About the Authors

Richard Coles (Author)

The Reverend Richard Coles is a writer, presenter and Church of England clergyman. He is the only vicar in Britain to have had a number-one hit single and appear on Strictly Come Dancing. Richard Coles is the author of the bestselling Murder Before Evensong mystery.

Charles Spencer (Author)

Charles Spencer is a journalist, broadcaster and author of historical non-fiction. He is the author of seven non-fiction books, including the number one bestselling memoir A Very Private School and the bestselling histories Blenheim, Battle for Europe, Killers of the King and The White Ship. Charles has also written for numerous publications including Vanity Fair, The Spectator, The FT and The Guardian.

Cat Jarman (Author)

Professor Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist and field archaeologist and the bestselling author of River Kings and The Bone Chests. She is also a historical adviser for museums and an experienced public speaker who frequently shares her expertise on BBC radio, podcasts, and TV. Professor Jarman's research has been covered by print and online news outlets internationally.

Richard Coles,
Cat Jarman and
Charles Spencer

THE RABBIT HOLE BOOK

Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Rare Brain Conditions (CJ)

Gambling and Gamblers (CS)

Two Pet Cemeteries (RC)

Domesday Book (CJ)

Goats’ Cheese (CJ)

Practical Jokes (CS)

François Thurot (RC)

The Hurricane (RC)

Poirot (CJ)

The Matpakke (CJ)

Obituaries (CS)

Simba the Cinéaste Lion (RC)

Hoards (CJ)

St Vitus’ Dance (RC)

Alien Abductions (CJ)

Marathons (CJ)

Mount Stuart House (RC)

Silk Road Diseases (CJ)

The Apparitions at Fátima (RC)

Oliver Cromwell’s Children (CS)

The Disappearance of Pulaski’s Masterpiece (CJ)

The Phaistos Disc (CJ)

Marie Antoinette (CS)

Military Uniforms (CS)

The Funeral Effigies, Westminster Abbey (RC)

Early Submarines (CS)

Evelina Haverfield (RC)

Shield Maidens (CJ)

Dollar Princesses (CS)

Prince Obolensky (RC)

Medieval Fear of the Sea, and Drowning (CS)

Butter (CJ)

The Anglesey Leg (RC)

Christian Missionaries in Japan (CS)

English Counties (CS)

Doctor William Price (RC)

The Early Circus (CS)

Runes (CJ)

Unusual Addictions (CS)

1001 Nights (CJ)

Butlers (CS)

Newport Arch, Bailgate, Lincoln (RC)

The Lino King (RC)

Toilet Paper (CJ)

Redheads (CS)

LEGO (CJ)

A Family Diary (CS)

The Mystery of the Ice Valley Woman (CJ)

Ghost Towns (CJ)

Ancient Ideals of Beauty (CS)

Bobby and Bum (RC)

The Spanish Flu (CS)

Taking the (Bath) Waters (CJ)

The Death of Lord Kitchener (RC)

Boudicca (CJ)

Two Pair of Pyramids (RC)

The All-But Forgotten Battle (CS)

Guano (CJ)

Ötzi the Iceman (CJ)

The Pilgrimage of Grace (CS)

The Origins of Pasta (CJ)

Wicksteed Park, Kettering (RC)

Alfred’s Pelvis (CJ)

The Panacea Society (RC)

William Marwood (RC)

Tennis (CS)

Double Agents (CS)

The FANYs (RC)

The Assassination of Sidónio Pais (RC)

Sunbathing (CS)

The Exploding Whale of Oregon (RC)

Cowardice (CS)

Bald’s Leechbook (CJ)

Cosmetics (CS)

The Martyrs of Namugongo (RC)

Crosswords (CS)

Lucca’s Last Levitator (RC)

Female Literary Detectives (CS)

Olga of Kyiv (CJ)

Philip II and His Spanish Armada (CS)

Walled Gardens (CS)

The Memorials of Cathays Park, Cardiff (RC)

Stealing The Scream (CJ)

The Brazilian Vaccine Revolt (RC)

Trolls (CJ)

Egyptian Animal Mummies (CJ)

Signet Rings (CS)

The Assassination of George Villiers at Portsmouth (RC)

Doubly Thankful Villages (RC)

Trepanning (CS)

Rongorongo (CJ)

Lancashire Dialect Writers (RC)

Guard Dogs (CS)

Window Glass (CJ)

The Wigtown Martyrs (RC)

HHMOs (RC)

The Peculiar People (RC)

Tattoos (CJ)

Famous Last Stands (CS)

Copyright

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1. Cover

2. Frontmatter

3. Contents

4. Begin Reading

Rare Brain Conditions

During the Second World War, a German air raid over Oslo caused limited casualties, but a thirty-year-old woman by the name of Astrid was hit by shrapnel, leaving her with a serious wound on the left side of her head. Although she survived, she was partially paralysed and initially unable to speak. When she finally did recover her ability to talk, something curious had happened: she spoke with a noticeable German- or French-like accent. Eventually, her case came to the attention of Professor of Neurology Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn, who described what is now known as foreign accent syndrome (FAS), where the sufferer’s speech is altered as a result of damage to a certain part of the brain. This can be caused by stroke or physical trauma, and cases of the syndrome have been recorded around the world and in a range of languages from Japanese to Korean, from Spanish to Hungarian, and from American-English to British-English. FAS is classed as a rare disorder, with only just over forty cases ever reported.

According to NORD, the US National Organization for Rare Disorders, a medical condition is ‘rare’ if it affects fewer than 200,000 Americans. As such, there are more than 10,000 such diseases in the US and an unknown number worldwide. Yet many are considerably rarer.

In 1880, the French neurologist Jules Cotard described a curious case of what he would later call délire des negations – the delirium of negation. He had observed a forty-three-year-old woman who insisted that she was nothing more than a decomposing body: she said she had no brain, no nerves, no chest, no stomach and no intestines. As she did not consider herself to be alive, she did not even need to eat. Later named Cotard’s syndrome, the illness causes the sufferer to believe themselves to be dead and seems to be a form of psychosis. In a case in Oxford, a brain tumour was shown to be the cause.

