Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i History Extra

“It’s that time of year when millions of people around Britain are set to embark on their summer holidays. And whether it’s a week in Margate or a fortnight in the Maldives, a large proportion of modern holidaymakers will be enjoying their time by the sea without having to worry about lost earnings. But that hasn’t always been the case. As Kathryn Ferry reveals in her article this month, it was only in 1938 that the idea of holidays with pay was enshrined into law, kicking off a leisure revolution. Head to page 62 to discover how this battle for the beaches was won. Twenty years earlier, a very different kind of battle was being fought in France. The clash at Amiens in August 1918 was a brief but decisive…

By the middle of August 1944, the Allied armies were at the gates of Paris. On the 19th, as German tanks roared down the Champs-Élysées, the first clashes broke out between the occupying forces and French Resistance fighters. Five days later, a company of nominally French – but actually mostly Spanish – troops broke through into the city centre, exchanging fire with the German defenders. The last battle for Paris was at hand, and Hitler’s instructions were clear. If the enemy attacked, the French capital must be destroyed. It “must not fall into the enemy’s hand except lying in complete debris”. But, despite the dictator’s orders, Paris was not destroyed. Later, the German governor, Dietrich von Choltitz, wrote that he had deliberately disobeyed Hitler’s orders because he knew the führer…

“When Columbus sailed westward from Spain to search for a sea route to Asia, and instead found himself in the Caribbean, he initiated the European discovery of the Americas. Convinced that he had managed to find an easy route to Asia, Columbus returned to Spain, leaving a small number of colonists in Hispaniola to claim the region for Spain. It has become the most famous voyage in the history of exploration. Although Vikings had already reached the Americas, information on their voyages had been largely lost. Columbus’s letter about the voyage, in contrast, was published in five countries. He was a brilliant propagandist who convinced settlers of the attractions of the lands and he ignored the fact that they were home to an indigenous population. Attitudes to the voyage have…

Writer, historian and broadcaster John Julius Norwich has died, aged 88. The son of Conservative MP Duff Cooper and Lady Diana Cooper, Norwich studied French and Russian at New College, Oxford, before embarking on a career at the Foreign Office in 1952. His passion for history was first ignited during a two-week trip to Sicily in 1961: three years later Norwich left the Foreign Office to publish his first book, Mount Athos, written with Reresby Sitwell. Twenty-four books followed over the next 54 years, including The Popes: A History and the two-volume A History of Venice. Norwich was interviewed about his final work, France: A History: From Gaul to de Gaulle (John Murray, 2018), in the April 2018 issue of BBC History Magazine. Norwich was also a familiar face on…

On the edge of the National Forest in Staffordshire, you’ll find the National Memorial Arboretum. It’s a glorious, maturing woodland landscape, home to more than 30,000 trees, as well as more than 350 memorials. The Arboretum is designed to help people reflect, celebrate lives lived and commemorate lives lost in service. It’s an uplifting place that’s truly beautiful and full of life and meaning. It’s grown into a place for young and old to enjoy, with a full programme of exciting events throughout the year. No wonder it was the winner of Visit England’s Large Visitor Attraction of the Year Gold Award in 2018. IF YOU HAVEN’T VISITED THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL ARBORETUM BEFORE, OR HAVEN’T BEEN FOR A WHILE... HERE ARE FIVE REASONS TO PUT IT AT THE TOP OF…

On 4 October 1597, an elderly lady took up residence in her newly built home in Derbyshire, close to the town of Chesterfield. Hardwick New Hall was no ordinary country residence, but rivalled queen Elizabeth I’s palaces in scale and magnificence. Each of the three storeys was taller than the one below, and there were so many windows that it inspired the rhyme: “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall.” The most striking feature, however, was the initials ‘ES’ emblazoned on the tops of the six towers. By the time that she moved into Hardwick New Hall, Elizabeth (‘Bess’), Countess of Shrewsbury, was 70 years old and the richest woman in England after the queen. Built just a stone’s throw from the site of her childhood home, the house was a…

