It has been thirty years this month since the master forger Konrad Kujau had his fifteen minutes of fame. Kujau managed to fool Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday Times into believing that Hitler had secretly kept a diary. On 25 April 1983, Stern went public with the sensational story that Hitler’s diaries – which Kujau had penned in the late 70s and early 80s – had surfaced and that the history of the century had to be rewritten. By 6 May, it had become clear that two of the most venerable German and British publications had become the laughing stock of their nations. While no-one still believes that Hitler kept a diary, many other untrue facts about Hitler have been surprisingly resilient:

1. Hitler was really called Schicklgruber.

Adolf Hitler as a child

Would Germans have been prepared to greet each other with a hearty ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ every day? Could Hitler have become a dictator if he had used his real name, Schicklgruber, or would this have been just too ridiculous aname for a dictator? These are the kind of questions that continue to be discussed regularly on internet discussion sites. They are, however, historically pointless questions, as Schicklgruber never was Hitler’s name. Hitler’s father had been born out of the wedlock to Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Yet he had changed his name to Hitler, the name of his step-father, who by all likelihood also was his biological father, well before Adolf Hitler was born. While the claim that Adolf Hitler was really called Adolf Schicklgruber is historical nonsense, it is nevertheless telling that people continue to spread the claim. It points to the urge of people to turn Hitler into an object of ridicule.

2. Hitler had a Jewish grandfather.

The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.

If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.

3. Hitler fathered a child in World War I before losing one of his testicles.

Another ‘fact’ which was exposed as untrue by Jean-Paul Mulders, if his DNA testing is to be trusted, is the idea – only revived by a French news magazine last year – that Hitler fathered a child with a French woman during the First World War. Most other evidence also suggests that Hitler was neither heterosexual nor, as some claim, homosexual but asexual. Then again, German authorities seem to have made payments to Hitler’s French family during World War Two which is odd if no relationship of any kind had existed between Hitler and the mother of Hitler’s purported son.

The belief popularized by an English Second World War rhyme that Hitler had only one ‘ball’ was recently claimed to have finally proven to be true as a result of newly available testimony of a German medical orderly who claimed to have treated Hitler after being wounded in his groin. However, nothing in this story really adds up.

4. Hitler survived World War II.

If we are to believe recent news reports, Adolf and Eva Hitler escaped from Berlin in the eleventh hour, as the Russians were closing in. On board a submarine they made their way to Argentina, where they lived happily ever after until Hitler died of old age in the 1960s. The Hitler-escaped-to-Argentina story is only the latest tale in the saga that has tried to explain why, in 1945 and after, no Western investigators managed to locate Hitler’s corpse. Yet eyewitness testimony of several people exists that confirms that Hitler committed suicide and that his body was soaked with petrol before being burned. Furthermore, parts of Hitler’s skull and teeth are almost certainly held in a Russian repository. Even in the absence of eye-witness testimony and forensic evidence, Hitler’s psychological make-up makes it implausible to argue that he would have wanted to continue to live after his downfall at the hand of the allies.

Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler

5. Hitler himself was the most significant creator of untrue Hitler facts.

What Hitler told the world about how he had turned from a postcard painter into a fascist leader was seldom supported by true facts. A pathological and talented liar, Hitler told people whatever they wanted to hear and what was politically opportune. The core of his invented story were the four years that he served in the German Army on the Western Front. It was a story that he told so successfully that it was believed for almost a century after the end of the Great War. Hitler used it when he wanted to tell his core supporters that National Socialism had been born in the trenches of the First World War and that the war had made him. He also used it when he tried to broaden his appeal to a skeptical public in the late 1920s. And he used it in 1938 to court and fool Neville Chamberlain by telling the British prime minister a tall story of how a British soldier had saved his life in 1918. Many other canards of Hitler and untrue facts created by his propagandists persist to the present day. As the young historian Norman Domeier recently put it, “today’s perception of Nazi Germany by the public at large is still dominated by Nazi propaganda.”

Thomas Weber teaches European and international history at the University of Aberdeen and directs the Centre for Global Security and Governance. He is also Fritz Thyssen Fellow at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships or has taught at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (2010).

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image credits: Adolf Hitler, Kinderbild [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F051673-0059 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de [Creative Commons Licence] via Wikimedia Commons

The post Top five untrue facts about Hitler appeared first on OUPblog.

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival 2013 is in full swing, welcoming thinkers and writers from across the globe to our wonderful city of Oxford. We’re delighted to have over thirty Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year! OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Oxford this year, you won’t miss out on all the action. Don’t forget you can also follow @oxfordlitfest and check the event schedule here.

Mike Rapport will be giving a free talk at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday 23 March 2013 at 1.15 p.m. to talk about The Napoleonic Wars. The Very Short Introductions ’soapbox’ talks will be running twice a day during the festival.

By Mike Rapport

Modern wars, someone once wrote, are fought by civilians as well as by armed forces. In fact, it is of course a truism to say that civilians are always affected by warfare in all periods of the past — as the families left behind, by the economic hardship, by the horrors of destruction, plunder, requisitioning, siege warfare, hunger, and worse. The involvement of civilians in modern wars, however, became more intense because, with the advent of ‘total war’, belligerent states began to mobilise the entire population and material resources of the country. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were an early example of the ways in which a modern war could grind millions of people up in its brutal cogs, whether as conscripts in the firing lines of Europe’s mass armies and navies, or as civilians caught in the path of the oncoming battalions and trapped in the crossfire of the fighting itself. At the Oxford Literary Festival on 24 March, I will be speaking about the non-combatants who, in one way or another, found themselves entangled in the wars.

Civilians were of course victims. Four years ago Karen Hagemann published a fine article on the civilian experience of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, the largest battle in European history before 1914. The local people started as horrified onlookers, as maimed, sick French troops retreated into the city to find treatment in makeshift military hospitals But soon the fighting arrived on their streets and doorsteps and they themselves became the victims. First, they suffered economically with the pillaging and requisitioning of tools, furniture, food and livestock. Then they found themselves under fire, huddling in churches and cellars to shelter — sometimes in vain — from the bursting shells, or they fled the carnage, carrying what they could on carts and wheelbarrows and dragging their terrified children along with them.

Yet this was a ‘people’s war’ not only because the conflict may have killed at least one million civilians (and very likely many, many more). It was also a ‘people’s war’ because the civilian population of all the belligerents mobilized behind the war effort. Economies were reoriented into supplying armies and navies, while the recruiting-sergeant and press-gang became all-too-familiar sights across Europe. In revolutionary France in 1793, the ‘mass levy’ of the entire population for the war effort gave men, women and children explicit roles to play in the mobilisation of all the nation’s resources for the sole purpose of fighting the war. Yet civilians also voluntarily engaged in the prosecution of the conflict. In France in the 1790s, communities collected money and valuables and presented them to the government as ‘patriotic donations’. Women played a pivotal role: in Germany, a ‘Women’s Association for the Good of the Fatherland’ raised money and collected valuables for the Prussian war effort against France in 1813: it boasted some 600 branches by 1815. In Britain, women raised subscriptions for the wounded, the widowed and collected materials and clothing for the troops: there were, again, hundreds of such organisations. In Spain, men and women joined bands of guerrillas to fight and plunder the French, although in many cases such actions appear to have been little different from banditry, since Spaniards suffered from these depredations too.

Yet it all shows that people were not simply coerced. They were stirred by propaganda fed to them by governments and by a media trying to convince them that the war was, variously, a struggle for survival, for liberty, for religion, for monarchy, or for the Emperor. The people themselves played a role in shaping the propaganda, in defining what the war was about. With an expansion in literacy in the eighteenth century, such popular support would have been impossible without an interaction between public opinion and governments. In the varieties and intensity of the civilian experience, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are a chilling anticipation of the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century.

Dr Mike Rapport is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Nationality and Citizenship in Revolutionary France: The Treatment of Foreigners 1789-1799 (OUP, 2000), The Shape of the World: Britain, France and the Struggle for Empire (Atlantic, 2006), 1848, Year of Revolution (Little, Brown, 2008), and The Napoleonic Wars: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2013).

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with Very Short Introductions on Facebook, and OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Image Credit: Victory declaration after the battle of Leipzig, 1813 [Public Domain} via Wikimedia Commons

The post In the path of an oncoming army: civilians in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars appeared first on OUPblog.

Guy Halsall, author of Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages, illuminates the reality behind the façade of myths and legends concerning King Arthur. He outlines here ten ways which will challenge what you thought you knew about the legendary King Arthur and the world in which he was supposed to have lived.

1.            Stop looking for ‘King Arthur’.  There is no conclusive evidence that he ever existed and none at all that would allow us to say anything reliable about him if he did. He might have lived … or he might not. That’s all there is to say and, unless some entirely new piece of evidence is discovered (unlikely), that is all there will ever be to say on the topic (and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise). There are far more interesting things to think about in Britain between 400 and 600.  Get over it!

2.            Forget the characters, artefacts, and places of legend.  If there’s hardly any evidence to support Arthur’s existence, there is even less for Guinevere, Lancelot and the other Knights of the Round Table, for Excalibur or Camelot. While the evidence we have suggests that some people (not many) knew of an Arthur figure, legendary or historical, in the first millennium, the other people, places and things of the legends were all invented after 1000.

Glastonbury Tor: Often supposed to be the Isle of Avalon from Arthurian legend (via iStockPhoto)

3.              Abandon the written sources.  Sadly almost no reliable written evidence exists for a political narrative history of Britain between c.410 and c.597. Gildas’ On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain (written c.475-c.550) tells many things about the church, mentalities and some politics of his day, but little in detail – and we don’t know where or when he was writing. The Life of Germanus of Auxerre tells us a little about the bishop’s visit to the island in 429 and (maybe) again in the 440s, but not much. That apart, every datable source for political history is late (from at least 200 years after Arthur’s supposed lifetime around 500!) and written for the political agendas of its own day.

4.            It’s not just about the South — get some context!  What happened in Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall will only make sense if viewed in a broader context, one that not only takes into account the north of Britain but the whole of western Europe in the fifth and sixth century. (See point 5.)

The Pictish fort at Dundurn at the head of Strathearn, © Guy Halsall 2013; all rights reserved.

5.            ‘Arthur’ was not the defender of the Romans.  Whatever happened as the late Roman diocese of Britanniae (The Britains) became a series of kingdoms, English and Welsh, it did not involve the destruction of Roman Britain by barbarian invaders. Roman civilisation in Britain collapsed in the crisis of the Empire around 400, long before any ‘Saxons’ took over. Any ‘proto-Arthur’ was not fighting to defend Roman civilisation; that had long gone. Fifth- and sixth-century change in Britain only makes sense when you take a view that crosses the artificial boundary between ‘Roman archaeology’ and ‘early Anglo-Saxon’ (or sub-Roman, or early historic in other areas).

6.            ‘Arthur’ did not fight against the Saxon invasion.  The details of the written sources have long since been dismissed by serious scholars but the framework they provided remains. That framework sees Arthur and/or the Britons fighting a defensive war against invading ‘Saxons’, gradually pushing them to the west. But that is an image that suited particular moments of eighth- to tenth-century politics and the histories that were written then. Nowhere in the fifth- and sixth-century West did politics play out simply in terms of conquering barbarians fighting defending Roman provincials. Without the dubious written sources (point 2) there is no evidence that Britain was any different.

A defence against the Saxons? Or a fortified depot safeguarding Roman Britain’s crucial links with the rest of the Empire? The mighty walls of the ‘Saxon Shore’ fort at Richborough (Kent), © Guy Halsall 2013, all rights reserved.

7.            Britain wasn’t united — fifth-century factions.  Fifth-century politics everywhere else in western Europe were about faction-fighting. Regional alliances of Roman aristocrats and barbarian soldiers fought other Romano-barbarian factions for control. This pattern looks quite like that of Anglo-Welsh alliances that we can see when we first get reliable political historical evidence in the earlier seventh century. The political map was probably complex and ever-changing. A ‘Proto-Arthur’, therefore, could have been a ‘Briton’ whose troops were ‘Saxons’, or whose kingdom ‘became’ Saxon. People like that existed. If he was it’s not surprising he was left with nowhere to go but legend.

8.            Stop looking for Saxons or Britons.  Archaeological evidence should not be discussed as relating to Saxons or Britons. Such identities were political. They were multi-layered, they could be adopted or abandoned in certain circumstances and they didn’t only — or perhaps even primarily — relate to the places where someone or their family originated. Therefore specific types of finds, buildings or burials are unlikely to tell you the geographical or biological origins of a site’s occupants or users and, if they do, that will not necessarily tell you what their ethnic identity was. In any case, the archaeology maps very badly onto the old idea of a simple east-to-west advance across the landscape by English (Anglo-Saxon) settlement and kingdoms.

