Ask the average person (always assuming that such a being exists) when women got the vote in Britain, and I reckon they'd say the 1920s or thereabouts. Nothing wrong with that answer; until a recent visit to Newham Archives I'd have said the same, and then I'd have scurried off to look up the details in a reputable reference book: I'd have found the 1918 Representation of the People Act (certain women over 30) and then ten years later the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act (all women over 21, irrespective of property ownership). Job done.
But documents at Newham Archives - while not exactly overturning the conventional wisdom - tell a slightly different story that is worth repeating here, if only to drive home once again the point that the past is rarely straightforward. Who among us, has ever heard of the 1869 Municipal Franchise Act and the even more prosaic-sounding Local Government Act of 1894? Dull but worthy legislation no doubt, but it enabled my client's great-grandmother Caroline Meredith to vote in municipal elections. I'd found a few gleanings about her and her husband Donald on my visit but had given up finding anything else, when a helpful member of staff flourished a 1908-09 electoral register for West Ham Ward no. 7 and there was Caroline at 31 Stratford Road, presumably entitled to vote in local elections as a property owner and ratepayer.
I must say that seeing her name in this source rather floored me, as when it was suggested that I check it I immediately dismissed the idea with a complacent conviction that turned out to be totally misplaced - a rather chastening experience for me (my reaction brought a wry smile to the face of the archivist). Now I'm not suggesting that voting in local elections in any way counts as 'the vote', but the fact that Caroline did at least have a very minor stake in the system in the early twentieth century is something. And it's also a reminder that with history the devil is always in the detail; no matter what the subject, it's bound to be more complicated than we think - the past always has a habit of springing surprises on us.
Wednesday, 1 July 2015
Tuesday, 19 May 2015
Some real political campaigning
I happened to be in the vicinity of the LSE recently, and having heard about a new exhibition in the Library entitled 'Campaigning: Causes and Connections' I thought I'd take a look. I found a strikingly designed space, well structured and full of thought-provoking items about electoral reform, the suffragettes, CND and gay rights. The centrepiece is the superb wall display, which features a stunning sequence of photographs and text that are blown up to monumental size and set on a slow-moving loop. This wall almost forms an artwork in itself; the photographs of crowd scenes are full of incident and detail, and - as with all great paintings - I'm sure that different people will see and interpret different things. It probably says a lot about me, but I also found the ostensibly mundane items fascinating: typed and handwritten letters, minutes, memos, postcards of staged scenes and what not don't sound up to much, but the typeface, old-fashioned letterheads, scrawled handwriting, even the shoddy quality of the original paper itself somehow exert a strange spell.
As to the historical content, I have to say that I found this to be something of a fillip after the intellectually dispiriting election campaign that we have just endured. (I realise that to some extent the comparison is unfair as the concentrated burst of political activity - I don't think that I can dignify it with the term campaigning - during a modern general election is nothing to do with the sustained commitment and engagement that working for deep societal change requires - Parliament is the last place that you're going to get that!) While walking around I jotted down a few themes, many of which struck me as perennial: the need to take the long view when seeking to achieve change; the inevitable despondency following reverses and defeats, and the difficulty of maintaining the faith; colossal personality clashes among leaders; disagreements, infighting, tactical blunders and - yes, occasionally - triumph: it's all here. And it made me think how much we do owe to these campaigners, their reserves of stamina, patience, courage and fortitude, and how poorly we compare in some respects. We could learn a thing or two from them: it takes more than a tweet to change the world.
As to the historical content, I have to say that I found this to be something of a fillip after the intellectually dispiriting election campaign that we have just endured. (I realise that to some extent the comparison is unfair as the concentrated burst of political activity - I don't think that I can dignify it with the term campaigning - during a modern general election is nothing to do with the sustained commitment and engagement that working for deep societal change requires - Parliament is the last place that you're going to get that!) While walking around I jotted down a few themes, many of which struck me as perennial: the need to take the long view when seeking to achieve change; the inevitable despondency following reverses and defeats, and the difficulty of maintaining the faith; colossal personality clashes among leaders; disagreements, infighting, tactical blunders and - yes, occasionally - triumph: it's all here. And it made me think how much we do owe to these campaigners, their reserves of stamina, patience, courage and fortitude, and how poorly we compare in some respects. We could learn a thing or two from them: it takes more than a tweet to change the world.
