Chudleigh Hold by Elinor M Brent-Dyer

This was a Blytonesque adventure/mystery/thriller book, but with some very Brent-Dyer-ish touches – a large family, a long-lost cousin and two redoubtable old ladies.  It had a definite post-war feel, with references to both Nazis and rationing.  I really enjoyed it apart from the confusion over Arminel Chudleigh becoming Gill Culver of the Chalet School.  Why the name change and why the personality change?  And why on earth was Arminel nicknamed “Crumpet”?!  The other nicknames, which were fairly self-explanatory anyway, were explained, but there was nothing about that one.

Chudleigh Hold was home to a young baronet, his seven siblings, their nanny, a governess rejoicing in the name of “Loo” and a housemaid, later joined by their great-aunt and her companion.   It was close to the sea, with smugglers’ coves and secret tunnels – you get the idea – and the house was full of valuable paintings and jewellery.

A hitherto unknown cousin invited herself to stay, and Mysterious Things began to happen.  Of course, it turned out that she was a fake, and the truth all came out and the baddies were vanquished in a dramatic adventure, with Great Aunt Merrill and “Crumpet” in the thick of it.  It’s really rather a shame that EBD didn’t write more adventure books, because the Chudleigh Hold series is great fun!

The US and the Holocaust – BBC 4

This three two-hour episode Ken Burns film made for some very uncomfortable viewing at times, and was clearly meant to.  I don’t think it was meant as direct criticism of the US, but it certainly raised some questions about isolationism and tight immigration controls at a time when the media’s full of reports of terrible persecution.  Viewers were informed that, even after the war, when people had seen the newsreels showing what had happened at the concentration camps, polls showed that most Americans opposed admitting refugees.  It also reminded the viewer of some of the less savoury elements in parts of American society, ending with footage of recent hate crimes and the storming of Congress.  There was certainly a great deal to think about.

The first episode, about the situation up to 1938, didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know.  I studied US immigration history in depth at university, so I knew all about the quota-based system and the eugenics-based arguments behind it.   The revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the WASP-only clubs, hotels and even housing estates, the German-American Bund, Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic propaganda, Charles Lindbergh’s American First movement … it was all familiar.  But hearing it all together, in this context, was definitely food for thought.   It was even pointed out that Hitler admired the Jim Crow laws and the deportation of Native Americans from their homelands.

The programme did try to present a balanced view, and it was made clear that, the majority of people in the US were horrified when reports of persecution began to come in, especially after Kristallnacht.  And the US did take in more refugees from Nazi-controlled lands than any other country, and there were some major anti-Nazi protests.   As the programme pointed out, organisations in the US which wanted to help were in a difficult position, with Hitler claiming that anything they did showed that Jews controlled American politics.  There was, however, also a fear that too much open protest by Jewish groups would lead to a rise in domestic anti-Semitism.

It was Roosevelt who called the Evian Conference to discuss the refugee crisis.   Pretty much every country represented there refused to do any more to help.

There were some absolutely heartrending accounts, mainly told through first person interviews with elderly people who’d been children at the time, of desperate attempts to bring loved ones to safety in America, only to be thwarted by red tape and demands for unaffordable financial bonds.  There were also accounts from Holocaust survivors, including Anne Frank’s stepsister.  It wasn’t just the quota system: it was the need to prove that the individual wouldn’t be a burden on the state.  It was a far cry from “Give me … your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free”.  What vision of America did people actually have?   Or do visions not matter, only practicalities?  Unrestricted immigration isn’t practical, but should exceptions be made when people are clearly refugees, not economic migrants?   These are difficult subjects, and there was a lot of food for thought in this.   And of course it wasn’t just America.  Other countries did little to help either.

You got the feeling that FDR, left to himself, might have eased immigration controls, and brought the US into the war earlier.  But he was working in the face of overwhelming isolationist feeling amongst the American public.   Given the loss of American life in the Great War and the problems caused by the Depression, that was understandable.   It’s not the United States’ job to be the world’s policeman.   But was it her duty to stand up against the Nazis?

Of course, Pearl Harbour brought the US into the war, against the Nazis as well as against Japan.  By 1942, reports of mass killings were coming in, from prisoners who’d managed to escape and from the Polish Resistance, and then from Soviet forces as they advanced westwards.   There were some calls to prioritise trying to rescue prisoners, but the authorities felt that they had to concentrate on winning the war – and, at that point, Allied planes would have to have left from Britain and wouldn’t have been able to reach Poland.   Once the Allies were in control of Italy, the planes would have been able to reach the concentration camps, but didn’t have the precision to guarantee that they’d hit the gas chambers and not the housing blocks.

