Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i History Extra

“Thanks in part to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the workhouse is often seen as the epitome of all that was wrong with 19th-century Britain. At a time of great advances in industry and technology, the country’s poorest inhabitants were forced to endure frequent humiliation – and dreadful food. But how accurate is the Dickensian vision of workhouse life? According to historian Peter Higginbotham, the picture is a little more complicated. Though the institution was hardly idyllic, conditions varied enormously and improved dramatically over the course of the Victorian age. Turn to page 20 to find more. Our cover feature this month takes us to New England and the Salem witch trials of 1692-93. What began with the unusual behaviour of two young girls, resulted in a mass panic that led…

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A man who died more than 5,000 years ago in present-day Latvia may have been the first person to be infected with the plague, experts believe. The Neolithic hunter-gatherer was one of four people buried at a midden, or waste dump, near the river Salac. Analysis of his remains suggest that the man died with an ancient strain of the Yersinia pestis bacterium in his blood, possibly after being bitten by a rodent. It’s thought that this particular strain emerged about 7,000 years ago, when it split from all other forms of the pathogen, making it the earliest known version of the bacterium that became known as the Black Death. But unlike the variant that killed tens of millions in the 14th century, this Stone Age iteration lacked the gene…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Just not cricket On reading your recent article about cricket (Batting for the British Empire, July ) I was reminded of a story my father told about his Great Uncle Willy. This was deputy surgeon-general William G Don MD, who served on the Duke of Wellington in the Baltic during the 1855 bombardment of Sveaborg. In his printed but unpublished memoir Reminiscences of the Baltic Fleet of 1855, he tells how “the first few days in September were exceedingly fine; we made the most of them on shore in cricket matches and other amusements… On the 8th we played a grand cricket match – ‘the Duke’ v ‘The Fleet’ – and had the satisfaction of winning by 101 to 56 in one innings, being unable to…

Accompanies Katherine Harloe’s BBC Radio 4 documentary Detoxifying the Classics In August 2017, TV news reports were filled with images of far-right, white nationalist protesters marching through Charlottesville, Virginia. This was the so-called “Unite the Right Rally”, called to oppose the taking down of a statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. Crowds of white supremacists marched through the streets, carrying torches and chanting “White lives matter” and “You will not replace us”. The next day they attacked counter-protesters. One murdered an anti-fascist demonstrator, Heather Heyer, by running her over in his car. In January 2021, history seemed to repeat itself as a political demonstration with white nationalist elements in the United States again turned violent. This time, a crowd of Donald Trump supporters, arguably encouraged by the outgoing president…

Who was the GreenBrier Ghost? She was (Elva) Zona Heaster Shue, whose body was found at her home in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, on 23 January 1897. By the time doctor George Knapp arrived, Zona’s husband, Edward Shue, had returned home and laid out her body in a high-neck dress. His apparent grief made examination difficult and Knapp wrote “childbirth” as the cause of death, saying he’d recently treated her for an unspecified “feminine” problem. After the funeral, Zona’s mother, Mary Jane Heaster, claimed a bedsheet taken from the coffin turned red when she tried to wash it. Weeks later, Zona apparently appeared to her in four dreams, saying Edward had broken her neck; she turned her head to face backwards to prove it. The local prosecuting attorney didn’t buy…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST During the freezing January of 1692, unsettling incidents began to occur in the parsonage of Salem. The Reverend Samuel Parris’s 11-yearold niece and nine-yearold daughter – usually well-behaved girls – began to shudder and shake, shrieking, wailing and barking like dogs. A local physician was called in and delivered a damning diagnosis that the girls were not suffering from any standard medical issue, but rather an “evil hand” was at work. By that, the physician meant an agent of the devil. That diagnosis would result in one of the darkest and most bizarre episodes in the early history of the United States. Keen to discover the perpetrator, a local woman, Mary Sibley, encouraged the parsonage girls to bake a “witchcake”. Soaked in urine and fed to…

Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall by Helena Merriman Hodder & Stoughton, 336 pages, £20 Joachim Rudolph was 22 years old in 1961 when his carefree summer holiday was interrupted by the news that Berlin had been split in two. He quickly came to the conclusion that he could not stay in the East, penned in, as it now was, by a wall. He had to leave, but it was unclear how he could do so – and the window of opportunity was shrinking fast. With every escape, border guards tightened their security. It was a case of now or never. Cycling along the border with a school friend, the duo concluded that no escape attempt was going to be perfect – but…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery by Alex Renton Canongate, 400 pages, £16.99 Journalist Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy is a timely interven-tion into recent debates about Britain’s history as a slavery nation. From the 1760s until the 19th century, the Fergussons, a Scottish aristocratic family and Renton’s ancestors, owned plantations and enslaved people in the Caribbean. Blood Legacy is the story of their failed coffee and indigo plantation in Tobago and the moderately successful Rozelle sugar estate in Jamaica. Renton tells this story using the Fergus-sons’ family papers, especially the records of family patriarch Sir Adam, an absentee planter who appears to never have travelled to the Caribbean. Although Renton’s grandfather, a former keeper of the records at the National Archives of Scotland,…

Archives unite in bid to save literary treasures Major UK institutions including the British Library, Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the National Library of Scotland have joined forces in an effort to raise funds to keep a literary resource publicly available. The Honresfield Library contains more than 500 manuscripts, letters and first editions written by such luminaries as Jane Austen, Robert Burns and Emily Brontë. It was originally compiled at the turn of the 20th century by brothers Alfred and William Law, who kept it at Honresfield House, near Rochdale. The collection, which bears the house’s name, has been almost entirely inaccessible since Alfred’s son died in 1939, and only re-emerged recently when plans were revealed to put it up for auction. The initiative to keep the Honresfield Library in the…

On 30 September 1846, 175 years ago, a dentist called WTG Morton made a huge leap forward in the quest for pain-free operations, claiming to have used ether as an anaesthetic for the very first time. Just over two weeks later, in the Massachusetts General Hospital, Morton successfully anaesthetised a young man while surgeon John Collins Warren removed a facial tumour. This was the first effective public demonstration of using ether. Until Morton’s pioneering work, the pain of surgical operations was so agonising that physicians and patients avoided resorting to the knife unless the patient’s life was threatened. Of course, alternative forms of pain relief had long been available. These included administering salicylate (willow bark), alcohol, opium and – from 1805 – morphine. Physicians also blunted pain by freezing limbs,…

"Tory spending cuts send us back to the misery of the Victorian workhouse,” cried a Mirror headline in 2010. Workhouses were “bleak, grimly austere and oppressive”, wrote the author of a study of one local institution in 2012. Ever since Dickens’ Oliver Twist began publication in 1837, the establishment he described, and numerous on-screen representations of it, have become the filter through which the institution is invariably viewed. Portrayals of the workhouse habitually take it as read that it was unremittingly horrific, harsh and dehumanising. But was it really that bad? The Victorian workhouse first came about as a result of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. This act transferred the administration of poor relief from individual parishes to a coordinated national system based on new groupings of parishes, known…

ON THE HistoryExtra PODCAST “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.” So opined Jane Austen in 1814. “It is not fair,” continued the author of the recently, and anonymously, published Pride and Prejudice. “He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it – but fear I must.” Austen’s fears were entirely justified. Scott, already a highly celebrated poet who had been offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate, published his first work of fiction, Waverley, or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, to immediate and unprecedented success. Austen was indeed impressed, and she was far from alone. The…

The Nile: History’s Greatest River by Terje Tvedt IB Tauris, 400 pages, £30 The Nile has always fascinated western explorers. Julius Caesar allegedly vowed that he would give Egypt away if only someone could tell him where the source of its river lay. He – again, allegedly – boarded Cleopatra’s luxurious barge, hoping to make this momentous discovery himself, but failed in his mission. One can only imagine that he had an enjoyable experience nonetheless. Later explorers were not so lucky. In 1842, impoverished ultra-runner Mensen Ernst, tempted by the promise of a large reward, determined to run to the source of the Nile fuelled only by biscuits and jam. He made it to Aswan, where he died of dysentery. Equally determined was the Dutch heiress Alexandrine Tinne; she lost…