Brain anomalies are also the cause of alien hand syndrome. Here, the patient experiences involuntary movements of one hand, in a purposeful rather than a random or uncoordinated way. These movements cannot be controlled, and in severe cases they may be violent: an example includes an eighty-one-year-old woman who reported being terrified of her left hand because it had repeatedly attempted to choke her and hit her face, neck and shoulder.

Equally frightening is the so-called Alice in Wonderland syndrome (AIWS). Sufferers suddenly find that they observe the sizes of parts of their bodies incorrectly: usually, the head and hands seem disproportionately large or small. The same can be the case for objects around them and the individual also loses a sense of time. Others may experience hallucinations and many have severe migraines. The experiences of AIWS patients are so similar to what happens to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that there has been speculation that Carroll himself suffered from the syndrome. Carroll is known to have suffered severe migraines and British psychiatrist J. Todd, who coined the name of the syndrome in 1955, wrote that it is possible ‘Alice trod the path of a wonderland well known to her creator’. Incidentally, another neurological syndrome may be described in the book: the Mad Hatter’s eccentric and unusual behaviour may have been the result of mercury nitrate poisoning, something hatters used to be prone to because mercury was used in felt-hat production.

While the causes of many such conditions are unknown, others can be avoided if certain precautions are taken. This is the case for Kuru, or prion disease, which affects the nervous system. Also referred to as laughing sickness, the illness was first reported in a publication in 1957, when it was observed in the Fore tribes of Papua New Guinea. There, Kuru, which means to tremble due to fever or cold in the local language, had been prevalent since the early 1900s, affecting up to 1 per cent of the population. Victims displayed a range of severe symptoms including pain and difficulty with walking and coordination, difficulty swallowing, tremors and muscle jerks, and outbreaks of uncontrollable laughter. The disease is degenerative and deadly, usually within two years. It is no coincidence that the disease was so prevalent among the Fore and in a few other places because Kuru has a very specific cause: it is spread through the consumption of highly infectious brain tissue. Up until the 1960s, Fore groups carried out a funerary practice where they ate the brains of dead people as a form of mourning and respect. As the disease has an incubation period of up to fifty years, it was still being reported until recently even though the rite is no longer carried out. If you want to avoid it, simply refrain from cannibalism.

CJ

Gambling and Gamblers

Previously categorized as an ‘impulse control disorder’, gambling addiction has been recognized formally as a medical condition only since 1980. Its dangers were noted in the Rig Veda, an ancient Indian Sanskrit text written from 1700 to 1100 BC:

Dice, believe me, are barbed: they prick and they trip,

They hurt and torment and cause grievous harm.

To the gambler they are like children’s gifts, sweet as honey,

But they turn on the winner in rage and destroy him.

The ancient Greeks gambled with dice, and also astragaloi – the ankle bones of sheep – which were used in Rome and Mesopotamia. Other games were spinning coins, cock fighting, quail fighting and a game called himanteligmos – described by the second-century Greek scholar Julius Pollux as ‘a certain labyrinthine twisting of a folded strip of leather; upon this one had to chance upon the fold with a peg. If, when the leather strip is unwound, the peg is not caught by the strip [inside the fold], the one who placed the peg loses the game.’

The Romans enjoyed playing latrunculus, and boards for this have been discovered from Britain to the Egypt–Sudan border. We do not know the rules, but it may have been similar to draughts, with dice thrown – interestingly, the dice were cast down a tower next to the board, to stop anyone influencing how they fell with a cunning use of the hand.

The key gambling fact is, the house always wins. The biggest earners in Nevada – ‘the Silver State’ – are the slot machines, which generated $10 billion in profits in 2022. Penny slots alone generated $3.59 billion: to visualize what that sum means, a stack of those pennies one on the other would trail to the moon and halfway back. Baccarat and blackjack each brought in a further $1 billion, while roulette and craps harvested $450 million apiece from the optimistic.

One of those who, historically, failed to be cowed by the odds was John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, an English aristocrat who in 1762, so the story goes, was so determined to have no serious interruption during a twenty-four-hour gambling binge that, an astonished Frenchman noted: ‘he had no subsistent but a bit of beef, between two slices of toasted bread, which he ate without ever quitting the game. This new dish grew highly in vogue, during my residence in London.’ This first fast food was, of course, christened the sandwich in honour of the gambling earl.

George Osbaldeston was another betting addict. An excellent all-round sportsman, Osbaldeston was from 1812 to 1818 a Whig MP, but he found that his parliamentary duties came a distant second to his mania for gambling.

Aged forty-seven, Osbaldeston bet a General Charritie £1,000 that he could ride 200 miles in ten hours, using as many horses as he wished. His training for the feat involved galloping sixty miles each morning. The challenge took place at Newmarket, his start and finish the Duke’s Stand. Osbaldeston rode twenty-eight horses that day, and successfully completed his wager in eight hours and forty-two minutes (including an hour and a half of stoppages).

He would bet on anything, once putting £50 behind his being able to pull 3,500 glasses of ale within twelve hours, in a Bethnal Green pub. He won that wager, but gambling eventually proved a ruinous pastime. He lost £200,000 in all and had to sell his family estate before dying in poverty in St John’s Wood.

Gambling was long seen as an English obsession, a German visitor in the eighteenth century recalling the fever of excitement at an English cock fight: ‘When it is time to start, the persons appointed to do so bring in the cocks hidden in two sacks, and then everyone begins to shout and wager before the birds are on view. The people, gentle and simple (they sit with no distinction of place) act like madmen and go on raising the odds …’

Archie Karas, known in the gambling world as ‘The Greek’, who called himself the ‘king of the gamblers’, arrived in Las Vegas in 1952 with $50. By 1995 he had turned that into $40 million, following an episode known as ‘The Run’.

His first winning streak lasted six months. He borrowed $10,000 from another player, in an establishment called Binion’s Horseshoe, and tripled it in one game. He then went on to win $1.2 million in a pool table bar, where the stakes were $40,000 a game. Karas played the same opponent at poker, amassing $17 million within six months. However, on reaching the high-water mark of $40 million, he lost and lost. He was back to zero within twelve months. He has been excluded from Nevada’s casinos since 2015, accused of marking cards.

