, where is shot dead. EE: What's it been like living with these dictators? Was there anyone there who you wish you could have included or were these men self-selecting for your book? FD: I had a longlist of about 12, but then you realise that it's an awful lot of work to write so much. And in any event, I think about eight seems to me to be the right number, to see common features – but also to see that in every single case there will be an exception to the rule. So you can't come up with the title of ‘how to be a dictator’, you can't come up with the 12 characteristics of the dictator. You might say, for instance, that every dictator basically relies on what is basically the Leninist conception of a revolution – that you have a party that carries through the revolution and engineers it from above: the revolutionary vanguard. Hitler has one; Mussolini has one. Both are admirers of Lenin. But not so Duvalier, he does not have any party at all. Mengistu seizes power but doesn't start building up a Marxist party until many years later – some 10 years after the revolution, so there is always an exception to the rule. So I thought eight was about right. I had Gaddafi on my shortlist but he didn’t quite make it. I think there is another question: who would you like to spend an afternoon with? Well they’re all quite awful. I think there might be a slight misconception because of Hitler, in the sense that we only see him rant and rave at crowds. There is only one tape available where he speaks normally to another human being – a recording made when he was traveling on a train. It sounds reasonably straightforward, but nonetheless he always dominated the conversation – there's not a lot you could say. Possibly Kim Il-Sung; he would have been not only a charming man – like many others – but also someone who would have been interested in a conversation (unlike the others), so he would have been the one I would pick, if I had to be punished with spending an afternoon having tea with one of them. EE: Well we won’t inflict that on you! You do write that dictators today – with the exception of Kim Jong-Un – are a long way from instilling the fear of their predecessors. But nevertheless, you do question (in the book) whether we are seeing a revival of some of these techniques on the world stage today. Where are we seeing the cult of personality today? FD: Putin comes to mind. I think only about a week ago, slandering Putin was outlawed. This tells me that he is not really a very good dictator, because a good dictator would have done this many years ago! A good friend of mine says you can go to Moscow and you can google quite a few things about Putin – and you will find the people that disagree with him. Look at the demonstrations going on in Moscow, right? When it comes to Kim III – I call him Kim III, it really is a dynasty – then quite clearly we are dealing with a straightforward, old-fashioned 20th-century dictatorship. Xi Jinping, across the border in China, I think is very close to being one of those old-fashioned dictators; he certainly has quite drastically closed down that country over the last number of years. You may remember what I said earlier that there is a very simple test: go to a country and try to find somebody who speaks out against the man in charge. This is very difficult in the People's Republic of China today; people are demonstrating by the hundreds of thousands in Hong Kong, but across the border it is difficult to find any one person who offers support for Hong Kong. It is not a clash of civilizations, but an indication of the extent to which public opinion is strictly controlled there. So yes, Xi Jinping has his little red book. And, yes, Xi Jinping has his whole iconography. And yes, he towers well above his peers – and it would be as far above dangerous to speak out against him. There is a good list of people. But even if we look at North Korea. The extent of human misery and death is measured by the tens of millions in those regimes in the 20th century – it would be very hard to say that it is similar today; they are not on the ascendant, they are playing a losing game. It may not seem to us like that; it might seem that democracy is on the attack. Now it's always good to be vigilant, we must be vigilant – but seen from a much longer historical perspective, these dictators are playing a very weak hand. They will lose. Listen to the full podcast interview with Frank Dikötter here Elinor Evans is the deputy digital editor of HistoryExtra Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century
A history of nakedness in art: Mary Beard on her new BBC series Shock of the Nude
In the latest episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, classicist Mary Beard discusses her new BBC Two series Shock of the Nude, which explores western art’s depiction of nakedness across history. Read the full, unedited interview below...
