The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple

According to William Dalrymple, all the problems of the world are due to Evangelical Christians and Islamic fundamentalists. And no, he wasn’t talking about today – he was talking about the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58.  Let’s say that this isn’t the most balanced and unbiased view of events that I’ve ever read!  He makes some good points, though, and a lot of the writing is quite gripping – not always easy to achieve when writing about military events.  And he’s used some previously unpublished information which he came across whilst doing his research.

Dalrymple is also the author of White Mughals, about a relationship (a true story) between a British man and an Indian noblewoman, and he clearly feels very strongly about the changes in British attitudes towards Indian people as the 19^th century went on, and links that closely to changes in religious culture.  This was something I also mentioned when I was waffling about the Who Do You Think You Are? Episode about Olivia Colman’s mixed race ancestor – welcomed into the family and British society, in the early 19^th century, in a way which she sadly wouldn’t have been a few decades later.   There was definitely a change in attitudes, and it certainly wasn’t for the better.

The book’s actually supposed to be about Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor – as the title suggests. Also an Urdu poet and a Sufi mystic.  You associate the Mughal Empire with the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and tend almost to forget that there was still a Mughal Emperor, even if his rule was confined just to parts of Delhi, until the Mutiny.  Popular amongst both Hindus and Muslims, he was, at the age of 81, proclaimed Emperor of Hindustan by the mutineers … and he dithered whilst 52 Westerners were murdered at his palace, and then pretty much took the blame.  A British major then executed two of his sons and one of his grandsons.  Many other male members of his family were also executed by the British – it reads a bit like the Bolsheviks wiping out the Romanovs – and, according to Dalrymple, many of the women ended up working as prostitutes.  Zafar was exiled to Burma.  And Delhi was wrecked.

It was not the British Empire’s finest hour – although an amnesty was proclaimed for all mutineers not actually involved in murder.  It should also be noted that the press didn’t help, by exaggerating what had gone on, particularly with false claims about mutineers sexually assaulting British women.  The press in the second half of the 19^th century seem to have been very good at whipping up hysteria: they did the same in the 1870s, during the Russo-Turkish War.

And, as we all know, the rule of the East India Company was then replaced by the British Raj – although it should be pointed out that large areas of India remained under the control of local rulers, and also that a royal proclamation was issued, promising Indians under British rule the rights of British subjects.

The Mutiny’s covered in two of my all-time favourite books, God is an Englishman (retrospectively) by R F Delderfield and A Dark and Distant Shore by Reay Tannahill.   Both make it clear that there was horrific violence on both sides – and that’s where I think Dalrymple could do with seeing both sides a little more clearly.  He does follow the experiences of a number of British people, men and women, in Delhi during the Mutiny, and he does make it clear that some of them were murdered, but he doesn’t seem to express the same horror about that as he does about the atrocities committed by the British forces.  Two wrongs, especially two such horrific wrongs, do not in any way make a right; but it is important to recognise that there was wrong on both sides.  His view doesn’t seem particularly balanced, and a lot of that seems due to his conviction that relations between the British and the Indians went wrong because of Evangelical Christianity.

He does also deal with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, so maybe he has it in for religious extremism in general. It’s hard to argue with anyone on that score!   But his argument seems to be everything that was going wrong revolved around cultural changes in British attitudes towards India, associated with the rise of Evangelical Christianity, whereas there were all sorts of different reasons for the Mutiny.  And, yes, I know that not everyone uses the term “Mutiny”, but it’s the one I’m used to.

Going back to God is an Englishman and A Dark and Distant Shore, neither of them – and obviously they’re novels, not academic books – focus on Delhi.  Books by British authors do usually focus on Cawnpore (Kanpur) and Lucknow and the sufferings of British civilians there, but this one does very much focus on Delhi, and the Indian viewpoint.  I’m saying “Indian”, but obviously we’re talking about a subcontinent of three major religions and many different ethnic groups, and that needs to be borne in mind.

The cause I first remember reading about was the use of beef and pork fat on cartridges used to grease guns. Soldiers had to bite the cartridges open.  What a stupid, insensitive thing to do – upsetting both Hindus and Muslims, and it could so easily have been avoided by using goat or mutton fat.  But that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.  There was so much else going on.  Interference in religion and culture, yes.  Fears that attempts would be made to make mass conversions to Christianity, yes.  Economic policy – free trade is a wonderful thing, but not when it interferes with local traditional ways of doing things.  The Doctrine of Lapse, by which the British authorities helped themselves to princely states with no direct heir, refusing to recognise the traditional practice of adopting an heir in such circumstances.  And it wasn’t called the Mutiny for nothing – there was widespread discontent in the Army, over pay, lack of opportunities for promotion, and, as British holdings in India expanded, men being sent further and further afield.

So it was hardly all about religious/cultural ideas.  And it’s pushing it to suggest, as Dalrymple does, that Evangelical Christians were making all the decisions about British policy in India, and I also think it’s pushing it to say that Evangelical Christians were to blame for all the negative aspects of imperialism … even if it does make a change from the often-made suggestion that British attitudes towards Indians changed for the worse when more British women began going to India, which is very objectionable!  A lot of the trouble in China was caused by Catholic missionaries, rather than Evangelicals, incidentally.  And the people who did look at expansion and imperialism as some sort of religious thing were part of a wider culture of Western-centrism, which was about race and industrialisation as much as it was about religion.  It’s the whole “White Man’s Burden” thing.  And the American term “Manifest Destiny” goes right back to just before the Mexican War.  It’s horrible, and it’s frightening, but it went way beyond religious activism.

These people did actually mean well, I suppose. And, as much as it’s easy to criticise their ideas of cultural superiority, you can see why they thought that, for example, trying to end the practice of widows committing suicide was a good thing.   This still goes on today.  Should people be criticised for trying to end Female Genital Mutilation, which is a traditional practice in some areas? And David Cameron was accused of cultural imperialism when he quite rightly criticised the very poor record of some Commonwealth countries on LGBT rights – ironically, a subject on which Evangelical Christians would probably oppose change in the countries concerned.   All cultures can learn from other cultures. Look how many English words have come from Urdu and Hindi. We use some of them every day. Shampoo. Pyjamas. But that has to come in the right way, and that wasn’t what was happening in 19th century India.

I can’t abide preachy people who think they have the right to tell other people what to do, and who think that they’re morally and culturally superior to others. Thinking about missionaries in India always makes me think about St John Rivers, Jane Eyre’s cousin, one of the most annoying characters in classic literature – and that says a lot!  And some of the stuff coming out of the US at the moment is genuinely frightening.  But I do think Dalrymple’s a bit hard on them.  It’s worth remembering that Evangelicals played an important role in Abolitionism … although don’t get me started on the subject of William Wilberforce opposing holding of an inquiry into the Peterloo Massacre.  And the negative side of colonialism and imperialism was scarcely all their fault.  There were a lot of other factors at play.  Power politics.  The Mutiny broke out the year after the end of the Crimean War: the two things weren’t linked, but there was always “the Great Game” to be thought about.  Money – let’s never forget money!    Well, trade.  If only everyone had stuck to thinking about trade!

We do all need to try harder to see different sides of everything.  That’s becoming more and more of a rarity: increasingly, people will shout down anyone whose views differ from theirs, and hurl insults at them.  I recently read an obituary of Senator John McCain which referred to the respect that he and Barack Obama showed for each other.  Fewer and fewer politicians show that respect towards opponents now, and it’s the same with the press, and, in many cases, with people in general.

Back to the Mutiny. Was it Niall Ferguson who said that Britain somehow ended up with “the wrong empire”?  We were supposed to be after trade, not colonies and certainly not all this “white man’s burden” stuff.  There’d been criticism in Britain for years of Spanish behaviour in Latin America, all the “Black Legend” stuff.  Was the Mutiny the point at which it changed?

There’s a lot to think about, in this book, beyond the actual events of 1857-58. Poor old Zafar himself.  The final end of the Mughal period – that great Empire, the Empire of the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort and, for so many years, religious harmony.  What happens to emperors after their empires have gone?  Zafar only lived a few years afterwards, and the senior Romanovs were wiped out, but spare a thought for the various Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns and others still dotted around the world.  And, finally, back to the question of Evangelical Christians and Islamic fundamentalists – and add the religious right-wing elements of Judaism, Hinduism and other religions into that as well.   One of the few good things that Oliver Cromwell did for this country was to show people that religious extremism is best kept out of politics.  It usually is, here.  It’s a great shame that that isn’t the case everywhere.

Nobody can agree on the Indian Mutiny.  Mutiny?  War of independence?  Either way, you can’t argue that it wasn’t a big deal.  However, that’s usually seen in terms of the change from the rule of the East India Company to the rule of the British Crown – and, yes, that was the main effect, but the fact that it did finally end the Mughal Empire, even if the “Mughal Empire” was by then only one part of one city, deserves recognition too, and that’s what this book was about.  Even if it did go on rather too much about religious attitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lists – ten historical places in time I’d like to visit

This was a blog challenge idea, and it sounded so easy … but it wasn’t. I was originally going to try to tie it into particular books, but I didn’t get very far with that.  Would I really want to be caught up in the Siege of Atlanta, with or without Rhett Butler to help me escape?  Or in Russia in 1812, with everything being burned to stop the Grande Armee in its tracks?   Or negotiating the politics of the Tudor courts?   One of the balls in Jane Austen books would be a lot more peaceful, but I would very definitely be classed as “not handsome enough to tempt me“. Back to the drawing board.   Try just general places, without specific books.  And the first one has to be Victorian Manchester.  I’m so predictable, aren’t I?

