Mrs Lowry and Son

This film, set just three and half miles down the road from me, has the wonderful message that there is always beauty in everything.  Even bare bottoms (there seem to be a lot of these on our screens lately) in Agecroft 🙂 .  And mill chimneys, railway viaducts, canal bridges, and, of course, people. On the face of it, it’s a rather bleak film about a woman who can’t accept her loss of financial and social status, and deals with it by controlling and constantly putting down her lonely middle-aged son.  But there is that message there; and it’ll particularly mean a lot to those of us who know Pendlebury, Agecroft, Farnworth, Chorlton-cum-Hardy and the other places mentioned, even if we don’t remember the days when Victoria Park was a posh area!  Superb performances from Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave.  They even do pretty well with the Lancashire accents!

They aren’t today’s Manchester/Salford accents, but accents, like places, change over the years, and they work for the 1930s.  It’s 1934, and L.S. Lowry is living in Pendlebury with his mother Elizabeth – working as a rent collector, and painting in the attic in his spare time.  I’m not good with art, but I can always tell a Lowry. Matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs 🙂 . We’re proud of him.  The Lowry Centre is – obviously! – named after him.  There are songs about him. There’s even a statue of him in Sam’s Chop House. Unfortunately, his mother wasn’t very proud of him.  She resented the fact that the debts left by his late father meant that they had to leave Victoria Park, quite a posh area in the 1930s, and move to a two-up two-down in a working-class part of Salford (I’m not quite clear on how a two-up two-down comes to have an attic, but never mind), she saw her son as a disappointment, and she controlled and dominated him.

I don’t think she was as bad as she’s shown here, and I don’t think he was anything like as downtrodden as he’s shown here; but it works for the sake of the film, and there was certainly a fair amount of truth to it.  The film is almost entirely about the two of them.  No-one else has more than a handful of lines, and much of the action takes place in her bedroom, which she rarely leaves.  They even eat their tea in there.  She stays there all day, whilst he goes around the area working as a rent collector.  She complains about his job, even telling him to wash his hands when he gets in, and demanding to see if they’re clean as if he were a little boy.  And she keeps on telling him that his paintings are no good.  It’s partly to put him down, to knock whatever confidence he’s got, but it’s also because most of them are of the industrial landscape and its people, our people, and she doesn’t want that – she doesn’t want the life, and she doesn’t want the depictions of it.

But he sees the beauty in it all.  The Hovis advert streets.  I’m not sure where that was filmed: nowhere in Salford actually looks like that!  Looking down on the mill chimneys of Bolton from the moors.  The canals.  The railway arches.  The miner who works at Agecroft Colliery – which was about two and a half miles from me, and, like all the other Lancashire collieries, is now closed – having a bath in the back yard and then getting out of it.  The woman with a beard.  He says that he paints, and he paints what he sees.  And it’s beautiful.

I mean, obviously industrial Lancashire is beautiful 😉 . We all know that!  But he’s got the gift of seeing beauty in everything.  At the moment, it seems as if too many people want only to see ugliness in everything.  I’m so upset about Bury FC being kicked out of the league.  L S Lowry would be too, if he were still alive.  He knew that there was beauty in going to a football match, even if he did support City!  But the beauty in it was all the support from fans of other clubs, and all the people talking about community and history and heritage without some sneering avocado-eater from Islington or Notting Hill calling them racists.  It so often seems now that people want to see hatred and ugliness in everything that anyone else says or does, and in every little thing that they see around them.  Why do people have to be like that?  Walk around the streets, look around you, look at the people around you, and see the beauty there.

She couldn’t – she didn’t even leave the house, and all she could see was disappointment.   He wanted so badly to please her, but he couldn’t.  But he’s pleased so many other people.  And he’s reminded us that there is always beauty all around us – and that’s lovely.

Prince Albert: a Victorian hero revealed – Channel 4

It’s very nice that Channel 4 are showing so many programmes on Royal history, and it’s brilliant that thousands of documents from the Royal Collection are being digitised and made available on-line, but I didn’t feel that this programme really said very much.  That wasn’t really its fault, more a reflection of the fact that there’ve just been so many programmes about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert recently.  Interesting as they are, it’s time to focus on someone else instead.  Maybe Queen Anne, following the success of The Favourite?  Or George III and George IV, to tie in with Sanditon?  I see that Lucy Worsley’s been prancing about in a Regency-era bathing costume.  One for ladies, I mean! Or the first three Edwards?  There’s plenty of choice!

Obviously there’s a lot of interest in Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the moment, partly because of the popular ITV drama series and partly because of this year marking the bicentenary of their births, but we really are being inundated with programmes about them!  Er, yes, OK, I know, I don’t have to watch them all!  And I did quite enjoy this, even though some of it was rather patronising – I’m sure viewers were well aware that most people in the 1840s didn’t have the vote, and that conditions for the urban working poor were pretty dire, and didn’t need either fact pointing out as if it were some sort of startling revelation!   It was especially interesting to see the personal photos and other items in the archive – particularly poignant was the copy of Peveril of the Peak (which I have still never read, despite there being a pub in town named after it and despite the fact that I’ve been to Peveril Castle) with a bookmark still at the place where Victoria, who’d been reading it aloud to Albert, had got up to when he died.