9.            There were no ‘knights’.  Any Arthur proto-type didn’t win his wars because of his use of heavy cavalry. There’s no evidence for fifth-/sixth-century ‘Arthurian’ heavy cavalry. Most if not all war-leaders at the time led warriors who had horses, who sometimes fought mounted and sometimes on foot.

10.          Start thinking in terms of a mess.  Forget the neat lines on the map, the orderly ‘front-line’ of traditional views. Think of a kaleidoscope. A mess is maybe less romantic but more interesting and exciting.

Guy Halsall has taught at the universities of London and York, where he has been a professor of history since 2006. He has published widely on a broad range of subjects and his most recent book Worlds of Arthur: Facts and Fictions of the Dark Ages explores King Arthur, the myths, the legends, the history — and what we can ever really know about him.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Ten ways to rethink ‘Arthur’s Britain’ appeared first on OUPblog.

Writing to his friend Dudley Carleton on 17 January 1599, the enthusiastic correspondent John Chamberlain (1553-1628) noted that “Spencer, our principall poet, coming lately out of Ireland, died at Westminster on Satturday last.” Chamberlain’s testimony confirms that Spenser died on 13 January. Chamberlain is a good recorder of court gossip and a barometer of what interested the upper echelons of London society. Edmund Spenser’s death is reported at the end of a letter listing the marriages and deaths of people the two correspondents both knew. We have no idea what led to Spenser’s death. The few accounts we have of his last days, all of which are brief and limited in detail, fail to provide clues of his state of health or mind. The trouble is that different explanations are equally plausible. Spenser’s circumstances might have had an impact on the timing of his death, or he might simply have died of natural causes, being neither especially young nor particularly old to die in an era of relatively primitive medical practice, bad diet, and the absence of comfort when winter weather was extreme. The most striking fact is that he died within three weeks of leaving Ireland, having left in grim circumstances.

By the time of his death Spenser was undoubtedly the most celebrated and important poet writing in English. He had assumed the mantle of Sir Philip Sidney, the most important aristocratic poet before Spenser; William Shakespeare wasn’t really in Spenser’s league as a poet; John Donne and Ben Jonson were yet to emerge as poets of stature. Yet, according to Jonson, talking to William Drummond some years later Spenser “died for lack of bread.” It is unlikely that this is true as Spenser had a generous pension from the queen of £50 per annum, and had carried some letters from the desperate colonists in Ireland to the Privy Council who, surely, had not stood by and let him starve. Perhaps payments were delayed; more likely Jonson’s comments are a reflection on the catastrophic loss that Spenser had suffered when his estate was over-run in Ireland and he was forced to flee. Legend has it that Spenser and his family escaped via a cave beneath his house at Kilcolman, but it is more likely that they had already fled to the safety of Cork city before heading for London. Spenser, it seems, was recognised as an unfortunate writer, one whose talent had taken him from relatively obscure origins to unprecedented heights, only to cheat him at the last.

Cave at Kilcolman. Courtesy of Andrew Hadfield.

But if Spenser was a detested colonist in Ireland and overlooked by the authorities in England, he was celebrated and lauded by his fellow poets in London. He was buried at the end of January in Westminster Abbey. William Camden has provided the best account of what must have been a moving and significant event. Camden, like Jonson, provides evidence in his short sketch of Spenser’s life and death that Spenser was perceived to have been harshly treated in life and that he died in poverty, a belief shared by most who commented on the last months of Spenser’s life in the early seventeenth century. Camden writes:

But by a Fate which still follows Poets, he always wrastled with poverty, though he had been Secretary to the Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland. For scarce had he there settled himself in a retired Privacy, and got Leisure to write, when he was by the Rebels thrown out of his Dwelling, plundered of his Goods, and returned into England a poor man, where he shortly after died, and was interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the Charge of the earl of Essex; his hearse being attended by Poets, and mournfull Elegies and Poems with the Pens that wrote them thrown into his Tomb.

The area where Spenser was thought to be buried was dug up in the inter-war period but there was no trace of the body, poems or pens.

Many of these elegies would have reappeared in print, such as that by the young Cornish poet, Charles Fitzgeoffrey (1593-1636), who had already praised Spenser as the heir of Homer in his long lament for Sir Francis Drake (1596), and who now cast him as the English Virgil in a series of Latin tributes published in 1601. There were poems from more established writers such as Nicholas Breton, whose “An Epitaph Upon Poet Spencer,” with such memorable lines as, “Sing a dirge on Spencers death, / Till your soules be out of breath,” was published as the last poem in the volume, Melancholike Humours (1600). It is also likely that another elegy written for the occasion was the unpublished Latin epigram by William Alabaster (1567-1640), ‘In Edouardum Spencerum, Britannicae poesios facile principem,’ which does sound as if it were designed for the funeral:

Fors qui sepulchre conditur siquis fuit           If who’s buried here,
Quaeris uiator, dignus es qui rescias.               you ask passerby, you deserve to hear.
Spencerus istic conditur, siquis fuit                 Spenser is buried here. If who he is
Rogare pergis, dignus es qui nescias.               you go on to ask, you don’t deserve to know.

The decision to bury Spenser near to Chaucer was a first step towards defining the collection of graves of writers in the south transept, Poets’ Corner. The area was not formally designated as the resting place for the nation’s most celebrated writers until the eighteenth century, but Spenser, generally accepted as the natural heir of Chaucer, was buried next to his most illustrious predecessor, a decision that started a trend. By 1723 the site contained the graves and monuments of a number of illustrious poets: Samuel Butler, Abraham Cowley, Michael Drayton, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell and others. A monument was eventually erected by Lady Anne Clifford. Clifford, who had been taught by Samuel Daniel and was later pictured alongside her books, which included Spenser, was clearly eager to advertise her role as a reader and patron of English poetry. The monument was built by Nicholas Stone (1585/8-1647), who noted in his account book, “I also mad a moument for Mr. Spencer, the pouett and set it up at Westmester for which the contes of Dorsett payed me 40£.” Stone was a distinguished master mason, “the best English sculptor of his generation,” who later designed John Donne’s tomb in St. Paul’s Cathedral, helped build the Banqueting House in Whitehall from Inigo Jones’s designs, as well as Goldsmith’s Hall and a number of other funeral monuments and prominent country houses. The inscription on the now destroyed monument, gave erroneous dates for the poet’s birth and death, although, at least, his Christian name was spelled correctly:

HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND
COMMINGE OF OVR SAVIOUR CHRIST
JESVS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER,
THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME;
WHOSE DIVINE SPIRIT NEEDS NOE
OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS
WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM.
HE BORNE IN LONDON IN
THE YEARE 1510. AND
DIED IN THE YEARE
1596.

Spenser monument, Westminster Abbey. Reproduced with kind permission of Westminster Abbey.

According to the antiquarian John Dart (d.1730), it was not an impressive edifice, a pointed contrast to its replacement. Recommending a tour of the poets’ monuments in the South Transept, Dart notes that:

[T]he first Tomb you come at is a rough one, of coarse Marble and looks by the Moisture and Injury of the Weather, and the Nature of the Stone, much older than it is. This, whose Form is here erected to the Memory of Mr. Edmond Spencer, a Man of great Learning and such luxuriant Fancy, that his Works abound with as great Variety of Images (and curious tho’ small Paintings) as either our own or any Language can afford in any Author.

Dart, citing Camden as an authority, reproduces a Latin epitaph that was supposedly on the original tomb, although it is now no longer visible. Dart translates it as:

Here lies Spenser next to Chaucer, next to
him in talent as next to him in death. O Spenser,
here next to Chaucer the poet, as a poet you are
buried; and in your poetry you are more permanent
than in your grave. While you were alive, English
poetry lived and approved you; now you are dead,
it too must die and fears to.

Chesterfield portrait of Edmund Spenser. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and the author of Edmund Spenser: A Life (OUP, 2012). He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Shakespeare and Republicanism; Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625; Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl; and Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. He was editor of Renaissance Studies (2006-11) and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement. Read his previous blog post “10 facts and conjectures about Edmund Spenser” and “Edmund Spenser: ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet?’”

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post The death of Edmund Spenser appeared first on OUPblog.

It was announced on 10 December as an outcome of the recent Commission into cannabis that the UK Government has decided to reorganise its ‘ganja administration’ with the objective of taxing sales of the drug in order to generate revenues and to control the price in order to discourage excessive consumption. The Government will work with partners from the private sector to ensure that products of a consistent quality are available to consumers. A source at one of the cannabis corporations has stated that they are happy to make a full contribution to the Government’s finances, although critics have argued that they deploy a range of strategies to avoid paying tax.

The Home Affairs Committee’s Ninth Report, with the title Drugs: Breaking the Cycle, generated plenty of controversy early in December when the Prime Minister rejected its recommendation that a Royal Commission on Drugs Policy be established. The controversy may well have been a furore had an announcement along the lines of the above been included in its pages. Yet mention in the Committee’s report of state cannabis monopolies, of the legal consumption of the drug, and of permissive control regimes in faraway countries, invite comparisons to a previous period in British history, as does the Prime Minister’s allusion to a Royal Commission. This was a period when the paragraph above would have raised few eyebrows as British tax collectors skimmed off revenues from some of the world’s largest cannabis consuming societies.

The period, of course, is the 1890s. The Commission in question was the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission which was ordered in the House of Commons in 1893 and which reported in 1894. This Commission was the forerunner of the better known Royal Opium Commission which came to its conclusions in 1895. The enquiry into ‘Indian Hemp’, or cannabis, was focused on the colonial administration in India and its handling of the cannabis trade there. Critics of the opium trade had discovered that the Government of India was also making money from cannabis through a tax on the local market there, and seized on this as further evidence of the corruption of British rule. William Caine, one of the most passionate of these critics declared that cannabis was ‘the most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced’ and started a campaign that forced the inquiry.

What the inquiry revealed was a thriving market for cannabis products in Britain’s colonies in south Asia. These substances had long-been been used for medication and intoxication there, and complex local beliefs about their uses and dangers were well-established before the British arrived. Colonial scientists and doctors proved to be curious about the potential of cannabis, and William O’Shaughnessy, Professor of Chemistry and Medicine in the Medical College of Calcutta, championed its virtues as a wonder-drug in the 1840s. However, the most sustained interest in the substance on the part of the British was from the Excise officials charged with taxing it as by the 1890s revenue from commercial cannabis was in the region of £150000 per annum, or around nine million pounds in today’s money.

Many of these officials worked readily alongside India’s cannabis producers in the trade. One magistrate reported that ‘they are singularly peaceable and law abiding and they are remarkably wealthy and prosperous’ and went on to note that:

The ganja cultivators contributed amongst them Rs. 5000 for the creation of the Higher English School at Naugaon. If a road or a bridge is wanted, instead of waiting for the tardy action of a District Board or committing themselves to the tender mercies of the PWD the cultivators raise a subscription among themselves and the road or bridge is constructed.

Other British officials were more suspicious of these producers however. As early as the 1870s fears were expressed that all manner of strategies were devised by those in the trade to evade the administration’s efforts to tax it. Storing crops away from the eyes of inspectors, claiming that fires had destroyed full storage facilities and clandestine shipments of the drug were all uncovered. Officials regularly swapped stories like the following:

In December, a couple of police constables and a village watchman were, about 9pm, on their way to Bálihar, when they saw two persons crossing the field with something on their heads. On their shouting out, the men dropped their loads and ran off. It was then found that they had dropped 36 ½ kutcha seers of flat hemp. The drug was taken possession of by the constables but the culprits were never traced.

Perhaps because of such episodes the British continued to tighten their grip on commercial cannabis into the twentieth-century and reforms in the wake of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission included price fixing, government-controlled warehousing of all crops, and licensing of both wholesale and retail transactions. The example of cannabis-taxation in India was followed elsewhere, with colonial administrations as far apart as Burma and Trinidad abandoning initial attempts at prohibition. In fact it emerged in 1939 that the Government in India had been supplying cannabis to markets in both Burma and Trinidad in contravention of the international controls on the drug that had been imposed in 1925 at the Geneva Opium Conference.