Harry Kakavas, an Australian property dealer, turned over A$1.5 billion at a single casino during fifteen months in 2005–6, eventually losing all the A$20 million that was his money in fifteen months. He once lost A$2.3 million in one twenty-eight-minute baccarat session. He sued the casino in Vegas that took most of his money, claiming they should have turned him away because they knew him to be an addict. Even this action, he lost.

CS

Two Pet Cemeteries

In 1925 the architect Sir Clough Williams-Ellis bought the Aber Iâ estate near Penrhyndeudraeth in north Wales. It had cliffs overlooking a sandy estuary, streams, woods, picturesque ruins, ‘a neglected wilderness’, he wrote, ‘long abandoned by those romantics who had realized the unique appeal and possibilities of this favoured promontory but who had been carried away … into sorrowful bankruptcy’.

There he started building a village named Portmeirion, an extraordinary effort to create a fantasy Italianate fishing village on the River Dwyryd in what might be described as the munchkin-baroque style. It became famous in the 1960s as the location for the television series The Prisoner, in which Patrick McGoohan played Number 6, a former spy who tried to leave the Service but was abducted and is now held at ‘the Village’, where he attempts to assert the inviolable rights of the individual against corporate power. His frequent attempts to escape are thwarted by a giant white bouncy ball.

If this sounds eccentric, his character was not the first unlikely prisoner there. From 1870 to 1917 Aber Iâ was home to Mrs Adelaide Haig, a devout, if unorthodox, Christian widow, who grew more and more disenchanted with the society of human beings and disgusted with the rapacious character of our species’ treatment of the natural world. She instructed her gardeners not to cut back, prune or trim anything that nature produced and required them instead to send out patrols to seek and detain stray dogs and bring them to the house, which became more and more difficult as it became isolated in the overgrown grounds.

There the dogs assembled in the Mirror Room, where Mrs Haig would preach sermons to them sitting behind a screen in the hope that they too would become devout. Regardless of her success in this enterprise, when the dogs died they were given Christian burials in a cemetery she had created for them, their resting places marked by headstones carved with fulsome inscriptions:

My dear, dear dog gone before

To that unknown and silent shore

Shall we not meet as heretofore

Some summer morning?

You may visit it today with ease, unlike the undertakers who came in a hearse to collect Mrs Haig’s body in 1917 and found the house inaccessible until a mysterious stag appeared on the promontory and led the gardeners, equipped with machetes and saws, through its jungly thickets.

The cemetery continues to be used by bereaved dog lovers, and may be found to the west of the Oriental Lake.

The most splendid pet cemetery in the country, in my view, is found in the former garden of Mr Winbridge, who lived at Victoria Lodge where West Carriage Drive meets the Bayswater Road on the north side of Hyde Park in London. Here you will find the graves of hundreds of dogs as well as those of some cats, birds and three small monkeys, the beloved pets of London’s high society, which in the 1880s thronged the park serving the smart neighbourhoods of Knightsbridge and Mayfair.

Unfortunately this was extremely dangerous for dogs owing to the number of carriages that circulated there, and under their wheels, and the hooves of the horses that drew them, many met their ends.

‘Darling Dolly – my sunbeam, my consolation, my joy’, reads one, then ‘Dear Impy – Loving and Loved’, my favourite, ‘Alas! Poor Zoe’, and that of the first dog to be buried, ‘Poor Cherry. Died April 28. 1881’. Cherry, a Maltese terrier, belonged to the Lewis-Barned family, descended from a highly respected Jewish banker and philanthropist in Liverpool, whom Mr Winbridge served with ginger beer on hot days. Cherry adored his back garden and when she died of old age the children asked him if she could be buried in her favourite spot. Mr Winbridge agreed.

Perhaps this was a sentimental gesture he came to regret, because the next request for burial was for a royal dog who was run over by a carriage on 29 June 1882. Prince, a Yorkshire terrier, belonged to the actress Louisa Fairbrother, who is remembered mostly for marrying HRH the Duke of Cambridge, cousin of Queen Victoria, without permission, so the match was never properly recognized. ‘Poor Prince’, reads his simple headstone.

That started rather a trend, and Mr Winbridge’s garden, in which he had intended only to bury Cherry, was very much in demand until the cemetery closed in 1903.

You have to make an appointment via the Royal Parks website to visit now, and pay quite a stiff charge, but I highly recommend it. Look out for the grave of Topper, an obese and disagreeable police dog who was despatched by his owner’s truncheon; Balu, poisoned by ‘a cruel Swiss’ in Berne in 1899; ‘dear little Goofy’; and Ginger Blythe, ‘a King of Pussies’.

RC

Domesday Book

At Christmas in 1085, a meeting of the King’s Council was held at Gloucester. William the Conqueror, who, by then, had held England for nearly two decades – was concerned with three particular topics: who were the people who lived in the country, what did they do and own, and how much was their property worth? The answers to these questions, he had come to realize, were key to ensuring he could gather the correct amount of tax, money he sorely needed to fend off the threat of invasion from foreign powers. As a result, William commissioned a survey, later to be known as Domesdei or Domesday, the day of judgement. What has been passed down to us is a remarkable, unique census: Britain’s earliest public record and the most complete surviving account of a pre-industrial society from anywhere in the world.

In 1066, William, a Norman duke, conquered England by defeating the Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings. The event led to significant changes across the country, not least in terms of land ownership, as William replaced the English landowning elite with Normans, many of whom received land in return for military service. And when the country was threatened by Danes in the 1080s, he needed funds to pay mercenaries. For this reason, he needed to know exactly how much he could demand from his people. A remarkably thorough logistical approach followed. We believe the survey began mid-January 1086 after England and Wales (Scotland was not under Norman rule) had been divided into seven areas called circuits, each comprising two or more counties. For each, several high-ranking commissioners were assigned to the task of collecting and verifying relevant information that had been gathered by local tenants-in-chief, sheriffs and other officials. To ensure neutrality, the commissioners were not allowed to work in areas where they held land. The exercise was a multilingual affair: William’s men were largely French-speaking lords collecting information from English speakers and recording the information in Latin. Accuracy was ensured through a detailed process. In each administrative region (known as hundreds or wapentakes), jurors were summoned and questioned, under oath, on the veracity of the information collected. Yet it seemed the process was not without drama, as many landholders were keen to take advantage, perhaps exaggerating their claim to land. Many claims and verdicts were challenged. In a record of an inquest in Cambridgeshire, for instance, an unscrupulous sheriff named Picot is described as ‘the hungry lion, the prowling wolf, the crafty fox, the shameless dog’.