English Nationalism: A Short History by Jeremy Black Hurst, 224 pages, £16.99 Jeremy Black wants to rescue English nationalism from the extremists – from those on the right who peddle a perverted, racially exclusive idea of identity, and from those on the left who caricature mainstream Englishness in precisely those terms. It’s a laudable aim, particularly in light of Brexit and the lingering possibility of Scottish independence: the tricky question of English nationhood is topical as never before. Does he succeed? The answer must be a qualified one. Black wants to show that English nationalism has deep historical roots, that its legitimacy derives from real – not fancifully invented – continuities: it had a living presence right back to Anglo-Saxon times. There’s much to be said for this perspective. Black…

Witch Light Susan Fletcher (2010) Imprisoned in Inveraray, a young girl named Corrag from the Scottish mountains is condemned to burn as a witch. The year is 1692 and the Glencoe Massacre –when members of Clan Campbell loyal to William III and II slaughtered members of Clan MacDonald – has just taken place. Corrag witnessed it and is questioned in her cell. As she describes what she knows, she also unfolds her own story in a novel of great insight and poetic power. Secrets of the Sea House Elisabeth Gifford (2014) In the 1990s, a young couple move into an old house on the island of Harris. While renovating it, they make the shocking discovery of a baby’s bones in a trunk buried beneath the floor. In the 1860s, the…

An Austrian émigré who fled the Nazis to settle in Britain, art historian EH Gombrich was one of the most eminent public intellectuals of his time. Among other highlights in a remarkable life, he was the man who alerted Churchill to Hitler’s death while monitoring German broadcasts for the BBC World Service, and wrote the much-quoted aphorism: “There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists.” For Archive on 4: The Story of EH Gombrich (Radio 4, Saturday 28 July), long-time fan Robert Newman considers Gombrich’s influence. Also on Radio 4, Reflections with Peter Hennessy (Tuesday 31 July), the show in which the historian discusses recent political history with senior politicians, returns with four new episodes. Among the dramas on Radio 4, there’s a new adaptation of…

Art and pain EXHIBITION Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up V&A Museum, London Until 4 November - 020 7942 2000 • vam.ac.uk In 1954, following the death of his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera shut her possessions in a bathroom at the Blue House – the couple’s Mexico City home – and demanded it remain locked until 15 years after his death. Rivera died in 1957, but the bathroom was not opened until 2004, when its contents were finally revealed to the world. More than 200 of the objects once hidden away in the Blue House are now on show at the V&A – the first exhibition outside of Mexico to display Frida Kahlo’s clothes and intimate possessions. Personal letters, pre-Columbian necklaces strung by Kahlo herself, vividly…

Kitcheri Kitcheri is a dish from the Indian subcontinent with a wonderful history. As far back as 300 BC, the Indian philosopher Chanukya wrote that a balanced meal for a gentleman should consist of rice, lentils, ghee or oil – the main ingredients of this dish. For an insight on the history of kitcheri, read Rhitu Chatterjee’s article: https://n.pr/2FoMdfq INGREDIENTS 300g basmati rice 4 large eggs 60g unsalted butter 4 onions, sliced into half moons 400g tin green lentils, drained and rinsed Salt and pepper Chopped fresh parsley METHOD Rinse the rice with cold water four or five times, or until the water runs clear. Cover the rice with cold water and add 2 tablespoons of salt and leave to soak for an hour (or 30 minutes if in a…

Miles Taylor Queen Victoria was more than a token ruler of India. Passionately interested in its people and culture, she intervened frequently in Indian politics. • Miles profiles some of the Indians who were welcomed at Queen Victoria’s court on page 35 Helen Rappaport It has long been assumed that the failure to save the Romanovs was all down to King George V reneging on a British asylum offer. But the situation was far more complex, and it is time to reappraise where exactly the blame should fall. • Helen chronicles international efforts to save the Romanovs in 1918 on page 30 Jonathan Healey The civil wars that convulsed the British Isles in the mid-17th century seemed to come from nowhere. But, as well as political errors, deep-rooted social change…

