Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2020 i History Extra

“ The historical milestones we mark each year are frequently connected to the wars that dominate popular history. In 2020, however, there’s been an outbreak of peace. May saw the 600th anniversary of Henry V’s Treaty of Troyes and 75 years since VE Day. And now we reach the 500th anniversary of the most magnificent peace of them all: the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As Glenn Richardson reveals in this month’s cover feature, Henry VIII’s summit with French king Francis I was truly extraordinary, not just in the lavish feasting – where 30,000 fish were served – but also in the ways the kings sought to convert their warrior instincts into competitive diplomacy. Find out more on page 20. With much of the UK in lockdown, and schools…

Lockdown learning has dominated the lives of many over the past few months, with courses suddenly moved from lecture halls to the kitchens and living rooms of academics who were required to hastily tidy up – until they realised they could blur their video-chat backgrounds! It has been a learning experience for all. And, with a new academic year on the horizon, the prospect of how and where history teaching might be delivered has raised all kinds of questions, not least over the ‘value’ of online education. One student, Kayleigh Murray (@kayleighmurray_), tweeted the view of many: “We pay £9.25k for an online course where access to campus and other facilities is just ‘an added bonus’? I don’t think so.” The UK’s minister of state for universities, Michelle Donelan (@michelledonelan),…

“Do pandemics change us for ever? Or does life just go on?” I don’t normally like watching my own films, but the other day I caught up with an episode of Story of England, our series telling the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through history. As the story reached 1348, it became startlingly topical. Kibworth had the heaviest known losses from the Black Death of any English village, with two-thirds of its inhabitants dying. This set me musing about past pandemics. Do they change history? Do they change us? Or does life just go on? Great pandemics, such as the Plague of Justinian in AD 541, were often preceded by extreme weather events and natural disasters – history warns us about the interrelationship between climate and plague. In…

"Garibaldi was feted by our Victorian ancestors in an unprecedented way" It’s not at all surprising that Giuseppe Garibaldi is a national hero in his native Italy. Arguably the pre-eminent figure in the struggle to unify the Italian peninsula, his statue is everywhere and most Italian towns and villages seem to have at least one street or square named after him. What is more unexpected is that Garibaldi was also regarded as a hero here in Britain. In the middle decades of the 19th century, he was feted and lionised by our Victorian ancestors in a way and to an extent that was arguably unprecedented. The relics of Britain’s Garibaldi craze can still be found today. On a street corner in the centre of Newcastle, for example, is a plaque…

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Mistaken identity In October 1904, during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Baltic fleet was sailing in the North Sea when it spotted what it thought was a force of Japanese torpedo boats and opened fire. In fact the targets weren’t Japanese at all, but a fleet of English fishing trawlers operating out of Hull. In what became known as the Dogger Bank Incident, two fishermen were killed, one trawler was sunk and four others damaged before the Russians ceased fire. Pioneering physician In 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became the first woman in Britain to openly qualify as a doctor (Margaret Bulkley had qualified 50 years earlier, but disguised as a man). After her attempts to study at a number of medical schools had been thwarted on account of her sex,…

Rob Attar: What were the origins of the Lancaster bomber? Why was it needed? John Nichol: At the start of the Second World War, the Royal Air Force’s offensive capability was quite limited. It soon became clear that the RAF needed bigger, better and more powerful bombers that could carry much greater loads. Now, what we’re really talking about are weapons to kill people and destroy things. And the early bombers weren’t doing that enough. They weren’t achieving what the politicians and military leaders wanted, which was to take the war to the heart of Germany. With the Lancaster bomber that’s what they were able to do, thanks to its range and its massive weapons load. How much of a challenge was it to build Lancasters in the quantities required?…

Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935–1943 by John Gooch Allen Lane, 576 pages, £30 The popular picture of Italian conduct in the Second World War is that of the decent Italian soldier: amorous, cultured, far from bellicose and eager to see the end of the conflict. This is the image presented in Private Angelo, the 1946 novel by Eric Linklater who was the official British historian of the war in Italy in its final years. It can also be found in Louis de Bernières’s 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, and the charming 1991 Academy Award-winning film Mediterraneo. The reality was very different. By the time Mussolini declared war in June 1940 after a period of ‘non-belligerence’, he had spent 20 years trying to convert Italians into a…

BIOGRAPHY The Mystery of Charles Dickens by AN Wilson (Atlantic, 368 pages, £17.99) Dickens on his deathbed In June 1870, part way through penning The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the 58-year-old Charles Dickens died. AN Wilson’s new biography begins back to front, taking the author’s final moments as a jumping off point to explore some of the biggest ‘mysteries’ of his life, from his difficult childhood and failed marriage to his mesmeric public persona and the dizzying success of his novels. VISUAL The World Aflame: The Long War, 1914–1945 by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral (Head of Zeus, 448 pages, £25) Life in colour “Breathing life into the past” is how artist Marina Amaral describes her work colourising black and white photographs. Here, her images are used to tell the…