86 DIARY: LISTEN / WATCH / VISIT By Jonathan Wright, Rhiannon Davies and Rachel Dickens 94 EXPLORE… Stockport Air Raid Shelters WATCH Action and consequences The 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is, says American writer-director David Lowery, “so rich, so overflowing with meaning and symbolism, that one could make a dozen adaptations of it and still not quite capture what makes it so vital”. He hasn’t let this stop him trying as, in a special-effects-laden fantasy that plays out almost as a superhero origin story, Dev Patel (The Personal History of David Copperfield) stars as King Arthur’s nephew, Gawain. He’s an impetuous young man who lands himself in trouble after an encounter with an eldritch figure who turns up at Camelot, passing through to issue a…

Outside, the sun is shining down on Chestergate in the centre of Stockport, Greater Manchester. But inside the labyrinth of interconnected tunnels that constitute the town’s air raid shelters, it’s dark and damp, and there’s a chill in the air. This is not a place for those who suffer from claustrophobia, but the shelters provide a fascinating insight into what it was like for local civilians seeking refuge from German bombs during the Second World War. In 1938, workmen demolishing properties in Chestergate as part of a road-widening scheme discovered cellars dug out of the sandstone on which Stockport centre is built. At first it was suggested that these should be extended to create an underground car park, but war was looming, and the town’s authorities decided that air raid…

“WE MADE OUR OWN FUN” In 1916, after a year in the Steyning workhouse, four-year-old John Austin began an 11-year stay in the union’s children’s home at Shoreham-by-Sea, which he called “the orphanage”. In memoirs recorded by his daughter, Pat Mathewson, he would later recall: “We made our own fun. One of the things I really enjoyed was being a member of the local church choir. Apart from the fact that I could go out of the orphanage without supervision, which was a great relief, I also got paid pocket money for singing my little head off.” He got plenty of exercise, too: “A very kind gesture was made by the two Box brothers of Brighton when they supplied a complete set of gymnastic equipment. They also spent at least…

On 20 July 1942, a German warplane touched down in the Egyptian desert near El Alamein, where German and Italian forces were battling Britain’s Eighth Army. From the plane stepped Walther Rauff, a blond, blue-eyed Obersturmbannfuhrer – a lieutenant colonel in the SS, the brutal, elite corps of the Nazi Party. At 36, Rauff was already an engineer of death. His previous assignments included the mass production of mobile gas chambers used by the SS to murder as many as half a million people in eastern Europe as part of the Final Solution, the Nazi genocide of Jews. From the plane, Rauff went to Erwin Rommel’s battle headquarters, where he presented his orders to the field marshal’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal. As commander of a new mobile…

Across 8 See 19 down 9 Born Elizabeth Griscom in 1752, she helped design the first flag of the United States (according to family stories) (5,4) 10 Small European principality governed solely by Spanish and French “co-princes” until its new constitution in 1993 (7) 11 Second-century AD Greek historian, author of a work about Alexander the Great’s military exploits (6) 12 A major deity of ancient Egypt (in fact a fusion of two gods) (4–2) 13 Term for a law officer that in England dates back to before the Norman Conquest (7) 15 In Hinduism, the supreme god (7) 17 In 1762 a treaty was concluded by this princely state of north-east India with the British to expel the occupying (Myanmar) Burmans (7) 20 Ancient area of Eurasia whose ancient…

A selection of the exciting content on our website historyextra.com History quiz: how much do you know about medieval kings and queens? Are you worthy of a crown, or just muddling through the Middle Ages? Take our medieval kings and queens quiz and put your royal knowledge to the test. historyextra.com/royals-quiz James VI and I: England’s first Stuart monarch How did James VI of Scotland come to rule as King James I of England? Who were his personal favourites? And what was his role in the witch hunts at the turn of the 17th century? Historian and author Tracy Borman presents a comprehensive guide. historyextra.com/james-vi-i Joseph Bazalgette As concerns about London’s water grew during the first half of the 19th century, particularly following the arrival of cholera in 1831, Bazalgette…