Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i History Extra

“Elizabeth I did not have the happiest childhood. Before she was three years old her father executed her mother, and she was subsequently neglected by that father and imprisoned by her half-sister. When she finally ascended the throne, how would she make sense of all this? Would she seek to honour Henry VIII, or try to rehabilitate Anne Boleyn? In our cover feature, on page 20, Tracy Borman considers how the queen navigated this dilemma. Also this month, we’re reflecting on two anniversaries in which Britain played a key role. On page 28, Robin Ashcroft revisits the expedition that ascended Mount Everest 70 years ago. And on page 46, Matthew Hughes looks back on the British mandate of Palestine, which concluded 75 years ago, coinciding with the foundation of the…

1852 Radhanath Sikdar (below) of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India calculates that the mountain known simply as Peak XV is the world’s highest. It is subsequently - and somewhat controversially named after the former surveyor general of India, George Everest. 1913 Young British lieutenant John Noel slips illegally over the border from India into Tibet, approaching to within 40 miles of Everest. Before being arrested and deported, he identifies a climber’s route up the mountain’s northern ridges. 1919 Noel delivers a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society. This enthuses fellows to establish (with the British Alpine Club) the Mount Everest Committee, targeting the so-called ‘Third Pole’. 1921 A British reconnaissance expedition explores, surveys and maps the Everest massif from the Tibetan side, identifying a viable approach route to the…

What happened to Mata Hari's head? Mata Hari’s extraordinary life began in the Netherlands in August 1876. In 1906, this controversial woman (born Margaretha Zelle) had divorced her husband. In an attempt to find income for her family, she took up exotic dancing in Paris under the stage name of‘Mata Hari’, meaning ‘the Rising Sun’ in Malay. Mata Hari became a huge success in Paris and other cities of Europe. It was rumoured that many of her followers became her lovers and increasingly talked to her about their jobs. Many were military officers, and the information was of potentially great value. Early in the First World War, a German official offered Hari money in exchange for information. In Paris in February 1917, she was arrested for being a German spy.…

First published in 1962 and never out of print since, The Guns of August (titled in the UK simply August 1914) by the late American historian Barbara Tuchman has become the classic narrative history of the outbreak of the First World War. Military history had traditionally been the jealously guarded exclusive preserve of male historians, often ex soldiers, so to have a woman writing brilliant, colourful and authoritative history that was well-researched into the bargain came as something of a shock. But the book quickly became an international bestseller and won its author the first of her two Pulitzer Prizes. Critics praised her insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the commanders she examined. Tuchman’s studies of the German generals Moltke and Von Kluck did much to explain the failure…

PODCAST The tailor-made fashions of the Tudor era EXPLORE Pembroke Castle, Pembrokeshire TRAVEL Madrid, Spain VISIT China's crossroads If the past century was tumultuous in China, marked by the triumph of Mao’s Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution and recent soaring global status, then the previous one was equally so. The years 1796-1912 are the focus of a major new British Museum exhibition, which shines fresh light on a lesser-known yet transformative era of civil wars, international conflicts and enforced new trading relationships. And, as the displays reveal, this was also a period of great cultural, artistic and technological development. The exhibition explores the lives of people from all sectors of society through a diverse range of artefacts - from maps, official documents, decorated snuff bottles and cooking ingredients to magnificent…

Across 1 Las Casas 5 Thebes 10 Niger 11 Yousafzai 12 Scripture 13 Henge 14 Istria 16 Leipzig 20 Hypatia 21 Orwell 24 Arras 26 Dr Johnson 28 Old Bailey 29 Nelly 30 Sweden 31 Irangate Down 1 Longship 2 Sugar 3 Agrippina 4 Asylum 6 Heath 7 Byzantine 8 Shires 9 Sudeley 15 Tay Bridge 17 Parthenon 18 Tisdall 19 Blantyre 22 Jacobs 23 A J Ayer 25 SHAPE 27 Sulla Four winners of Courting India A Devitt, North Yorkshire; D Duck, Berkshire; D Dutton, Liverpool; C Walker, Cumbria…

Jonathan Kennedy “Pandemics have killed millions of people and brought empires crashing down - but they have also created the space for new societies and innovative ideas to emerge and thrive.è Jonathan charts six moments when disease transformed society on page 40 Joanna Arman “I wanted to find out who Margaret of Anjou actually was: to peel away the centuries of propaganda, myths and rumours. Above all, I wanted to see if I could find Margaret’s authentic voice - not just what others said about her.” Joanna profiles one of the most formidable women of the Wars of the Roses on page 56 David Carpenter “That Henry III survived, and was not deposed, I think was because of his huge prestige as a major Christian king. Ultimately you couldn’t describe…