What can these newspaper advertisements tell us about slavery in Britain in the 18th century? The collection of more than 800 advertisements, published over an 80-year period, offers a fascinating glimpse into British views on slavery during the period. Slavery was not simply an institution that existed in Britain’s colonies: slaves and bound people were present and visible in Georgian Britain. Any reading of the advertisements has to be done cautiously: masters and mistresses will have been particular in how they crafted the advertisements that sought the return of their escaped ‘property’, and they would have been concerned about public perception of how they treated their slaves. But we can still learn a lot about the runaways. The notices describe the mannerisms, clothes, hairstyles, skin markings, and skills of people…

“The struggle of human beings against power, said the Czech writer Milan Kundera, is the struggle of memory over forgetting. That goes for history as a whole, I think. We remember because it still matters to us as human beings. But how easy it is to forget. Kundera came to mind recently when I read the Washington Post’s survey on the Holocaust. It revealed that 41 per cent of Americans today did not know what Auschwitz was. Even more astonishing, when you look at millennials, the figure goes up to 66 per cent – two thirds of young Americans of college age. This is just 75 years on, still within the living memory of survivors. And yet there is still no end to cinema films on the Nazis: from Night…

The historian Dan Snow revealed that he told his daughters that women flew Spitfires in combat during World War Two . Is it ever right to alter history for children? Joseph Ferriera I teach modern history at a high school. I send home permission slips when tackling topics with brutal images (eg the Holocaust), but I refuse to shield students from them, as they need to learn how to deal with them. James Bennett No and yes... there are some parts of history which are too grim for a young audience. War is a hard subject to tackle and my five-year-old struggles to understand why war happens. John Scanlon If you paper over something, or paint a nice gloss on historical truth with the best of intentions, it’ll lead to…

British popular memory of the First World War has been dominated by the grim, attritional struggles of 1916–17, with the Somme and Passchendaele epitomising the terrible carnage and ultimate futility of the war. By contrast Amiens has been largely forgotten. It was a battle of much shorter duration and with many fewer casualties than the Somme and Passchendaele. It was also only one part of a series of major offensives (known as the Hundred Days) that brought the war on the western front to an end. These are perhaps some reasons why it has attracted much less attention from historians than other battles. Crucially, however, Amiens did not fit in with the dire image of the war that many influential critics of British High Command – from David Lloyd George…

William Cavendish William, Bess’s second husband, was treasurer of Henry VIII’s chamber – and, as such, propelled his wife into royal circles. William and Bess had eight children, six of whom survived into adulthood, and made Chatsworth their home. Elizabeth I Bess had a rollercoaster of a relationship with the Tudor queen. In the early 1560s, Elizabeth had Bess thrown in the Tower, after becoming convinced that she was trying to oust her from the throne. But – in her role as keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots – Bess would regain Elizabeth’s trust. Lady Katherine Grey Lady Jane Grey’s sister was the cause of Bess’s first clash with Queen Elizabeth. Katherine confided in Bess that she was pregnant with Edward Seymour’s child – and so, when the queen got…

The National Debt: A Short History by Martin Slater Hurst, 256 pages, £20 Should we worry that the UK’s national debt in 2015 was 89 per cent of its GDP? The warning of economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart that growth would drop by 1 per cent a year if debt reached 90 per cent of GDP gave George Osborne a justification for austerity. But to others, the 90 per cent rule was ahistorical. Debt reached at least 200 per cent in the Napoleonic Wars and Britain experienced the industrial revolution. It was at similar levels in the First World War, with low growth as a result of the collapse of the global economy, and in the Second World War, when war demand ended the great depression and the global…