It was basically a quick run-through of his life and times – a bit about his childhood, then (with Vltava playing in the background, for no apparent reason) his marriage to Queen Victoria, his early unpopularity, his keenness to promote the image of them and their children as the perfect family, his involvement with the design of Osborne House, the effect on him of the big Chartist demos in 1848, his interest in improving housing and education, and the Great Exhibition.  And it was all very interesting – his concern for social issues was very admirable, and his work ethic very impressive.  He was an incredible man, and he had a huge impact on this country and beyond.

It’s just that there’d been so many programmes about him and Queen Victoria this year already.  At one time, every historical documentary on TV seemed to be about either Henry VIII or Elizabeth I.  Now they’re all about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.  A bit more variety, please!!  Come on, George IV and Mrs Fitzherbert and Queen Caroline would make for a brilliant documentary …

Sanditon – ITV

I really wanted to enjoy this, especially with Poldark finishing; and I did, but with a lot of reservations. On the positive side, I loved how Andrew Davies had interpreted the characters and their friendships. Lady Denham was superb, Charlotte Heywood appealing and Miss Denham gloriously bitchy; and Sidney Parker displayed traits of both Mr Darcy and Mr Knightley. On the negative side, he’d gone so overboard in trying to “sex it up” that I got the distinct feeling that he was more interested in trying to grab headlines than in entertaining viewers. Male nude bathing period during the Regency period, OK, but not streaking across the beach! The ball ended up more like the Oom-pah-pah scene from Oliver! than something from a Jane Austen book, the suggestions of incest were gratuitous; and Sir Edward Denham and Clara Brereton were supposed to be having a quiet private conversation, not getting up to all sorts in the woods. And a bit more humour wouldn’t have gone amiss. However, in between the shots of bare backsides and wild waltzing, plenty of interesting questions were posed as to how the story might pan out, and I’ll be sticking with it. But I don’t think we’ll still be talking about this in twenty years’ time.  Or even twenty weeks’ time.

The late Georgian era was not the Victorian era. Jane Austen’s books are hardly puritanical. Colonel Brandon’s childhood sweetheart had an illegitimate child and a string of lovers, Maria Rushworth (nee Bertram) left her husband and ran off with Henry Crawford, and Lydia Bennet was quite happy to live with Mr Wickham before they got married. But many of the scenes in last night’s episode just didn’t fit with her writing at all. They weren’t even historically accurate: the waltz was still considered quite shocking in 1816, when the book was set (the manuscript makes the date clear, although last night’s programme didn’t), and wouldn’t have been danced by unmarried couples at a respectable ball. And they weren’t even attractive. Mr Darcy in a wet shirt – yes. Ross Poldark scything with no top on – yes. Bare bums jiggling about on the shore – er, no, thanks.

Bare bums aside, this was always going to beg a lot of questions because Jane Austen was only able to write so little of the story before her final illness. What there is of the book tells us virtually nothing about some of the characters, and we have no real idea how everything was going to unfold or whom she intended to end up with whom. It’s also different from her other books in that it centres on, as Lady Denham summed it up, “industry and enterprise”, rather than the world of the country gentry.

Andrew Davies has developed what we are told about the characters, and I like the way he’s done that. Charlotte was in on the action from the first, with plenty of Elizabeth Bennet’s liveliness but with a touch of Catherine Morland’s naivete, and made a very appealing heroine. Clara Brereton, played by Lily Sacofsky from Didsbury – quick shout out to a fellow Mancunian there 😉 – , was reminiscent of Jane Fairfax – although Jane wouldn’t have been getting up to no good in the woods. Sidney Parker, who’s presumably going to be the hero, was being rude like Mr Darcy, delivering lectures like Mr Knightley, and generally being all dark and handsome and brooding. Arthur Parker was a bit of a comic caricature, but a lot of Austen’s characters are like that – think Mr Collins, or Anne Steele. Sir Edward Denham was very slimy, and Esther Denham very bitchy – I was going to say like a more sophisticated version of Isabella Thorpe, but she didn’t even try to be friendly with anyone!

The one main character whom we haven’t really met yet is Miss Lambe, who, as Austen’s only non-white character, will inevitably attract a lot of attention from viewers and reviewers. All Austen really tells us about us is that she’s “sickly”, the word she uses to describe Anne de Bourgh, which isn’t promising at all – I’m afraid Austen had no patience with health problems! But it looks as if Davies has imagined her being rather more like Caroline Bingley – a bit snooty and very confident, and much more interesting than Anne de Bourgh! The star of the show, though, was Lady Denham, played by Anne Reid. Absolutely brilliant! Like the Dowager Countess of Grantham crossed with a Coronation Street battleaxe. I can’t rave about her enough! I bet she gets all the best lines. And good lines are much more important than streaking across beaches.

The 9pm on Sunday timeslot’s now iconic. It’s the period drama timeslot. But Beecham House was disappointing, the last series of Victoria was too full of historical inaccuracies, the final series (sob!!) of Poldark got rather silly and now it doesn’t look as if Sanditon‘s going to live up to the high standards set by earlier series either. Thank heavens for Gentleman Jack, which raised the bar right back up! I just wish the rest of this year’s period dramas had matched it. It doesn’t look as if this one’s going to. But there were some promising aspects to the first episode, and, hey, maybe it’ll get better!