While the Home Affairs Committee is right to look to current experiments with control regimes for cannabis in Washington, Colorado and Uruguay, perhaps the stories above are reminders that British history too provides plenty of evidence for assessing ‘the overall costs and benefits of cannabis legalisation’. These stories provide glimpses of a world where cannabis transactions provide state revenues rather than act as drains on resources, where suppliers club together to pay for educational facilities rather than hang around school-gates plying their wares, and where doctors work freely with a useful drug. But they also seem to warn of the moral complexities of state-sponsored markets in psycho-active substances, and of the problems that any control system will face when confronted by those keen to maximise their profits from such drugs.

James H. Mills is Professor of Modern History at the University of Strathclyde and Director of the Strathclyde hub of the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare (CSHHH) Glasgow. Among his publications are Cannabis Nation: Control and consumption in Britain, 1928-2008, (Oxford University Press 2012), Cannabis Britannica: Empire, trade and prohibition, 1800-1928, (Oxford University Press 2003) and (edited with Patricia Barton) Drugs and Empires: Essays in modern imperialism and intoxication, 100-1930, (Palgrave 2007). The extracts above are all taken from his books.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only law and politics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Photograph of cannabis indica foliage bygaspr13 via iStockphoto. 

The post Ganja administration appeared first on OUPblog.

The steady flow of new books about Winston Churchill should confirm that the famous wartime prime minister is now the best known and most studied figure in modern British history.

Churchill, a tireless self-promoter in his own time, would undoubtedly have taken a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that the legend he helped to craft would endure well into the twenty-first century. Unlike most politicians, he was deeply concerned with how he would be remembered – and judged – by history. And, although the verdict today is by no means universally positive, there is no doubt that he has achieved a level of fame that few can rival.

Academic historians (like me) spend so much time immersed in the study of the past that we cannot help but see it as a crowded place full of familiar faces. And a figure like Churchill is impossible to ignore: his memory, like the man himself, positively demands our attention. But the full-time historian is generally able to tune Churchill out when necessary: for most of us, he remains just one of the many historical actors we must look at to understand the past.

For the public at large, however, the past is a very different place. Most people approach it as they would a party full of strangers: instinctively scanning the crowd as they enter in hopes of spotting a familiar face. But the more time that passes, the more unfamiliar the past becomes – and the fewer faces we are likely to recognize. Our collective historical memory is subject to a natural sort of attrition process. Most of Britain’s leading politicians, statesmen and warriors of the early twentieth-century, many of them household names in their own time, are now barely remembered at all. Lord Kitchener’s famous recruiting poster from the First World War is still instantly recognizable, but every year there are fewer and fewer people who can put a name to the face of a man who in 1914 was better known – and certainly more widely admired – than Churchill.

• Winston Churchill in 1881

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill1.png

• Winston Churchill in 1904

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill2.png

• Winston Churchill in 1943

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchill3.png

• Winston Churchill in 1944

   

  http://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/churchilll4.png

The process has distinctly Darwinian overtones, as the most famous figures of yesteryear gradually displace their lesser-known rivals – and eventually each other – in the competition for a place in our collective memory of the past. Only a handful of famous twentieth-century Britons can share the historical stage with Churchill and demand anything like equal billing. And even they do not seem to share his seeming immunity to the passage of time. Neville Chamberlain, for example, remains an iconic figure, although for many he is not an important historical actor in his own right so much as a supporting figure in a better-known, and implicitly more important, story: Churchill’s triumphant rise to power in 1940.

Britain has good reason to look back on the Second World War as the “People’s War”, but the fact remains that only one of “the people” could be reliably identified today in a police line-up. And he is recognizable precisely because of his role in this great conflict. Churchill’s near-mythical status was ensured by his leadership in the critical months between the army’s evacuation from Dunkirk and the Royal Air Force’s victory in the Battle of Britain. At a time when Britain’s defeat seemed not only possible but imminent, Churchill rallied and inspired the people as no other contemporary politician could have. In Britain’s national mythology, he almost single-handedly changed the course of the war by sustaining the morale of the British people at the height of the Nazi onslaught, and in so doing ensured Hitler’s ultimate downfall.

Even in 1940, there was already a tendency to regard Churchill as the personification of Britain’s collective war effort and the embodiment of the nation’s heroic defiance of Nazi Germany. Churchill himself once attempted to put his role into perspective when he declared that “It was a nation and a race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” How far Churchill really believed this is debatable. In his speeches and memoirs he consistently downplayed the doubts and fears that pervaded Britain after the fall of France. But he knew better than anyone how close Britain may have come to a negotiated peace with Hitler in 1940 – and how important was his role in preventing this.

As more and more of Churchill’s contemporaries have receded and then disappeared from public memory, the popular association of Churchill with this defining moment in Britain’s history has only grown stronger. He may soon be, if he isn’t already, the last (recognizable) man standing in the history ofBritainduring the first half of the twentieth century.

Churchill believed that history was made by “great men”, and it is hard to imagine him being troubled by this trend. Historians might lament the public’s disproportionate interest in any one particular individual, but this is not to suggest we don’t need any more books about Churchill. The central place he enjoys in our memory of the twentieth century makes it all the more important that the record is as full and accurate as possible. The challenge is to populate that history with real people, and recognize that Churchill was also a supporting character in their stories.

Christopher M. Bell is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The Royal Navy, Seapower and Strategy between the Wars (2000), co-editor of Naval Mutinies of the Twentieth Century: An International Perspective (2003), and author of Churchill and Sea Power (2012).

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

Slideshow image credits: all images by British Government [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (1, 2, 3, 4).

The post The familiar face of Winston Churchill appeared first on OUPblog.

Three words to sum up Alan Turing? Humour. He had an impish, irreverent and infectious sense of humour. Courage. Isolation. He loved to work alone. Reading his scientific papers, it is almost as though the rest of the world — the busy community of human minds working away on the same or related problems — simply did not exist. Turing was determined to do it his way. Three more words? A patriot. Unconventional — he was uncompromisingly unconventional, and he didn’t much care what other people thought about his unusual methods. A genius. Turing’s brilliant mind was sparsely furnished, though. He was a Spartan in all things, inner and outer, and had no time for pleasing décor, soft furnishings, superfluous embellishment, or unnecessary words. To him what mattered was the truth. Everything else was mere froth. He succeeded where a better furnished, wordier, more ornate mind might have failed. Alan Turing changed the world.

What would it have been like to meet him? Turing was tallish (5 feet 10 inches) and broadly built. He looked strong and fit. You might have mistaken his age, as he always seemed younger than he was. He was good looking, but strange. If you came across him at a party you would notice him all right. In fact you might turn round and say “Who on earth is that?” It wasn’t just his shabby clothes or dirty fingernails. It was the whole package. Part of it was the unusual noise he made. This has often been described as a stammer, but it wasn’t. It was his way of preventing people from interrupting him, while he thought out what he was trying to say. Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah. He did it loudly.

If you crossed the room to talk to him, you’d probably find him gauche and rather reserved. He was decidedly lah-di-dah, but the reserve wasn’t standoffishness. He was a man of few words, shy. Polite small talk did not come easily to him. He might if you were lucky smile engagingly, his blue eyes twinkling, and come out with something quirky that would make you laugh. If conversation developed you’d probably find him vivid and funny. He might ask you, in his rather high-pitched voice, whether you think a computer could ever enjoy strawberries and cream, or could make you fall in love with it. Or he might ask if you can say why a face is reversed left to right in a mirror but not top to bottom.

Once you got to know him Turing was fun — cheerful, lively, stimulating, comic, brimming with boyish enthusiasm. His raucous crow-like laugh pealed out boisterously. But he was also a loner. “Turing was always by himself,” said codebreaker Jerry Roberts: “He didn’t seem to talk to people a lot, although with his own circle he was sociable enough.” Like everyone else Turing craved affection and company, but he never seemed to quite fit in anywhere. He was bothered by his own social strangeness — although, like his hair, it was a force of nature he could do little about. Occasionally he could be very rude. If he thought that someone wasn’t listening to him with sufficient attention he would simply walk away. Turing was the sort of man who, usually unintentionally, ruffled people’s feathers — especially pompous people, people in authority, and scientific poseurs. He was moody too. His assistant at the National Physical Laboratory, Jim Wilkinson, recalled with amusement that there were days when it was best just to keep out of Turing’s way. Beneath the cranky, craggy, irreverent exterior there was an unworldly innocence though, as well as sensitivity and modesty.

Turing died at the age of only 41. His ideas lived on, however, and at the turn of the millennium Time magazine listed him among the twentieth century’s 100 greatest minds, alongside the Wright brothers, Albert Einstein, DNA busters Crick and Watson, and the discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming. Turing’s achievements during his short life were legion. Best known as the man who broke some of Germany’s most secret codes during the war of 1939-45, Turing was also the father of the modern computer. Today, all who click, tap or touch to open are familiar with the impact of his ideas. To Turing we owe the brilliant innovation of storing applications, and all the other programs necessary for computers to do our bidding, inside the computer’s memory, ready to be opened when we wish. We take for granted that we use the same slab of hardware to shop, manage our finances, type our memoirs, play our favourite music and videos, and send instant messages across the street or around the world. Like many great ideas this one now seems as obvious as the wheel and the arch, but with this single invention — the stored-program universal computer — Turing changed the way we live. His universal machine caught on like wildfire; today personal computer sales hover around the million a day mark. In less than four decades, Turing’s ideas transported us from an era where ‘computer’ was the term for a human clerk who did the sums in the back office of an insurance company or science lab, into a world where many young people have never known life without the Internet.

B. Jack Copeland is the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, and author of Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain, and Colossus. He is the editor of The Essential Turing. Read the new revelations about Turing’s death after Copeland’s investigation into the inquest.

Visit the Turing hub on the Oxford University Press UK website for the latest news in theCentenary year. Read our previous posts on Alan Turing including: “Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing” by Peter J. Bentley, “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott, “Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy” by Keith M. Martin, and “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens, “Computers as authors and the Turing Test” by Kees van Deemter, and “Alan Turing, Code-Breaker” by Jack Copeland.

For more information about Turing’s codebreaking work, and to view digital facsimiles of declassified wartime ‘Ultra’ documents, visit The Turing Archive for the History of Computing. There is also an extensive photo gallery of Turing and his war at www.the-turing-web-book.com.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post Summing up Alan Turing appeared first on OUPblog.

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,” instructs the old nursery rhyme, and offers a useful summary: “Gunpowder, treason and plot.” But we have never been sure quite what, or how, we should be remembering.

On 5 November 1605 a small gang of Catholics and minor noblemen plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, during the State Opening at which King James I would be present. One of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was caught with the gunpowder before he set it off. The other plotters were soon caught, and all were executed.

By government decree, the date was soon declared a national day of thanksgiving and remembrance, but this was at first an anti-Catholic festival, and effigies of the Pope were burned. In the eighteenth century it became popularly known as Guy Fawkes night, and children collected pennies for an effigy called the “guy”; and then in the twentieth century, this became Fireworks Night. Fireworks are surely a tasteless way to commemorate an explosion that didn’t happen: if we enjoy the fireworks, surely we are also relishing precisely what Fawkes wished for? However, 5 November has always been an uneasy holiday, and a celebration, perhaps, of misdirected sympathy.

Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, written in late 1605 or early 1606, remembers the fifth of November not with fireworks but as a moment of terror. A copy of a manual of equivocation was found in the possession of one of the plotters: it advised English Catholics to “equivocate,” or to speak in ambiguous double statements under interrogation, thus both avoiding the sin of lying and also preserving their safety. The author of the pamphlet, Henry Garnet, was tried and executed for involvement in the plot, and in the second act of Macbeth the porter at the gate of the castle mocks this Catholic martyr. “Who’s there?” he asks, and continues: “here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven.” This is one of the very few decisive contemporary allusions in Shakespeare’s plays.

The subject was controversial. In 1603, King James of Scotland had inherited the throne of England, and two years later his subjects tried to assassinate him; shortly after, Shakespeare chose to write a play about the successful assassination of a Scottish monarch. He had every reason to tread carefully. Since James’ accession to the throne, Shakespeare’s company of players had been granted royal patronage, and performed under the official name of “The King’s Men”. They relied upon the king’s generosity, particularly when the commercial theatres were closed due to outbreaks of the plague and royal performances were a vital source of income. A modern analogy might be helpful here. Imagine, for example, that in the weeks after 11 September 2001, an American theatre company apply for public funds to stage a new play. They want to stage it in the White House, before the president and his invited guests. And the play will present a sympathetic view of a Muslim who hijacks a plane.