1 – Victorian Manchester. Yes, I know all about the condition of the working-classes: I have read Engels’ book several times.  But this was a time of confidence, and belief, and hope.  This was a time when people believed they could change the world.  Peterloo (OK, that’s Georgian, not Victorian) – it was a tragedy, but it began with the genuine belief that people could win their rights.  The Chartists carried that on, and so did the Suffragettes.  The Anti Corn Law League, the whole campaign for free trade – we even named the Free Trade Hall after it!   The glorious buildings – to have the confidence to do that, even after the Cotton Famine.  The ideas of self-improvement and self-help, and the growth of the trade union movement.  That’s what the world’s missing now – the confidence that we can change things for the better, and getting out there and fighting for it.

And 9 more, in no particular order.

2 – Elizabethan England, again for that feeling of hope and confidence, moving on from the internal turmoil of the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation. Well, until it all went pear-shaped in Charles I’s time, but no-one would have seen that coming back in the Gloriana days.  The flourishing of culture, as well.  I can’t be doing with Shakespeare, but he does symbolise the English Renaissance.  Yes, I know that the Elizabethan Age gets rather mythologised, but you can’t have myths unless you’ve got something to start with.

3 – Venice in the 18^th century. I was going to say the Renaissance, but I’m not an arty person, for one thing, and Renaissance Italy involved too much fighting and political chaos and religious intolerance.  Venice in the 18^th century, all that grandeur and glamour and elegance, would be a much better bet.  I’ve even got Carnevale masks: I wore them when I went to the Venice Carnival for my, ahem, “significant” birthday in 2015.

4 – Vienna in the late 19^th century.  Music and waltzing, literature and philosophy.  I quite fancy the idea of sitting in a Viennese coffee house, exchanging ideas with great minds … who would probably think I was talking a load of utter rubbish and be totally unimpressed with my support for Slavic nationalists. But still.

5 – The Caliphate of Cordoba. OK, this is another one that’s probably been mythologised into a lot more of a Golden Age than it actually was, but there is certainly something in the idea of La Convivencia, the flourishing of Christian and Jewish and Islamic culture together.  We’ve come so far from that, and sometimes it seems as if we’re getting further away from it rather than getting closer towards it again.

6 – I’ve got to have Russia in here somewhere!   I want to be a romantic Slavophile.  I want to walk around wearing a red sarafan (I have actually worn one once) and go on about mysticism and melancholy and the “going to the people” and peasant communes.  Er, except that most of that is romantic rubbish.  I could be a noble in St Petersburg, but that really doesn’t work at all with being a romantic Slavophile.  Oh dear.  I’m going to have to be a revolutionary instead, aren’t I?

7 – The Lake District in the time of the Romantic poets. Hooray – I can get away with Romanticism in this one!   Maybe I could stay with Wordsworth in Grasmere?

8 – I’ve got to have America in here somewhere, as well, but it’s a bit difficult to say that I actually want to be there during “my” period of American history, the 1840s to the 1870s. The Twelve Oaks barbecue does sound like good fun, until war gets declared in the middle of it, but, quite apart from the fact that, as with a Jane Austen ball, I’d be the person no-one wanted to sit with or dance with, it’s a slaveholding society and I just couldn’t be there.  No – it’s going to have to be the American Dream, the immigrants sailing into New York and hoping that they’re going to find that the streets are paved with gold.  OK, it’d probably mean ending up doing backbreaking work in horrible conditions, but, again, it’s that feeling of hope, that belief, that you can make the world a better place and be part of it.

9 – India with Gandhi. I normally refuse to class anything later than the First World War as “history”, but I watched the Gandhi film again recently, and I’ve been reading up on Indian history, and … that incredible idea that you can bring about change by non-violent civil resistance, and the hope – even if it did turn out to be futile – of religious tolerance and co-operation.  There are a lot of groups of people now who have little hope – the Rohingyas spring to mind – but what an inspiration that time was.

10 – Do you know what, I actually do want to go to a Jane Austen era ball? I’d get over no-one wanting to dance with me!   At least the clothes of the time were fairly loose, so I wouldn’t look as fat in them as I would in clothes from some other time periods.  I like that idea of the county society in Jane Austen books, that you did get invited to parties and balls as a matter of course, and weren’t sat at home wondering how you’d get to meet new people.  I am absolutely useless at social occasions and would probably have hated it all in practice, but I do like the idea in theory.  I mean, Mary Bennet does seem to enjoy the balls, doesn’t she, even though everyone thinks she’s weird?  I like the idea of visiting spa towns and “taking the waters” as well.

I just wish I could match all these times and places up to books! But most of the best historical fiction’s set against a background of war and turmoil.  Is that because it appeals to authors, it appeals to readers, or it appeals to me?  And, if anyone’s reading this, please tell me when and where you’d like to go, and if any of our ideas match.  If they do, maybe we can build a time machine and go there together 🙂 .

A Passage to Britain II, Polish refugees in India – BBC 2

There’s been a sizeable Polish community in Manchester, as in many other parts of the UK, since the war. I’ve always been aware of that, right back to when I was at primary school and some of the other kids there had Polish names.  And I knew that there’d been Polish Displaced Persons camps in the UK, one of the largest being at Delamere Park near my mum’s home town of Northwich.  But I have to say that I knew very little about Polish wartime refugees coming to the UK via India; and I don’t think that the makers of this rather interesting series did either, until they came across this sad but fascinating story whilst looking into immigration from India to Britain in the immediate post-war era.

I got the impression that Yasmin Khan – who would be a good presenter if she didn’t seem so keen to present Britain in as negative a light as possible – was expecting to find that most of those sailing on the Asturias, the ship featured in the second programme, in late 1947 were fleeing the horrific violence associated with Partition.  That’s what I’d have been expecting too.  (I did also think we might get a few British people/families who’d spent their entire working lives in India returning to the UK to make a new start in a “home” that they didn’t really know, but we didn’t.)

There were certainly people leaving because of Independence and or Partition. Some of those featured were Sikhs: Partition was about Hindus and Muslims but, especially with most of the violence being in the north, so many Sikhs suffered terribly.  There was a rather nice reference by one Sikh man to his father having previously spent time in Britain in the 1930s and having worked as a market trader alongside Jewish market traders in the East End of London, two religious minority groups together.

There were also a number of Anglo-Indians, a community which tends to be overlooked when discussing this period of history. It’s a confusing term, because “Anglo-Indian” originally meant white British people living in India, with people of mixed heritage being descrived as “Eurasian” – but then, somehow, the meanings changed, and “Anglo-Indian” came to mean people of mixed heritage.  As with so many stories of immigration over the years, there were some sad tales of skilled workers having to take whatever work they could get, often with little relevance to the skills and experience they’d brought with them – but, alongside that, inspiring tales of building up successful businesses.

The part of the programme that most caught the attention, though, was the part focussing on the Polish people travelling on the ship, because it just wasn’t what either the presenter or the viewers would have been expecting.

After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union led to the Soviets joining the war on the Allied side, the Soviets deported large numbers of people, possibly as many as a million, from Soviet-occupied parts of Poland to gulags in Siberia and Kazakhstan. During a temporary amnesty in mid to late 1942, many of those people were able to leave, but it was a long and arduous journey, through Persia.  Some of the young men went into the Polish Armed Forces in Exile.  Civilians, mostly women and children, were taken to various places, mostly parts of the British Empire and the Dominions; and India played a large part in this.

Within India, various authorities were involved – the British colonial authorities, the Polish consul general in Bombay/Mumbai and his wife, and the royal families of some of the princely state. The Maharajah of Nawanagar played a particularly important role: he unfortunately didn’t get a mention in this programme, but I’ve been reading a bit about him.  He set up a camp for Polish refugee children, and there’s a school named after him in Warsaw, and also a “Good Maharajah Square”.  The Maharajah of Kolhapur also set up a camp for Polish refugee children.

We didn’t hear about the maharajahs’ camps, but we did hear how Polish communities were established in India, and we saw pictures of Polish shops and Polish dancing there. Some of the Polish refugees settled in India and spent the rest of their lives there, but the programme was about people coming from India to Britain and, along with many other Poles – there seem to have been about 250,000 in all – who ended up in Britain after the war, the people interviewed had settled here, not wanting to go back to a Poland which by then was under communist rule.

There are so many little-known stories about groups of people displaced during or after the Second World War. Even now, the stories of Stalin’s deportations of the Chechens and the Crimean Tatars aren’t well-known in the West.  Then there were the Germans forced to leave the Breslau area, now Polish Wroclaw … and the repopulation of Wroclaw by Poles who left Lviv/Lvov/Lviv/Lemberg when it became part of Soviet Ukraine.  Just a few examples.  It’s thought that around 1,000 Poles came to Britain via India.