Note: this is an unedited transcript of our recent podcast Mary Beard on the nude in western art, which you can listen to here. It contains some explicit content Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories magazine: OK, so your new series is called the Shock of the Nude, what inspired you to make this particular programme on this subject? Mary Beard: I think we were all looking for a subject in the history of art that people really wanted to kind of argue about. That still made people cross or puzzled or take very, very different views. An awful lot of art history somehow comes down to admiration and here was a subject where you could see there were controversies. And so it was fun to try and unpick what those controversies were and how we might resolve them. ME: And some of your comments have caused a bit of a stir. You said, I believe, that female nudes in western art are soft porn for the elite dressed up in a classical guise. MB: I don't think I quite said that. ME: OK, OK. MB: I mean, when those things get reported, they get cruder and cruder the further they go down the food chain. I think what I said, I can’t remember the exact words, is that you’ve got to face the question of that – of whether nudes are soft porn for the elite. And, you know, in a way, what I was thinking was committed gallery-goers tend to be terribly snippy when they hear someone say, “Oh this is just soft porn for the elite, isn’t it?” And, you know, I can be sniffy about that too, but I think it’s a question that you really have to answer (or you have to ask). I’m not sure what… there isn’t an answer, is there? But I think you do have to look at this and think: “so what is the difference between this and soft porn?” And that comes over very clearly in one of the paintings that we feature in the first episode, which is Courbet’s Origin of the World, which is a very detailed, hyper-realistic painting of a woman’s genitals and she doesn’t have a head and she doesn’t have any limbs. And you think: why is it? How do we explain why this is in a gallery and is a masterpiece (whereas similar photographs of that, we’d much more likely find in a not-wholly-salubrious shop)? When it comes to the human body, I think that there isn’t a straight divide; porn or art is partly in the eye of the beholder. But I think it was very interesting looking at this painting, which has been extremely controversial, and it now hangs very much in a very kind of proud place in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. It was interesting thinking about all the ways that we have of convincing ourselves that a painting like that is art. So it’s in a very elaborate, gilded frame, which says masterpiece, right? It’s called the Origin of the World, which gives it a kind of, sort of, high-level mysticism. And even the Musee d’Orsay’s own website talks about how the use, and the sophistication of the use, of colour stops it being pornography. And all those things are, in a way, true, but what I think that shows is just how difficult the boundary is between art and porn. And I’ve been very surprised at the vehemence of the reaction, even to the kind of rather crude semi-accurate quotes of what I said. How really violent people get when they’re confronted with the difficulty of that distinction. And, in a way, justifies the programme, I think. You know, looking at some of the responses on Twitter, you think, “Blimey, you need a programme which actually investigates some of these issues.” Because people are really, not just sounding off, that’s fine. No, they’re threatening, you know, “I think she needs to be punched every day.” For saying that there might be a problem about the difference between art and porn. You think, wow, why is this so difficult? ME: Something your programme illustrates really strongly is that this has always been contentious, it has always been a subject that’s got people animated and angry. You open with a 4th century BC statue, for instance. What was that statue and what reaction did that cause? MB: Well, it’s what we believe to be the first full-sized sculpture of a female nude in the west, certainly in Greece but probably the west. And it’s a very puzzling piece, it was made in the early 4th century BC. We’ve got no idea after centuries of representing women clothed, the sculptor Praxiteles chose to do this sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite in the nude. What we do know is it was instantly quite difficult for people. The first clients he offered it to said no, thank you, I’m not taking that. It then ended up being taken by the city of Knidos in what is now Turkey. And they kind of turned lucky in a way, because it became a huge, slightly notorious tourist attraction. They put it, you know, they put it on the ancient equivalent of fridge magnets, you know. It went on coins and on lamps and everything. But there is, there’s a whole lot of kind of background stories told about it which shows you very clearly how difficult it was for people. There’s one famous incident, it’s described a couple of centuries later, about a young man. A story of a young man who falls in love with the statue and manages to get locked up with her in the temple. And then he tries to, well, you know, sleep with her is probably a bit too coy and rape her is probably a bit too extreme, have his way with her is what kind of books usually say. And he then, he does that, he leaves, apparently, the mark of his seed on her thigh and then he goes off and he throws himself off a cliff. And I mean, I think often people read that story, or classicists read that story, it’s not exactly a well-known story throughout the world. And they say, “Isn’t that odd?” Yes, it is an odd story but really it is a story about how this provokes human desire. So when you say, look, one thing about the nude is that it implicated in male gaze, the female nude or sometimes the male