 

Massachusetts by Nancy Zaroulis

This is one of those Edward Rutherfurd/James Michener-type books which tell the history of a country, a city, or, in this case, an American state through the lives of several generations of a small number of families. In this book, it’s just one family – the Revells, one of whom arrives in America on the Mayflower. It’s always tricky to know what to say about books like this, because only so much can be fitted in and we all have our own ideas about what the most important events in history are. It’s very interesting as a history of Massachusetts, but I did find it quite insular – neither world war got more than a passing mention, the Civil War didn’t feature very much because there was no actual fighting in the area, and don’t even get me started on one of the characters claiming that the Industrial Revolution started in Massachusetts – and it might have been better to have included different families from different backgrounds rather than just the one. Gold star, however, for the focus on female characters, which is unusual in these types of sagas.

The Revells do the American Dream thing, and become one of Boston’s leading families. We follow them from the Mayflower, on to the founding of Boston, and its early days under strict Puritaan control – we see the persecution of anyone whose religious views didn’t suit the Puritans, and we see one of them falling victim to the Salem Witch Trials. Massachusetts is such a paradox – in the forefront of the fights for Abolitionism and women’s suffrage, both of which are covered in the books, and yet with such a history of religious persecution and, well into the 20th century, religious and ethnic discrimination.

The book doesn’t shy away from the negatives. The Sacco and Vanzetti trial, which saw two Italian anarchists executed for a murder of which they may well have been innocent, is covered in detail. We also see the struggles of the Shaughnessys, a working-class Irish-American family, against poverty and discrimination – although the focus is always on the Revells.

This was published in 1991, before there was so much emphasis on “diversity”; but books like this do usually include a number of different families. I assume from her surname that the author, like a lot of people in Massachusetts, has Greek heritage: there are no Greek Americans here. Sympathy is shown for Native Americans, but they only feature when they’re kidnapping one of the early Revell women, and there is only one black character, the maid of the woman who’s kidnapped, in the entire book. It’s made clear that the discrimination against Catholics and Jews and, in the early days, Quakers is wrong, but we don’t really hear their voices, except to some extent with the Shaughnessys. There’s also sympathy for the industrial workers and their attempts to form unions and win better working conditions, but, again, we don’t really hear their voices, only those of the wealthy Revell who owns the mills, and another Revell who’s reporting on it all.

On the other hand, this isn’t a textbook, so maybe I’m being unfair. If it’d been called “The Revells of Massachusetts” instead of just “Massachusetts”, I wouldn’t be criticising – it’s only because the title suggests that it’s telling the history of a state, not that of one family. And, as I’ve said, it’s not as if it doesn’t show both negative and positive aspects of the history of Massachusetts. All sorts of things are included. There’s quite a lot about transcendentalism. And it ends with an environmentalist campaign.

It’s pretty much all set in Massachusetts. We don’t follow the characters anywhere else. The Civil War doesn’t really feature very much, because there was no fighting in or around Boston. However, there is loads and loads about the Revolution. The Revells are in there at the Boston Tea Party, and they play major roles during the War of Independence. Let’s just say that that’s very much told from an American point of view. But the War of 1812 isn’t mentioned very much, and the two world wars and Vietnam only feature in passing.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this book. The characters are quite interesting and there’s a lot of information about the history of Massachusetts, especially Boston. I can’t fault the history, and, apart from the part about the War of Independence, it isn’t biased. And it was great to see so many strong female characters. But I’d like to have seen some different families – maybe a poorer family who’d also come over the Mayflower but not succeeded economically, for a start. And, whilst I fully appreciate that the book was about Massachusetts, I think that having all the action in Massachusetts meant that some crucial events, notably the Civil War, didn’t get the attention they deserved.

However, despite the moaning (sorry!), I did enjoy this – it packed a huge amount into 700-ish pages, and it was never boring. Books like this can be a really good way of learning more about a place.

Living in the Shadow of World War II – More4

Programmes about the history of food are always interesting, and the effect of food rationing during the Second World War is still with us. Apple crumble and carrot cake, anyone 🙂 ? My fridge is full of leftover bits and pieces, even fruit that’s starting to go off, because my grandparents’ generation trained my generation never to throw good food away. This programme managed to cover all sorts of things in under an hour – glorious terms such as “National Loaf” and the “Rural Pie Scheme”, some strange revelations about the testing carried out by nutritionists, the Dig For Victory scheme, mobile demonstration vans showing people how to make eggless cakes, issues with knicker elastic, how being Land Girls made life easier for lesbians, “Doctor Carrot” (with very odd-looking shoes) and, of course, queues. You’d think they’d have mentioned that Lord Woolton, the Minister for Food (and only a “lord” since 1939) grew up just round the corner from Old Trafford, though. I mean, I’d have said that in the first few minutes.  What came across really well was what a good job the authorities did of managing a difficult situation, and how they really tried to make it as fair as possible.

I’m not sure that I really needed to know that nutritionists were analysing what came out as well as what went in, but, OK, it made the point that there was serious scientific research going on into what people needed to eat in order to remain healthy. Whilst the Nazis allowed people not considered to be part of the master race only 450 calories a day, and the Soviets prioritised the transport of armaments even if it meant food supplies running short, the government here really did try to make sure that no-one went without – even though, by late 1942, pretty much all types of food other than vegetables were on ration, and it wasn’t always possible to get certain items even if you had the coupons for them.

All that queuing! And then trying to feed yourself and the rest of your household on whatever you’d managed to get. My grandmas and great-aunts used to keep ridiculous amounts of non-perishable foodstuffs in stock, because they never quite got past the psychological impact of coping with rationing. And it was a huge amount of work for shopkeepers. The programme talked about all the detailed record-keeping that had to be done, especially when people wanted to take only part of their weekly ration and come back for the rest another day, and people remembered little arguments over things like whether or not the weight of the paper that the food was wrapped in should be taken into account. And, OK, there was a fair bit of black market activity going on, despite the large fines and two year prison sentences that could be imposed for it, but people were generally very accepting of the situation. There were no food riots, even though everyone must have got thoroughly fed up (no pun intended) with it all.