This programme’s hopefully drawn attention to their story – and it’s fascinating how historical research can lead you down paths that you hadn’t set off to go down, and teach you about something that you hadn’t been looking for. You look for stories about people fleeing the violence of Partition between India and Pakistan, and stumble across stories of people deported from Soviet-occupied Poland.  And, amid all the evils of those times, there were wonderful people like those two maharajahs who set up camps for refugee children from a faraway land.  I feel quite bad that I didn’t know about the history of Polish wartime refugees in India.  I’m glad that I do now.

Camping and Tramping, Swallows and Amazons by Hazel Sheeky

“Camping and Tramping, Swallows and Amazons: Interwar Children’s Fiction and the Search for England” – to give it its full title.

I felt like playing The Manchester Rambler on loop after reading this!  In fact, if I wasn’t so unfit and lazy, I’d have felt like coming the Cheetham Hill communist and re-enacting the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass 🙂 .  All right, we all know that, as the author discusses at length, most pre-1960s 20^th century children’s fiction is horrendously snobbish; but, whilst I can take a lot of it, on the grounds of the past being a foreign country etc, all that Campers and Trampers versus Holidaymakers and Day Trippers stuff always makes my blood boil.  I nearly exploded when the author quoted a bunch of upper-middle-class Southerners in one book talking about “ghastly places in Lancashire”.  Ooh!!

This was a PhD thesis, and the author spent quite a lot of time bemoaning the fact that she didn’t have room within the word limit to say everything that she wanted to.  I believe she has now written a book on the subject, but it probably costs a fortune, so reading this’ll have to do!  Being a thesis, it was inevitably full of methodology and explanation about what she was trying to get at, which wasn’t very interesting – but, OK, it wasn’t meant for a general audience.  It was also a bit confused: it wasn’t particularly clear exactly what it was that she was trying to get at.  And the concluding section referred to children’s literature between “1930 and 1960”.  Excuse me for thinking that the inter-war period was from 1918 to 1939!

The general idea seemed to be to argue against people who’ve said that children’s fiction from the first half or so of the 20^th century was a load of rubbish – do not get me started on the primary school teacher who tried to get me to stop reading Enid Blyton books (I took no notice) – and also to argue that it wasn’t overly romantic or fantastical but was in fact realistic and part of the wider culture of the time.  It also seemed to be to discuss whether it was trying to create a myth of nationhood.  The author’s views and arguments didn’t really come across that clearly, but the arguments and debates themselves, the issues involved, were very interesting.

Unfortunately, I haven’t read most of the books mentioned, apart from some of the Arthur Ransomes and a few of the Malcolm Savilles.  Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels were dismissed as not being “properly” Camping and Tramping, and Lorna Hill’s Patience and Marjorie books (which, like Enid Blyton’s, would count if going up to 1960) didn’t get mentioned at all.  But hopefully I’ve got the general idea!

These books are, as the author says, generally about the middle-classes – but I prefer the term “upper-middle-class”.  Being middle-class in the inter-war period to me means a suburban semi and, if your family could afford it before paid holidays came in, a fortnight in Blackpool every summer.  It does not mean going to boarding school, owning a boat and or a pony and having a dad who’s an officer in the Royal Navy : there’s nothing very “middle” about that!

People do like to read a lot into children’s fiction, and there are various theories about “camping and tramping” novels of the inter-war period, and indeed the interest in nature and the countryside in general, being something to do with trying to colonise the countryside now that Britain’s imperial power was on the wane.  No, me neither!   The author neither.  Britain’s imperial power actually wasn’t really on the wane in the 1920s and 1930s, for one thing.   Other theories involve in being about building a myth of nationhood, stressing rural and maritime traditions.

Well, they do work better, but it was a combination of things, and it went back well before the Great War.  It wasn’t just a British/English thing, either.  It’s probably best not to dwell too much on it, but the Nazi youth movements in Germany were very into the countryside.  The idea of access to the countryside being available to all was also important elsewhere – notably in Norway.

Various things, then.  Well, for a kick-off, the Romantic poets and artists.  Merrie England, rural idylls, folk dancing, maypoles, etc, but mainly the romantic ideas of the countryside, the green and pleasant land.  Whilst I will not have anyone criticising mills as being dark and satanic 🙂 , I buy into the romantic countryside thing completely.  Every April, you will find me going to Grasmere to see the hosts of golden daffodils!   Yes, I have all sorts of romantic notions of the countryside – and I’m talking lakes and mountains, not farms.  I can’t be doing with animals.  Too noisy and too smelly.  Does that come across in “camping and tramping” books?  No: I don’t think it does.  It comes across far better in something like the Chalet School books.  Camping and tramping books are too active!   Too much doing and not enough looking and dreaming!

The Victorian Romantics sadly don’t get much of a mention in this book, although Whitman and Thoreau do.   I can’t really be doing with all that wilderness stuff.  Lakes and mountains and daffodils are much better.

Then there was the Victorian fresh air and exercise thing.  “Muscular Christianity” to build an Empire.  Combined with that, the wake-up call given by the poor health of many of the working-class men who volunteered to fight in the Boer War – not only did it help to bring about Lloyd George’s welfare reforms, but it also led to an increased emphasis on fresh air and exercise for all.  Think the famous images of the Duke of York, the future George VI, singing “Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree” at boys’ camps.  And people in inter-war children’s books seem to be able to walk miles and miles without ever getting tired.  Not to mention eat vast amounts without putting on weight!

Then, and this was specifically inter-war, there was the idea of the countryside as a peaceful place, an antidote to the horrors of the Great War.  I recently read a review of the new Christopher Robin film, written by someone who said that AA Milne would have been horrified at the thought of taking Winnie The Pooh & co to London, because the whole point was that they were supposed to be in the countryside.   And, as the author says, there’s an argument that the set-up found in most of the books is a reaction against the imperialism/militarism of organisations like the Scouts and the Guides and the Boys’ Brigades.  No-one’s marching or wearing uniforms; and there are no formal organisations, just groups of siblings, cousins and friends.

So, are the books about imperialism or national mythology or upper-middle-class values, or whatever?  Well, the argument in this thesis really isn’t clear.  There’s a lot of information in it, but most of it isn’t clearly linked to either the introduction or the conclusion.  I don’t particularly think it is.  I think everyone’s got rather obsessed with trying to find imperialism in everything.  The author does come back to this in a later section, about maps, and argues that, when the Swallows and Amazons crew rename all the places around Coniston with the names of far-flung places around the world, and talk about discovering them, they are displaying an imperialistic attitude and trying to impose their power and control on the countryside.

And here was me thinking it was just a bunch of kids using their imaginations to try to make their summer holidays seem a bit more exciting!   Someone – I think it was Dan Brown – once said that you can invent a conspiracy theory by looking at the pattern of letters in the phone directory, if you try.  People read into things what they will, but I’m really not convinced that giving places exotic-sounding nicknames indicates a desire to take over the world.

Another of the big issues was whether or not the books are realistic.  The author seemed keen to argue that they were, but a lot of the subject matter was contradictory.  Arthur Ransome’s books do not belong to the same category as, say, AA Milne’s or Kenneth Grahame’s.  Well, seeing as that they don’t involve talking animals, that’s probably a given.  But a more relevant point was that, unlike in Enid Blyton’s books, no-one ends up chasing spies or rescuing kidnap victims – and I think a lot of people were very annoyed that a spy story was shoved into the recent film adaptation of Swallows and Amazons.  But she then said that you do get wild adventures in Malcolm Saville’s books, which contradicted the arguments that the whole genre’s realistic.

To some extent, it’s a pointless argument.  None of the books are realistic, with young kids being allowed to go off on their own.  It’s like the arguments about the lives of characters in soap operas being unrealistic.  The reality of daily life is not very exciting.  No-one wants to read a book or watch a TV programme about it!    But, no, the books aren’t set in … well, this image we have of the Long Golden Edwardian Summer, this time of innocence before the Great War, “It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910” and all that kind of thing.

The reality argument was then contradicted again, in a section about how the books treat the countryside as a playground, with rural people only appearing as, say, rosy-cheeked farmers’ wives who produce enormous amounts of home-made food every five minutes, with very little about the harsh reality of rural life and how hard farming people had, and still have, to work.  There was also quite a bit about the idea of both boats and caravans as symbolising freedom.  They always sound so great in books, don’t they?  Both Enid Blyton and Noel Streatfeild had me longing to go off in a houseboat or a caravan.  Ugh!   I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes!   Again, romance trumps reality – and possibly defeated the argument that everything in the books was realistic!   However, the author did argue again for realism by pointing out that the characters in The Wind in the Willows soon find out that life on the open road isn’t very exciting at all – although I’m not sure how valid it is to argue that a storyline involving a talking toad in a flat cap driving round the countryside shows that a book reflects reality!