nude, implicated in the male gaze and the male desire, people tend to think that’s a sort of invention of some radical 1960s and 70s feminists. That idea that what art does is provoke sex goes right back to the very, very origin of the western female nude. Sex and the (Vatican) City: a brief history of clerical celibacy Sexing up history: how to study and tell the history of sex ME: Why, for so long, was the nude a female nude? MB: I don't think it really was, for so long, a female nude. Because, I mean, the historical truth about this is although the female nude was the nude that caused anxiety, there had been male nudes long before that in the Greek world. Early Greek sculpture, back to the 7th century BC, of men, is very often, usually naked. And I think what you see there is a really puzzling difference between the representation of the male body and the female body. And in some way, the male body in the classical world wasn’t much, I’m sure it was in part, but it wasn’t much associated with desire. It was associated with virtue, with good citizenship. You know, you saw the virtue of the classical citizen in the virtue of their naked body. And you didn’t see that in women, women weren’t active citizens. They didn’t have any political rights and their body was quite different. So you’ve got two very different strands of appreciation there. And I think it’s, it’s really quite striking how now probably the male nude, at least on places like television, you know, what you can and cannot show of the male body is probably more restricted than the female body. This, I think, would have amazed the classical Greeks. ME: Why do you think that is? MB: I think it’s an almost, almost all these why questions are impossible to give any simple answer to. I mean, there is something about the way that Christianity, at some level, changed, undermined that sense that the naked male body, genitals and all, was a symbol of citizenly goodness. And so it kind of brought, once the… that version of how you understood the male nude had, it had gone into abeyance, it became also much more associated with sex and desire. And you can see that in Michelangelo’s David. You know, now again, one of the, you know, the modern equivalent of the Aphrodite of Knidos in being, you know, the fridge magnet version of, in this case, a male nude. And, you know, people now, me included, we flock in our millions to see it. When it first went up, in the public square in Florence, Michelangelo, in many ways, was trying, I think, to recapture some idea of the sense of the classical body being a version of citizenly virtue. But the citizens of Florence didn’t think that. And they pelted it, they threw things at it and, within a few weeks, they’d fitted a little belt with some low-hanging leaves from it, in order to disguise its genitals. Its genitals were covered up till the very end of the 19th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/02/19051738-low_res-mary-beards-shock-of-the-nude-bb13a9b.jpg" width="2000" height="1334" alt="Mary Beard at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, for her new TV series 'Shock of the Nude'. (Photo by BBC/Lion TV/Helena Hunt)" title="Mary Beard at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, for her new TV series 'Shock of the Nude'. (Photo by BBC/Lion TV/Helena Hunt)" /> ME: Sticking with the theme of gender, because that really interests me that, I think you say, that for so long, men got away with this. It was male buyers, it was male commissioners. There’s a painting by Johan Zoffany which I wonder if you can describe for us, because I thought it was really interesting. MB: It is one of the most amazing paintings that we looked at in the whole series, is this painting by Zoffany of a gallery in the Uffizi Museum in Florence. And for me, it’s an interesting painting because it reveals not only the raunchiness of people’s association with these nudes. But also it shows Zoffany, you know, being very well aware about what’s going on, you know. He also knows exactly about the male gaze and male desire. And what it is, is it’s this internal gallery where, you know, the really greatest masterpieces went in the Uffizi in the 18th century. And it’s absolutely packed full of men. Now, we know that women went into this gallery because we’ve got descriptions of them saying what they thought about it. What Zoffany’s done is put it only men and he’s, almost every man there, whether it’s in terms of homoeroticism or heterosexuality, is engaged in leering in some way at a sculpture or a painting. One bit of the, it’s packed full with lovely kind of detailed scenes of the way these blokes are looking at, are looking at the works of art. But there’s a wonderful classical sculpture, what’s now known as the Venus de’Medici, it’s very like the first classical nude by Praxiteles. And you look at them and you suddenly see, there’s one guy there who’s kind of peering at her with a magnifying glass. And the other bloke’s around the back, looking up her bum actually. And you think, you know, what Zoffany is outing here is that very fragile boundary between, you know, love and sex and over-love of art. You know, all these relatively well-heeled, largely British travellers to Florence, are there gawping at a nude. And, as I say, I love it because it’s another example of how people have known this, you know, for centuries. You know, it’s not a