“History - like any person’s story - is messy. It doesn’t fit into neat boxes” EIGHTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD JAMES MEREDITH walks into Bully’s Soul Food Restaurant, a traditional eaterie in Jackson, Mississippi. He is wearing a snappy white suit and cap, and is greeted like a hero. Everyone knows who he is. Black Americans stop him: they want to take a selfie, shake his hand, thank him for what he has done, tell him how his actions changed their life. BBC radio producer Conor Garrett recounted this anecdote to me shortly after that telling episode. He had recently gone to Jackson to interview Meredith about a key moment in the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, Meredith applied and fought all the way up to the US Supreme Court for the…

Early bird warning? During the First World War, the Royal Navy tried to train gulls to reveal the presence of German U-boats. Wild gulls were fed from a dummy periscope in the hope they would associate a periscope with food. The sight of a flock wheeling around one in the sea would then warn ships that a submarine was nearby. It didn’t work. Nor did the suggestion that the birds should be encouraged to defecate on any periscope, thus rendering the U-boat effectively blind. Drum and japes In 1903, a writer concluded his book The Musical Guide, an encyclopedia of musical terms, with the entry ‘zzxjoanw’ (pronounced ‘shaw’), which he claimed was a Maori word referring to a type of drum. Rupert Hughes, uncle of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, meant…

David Musgrove: This is the second volume of a two-part biography of Henry III, covering the period 1258 down to the king’s death in 1272. The year 1258 saw revolt against the king, so had Henry’s reign gone well up to this point? David Carpenter: Henry would have said that he had given long years of peace to England, linked to an absence of foreign war. He was a pacific king as well as a most Christian one. He had none of the cruelty and irreligion of his father, King John. He gave huge alms to the poor, attended multiple masses, and, most importantly, was rebuilding Westminster Abbey in honour of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. Henry had accepted Magna Carta, and his financial exactions (though still resented) were…

How do we know what we know about the Holocaust, especially its victims? What is the relationship between history, evidence, and memory? For whom have the “guardians of the past” spoken and why? Huge questions like this underpin Ari Joskowicz’s remarkable new book, examining the fraught history of relations between Romani and Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Both were targeted by the Nazis, yet as Joskowicz notes, “Roma and Jews did not have a shared experience of persecution under Nazism. They suffered next to but rarely with each other.” Intriguingly - and perhaps unexpectedly - Joskowicz focuses on the relationship between Roma and Jews through the prism of the Second World War’s aftermath rather than devoting significant space to wartime persecution and murder. He traces the production of knowledge about…

Your new documentary traces the trajectory of Wedgwood. Can you tell us about the company’s founder, the first Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95)? He was a visionary figure, a product of the Enlightenment and of a moment of confidence. There was a desire for change, an excitement about change, and [the idea] that change would be liberating and progressive. He was a terrifyingly remarkable individual: a businessman, an engineer, a designer, a kind of advertising genius, a political activist, a father, a proud man - a phenomenal figure. He dealt with a disability as well, his leg having been cut off without an anaesthetic. He was a force of energy when Britain itself was full of energy. In the 19th century, Wedgwood as a company was less of a force. Why? Crucially,…

Diary of dresses In 2016, fashion historian Kate Strasdin was given an album of richly coloured and brightly patterned fabric scraps. All of these samplesfrom a snippet of a wedding gown to the corner of a Bornean pirate flag were collected by one middle-class woman, Anne Sykes, across the course of the Victorian age. Strasdin told us what the album can reveal about fashion, fabric production and the experiences of ordinary women of the time. historyextra, com/patchwork-pod Hairs and graces In today’s era of natural hair styling, the historical craze for wigs can look outlandish, even silly. But exorbitantly expensive hairpieces were once an important way of conveying wealth, power and respectability. Curator Sue Prichard joined us to discuss how and why Britain’s monarchs embraced the fashion for wigs-from the…

MY HISTORY HERO Children’s author Patrice Lawrence chooses IN PROFILE Lord Kitchener, ‘the grand master of calypso’, is best known for his song ‘London Is the Place for Me’, which he was filmed singing on his arrival in England in 1948 on the Empire Windrush. Born Aldwyn Roberts in Trinidad and Tobago, he was orphaned at 14 but went on to have a long and successful career as a calypso star in both Britain, where he lived for 14 years, and his Trinidadian homeland. He died aged 77. “Not only an important figure in Trinidad’s story, his songs show the way that music can document everyday history” When did you first hear about Lord Kitchener? My mum, the second youngest of 12 children, moved from Trinidad to England in the 1960s to…

30 JUNE 1860 Great minds clash during Oxford’s ‘Great Debate’ Church spars with science over Darwin’s evolutionary idea A hubbub of anticipation swelled in Oxford’s Radcliffe Library, packed with almost 500 people on 30 June 1860. The 30th annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was being held here to celebrate the opening of the University Museum (now Oxford’s Natural History Museum). This would be no dry conference, though; instead, discussions rapidly gravitated towards On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin’s book - published just seven months earlier - proposing the idea that organisms evolve over time through a process of natural selection. It was a controversial concept - not least with the church. As the debate heated up, two intellectual heavyweights faced off: Samuel Wilberforce,…