So much thought and work went into it all. What a contrast to the times of food shortages in earlier periods of time, when the less well-off were just left to suffer. Famously, even the Royal Family were subject to rationing, and we heard Eleanor Roosevelt’s account of being served off gold and silver plates on a visit to Buckingham Palace, but only getting the same amount and type of food that was available to everyone else, including “National Loaf” bread – which must have been very good for you, because it contained extra calcium and vitamins, but which apparently looked and tasted bloody awful. Price caps were put on the amount that restaurants could charge for a meal, to ensure that it didn’t become a case of the rich eating out all the time whilst everyone else had to cope on rations, and subsidies were given to the least well-off.

It didn’t mention school dinners, which was a shame, but I suppose they couldn’t cover everything. We did hear about British Restaurants, though – and how they got their patriotic name because Churchill thought that terms like “community feeding centres” sounded too socialist! It wouldn’t be a bad idea to bring something like that back. And the wonderfully-named Rural Pie Scheme, providing pies for farm workers. A lot of voluntary work was involved. Then there were the “mobile demonstration vans”, doing their eggless cake demos! Austerity food like apple crumbles and carrot cakes are still very popular … although some of the other stuff mentioned, including horse meat and (immediately after the fall of Norway) whale meat, didn’t go down very well even at the time. It seems a bit unfair that game wasn’t rationed, seeing as people in inner city areas would have had far less access to it than those in rural areas, but I suppose there was no practical way of monitoring it.

The programme talked a lot about the campaigns to help people cope with rationing and promote healthy eating, as well. There seemed to be a lot of films, which presumably people only got to see if they went to the cinema, although wireless programmes were also mentioned. Doctor Carrot, with a top hat, glasses and some very odd-looking shoes, helping fighter pilots to see in the dark!  A lot of it sounds horrendously patronising now, especially as the voiceovers were always by men, at a time when nearly all the cooking would have been done by women, and always in those terribly posh accents that all BBC announcers used to speak in, but the authorities really were trying hard to make sure people could manage.

We also heard a bit about the Dig For Victory scheme, including film of Aintree racecourse, a golf club and parts of the royal estates being dug up. It was all so well-organised. I hate to sound like some old biddy going on about how everything was done better back in the day, but imagine if the people in charge of, say, rolling out Universal Credit had been in charge of distributing ration coupons or encouraging people to Dig For Victory. Domestic food production levels rocketed. Farm labourers’ wages went way up! People volunteered to help bring in the harvest. The Land Girls did incredibly important work – some of it, especially for those in the Timber Corps, extremely physically demanding.

The programme also touched on how the war was quite liberating for those women, with particular reference to lesbians, and also briefly mentioned clothes rationing – with specific reference to painting your legs to make it look as if you were wearing stockings, and the potential issues that a shortage of elastic could cause with underwear! – and petrol rationing, but it was mostly about food. It says a lot about how attitudes had changed. I’ve got the Napoleonic Wars on the brain at the moment, because of the Peterloo bicentennial, and there were terrible food shortages then, with people just left to cope as best they could, food riots breaking out, and then, after the wars, the Corn Laws making it all worse. During the Second World War (I do wish people would not talk about “World War II”, as if it were a film franchise), things really were pretty well-organised – and, as we’re always being told, the health of the working-classes actually improved.

I don’t know why this series was shoved in a graveyard slot, on More4 rather than on Channel 4 itself, because there’s usually a lot of interest in the Home Front during the Second World War. There are two more episodes, which I haven’t had chance to watch yet. I’m looking forward to them: this was great.

Sanditon by Jane Austen (Facebook group reading challenge)

The forthcoming ITV adaptation of this, Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, apparently includes three men skinny-dipping in the sea.  Austen did not actually write that scene 😉 .  She didn’t actually write very much of this at all, before she had to stop work due to ill-health.  I’m not sure what she’d have made of people reading her unfinished work, much less of people making up their own endings to it; but it’s a promising start, and not necessarily what you’d expect of Jane Austen.  It’s set in a Sussex seaside resort – it’d probably make a wonderful sitcom, the genuinely funny kind that we used to get in the ’70s and ’80s – and there’s quite a big cast.  It includes a mixed race character, which was a first for Austen, and a wealthy widow who’s the queen of the town of Sanditon.  Our heroine is Charlotte Heywood, who’s staying with family friends, there are various other young single people, and presumably they were all going to be paired off after various misunderstandings and revelations.  However, there just isn’t very much of it – Jane Austen set the scene, but sadly wasn’t able to get much further.

It helpfully refers to Waterloo, so we know that it’s set some time between the Battle of Waterloo, in June 1815, and early 1817, when Jane Austen had to give up writing.  It’s summer, so it must be the summer of 1816.  I do like to know when books are set, and, apart from Persuasion, her other books don’t make it clear!   So it’s set in peacetime – not that the wars ever seem to bother Austen characters very much – and it’s set during the Regency, the Prince Regent famously being very keen on Brighton.  We don’t know exactly where Sanditon is, but it’s somewhere near Brighton and Eastbourne, but, unlike them, at this point fairly undeveloped.  There are all sorts of glorious Austen sarcastic remarks … oops, I mean “ironic” remarks.  We did Northanger Abbey at school, and the teacher went berserk if anyone talked about Jane Austen being “sarcastic”.  “Ironic,” she would say indignantly.