The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 by Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 336 pages, £25 The 50-year fight for Roman Catholic emancipation across the turn of the 19th century has been rather overshadowed by momentous contemporary events such as the industrial revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and parliamentary reform. Yet it was as hard fought as any of them, pitting the struggle for religious rights against long-standing fears and bigotries over the true allegiances of Britain’s Catholics. At last, with Antonia Fraser’s latest book, there is an accessible account for a general readership. Now that sectarianism is generally on the wane, it is hard to appreciate just how vehemently contested emancipation was. The first minor tinkering to remove legal prohibitions on Catholics in 1778 provoked the Gordon…

“When I was growing up, all I wanted to do was write books for children. I had been so influenced by great writers such as Tolkien, CS Lewis, Ursula K Le Guin and, later, JK Rowling. These books formed me, instilling a taste for the fantastical, magical and historical. But in my first year reading English Literature at university, I was exposed to the world of Old English literature. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to simply read the texts. I wanted to know about the archaeology, art and culture that magnificent poetry like The Wanderer and Beowulf had emerged from. In place of novels, I began to devour obscure academic articles on interlacing gold and excavations in Sweden. Studying the early medieval period, I started to imagine myself in the minds…

“Visiting Tokyo is like stepping into the future. But its modernity is only one side of the city” Visiting Tokyo is like stepping into the future. Everything feels clean and bright and new. I get up earlier, walk faster, join the crowds hurrying along the streets, gaze up in admiration at the latest modern architecture, all steel and glass, extraordinary curves and angles. But Tokyo’s brash modernity is only one side of this sprawling, glorious city. It also has its quiet spots where, despite American firebombing in the Second World War, the atmosphere of the old city survives. Old houses ramble along lanes just wide enough for a bicycle, temple bells toll, and you can still find the occasional canal for which Tokyo was once famous. I fell in love…

1. Which English queen was born at Grafton Regis in Northamptonshire? 2. Which artist (pictured left) was killed in July 1944 while serving with the Welsh Guards in Normandy? 3. What happened at Kinder Scout in Derbyshire on 24 April 1932? 4. What links bachelors, windows and hearths? 5. Which was the first self-governing country to extend the vote to all adult women? 6. Near which river is this building? A. The Loire B. The Danube C. The Tees QUIZ ANSWERS 1. Elizabeth Woodville, wife of Edward IV. 2. Rex Whistler. 3. There was a mass trespass. 4. They were all the subject of taxes. 5. New Zealand. 6. C. The Tees. It’s the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle. GOT A QUESTION? Write to BBC History Magazine…

Elizabeth I was queen of England from 1558 until her death. The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the childless Virgin Queen was the last of the Tudors. One of her first acts as queen was the establishment of an English Protestant church. She also had Mary, Queen of Scots imprisoned and executed. In 1570 the pope excommunicated her, a reflection of the religious tensions of the era. When did you first hear about Elizabeth I? At my Welsh grammar school, where I studied the Elizabethan era. She really stood out for me as an individual, someone who helped shape the course of history. How could any schoolchild, then or now, fail to be excited by the dramatic events of her reign, culminating in the defeat of the Spanish…

There is a famous painting by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, from 1894, that depicts a number of dogs sitting around a table playing poker. It became his calling card as an artist, and he painted and repainted the scene well into the 20th century. Perhaps, it might be argued, Coolidge found inspiration for this scene two years earlier, when the Jarrow Express carried an exciting report of a famous ‘Dog Domino Player’. Mr Leonard, who the paper described as “a gentleman of independent fortune”, had taken up a new hobby. Clearly blessed with more money than sense, Mr Leonard was occupying his time by teaching his dogs to play dominoes. number of his friends A , having witnessed the dogs play one another, began to argue that it was all a…