It was also, rather amusingly, pointed out that no-one in these books ever roughed it!   The Swallows, in particular, take vast amounts of stuff with them, and always eat rather fancy meals.  There were pages and pages in the thesis about the symbolism of Susan Walker’s campfire as showing her establishing her control over the countryside and defining The Great Outdoors as a domesticated space.  Again, I think that might be reading too much into it all!   There was also a section about Geoffrey Trease showing the Lake District as being devoid of people and buildings, which apparently also showed people wanting to establish their power and control over the countryside.  I’m not sure how any of this was meant to fit with the arguments that the books all reflected reality, but never mind!   They were good points about the genre in general.

Then we got to the part that wound me up!   To me, the importance of the countryside in the inter-war years, linked in with the increased affordability of public transport and bicycles, is everything that The Manchester Rambler says: it’s about people from urban, industrial areas being able to get out into The Great Outdoors and enjoy the freedom and the beauty of it.  And, no, that isn’t realistic at all, because it isn’t about rural people and rural life!   But, as the author says, most of the characters in the books aren’t rural people, living rural lives: they’re on holiday.

No, sorry, they aren’t “on holiday”.  Nothing so common.  They’re Campers and Trampers, and the books are full of snotty remarks about “day trippers” and “holiday makers”.  I hate that.  It really, really does my head in.  It’s Them and Us.  The author does try to argue that it’s not about snobbery, and that it’s more about people who appreciate the countryside versus those who don’t.  It’s pointed out that some of the Not The Right Sort characters in some of Arthur Ransome’s books are clearly well-off, whilst some of the Author Approved characters are the offspring of boat-builders, and that being The Right Sort is sometimes indicated by clothing, or general appearance, or traits like the volume at which you speak, rather than by social class.

Hmm.  I’m not convinced!   The characters in the books always have weeks and weeks to spend on holidays.  The “day trippers” and “holiday makers” don’t.  And that’s the point.  “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday.”  The thesis does quote a historian acknowledging that “it was the northern working-class groups that escalated the power for access reform” – but, bizarrely, the said historian apparently said that this was because the Northern working-classes had so much time on their hands due to the high levels of unemployment during the Depression!  That is one of the stupidest things I have ever heard!   How exactly were people who were struggling to put food on the table supposed to pay for train tickets to the Lakes, the Peaks or the Dales?  No, no, no!   “I may be a wage slave on Monday, but I am a free man on Sunday.”  There was a rather more sensible quote, from a different historian, about the links between socialism and the importance of the countryside and access to it being available to all.

There are some examples in the books of characters acknowledging that access to the countryside should be available to all.  A Geoffrey Trease character said that “The hills, the rivers, they must be free to all”.  But, ugh, the snobbery!   As the author pointed out, characters often seem to think that working-class characters in the books, especially those on farms where they’re staying, are just there to serve their needs.  Characters in Explorers on the Wall by Garry Hogg – a book I shall not, ever, be reading! – apparently apparently whinge about going through “ghastly places in Lancashire”, and even specifically refer to Manchester as “a grim place” – never, ever, shall I read this book!!  And characters in The Compass Points North by ME Atkinson apparently make similar comments about the mining areas around Newcastle, as they pass through it on the train.

Is this snobbery, or is it just the dark satanic mills versus green and pleasant land thing?   Is it about the idea of a creating an adult idea of a pastoral elegy, as the author suggests?  Well, those of us who live in the land of the dark satanic mills are as keen on the green and pleasant idea as anyone.  Maybe more so – you can’t really be a Manchester Rambler if you live in the sort of area that the characters in these books do.  But to dismiss places as “grim” and “ghastly” like that – ugh!!

Again, the thread of whatever argument there was didn’t really follow, but I’m so glad that that section was included, even if there was no direct reference to the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass.  There was then a related section about whether or not Arthur Ransome meant to show that sailing was affordable for all.  As the author said, that was partly more about location than class or financial situation – but the “cruising” boats featured in most of the books would certainly not have been affordable for most people.  There were also some comments about the snotty pre Second World War attitudes towards the Merchant Navy as opposed to the Royal Navy.  Two members of my family (on the Liverpool side) were amongst the Merchant Navy men killed in the Great War, and I find that snotty attitude extremely offensive!

Then came a section about how John Walker is meant to symbolise the sense of duty and responsibility associated with the Royal Navy, and how the storylines in the books are part of his character training.  Fair enough.  That arguments works with school stories as well – not particularly in terms of the Navy, but in terms of character building and leadership skills and so on.  It’s a big feature of children’s literature in the period in question.  But I was less impressed by the argument that the Swallows and Amazons books are intrinsically sexist, and that Nancy Blackett is undermined by John and forced to submit to female gender stereotypes and roles.  A lot of children’s books of the inter-war and post-war era do feature bossy boys, and girls being left out of adventures entirely or else forced to accept a lesser role; but I’d never said that the Arthur Ransome books fitted that category.

It did end with sailing, and an argument that the books were meant to promote a Britannia Rules The Waves type national mythology.  I’m not convinced.  The author had said earlier that ships were a symbol of freedom.  And that’s what I think these books are about – freedom.  Freedom from the ordinary routine of daily life.  Freedom from adult control.  And the whole idea of the countryside as freedom.  That’s what The Manchester Rambler’s about.  And that’s why all those comments in the books about the evils of “day trippers” annoy me so much, because they’re about people wanting that freedom for themselves, because they think they’re the Right Sort of People, but not for others.

As I’ve said, this wasn’t meant to be a mass market read, or even a general academic read, and it’s not particularly coherent and it’s not particularly clear what it’s getting at – but it does contain some very interesting and thought-provoking stuff.  Thank you so much to Janice for recommending it!

 

A Passage to Britain – BBC 2

It’s been a while since we’ve had a documentary series about historical immigration to the UK and, with the upsurge in interest in genealogy making personalised history very appealing at the moment, the idea of tracing the lives of passengers on ships travelling from India to Britain in three different decades sounded fascinating. It would have been a lot better had it concentrated more on telling their stories and less on trying to score socio-political points; but it certainly had its moments and was well worth watching.

The first episode used the passenger lists from the voyages of the P&O ship Viceroy of India, a rather luxurious liner, in 1933 and 1935.  Immigration from India to the UK is generally associated with the post Second World War era, so this sounded like it might throw up some particularly interesting stories.  At least, Yasmin Khan, the presenter, said that she was looking for stories about Indian (which at the time would obviously have included people from the areas which are now Pakistan and Bangladesh) people settling in the UK; but only three of the six people whose stories were explored actually fitted that category, so I’m not quite sure why she said it.

Maybe she said it because, at the beginning of the programme, it was a convenient way of dismissing the many schoolchildren and university students who were amongst the passengers. Students at schools, universities and other further education institutions made up a third of the Indian population of the UK in the 1930s, and – as an avid reader of school stories! – I’d like to have heard about the experiences of some of them.  Especially the girls, given that four of the five passengers we did hear about were male.

But they were ignored on the grounds that most of them went home afterwards –which would have been fair enough had the programme actually been all about Indian people staying in the UK. Maybe I’m being unduly cynical, but it was hard not to feel that they didn’t get a look-in because most of them would have been from the royal families of the princely Indian states, which weren’t under British rule, and that the BBC didn’t think that the avocado-eaters of Islington, or whoever it is that they try to appeal to these days, wanted to hear about them.  On a posh ship like that, you’d think there’d also have been plenty of adults from princely families, heading off to enjoy a whirl of glamorous social engagements in London and maybe then the French Riviera, and (I read Hello! magazine as well as school stories) I’d rather have like to have heard about them too … but nary a mention did they get.

Oh well!   The one student we did hear about had a very interesting story, as it happened.  The idea of the programme was to trace the passengers’ surviving relatives and follow the stories with them, and the son of this man was under the impression that his dad had come to London to take the Indian Civil Service exams, failed them, and not returned to India because of the shame.  Instead, it turned out that he’d become involved with the independence movement and that his parents had sent him away because they thought they were keeping him out of trouble.  He was so angry that he never spoke to them again.  You wonder why he never told his family about this, but evidently he didn’t.

The BBC tried to make out that this was all about the evils of empire, but I don’t think that that was entirely the right angle to come at. Clearly it was about the Indian independence movement, but it was also part of a wider pattern – a story, and you can find so many similar stories in the history of pretty much every country in the world, about the people who are involved in trying to overthrow a foreign and or tyrannical regime, or to work for change within that regime; and the people, generally the older generations, who either don’t want change or are frightened of the possible consequences of working against the powers that be.  What an intriguing story – and what a shame that this man’s relatives had thought all these years that the reason he’d stayed in Britain was because he was ashamed of failing some exams.  I hope they were really pleased to learn the real story.

Next up was Mulk Raj Anand, the writer. Of course, the BBC had to make out that the focus of his writings was, you guessed it, the evils of empire, whereas he also wrote a lot of important works about the sufferings of the Untouchables under the Indian caste system.  They also ignored his journalistic work during the Spanish Civil War.  Now there is a subject that deserves a documentary series – the role of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War!   He was someone who was in favour of change in many ways and many places – yes, Indian independence, but a lot more than that.  We heard a bit about his unsuccessful marriage to a British woman, and there was a nice personal touch with his niece talking about his recipes for curry!