Anyway.  There are lots of ironic remarks sending up the fad for sea air and sea bathing.  Health fads are nothing new – although most of us are unable to take advantage of any which involve going on holiday for weeks at a time!  I’m actually a great believer in sea air, but, as this book delights in pointing out, at that time there were a lot of hypochondriacs who decided that they had all sorts of ailments which sea air and sea bathing would cure, and Jane Austen did love to poke fun at people she saw as being a bit daft.

Unusually, the book doesn’t start with the heroine, but with an initially unnamed lady and gentleman whose carriage overturns in the Sussex countryside.  They turn out to be Mr and Mrs Parker: Mr Parker is an entrepreneur who’s hoping to make Sanditon the next “in” seaside place.  This is really something different for Austen: she didn’t normally “do” entrepreneurs.  They’re helped out by the Heywoods, and they, apart from having 14 children (13 of whom aren’t even named) are a more typical Austen family – gentry, but of limited means.  The Parkers take Charlotte Heywood, one of the daughters, back to Sanditon with them.  They’re desperate to get tourism going in Sanditon, and news of any new arrival is greeted with great excitement.

Charlotte was clearly set to be the main character, but the book doesn’t revolve around her in the way that Austen’s other books revolve around their heroines.  There’s a lot about Lady Denham, the aforementioned wealthy widow, and her niece, the sweet and beautiful but dowerless Clara Brereton.  Then there’s Miss Lambe, the “half mulatto” 17-year-old West Indian heiress, who like Anne de Bourgh is extremely rich but sickly.  She’s one of a group of schoolgirls spending the summer in Sanditon, but we don’t really get chance to know any of them.  Assorted other characters arrive in Sanditon, but, before Austen was able to do anything much other than set the scene, that was it: she wasn’t able to write any more.  It’s not even clear who was going to be the hero.

How very frustrating!   I’m sure Andrew Davies has done a good job of it, but we’ll never know what Jane Austen intended to happen – and that’s a shame, because it was shaping up to be very good, and also a bit different from her other books.  I’ve read them all so many times that I practically know them off by heart, but, for some reason, I’d never read this one before.  The Sunday night 9pm slot, the famous Downton Abbey slot, always gets people talking, so, once the ITV series gets going, I’m sure that Sanditon will be being talked about everywhere!  But, in terms of what Jane Austen actually wrote, there isn’t really very much to say.  Unfulfilled promise!

 

The Peterloo Affair by Lucinda Elliot

This can be quite accurately described as a Regency romance, although it couldn’t be further removed from the images that that term conjures up. That made me think about how wide of the mark general perceptions of the Regency era are. Thanks to Georgette Heyer & co, the word “Regency” suggests dashing young men in breeches dancing with elegant young ladies in long frocks, at glamorous balls in spa towns or stately homes. However, the Regency was a time of war, unrest, riots, repression, lack of representation, assassination, unemployment, food shortages and high prices for what food there was.  Today, we mark the 200th anniversary of the killing of eighteen people, with hundreds more injured, as they attended a peaceful parliamentary reform meeting in our city. The response of one of the most authoritarian governments our country has ever known was to introduce even more measures aimed at repressing attempts to improve the rights of ordinary people.  It was a far cry from the world of the Bath Assembly Rooms.

This book traces the romance between two people, from a fictional village somewhere on the north east side of Manchester, who were both at St Peter’s Field that day. It’s not the greatest book ever – although it did amuse me by using words like “dandyprat” and “rumpskuttle”.  And it would have benefited from more careful editing: the piece de resistance was when the name of a character called Jimmy Thribble was mistyped as “Jimmy Riddle” (I am not making this up).  But it’s not bad, and it’s got the additional merit of having a woman as the main character: a disproportionate number of those injured at Peterloo were female. For 99p on Kindle, it’s worth a read.

We can’t know whether or not women were deliberately targeted, but we do know that the proportion of women injured, relative to the number of women attending, was considerably higher than that for men.  Women who became involved in political protest risked particular hostility from the authorities – don’t get me started on religious and political leaders who seemed to think that women speaking at Abolitionist meetings was more shocking than the institution of slavery itself – and also, as this book shows, from elements within their own communities.

The community in this book is that of an unspecified and presumably fictional village, seven miles out of town and, given the references to Middleton, Harpurhey and Oldham, presumably on the north east side of town. Our heroine is a young woman called Joan. Her social background’s a bit confused/confusing. The family are working-class, and, due to the socio-economic problems of the time, they struggle to afford food and clothing.  However, Joan and her friends seem to have, or at least have had, access to lots of romantic novels.  And we never actually see anyone doing any work: they seem to have a lot of free time.  And their parents seem very worried about what the neighbours will think about everything!

However, the author’s got it right in that they’re not factory workers.  Not that many people at Peterloo actually worked in mills: it was a Monday, and, whilst a lot of what would now be called self-employed people took “Saint Mondays” off, it was a working day for people in factories.  It’s estimated that over a third of those there were handloom weavers, and many of the others were artisans – shoemakers, tailors etc. .