Misleading health claims It was predictable that, as a BBC publication, you would omit, when recording the birth of the NHS, any mention of whose government ordered the Beveridge Report, and whose PM stated in a 1943 broadcast that they promised a scheme of health protection “from cradle to grave, after the war”. Nye Bevan was no more than the inheritor when the government changed, and bragged about his “achievement”. His devious poster, sly and misleading, is the only splash of vivid colour in your entire feature. Tim Topps, Oxford Rethinking the Vikings I have never been much interested in the Vikings, thinking of them simply as over-indulging their violent hobbies while wearing silly hats with horns. However, the article The Immortal Viking (July) has made me want to read…

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew Allen Lane, 960 pages, £35 Few historians have done more to chronicle the history of espionage than Professor Christopher Andrew. Over a career spanning more than five decades he has offered some of the most authoritative accounts of British, American and Soviet intelligence agencies. All of his work underlines the importance of intelligence in international relations and domestic security, and aims to correct the general exclusion of these matters from historical analyses of the 20th century. In The Secret World Andrew takes this a stage further, aiming to illuminate intelligence’s global history. Few people could be better placed to take on such a task. Intelligence has always attracted the brilliant, eccentric and downright villainous The core message of the book…

“Abducting child actors evolved out of the custom of impressing child choristers” Abducted: Elizabeth I’s Child Actors TV BBC Four Scheduled for the summer On 13 December 1600, while walking to school, 13-year-old Thomas Clifton was kidnapped. Shocking as it may seem, this was hardly unusual in Elizabethan England, an era when the practice of impressment, forced recruitment into public service, was perfectly legal. It was also an era when the definition of public service was broad enough to encompass the theatre, and when troupes of child actors were popular. Boys who were well educated were highly prized. “A remarkable aspect of this story is that all these children were highly literate,” says Archie Baron, executive producer of a documentary about Clifton presented by children’s writer and academic Katherine Rundell.…

1 Lyveden New Bield NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Where Tresham expressed his faith Lyveden is a second great manifestation of Thomas Tresham’s Catholic faith. It’s a tribute to the Passion – and, as such, is built in the shape of a Greek cross. When the sun shines through the parlour window in the morning, it casts the shadow of a crucifix on the opposite wall. nationaltrust.org.uk/lyveden 2 Rushton Hall NORTHAMPTONSHIRE Where Tresham lived Rushton Hall was the ancestral home of the Tresham family from the 15th century, and Thomas Tresham lived here while having the lodge built just a mile away. It’s a hotel today but a priest hole and a 16th-century oratory that houses a plaster representation of the Passion offer hints at its past. rushtonhall.com 3 Coughton Court ALCESTER, WARWICKSHIRE Where…

BEST TIME TO GO Common wisdom tells you to go in spring for the cherry blossom, and autumn for the maple leaves. But Tokyo is a year-round city. Apart from June (the rainy season) and September (typhoon season), every month has its delights. GETTING THERE Tokyo has two airports. Haneda is closer to town, with a monorail taking visitors into the city. Narita, once the only international airport, is further away, and you get into the city by limousine bus, subway or train. WHAT TO PACK Walking shoes you can easily slip into and out of for visiting temples, teahouses, traditional restaurants and people’s homes. Also take plenty of money and smart clothes for dining out. WHAT TO BRING BACK Bags and other things made from kimono fabric, pottery and…

1. BENTLEY PRIORY MUSEUM Join us this summer for ‘Pilot School’; hands-on activities for all the family, included in Museum admission. Please visit our website for more information. Available Saturday 21st July – Saturday 1st September. bentleypriorymuseum.org.uk  | 020 8950 5526 2. READING ABBEY QUARTER Visit Reading Museum to discover the story of Reading Abbey and then explore the Abbey Ruins to uncover its 900 year history. Visit our website to see our exciting events programme. readingabbeyquarter.org.uk  | 0118 937 3400 3. THE MERCHANT’S HOUSE Rare example of a seventeenth century merchant’s house on Marlborough High Street. Open for guided tours from April to October. themerchantshouse.co.uk  | 01672 511 491 4. ANAESTHESIA HERITAGE CENTRE A unique medical science museum devoted to the history of anaesthesia, resuscitation and pain relief. The…