By the end, a detailed account was compiled of who owned what: this included how many hides (a standardized unit of land, enough to support a household) there were; how many ploughs (meaning taxable amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of eight oxen); how many men in different social categories (including free men and slaves); the value of the land; and how much of it was woodland, meadow, pasture, mills, or fisheries. To add to this vast amount of data, the same information was recorded for the current year as well as for 1066, the year of the conquest, and for the year William gave the land away. Crucially, this has given us an extraordinary insight into the social changes that took place with the arrival of the Normans.

In total, 268,984 people are listed, each of whom was the head of a household. Unsurprisingly, the records show that very few women independently held land. Among those who did, one with the greatest holding in 1066 was Gytha, the widow of Earl Godwine of Wessex and the mother of the defeated King Harold. Another was a woman named Asa from Yorkshire, whose lands were disputed in 1086: here, the jurors inform us that the land was independently hers and did not belong to her husband, Bjǫrnúlfr. When the two separated, she withdrew her possession and kept it herself as a ‘lady’. Yet such women were rare; in fact, one historian has pointed out that there are more pigs listed in the census than women.

Eventually, the returns from all seven circuits were assigned to be written up and collated into one volume, now known as Great Domesday Book, by a single scribe. For reasons unknown, the eastern circuit was never included, and now exists as a separate volume dubbed the Little Domesday Book. While more than 13,000 places are mentioned in the survey, some significant areas were missed out, including London, Winchester, County Durham and Northumberland, again for reasons that are unclear.

The book itself was never intended to be called ‘Domesday’. The name first appeared in the Dialogus de Sacarrio, a book written about the Exchequer around 1176. There, it states that this name was given to it as a metaphor because, like the Last Judgement, the decisions contained within it were unalterable.

CJ

Goats’ Cheese

When I grew up in Norway, you could pick from two types of cheeses for your open-top sandwich: yellow or brown. Your choice would be cut thinly using a cheese slicer (a Norwegian invention it baffles me that the rest of the world seems to live without) and placed on top of a slice of dark granary bread. The brown cheese was made of goats’ milk, but I didn’t learn until I was much older that this was not what most countries would consider the goats’ cheese norm. Our version, named either brunost or gjetost, is sweet and almost caramel flavoured, and made from the whey that is usually discarded by cheesemakers. But while brunost may be an acquired taste, humans may have produced cheese from goats’ milk for at least as long as they have from that of cows.

Goats were first domesticated around 10,000 years ago, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, the name given to the region in the Middle East bounded by the Mediterranean and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. From there, the animals soon appeared in both Europe and Asia, treasured for their hardiness and adaptability to harsh environments as well as for their fresh milk, meat, skin and fibres. The milk would have been used for cheese from an early stage: we know that cheese production from other animals has taken place for at least 8,000 years. Archaeologists have found sieve-like pottery vessels, likely to have been early cheese-strainers, with evidence of dairy products preserved in the ceramic material.

The Egyptians were certainly fans. During excavations of the tomb of Ptahmes, the mayor of Memphis in the XIX dynasty (thirteenth century BC), archaeologists found a large jar containing a solidified whitish mass once covered with a canvas fabric. When analysed, this turned out to be a cheese-like product made of a combination of cow and goats’ milk.

The Greeks, however, credit the god Aristaeus, son of Apollo and the huntress-nymph Cyrene, with the invention of cheese: he allegedly learned the art of curdling milk from the nymphs. While this particular story must remain unproven, we know from written sources that both the Greeks and Romans used goats’ milk in their cheese production, but often, this was mixed with milk from other animals. While Sicilian cheeses typically contained a mix of sheep and goats’ milk, Phrygian cheese (from present day Anatolia) could include milk from asses and mares.

Today, we may well mainly associate goats’ cheese with France. Legend has it that the goats that now roam the regions of Poitou, Périgord and Aquitaine are descendants of those brought to Spain by invading Arabs in the eighth century. When the Arabs attempted to take France too, they were defeated in a battle near Poitiers in 732. However, the troops had brought along herds of goats to sustain themselves and some of these didn’t make the trip back home. This is allegedly the reason behind the popularity of goats’ cheeses in the region, and some say even accounts for the cheese names such as Chabichou, said to come from an Arabic word for goat. While this story may not be entirely true, French goats’ cheeses – especially chèvre – became popular around this time. We also know that goats’ cheese-making was popular across the border in Catalonia. The fourteenth-century cookbook Sent Sovi, the oldest surviving culinary text in Catalan, preserves a recipe for Mató, a cheese a little similar to ricotta, eaten as a dessert. Another Catalonian cheese is the Garrotxa St Gil, a pasteurized cheese that came about in its current form in the late 1970s, when jipsosos (hippies) from Barcelona fled to the countryside to avoid persecution at the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. There they began making cheese, and the Garrotxa was one that was made from pasteurized milk because the older generation in the region kept falling ill from brucellosis, a bacterial infection.

My favourite now has to be feta cheese, technically a combination of sheep and goats’ milk, which is formed into blocks and aged in brine. The method is documented in Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura from the second century BC and similar cheeses are described throughout the medieval period.

You can make a goats’ milk version of pretty much any cheese and, for the most part, they are better for you than cheeses from cows. They’re higher in protein, lower in sodium and cholesterol, and slightly lower in fat. Goats’ cheeses also contain more capric acid (‘goats’ acid’, named so because of its sweaty, unpleasant smell), which has many health benefits, and plenty of nutrients.

Strangely, however, the Norwegian version has yet to take on the world.