The language is also a bit confused: the author’s tried to write some but not all of the dialogue in dialect, so we sometimes get “thee” and “thou”, and sometimes don’t; and she sometimes gets the dialect completely wrong – “fash” is a Scottish or Geordie term, not a Lancastrian one! Whilst I’m moaning, there are some irritating grammatical errors, such as the use of “her” rather than “she” and “who” rather than “whom; and the “Jimmy Riddle” thing is just ridiculous!  And the Six Acts were a response to Peterloo, not a cause of it!

OK, enough moaning.  It’s really not bad at all!  Joan and her pal Marcie – how many people in Lancashire in 1819 would have been called Marcie?! – are unimpressed with women’s lot in life, and have decided that they’re going to steer clear of men and become some sort of doctors, treating people with herbs. A term like “wise women” might have been better, but, OK, credit for emphasising the lack of choices for women at this time. Their intentions don’t last very long, when Joan gets involved with a handsome Irishman called Sean and Marcie gets involved with Joan’s brother. Sean actually does have traits of a typical Regency romance character, having a terrible reputation for loving girls and leaving them. One of his exes even went mad as a result: even Sense and Sensibility didn’t go that far 🙂 . However, the way it’s written isn’t too Mills and Boon-ish to be taken seriously, and we learn how Sean’s wild behaviour was triggered by what would now be recognised as PTSD after his experiences during the Napoleonic Wars. Joan dumps him at one point, but, after he’s badly injured at Peterloo, realises how much he means to her, and it all ends happily.

OK, OK, it’s not the greatest plot ever; but we do see the people of the community, led by Joan’s father and Sean, becoming involved in calls for reform, we see their struggles at a time when the Corn Laws are making the price of food very high, and, in particular, we see the insistence of Joan and Marcie and the other girls in the area that women should join the local contingent going to hear Orator Hunt speak at St Peter’s Field.  The part of the book is the section covering the day of the Peterloo Massacre itself is excellent: the events of the entire day are extremely well-described, and it’s worth reading for that alone.

It’s Joan’s story, rather than the story of Peterloo, but the reform movement and the social and economic conditions of the time are very much a part of it; and, as I’ve said, the sections covering the events of 16th August 1819 are very well done, even if some of the rest of the book isn’t.  For 99p, it’s worth a read.

Councillor Luthfur Rahman, executive member for skills, culture and leisure, Manchester City Council, said: “The Peterloo Massacre was a significant moment in Manchester’s history and in the campaign for democracy in the UK. It’s important we don’t forget and that we remember the sacrifices of all those who went before us in the name of democracy and peace.”

There are a lot of events taking place today and over the weekend to mark the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre.  I hope they get the nationwide coverage that they deserve.  There’s been considerable controversy over the importance and impact of Peterloo.  When there’s controversy over something, it’s usually a pretty sure sign that it’s something important.

 

More about the historical background – Peterloo.

Who Do You Think You Are? (Kate Winslet) – BBC 1

I thought that this was the best episode of the series so far, despite Kate’s melodramatics. I don’t think we’ve ever had anyone with Swedish heritage before: it was like stepping into the world of Vilhelm Moberg’s Karl Oskar and Kristina, and it’s a subject that’s not often covered on English language TV. It was really good to see something different. The military heritage on the other side of her family was interesting too. It had never really occurred to be that the Armed Forces would have been the main employers of musicians before the days of civil orchestras, although it’s really obvious when you think about it! And it’s nice to have an A-lister on the programme: they do sometimes have people whom I’ve barely heard of.  This was a very interesting hour’s TV.

She did overdo it a bit, with the tears and the “I can’t bear it”-ing. OK, it can’t be very pleasant finding out that your long-lost ancestors lived in poverty, had brushes with the law due to stealing food and lost children in infancy, but it’d probably be a similar story for most people’s families. Even those at the top of the social ladder would have been hit by infant deaths, and adults dying young. There were the constant references to her ever-so-‘umble roots, as well. One would have done! But, hey, at least she was interested enough in the social history to get emotional about it.

The story with Kate was that her great-great-grandfather had moved to London from the Halland region of Sweden, becoming a successful tailor on Savile Row. This was fascinating: you think of emigration from Sweden as being to Minnesota and other parts of the American mid-West, not to London. Even Swedish emigration to America isn’t something that’s talked about that much in English language books or TV programmes. So much attention’s paid to emigration from Ireland and, later on, from Italy and the Russian Empire, and yet relatively little’s paid to emigration from Sweden and (then under Swedish rule) Norway, or even to the huge waves of emigration from Germany. I suppose it’s because there wouldn’t have been that much of a cultural or, with Scandinavia and mainly Protestant parts of Germany, religious clash, but it’s certainly a neglected area.

I don’t know what Kate was expecting to find out, but I got the impression that she wasn’t expecting to find that her ancestors’ lives had been so hard.  We think of Sweden, as with Norway and Switzerland, as being a very wealthy country, and forget that that’s a fairly recent development, and how difficult it was historically for countries with very cold weather, very hot weather and or a lot of mountainous terrain, especially at a time of rapid population growth.  The same with the idea of some countries as being particularly liberal, and or as not having a rigid class structure. It hasn’t always been like that.  Take the Netherlands, generally seen as the most liberal-minded country in Europe now, and its centuries of strict Calvinism.