new discovery to say that nudes prompt male desire, Zoffany got there a long time ago. When was the Venus de Milo found? Bettany Hughes on the symbol of Venus ME: Can looking at non-western art cultures help understand why western art is so fascinated by the nude, or seems to be? MB: I think looking at non-western cultures puts western culture very much into perspective and you might almost say puts it in its place. We decided not to do a complete world tour of naked bodies in art. And that’s not because there aren’t the most amazing and wonderful representations of the naked human body in almost, almost every culture you can find across the planet. What we felt very strongly was that there wasn’t another culture which quite obsessed about the naked body and its sexuality in the way that western culture, since the ancient Greeks have done. And, you know, if you think about it, we sit here and we assume that, the basic central bit of art training for young artists will be to draw the naked body. We think that that’s absolutely, that is what art training is centred on. And one of the things we wanted to do, and we show a little bit of this in the first episode, is that if you look at other cultures’ versions of this, A, they’re not doing that. They’re not kind of, you know, what they would say about us, I think, is kind of weirdly fascinated by it. But they’re using the naked body in a way that is much less, much less sexualised, much less fetishized. You look at a wonderful Yoruba headdress from Nigeria, with a, you know, tremendous naked female at the centre of it. And what’s very clear is that this is, you know, this is a headdress which is celebrating community, it’s celebrating woman’s role at the centre of the community. And it’s really significantly different from most of the ways the west has treated the female nude. Now, why that’s, you know, that’s another of those big why questions. Why the west has gone down this route? I think it’s very difficult to say. But I think it’s quite important, actually, as a first step, to show people that it has gone down a route that, from the outside, doesn’t look so obvious and natural as it does to us. ME: I believe the second programme, which is on next week, explores the ways in which considering the nude makes us consider how we see ourselves as humans more generally. How did you go about doing that, that sounds like quite a big subject? MB: Well, I think what we wanted to do was to say, look, we have very strange boundaries about what we think counts as a nude. And that still very much sits, not entirely, but it very much sits within a potentially classical form. And we wanted to say, look, there’s all sorts of other naked bodies that maybe we have to put back into the category of the nude. And we start, very near the beginning of the programme, with the body of Jesus. Because actually if you think about, you know, western urban culture, the place you see naked bodies is almost, sometimes is more often than anywhere else, apart from an art gallery and even there sometimes, is in churches. You know, the crucified Jesus is usually not absolutely naked but effectively naked. And we don’t talk about the nude Jesus, very occasionally but it’s slightly odd to talk about the naked Jesus. And so it was quite interesting to explore why we thought Jesus hasn’t come into the category of the nude. And what happens, actually, if you look at him with a sense that you could see him as a nude, and we look at some amazing Michelangelo drawings that are in the British Museum, with Neil MacGregor who used to be the director there. And he’s very clear that, you know, one of the bodies that has been most crucial and formative in the way the west has thought about nakedness and nudity is Jesus’s body. And of course it has because if you have a religion whose central paradox is God made Man, you have to say so in what sense and how far is Jesus Man and how far is Jesus is a sexual being? And there are some extraordinary drawings in which you can see, well, yeah, let’s not put too fine a point on it, there’s not much doubt that Jesus has got an erection. And that’s important naturally, that isn’t, you know, that’s not smutty, that’s an important way of saying yes, Jesus was a man in every sense of the word of being a man. ME: Some of these anxieties are timeless in a sense, and then there’s others that may have been reframed recently in terms of the MeToo debate, in terms of gender binaries breaking down. Do you think this is a chance for us to re-understand nude in terms of 21st century identities? MB: I think that there is a 21st century perspective here. When we were very much in the planning stages of the programme, Jonty Claypole, who’s the head of BBC Arts said to us, very firmly, “I want to know why we’re making a programme about the nude now. What’s different?” And that proved to be a very important interjection because it made us think a bit harder. And very quickly, obviously, I think, we thought, “Right, OK, we’re in a moment in which binary gender, different forms of sexuality are being increasingly challenged.” That, in some way, must be framing the naked body in a very different way. And I suppose I thought to myself that we might end up concluding that in a gender-fluid, non-binary world, the nude, perhaps had had its day. Because most nudes, not all nudes but most nudes in the kind of mainstream western