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Such, Such Are The Joys ...
More treasures from the India Office collections, this time in the form of two brief references to some character called E. A. Blair. In some ways, Eric Arthur Blair is a fiction that will forever be overshadowed by the nom de plume he created for himself, and so being out of reach he is perhaps of more interest. Not that there was much in the way of substance to what I found in the India Office Lists for 1927 and 1928: one, a terse announcement that Blair had joined the service as a district superintendent in Burma on 29 November 1922, the other an equally short note advising of his 'retirement' on 12 March 1928. Not that there is any great mystery about this period of the man's life - it produced two classic essays, and doubtless the references I looked at have been used by his many biographers. But the thrill of seeing it there in black and white, and knowing something of what lay behind his decision (momentous as it turned out) to 'retire'! This is George Orwell I'm on about - not some Phil Space hack writing to order for the tabloids.
Saturday, 28 February 2015
The Correct Use of Language
Up, and to the British Library to use the records of the India Office. A vast, mysterious and forbidding collection: but then how else could it be given that British control of India produced so complex and Byzantine a structure of government. But I was not looking for government records; I was after finding private letters of a certain individual of some prominence in his day, and to that end I was scouring a particular collection among the IO private papers on a hunch that, as it turned out, was completely wrong. It happens, but in one of those minor pleasures that occurs in research of this kind a mistaken hunch yielded an absolute treasure.
It was once a commonplace to sneer at Babu English, the elaborate, poetic and richly ornate language of the educated Indian. Well the hard-boiled and unimaginative can mock all they like; I have loved Babu English ever since at the Historical Manuscripts Commission I received a letter from Delhi in which I was addressed as 'Most esteemed sir'. And here at the BL, among the papers of Sir Basil Blackett (Mss Eur E397), was a collection of classics; with other things to do, and the meter running, I had time to note down just one, the work of Mr S. V. S. Satyanarayan of Madras, writing to Sir Basil on 3 May 1929:
'Your merits were truly tried tested [sic] in the hot furnaces of London, where no less a man than Lord Birkenhead competed with you and failed to carry the palm of victory.'
And that was one of the more restrained passages! To me it is so unfettered and joyous, as if the writer is revelling in language for the sheer joy of it. It is a fact that we live in an age in which the language of public life has been debased almost beyond salvage by the grim terminology of business, the prevalence of exhausted cliches and an impoverished vocabulary; perhaps we could learn something from Mr Satyanarayan's learning and exuberance.
It was once a commonplace to sneer at Babu English, the elaborate, poetic and richly ornate language of the educated Indian. Well the hard-boiled and unimaginative can mock all they like; I have loved Babu English ever since at the Historical Manuscripts Commission I received a letter from Delhi in which I was addressed as 'Most esteemed sir'. And here at the BL, among the papers of Sir Basil Blackett (Mss Eur E397), was a collection of classics; with other things to do, and the meter running, I had time to note down just one, the work of Mr S. V. S. Satyanarayan of Madras, writing to Sir Basil on 3 May 1929:
'Your merits were truly tried tested [sic] in the hot furnaces of London, where no less a man than Lord Birkenhead competed with you and failed to carry the palm of victory.'
And that was one of the more restrained passages! To me it is so unfettered and joyous, as if the writer is revelling in language for the sheer joy of it. It is a fact that we live in an age in which the language of public life has been debased almost beyond salvage by the grim terminology of business, the prevalence of exhausted cliches and an impoverished vocabulary; perhaps we could learn something from Mr Satyanarayan's learning and exuberance.