CJ

Practical Jokes

Caligula is known to history as a cruel madman, but at least he had a sense of humour. The deranged Roman emperor particularly loved watching the comedian Mnester, Suetonius writing that Caligula ‘used to kiss the pantomime actor Mnester even in the middle of the games. And if, when Mnester was performing, anyone made the slightest noise, he had him dragged from his seat and flogged him himself.’

Once, when someone in the audience made such a disturbance, an annoyed Caligula punished the culprit by playing a convoluted practical joke: he sent a centurion to him with a message that had to be taken immediately to King Ptolemy in Mauretania (roughly modern-day Algeria, with some of Morocco). The man sailed from Rome and handed the letter to the king. It simply said: ‘Do nothing at all, either good or bad, to the bearer.’

This combination of absurdity and revenge is also noticeable in the sixth-century tale of Anthemius of Tralles. Anthemius was an architect and mathematician employed to reconstruct Hagia Sophia, the church in what was then Constantinople, after a fire.

He had a disagreement with Zeno, a neighbour, which resulted in a legal victory for the latter. Anthemius sought revenge, and put several cauldrons of water in a cellar that ran under Zeno’s house. These were heated, while the cauldrons were tightly covered with animal skins, so the pressure grew and grew. Anthemius employed leather pipes to pump the steam from the cauldrons into the base of one of Zeno’s finer rooms on the ground floor. So strong was the force of the steam that it made Zeno’s floorboards shake violently. Zeno and his friends fled from what they believed to be an earthquake, and Zeno soon became a laughing stock when talking so earnestly about ‘the earthquake’, when almost nobody else had experienced it.

Jonathan Swift, the Anglo-Irish satirist most famous for writing Gulliver’s Travels, had an aversion to the almanacks that people bought to try to predict the future. Swift particularly took against John Partridge, a prolific almanack printer.

In 1708 Swift ran his own predictions against Partridge’s, while writing under the pseudonym of ‘Isaac Bickerstaff’, a supposed rival in the almanack world. ‘Bickerstaff’ apologized for his first prediction – that Partridge would be killed by ‘a raging fever’ on 29 March. Straight after that date, ‘Bickerstaff’ published The Accomplishment of the first of Mr Bickerstaff’s Predictions, which claimed to be a relating of Partridge’s pitiful deathbed scene – accompanied by an alleged confession by the dying man in which he admitted that he was a fraudster. While Partridge eventually convinced people that he was still alive, he could not shake off the ridicule that Swift had lain at his feet. Credibility shot to ribbons, Partridge produced no more almanacks.

A long-lived practical joke in London involved ‘the washing of the lions’ at the Tower of London on April Fool’s Day. First recorded in 1698, the joke was still in practice deep into the nineteenth century – a ticket to the 1856 performance can be found in the Tower’s archives.

In 1848 tickets were printed that promised to allow the ‘bearer and friends’ admittance to the White Tower, on 1 April, to witness the lions receiving their annual bath. When some duped guests were refused entry, such a rumpus ensued that the warders had to whistle up some reinforcements.

Perhaps it is more of a hoax than a practical joke, but another April Fool’s spectacular took place in 1957, when the BBC ran a three-minute report on a supposed bumper harvest on spaghetti trees in Switzerland. The combination of fine weather and an end to the dreaded ‘spaghetti weevil’ were given as the reasons for the bonanza, and the report – viewed by 8 million people – was given added credibility because it was voiced by the venerated commentator Richard Dimbleby.

The 1950s was a time when most British people only encountered spaghetti in chopped up strips, doused in a red, tangy sauce and emptied out of a tin. When viewers rang in the next day to ask how they might also grow spaghetti, the BBC suggested they ‘place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce – and hope for the best’.

CS

François Thurot

Near Monreith Bay in Galloway, just off the road to Point of Lag from the A747, you will find a sculpture in bronze of an otter sitting on a rock looking out to sea. It commemorates the strange and captivating Gavin Maxwell, of the family and clan that has lived in those parts for centuries. He was a wonderful nature writer, gay and bipolar, served in the Special Operations Executive in the war, went to live with the marsh Arabs of Iraq in the 1950s and brought home a pet otter, Midge, whom he wrote about in Ring of Bright Water. It sold a million copies and was made into a feature film with Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers that traumatized a generation of animal lovers.

Not far from the bronze otter, opposite the car park to St Medan’s Golf Club, is the ruins of Kirkmaiden church, one of the oldest in Scotland. Many Maxwells repose there, some in the unusual neo-Norman burial chapel carved crisply from local sandstone, unfortunately in some disrepair now.

The last to be immured in it was Sir Herbert Maxwell in 1937, a naturalist, Tory MP and famous salmon angler, who chaired the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis in 1897 and was the grandfather of Gavin. The kirkyard’s most spectacular resident, however, is not a Maxwell, but François Thurot, the Dijonnais pirate.

How did a French pirate come to be interred among Scottish lairds on a distant shore?

The grandson of a Captain O’Farrell, who served in the Irish Brigade of the French army, and from whom he perhaps inherited spirit and temper, Thurot was brought up in Nuits-Saint-Georges, twinned with Hitchin, in the Côte-d’Or.

Winemaking, for which the region is famous, was not for him, and he was apprenticed to a surgeon at Dijon, but when his father died and his mother required financial assistance, he chanced across some silver at an aunt’s house and pawned it. An ungenerous accusation of theft followed and he ran away to sea just in time for the War of the Austrian Succession, enlisting as a ship’s surgeon on a privateer that sailed from Le Havre. It was immediately captured by the British and Thurot was imprisoned on a prison hulk at Dover, where he learned to speak English. He escaped, stole a small boat and returned to France, where he must have impressed his superiors, for he was given command of a ship aged only twenty.

They chose well, for he captured several British merchant ships before the war ended, which enabled him to develop a sideline in smuggling, until in 1753 Customs Men seized his ship, the Argonaute, off the coast of Ireland.

This only intensified his anti-British feeling, and when the Seven Years War broke out he was given command of a corvette and laid into the British with notable flair. He sank or captured around sixty ships before being promoted to captain of a forty-four-gun frigate, the Belle-Isle.