tradition are being jolly well binary. But the more we explored with people in the trans community and other people working on, you know, different versions of gender, the more we found that there was a huge enthusiasm not to kind of get rid of the nude but to rewrite the nude and to make it speak differently. And one of the most moving interviews that we do is with someone who’s a trans model and they speak very powerfully about the importance of seeing the trans body in the history of nudity. So I came much, really to my surprise, thinking that maybe newer, more radical views about gender might be just what the nude in art needed rather than being about to kill it off. ME: Are there any other interviews or experiences you had making the documentary that stand out for you particularly? MB: Yes, almost every single one. I think one that is kind of unforgettable for me actually comes from the first episode and it’s going to see Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of Susanna and the Elders in Burghley House, a painting which is about the prelude to sexual violence. And it was memorable because we could get up so close to it and paintings are always very, they become more edgy when you get very near them. But here, it really prompted, I think, some important points about how women represent the nude and sexual violence to themselves when they’re artists. And in the case of Artemisia Gentileschi, and she’s going to be the subject of a big exhibition in London soon which will be amazing, I think. You know, Artemisia Gentileschi is notoriously the victim, herself, of rape. And seeing a painting of a woman who is being assaulted, basically, by somebody who has been raped is, makes you rethink, you know, it’s hardly, yeah, OK, in the light of MeToo but in all kinds of ways. You know, the nature of what it is to represent the naked female body. And to wonder whether, I think quite difficulty, you know, we can’t get, I can’t certainly, get the fact that Artemisia herself had been raped. That’s part of my understanding of those paintings. But there was also a sense in somehow, that I had to have another, I had to learn to look at it with different eyes too. That Artemisia can’t go through the whole of history being a painter whose only mode is to represent the outrage of the violence done against herself, important as that might be. And so to think about how, how you could see those paintings of hers, both inside and outside a narrative of rape. Or, for that matter, how you look at, you know, Titian’s most famous nude, I suppose, the Venus of Urbino. And the question that we raise there. It’s OK if you see it as the male gaze, part of that relationship between viewer and painting. Well, OK, that’s fine and, I think, right in part. But where does it leave me? You know, I enjoy this painting, so how does a woman enjoy these paintings? Because I think, for me, part of the experience of making the programme was I got to like the nude more. You might have thought that you’d end up liking it less after a, you know, a fairly kind of consistent diet of what you can imagine, you know, over several months. But I’ve found myself warming to it in a way that I hadn’t expected. And to try to think, right, I’m going to position myself, I have to find a place for me in this encounter. And I suppose I put myself in the position of the female model and I thought what does it, you know, there’s a bit of female solidarity here. I’m here with the Venus of Urbino and, you know, actually, we shouldn’t be taking the male gaze quite as seriously as sometimes we do and maybe we ought to be laughing, just like Zoffany, at the guys who are leering at us. Mary Beard: “I couldn’t give a toss what Roman emperor Donald Trump was most like” plus 3 other things we learned about her ME: Which leads nicely into my last question really, which is what new ways of seeing or questions would you like people to have as a result of watching the documentary? MB: I haven’t got any one in particular. I’d like, I’d like them to recognise the difficulties that they have with this medium and this genre, which we’re often kind of… encouraged not to look at. You know, we’re encouraged to take the nude a bit for granted, even though we know it’s controversial in all kinds of ways. And I’d like us to examine what we think we’re doing in looking at it. I don't want to stop people looking at nudes, I’ve got absolutely no interest in that whatsoever. But I want them to, and when I say I want them, I mean, also I want me, to just be a bit more kind of quizzical about what’s going on when we do that. And wonder why and how we let some people look at some things and not others. You know, what does it matter if there’s a fig leaf on it or not? What are we saying about ourselves, you know, what are we saying about ourselves when we think, you know, there are some bodies which we don’t feel very happy about or have not traditionally felt happy about being represented. What happens when we bring that back in to the nude? Can we start to think about this in a way that possibly, you know, this is only a very small hope here but possibly make us think about, you know, modern pre-occupations with a very normalised body image. You know, maybe, there was an article in a newspaper recently which said actually getting teenagers to do life drawing was very good because they actually saw what a real body