A poll in early 1943 showed that over half of Americans didn’t believe the reports of mass killings of Jews.   Even when the Soviets liberated Kyiv and American photographers took pictures at Babyn Yar, some of the American press presented the reports as Soviet propaganda.  It was stated by the programme that the government didn’t want people to feel that the war was being fought for Jews, in case that damaged morale.  I was expecting someone to point out a parallel with the Union side in the Civil War there, not making it a war about slavery – “Let us die to make men free”?? – but no-one did.   Most shocking was the attitude of the State department, which deliberately suppressed reports of atrocities which the Polish Resistance managed to smuggled into Switzerland, and stalled moves by the World Jewish Congress to send funds to help Jews in Hungary and Romania, then not under direct Nazi control.

By this point, the programme showed us, American Jewish groups were lobbying for action to stop the mass murder of European Jews, including a number of large scale rallies.   Eventually, in 1944, Roosevelt set up a War Refugee Board, which worked with diplomats from neutral countries to gain their protection for Jews in Hungary, and also bombed Hungary in a move to stop deportations.   After US reporters sent home pictures from Majdanek, liberated by the Soviets, people accepted that something truly horrific was happening, even if they couldn’t quite take in the scale of it.

When it came to the liberation of the camps and the end of the war, the programme did move away from American attitudes and focused on the accounts of the survivors, and of veterans who’d been amongst the liberators and one of the men who’d been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.   But then it told us that, even then, public opinion in America was against admitting refugees, and reminded us that the quota system didn’t end until 1965.

Then it finished with footage of some of the hate crimes and extremist marches which have taken place in the US very recently, and of the storming of Congress.   I honestly don’t think that this was meant as an attack on the US, which I love, which I’m sure Ken Burns, his fellow film makers and all those involved in the making the programme love, but it was a reminder that we – in the UK and everywhere else, as well as in the US – don’t always see what’s happening abroad as our problem, and that there are dangerous elements even within our own societies.  If you’ve read all that, thank you.  If you want to watch it all, it was shown in the US last year, and has been shown in both the UK and Australia, and possibly elsewhere as well, in the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow.   It’s long and sometimes chilling, but it’s worth watching.

Stock Aitken Waterman: Legends of Pop – Channel 5

Back in the day, it was considered a bit uncool to like Stock Aitken Waterman songs; but everyone did anyway.   How could you not?   They were just so catchy!   The trio are probably most associated with their big hits of the late ’80s and early ’90s, working with either unknowns, like Rick Astley and Sonia, or soap actors looking to break into the music business, like Kylie and Jason.   But they worked with some big name established acts too, people like Bananarama and Donna Summer, who went to them because they admired their success.

This first episode focused on their early years, how they got together and some of their early singles.   It went into quite a lot of technical detail, which was something different, but it was largely an exercise in ’80s music nostalgia.  And, hey, I’m always up for a bit of that!  Loving this, thank you Channel 5!

How the Holocaust Began – BBC 2

There are a number of Holocaust-related programmes on this week, leading up to Holocaust Memorial Day on Friday.  This one focused on the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen as Nazi troops advanced into the Soviet Union, and the complicity of many local people in those massacres.  It made for chilling viewing.

It included aerial photographs and film shot by the Nazis, and records showing the numbers of people killed in each mass shooting.  Many of the graves have never been found, but an American team’s working on locating them, using radio wave and imaging technology as well as the film and photos.  We saw some of their work.

The programme followed the route of one of the four teams of Einsatzgruppen.   So many burial sites, some of them very close to town and village centres, exist, and the numbers killed are so high, that one team of Einsatzgruppen couldn’t have rounded up and killed them all.   It’s known that some local people were complicit in the killings.   Presenter James Bulgin spoke to a woman whose relatives were killed by fellow Lithuanians from their own town.  Local people could also be seen on the photos, watching – as James said, as if it were some sort of spectator sport.

James spoke to a 97-year-old lady who witnessed one of the massacres: it took place in a field next to her home, in a town where 80% of the population was Jewish.  We heard how local people forced the Jewish population to the killing site, and Lithuanian policemen then carried out the shootings.  The locals then looted the homes of the murdered.

I think the idea of the programme was partly a reminder that the Holocaust didn’t begin with organised death camps, and partly a reminder that many local people participated in the massacres.   A Lithuanian author spoke of the abuse she’s received since publishing a book on the subject.