Over the next three years he created havoc among British shipping and became celebrated and feared in equal measure as a kind of cross between Drake and Blackbeard. In 1759 the French government gave him command of a squadron and 2,000 soldiers for an expedition to Ireland, where he was particularly admired, partly because of his ancestry and partly owing to the ambivalence of its people to British interests.

Thurot was always unlucky with weather, and storms wrecked half the squadron and blew the surviving ships off course. The soldiers’ commanding officer urged him to abandon the mission, but Thurot refused, pausing only to put in at Islay, where the starving crew dug potatoes out of the soil with bayonets.

He anchored off Carrickfergus on 21 February, and overpowered its garrison with what was left of his men, who unfortunately started pillaging the town even though he had given his word they would not. This alienated local feeling and he was obliged to re-embark his troops and set sail on 26 February. On the 28th, off the coast of the Isle of Man, Thurot’s Belle-Isle met Captain John Elliott’s Æolus, which fired a devastating broadside.

When Elliott’s crew boarded the Belle-Isle it was discovered Thurot had been killed, and his body thrown overboard, along with 159 of his men who were lost to Elliott’s four. Among the survivors was a Miss Smith of Paddington, Thurot’s mistress, or so it was said. This was especially awkward, for at home his wife had just given birth to a daughter, Cécile-Henriette.

His short life – he was thirty-two when he died – was so vivid he was very quickly mythologized. All England lamented the death of a sailor who fought for ‘honour rather than plunder’, all Ireland chorused ‘blessed be the day that O’Farrell came here’.

Meanwhile his body, identified ‘by a few tokens’, washed up in Luce Bay off the Galloway coast and was recovered by the laird of those parts, Sir William Maxwell, who paid for his funeral and attended as chief mourner.

RC

The Hurricane

I live on the South Downs, about half a mile from the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Every once in a while a Spitfire flies overhead and we all look up, point and go ooh. Spitfires are rare today, but not in the Second World War, when the Battle of Britain was fought in these skies. For Britons, could there be a more iconic aircraft than this, defending us from the Nazi Luftwaffe?

Probably not, but there is another aircraft which played an even nobler part in that fight and which gets insufficient credit in my view. It is the Hawker Hurricane. That’s Hurricane to rhyme with honeybun rather than windowpane.

A single-seat fighter, like the Spitfire, it can be recognized by the Hurricane’s rather plain appearance, with straight-edged wings, unlike the Spitfire’s ellipse, a hump-backed appearance thanks to a cockpit mounted high for better visibility and, if you look closely, rather corrugated flanks.

It was designed in the 1930s by Sir Sidney Camm of Hawker in consultation with the RAF, which was looking for monoplane fighters to replace his Hawker Fury biplane. It would be hard to overstate the technological advance of the Hurricane over its forebear, with a single wing, retractable undercarriage, and the same Rolls-Royce Merlin engine that also powered the Spitfire (they sound very similar). It also had eight machine guns capable of firing 1,000 rounds per minute. This last capability was introduced thanks to calculations by Hazel Hills, the thirteen-year-old dyslexic daughter of the Air Ministry’s Science Officer, who proved to be not only an excellent mathematician but also, in later life, an eminent children’s psychiatrist and a world-renowned expert in autism.

In some ways, however, the Hurricane looked backwards rather than forwards. The fuselage was a steel tubular design with a wood frame covered with painted Irish linen stretched over it by dressmakers, hence the corrugation. The tail also looked antique, as if it had been transplanted from one of Camm’s biplanes rather than created for a new era of aeroplane design.

Construction of the Hurricane began in 1936. It was the first mass-produced RAF plane to break the 300 mph barrier, could fly at an altitude of 16,000 feet and climb to 15,000 in about five and a half minutes. Its chief test pilot reported that ‘the aircraft is simple and easy to fly and has no apparent vices’. By the time war with Germany was declared in September 1939, 500 RAF Hurricanes were operational, with another 3,500 on order.

Hurricanes did far more damage to the Luftwaffe than Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. There were more of them – thirty-two squadrons compared with nineteen – but they were slower and less manoeuvrable, workhorses rather than show ponies, used to attack bombers rather than their fighter escorts, which were left to the Spitfires. In some ways they were actually better served by their more antique composition. Messerschmitt Bf 109 cannon shells passed through the stretched linen fuselage rather than exploding on contact, requiring only a patch to be applied when the plane returned to base to make it good to go again. Its undercarriage also was better than the Spitfire’s, more stable on landing. That said, no one would deny that the Spitfire’s metal monocoque and technological refinements made it the faster, sexier machine.

Both, of course, had their flaws. The internal-combustion engine could not cope with a negative-G dive, unlike the fuel-injected Messerschmitt. If the RAF pilots tried to do this the carburettors would flood and the engine cease to roar, so they had to peel away and circle back, to the enemy’s great advantage.

This was remedied by the introduction of Miss Shilling’s Orifice in 1941. Beatrice Shilling was a butcher’s daughter from Waterlooville in Hampshire, a champion motorcycle racer and a scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, responsible for research and development for the RAF. She invented what is more properly known as the RAE Restrictor, a sort of thimble-shaped washer that limited the flow of fuel into the carburettors during a negative-G dive. It could also be installed without taking the aircraft out of service and made such a positive contribution to the Hurricane’s and Spitfire’s performance their pilots gave it the more colloquial name. Miss Shilling (actually Mrs Naylor at the time of her innovation) received an OBE for her services after the war and enjoyed considerable success in motorsport, racing cars with Mr Naylor, whose offer of marriage she had initially declined until he, like her, had lapped the Brooklands circuit on a motorcycle at a speed in excess of 100 mph.

No such glamour attended the Hurricane. It was always a Cinderella aircraft, even with refinements and impressive results, and never acquired the prestige of the Spitfire, nor indeed of the Bf 109. Three thousand Hurricanes were built for the Soviet air force in the Lend Lease agreement following the war, but the Russians weren’t mad about them. In 2023 eight were discovered buried in crates in Ukraine. Why bury Hurricanes? Under the terms of the agreement, aircraft lost in conflict need not be paid for.