was like and they looked at it, and they had to look at it, hard, which hadn’t been Photoshopped into perfection. So there’s those kind of issues but, you know, just look again, that’s what I want people to do. Listen | Mary Beard discusses her career and passion for the ancient world Mary Beard in conversation with Janina Ramirez Mary Beard and Janina Ramirez discuss some of the thorny issues surrounding the nude in western art over the centuries Janina Ramirez: OK. Mary, I’m so excited to be here talking with you on the eve of launching your beautiful new series, Shock of the Nude, out to the world. And for BBC History Magazine, we’re going to talk a little bit, me with my art historian hat on. Mary Beard: Oh, right, oh, that’s a bit scary. JR: Oh, well, no, I won’t scare you with it, it’s not a big pointy hat, it’s a good hat. And I wanted to ask you about three particular artworks that pop up in the series and why you think they’re important, why we should be looking at them afresh with new eyes. So first of all, one that I know is close to your heart, the Aphrodite of Knidos. Now, you’ve been looking at her for a long time. MB: How very tactful of you. I’ve been looking at her for about 50 years. JR: Oh, goodness. And in those 50 years, has the way you’ve looked at her or thought about her changed? MB: Yeah, I think it has. You know, I think when I was, you know, when I was a young classicist, like most people, I thought that a line-up of nudes, going back to the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first nude that we know to have been made in the Greek world, you know, I thought they were pretty dull, actually. Let’s face it, you know, and you go into museums, particularly museums in the Mediterranean where they’ve got lots of them and you see them all against the wall and you see people, totally understandably, just walking past them. Because we haven’t relearnt, I think, how to find them interesting. JR: Yeah, we go almost marble blind in the face of all of that, yeah. MB: Yes, it is. And what is really exciting for me, and I suppose it took about another 20 years after I was a student first looking at this sculpture, was to see that it was really, really kind of edgy, controversial. You know, it was the first time I realised that stuff that I think is classic in every sense of the word, you know, actually could be dangerous and difficult. JR: And, of course, you know, it’s rejected, it’s not necessarily embraced by everyone at the time. MB: You know you think, “Oh, everybody in the Ancient world must have liked this.” No, they didn’t. When Praxiteles did this thing first, the first town he offered it to said, “Not on your Nelly, I’m not having it. You know, this is the first full-sized naked statue of a woman stroke goddess, not having that, thank you very much. You know, give us a clothed one, please.” In the end, the people of Knidos, who are sort of a bit further down the food chain in Praxiteles’ customer list took it. But they hit really lucky because although it remained controversial in actually very, very vivid ways, it also became a notorious tourist attraction. So the tourist industry at Knidos, this little town on the coast of what’s now Turkey, boomed with people coming to see the first nude. Books interview with Janina Ramirez: the private lives of the saints Vikings didn't wear horned helmets, plus 7 more Viking myths busted JR: Like everybody rushing into the Louvre and skipping past everything to get to the Mona Lisa, they have their own Mona Lisa. MB: That’s right, yeah. JR: But there was something so intriguing about the sculpture because, and again, I think this sort of feeds into what you’re picking out in the series. She is naked, as in she has no clothes on, but it’s something else than that, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be sort of timeless nakedness, of the nude, and she conceals yet reveals, doesn’t she? MB: Yes, she’s a very naughty sculpture really because she looks as if she’s being a little bit modest, you know, she’s got her hands over her breasts and she’s got by her side, a kind of towel, I suppose, and a water pot. So really, it’s, I think, to give the viewer an excuse to look at her. You know, you can’t look at a woman or a goddess just like that, you have to imagine that you’ve just surprised her as she was having her bath. JR: Like Diana in the hunt, you know, the idea of peeping at her. And in a way, then, that’s where we start to get into this problem of the female nude in particular but nude bodies more generally. How complicit are we in the looking, and if we think about an artwork like Courbet’s Origin of the World, that is purely a woman’s private parts on display. Even the angling, there’s no head, it’s just the lowermost body, it’s all about that. MB: You know, and if you look at, you know, standard definitions of pornography. I mean, I don't think there is ever any good definition of pornography but if you look at what people say makes something pornographic, it’s that you have no personality, all you’ve got is the genitals. You don’t have a head, you don’t have a face, you’re not engaging with this person, you’re just seeing it as sexual organs. And in every way, on that kind of definition, Courbet’s Origin of the World looks like a piece of porn. JR: Absolutely. MB: And yet, it is treated now, and to some extent for me has become, is, you know, let’s, you