“ Shakespeare’s plays are still powerful statements on the human condition ” THIS YEAR IS THE 400TH ANNIVERSARY OF the publication of Shakespeare’s complete works, known as the First Folio. It was in November 1623, in William Jaggard’s printing house at the “sign of the Half-Eagle and Key” in Aldersgate, that the last pages of the whopping 900-page book came off the press. The whole print run (unbound) was then taken to the bookshops in St Paul’s churchyard. The book was finally on sale. Publication was announced to the world next spring at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The collection featured 36 plays - half of which we would never know were it not for the Folio, including The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night and Macbeth. Without them, how would we…

LETTER OF THE MONTH Brilliant Brummies I must add a name to Richard Vinen’s piece (April) on the first families of Birmingham: Nettlefold. John Sutton Nettlefold was married to Margaret Chamberlain and became chairman of the Housing Committee for the City of Birmingham. Like Cadbury, he created a village - not for his workers, but instead for people being moved out of central Birmingham’s slums. Motivated by strong Christian principles, he also created a ‘garden suburb’ estate, Moor Pool, with affordable rents for those who had been living in the intensely overcrowded ‘back-to-backs”. As he said in a 1906 speech: “We can, if we will, arrange for healthy, wholesome surroundings for every Birmingham adult, and even more important, give every Birmingham child ‘light and air’ that are so essential for…

Affair of the Poisons On a cold day in February 1680, a woman in her early forties was driven through the streets of Paris to the Place de Grève. A huge crowd had gathered to witness the spectacle to come. A priest stood to one side, a prayerbook in his hand, his voice silenced by the roar of the crowd. The executioner, his face concealed within a leather mask, ordered the woman to be brought forward. Her drunken state dulled some of her terror as she was tied to the stake, seated and bound with iron. Wood and straw were piled up around her. The fire was lit. After some time, her screams were ceased as her earthly agonies came to an end. The woman’s name was Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin,…

2 November 1917 The Balfour Declaration, a letter from Britain’s foreign secretary, AJ Balfour, vaguely declares support for a Jewish “home” in Palestine. British troops soon oust Ottoman forces from the region, and on 11 December, General Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem’s old city, marking the start of British administration. 24 July 1922 League of Nations articles 4 and 6 for Mandate Palestine codify the Balfour Declaration and establish the Jewish Agency as the official Jewish body in Palestine. They also restate the goal of a Jewish “home” in Palestine, and commit Britain to “facilitate” Jewish immigration and “settlement” there. 20 October 1930 British colonial secretary Lord Passfield’s White Paper notes the damaging economic and social effects of Jewish settlement on Palestinians, and suggests restricting Jewish immigration. This reflects the fact…

In 2019, 83.7 million tourists travelled to Spain where they spent €92.28bn (approx £81bn). This is one reason why the Spanish economy has grown to become the fourth largest in the European Union. Yet Spaniards have not always enjoyed the self-confidence of today. At the tail end of the 19th century, they suffered a crushing and humiliating defeat at the hands of the United States in Cuba, leaving the Spanish newspaper El Correo to bemoan “everything is broken in this unhappy country”. For figures like General Franco, the ‘Disaster’ helped fuel an obsession with making Spain great again. For more progressive groups on the centre and left, the great task lay in becoming more like, and better integrated with, other European countries. Meanwhile, for historians of Europe, Spain always seemed…

If Stratford-upon-Avon is the home of Shakespeare, and Haworth the heart of Brontë country, then Pembroke - Penfro, to give its Welsh name - has grounds to be celebrated as the birthplace of the Tudor dynasty. Certainly, that’s what road signs into this charming town in west Wales declare. Today a small town of just 8,000 inhabitants, Pembroke is still dominated by the hulking fortress that has guarded its rocky promontory for over 900 years. Its owners including the Tudors - have come and gone, but the castle still looms above Mill Pond, a stern reminder of Pembroke’s strategic importance. Military garrisons have, though, been replaced by exuberant children excitedly exploring every nook of this stone labyrinth. Pembroke first came to prominence after the 1066 conquest of England, when some…

Across 7 African port, the focal point of a struggle against France from 1954-62 (7) 8 Indochinese kingdom, dating from around the second century AD, eventually absorbed by the Vietnamese (6) 9 Ninth-century BC king of Israel, reputedly influenced for the worse by his wife, Jezebel (4) 10 Oxford university college named after Mary_, the esteemed 19th-century mathematician and science writer (10) 12 Germanic-speaking people, roaming the lower Rhine area in the third century AD, who went on to dominate Europe (6) 13 Surrey market town, shown in the Domesday Book as Cherchefelle (7) 15 Tragic event of 19th-century Ireland, caused by the failure of the potato crop (5,6) 19 Surname of the 15th and 16th-century explorer after whom America is named (8) 20 The Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968…