The third person discussed was the only woman of the five – an ayah to a British family. They didn’t seem to have been able to find any of her relatives, but the baby of the family for whom she’d worked was still alive.  He’d been on the ship as well, possibly the only passenger from either of those voyages still alive.  The poor ayah had had to travel third class, whilst the family had been in the posh part.  There wasn’t much information about her, though: the family had paid for her to return to India once the children were older, and the BBC tried to make out that she’d been hard done by, but surely, unless she’d worked for someone like the Earl of Grantham, a nanny would have expected her employment to be terminated once the children were all at school?   It was pretty horrible that they’d refused to pay for her to have a decent cabin on the ship, but, sadly, par for the course, whether the servants were Indian or British.

The family themselves were very interesting. I got the impression that the BBC had hoped they’d be some very snooty types, the way people usually envisage the British in India – think all those people at the club in A Passage to India – and very definitely coming from British India, but it transpired that the dad was a jockey who’d been working for a maharajah.  So we got to hear a bit about the glamorous lives of princely families after all, hooray!  (Sorry, too much Hello! magazine!)  The surviving passenger had some lovely stories to tell about the relationship between his family and his father’s employers, and the good times they’d had there.

None of this really had much to do with the establishment of Indian communities in Britain, though. No problem with that – it was all very interesting – but why make out that that was what the programme was about, when it wasn’t?!   And the next passenger certainly wasn’t Indian: he was the gloriously named Sir Lancelot Graham, the first governor of Sind.  And his grandson lives in Altrincham!  The BBC seemed keen to push the snooty angle, going on about how Sir Lancelot had been to a public school and then to Oxford, but his grandson made a point about how hard the exams were and how hard his grandfather had had to work to pass them.

I think a lot of us are guilty of thinking of the imperial service in general, not just in India, as some sort of old boys’ club where getting a top job wasn’t so much what you knew as who you knew, but it’s probably not very fair to think like that, certainly by the 1930s. Er, yes, and the last viceroy was the king’s second cousin and the uncle of the future queen’s intended!   OK, OK!

It moved into Children of the Raj territory then, with the Altrincham-dwelling grandson explaining that his father hadn’t been on the ship because he had at that time been at boarding school in Britain, and talking about the difficulties faced by families because of the system of sending children to school in Britain whilst their parents remained in India.  That possibly wasn’t what the BBC had been after, but it was a fair point.  It can be hard now to sympathise with adults who made that choice, although it’s very easy to sympathise with the children, who weren’t given any choice; but times were different then, and the separation can’t have been easy for anyone.

Finally, we did actually get back to what was supposed to be the point, Indian immigration to Britain – with the life of a man, a lawyer, who’d come from India and settled, not in an urban area of the UK, as might have been expected, but in a rural area of Essex, and had married a white British woman. We were told that there were around three thousand marriages between Indian men and white British women in the 1930s, probably more than might have been expected.  At a time when levels of racial tolerance left a lot to be desired, and when religious intermarriage even between Protestants and Catholics was frowned on, this marriage hadn’t gone down very well with either family.  Even now, there are so many cases of families being unwilling to accept someone’s choice of partner: we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a long way to go.

It was also sad to hear, from one of the couple’s descendants, about the abuse that the children had suffered at school, from the teachers as well as the other kids. In that area, at that time, the man who’d travelled on the ship was the only Asian person, and that must have been very difficult.  The idea was mooted last year about every council in the country being asked to take a small number of Syrian immigrants, rather than large groups of people settling in a small number of areas, and you can see where the authorities were coming from from a financial and practical viewpoint, but that sort of thing just doesn’t work.  It must have been so hard to have been the only Indian person, the only non-white person, in a community that doesn’t seem to have been overly welcoming.

Also, the family’s surname had been changed, to something that sounded English. That, in my experience, is very unusual for a family with Indian sub-continental heritage: it happens more with surnames associated with other parts of Europe. I doubt we’ll be seeing that again in the later episodes.

All in all, quite a mixed bag of stories. I’m not sure what the programme was actually hoping to show – the BBC always seems to have to have an agenda with everything these days, and it’s rather annoying –  and I’m not sure that it showed what it hoped to, but it was certainly interesting.  I suppose they don’t want to overlap too much with Who Do You Think You Are?, but I wonder if this could be done with other groups of immigrants to the UK as well – maybe go back to the 1680s (possibly not with ships’ passenger lists, but there’ll be some records available), when there were Huguenots moving to the British Isles (I can’t really say “Britain” pre-1707!) from France, and both Protestants and Jews from the United Provinces (the Netherlands), and work forward from there?

As I said, it’s been a while since we’ve had a documentary series about immigration to the UK – and I’m talking history, not current affairs and certainly not politics.   And this personalised history does seem to be very popular at the moment.   Great idea for a documentary series.

Versailles and Knightfall and the persecution of religious minorities

By a strange coincidence, both of these (thoroughly inaccurate!) historical dramas have chosen to include major sub-plots involving the persecution of religious minorities in France – in Versailles, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which led to hundreds of thousands of Huguenots leaving the country and is said to be when the term “refugees” originated, and, in Knightfall, the Great Exile of the Jews in 1306.  Versailles even cheekily but not inappropriately chose to show a character coming out with the famous line by Heinrich Heine – who, on the subject of religious discrimination, converted from Judaism to Protestantism because Jews were excluded from academic posts in Prussia – about how burning books leads to burning people, 136 years before it was written.

The “burning books” line always sounds as if it was about the Nazis: obviously, having been written in 1821, it wasn’t. It was actually about the Spanish Inquisition – which was closely associated with the Alhambra Decree of 1492, expelling Jews from Aragon and Castile and their subject territories, and the Expulsion of the Moriscos by their great-great-grandson Philip III in 1609-14.

It was hardly just France and Spain. Religious discrimination was practised across Europe. It’s often associated with the Middle Ages – burnings at the stake et al – and with the Reformation era, but it went on long after that.  Even countries generally considered fairly liberal practised legal and practical discrimination: Catholic emancipation in the United Kingdom (then, of course, including the whole of Ireland) didn’t come about until 1829, Catholics in the Netherlands suffered discrimination until the twentieth century, and Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants includes an interesting portrayal of the persecution of non-Lutheran Protestants in nineteenth century Sweden.  In most places, things were improving by the mid nineteenth century, helped by Napoleon’s secularisation policies, but the 1882 May Laws in the Russian Empire led to a wave of pogroms and the emigration of over two million Jews.

It’s not a problem that ever seems to go away. We don’t really get new religions developing any more, and religious minorities have tended to evolve into ethno-religious minorities, so it can be difficult to say whether the issues are about ethnicity or about religion, but the point is that minorities are still being discriminated against and even persecuted.  China’s clamping down on the Uighur Muslims.  The Rohingya Muslims are suffering horrific persecution in Burma/Myanmar: that and the barbaric treatment of the Yazidi people by so-called Islamic State – who have now turned on the Druze as well –  are probably the worst examples in recent years.  Christians have come under attack in Egypt and Nigeria.  Concerns have been expressed about the attitude of the right-wing Hindu government in India towards Sikhs and Muslims, and about the effect of the new Israeli constitution on the status of the Druze.  Just a few examples.  Even in the UK, you can’t turn on the TV, pick up a newspaper or glance at the internet without reading/hearing about someone accusing Jeremy Corbyn of anti-Semitism or Boris Johnson of Islamophobia.

Neither programme comes even remotely close to being historically accurate!   Versailles has a group of Huguenots (who for some reason all have North of England accents) plotting to assassinate Louis XIV … who has just found out that he and the Duc d’Orleans are not really the sons of Louis XIII but are in fact the products of an affair between Maria Teresa of Austria and Spain, Queen of France, and the Man in the Iron Mask. Knightfall, quite apart from featuring a pope who’d died several years before it’s set, has a major plot involving Princess Isabella (the She Wolf of France, she who would eventually marry Edward II, have an affair with Roger Mortimer and overthrow her husband) having an affair with a Prince Lluis of Catalunya, son of King and Queen of Catalunya … despite the fact that the Crown of Catalunya had been part of the Crown of Aragon for nearly 150 years by this time!  Not to mention the Queen of France having an affair with one of the Knights Templar.

But the fact that they are such utter twaddle – although quite entertaining, and I’ll rather miss Versailles now that it’s finished – actually makes it even more interesting that they’ve chosen to focus so much on something as serious as this.  Really, the two situations aren’t comparable, and, in terms of both numbers and impact elsewhere, the Edict of Fontainebleau/Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Alhambra Decree would be a better comparison, but there’s nothing on about Spanish history at the moment.  And the Revocation wasn’t an instrument of expulsion: the Huguenots weren’t told to get out of France.  But their lives were made so miserable that most of them did.

Just going back to the impact of the Revocation, it had a big effect elsewhere, and nowhere more so than here. As well as the impact of the refugees who flooded into the British Isles – and had a very positive effect on the economy – the fear of what a Catholic monarch might do, and the way in which interested parties (to use a Jane Austen expression) used that fear, played a big part in bringing about the Glorious Revolution and everything associated with it.  The Great Exile didn’t really affect anywhere other than France – but it’s worth noting that the persecution of religious minorities in Spain and, later, the Russian Empire, had a big impact on international impressions of those countries, and that the flood of emigration had a big effect – as with the Huguenots, often a positive one – on the countries to which those emigrants went.