Vilhelm Moberg described life for lower-class people in Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century so well in The Emigrants, and I kept thinking about that when Kate was learning about her ancestors, although at least there were no religious issues here.  When she was taken to a grand castle type place, she must have wondered if they were aristocrats. But no – her great-great-great-great-grandfather was a worker on the estate, paid in tokens that could only be spent in the estate shop, and ended up dying in prison after being convicted of stealing potatoes, shortly after the death of his infant son.  The family were starving, with Sweden being hit by successive years of food shortages even before the Hungry Forties and the Great Famine of the late 1860s.  Neither of those two major famines came into it, strangely enough – we heard about the early 1830s and the early 1850s, but not the two “big” famines, although that was just because of which dates fitted with major events in the family’s history.

Her great-great-great-grandfather fared better, going into the Navy; and it was brilliant that she was able to see the sort of croft house that he’d have. But her great-great-grandfather was the only one of the three children he and his wife had who survived to adulthood.  He became a tailor, like his father – who’d been booted out of the Navy for embezzlement!  I can’t think of any other episode that’s featured Swedish history, and I really enjoyed it. How brilliant were the records, as well? Very impressed with mid 19th century Swedish record-keeping!

Turning to the other side of her family, she found out that her great-great-great-grandfather had served in the Grenadier Guards, joining up at the age of just 11, during the Napoleonic Wars. After having to leave the Army due to rheumatism, he became the head prison warder at Dartmoor … but, at that time, Dartmoor was seen as a sort of new model prison, with inmates working in gardens and attending classes in all sorts of subjects.

That was interesting as well, but I thought that the really good bit was his time in the Army, starting off as a real life Little Drummer Boy, at a time when the sons of soldiers often joined up as children so as to benefit from the educational and career opportunities offered, and rising to the rank of Drum Major. We’re all familiar with military bands, and the importance of drummers and buglers and fifers in the Army in the 18th and 19th centuries – I’m going to have “Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum?” going through my head for the rest of the day now – but, as with Swedish and German emigration to Britain and America, it’s something that doesn’t get all that much attention, and it’s always nice to see new topics covered on a long-running programme.

I’d love to know how they choose people to go on this programme. Presumably they must do a certain amount of research first, to make sure that they can actually find something out, and that it’s something reasonably interesting. But do they approach the celebs, or do the celebs approach them? Where would you start, when it came to choosing people?   They usually manage to turn up something of interest, but often the socio-economic history behind it is something we’ve heard before, with other people.  But, as I’ve said, I don’t think they’ve shown anyone with Swedish heritage before.  A really good hour’s TV.

The Queen’s Lost Family – Channel 4

The title of this programme was very misleading – none of George V’s children were “lost”, with the arguable exception of Prince John, whom the programme never even mentioned – but it was quite an entertaining hour of serious talk about the changing role of the Royal Family, combined with a fair amount of gossip and scandal. OK, it didn’t really say anything new, despite making a big deal of having access to the newly-released letters and diaries of Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood, and it jumped around a lot; but still, I do love a bit of royal talk! It also made some good points about life in the Britain of the 1920s in general. It was too light on the gossip element, though: it never even named any of Prince George (the future Duke of Kent)’s alleged celeb lovers!

I’m not entirely sure what it was aiming to do, especially given the confusing title. Explore the relationships between George V’s children? It was lovely to see, from the letters, how close Mary was to her brothers, and especially to her eldest brother. She’s known to have been quite supportive of him over the Abdication Crisis. Make a point about how all George V’s children suffered from his strictness? I think he gets a bit of a raw deal, TBH. Many fathers of his class and generation were quite remote from their children – although he does, to be fair, seem to have been exceptionally strict. If they were trying to do that, they should really have said more about Bertie’s stammer: it wasn’t mentioned once. Nor was Prince John, which really was weird. There was just no reference to him at all, even in passing. Trace the lives of each of the children (well, except from John)? Maybe. Very little was said about either Mary or Bertie after their marriages, but I think it was focusing on the more glamorous and more scandalous siblings. It was a shame, really, because both Bertie and Mary did a lot of charity work, much of it in unglamorous places, and I think they deserved more attention than the programme gave them. But I suppose you can only fit so much into an hour. Minus adverts.

Or was it meant to be about the changing face of the Royal Family in the 1920s? That was certainly how it started. With the Romanovs murdered, and the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs sent packing, the newly-renamed Windsors must have been more than a bit worried – and it’s to the eternal credit of King George V and Queen Mary that the British monarchy came through this period so strongly.  The programme made it sound as if the country had gone straight from the pre-1832 world of only the upper-classes being able to vote to the post-1918 world of all men and most women being able to vote, which was hardly accurate; but the general point that Britain in 1919 was a very different world to Britain in 1914 was fair enough. The independence movement in India was also covered, although, for some strange reason, Ireland wasn’t mentioned at all.

There were clips of the princes and princess carrying out royal engagements in all sorts of different places. Edward/David got to go on tours of the Empire: Bertie got to visit factories at home. There was also some interesting talk about Mary, and how she was stuck at home whilst her brothers were away at school or naval college, not really allowed to do anything and with no hope of escape other than marriage. Being a princess sounds so glamorous, but it really wasn’t … until Princess Margaret came along, and showed that princesses could go living it up on the town just as well as princes could! A good point was also made about how it was Mary’s wedding, the first time the daughter of a sovereign had married in Westminster Abbey since Edward I’s time, that set the tone for modern royal weddings, with huge crowds in the streets and widespread coverage in the media.