In controversy lies good drama; Shakespeare knew this. In courting danger, and in shocking the audience, his plays achieve their magic. They are never only of one side. But Shakespeare had, too, a more personal interest in the heated religious tensions of this specific moment. Immediately after the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, new laws were passed which aimed to expose secret Catholics: church attendance was carefully watched, and on 5 May 1606 twenty-one people at Stratford upon Avon were charged with not having received Communion at church. Among them was Susannah, Shakespeare’s oldest daughter. We cannot know, now, if this suggests that she was Catholic, but we can know that she at this moment of political tension resisted going to church; that she felt, for a moment, on the side of those opposed to the king. This much Shakespeare knew, too, as he wrote a play at whose heart is the ambiguous, sympathetic portrayal of a man who kills a king and who is punished for it. 5 November, for us as for Shakespeare, is a reminder of what it might be to find oneself on the wrong side, or to be torn.

Daniel Swift is Senior Lecturer for English at the New College of the Humanities. His first book Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. His latest work, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Ageis scheduled for publication in the autumn. Read his OUPblog article about 15 August 1040: the day Macbeth killed King Duncan I of Scotland.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

Image credits: The Gunpowder Conspirators, from a print published immediately after the discovery [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons]; Guy Fawkes before King James By Sir John Gilbert [Public domain via Wikimedia Commons].

The post “Remember, remember the fifth of November” appeared first on OUPblog.

To mark the anniversary of a now little-remembered national catastrophe – the nineteenth-century fire which obliterated the UK Houses of Parliament – Oxford University Press and author Caroline Shenton will reconstruct the events of that fateful day and night in a real-time Twitter campaign. Here’s the story so far. Join us tomorrow, 16 October 2012!

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  
Read Caroline Shenton on OUPblog: London’s Burning! Ten Fires that Changed the Face of the World’s Greatest City.

The post The Day Parliament Burned Down in real-time on Twitter appeared first on OUPblog.

What does the extraordinary story of Tutankhamun tells us about the mummy’s curse?

Click here to view the embedded video.

To what extent did the story of Tutankhamun become a media event?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What does the curse of a Victorian gentleman have to do with Arthur Conan-Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roger Luckhurst explains why he explored the mummy’s curse and why we are still so interested in the myths of Tutankhamun.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of ‘telepathy’ emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy  publishes in late 2012. Read his article on Downton Abbey and the Curse of King Tut.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post Tutankhamun and the mummy’s curse appeared first on OUPblog.

Susan Sontag wrote that having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a piece of the True Cross. We don’t have a photograph, of course, and even the portraits that we do have are unreliable, but in his plays he left snapshots of a different kind. Since we know with some precision — thanks to the diligence of many scholars — the sources he relied upon in writing the plays, we are able to trace his creativity by a simple contrast. By paying attention to what he retains from his sources, and what he changes, we may produce — like developing a photograph from its negative — a portrait of Shakespeare at work.

The principal source for the plot of Macbeth is the massive Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, compiled by Raphael Holinshed and first published in 1577. Holinshed narrates how Macbeth was “sore troubled” by King Duncan’s nomination of his son Malcolm as heir to the throne, and “he slue the king at Enuerns, or (as some say) at Botgosuane, in the sixt year of his reigne,” on 15 August 1040. Macbeth is, according to Holinshed, not immediately a tyrant: “governing the realme for the space of ten yeares in equall justice,” he becomes increasingly paranoid and murderous, and eventually “He was slaine in the yeere of the incarnation 1057” by Malcolm, who assumes the throne.

Macbeth and Banquo encountering the witches. Holinshed Chronicles, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This compression of seventeen years into what feels like only weeks isn’t incidental to the play. The central character is obsessed with the rushing passage of time. The witches promise Macbeth that he shall be king, but they also show him a vision of the eight kings that will follow him, all of whom are the heirs of Banquo. “What!” he declares, “will the line stretch out to th’crack of doom?” He is horrified that Banquo’s family will rule until, it seems, the end of time, while his kingship is only temporary. Later, when he hears of the death of his wife, he says:

She should have died hereafter,
There would have been time for such a word.—
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.

He longs for eternity, for the endless deferral of the present, but he is like all of us trapped inside too-short human time.

15 August reveals much about this play and its author. Shakespeare’s is an art of intensification. He condenses years into moments, bitter rivals into lovers, and in particular the tragedies hinge upon the shortness of time. In both Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, messages are delivered only moments too late and cause deaths. “The weight of this sad time we must obey” says Edgar at the end of King Lear, and in Othello — another play whose timespan Shakespeare has drastically reduced from his source — the hero echoes this line: “We must obey the time.”

Battle of Dunsinane by John Martin. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Shakespeare disobeyed the time given by his source. He denies Macbeth the seventeen years for which the historical king ruled. He is, after all, writing tragedy, not faithful history, but August 15 might have taught him how to do this. According to other chronicle accounts of this period — although not Holinshed — the date when Macbeth was killed in 1057 was also 15 August. The day of his accession to the throne was also the day of his death, and the historical original, like his dramatic counterpart, simply ran out of time.

Daniel Swift is Senior Lecturer for English at the New College of the Humanities. His first book Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. His latest work, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age is scheduled for publication in the autumn.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post 15 August 1040: Macbeth kills King Duncan I of Scotland appeared first on OUPblog.

In July 2012, two prisoners lost their application for judicial review of two Prison Service Instructions that implement the Prisoners’ Earnings Act 1996. This Act demands that a deduction of up to 40% from the wages of prisoners in open prisons is imposed. In response to the prisoners’ argument for discretion to be applied to each individual’s circumstances, Mr Justice Sales said that deductions are justified:

“They have been promulgated in order to promote a legitimate public policy objective (that prisoners should make a contribution to support victims of crime) and they are formulated in a way which is proportionate to that objective. There is a strong interest in keeping the rules simple and clear, so as to keep the costs of administering them within reasonable bounds.”

This case — which in effect upholds the policy of the Coalition Government to use opportunities for (more) work in prisons as both rehabilitation and reparation — may seem a far cry from the cover image of the third edition of Sentencing and Punishment: The Quest for Justice. However, we chose this cover, which reproduces a painting of a prison hulk and prisoners at work moving timber in Woolwich in 1777, to highlight the current issue of provision of constructive activities for prisoners. It also reflects upon the problem, critical at the end of the eighteenth century and now, of dealing with overcrowding.

Cover of Sentencing and 'Punishment: The Quest for Justice'

Further, the jacket image has a personal resonance. A Woolwich hulk ‘housed’ a convict named Isaac from 1800 to 1804 and we’ve discovered that he was probably married to one of our great-great-great-great grandmothers. Isaac was sentenced to transportation by Derby Quarter Sessions for ‘obtaining money etc, at the head of a mob’ (Derby Mercury, 1800).

So why were convicts in hulks on the Thames in 1777 and 1800? Prison hulks have a long history in Britain, being used to deal with prison overcrowding. The 1718 Transportation Act enabled courts to order transportation as punishment. However, the outbreak of the war with America in 1776 meant that convicts could no longer be transported to North America. In that year, their punishment was to be hard labour — not rehabilitative work — on a hulk. While a new destination for transportees was considered (eventually Australia), pressure for reform and the building of new prisons intensified, especially after the Gordon Riots in 1780 led to the destruction of several London prisons. The Penitentiary Act was passed in 1779 and a new Transportation Act in 1784 was enacted after the end of the American War.

The first prison ship in England was moored at Woolwich and the ship depicted on the book cover is probably the Justitia. It was followed by a long line of ships including the Censor, the Ganymede and decommissioned naval ships including HMS Warrior and HMS Temeraire. Hulks were also used in Portsmouth and Plymouth. The Act of Parliament in 1776, which authorised their use, intended them as a temporary measure to be adopted for two years, but in fact they remained in use until 1857, and then reappeared 140 years later in 1997. HMP Weare was moored off Portland but closed in 2005.

Private companies ran the original hulks, were paid a fee by the state for their services, and fell under the purview of the justices of the peace. They provide an early illustration of the operation of the penal system as a commercial enterprise. The Justitia was owned and run by Duncan Campbell, a leading penal entrepreneur, also involved in the penal transportation industry, and an uncle-in-law of Captain Bligh. The inmates included young boys as well as elderly inhabitants, and occasionally women were also held on the hulks. Many of the inmates were sentenced for very minor thefts.

Conditions on board the hulks were harsh and squalid. Some prisoners were held for the duration of their sentence or while awaiting transportation, but others didn’t survive their incarceration or the outbreaks of disease on board. However, in some respects they were more humane than subsequent early Victorian prisons. As the picture illustrates, prisoners benefited from working with others, in the open air, in contrast to the psychological deprivation of the silent prisons of the early nineteenth century, or indeed the conditions found in modern supermax prisons in the United States and elsewhere. The Thames was a favoured site for prison labour as it provided work opportunities such as dredging the river and driving in posts to prevent erosion of the riverbank. Prison labour was also used to develop Woolwich Arsenal and to maintain the hulks themselves.

While prisoners suffered the stigmatisation of carrying out their work under the scrutiny of the public, the visibility of the hulk and its inmates highlighted to the public the problems of imprisonment, with the conditions on board attracting criticism and accelerating demands for reform and the resumption of transportation. Critics also highlighted the high running costs of the hulks and the fact that their use appeared to have no noticeable effect on crime rates.

To return to Isaac (the convict sentenced in 1800), he was also sent to a hulk at Woolwich because he could not be shipped straight away to a foreign land. The reason didn’t lie in Australia or North America but, rather, in the lack of available sea-worthy ships in England. The ships were all away blockading ports and fighting Napoleon’s navy. Isaac started his ‘imprisonment’ on Stanislaus and was moved to Retribution in 1803 before he was pardoned in May 1804 to serve in the army. Whether Isaac survived to fight Napoleon — certainly not a soft option — and what happened to him next is as yet unknown.

Susan Easton and Christine Piper are the authors of Sentencing and Punishment: The Quest for Justice. Susan Easton is Reader in Law at Brunel Law School. She has a particular research interest in prisoners’ rights and the experience of imprisonment. Christine Piper is Professor of Law at Brunel Law School. Her current research interests include issues in youth justice and the impact of punishment on families.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only politics and law articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

Image: cover of Sentencing and Punishment: The Quest for Justice: Third Edition, Oxford University Press (2012)

The post Making prisoners work: from hulks to helping victims appeared first on OUPblog.

At the time of the collision, Hanna Touma was standing in the doorway of the family’s cabin. She was talking to one of the other migrants from her village. It was just a jolt, but it made the door slam shut, cutting her index finger. Two of the men went to find out what had happened while Hanna went to the Infirmary to get her hand bandaged. Everyone she passed wondered what had caused the jolt and why the ship had stopped. The people looked worried, but Hanna could not understand what they said. The men returned and said the ship had struck an iceberg. They were told to stay in their cabins, to remain calm, and pray. The time was 11.40pm, the day Sunday, the date 14 April 1912.

It was four days earlier, on the evening of Wednesday 10 April, that the family had joined the ship at Cherbourg. They had been waiting in a hotel in the French port for six days. While the Titanic had been undergoing its sea trials, Hanna and the children had been travelling to Beirut, in the Lebanon, thousands of miles to the East. Hanna Youssef Razi was born in the tiny village of Tibnin on 10 April 1885 and her future husband Darwis Touma in 1870. They had got married in 1899. Hanna had been 14, Darwis 29. The couple had two children: Maria (born in October 1902) and Georges (born in February 1904).

Working in the onion fields, Darwis had saved a little money to pay for a passage to America. His brother Abraham had gone with him. They settled in the small town of Dowagiac, Michigan. Their plan, like that of most migrants, was to earn enough to send for their families to join them. Darwis had little success in this and seven years passed. He couldn’t save as he had been sending Hanna a little money from time to time. Abraham, on the other hand, had saved enough since he had no dependants to support. He sent his sister-in-law enough money for the trip, along with a piece of paper which said ‘Dowagiac, Michigan’. His intention was to surprise his brother.

Hanna treasured this piece of paper. Even though she had no idea where this place was, it was where her husband lived and that was where she was going. Hanna and the children travelled from Tibnin to Beirut by camel caravan. The days were long and exhausting, the nights short, and they did not have enough sleep or rest. The caravan company supplied the tents that they slept in and the food which they ate: yoghurt, cheese, and olives stuffed in pitta bread, spiced with onions and garlic. While this was a typical Arab meal, washed down with homemade wine, Hanna was a Christian. About a dozen other families accompanied the Touma family. Since the villagers brought their own musical instruments with them, the evenings were enjoyable. They had homemade flutes made from hollow pipes, and small hand drums covered with goat skins. Everyone, children and adults, danced in a circle with the men spinning their handkerchiefs high in the air.