Are the events of 1306 and 1685 comparable in terms of motive?   Was any of it actually about actual religion/piety, for a kick off?  Not really.  There has always been an idea that Louis XIV was influenced by Madame de Maintenon, who was very Catholic and disliked Protestants for religious reasons.  That idea certainly came across in Versailles.  Why do people always want to blame women for what men do??  No-one’s ever suggested that Philip IV of France was henpecked into exiling the Jews, but I’ve certainly read articles suggesting that the Edict of Expulsion of Jews from England, in 1295, was influenced by Edward I’s mother, Eleanor of Provence.  I’m not buying any of that – and I don’t think any of it was actually about religion.

Philip, like Edward I, was probably largely motivated by money: he didn’t want to pay his debts to Jewish moneylenders, and he also grabbed the money and other assets which the exiled Jews were forced to leave behind. Louis wasn’t, though, to be fair.  France actually suffered economically as a result of the expulsion of the Huguenots, who included many skilled craftspeople.

Attempt to gain popularity, maybe, in the case of either or both? We’ve all seen how “populist” politicians seek to appeal to a certain section of public opinion by railing against religious minorities, and that’s very definitely nothing new.  Toleration of Huguenots, granted by Henri “Paris is worth a Mass” IV, once a Huguenot himself, was not popular amongst French Catholics.  The expulsion of Jews from Edward I’s England has been seen as a sop to the upper classes ahead of the imposition of a new tax, and the Great Exile (one of several expulsions of Jews from medieval France, but probably the one which had the most effect) probably went down pretty well with the Christian majority.  Again, though, I don’t think it was really that.  Religious minorities are an easy target, blamed for everything from heavy taxation in Polish-ruled Ukraine (i.e. at the time of the Khmelnytsky Massacres) to the Great Fire of London, but there was nothing particular of that sort going on in either 1306 or 1685.

No: it mainly seems to have been about power and control. Maybe not so quite much so in 1306, but definitely in 1685.  And you can say the same about the “Orthodoxy, autocracy and nationality” idea in Alexander III and Nicholas II’s Russian Empire, the drive to eradicate Protestantism in the Habsburg Empire, and a million and one other examples.  Religion and control are very closely intertwined, and it’s a lot easier to control people when you’ve got religious uniformity – when you’ve got everyone singing from the same hymn sheet, in fact, and, as part of that, when you can make everyone feel that they’re all part of a whole.  Attacks on religious minorities by random groups of people are usually motivated by hatred, or just by wanting someone to blame for social and economic problems,  but, when it’s coming from the state, from the centre of power, it does tend to be about power and control.  And Louis XIV was very keen on power and control.

Of course, sometimes, power and control involve political leaders clashing with the power of the majority religion –Henry VIII and Napoleon – but that’s another story. And we get enough programmes about the Tudors and about the nineteenth century: it’s nice to see something different!   And, whilst this again is another story, the hunted, if they gain power, often become the hunted.  All those stories about the persecution of early Christians in the Roman Empire – and then, once the Roman Empire became Christian, the Christians set about persecuting minority Christian sects and everyone else!

The Great Exile and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes are far from being the worst examples of religious persecution in the history of Europe, or the history of the world. They aren’t even the worst examples of religious persecution in the history of France – the Albigensian Crusade was probably that, and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre also springs to mind.  There were no massacres, no mass rapes and no autos da fe.  And there weren’t any gas chambers … the Nazi genocide isn’t really to be compared with the general history of religious persecution, but I want to say something (in case anyone’s actually reading this!) about the current trend for the use of very incendiary language and inappropriate comparisons with events from history, and referencing the actions of the Nazis is one of the main forms of it.

We are currently seeing a very worrying rise in far right attitudes, in many countries, but the use by the media and by individuals of inappropriate comparisons with the atrocities of the past is, in addition to being inappropriate, extremely unhelpful.  It increases tensions which really don’t need increasing – and it’s also rather insulting to the victims of those atrocities.

If you’re talking about the persecution of the Rohingya, by all means compare it to the worst incidences of persecution in the past. But yelling and screaming about how Donald Trump’s immigration policies are reminiscent of Nazi Germany isn’t helpful.  The separation of children from their parents is beyond disgusting, and deserves to be condemned in very strong terms – but not in terms which reference the murder of seventeen million people.  The blockade of the Gaza Strip has created an appalling humanitarian crisis, and is completely unacceptable, but, again, referencing the genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany is completely inappropriate.

The other week, racist graffiti was daubed on the home of a black family in Rochdale. That’s utterly appalling, and I hope that the victims are getting whatever support they need and that the perpetrators are caught and locked up, but I was rather taken aback to hear someone telling a local TV news crew that we seemed to be going back to the days of slavery.  Graffiti is not comparable with the evils of slavery.

There is undoubtedly a problem with anti-Semitism within elements of the Labour Party, and Jeremy Corbyn couldn’t really have made a worse mess of handling it if he’d tried. But is it really appropriate to talk about him being an “existential threat to Jewish life” in the UK?  He’s hardly planning to re-issue the 1295 Edict of Expulsion, is he?  And Boris Johnson’s comments about burkas were extremely offensive, and have caused a completely unwarranted row – I appreciate that he was talking about the bans on burkas imposed in several Continental countries, but it isn’t an issue here, so why make it one? – but he was actually opposing the imposition of bans on burkas, unacceptable as his language was.

I wish people would just tone down the language with all of this.   Especially when it comes to comparisons with events of the past.  Possibly don’t watch Versailles and Knightfall, if you’re after an accurate idea of what went on in the past.  But do think about some of the horrors which they’re addressing, and the many other lessons of history which we need to learn and ensure are never, ever repeated.  Think about all those people who were driven from their homes, and their home countries, in 1306 and 1685.  Think about the current series of Who Do You Think You Are, which has shown both Marvin Humes and Shirley Ballas finding out that some of their ancestors were enslaved, and Robert Rinder learning about his grandfather’s experiences and the loss of many of his relatives in the Holocaust.  Please don’t reference those events, when talking about today’s events, unless it really is appropriate to do so.  But please also remember just how bad it can get.  There’s a lot of unpleasant stuff going on at the moment.  It needs to be stopped.  Far too often, it hasn’t been.

 

 

Reginald D Hunter’s Songs of the Border – BBC 2

Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with building walls has given Reginald D Hunter an excuse for a road trip along the US-Mexican border and me an excuse to write about a) the Mexican War and b) how lovely San Antonio is.  This programme, far more political than musical, also reminded me about being made to learn The Streets of Laredo in primary school singing lessons.  How weird is that?  Why get a load of little kids in a North of England primary school to learn a song about dying cowboys?!   Anyway, back to the point, which was that, whatever may go on with Mr Trump and his bonkers ideas, music knows no borders, certainly not between northern Mexico and the south western United States.

I’m afraid that most of the musical references in this went over my head.  I’m not sure what I was expecting.  Fernando and Ride Like The Wind?  Just kidding – not really!  I was OK when he was talking about Ricky Martin (who’s actually from Puerto Rico) and Lou Bega (who’s actually German).  And obviously I recognised the song they played at the end, sung by one of the most famous Mexican-Americans of all time – La Bamba, by Ritchie Valens (even if I do associate it with the diner in Grease).  I think I do vaguely remember hearing about Selena, the Mexican-American singer tragically murdered in the 1990s.  But there were a lot of terms I’d never heard before.  Maybe I’m just really ignorant 😦 !  Well, I never claimed to be an expert on world music, did I?!

I now know that narcocorrido songs are ballads about drug dealers.  Nobody tell Donald Trump that, please: he’d be making all sorts of horrendous stereotypes out of it, whereas the style of music actually originates from folk music, and evolved via the norteno-corrido style of ballad that was more about the Mexican Revolution of 1910 – Pancho Villa et al.  I also know that cumbia is not a misspelling of a region of Northern England but is a form of Columbian music.  And that mariachi is a form of Western Mexican music.  According to Wikipedia, being able to play mariachi gave you a good chance of getting a job at a hacienda.  No, not the Hacienda, but an estate in colonial Mexico.

And conjunto, which sounds like something to do with either Juan Peron or the Napoleonic Wars, is a form of music played by small groups – and this is particularly interesting, because it originates in a unique form of Tex-Mex cultural crossover, involving German button accordions.  A lot of Germans settled in Fredericksburg, Texas (not to be confused with Fredericksburg in Virginia, site of the famous battle in 1862), and it still has a strongly German feel to it.  I went there in October (2014), and they were having an Oktoberfest.  The Oktoberfest idea is Bavarian, and the Fredericksburg settlers were mainly from Prussia, but you get the idea.  Loads of German bakeries, as well.  Germans also settled in Mexico (it’s OK, I’m not going to write an essay on the Austrian involvement there in the 1860s), and a lot of those settlers then moved into South Texas at the time of the Mexican Revolution.  There’s always been a lot of that to-ing and fro-ing across the border, and that was the point that Reginald D Hunter was making.