Edward/David missed it, because he was away on a royal tour. He came across as being incredibly annoying. There’s this image of him as the people’s prince, because of his “something must be done” talk after the famous visit to mining areas of the North East, but comments he made after the 1922 General Election and during the General Strike make it pretty clear that he wasn’t actually that keen on “the people” at all. And he did a lot of moaning about how hard his life was, but was quite happy to be a prince when it came to getting into all the best nightclubs and pulling plenty of attractive women. He even moaned about being expected to return from a tour of Kenya when his father fell seriously ill. Bertie, meanwhile, was living a life of eminent respectability, and genuinely trying to help the working classes by running his Boys’ Camps – which the programme didn’t mention.

Henry, Duke of Gloucester, is usually seen as the one who kept a low profile, but he created a bit of scandal of his own, getting involved with an unsuitable woman and installing her as his mistress in a house close to Buckingham Palace – whilst she was heavily pregnant with someone else’s child. He did make a career for himself in the Army, though. And then there was George, who ran wild. The programme was very unsympathetic towards him – OK, he did run wild, but saying that it was “irresponsible” to have homosexual affairs and get addicted to cocaine was a bit much!  “Irresponsible”?!

It was all very bitty, and the title was very silly, but there was some good stuff in it, both about the Royal Family and about the social and economic issues facing post Great War Britain.  Also, whereas the BBC would have spoilt this by shoehorning in their own political agenda and making a load of irrelevant references to modern political events, Channel 4 just talked about the period that the programme was about, and I appreciated that.   Not bad at all!

Blinded By The Light

This started so well!  A Pet Shop Boys song, an A-ha song, and a shot of someone reading Smash Hits.  It doesn’t get much more promising than that!   Unfortunately, it wasn’t actually very good: it wasn’t a bad idea, but it was too full of tropes, stereotypes and negativity.  However, it was still worth seeing, for the glorious music – I thought it was all going to be Bruce Springsteen music, but, even better, it was like Greatest Hits of 1987 – and the ’80s nostalgia.  Pound notes, Walkmans, those traffic light thingies you hung from car mirrors, wearing too much eyeshadow … !  It wasn’t a great film, but it did get a lot of aspects of the ’80s across pretty accurately, and also highlighted the fundamental importance of music, especially during your so-called formative years.  Did anyone’s school actually have a radio station in the 1980s, though?  Mine certainly didn’t!

It was supposed to be a feelgood film.  I suppose it was, in some ways.  Plenty of music and dancing, and a happy ending.  British-Pakistani teenage boy growing up in Luton in the 1980s, and not feeling very happy about anything.  His dad had been made redundant, his mum was having to work all hours to pay the bills, he felt like a misfit at school, he couldn’t get a girlfriend, his parents had expectations of him that weren’t what he wanted, there were issues with racism in the area … and then a friend introduced him to Bruce Springsteen’s music, and the lyrics inspired him, and everything came right for him in the end.  It sounded great, but it just didn’t quite hit the right spots.

Too many tropes?  Most of them were tropes that could have been done so well, though. Loving but overly controlling British-Pakistani father, teenage kids who want to assimilate into British society but also stay close to their families – done brilliantly in East is East.  Geeky teenage boy who’s into politics, writes poems and somehow manages to get together with the cool girl – done brilliantly in the Adrian Mole books.  Supportive, inspirational teacher – done brilliantly in numerous films.  Teenager who wants to become a writer (/artist/singer/dancer/whatever), rather than get what his parents consider a “proper” job – again, done brilliantly in numerous films, and books.  There was nothing wrong with the tropes as such: the film just wasn’t all that convincing.  Maybe the characters didn’t work.  Everyone was so stereotypical.  And they were all, apart from the dad who was a bit of both, either goodies or baddies: there were no nuances at all.

It wasn’t exactly very realistic, either.  OK, fiction would be pretty boring if it was entirely realistic, but there are limits – at least make it believable!  The aforementioned supportive teacher entered one of our hero’s essays in a competition, and, whaddaya know, it won, and the prize was a trip to a writers’ conference in New Jersey, just near Bruce Springsteen’s home town.  Right, because stuff like that happens all the time.  He’d probably have got a £10 book token.  Also, no-one in Britain in the ’80s said “You did good” or referred to their homework as an “assignment”.

Then there was all this American Dream stuff.  In America, anyone can achieve anything!  No-one cares where you come from.  No-one feels negatively about anyone else.  Er, what??  Don’t get me wrong, I love America, but was that idea not all rather more 1890s than 1980s?  And it kept slagging off Luton.  What’s poor Luton ever done to anyone?  Maybe it was meant to be taken humorously, but I don’t like films or songs or books that sneer at places like that.  Why does Gurinder Chadha have to be so negative – not just about Luton, but about Britain in general?  See also Beecham House and Viceroy’s House !  I thought she overdid the controlling dad bit, as well.   But then Bend It Like Beckham was so good – that was everything this could have been and wasn’t, a really lovely feelgood film about a British-Asian teenager. Please, dear, get back to doing what you did so well in 2002!

Our hero did not, incidentally, end up in America.  He went to university in Manchester.  Nothing negative was said about Manchester, at least – that really would have been the final straw!   That was if they ever actually got to Manchester, given that they were rather worryingly following a signpost for “M1 London”.  And he suddenly realised that his dad was actually a really great guy who’d always done his best for his family, and his dad realised that he was really wonderful as well – yeah, yeah, yeah!  Subtle as a sledgehammer.

At one point, our hero and his mate took over the school radio station, blasted out Bruce Springsteen music, and damaged the DJ’s Tiffany record.  There are some Tiffany lyrics which sum this film up pretty well.  “Could’ve been so beautiful, could’ve been so right.”  Er, yes,  Could’ve been …