When Hanna and the children reached Beirut, they left the camel caravan behind and took a freighter to Marseilles. On the voyage, the food was poor and the cabin cramped. It took five days. The migrants boarded a train in France and on the three-day journey to Cherbourg the children ran through all the carriages to see if there were any other children on the train besides the ones travelling with the villagers. Maria and Georges found that the other children spoke differently and they could not understand them, but they found ways to amuse themselves.

Half an hour after the collision, Hanna took Georges by the hand and headed for the top deck. She instructed Georges to stay put. She had to return for Maria, and the precious piece of paper that stated where her husband lived. She quickly helped Maria into her coat, grabbed her money and the slip of paper, and raced down the passageway that led out of Third Class. They climbed up from deck to deck, stopping only to grab three lifejackets, and they found Georges just where Hanna had left him. He related in tears how some of the people wanted to put him in a lifeboat, but he would not go without his mother.

When the Engelhardt C collapsible boat was lowered, the rowing started at once. The rowers then stopped, and the passengers could see the ship very clearly, badly down by the bow. It was freezing cold and the view was something Hanna would never forget. The enormity of the ship looked unreal, with hundreds of portholes all lit up and slowly being extinguished one by one. The cries of the people in the water soon stopped and it became very quiet. The sky was black with millions of stars all the way into the distance where the sky and waterline became one. It was so black you couldn’t see who else was in the lifeboat. They were all in a state of shock.

Although all the lights seemed to be on, suddenly they all went out and a loud explosion was heard. The tail end of the ship aimed straight up towards the stars. It stayed that way for several minutes. Then another slight noise was heard, it very slowly began to go lower, and then completely disappeared. Hanna covered Georges and Maria with her cloak so that they could not see. She cried for her fellow villagers: Fatima Mousselmani; the farm labourers Mustafa Nasr Alma, Raihed Razi, Amin Saad, Khalil Saad, and Assad Torfa; and Yousif Ahmed Wazli, a farmer.

Hanna and the other survivors were rescued by the Carpathia. Georges Touma was placed in a sack and pulled up on deck. After arriving in New York and having lost everything other than a few documents and mementos, St Vincent’s Hospital helped Hanna and the children. Meanwhile in Dowagiac, Abraham was shocked at the news of the disaster. How was he to tell his brother that his wife and children had been on the Titanic and now were gone? When he told Darwis, the two cried in sadness and rage, both devastated. Five days later, on Saturday 20 April, they received a telegram from a priest who spoke Arabic. He had a message for someone in Dowagiac that his wife and children had been saved. The little piece of paper had enabled Hanna to find her husband.

While the Touma family were reunited, Fatima Mousselmani was the only other survivor of the Tibnin villagers. The stories of the Titanic’s Third Class passengers are some of the most poignant. Unlike the Astors, the Guggenheims, the Thayers, and the Wideners, very little is known about their lives and it is only because of the Titanic that they have gained a place in history.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He is the author or editor of six books on twentieth-century British social history, including Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is also the author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (Oxford University Press, 2012). Read John Welshman’s previous posts: “One Voyage, Two Thousand Stories,” “Fellowes and the Titanic,” “Everyday people aboard the Titanic,” “Images from the Titanic Disaster” and “Tales of the Titanic Disaster,” and “Titanic Street.”

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post Titanic: One Family’s Story appeared first on OUPblog.

Germany’s Army, Air Force, and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during the Second World War. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war, such as weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands — sometimes within an hour or two of its being transmitted. The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained. On at least one occasion an intercepted Enigma message’s English translation was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it.

On the first day of war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian Buckinghamshire mansion that served as the wartime HQ of Britain’s top codebreakers. There Turing was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German military’s typewriter-like cipher machine. Turing pitted machine against machine. The prototype model of his anti-Enigma ‘bombe’, named simply Victory, was installed in the spring of 1940. His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing’s machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month — two messages every minute. Turing personally broke the form of Enigma that was used by the U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys. It was a crucial contribution. Convoys set out from North America loaded with vast cargoes of essential supplies for Britain, but the U-boats’ torpedoes were sinking so many of the ships that Churchill’s analysts said Britain would soon be starving. “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” Churchill said later. Just in time, Turing and his group succeeded in cracking the U-boats’ communications to their controllers in Europe. With the U-boats revealing their positions, the convoys could dodge them in the vast Atlantic waste.

The Bombe. Turing's Bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. Source: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland, USA.

Turing also searched for a way to break into the torrent of messages suddenly emanating from a new, and much more sophisticated, German cipher machine. The British codenamed the new machine Tunny. The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today’s mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front line generals. Turing’s breakthrough in 1942 yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as ‘Turingery,’ and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy — information that changed the course of the war. “Turingery was our one and only weapon against Tunny during 1942-3,” explains ninety-one year old Captain Jerry Roberts, once Section Leader in the main Tunny-breaking unit known as the Testery. “We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak.”

Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers’ Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer. With the installation of the Colossi — there were ten by the end of the war — Bletchley Park became the world’s first electronic computing facility. Turing’s work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany’s codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma. Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a statue of him in London among Britain’s other leading war heroes.

Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park’s massive codebreaking operation (especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma) shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats’ hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe (the D-Day landings) could have been delayed perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food, and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America. Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat. Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out. The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea — or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany — and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops.

In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long. At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing’s contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did. If U-boat Enigma had not been broken and the war had continued for another 2-3 years, a further 14-21 million people might have been killed. Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in 1945 because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing’s contribution.

B. Jack Copeland is the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, and author of The Essential Turing, Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain, Colossus, and Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age. Read the new revelations about Turing’s death after Copeland’s investigation into the inquest.

Visit the Turing hub on the Oxford University Press UK website for the latest news in the Centenary year. Read our previous posts on Alan Turing including: “Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing” by Peter J. Bentley, “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott, “Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy” by Keith M. Martin, and “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens, and “Computers as authors and the Turing Test” by Kees van Deemter.

For more information about Turing’s codebreaking work, and to view digital facsimiles of declassified wartime ‘Ultra’ documents, visit The Turing Archive for the History of Computing. There is also an extensive photo gallery of Turing and his war at www.the-turing-web-book.com.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Alan Turing, Code-Breaker appeared first on OUPblog.

A particular anxiety/curiosity of any author who undertakes a work of biography is whether they have discovered anything new about their subject. I’m not sure that I have any ‘smoking gun’ for Edmund Spenser (1554?-1599) that conclusively proves something that no one knew before, and there is no one single archival discovery that can be trumpeted as a particular triumph. But I think I have rearranged and rethought Spenser’s life and its relationship to his work in some new ways. Here is a list of my top ten favourite Spenser facts and conjectures, some known, some less well known.

1. His first wife, Machabyas Childe, is something of an enigma. She married Edmund Spenser on 27 October 1579 in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster — a grand venue, which later witnessed the weddings of Samuel Pepys, Sir Winston Churchill, and Harold Macmillan. It is now the church of the House of Commons. Despite my best efforts I can find no other woman called Machabyas in early modern England and I have asked the Dutch and Huguenot Churches for help. She died at some point before 11 June 1594, when Edmund married Elizabeth Boyle.




2. Spenser was closely connected to Sir Henry Wallop, the under-treasurer in Ireland, and was involved in land deals with him. He briefly owned Enniscorthy Castle, which the Wallops held until the early twentieth century. Colm Tóibín’s family later lived there.
3. Spenser probably visited Wallop in Farleigh Wallop. John Aubrey interviewed someone who remembered Spenser being in the area, linking him to Alton, where a house proudly bears a plaque claiming that Spenser lived there. But Spenser surely went to Farleigh Wallop.


‘Spenser and Raleigh’, from H. E. Marshall, English Literature for Boys and Girls (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1910). Reproduced with kind permission of Lebrecht Music and Arts.

4. Edmund Spenser was related to the Spencers of Althorp through his second wife, and so is related to Lady Diana Spencer (Diana, Princess of Wales). He may have had a more direct relationship too, but there is no evidence of this (probable) link.
5. Spenser’s writing career is very odd. He burst on to the scene at a relatively late age when he published The Shepheadres Calender in 1579, then published no more poetry until the first edition of The Faerie Queene in 1590, which appeared in a rather unimpressive form, a sign of how far his stock had fallen. However, a torrent of works followed, and by his death he had become the most celebrated poet writing in English. The hiatus is surely no accident as Edmund acquired his estate in 1589/90, just before he started to publish again.
6. Spenser is assumed to have been friendly with Sir Walter Raleigh and they are frequently depicted together. They clearly knew each other, but the evidence is all on Spenser’s side, not Raleigh’s. Raleigh’s widow, Elizabeth Throckmorton, annotated her son’s copy of The Faerie Queene, but seems not to have known much about Spenser and reads his poem in odd, self-serving ways.
7. Spenser is associated with Cork, but he probably spent far more time in Youghal, where his second wife lived. Transport was undertaken more often via waterways than roads, and the navigable rivers — the Blackwater and its tributary, the Awbeg — would have taken Spenser from his estate to Youghal rather than Cork.



8. Legend has it that when his Irish house, Kilcolman, was finally overrun by Hugh O’Neill’s forces in October 1598, Spenser escaped through a cave and that a child of his perished as the house burned. This is unlikely to be true. Unless he was very foolish he had probably already left for the safety of Cork city.
9. William Camden records that many poets threw poems and quills into Spenser’s grave at his funeral. His tomb was searched in the 1930s, but nothing was found.
10. There is no reliable image of Spenser or anyone connected to him. The Spenser portraits we have were discovered in the eighteenth century and are no more than dubious attributions. There is a tomb in Kilcredan Church which once contained the head of Elizabeth Boyle, but it has now been lost.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of works on early modern literature, including Edmund Spenser: A Life; Shakespeare and Republicanism; Literature, Travel and Colonialism in the English Renaissance, 1540-1625; Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruyt and Salvage Soyl; and Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. He was editor of Renaissance Studies (2006-11) and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only literature articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post 10 facts and conjectures about Edmund Spenser appeared first on OUPblog.

The life of Sir Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532-1588) was every bit as opulent and complex as one of the grand dresses in which Elizabeth I was pictured wearing in her pomp, a Gloriana presiding over the vast hive of the Tudor court. Dudley knew that hive inside out: its drones, its honeyed talk and the potentially lethal stings of its intrigues, and most of all its Queen. Perhaps the most ambiguous figure in English royal history, Dudley was more than a friend but less than a full consort to his virgin monarch, a male confidant on intimate terms with the most powerful woman of her age. That his first wife had died in odd circumstances made the warmth and depth of this long friendship with Elizabeth all the more questionable. Given the queasy political climate of 16th century England, however, some things were better left unsaid. The Earl had influence, and didn’t hesitate to use it: more than one of his adversaries or associates ended up on the scaffold, including Mary, Queen of Scots. To prosper at Elizabeth’s court one needed the sweetness of a lawyer and the sharpness of hawk, and Dudley had both. “I stand at the top of the hill,” he wrote in 1576, “where I know the smallest slip semeth a fall.”

Procession portrait of Elizabeth I of England, circa 1600. Attributed to Robert Peake the Elder.

Nor did the demands on him lessen with age. In his last months, Dudley was at the heart of the preparations to repel the Spanish Armada, and arranged the queen’s extraordinary visit to Tilbury docks to mark its defeat. He was Elizabeth’s arch favourite and Master of Horse, a stoic and dainty campaigner who triumphed where others often quailed or stumbled over court intrigue. More benignly, he also used his influence to become a patron of the arts. It was in this capacity that Dudley has some claim to being the founding father — or, more accurately, the midwife — of Oxford University Press.

Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, circa 1560s, by Steven van der Meulen. Source: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Accordingly, in 1584 he was presented with a Latin “Supplication,” a brief to argue Oxford’s case with Elizabeth. Presumably drafted by an academic committee, the document makes interesting reading. For one thing, it’s an early example of Oxford’s renowned ivory tower vagueness. It cites the precedent of “a man living in Oxford fifty years ago, more or less, who used to print books”: an impression is instantly conjured up across the centuries of an august university don trying to recall some jolly tradesman in a rather obscure nook of the city. More seriously, the document also parades the Renaissance ideal of modern scholarship nourished by wisdom from a bygone age. European thought had considered it “self-evident that where there is a settlement of scholars, there should be printers, so that books can be printed … and texts most carefully collated.” A sanctioned press at Oxford would rescue “very important manuscripts foully beset by dust and rubbish” in the university’s libraries, employing English scholars to prepare new editions and so — changing the emphasis of the appeal — “blot out the charge of laziness brought against them by foreigners.” Moreover, the new printing business would provide “pure streams of improved literature” to displace “frivolous trifles,” improving the cultural life of “England, Wales, and the hitherto barbarous realm of Ireland.” Tellingly, these clauses were designed to appeal to Elizabeth’s patriotic sentiment at a time of great national uncertainty, and its framers seemed to take their success as a foregone conclusion. The text closed with a nod to fait accompli: “God prosper it!”