It wasn’t just Lithuania: it was Latvia and Ukraine as well.   I’ve been to Babyn Yar, or Babi Yar to use the more familiar Russian name.  There’s a memorial there now, but there wasn’t then.  The programme showed a filmed account given by a survivor.   It’s the best known of the massacres, but it was only one of many.

James explained that, until late 1941, there’d been no programme of mass shootings in Poland.   And that there was concern about the mental health of the soldiers carrying out the shootings.   He then met a team working to uncover burial trenches in Poland where people were forced into pits and covered with boiling quicklime.   As he said, the idea of a Final Solution had been formulated but they were testing different methods of killing.

They eventually, of course, concluded that the answer was gas chambers – first used in 1939, on disabled people.  And so the death camps were set up.

This was truly horrible.   It can’t be very nice for the teams working to find the mass graves, but they’re doing a job which they feel is very important.   And, as James concluded, what happened wouldn’t have been possible without collaborators.   All in all, an interesting but chilling hour’s TV.

Elizabeth of York: The Last White Rose by Alison Weir

This is a really enjoyable historical novel, telling the story of Elizabeth of York from her childhood to her death.   It’s quite lightly written, but covers all the main events of the time insofar as they affected Elizabeth.

History gives us two versions of the young Elizabeth – the heroine of The Song of the Lady Bessy, working towards marriage with the future Henry VII because she believed that her uncle Richard III had murdered her brothers, and the scheming minx who wanted to marry Richard and was plotting it even before Anne Neville was dead.   Alison Weir largely goes for the first version, but works with the second by saying that Richard wanted to marry Elizabeth, talked her into the idea by claiming that Buckingham had spirited the boys away, then changed his mind.   We later see relatives of James Tyrell confirming that he’d had the boys murdered on Richard’s orders.

Elizabeth, Henry, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth Woodville/Wydeville are all quite favourably portrayed in this.   It’s a very nice, gentle book, considering that it covers some very violent times!    There are going to be two sequels: going into the first one, it takes the traditional view that Arthur was always sickly, and that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon was never consummated.   It takes the traditional view on pretty much everything, which I’d much rather have than people making up nonsense just for the sake of being different.

I really enjoyed this, and highly recommend it.   

The Faberge Secret by Charles Delfoure

Oh dear.   If you’re going to write a book, at least do a tiny bit of basic research.   Set in pre-Revolutionary Russia, it repeatedly used the male form of surnames for female characters. and frequently failed to use the patronymic where appropriate.   Then it came out with this absolute classic:

“You’re still coming next week to my home for Passover?” asked the Baron as the carriage rattled along.  “There’ll be lots of challah.”

The story, if unlikely, wasn’t bad, but the very obvious lack of even basic research into the cultures of early twentieth century Russia just spoilt it.

The idea was that a close friend of the Tsar became part of the revolutionary movement, through a young female doctor with whom he began an affair.   They were both horrified by the pogroms, by Bloody Sunday, and by the lives of the peasants and urban working-classes in general.  It was an interesting idea, and it could have been a good book, but the mess-up with the names was annoying, and the invitation to eat bread during Passover was just the final straw.  Oh dear!

Abigail of Venice by Leigh Russell

This is a rather unlikely story, but it’s quite an interesting read.  It starts, in the 1560s, in a ghetto which seems to be somewhere around the current border between Lithuania or Belarus, recently conquered by Ivan the Terrible, but most of it’s set in the Ghetto of Venice, during the time of the mass burning of Jewish books and the Battle of Lepanto.  I once went to Lepanto, or Naupaktos as it’s now called.   I was so excited about being there that I ended up being last in the ice cream queue (for non-historians, the place is just a nice seaside resort), which is really *not* like me.  Anyway.

Abigail is the eldest of several sisters in a poor family with no money for dowries.  A marriage is arranged for her with a rich man who turns out to be cruel and violent.  Then Ivan’s soldiers attack the ghetto, and only Abigail and her uncle escape. I was more than a bit confused by this, because the Livonian War wasn’t really about conquering parts of what became Poland-Lithuania,  there were no formal ghettoes there, and Ivan’s reign is not associated with pogroms.  Maybe the author knows something I don’t, but I didn’t quite get it.

The two survivors then travel around Europe, spreading word of the massacre, which seems very unlikely.  Surely they’d have settled somewhere safe?   But it *could* have happened.  Abigail eventually tires of the travelling, and stays in Venice, where she finds love with a good man, Daniel.  They get engaged.  But then her husband turns up and forces her to get back with him … until he’s sentenced to spend 15 years as a galley slave for brawling in a pub.   As I said, it’s a bit far-fetched!   Oh, and then, in a random chapter, Abigail and Daniel meet Shakespeare’s dad.