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Birds and History
Anyone not sensible to the enriching presence of birds in our everyday lives is denying themselves a simple but profound pleasure, but what about birds and history - or rather birds in history? Is there anything significant beyond their mere presence in the historical record? Anything of genuine importance in historical terms? Well, I'd argue that the domestication of the original wild chicken was a process (not an event) that has had a considerable impact on the course of human history. The use of homing pigeons in the two world wars is surely worthy of more than just passing comment; and does not the founding of the RSPB in the late nineteenth century by women appalled at the use of grebe and egret feathers in the millinery trade tell us something about political campaigning at that time? I dare say if I looked deeper there would be many other such examples, but the two things I have are not in this league; mere curios in fact, but interesting in themselves I think.
First, a simple coincidence: a recent article in Birdwatch magazine examined the arguments for and against including 'ship-assisted' vagrant birds on the official British list. A subject of warm controversy it would seem, although not one about which I myself have strong feelings. But a few weeks after reading this I was given a copy of The Birds of the British Isles by T. A. Coward (London: Frederick Warne & Co Ltd, 1941), and lo, there on pp. 360-61 is mention of a voyage made by the (ultimately doomed/infamous) Lusitania in August 1913 during which two large curlews (possibly Long-billed Curlews says Mr Coward) were seen flying alongside the vessel as she steamed towards the Irish coast. Mr Coward's correspondent suspected that the two birds rested on the ship at night, but couldn't prove it. So a minor point: a soon-to-be world-(in)famous ship probably providing temporary respite for two exhausted and lost souls a long, long way from home.
Secondly, while ploughing through Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well recently I smiled at the mention of 'choughs' language' (Act IV. I. 19); the reference is to the garbled and unintelligible babbling of foolish people, and anyone who has ever heard choughs soaring and chattering to each other will know just how perfect the comparison is. But look at it this way: the metaphor is so apt that Shakespeare must, surely, have actually heard the birds in the wild at some time (either that or he heard captive birds, the comparison was proverbial, or someone else in the company supplied the relevant speech); and to do so, he would have to have travelled to one of the birds' coastal strongholds. Today, these are on the fringes - Cornwall (a happy recent recolonisation of a historically inhabited range), the Welsh coast, the Isle of Man and Ireland - but in the past the Chough may have nested on the Channel cliffs, as close to London as Dover. Shakespeare's life is notoriously undocumented, and so although my suggestion of him seeing and hearing the birds above the Channel cliffs or even further afield will always remain unproven, I like to think of it happening and of a superb dramatic image forming in his mind as he watched. Well that's my take on it anyway: the Chough as a biographical footnote - possibly illuminating a famously obscure life!
First, a simple coincidence: a recent article in Birdwatch magazine examined the arguments for and against including 'ship-assisted' vagrant birds on the official British list. A subject of warm controversy it would seem, although not one about which I myself have strong feelings. But a few weeks after reading this I was given a copy of The Birds of the British Isles by T. A. Coward (London: Frederick Warne & Co Ltd, 1941), and lo, there on pp. 360-61 is mention of a voyage made by the (ultimately doomed/infamous) Lusitania in August 1913 during which two large curlews (possibly Long-billed Curlews says Mr Coward) were seen flying alongside the vessel as she steamed towards the Irish coast. Mr Coward's correspondent suspected that the two birds rested on the ship at night, but couldn't prove it. So a minor point: a soon-to-be world-(in)famous ship probably providing temporary respite for two exhausted and lost souls a long, long way from home.