Their confidence was well-founded. Although Dudley obtained no official charter, Elizabeth apparently brushed aside the “Supplication” as a mere formality. Oxford moved into legally recognised printing work within months, whereas Dudley himself became entangled in the Dutch Revolt against Spain. It seems that he contracted a serious illness in the Netherlands, probably malaria. That infection proved fatal. Shortly after the defeat of the Armada, Dudley died at Cornbury in Oxfordshire — by coincidence, the future home of another Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, whose name was also to become associated with the Press. Though neither he nor Elizabeth lived to see it, Oxford’s printing did indeed prosper, and the sense of their own close relationship passed into folk-lore and literature. To take only one example, when T.S. Eliot decided to “do the police in different voices” and capture London as a fractured chorus of disappointment in the cut-up images of in The Waste Land (1922), he had Elizabeth and Dudley haunt the Thames on the royal barge, an apparition which could easily be imagined during the grand flotilla which has just marked the Diamond Jubilee of the present Queen. Their ghosts would no doubt be confused or distressed by much today — yet both Dudley and his Gloriana could hardly fail to be astonished by Oxford University Press. The press they helped to found has not only survived and matured, but now flourishes on an unprecedented scale around the world in this, the second Elizabethan age.

Dr. Martin Maw is the Archivist of Oxford University Press. Visit the Oxford University Press Archive online and visit the museum by appointment.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Sir Robert Dudley, midwife of Oxford University Press appeared first on OUPblog.

You must surely have been tempted on occasion to curse Julian Fellowes, if not for the script of Young Victoria, then for the creation of Downton Abbey, that death star of good old-fashioned aristocratic virtue and due deference. For a little while, all public debate seemed to be sucked through the funnel of Downton discourse, coinciding as it did with the election of all those shiny Eton boys to government in 2010. Fellowes has even had enough self-belief and ambition to become an aristocrat himself. He is now Baron Fellowes of West Stafford and sits on the Tory benches.

But don’t worry, he may already be cursed. It’s not just his obsession with the Titanic –- the sinking creates the opening crisis in Downton Abbey and this year he scripted ITV’s centenary mini-series. It turns out that there is another famous curse, ninety years old this year, which haunts Downton. The stately home that stands in for the Abbey is Highclere Castle, the family seat of the Carnarvons. And it was the fifth Earl of Carnarvon who sponsored the search for the tomb of Tutankhamun, found by Howard Carter in 1922. The Earl was present at the formal opening of the long-lost tomb in the Valley of the Kings in February 1923. Six weeks later he was dead, from pneumonia and blood poisoning, launching a frenzy of rumours and a host of mysterious deaths — allegedly. At Highclere, it was said the Earl’s three-legged dog Susie howled in misery and died at the precise moment of her master’s death. The sixth Earl, the surviving son, recalled all sorts of spooky events in the castle around his doomed father’s Egyptian adventure. There were séances and premonitions by fortune-tellers and Spiritualist mediums.

The Curse of King Tut was a monster bolted together by the tabloid press in the 1920s. It has often been called the first global media sensation, although it surely was not. But because rumours can never be denied, only ever more elaborated upon, the curse has proved remarkably persistent, evolving over the decades, claiming more and more victims. And now, it seems it has reached down to the set of Downton Abbey. The Daily Express and the Daily Mail reported recently that the set had been spooked by a series of uncanny events, associated with the museum display of artefacts from the tomb in the basement of Highclere Castle. The authoritative source for these stories, it transpires, is Shirley MacLaine, who will appear in a cameo role. MacLaine has been rather more famous for her occult and New Age beliefs than her acting in recent years. She reads auras and believes in reincarnation. She is one of many psychic sensitives who claim that they can see menacing presences swirling around Egyptian artefacts claimed from the graves of kings.

Thomas Douglas Murray. Courtesy of the London College of Psychic Science.

All of this is but the latest addition to a century of mummy curse stories associated with English collectors of Egyptian artefacts. In my book, The Mummy’s Curse, due out this autumn, I try to peel back the weird accumulation of stories to find the origin of these stories. The Curse of Tutankhamun flew off the presses in 1923, it turns out, because the way was prepared by two prior stories of Victorian gentlemen who had purchased mummy materials in the grey market of antiquities traders and suffered the consequences. The first, Thomas Douglas Murray, was a socialite well known for his parties with painters, actors, and African adventurers in his London town house in the 1870s. As a young man, he had bought a mummy case in Luxor in the 1860s, only to go hunting shortly afterwards, slip, and shoot his own arm off. He survived bearing this awesome wound of his colonial folly. The Priestess of Amen-Ra, as she was known, did all sorts of devilish things to Londoners until the case was presented to the British Museum in 1889. It resides in the Egyptian Rooms and is still known as the ‘Unlucky Mummy’, although much of the folk history attached to it has been shed along the way.

Walter Ingram. From the family collection of Anne Bricknell.

The second adventurer was the soldier Walter Herbert Ingram, who fought in the Zulu Wars and was a great hero of battles against Islamic rebels in Egypt and Sudan in the 1880s. Ingram bought a mummy case as a souvenir, only to be killed by an elephant on his next visit to Africa, prompting rumours that he had been cursed. Ingram was the youngest son of the founder of the Illustrated London News. His death, understandably, was a news sensation. The record of the lives of these extraordinary gentlemen has rested, largely untouched, in London’s eccentric archives and in family memorabilia, the fable of their curses wrapped around the true details of their lives.

Unravelling these histories tells us a lot about how Victorians and Edwardians used the supernatural to negotiate unease with colonial occupation and the traffic in ancient artefacts to the museums and private collections of the imperial metropolis. They tell us more, I’d like to think, than the clumsy way in which Downton Abbey’s Earl of Grantham and his sniffy butler are always bumping into world historical events.

Roger Luckhurst has written and broadcast widely on popular culture, specialising in science fiction and the Gothic. He is interested in the odd spaces between science and popular supernatural beliefs. He has previously written a history of how the notion of ‘telepathy’ emerged in the late Victorian period, and has published editions of Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula. He is also a regular radio reviewer of terrible science fiction films. He teaches horror and the occasional respectable novel by Henry James at Birkbeck College, University of London. The Mummy’s Curse: The true history of a dark fantasy is due to be published in late 2012.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post Downton Abbey and the Curse of King Tut appeared first on OUPblog.

I’ve always been intrigued by the appeal of cryptography. In its most intuitive form, cryptography is the study of techniques for making a message unreadable to anyone other than the intended recipient. Why is that so intrinsically interesting to so many people?

The answer has at least something to do with our natural human curiosity. We have a fascination for puzzles and mysteries. We love secrets. Cryptography uses secrets to transform messages into puzzles which can then only be solved by anyone else sharing the original secret. To everyone else the puzzle remains a mystery. How wonderful is that?

Cryptography is, however, a deadly serious game. For centuries cryptography has been a tool deployed in times of conflict to protect military communications from being understood by “the enemy”. This is the context in which Alan Turing cut his name as a cryptographer during the Second World War. Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park and is most famous for his contributions to the demystification of the Enigma encryption machines that the Axis powers used to protect their communications. Turing’s contributions to cryptanalysis, the art of defeating cryptographic schemes, were insightful. In particular, he is credited as being one of the main contributors to the design of the bombe, an electromechanical machine used to search for vital Enigma settings.

The efforts of the men and women of Bletchley Park are widely regarded as having played an important role in drawing the war to a close. Bletchley Park is open to the public and a highly recommended day out. You can see a replica bombe and a striking sculpture of Alan Turing, carved from slate by artist Stephen Kettle.

Alan Turing. Sculpture by Stephen Kettle. Bletchley Park. Photo by Jon Callas. Creative Commons License.

There is much more, however, to both cryptography and Alan Turing’s cryptographic legacy.

I don’t think it’s too shallow to claim that Turing was a genius. To me the strongest evidence is the fact that his work has had significant impact across several different fields of science, cryptanalysis being just one. His work on the theory of computation, along with his Bletchley experience, inevitably drew Turing into the post-war development of early computing machines. Turing was a key player in the initial convergence of theory and practice which enabled the modern computer to emerge in the subsequent decades. Turing was there at the very start. Who knows where our computing journey will end?

What we do know is that modern life would be barely imaginable without the networks of computing devices on which we now rely. We talk, we write, we trade, we bank, we play — all on computers. Our world, which once relied on physical presence and boundaries for its security, is now an open digital one. Without the right precautions we can never be sure, for example, who is taking our money online, what amount they really are taking, and who might be listening in. It’s scary, if you think about it for too long.

The good news is that this digital world can be made secure through the use of, guess what? Cryptography! Significantly, the cryptography used today provides much more than the creation of puzzles from secrets that was first alluded to. The requirement to secure computers has necessitated the development of many different types of cryptography that go far beyond the basic encryption of secret messages that Turing so admirably wrestled with in the 1940s. Modern cryptography also provides services which help to detect unauthorised modification of data. Cryptographic mechanisms can be deployed to assure the source of a digital communication. Cryptography can even be used to create digital analogues of handwritten signatures.

Rather than being a technology only encountered by brilliant mathematicians in the most desperate of times, cryptography is now something that, without even realising, we use every day. We rely on cryptography when we chat on our mobile phones, when we withdraw cash, when we make purchases over the Internet, even when we open our car door. During the Second World War, the Allied Powers nearly didn’t prevail because of the use of cryptography. Now none of us can survive without it.

Even at mass entertainment level, there is cryptography. I smile at the popularisation of the unbreakable encryption technique known as the one-time pad. I see people every day wrinkling their brows during attempts to construct complete specifications of one-time pads from partial information in a newspaper. Perhaps you know these better as Sudoku Squares? You see, we really do love puzzles, mysteries, and secrets. The eternal appeal of cryptography is guaranteed.

I would argue that cryptography is important, useful, clever, and fun, which I think is a charmingly rare combination. I am sure that Alan Turing would agree.

Prof. Keith Martin is Director of the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London and author of Everyday Cryptography. An active member of the cryptographic research community, he also has considerable experience in teaching cryptography to non-mathematical students, including industrial courses and young audiences. Since 2004 he has led the introductory cryptography module on Royal Holloway’s pioneering MSc Information Security.

OUPblog is celebrating Alan Turing’s 100th birthday with blog posts from our authors all this week. Read our previous posts on Alan Turing: “Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing” by Peter J. Bentley and “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott. Look for “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens and “Computers as authors and the Turing Test” by Kees van Deemter later this week.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only articles about technology the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy appeared first on OUPblog.

As North America begins to mark the bicentennial of the War of 1812, it is worth taking a brief moment to reflect on those who opposed the war altogether. Reasons for opposing the war were as diverse as justifications for it. Ideology, religious belief, opportunism, apathy, and pragmatism all played roles. Unlike Europeans caught up in the Napoleonic Wars ravaging that continent, the vast majority of free males in North America had — whether by right of law or the by the fact that military service was easy to avoid — choice of whether or not to participate. And, interestingly, most of them chose not to participate.

Like all wars, the War of 1812 is shrouded in myths and legends. One is the myth of American perseverance and bravery celebrated in the US national anthem (based on Francis Scott Key’s poem in the wake of the British naval bombardment of Fort McHenry at Baltimore in 1814). The reality is that the Americans lost most of their battles, and far more often than not they retreated or surrendered after suffering light casualties. At the start of the war, William Hull led a US invasion force into Canada. After meeting moderate resistance, which his force outnumbered, he quickly retreated back to a well-supplied fort at Detroit and then promptly surrendered it, the Michigan Territory, and all American troops and militia in the territory in a matter of days. A furious Thomas Jefferson remarked to President James Madison that “Hull will of course be shot for cowardice and treachery.”

Bombardment of Fort M'Henry. From An illuminated history of North America, from the earliest period to the present time by John Frost, 1856. Source: NYPL.