Then, in, hooray, a historically accurate episode, the Venetian authorities seize and burn all the Jews’ holy books.  Abigail saves one of the scrolls.  Next up, Joseph Nasi, the famous Ottoman Court Jew, visits the ghetto.   And then Abigail decides to return to her home town.  It’s all a bit disjointed and doesn’t really flow, and Abigail’s decision seems highly unlikely.  But the inclusion of real events and people is interesting.  And it then turns out that one of her sisters is alive and living in Buda, so she goes there.  Talk about clocking up some miles!

She then returns to the Venetian Ghetto.  The violent husband then reappears, but obligingly drowns, leaving Abigail all his money and free to marry Daniel.  She and Daniel live happily ever after.

The series of events wasn’t very likely, and didn’t flow very well.  But it was quite entertaining, and the settings were interesting.  I’ve read far worse!

No Place Like Home – Channel 5

I get very excited whenever a TV programme mentions the Cotton Famine, my dissertation topic, as this one did!!  I don’t usually watch this series, but I made an exception to see Victoria Derbyshire revisiting her childhood haunts in Bury, Rochdale and Littleborough, and enjoyed every minute of it.

It started by talking about a tannery works in Littleborough, which was founded by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and produced two-thirds of the leather used in Army boots during the Second World War.   Then it was on to central Rochdale, for the familiar stories of cotton mills, the Cotton Famine, Frederick Douglass’s visit to the town, and the mill workers’ support for Abolitionism.   The woke brigade are always so busy trying to make out that Britain was always linked with slavery that it was heartening to get this reminder of how strong Abolitionism was in mid 19th century Lancashire.

Then finally it was on to Bury, to visit the wonderful Bury Market, Victoria’s old school – Bury Grammar – and the Peel Tower, and also Warth Mills in Radcliffe, which was used as an internment camp as depicted in The Girl in.the Pink Raincoat.  All in all, it was a fascinating trip round some areas which I know very well, and made for very entertaining watching.

The New House at Winwood by Clare Mallory

 

This book combines the trope of a new headmistress making changes with the building of a new boarding house, apparently constructed and filled remarkably quickly.   Some of the girls don’t like the changes, and refuse even to set foot inside it, or to play its teams at sports.   It’s mostly the older girls, which seems remarkably immature of them.  And the younger girls all appear to love fagging for the older girls – really?!  Also, some of the names are rather odd  – Adair, Miff and even Winsome.

Having said all that, it does work pretty well.  The characters are well drawn, and the story of the ongoing feuding and its development comes across quite convincingly even though it seems a bit pathetic that girls of 17 would make such a fuss about the new house.   Of course, in the end everyone makes up and the school becomes united.  Not bad.   And I found this copy very cheap on Amazon, so I’m rather chuffed about that!

The Voyage of Freydis by Tamara Goranson

This, read for a Facebook group reading challenge (although it was already in my TBR pile!) was a story about Freydis, the legendary daughter of Erik The Red.  It didn’t bear any resemblance to the stories of Freydis in the Norse sagas, but it was well-written and entertaining.

(Thank you, Wikipedia!)  In the Saga of the Greenlanders, Freydís made a deal with two Icelandic men, Helgi and Finnbogi,  that they should go together to Vinland and share all profits half-and-half. When they got there, they all fell out for various reasons.  When she returned to her husband, Freydís claimed that Helgi and Finnbogi had beaten her, demanded that he exact revenge on her behalf, or else she would divorce him. He killed Helgi and Finnbogi as well as the other men in their camp, when they were sleeping. When he refused to kill the five women in the camp, Freydís  killed them herself.

In the Saga of Erik the Red, Freydis. She joined an expedition to Vinland and, when the camp came under attack from the “skraelings” (First Nations peoples),  most of the Icelandic and Greenlandic men fled, but Freydís fought back and the native peoples retreated.

She also appeared in Vikings: Valhalla, but that definitely wasn’t factual!

In this version of events, Freydis went to Vinland, with Helgi and Finnbogi, to escape her violent husband … but he followed him there.   Freydis became lost on a solo hunting expedition in severe weather conditions, and was rescued by a Native American tribe.  She then became involved with one of the men and conceived a child by him.

Then she returned to her camp, amd violence broke out between her party and her husband’s party; but she saw the enemy off and planned a divorce.

It was a very unlikely story, but an interesting one.  It was sad that Freydis had such an unhappy life in Greenland, but at least she got away; and she was a very attractive character.  I hope to read the next instalment in.the series soon.