know, when I look at it, I actually enjoy looking at it, I think. But it’s become a piece of art, it is a piece of art. Yet it’s a piece of art that you can see everybody is terribly, being very careful to remind you that it’s art, you know? JR: Yeah, when they talk about all the wonderful use of mustard and brush strokes. Yes, and you sort of think, we’re concentrating on brush strokes… MB: You know, it’s sort of, I mean, the website of the museum tells you that it’s not pornography because of the nice colours and you think, this is… I mean, I can see where they’re coming from but it’s desperate. They put it in this gilded frame which, you know, and it’s the kind of frame that you don’t put pornography in, you know? This is the kind of frame that masterpieces go in. I think also, we don’t know who gave it the title, we’ve got no idea. JR: Well, the title, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because as soon as you title something, you’re leading the viewer down a route and it’s such a huge, all-encompassing title, isn’t it? MB: Yes, it says women’s genitals are mystical. JR: Absolutely, all life originates here. MB: Yeah, and, you know one of the things we explore very briefly, or throw out in the programme is saying let’s try giving it a different title and this starts to look a bit different. You call it ‘Jeanette’s Pussy’ and then it’s instantly changed in significance. But it’s been wonderfully controversial in the Musee d’Orsay and there is, people can find this online very easily. There’s a wonderful street artist who came down, from outside, somewhere, and sits in front of it, in the Musee d’Orsay and then she lifts her skirt up, reveals her genitals. And then, of course, what happens is that, although they do have a sort of smile on their faces, the people in the room are very amused at this. But the guards, the custodians have been told to go and remove her. So there is a woman, a real woman, whose genitals you can’t actually see as clearly as one in the painting, is being removed from the gallery when, behind her, is this really detailed – JR: Super close-up. MB: I assume that what she was doing was trying to point out the irony of this. JR: And it is ironic and actually this leads me onto my third artwork which I wanted to talk about which is about removal. You know, at what point do we remove things because we deem them to be inappropriate. And in the series, you feature Waterhouse’s Nymphs. And it’s a beautiful pre-Raphaelite painting, I think it’s gorgeously done but it was very controversially removed from display in Manchester Gallery. Now how, what’s the big thorny issue behind all this, Mary? Well, there’s a sad story of complete misrepresentation in this, I think. I mean, it’s a pre-Raphaelite painting of a young man who is about to lured to his, we assume, death by a group of bare-breasted, barely pubescent water nymphs. JR: I mean, they do look extraordinarily young, without a doubt, they look like 13, 14-year-old girls. MB: And it caused a huge scandal quite recently because the artist Sonia Boyce came and did an intervention installation in which she removed Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs and all hell broke out. You know, amongst art critics who should have known better, honestly, saying, “This is censorship, Adolf Hitler started this way.” JR: I know, “Are we going to be burning books next?” was one of the comments I saw, yeah. MB: Yeah. And actually, what Boyce never intended, the removal of this painting, to be permanent. What she intended to do was make an intervention which was actually intended to make us look harder at the painting. There’s something kind of nicely paradoxical that you think harder about something if it’s taken down. JR: Absolutely. MB: And that is, in a way, what happened. But with real kind of, you know, sort of, fulminescences of journalistic outrage. And I mean, I think what she was trying to say is, “Look, just notice what this picture is of.” She’s not trying to take it down forever, she’s trying to say notice that it’s a group of young women, very young women, as it were, enticing this relatively innocent, we suppose, man. Think about what that’s saying. And the reaction was, it was very stupid actually in a lot of the press. The reaction in Manchester, where, it’s in Manchester Art Gallery that this happened, was actually much more interesting. Because she had loads of Post-It notes and had people writing their responses to not seeing the painting. And they were much, much more nuanced than most of the commentary. JR: Than the press response. But I think that’s what’s so interesting. It started a discussion, and it’s a discussion, I love it in the series when you look at the Post-It notes and explore each person’s response. There is so much more we could talk about, Mary, but I only had ten minutes with you. I think we covered a lot, we had more to talk about. MB: Thank you, Nina. JR: But for now, thank you for talking art with me. Listen to the full podcast interview with Mary Beard here Mary Beard is a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge, as well as an acclaimed author and broadcaster. She was speaking to Matt Elton, editor of BBC World Histories magazine, and Dr Janina Ramirez, a British art and cultural historian and television presenter Shock of the Nude starts on BBC Two at 9am on Monday 3 February. Find out more here