Another myth is that ordinary Canadians rallied around the British standard to heroically thwart a series of invasions from the US and gave birth to Canadian nationalism in the process. While the invasions were stifled, military historians have long credited this to the poor quality of the US forces and to the superior organization of the small force of British troops defending Canada. While there are numerous recorded actions of Canadian heroism, the truth is that the vast majority of eligible men avoided their legal obligation to serve in the militia. In fact, the Francophone population rioted when the militia was called up in Quebec. The largest turnout of the militia of Upper Canada (now largely Ontario) in the war came following the US capture of what is now Toronto. But they didn’t show up to fight. Instead, they appeared after the brief battle to accept the US Army’s offer of a parole to any militiaman who surrendered. A parole was a legally recognized document by which a combatant was released on his promise not to fight in the war (effectively a pass to sit out the remainder of the war).

The truth is that the War of 1812 was a conflict that few wanted. Not a single member of the Federalist party in Congress voted for a declaration of war. Governors and legislatures of New England states, where the Federalists were strong and anti-war sentiment even stronger, announced statewide days of fasting and prayer in mourning. In a public address sent to Congress in the response to the declaration of war, the Massachusetts House of Representatives declared that: “An offensive war against Great Britain, under the present circumstances of this country, would be in the highest degree, impolitic, unnecessary, and ruinous.” New England clergymen used their pulpits to rail against the war and discourage young men from service, with such ministers as Nathan Beman of Portland describing the army camps as “the head quarters of Satan.”

United States army and navy uniforms in the War of 1812 by Henry Alexander Ogden, 1897. Source NYPL.

Few suffered more than the group that defended Alexander Contee Hanson’s right to publish the flamboyantly anti-war Federal Republican paper in Baltimore in June 1812. A heavily-armed group defended the publishing house against a riotous Baltimore crowd that boasted an artillery piece manned by none other than the editor of the rival Sun newspaper. When the affair ended, one of the defenders was dead and eleven more were physically broken following hours of physical torture. These were hardly anti-American radicals. Among the severely wounded was Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee: Revolutionary War hero, former governor of Virginia, and father to the Confederate army general, Robert E. Lee. The dead man was James Lingan, another Revolutionary War veteran and former senior officer of the Maryland State Militia. George Washington’s adopted son, George Washington Parke Custis, gave the funeral oration.

While the war was less divisive amongst the political elites of the British Empire, a number of politicians spoke out against the war. In open debate in the House of Commons, one member called the war “a great evil,” while another lamented that Britain’s mean-spirited “detestation of liberty” and jealousy of post-revolutionary America’s success drove Britain into an unjust war. In Upper Canada, the provincial assembly initially refused to grant the commanding British general emergency powers for fear, at least according to the general, that resisting an American invasion would only agitate the invaders. Some Canadian legislators actually joined the US forces, and then raised and led Canadian troops on the side of the US.

Most North Americans on either side of the Canadian border were far less vocal in their opposition to the war. They simply refused to participate. Despite adding tens of thousands of troops to its paper army each year, the US never met its pre-war recruitment goal of 30,000 men. Desertion was rife in the British Army, which ran short on supplies throughout the hard Canadian winter, just as it was in the US Army, particularly when the bankrupt US government could no longer afford to pay or feed its soldiers in the last year of the war. Often backed by their governors, state militia regularly refused to cross borders, particularly when it meant fighting the enemy on the other side. A furious Madison tried but failed to place them under federal authority. The militia in Canada was not substantially different. Most men refused calls into service and those who did typically deserted by the autumn harvest. In order to persuade the militia in his command to march on the invading Americans in the summer of 1812, the British commander of Upper Canada had to trick the men into thinking they were simply going on an exercise.

George Cruikshank, “State Physicians Bleeding John Bull to Death!!” In one of innumerable public complaints about high taxes in Britain, this image shows John Bull, the personification of the British people, is being bled, or taxed, to death in order to support the massive military establishment that surrounds him. The British taxpayer proved to be one of the most influential opponents of the war. Fed up with decades of unprecedented levels of taxation, they demanded that Britain’s war machine be dismantled. Fearing a backlash of angry taxpayers if it continued the war, the British government signed a quick status quo antebellum treaty with the US in late 1814 — despite that the fact that Britain had tens of thousands of veteran troops massing in Canada, complete control of the seas, and the US government was bankrupt and unable to pay its dwindling army.

So as guns fire, re-enactors march, and replica ships set sail, remember that what we are recollecting is an important but ultimately just a small slice of the story of the War of 1812. A better representation might be the inhabitants of Nantucket. After public deliberation, a delegation from the island approached the British in the summer of 1814 and signed their own separate peace agreement, whereby the islanders would no longer pay federal taxes or fight in the war and Britain would release any of the island’s men being held prisoner and no longer molest its ships.

Troy Bickham is an Associate Professor of History and a Ray A. Rothrock Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He is the author of The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen Through the British Press, and Savages within the Empire: Representations of American Indians in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only American history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Who opposed the War of 1812? appeared first on OUPblog.

Enoch Powell in his garden, Belgravia, London. Photo by Allan Warren. Creative Commons License.

However Powell, as we might expect, was not one to do things by half. In the late thirties, in letters to his parents, he expressed the hope that the Tory appeasers would be strung up by the right-thinking body of stalwart Englishmen, for whom reverence for monarchy and Empire was (he believed) simply the natural order of things. In 1939, when war was declared, he relished the prospect of donning the King’s uniform and, so he hoped, dying for the King. To the end of his days, he felt robbed that he had survived the slaughter. As a young man the sole virtue he could see in marriage was that it was a social institution which enabled new generations of soldiers to be born, ready to sacrifice themselves for the Empire.

When in 1947, after decades of popular mobilization, the politicians in Westminster awakened to the fact that the British hold on the Indian subcontinent had come to an end. Independence for India was granted; the enormity of this event induced in Powell a political collapse of the first order. For him, the Empire without India was unthinkable and he had much intellectual work to do in order to imagine how England could be an entity with no Empire to rule. Through the fifties he came to conclude that the Empire had merely been a protracted historical diversion and that the reversion to an England without Empire allowed a new affiliation to the tenets of English nationhood to be re-born. Powell the English nationalist was born.

One can see why Powell is often viewed as a singular, idiosyncratic, even narcissistic figure. Few embarked on the journey he did with the same fervour and power of self-conviction. Yet the extremity of his political evolution should not blind us to the fact that many others, in many different registers, made the same journey. Powell was not alone in having to craft his persona, and his politics, to a new post-imperial reality.

But what is most striking about Powell is that, even as he arrived intellectually at the conviction that Britain’s Empire was no more and eventually came to welcome this fact, he still remained committed to the sensibilities of a hard, proconsular social vision. The system of social difference which he carried into the 1960s had clearly been forged in colonial times. On matters of race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, he continued to inhabit the present as if it were still the colonial past. Through the sixties, those social forces which, as he saw things, amounted to an ‘engine for the destruction of authority’ continued to mesmerize him. And for him, supreme in this respect were the forces of blackness, which through a quirk of historical fortune had come to reside in England itself, undoing the nation and unleashing untold grief amongst its white population.

Enoch Powell, 1987. Photo by Allan Warren. Creative Commons License.

For all his narcissistic qualities, Powell was not the singular figure who was the mutant, crazed offspring of the society which nurtured him. In many respects, he came to embody its deepest unspoken fears and fantasies. And this explains, in part, the hold that Powell still exerts on English society long after his death. Powell still acts as a touchstone about race and nation. Just when you think that he has finally dispatched, back he comes. Like a traumatic memory he always returns.

Bill Schwarz is the author of The White Man’s World and a contributor to British Cultural Studies: Geography, Nationality, and Identity. He has taught Sociology, Cultural Studies, History, Communications and English. He draws from this varied intellectual background to tell his lively story of the idea of the white man in the British empire. He has been a member of the History Workshop Journal collective for more than twenty years.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Enoch Powell appeared first on OUPblog.

In my last blog post, I looked at my research into the inter-war archaeologist Tessa Verney Wheeler (1898–1936) and the biography it led to. Today I’d like to present something she might have penned herself. Tessa and Rik Wheeler were both preoccupied with making the British past accessible, interesting, and even familiar on a local level. They used children’s activities, lectures, concerts, contests, newspaper articles, and even fiction on occasion to accomplish that.

This pastiche of an ad for a ‘new housing development’ at Verulamium (St Albans) around 275 AD when the great city gates were built plays on that idea. It reflects the view of Roman Britain the Wheelers wanted to present in the early 1930s: a modern-minded province, whose people (like the Londoners of the interwar period) commuted from outer towns into the greater metropolis. It also takes inspiration from the endless new housing development advertisements common in England today, particularly the new condos built along the old canal networks in modern bedroom communities like Oxford and Brentford.

The illustrations (by Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who also wanted to depict the universality of some human experiences across time) show a nicer lifestyle than the Wheelers really imagined the inhabitants of Verulamium enjoying. The proximity to London is also a bit exaggerated, but that’s what the fine print at the end is for!

Verulam Garden Development Ltd is proud to present its latest offering:
Verulamium, the Garden City!

Londinium — wonderful, vibrant, and wealthy — has never held a better place economically in the Empire. But that growth has come at a price. It’s never been easy maintaining a comfortable household in the metropolis, perfect as it is for trade and business. What’s a paterfamilias to do, if he wants to ensure his family lives in the comfort they require as Romans, while still maintaining his links to Londinium networks?

Now, there’s an easy answer. Verulamium has always been known as a pleasant provincial capital, well-built and attractively founded on the banks of the sparkling Ver.

Today, it’s something more. With the growth of exciting new living developments and the increasing ease of road and river trade, more and more households are settling permanently in Verulamium. Pater travels swiftly to Londinium for work when necessary, keeping an eye on those investments and trading opportunities only the Smoky City can offer. But we’re more concerned with his family. What of Mater, Julius, and little Soror?

At home, Mater rules a house equipped with every modern convenience for master and slave. Modern kitchens — freshly stocked with the latest designs in cooking braziers, under-floor tiled heating that rivals the best in Gaul, and well-proportioned triclinia — are a given. Add a wide choice of fresco and mosaic decoration, and it’s clear that Verulamium can provide the ideal domestic setting for those official dinners and parties that mean so much to a husband’s military or civilian career.

When not entertaining, Mater and Soror may be found enjoying the town’s wonderful bathing and worship facilities, taking in a show at the excellent local theatre, or perhaps browsing the charming shops of local craftsmen. The town’s

enameled jewelry is justly famous and residents enjoy a special discount that will enable every lady to become the envy of her friends. For more practical concerns or a change in service, why not visit the slave market or take in provisions drawn freshly from every corner of the Island at the daily food stalls? You may not see the sea at Verulamium, but you’re still able to dine on the freshest oysters Neptune can provide thanks to the town’s convenient river.

As for young Julius, he’s enjoying the most elite education in the town’s academies, well-built institutions boasting the most erudite Greek masters and the most pleasant playing fields. He’ll be ready to join Pater in a few years on those weekly trips into Londinium, where they’ll camp out uncomfortably in City lodgings and think enviously of Mater and Soror back home. Don’t worry, lads, thanks to the excellent Imperial road system that trip back is nothing to a good chariot! You can almost travel it daily, but who’d want to leave Verulamium more than they have to?

Disclaimers: All depictions of facilities are artists’ renderings and may not resemble final structures as completed in some or any respects. Road condition and commuting time not guaranteed. Residential jewelry discount not guaranteed. Frescos, mosaics, and kitchen equipment provided subject to a further financial payment over and above freehold cost. While the city of Verulamium has been subject to no major tribal attacks in recent memory, and is fully protected by the latest urban military technology, no financial or moral liability is assumed by Verulam Garden Development Ltd in the event of the settlement’s full or partial destruction by rebellion and/or any other aggressors including, but not limited to, Imperial conflict, fire, storm, plague, flood, local gods, harpies, Picts, Northern longships, and/or wrath proceeding from an undetermined or specific divine figure or figures.

Lydia Carr was born in New York City in 1980, and took her D.Phil at Oxford in 2008. She is the author of Tessa Verney Wheeler: Women and Archaeology Before World War Two. She is currently Assistant Editor at the Chicago History Museum and in her spare time, she writes light, bright mystery novels set in the 1920s.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Verulamium, the Garden City! appeared first on OUPblog.

This year of all years, 100 years on from the sinking of the Titanic, we are all familiar with the story of the doomed liner. One of the intriguing aspects of the Titanic story is the way it offers insights into particular locations. A particularly good example is Oxford Street in Southampton, England. Southampton became established as England’s main passenger port following the transfer, from 1907, of the White Star Line’s transatlantic express service from Liverpool. By 1912, the city was home to steamship companies that included the Royal Mail, Union Castle, and American Lines.