Secondly, while ploughing through Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well recently I smiled at the mention of 'choughs' language' (Act IV. I. 19); the reference is to the garbled and unintelligible babbling of foolish people, and anyone who has ever heard choughs soaring and chattering to each other will know just how perfect the comparison is. But look at it this way: the metaphor is so apt that Shakespeare must, surely, have actually heard the birds in the wild at some time (either that or he heard captive birds, the comparison was proverbial, or someone else in the company supplied the relevant speech); and to do so, he would have to have travelled to one of the birds' coastal strongholds. Today, these are on the fringes - Cornwall (a happy recent recolonisation of a historically inhabited range), the Welsh coast, the Isle of Man and Ireland - but in the past the Chough may have nested on the Channel cliffs, as close to London as Dover. Shakespeare's life is notoriously undocumented, and so although my suggestion of him seeing and hearing the birds above the Channel cliffs or even further afield will always remain unproven, I like to think of it happening and of a superb dramatic image forming in his mind as he watched. Well that's my take on it anyway: the Chough as a biographical footnote - possibly illuminating a famously obscure life!
Wednesday, 5 November 2014
Thoughts on WW1
I couldn't let the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 go by without something, and it just so happens that I have come across two things in the archives recently that I thought worth recording. Both relate to the war at sea, and although not important in themselves they have now become important to me - historical memory in action I suppose you might say.
The first incident relates to the torpedoing of the British Chantala in April 1916; one particular document I read struck me as interesting for the way it provides some evidence of the incident from the German point of view. The submarine commander (a Claus Rucker, I believe) must have picked up the survivors of the sinking; the account of events given later by the master of the Chantala describes a man nearly broken by the stress and responsibility of command: storming back and forth, spitting, foaming at the mouth, screaming abuse, incoherent at times. One cold and clear-eyed passage from the papers in ADM 137/1196 sums it up:
'In the opinion of the master of the CHANTALA the commander of the submarine is on the verge of a serious nervous or mental breakdown.'
No use feeling anything but enmity towards your enemy in the circumstances, of course, but I can't help thinking what a pitiful scene this was; I wonder if Rucker survived the war and ever recovered?
The second incident also concerns the loss of a British ship in the Mediterranean, but in this case it is something missing from the documents that is important. The torpedoing of any ship must have been an appalling spectacle: the chaos and din, the struggle to maintain order, the rush for the boats, the almost inevitable collapse of discipline as the ship founders and then the physical shock of the cold water. But this particular ship was a horse transport, and the screams of the terrified animals must surely have added to the nightmare quality of it all. No one saw fit to mention the dreadful fate of these creatures in any of the documents (I suppose the people who sent these telegrams, drafted reports and what not had more important things to worry about), but this is what immediately occurred to me; and rightly or wrongly, my own overactive imagination has rushed to fill the gap, in the process magnifying the horror of the sinking.
So no great ideas or theories - the war is too vast and complex a subject to offer anything in that line - just two small and relatively insignificant incidents that, to me at least, convey something of the essential terror of the conflict.
The first incident relates to the torpedoing of the British Chantala in April 1916; one particular document I read struck me as interesting for the way it provides some evidence of the incident from the German point of view. The submarine commander (a Claus Rucker, I believe) must have picked up the survivors of the sinking; the account of events given later by the master of the Chantala describes a man nearly broken by the stress and responsibility of command: storming back and forth, spitting, foaming at the mouth, screaming abuse, incoherent at times. One cold and clear-eyed passage from the papers in ADM 137/1196 sums it up:
'In the opinion of the master of the CHANTALA the commander of the submarine is on the verge of a serious nervous or mental breakdown.'
No use feeling anything but enmity towards your enemy in the circumstances, of course, but I can't help thinking what a pitiful scene this was; I wonder if Rucker survived the war and ever recovered?
The second incident also concerns the loss of a British ship in the Mediterranean, but in this case it is something missing from the documents that is important. The torpedoing of any ship must have been an appalling spectacle: the chaos and din, the struggle to maintain order, the rush for the boats, the almost inevitable collapse of discipline as the ship founders and then the physical shock of the cold water. But this particular ship was a horse transport, and the screams of the terrified animals must surely have added to the nightmare quality of it all. No one saw fit to mention the dreadful fate of these creatures in any of the documents (I suppose the people who sent these telegrams, drafted reports and what not had more important things to worry about), but this is what immediately occurred to me; and rightly or wrongly, my own overactive imagination has rushed to fill the gap, in the process magnifying the horror of the sinking.