I’m not very keen on Reginald D Hunter, TBH.  I find him quite aggressive and polemical, and it sometimes seems as if he’s deliberately setting out to rile people.  For example, in the middle of this programme, he randomly started ranting about Tennessee being full of “redneck racists”. But he did make some very good points about the culture of the border area, and how the border is fluid as far as that culture goes.

He visited El Paso (Texas), where he talked to local musicians about some of the older-style border songs which present Mexicans as baddies and or involve a lot of sentimentality about doomed romances between Anglo-American men and Mexican women, and also visited Ciudad Juarez (Mexico), where there was a lot of talk about drug cartels.  In both places, people talked about frequently crossing the border to visit relatives who, legally or illegally, live on the other side.  I haven’t been to either of those places, but he said that he felt that San Antonio, although it’s not actually on the border, was the cultural capital of the border area; and that was certainly the impression that I got.

I loved San Antonio.  I’d love to go again.  What an absolutely gorgeous place.   As I said, I was in Texas in an October – and so all the preparations for the Day of the Dead were taking place.  I’d never come across that before, and I was fascinated by it.  And it’s a Mexican thing.  As Hunter said, when you’re in San Antonio, you’re not always entirely sure whether you’re in the United States or whether you’re in Mexico!  Nearly all the signs are in both English and Spanish.  I even spoke to people in Spanish a few times, whilst I was there.

San Antonio was one of the two main reasons that I wanted to go to Texas.  I wanted to see the Alamo.  We got to the hotel late afternoon, and I stopped for about five minutes to have a glass of water and dump my bags, then opened the map and bounded off to the Alamo.  It was next door to a Haagen Dazs café, which was a bit odd, but never mind.  We did go there on a proper guided tour later on, but I had to see it as soon as I’d arrived.  I’m a historian, OK!  And 19^th century America is one of my specialist topics.  I was excited!

Just as a slight aside, the other main reason I wanted to go to Texas wasn’t the space centre in Houston (it was interesting enough, but I’m not a sciency person) – it was Southfork.  To quote Abba, “there’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that I didn’t see”.  I actually preferred Dynasty, but I loved Dallas as well.  Now, when the 2012 Dallas reboot (which sadly didn’t last long) was made, the main female character, who had affairs with both John Ross Ewing and Christopher Ewing (who also both had affairs with another woman, who turned out to be the secret daughter of Cliff Barnes) was someone who’d been born in Mexico and had emigrated from there to Texas as a child.  Even in a TV series, you can’t show Texas without showing the Mexican connection.

So.  Texas.  The “Six Flags” state – Spain, France (briefly), Mexico, the Texas Republic, the Union and the Confederacy.  When you visit the Alamo, you have to dress and behave as if you were visiting a place of worship.  It’s regarded as a sacred place.  To cut a long story short, a lot of  “Anglos” from America had settled in Mexican Texas, and, with discontent rising over the rule of President Santa Anna, Texas rebelled.  The siege of the Alamo, in 1836, although it wasn’t the decisive battle of the revolution, is the best-known.  Bowie knives, Davy Crockett hats, songs, films, etc.  An independent republic of Texas was set up – and, in 1845, serious moves began to annex it to the United States.  Most people in Texas do seem to have wanted this – the opposition came more from America, where people were concerned about what adding another big slave state to the Union was going to do to the fragile balance between slave states and free states – and, in 1846, it went ahead.

Mexico, which had never recognised Texan independence, wasn’t very pleased, and the Mexican-American War, generally known as the Mexican War, broke out.  I’ve been reading up on the Mexican War since I was 11, because it features heavily in North and South, the first book of the wonderful trilogy by John Jakes.  One of the main characters, played in the TV adaptation by the late, great, Patrick Swayze, loses an arm in the war, and has to give up his plans for a career in the Army.  OK, this has got nothing to do with music, but neither did most of what Hunter was saying: he was far more concerned with slagging off Donald Trump, and having a go at Barack Obama and Bill Clinton whilst he was at it, than in actually talking about songs of the border, or songs of anywhere else for that matter!

Despite the sad loss of Orry Main’s arm (I love those books), America won the war, and helped herself to not only Texas but also what’s now Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, part of New Mexico, a bit of Wyoming, and the vast state of California (where gold was soon discovered – war ended in 1848, Gold Rush in 1849, admitted to the Union, as a free state, in 1850.  My Darling Clementine, not being a border song, did not get mentioned.). The rest of New Mexico and Arizona was bought in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.  At least that bit was paid for.

So that whole area was Mexican long before it was American.  And, no, I’m not forgetting the Native Americans, but Native American culture didn’t really come into this programme.  There was a lot of movement across the border … well, even before Mexico was independent of Spain.  You weren’t supposed to settle in Texas in those days unless you were Catholic – like you weren’t supposed to settle in Savannah, Georgia, in the days when neighbouring Florida was under Spanish rule, unless you were Protestant or Jewish and definitely not Catholic – but people got round that!   And there’s been a lot of movement across the border ever since.  It’s an ongoing story – it’s about history going back many years – as with, say, the Cajun culture of Louisiana – and it’s about today, and it’s about everything in between.

Mexican immigration into the United States was actively encouraged during and immediately after the war years.  It isn’t now, but it’s still going on – and, as we all know, there’s no effective regulation of it.  This has both positive aspects and negative aspects.  There are a lot of issues with undocumented immigration, including the fact that unregistered immigrants are at risk of being taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers, and may struggle to get access to essential services.  There are undoubtedly some problems with cross-border drug smuggling.  There’s the issue of the importance of Mexican workers in the labour market in the border states.

And, as the programme kept pointing out, it’s not just a case of Mexicans going to Txas or other parts of the US and staying there.  It’s people going backwards and forwards across the border on a regular basis.  The programme was meant to be about the border being fluid in terms of music, and it did make that point, but it was also about the border being fluid in terms of the movement of people.   And it is.  Plenty of the people interviewed made that clear.  Some of that’s legal visiting.  Some of that’s illegal working.  It’s a complex situation.

There are two issues here.  One is Mexican-American culture.  Hyphenated American cultures are great.  That shouldn’t be a problem.  It’s only a problem in that there are some negative images about it.  Donald Trump’s unpleasant remarks about Mexicans tie in with those, and don’t help anyone – and it’s highly inappropriate for someone in high office to be coming out with things like that.  The other issue is immigration in general and the regulation of it.  That’s another story, and a controversial one.  But, come what may, there is this cross-border culture, much of it tied up in music.  And that makes the wall idea sound even stupider than it does anyway.

There’s so much history in music, and there’s a fair bit of music in history.  I don’t think Reginald D Hunter really wanted to talk about music.  He just wanted to have a go at American immigration policy, and this was a way of doing it.  But there was some interesting information about music in this, and interesting information about the cross-border culture in general.  And, hey, it’s given me an excuse to write a bit about the Mexican War.

I still don’t know why we had to sing The Streets of Laredo at primary school, though …

The Seamstress by Maria Duenas

This book is set partly in Madrid, partly in and around Lisbon, partly in Tangier, then a multicultural international zone associated with everything from artists to espionage, and mostly in Tetouan, which served as the capital of the Spanish protectorate of Morocco from 1913 to 1956. Four fascinating cities, and an interesting story set mainly during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, with a mixture of real people and fictional characters.

It’s not a spy story – I don’t really do spy stories, apart from James Bond! – but a lot of it does involve the Special Operations Executive. I generally associate Special Operations Executive with Occupied France – and I’m afraid that that’s just made me think of ‘Allo ‘Allo, but never mind – and the Norwegian heavy water sabotage, and don’t think very much about Spain and all the other countries where operations were taking place; and I think there’s also a tendency to think of Spain and Portugal as being outside mainstream European history during the period of the fascist dictatorships there, despite the well-known links between Franco and Hitler.

Also, despite the Rif War and its effect on Spanish politics in the 1920s, and for all the ongoing rows over Western Sahara (why does no-one make a fuss over the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara?), and the fact that Spain holds Ceuta and Melilla, it’s easy to forget that Spain was, and still is, involved in North Africa – it wasn’t all about France, Italy and (in Egypt) Britain. As the book points out, Spain didn’t really get involved in the Scramble for Africa, but it did, after losing control of Cuba and the Philippines, make an agreement with France which gave it control of a couple of bits of Morocco.  Tetouan, a city with a complicated history (involving a lot of pirates, back in the day!), and a mixed population of Arab Muslims, Berber Muslims and Sephardi Jews, was the administrative centre of the southern bit.

I’m not sure that we really got the distinction between Arabs and Berbers, though: there were just a lot of references to “Moors”. I was slightly bemused in Sicily recently to see a sign warning people to beware of “Saracens” in cafes.  I assume that it was in the sense of the old-fashioned English term “street Arabs”, but you just wouldn’t dream of using that term in English now, and you wouldn’t really say “Moors” when talking about the 20^th or 21^st centuries.  Anyway, things are presumably different in Spanish and Italian … and I have now got off the point.  I just have a lot of sympathy with the way that the Berbers have been treated in Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and elsewhere.  And, having said all of this, there were quite a few references to “Riffians”, and Riffians are Berbers.