View Larger Map

Opposite Oxford Street was the Southampton Terminus, the main railway station built by the London and South Western Railway in 1839. It was here that passengers would alight from the Boat Trains from London’s Waterloo Station. Where Oxford Street meets Terminus Terrace is the London Hotel (built 1907), while on the corner with Bernard Street was Parkers Hotel (now the Antico Restaurant and Bar). American postal clerk Oscar Scott Woody (44) stayed at Parkers Hotel the night before the Titanic sailed. He had lived in Clifton Springs, Virginia and he died in the sinking; his body was one of those recovered. The South Western Hotel (now South Western House), on the corner of Terminus Terrace and Canute Road, was the hotel of choice for many First Class passengers, including J. Bruce Ismay, Chairman of the White Star Line, and Thomas Andrews, the ship’s designer. Checking in for the Titanic took place at the hotel itself, and on the morning of 10 April 1912 another train took passengers from the hotel into the docks and right up to the ship.

We can try to reconstruct Oxford Street in April 1912. Other buildings housed shops and businesses that included:

No 12: Hooper’s Temperance Hotel. The hotel was run by Charles Sharp and his wife Mary. Five Titanic crewmen stayed at the hotel, and only one survived.

No 25: The American Express Co, on the corner of Latimer Street and Oxford Street. Some passengers collected their tickets there before embarkation (now Prezzo).

Nos 26-28: The Alliance Hotel (now the White Star Tavern). Third Class passenger Lewis Braund (29) of Bridgerule, Devon, spent the night there before travelling on the Titanic. He was a farm labourer, and had paid £7 11d for his ticket; he was travelling to the Qu’Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, in Canada. Lewis’s brother Jim had emigrated to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, some years earlier. Lewis Braund was travelling with his brother Owen; his cousins Samuel Dennis, William Dennis, John Henry Perkin, and John Hall Lovell; and his friend Susan Webber (37). Originally from North Tamerton, Cornwall, Susan had paid £13 for her ticket and was heading for Hartford, Connecticut. None of the members of the Braund family survived, but Susan Webber did, being rescued from Lifeboat 12, and living in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, for the rest of her life, until her death in January 1952.

No 29: A bakery owned by James Wildman, a pastry chef and confectioner (now the Olivetree Restaurant).

No 31: A tobacconists owned by Arthur Edwin Bannister and his wife Matilda (now Pizza Express).

Nos 33-34: The Oxford Hotel owned by Walter Percy Brandon (now the Oxford Brasserie).

Nos 35-36: Miller Rayner Ltd, a naval tailors and outfitters who supplied uniforms to the crew and officers of the White Star Line and other shipping lines (now Simons at Oxfords).

Nos 37-39: Roles Temperance Hotel owned by M. Jakobsson (now Kutis Brasserie and Scoozi Restaurant).

No 40: Tobacconist and foreign money changer (now La Esquina).

No 43: The Grapes, a popular Southampton pub, where the stokers Thomas, Bertram, and Alfred Slade, and Frank Holden, were drinking on the morning of 10 April 1912; Second Class passenger Lawrence
Beesley describes how they arrived late at the Titanic’s gangplank and were turned away by the Petty Officer.

No 45: The Sunlight Dye Works and Laundry (now Evolution Ladies Hairdressers).

No 47: Fred Everald Hairdressers (now Boutique De Fleur florists).

No 48: Payne’s Temperance Hotel was owned by Cecil Burrell and his wife.

Nos 51-57: The Sailors Home opened in 1909 to provide accommodation for sailors of the Merchant Navy when in port. Of the Titanic’s crew, 24 spent their last night on land there, while 17 gave the Sailors Home as their address. Lookout Reginald Lee (41) was originally from Bensington or Benson in Oxfordshire. He had served on the Olympic, and on the Titanic earned wages of £5 as a Lookout. He and Lookout Frederick Fleet saw the iceberg on the night of Sunday 14 April 1912. Lee survived and died in the Sailors Home in August 1913 (now home to the Salvation Army).

No 59: Tobacconists owned by Frank Henry George (now Charlie Chans).

Oxford Street, Southampton, is only one example of a ‘Titanic street’. But it reveals the fascinating spotlight that the ship and its story can shed on a particular location. In this case, we can uncover a world of railway stations, hotels, tobacconists, tailors and outfitters, ticket offices, bakeries, and pubs, and we can try to reconstruct the lives of the postal clerks, passengers from First, Second, and Third Class, stokers, and all the others who ate, slept, and drank there in the final hours before the Titanic sailed.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He is the author or editor of six books on twentieth-century British social history, including Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. He is also the author of Titanic: The Last Night of a Small Town (Oxford University Press, 2012). Read John Welshman’s previous posts“One Voyage, Two Thousand Stories,” “Fellowes and the Titanic,” “Everyday people aboard the Titanic,” “Images from the Titanic Disaster” and “Tales of the Titanic Disaster.”

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post Titanic Street appeared first on OUPblog.

We sat down with author John Welshman to discuss the people on this star-crossed voyage.

Titanic Histories with John Welshman

Click here to view the embedded video.

Twelve stories from RMS Titanic

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Titanic and one Third Class family

Click here to view the embedded video.

John Welshman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Lancaster University. He is the author or editor of six books on twentieth-century British social history, including Churchill’s Children: The Evacuee Experience in Wartime Britain. Read John Welshman’s previous posts “One Voyage, Two Thousand Stories,” “Fellowes and the Titanic,” “Everyday people aboard the Titanic,” and “Images from the Titanic Disaster.”

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post Tales of the Titanic disaster appeared first on OUPblog.

We sat down with Greg Woolf, author of Rome: An Empire’s Story, to discuss the enduring appeal of Ancient Rome and the latest breakthroughs in scholarship.

Greg Woolf on Rome

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg Woolf on what sustained the Roman empire

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg Woolf: the latest discoveries about the Roman Empire

Click here to view the embedded video.

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Rome: An Empire’s Story and Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder; editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the

The post What news from Rome? appeared first on OUPblog.

To celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, we’ve selected an extract from our Oxford Paperback Reference title, The Kings and Queens of Britain, for your enjoyment. – Nicola, blog editor.

Elizabeth’s childhood was affectionate and secure, with only a slight possibility at first that she might become queen, since her uncle (the Prince of Wales) might well marry and have children, or her parents might have a son. Neither event happened, and in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated, she became heir presumptive to her father, George VI. She was educated privately, with nurses and governesses playing a prominent part in her life. Her schooling was therefore comfortable, sheltered, and pleasant, if limited; with only a younger sister, there was little sense of competition and no great variety of experience. She learned to ride and grew up with a fondness for dogs.

Things changed at the outbreak of war in 1939. Most of her time was spent at Windsor castle; she was introduced gently into political and constitutional duties, making her first broadcast at fourteen and appointed a Counsellor of State at eighteen. In 1944 she launched a battleship HMS Vanguard. The following year she joined the ATS, was commissioned, and qualified as a driver; as always, palace spokesmen insisted that she would be treated like everyone else, but she was driven to Aldershot for the training, returning to the castle each evening. The first phase in her life ended in 1947 when, at the age of twenty-one, she married Philip, like her father a naval officer, whom she had known and admired for several years. A year later, her son Charles was born.

The Queen’s Coronation: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

She was given little time to develop her own family life before she was called to the throne in 1952 by the early death of her father. The mood and atmosphere of the country was still post-war. Economic recovery was slow, there was still rationing, and decolonization had already started with the independence of India, Pakistan, and Burma. The press wrote fatuously about a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, but there was little evidence for it. After the euphoria of welcoming a young and attractive queen, and the excitement of her coronation, watched by millions clustering round small black-and-white television sets, the mood began to change, and voices were heard in criticism. Though there could be no doubt of the new queen’s devotion to duty, she did not seem to enjoy it much. Lord Altrincham in 1957 complained that she sounded like ‘a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team’, and was promptly threatened with horsewhipping. Thoughtful people were prepared to admit that the royal family seemed remote, while the public was less respectful and more critical than its forebears. Debate began on the extent to which ‘the curtain’ should be raised on royal activities, and modernizers and traditionalists began to draw up battle lines. Meanwhile, the Queen settled down to visiting countries of the empire, only to discover that this involved her in further controversy that she was allowing herself to be the lead in ‘the Commonwealth charade’.

There were few significant political or constitutional issues, though the royal prerogative was involved in the choice of prime ministers in 1956 and again in 1963, and relations within the Commonwealth have often been delicate. Her greatest problems were within the royal family, and were accentuated by the growth of an avid, intrusive, and censorious press. The days of 1936, when a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ of newspaper proprietors could keep their readers in ignorance for months of the king’s infatuation with Mrs Simpson, were replaced by fierce competition for royal scoops or leaks. In 1955, when Princess Margaret was undecided whether to marry a divorcee, Group Captain Townsend, newspapers polled their readers to offer advice. Two years later, rumours that Prince Philip was involved with another woman prompted the palace to issue an official denial of any rift with the queen, which merely fed the monster. Henceforward, piquant stories followed at regular intervals. Lord Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, was sued for divorce in 1967; Princess Margaret announced a separation from her husband Lord Snowdon in 1976; the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, a television spectacular in 1981, was clearly in trouble by the early 1990s; the marriages of Princess Anne and Prince Andrew also ended in divorce. In 1992 the Queen referred openly and ruefully to her ‘annus horribilis’, which had included much criticism of the cost of the royal family, a difficult visit to Australia where republicanism was gaining ground, two royal divorces, details of the breakdown of the Prince of Wales’s marriage, and a disastrous fire at Windsor castle. ‘Not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure’, summarized the Queen.

Royal Family television documentary, 1969: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Palace was uncertain how to respond to a prurient and raucous press. One reply was a documentary film, Royal Family, shown in 1969, and regarded at the time as a daring initiative. An exercise in studied informality, it was well received, but the new press was not long to be satisfied with the revelation that the Duke of Edinburgh could fry sausages. The running was taken up by paparazzi, who pursued the royal family without mercy from behind hedges and hired rooms, aiming particularly at the younger royals, preferably female and preferably lightly clad. Prince Charles’s response was a series of speeches on contemporary issues, especially environmental, but even these were not wholly successful. While they illuminated the issues and the prince’s opinions were often popular, those criticized tended to answer back, and an increasingly sophisticated public wondered what qualifications the prince had for setting up as mentor to the nation.

A very different approach landed the royal family in the unmitigated disaster of It’s a Royal Knock-out!, shown on television in 1987, and including Princess Anne and the new Duchess of York in prominent parts. It was intended to demonstrate that the royal family had the common touch and could be good sports, and was reported to have been put on despite the Queen’s misgivings. The catastrophe was compounded the following day when Prince Edward, who had master-minded it, lost his temper at the press conference and stalked out. Even more extraordinary were the television interviews in which the Prince and Princess of Wales, their marriage in ruins, took the screen in a bizarre competition of candour about infidelity.

From these populist gestures, the Queen held aloof and emerged unscathed. It is unlikely that her way of life will change much in the twenty-first century: the pattern of garden parties at Buckingham palace in the summer, autumn among the heather at Balmoral, and Christmas at Windsor or Sandringham has been established over the years. There are, from time to time, rumours that she may abdicate, but they are invariably followed by strong denials, and Prince Charles seems likely to be one of the oldest monarchs to inherit the throne. Her reign has seen slow but substantial recovery from the Second World War, and her subjects are infinitely more prosperous than those she ruled over in 1952. The importance of the Commonwealth has receded, the issue of devolution has come to the surface, and Britain’s attitude towards the European Community remains deeply divisive.

The successful introduction into public life of her two grandsons has made the future of the dynasty more secure and the Queen has taken steps to share more of her official duties with them and the Prince of Wales. The later years of the Queen’s reign have been easier and the royal family has been reinforced by the grace and dignity of two newcomers, the Duchess of Cornwall, and the Duchess of Cambridge. Despite serious financial and political difficulties, the monarchy at the time of this jubilee looks more confident and assured than seemed likely 20 years ago. In 2002 Elizabeth’s fifty years on the throne was celebrated with widespread respect and affection and now having reached her diamond jubilee she is the oldest monarch. Should she still be on the throne in 2015 she will surpass the 63 years of her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

This is an amended extract from The Kings and Queens of Britain, an Oxford Paperback Reference title, by John Cannon and Anne Hargreaves.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only British history articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
View more about this book on the  

The post From childhood to the Diamond Jubilee: the life of Queen Elizabeth II appeared first on OUPblog.