So no great ideas or theories - the war is too vast and complex a subject to offer anything in that line - just two small and relatively insignificant incidents that, to me at least, convey something of the essential terror of the conflict.
Friday, 19 September 2014
'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'
Thus - supposedly - Sir Henry Morton Stanley on finding Dr David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10 November 1871, and apocryphal or not it is one of the classics of British understatement.
I may, quite possibly, have recently made a minor Livingstonian discovery of my own: I had been commissioned to visit the Hydrographic Office in Taunton, and my efforts to find relevant letters in the in-coming files not producing as much as I'd hoped I thought I'd try looking for retained copies of correspondence sent out from the Office. Buried within one of the entry books was indeed a rich stash of letters of interest to my client, so that was gratifying, but it was while frantically trying to get copies and notes of all of this material that I happened to notice a letter dated 5 November 1859 addressed to one Dr Livingstone - presumably the Dr Livingstone. No time to dwell on these things of course, as I was more concerned with my client's interests, but I couldn't help skimming the letter: the writer (John Washington, the Chief Hydrographer at the time) congratulates Livingstone on certain of his recent discoveries that had been made public, and goes on to list the technical specifications of a proposed steamer that would be built by the shipbuilders Thompson of Blackwall/Rotherhithe and put at Livingstone's disposal. I've no idea whether the steamer was actually built and used by Livingstone, but it would be interesting to find out and doing so might add a little more to the biographical storehouse.
All of this got me thinking about the complexities and challenges of the biographer's art, not so much the writing - difficult though that surely is - as the inevitable incompleteness of research. I dare say that this particular letter - if indeed it is addressed to the right man - has already come under the notice of his biographers (the original is presumably at SOAS, the National Library of Scotland or one of the other repositories which holds Livingstone's scattered papers), but what if it hasn't? What if it does actually contain information of real biographical value that has never been used? And therein lies the problem: if I were anyone's biographer I'd always have that nagging thought that my efforts were incomplete because I'd missed something absolutely vital; mind you, I can hardly make sense of my own life at times, let alone someone else's so it's not a problem I'm ever likely to face!
I may, quite possibly, have recently made a minor Livingstonian discovery of my own: I had been commissioned to visit the Hydrographic Office in Taunton, and my efforts to find relevant letters in the in-coming files not producing as much as I'd hoped I thought I'd try looking for retained copies of correspondence sent out from the Office. Buried within one of the entry books was indeed a rich stash of letters of interest to my client, so that was gratifying, but it was while frantically trying to get copies and notes of all of this material that I happened to notice a letter dated 5 November 1859 addressed to one Dr Livingstone - presumably the Dr Livingstone. No time to dwell on these things of course, as I was more concerned with my client's interests, but I couldn't help skimming the letter: the writer (John Washington, the Chief Hydrographer at the time) congratulates Livingstone on certain of his recent discoveries that had been made public, and goes on to list the technical specifications of a proposed steamer that would be built by the shipbuilders Thompson of Blackwall/Rotherhithe and put at Livingstone's disposal. I've no idea whether the steamer was actually built and used by Livingstone, but it would be interesting to find out and doing so might add a little more to the biographical storehouse.
All of this got me thinking about the complexities and challenges of the biographer's art, not so much the writing - difficult though that surely is - as the inevitable incompleteness of research. I dare say that this particular letter - if indeed it is addressed to the right man - has already come under the notice of his biographers (the original is presumably at SOAS, the National Library of Scotland or one of the other repositories which holds Livingstone's scattered papers), but what if it hasn't? What if it does actually contain information of real biographical value that has never been used? And therein lies the problem: if I were anyone's biographer I'd always have that nagging thought that my efforts were incomplete because I'd missed something absolutely vital; mind you, I can hardly make sense of my own life at times, let alone someone else's so it's not a problem I'm ever likely to face!
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