In August 1953, in a covert operation orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s MI6, Mohammad Mosaddegh was ousted as democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Across the subsequent years until the 1979 revolution, the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, became an increasingly authoritarian figure. Did Britain’s young monarch, Elizabeth II, play a role in this coup d’état without her knowledge? That’s the contention of a documentary based on the investigative work of security historians Richard Aldrich and Rory Cormac, authors of The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers. Drawing on rarely seen archives, the duo also argue that, for more than 65 years, the true story of what happened has been covered up. The Queen and the Coup Channel 4 / Due to air…

The urge to find someone to blame when things go wrong runs deep in our political culture, yet just how useful is it to point the finger? At a time when argument rages over the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, a new documentary from producer Phil Tinline looks back 80 years to see what a controversy in a previous era can teach us. In July 1940, the polemical bestseller Guilty Men was published, a scathing attack on the political class of the Baldwin-Chamberlain era and the idea of appeasement. Credited to ‘Cato’, it was the work of three journalists, including future Labour leader Michael Foot, who wrote the text in no more than four days. The book, argues Tinline, changed British politics forever – and yet it’s a problematical…

Grace Huxford Modern conflicts reverberate all around the world, and often in the most unexpected places. This underpins my social historical research on the Korean War. Grace explores the social history of the Korean War in Britain, on page 46 Glenn Richardson The Field of the Cloth of Gold is an extraordinary event that has intrigued me for many years as a student of Renaissance monarchy. It offers us a unique insight into how kingship worked in the 16th century. Glenn tells the remarkable story of the Field of the Cloth of Gold on page 20 Helen McCarthy As a professional historian and mother, I was fascinated to explore how women juggled wage-earning and childcare in the past, and to consider how much things have changed – or not. Helen…

The ways in which French continued to be spoken in medieval England at least 300 years after the Norman conquest are set to be explored in a new study. The research, by a team from the University of Exeter, will examine the linguistic legacy of the 1066 Norman invasion across the following centuries. It’s thought that, by 1300, as many as one in five people spoke both English and Anglo-French, with the latter becoming the language of court. This meant that it was deemed invaluable for professional success in fields as diverse as law, commerce and literature. Key information about the use and spread of the language comes from the Tretiz , a 13th-century textbook created to help bilingual children brush up on their skills. Its rhyming couplets span topics…

AT WAR WITH THE WORKHOUSE From the pages of novels such as Oliver Twist , Dickens savaged the injustices meted out to the impoverished – and at the top of his hit-list was the infamous New Poor Law “Please, Sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Oliver Twist approaching the master and asking him, timorously, for a second helping of gruel is surely one of the most famous scenes in all of 19th-century literature. When Dickens wrote these words in the 1830s, huge celebrity and vast fortune still lay in the future. Instead the author was thinking of the here and now – in particular, the plight of the most impoverished Britons. Dickens was determined to savage the terrible injustices he saw unfolding around him, and did that…

Beatrice Shilling 1909–90 IN PROFILE Beatrice Shilling was born in March 1909 in the small Hampshire village of Waterlooville. She bought her first motorbike at the age of 14, and was obsessed with them throughout her life. Shilling trained as an engineer – something that was incredibly difficult for women to do at the time – and secured a job as a technical officer at the Royal Air Establishment at Farnborough in the 1930s. She was awarded an OBE in 1947 for her pioneering work on the engines of fighter planes in the Second World War. “Shilling helped change the course of history: we might not have won the Battle of Britain if it wasn’t for her invention” When did you first hear about Beatrice Shilling? It was when my…

This striking bronze astrolabe was likely made in late 13th-century England, and would have been used to calculate when saints’ days fell in the calendar. It’s among 280,000 images of artefacts held at the British Museum that are newly available to view in high definition online, spanning continents and centuries. The update, announced ahead of schedule to coincide with the ongoing coronavirus lockdown, brings the total number of such images to almost 2 million. To browse the collection and find out more, visit britishmuseum.org/collection…

The sinking of the Mary Rose remains one of history’s great nautical mysteries. Why did a royal warship, which had been perfectly seaworthy for a quarter of a century, suddenly sink to the bottom of the English Channel, apparently untouched by enemy fire? What made it worse was the context. Henry VIII was at war with France, and an enemy fleet, almost twice the size of the later Spanish Armada, had sailed into the river Solent. But the king was confident of victory. On the night of 18 July 1545, he dined aboard his flagship, the Great Harry, and confirmed that the experienced Sir George Carew would be in charge of the Mary Rose the next day. On the morning of 19 July, Henry and his courtiers stepped onto the…