OK, OK, back to the point!   Amongst the Spanish officials there in the 1930s were the pro-British Juan Luis Beigbeder y Atienza, later Franco’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Franco’s pro-German brother-in-law, who would eventually replace Beigbeder as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ramon Serrano Suner.

So some pretty influential people. Both of them, especially Beigbeder, feature in the book, as do Alan Hillgarth, the British adventure novelist who was an intelligence agent in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, and Rosalinda Powell Fox, Beigbeder’s lover and a British spy.  Churchill’s supposed to have said that “the war might have taken a very different course were it not for Rosalinda”.

None of them are very familiar figures. It’s not a part of twentieth century history that gets a lot of attention.  Too much else going on at the time, to be fair!

The main characters, though, are the fictional ones. The first person protagonist, the seamstress of the title, is Sira Quiroga.  The early part of her life’s a bit like a cross between Evita and a Georgian melodrama – she’s the illegitimate daughter of a Madrid seamstress and her married former lover, grows up in poverty, and dumps her nice boyfriend for someone who is clearly bad news.  Her long-lost dad reappears on the scene, gives her a load of money and jewellery, and suggests that she get out of Spain because trouble (the civil war)’s coming.  She and the new boyfriend go off to Morocco, and, whaddaya know, he runs off with her money and jewellery and leaves her with a huge pile of debts.  She gets involved with various shady characters, and sets herself up as a high-class dressmaker in Tetouan, where most of her customers are the wives of Nazis hanging around there, but where she also meets and becomes friendly with the aforementioned Rosalinda Powell Fox, and is recruited by the British Special Operations Executive.

She goes back to Madrid, and is sent on a mission to Lisbon, and there’s a lot of chasing around and jumping off trains … it is all a bit James Bond, but it’s largely a historical novel, full of information about what was going on in the Spanish protectorate and in Spain itself at the time. What would have happened if Spain had joined forces with the Third Reich and Mussolini’s Italy?  It could well have happened.  Maybe it’s best not to think too much about it.  It sounds a bit weird that a book should start off as a tale of poverty and dodgy boyfriends and then turn into a wartime thriller, but it does work really well.  I love the idea of writing notes in Morse code, made to look like the stitches for a sewing pattern!

And it’s been made into a TV series, under its original title – El Tiempo Entre Costuras (The Time Between Seams) – in Spain, but unfortunately it’s never been shown in the UK. Sky Arts used to show some good Spanish drama series – I really enjoyed Grand Hotel and Isabella – but they don’t any more, which is a shame.

The ending is really annoying, though. We see Sira reunitedwith Marcus Logan, a British spy with whom she’d become involved in Tetouan and then (as you do) just happened to bump into whilst she was on her secret mission to Lisbon.  After they’d dramatically got off the train together to escape the agents of the Spanish double agent who’s working for both the British and the Nazis (I did say it was all a bit James Bond), and it’d turned out that he knew her long-lost dad (yes, OK, it did get a bit far-fetched), but we don’t actually find out what happens to them after the war – we’re told that it’s all a mystery.  Sorry, but that’s a rather silly way to end a book!

But, apart from the ending, and the fact that some of the spy adventure stuff is a bit bonkers for a book that isn’t actually a spy story, it’s very entertaining, and very interesting. It really is easy to think of Spain and Portugal as having been outside the mainstream of European history for much of the twentieth century, and maybe even the second half of the nineteenth century too.  They weren’t.  And Tetouan – I love Morocco, but I knew nothing about Tetouan before reading this book, but what a fascinating place it sounds!  And, come on, Sky Arts, give us some more Spanish drama!

In the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant

I love the idea of Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este, arguably two of the three most fascinating women (Caterina Sforza probably trumps both of them) of the Italian Wars/Renaissance period, having a really bitchy Krystle-Alexis type rivalry.  Unfortunately, Sarah Dunant’s books, much as I enjoy them – I’ll read anything set in 15^th/16^th century Italy! – never quite seem to go deep enough, and always leave you with a slightly frustrated feeling of only having skimmed the surface.  They’re good, but, given the subject matter, they could be so much better!

This is the sequel to Blood and Beauty, and follows the Borgias – Rodrigo (Pope Alexander VI), Cesare and Lucrezia – from the time of Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso d’Este, brother of Isabella and Beatrice, in early 1502, to Rodrigo’s death in 1503.  It doesn’t cover the relationship between Lucrezia and Francesco Gonzaga, Isabella’s husband … I don’t think that really got going until later on, which explains it, but it seems a bit odd that the author wrote the book in a way that meant that such a juicy storyline was missing.  Maybe she’s planning another sequel.  The Lucrezia-Isabella rivalry, which could have made for such fascinating reading, is, disappointingly, largely shown as bitching about who’s got the best clothes. We do get to see the poet Bembo, and Lucrezia becoming his muse, though.

It’s Lucrezia who dominates the book, but Rodrigo and Cesare feature too.  We only really see Rodrigo as someone in poor health who knows that he hasn’t got long to live, but that’s the stage of his life at which the book’s set.  Ever since that Sky Atlantic series about the Borgias, I keep imagining Rodrigo Borgia as looking like Jeremy Irons, and of course he looked absolutely nothing like him – he weighed about 10 stone more, for a kick off!    As far as Cesare goes, this book is set after the really interesting bits, i.e. the conquests of Imola and Forli, not to mention bumping off his brother-in-law, but we do see him taking control of Urbino and Camerino, and then falling out with his own men.  It’s not the most interesting part of his life/career, either, though.

Machiavelli also features – interesting idea to involve him.  He always turns up in books about the Medici, but not so much in books about the Borgias.  His wife, whom I don’t think I’ve ever seen mentioned in a book before, also has a role as a supporting character.  I think the Borgias probably had as much influence on the writing of The Prince (a book which I read over 25 years ago and do not particularly intend to read again) as the Medicis did, so I think that including him worked, although it made the story quite bitty – and, because it was jumping between the three main Borgia characters, it was quite bitty anyway.

But, as I said, the main focus is on Lucrezia – on her marriage to Alfonso d’Este, her grief for her previous husband, Alfonso of Aragon, how much she’s missing her young child, and her grief after she suffers a stillbirth which was probably a result of Alfonso d’Este contracting syphilis and passing it on to her.  Not the pleasantest of topics, syphilis, but you can’t really write about this period of Italian history without it.

The other week, I was waiting to get off the Palermo to Naples overnight ferry (I’d been to Sicily on holiday, but was flying back to Rome), and I was thinking about Neapolitan history to try to distract myself from the fact that everything was running late and I really needed my breakfast, and “See Naples and die” kept going through my head.  Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be because the city’s so beautiful (which it is), but it also has all these connotations of the spread of syphilis during the Italian Wars!   It’s not actually clear whether or not Lucrezia contracted it, but it would explain her sad history of miscarriages and stillbirths and general health problems during her marriage to Alfonso d’Este.  The book does go on about this quite a lot.  Er, and, as it’s not the pleasantest of topics, as I said, on to other things now.

All the rubbish that’s been written about the Borgias over the years, the incest and the poisonings and all the rest of it, is thankfully missing.  I don’t think anyone still buys that, but old stories die hard. The book shows Lucrezia as being quite a sweet person, and Rodrigo Borgia as being devoted to his family.  I quite admire Rodrigo – plenty of the senior churchmen in those days had mistresses and illegitimate children, but he was really the only one who had the nerve to act as if his children were equivalent to members of royal/noble dynasties, make grand marriages for them and encourage his surviving son to create a state for himself.  OK, he’s like a walking argument in favour of the Reformation, but you’ve got to admire that nerve!   The presentation of Cesare isn’t so favourable, but I don’t see how anyone can find much good to say about Cesare Borgia.  I cannot stand the man.

But I do like Lucrezia.  She, and Catherine de Medici’s another one, haven’t half been libelled over the years.  It’s good to see her being represented more as she actually was – and interesting to see her, like so many princesses and noblewomen over the centuries, having to cope with being packed off to a strange court and put under huge pressure to produce an heir.  There’s also an interesting interlude involving her staying at a convent, seeking physical and spiritual respite.

Machiavelli comes across as a decent bloke, as well.  I’m not sure what he’d have thought if he’d known that his name would be turned into an adjective meaning deceitful/unscrupulous!  It was a great idea to include him and the Borgias, and Isabella d’Este as well, in the same book.  It just doesn’t seem to be as good as it could have been.  It doesn’t help that this really isn’t the most interesting period of the lives of the Borgias, but, even so, with such a fascinating cast of characters, it had huge potential which it didn’t quite fulfil.  Or maybe it’s just me!

Incidentally, what is the obsession with Hilary Mantel?  I read the reviews of both this book and Nicola Griffith’s Hild on Amazon before buying them, and both were full of comparisons, evidently meant to be highly complimentary, with Hilary Mantel.  I’m obviously missing something here, because I didn’t get Wolf Hall at all, and it is not like me not to “get” a book about the Tudors.  I thought it was silly, quite honestly.  Oh well, never mind.  This is much better than Wolf Hall!  I just think it could have been … more.