From Mutiny to Music Hall

At its worst, genealogy can amount to little more than an arid exercise in collecting disconnected bits of information: the result of this drudgery is invariably an endless list of names and dates with nothing in the way of context, no colour or detail - essentially meaningless to anyone apart from the compiler. But at its best, genealogy really can illuminate and humanise important historical events and offer a rich and emotionally satisfying connection with the past to those doing the research. 

Which brings me to From Mutiny to Music Hall, a privately published illustrated family history which I had the pleasure to research and write for a client. When commissioned to do genealogical work it's not often that I get asked to settle more than the odd minor point of obscurity in a client's family history, so the chance to research and write a full-blown account of one particular branch of a family tree was too good to miss. And what was even better was that the facts as known at the outset offered so much potential - poverty in mid 19th-century London, soldiering in India during the 1857 Mutiny (with apparently some adultery on the side), Victorian music hall clowning, second-hand furniture dealing in the East End... if I couldn't make something readable out of that lot, I may as well have called it a day.

So great raw material to work with, but the research journey has not been straightforward. Far from it in fact: it not only involved the time and effort required to find widely scattered documents (worth pointing out that most were not available online) detailing something of the family’s history in the first place; it was also necessary to repeatedly analyse the surviving records in forensic detail to try and settle a conundrum caused by an old adversary – inconsistent evidence. In this case, the whole thing hinged on a small point that many genealogists will have come across: who is this person whose name appears on these bits of paper? She may be someone – so to speak – but then again, according to the records she might be someone else. Are we doomed to chase these fleeting shadows through the records, or is it possible to sort this out? And does it really matter? Well, trivial this sort of thing may certainly be, but it was fun to try and come up with a convincing explanation, and it does actually ask some profound questions about the fallibilities of the research process and the art of the historian when it comes to reconstructing a plausible version of the past (at any level) based on very imperfect sources. In the case of From Mutiny to Music Hall I did reach a conclusion about the mysterious person, but only after hours spent sketching possible scenarios and tortuous explanations, discussing them, changing my mind and then going through the whole process again. A tentative conclusion I admit, but I managed to convince my client, and I can happily see it in print without blushing.    

School for Scandal

Here's a question for literary scholars rather than historians, although they can chip in if they wish: what can there be in Sheridan's School for Scandal that could so have exercised the British ambassador to Italy in 1939? I don't know the work and don't have time to read it, but I would have thought it to be a finely wrought comedy of manners, very much of its time. And yet we find it proscribed from a list of plays to be performed by the Old Vic Company (and directed by John Gielgud no less) during their tour of Italy in November 1939.

So far, so obscure; how do I know this fact? Because of our old friend and constant companion in the archives, serendipity: it appears in a minute of a meeting held in Rome at the British Institute on 29 November (ref. TNA BW 40/7 for anyone interested). Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet got the nod, but SfS was on no account to be performed. Quite what this says about the play or British perceptions of Italian sensibilities I'm not sure, but wartime does strange things to people. Maybe the ambassador Sir Percy Loraine just didn't think much of Sheridan.

By the by, it seems extraordinary that with WW2 three months underway a British theatre company should have been anywhere near the Continent, but the Italians were still warming up on the touchline of course, and war or no war, life goes on.

The Good Old Days?

I think that it was the late Gore Vidal who advised a one-word response if faced with anyone nostalgically harping on about the good old days: 'dentistry'.

I write with some feeling on the subject: having suffered with terrible teeth for as long as I can remember I have frequently had good reason to offer heartfelt thanks for the advances made in medical science. But our good fortune to live in a time of effective anaesthetics was never made clearer to me than after stumbling across a truly fearful advertisement in the 10 May 1834 edition of the Royal Gazette of British Guiana (a riveting read: I'll explain some other time). Headed simply 'The Teeth', the piece acquainted the public with the news that surgeon-dentist Mr C. F. Koth had arranged for the importation to the colony of a large consignment of natural and artificial teeth, together with a newly invented cement for filling cavities. These conveniences had duly arrived and their benefits could be enjoyed by patients courtesy of  Mr Koth's 'Easy Chair' (a contrivance 'of the most approved construction' apparently), and 'an immense number of Instruments for rendering his operations as little painful ... as possible'. Mr Koth also helpfully provided a price-list for scaling, 'plugging' and extracting, and generously offered gratis treatment to those in indigent circumstances (what ever did happen to dentistry on the NHS by the way? I seem to pay a fortune these days).