One hundred years ago, on 25 July 1920, Britain’s most famous female scientist, Rosalind Franklin, was born. 2020 seems a particularly appropriate moment to celebrate her life. Just 37 years old when she died, Franklin carried out pioneering research into viruses and made crucial contributions to gas masks – a kind of wartime PPE. But she is best known for a relatively brief period during which she investigated DNA, the double helix molecule carrying our genetic code. The controversies surrounding her misogynistic treatment by US scientist James Watson have overshadowed her other achievements, and Franklin has become mythologised as the helpless victim of male prejudice. Franklin’s difficulties began in 1950, when she returned to England after three successful years in a Parisian laboratory, where she became an expert in X-ray…

I enjoyed the May issue features on VE Day, particularly the article on the differences across Europe. But as a Channel Islander born in Guernsey and resident in Jersey, I’m disappointed that historians still don’t seem particularly interested in the experiences of British subjects whose lives were turned upside down by five years of German occupation. The islanders, and the islands themselves, were forever altered. My mother, sisters and grandparents remained, and their home was near the enormous Mirus Battery which was regularly fired as practice, shaking the ground. My father left Guernsey intending to volunteer, and was needed in a factory producing Spitfire parts. He was separated from his island, his mother and one of his sisters but was on the first possible boat back. My husband’s parents were…

In the summer of 1947, the British government launched a patriotic appeal to the nation’s wives and mothers. War debts and the costs of rebuilding bomb-ravaged cities had sucked the life out of the country’s major export industries, from textiles and clothing to shoe, boot and hosiery production. Hospitals and schools were short on staff, while farmers had no one to harvest their crops. Only the married woman at home, ministers insisted, could restore economic prosperity by offering her labour. “In the next big effort,” one newspaper advert read, “you can be one of the women who turn the tide of recovery.” A key question, however, was left unanswered: what would happen to the children of these selfless volunteers? The war nurseries, established after 1939 for use by munition workers,…

Today, not many people know the names Hewlett Johnson or Monica Felton. But during the Korean War (1950–53), these two figures were well known, even notorious, for their opposition to British involvement in Korea. Their stories tell us an alternative history of the Korean War, of the social response to the conflict back in Britain. Even though the fighting raged many thousands of miles away, Felton and Johnson show us the complex impact it had in Britain, the legacies of which we continue to live with today. To grasp why these two Britons opposed the Korean War so passionately, we need first to understand why the conflict erupted in the first place – and, to do that, we must return to the climax of the Second World War. When the…

Which British monarch had the most illegitimate children? You would be forgiven for thinking that this is a tricky question to answer – after all, children born out of wedlock were surely not something that the royals wanted to shout about. But in fact, most monarchs were keen to prove their virility and therefore openly acknowledged – indeed, often ennobled – their illegitimate offspring. Notable examples include Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset, whom Henry VIII was inordinately proud of because his birth seemingly proved that the king’s lack of legitimate sons was the fault of his wives. Or James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, eldest illegitimate son of the ‘Merrie Monarch’ Charles II, who grew up with such an inflated sense of importance that he attempted to depose his…

Dan Jackson on life in the north-east of England “It was fundamentally a dangerous place for a long time. Northumbrians had to worry about armies appearing over the hill in a way that didn’t apply to the rest of the country. As one historian describes it, the north-east was ‘the ring in which the champions [Scotland and England] met’. There are no domestic medieval buildings left because they all burned down. There are plenty of castles though – North- umberland is the most fortified county in the British Isles.” Annie Gray on the trials of being Churchill’s cook “The Churchills were awful employers. Not only did they pay very badly, they were also very demanding, and got blacklisted by every employment agency in London after the war. But when people…

Sadly, it’s probably going to be difficult to travel this summer, but there may be at least some solace in making tentative plans for next year. A new series from Bettany Hughes might offer some inspiration: it follows the classicist and historian on an odyssey to explore Greece’s islands. And Odyssey really is the right word here, because these are travels inspired by the journey of Odysseus back from the Trojan War, from modern-day Turkey to his home island of Ithaca. In the first of six episodes, Hughes heads for the eastern Mediterranean near Fourni, where marine archaeologist George Koutsouflakis takes her to the site of a remarkable discovery: 58 shipwrecks that date back 2,500 years. It’s a reminder that travel by sea was fraught with  danger in the ancient…