RC

Poirot

‘Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible.’

With these lines, one of the world’s most famous fictional detectives was introduced to the world. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, was Agatha Christie’s first crime novel. He later went on to feature in thirty-three further novels, over fifty short stories and a play.

Born in Belgium, Poirot is a retired police officer who fled to England during the First World War and began a second career as a private detective in his newfound homeland. Short in stature and with an impeccably groomed moustache that is waxed to perfection, his distinctive personality is a blend of intelligence, fastidiousness and a certain degree of flamboyance (he uses a preparation called Revivit to mask his grey hair). He is often underestimated by those who meet him, something Christie uses to her advantage in many storylines. Poirot prides himself on his meticulous nature and ‘little grey cells’, while his approach to solving crimes is deeply psychological, involving an acute understanding of human nature.

Christie’s creation was influenced by her own experiences during the Great War. Taking on work as a volunteer nurse in her hometown of Torquay, Devon, Christie crossed paths with numerous refugees who had arrived from the continent. Europe was reeling from the conflict and Belgium had suffered greatly, with much fighting taking place on its soil. After the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 a significant humanitarian crisis led to hundreds of thousands of Belgians fleeing their homes to seek refuge in several countries, including Britain. The interactions Christie had with the newcomers provided her with insights into their culture, language and mannerisms, traits she translated directly to Poirot. By making her protagonist an outsider, she could also allow for him to observe English society from an unusual perspective, often commenting on its quirks and peculiarities. Moreover, the detective’s Belgian identity made him more relatable and sympathetic to readers. As a refugee, he embodied resilience and adaptability, qualities that resonated with a post-war audience. With a polite and dignified demeanour – and occasional struggles to adapt to English customs – Christie created in Poirot a character her readers found endearing. He was also markedly different from the type of sleuth the British public was accustomed to. In the early twentieth century, the detective genre was burgeoning, with characters like Sherlock Holmes making a particular mark. Unlike most others, Poirot did not depend on physical evidence alone, nor his physical prowess. Modesty, however, was not one of his main traits. ‘My name is Hercule Poirot,’ he said in The Mystery of the Blue Train, ‘and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.’

Poirot has several friends and acquaintances assisting him in his work. We most commonly meet the first friend he made after arriving in England, Captain Arthur Hastings, who in 1916 was recovering from wounds sustained during the war. Chief Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard – described by Hastings as a ‘little, sharp, dark, ferret-faced man’ – often crosses paths with Poirot. Felicity Lemon is the detective’s secretary who is extremely useful to him but unfortunate in appearance: she is described as looking like ‘a lot of bones flung together at random’.

On screen, the character of Poirot was first shown on television in 1937, only a year after the BBC had launched its TV service. The actor Francis L. Sullivan played the part of Poirot in the one-act play The Wasp’s Nest. The actor now best known for playing the part is undoubtedly David Suchet, in the ITV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot; his iconic moustache and Belgian accent making an imprint on viewers.

Poirot’s last case is the aptly called Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, which takes him back to Styles, where his first mystery was solved. While not published until 1975, the story was written by Christie during the Second World War as a gift for her daughter, the author fearing that she might not survive the extensive bombings. In the book, Poirot dies, and the reception of the story was so immense that he had an obituary published in the New York Times, the only fictional character to ever have received such an honour. ‘At the end of his life,’ the obituary reads, ‘he was arthritic and had a bad heart.’ Living out his final days in an Essex nursing home, Poirot’s vanity led him to wear a wig and false moustache to mask the signs of ageing.

CJ

The Matpakke

If you visit a Norwegian office around 11.30 in the morning, you will likely find some of its employees huddled around a table in a break room, with the crinkling sound of paper being unravelled as they prepare to eat their lunch. But if you are now picturing elaborate, open sandwiches piled high with countless layers of smoked salmon, draped with artistically sliced pickles and garnished with sprigs of dill, you will be disappointed. The traditional matpakke – the packed lunch – is an austere affair. A true Norwegian will make his or hers early in the morning and it will consist of three to four slices of wholesome granary bread, with just enough of a topping (pålegg – on-put) to cover it. This should be a slice of cheese (yellow or brown, the latter a form of goats’ cheese), salami, liver pâté, or, if feeling fancy, mackerel in tomato sauce from a tin. A garnish of a slice of cucumber or pickle is allowed. The matpakke is wrapped tightly in greaseproof paper, with rectangles of mellomleggspapir (between-put-paper) separating the layers to keep things tidy. On the side, a carrot or an apple is an acceptable addition.

Norwegians will be used to this tradition from school, and without knowing its background, I never questioned the logic behind it. What the matpakke lacks in taste, and frankly, excitement, it makes up for in practicality and productivity: concepts that are close to the northerners’ hearts.

From a workplace perspective, it makes perfect sense. Despite Norway having the world’s third shortest working week (thirty-eight hours, on average), the country also ranks the fifth most productive worldwide, based on GDP per hour worked. This has partially been attributed to the very high value placed on work–life balance: most workers leave their desks promptly at 4 p.m. (or 3 p.m. in the summer for those who have dedicated summer hours, to make the most of the rare long hours of sunlight). Lunch breaks are typically thirty minutes long and paid, meaning there is little time to queue at the local deli or go out for a meal: quickly and efficiently consuming your uninspiring slices of bread therefore makes a lot of sense.

The matpakke in its current form, however, evolved from something of a revolutionary concept relating to child health developed in 1929: the Oslo breakfast. Since the 1880s, many schoolchildren in Norway’s capital, then named Kristiania, were served a daily meal as a philanthropic measure. During the First World War, this was extended to all children regardless of financial need, but in the 1920s, chief school physician Carl Schiøtz queried the benefits of the scheme. Most children also ate a full, warm meal at home in the late afternoon and, with a newfound interest in nutrition, Schiøtz questioned the benefits of eating two large servings so close together: he also knew many turned up at school without having eaten anything in the morning. Schiøtz’s solution was to replace the midday meal with a nutritional, communal breakfast at school, a solid meal rich in minerals and vitamins that would provide all children with a third of their daily calorific need, so that they would be ready to learn. Knowledge of vitamins was a new field, with most only identified from the 1920s onwards. To provide balance, the Oslo breakfast was to consist of bread and milk as well as a raw carrot and/or an orange.