I really did shudder whilst reading this bland and complacent account with its implied terrors. It is all too easy when one dwells on the numerous minor miseries and indignities that modern life inflicts on us - let alone contemplating the unending nightmare of current geo-politics - to conclude that things really were better before, but think of Mr Koth and his hapless patients and remember this - at least we have the means to make a simple visit to the dentist a tolerable experience.

The 21st Century Historical Researcher

In between completing recent research commissions for scholars working on Turkish POWs interned in India and Burma in WW1, Iraqi coinage (issued by the Royal Mint - hence the records at TNA) and Greek refugees in the post-WW2 period, I'm currently chipping away at my PhD, trying to render it fit for publication (and not before time given that I finished the thing 20 years ago). The working title of this eagerly awaited masterpiece is 'Venal Hirelings and Despicable Incendiaries: British West Indian Newspapers During the Struggle for Abolition', and what strikes me on revisiting the original text is how different it could have been had I been doing the research now. So many new and potentially rich fields of historical enquiry have been opened up by the Internet that it's difficult to pick any one that would illustrate just how different the experience of the 21st century researcher is to his/her counterpart of a mere 20 years ago. Take the records of Parliament, for example; struggling as I was to get to grips with the Colonial Office stuff at TNA, I never did get around to even approaching this apparently impenetrable mass of material - why! even referencing the report of a nineteenth-century select committee seemed to be an arcane mystery. Thus these invaluable records remained untouched, at least as far as my work was concerned. And what an omission: a few careful searches of the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers website has produced an undreamt of bounty, all of which can be read, sifted and analysed at home and at leisure.

But it's not that simple, and even though the technocratic mystics out there may not like it there are some things that the Internet can never change: individually and collectively, the documents themselves are still what they always were, and I remain staggered at just how complex and multifarious the records of Parliament and government can be (the two are not the same thing, of course). Even finding a simple verbatim account of what was said in the Commons or Lords on a certain occasion can pose problems: 20 years ago as a callow researcher I would have thought that we would be on safe ground with Hansard, but not so - or at least not for the 1830s. In fact, I have found Hansard to be remarkably inaccurate and have had to resort to other sources in the quest to find what I was looking for: the little-known Mirror of Parliament (on which Dickens - a famously accurate notetaker - worked) or the parliamentary reports that appeared in the press, for instance. However, press reports differ slightly from MoP which differs from Hansard - so which should I use? It goes on and on: access to records has improved to an extent that previous generations would have thought impossible, but certain ineluctable research problems remain for the historian to wrestle with.     

The Stories of the Titanic

By my reckoning there can be no single event in recent history which exercises such a hold over the collective imagination as the sinking of RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. Except that it wasn't a single event, of course, but a series of innumerable events as individually experienced by the 2200 people on board. Among the 1500 people lost were the following: Leslie Williams and Dai Bowen. Now there is nothing unusual about this information; both appear on the passenger manifest, and Bowen even has a short entry on Wikipedia (with the obligatory 'what if' element to the story). But what may be unusual is the reason for this blog post: I recently found two photographs of these men while searching issues of Health & Fitness magazine (a truly memorable publication, incidentally, in its own right) for a client working on a very particular aspect of the history of physical fitness. It is well known that Williams and Bowen were both talented boxers travelling to the US to take part in a series of fights, but these photographs may, just possibly, be unknown to those who are interested in the ship, her passengers and their stories. So here they are, Leslie and Dai, two friends who perished in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic - a night to remember, indeed.

Expect the Unexpected

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. 

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.