While a few other parts of the country followed suit, most lacked the means or facilities to copy Oslo’s example. Elsewhere, families were given recipes to bake their own bread, which they were encouraged to send their children to school with, and in 1937, regional doctor Olav L. Lien published an article on his experiment to encourage families to send a matpakke in the prescribed format, with a literal carrot given in return by the school. The experiment had been a huge success. Following the Second World War and subsequent political debates on the pros and cons of state-provided school meals, Lien’s version was introduced in Oslo in 1955, with the bread and pålegg brought from home, and milk, fruit and vegetables, and cod-liver oil provided by the school. Eventually, the meal was consumed in the late-morning break and the arrangement was officially upheld until March 1980.

Now, the matpakke is thoroughly ingrained in the Norwegian psyche, even though it is – usually – socially acceptable to experiment with the format. There are standardized varieties too: if you are hiking or cross-country skiing, your matpakke should include an orange, a flask of hot chocolate or black coffee and a Kvikk Lunsj, the Norwegian chocolate-covered wafer rivalling the English Kit Kat. Crisps or other sweets are not allowed.

CJ

Obituaries

Modern obituaries continue a tradition started by the ancient Romans, who, from 59 BC, included death notices in their Acta Diurna – ‘Daily Events’ – which were written and circulated on papyrus as a sort of newspaper prototype.

While the deaths of prominent people have always made the news pages, personalized obituaries were very rarely printed in the early newspapers of the late 1750s, and they seem to have become a regular feature only from 1800.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, funeral homes would supply their records to newspaper journalists for transformation into structured death announcements. These were often simply factual summations of lives ended, published in columns that lacked frills, under the heading ‘Died’. Children’s obituaries were allowed greater sentimentality and might include a biblical or poetic verse – a nod to the particular tragedy of a life extinguished before it had burned for long.

The blood harvest of the American Civil War, which saw more than 600,000 killed, led to a proliferation of obituaries in the United States during the 1860s. These mourned the departed, but also served as legal notices that alerted the reader to estates being live, now their owners were no longer so.

Newspapers grew in physical size once the Linotype machine – invented by a German watchmaker – came into use in the late nineteenth century. No longer was it necessary for each word to be laid out by hand. Instead, this hot-metal typesetting system cast blocks of metal type and remained the norm for newspaper production till the 1970s and 80s.

Those that placed obituaries paid to do so, thus swelling the income of newspaper proprietors. By the 1930s they had become a large and important part of daily newspaper content and had adapted the four-part formula common to the obituary ever since, blending personal detail with practical information: the announcement of the death, a potted biography of the deceased, a reference to surviving family members as a focus for grief, and funeral plans flagged up to those who might wish to attend. Shorter entries tended to come from those close to the deceased, while more substantial ones would be penned by journalists marking the deaths of folk considered newsworthy, whether locally or beyond.

Terry Pratchett, the UK’s best-selling author of the 1990s, wrote his own obituary when he discovered he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. He concluded his look at his life, achievements and thoughts on mortality with: ‘Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.’

I like how people of global reputation are seen in different contexts by their obituarists. So Napoleon’s obituary in Le Parisien concentrated on the tragic descent of one of France’s own, from unparalleled greatness to impotent exile, with: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French and architect of the Napoleonic empire, has breathed his last on the remote island of St Helena’; while the New York Times sought to balance the undoubted gifts of a remarkable man with the devastation he had wrought on what was – to Americans – distant lands: ‘[Napoleon’s] ambition, cunning, and strategic brilliance propelled him to the heights of power, yet his legacy is clouded by the devastation of war and the erosion of liberty.’

The New York Times’ obituaries are often notable for their ability to capture an enormous amount in succinct form. In 1952 its obituarists wrote: ‘Eva Perón, the dynamic former radio actress who rose from the slums of Argentina to become the nation’s spiritual leader as the wife of President Juan Domingo Perón, died last night at age 33.’ You would have to sit through two-and-a-half hours of Evita to learn the same about the arc of her life.

Legacy.com attracts more than 10 million followers each month. Ancestry, the genealogical website, offers access to more than a quarter of a billion such death notices. Given the essential family information they contain, they are of particular use to those examining their ancestral roots.

In the United States, things changed in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the New York Times carried short obituaries for each of the 3,000 murdered that day. Despite their brevity, these obituaries were highly personal – celebrations of people brought to life, individually, with the full range of emotions, from tragic to kindly comic. After these, many felt emboldened to break the rigid conventions of the previous 250 years, and celebrate the dead person’s full life, including the less flattering bits. Truth was seen as more important than flattery.

CS

Simba the Cinéaste Lion

Croyland Abbey, once Wellingborough’s manor house, is today home to council offices. Its gardens are a park where children play around a sculpture of a lion made by the chainsaw artist Mick Burns. It commemorates Simba, one of the star attractions of Wellingborough Zoo, which stood on this site until 1970 and closed after an intruder lost an arm to a leopard which was discovered to be living in conditions that were less than ideal.

The zoo was the creation of a Mr Stevens, who kept a pet shop in Midland Road and lived in Croyland Abbey. Rather a showman, often seen around town in a trilby with a peacock feather tucked into the band, to mitigate the material and cultural privations of war he decided to show off his collection of exotic and not so exotic animals. The zoo opened to the public in the summer of 1943, just after the Dambusters raids. Entry cost sevenpence (3p) and visitors were entertained with a pond of goldfish, a turkey, some squirrels, a baby elephant, a polar bear and a chimp called Boo Boo, who wore a peculiar sort of overall and smoked a pipe. Children were forced into his cage to have their photograph taken with him. There was also a parrot that swore like a trooper, and in the 1960s, under different management, an elephant called Twiggy and a puma called Judy who once appeared on the children’s TV programme Blue Peter.

Two of the apes went on to star in another early TV show, On Safari, with Armand and Michaela Denis; Charlie the chimp made a spectacular appearance with Wilfred Pickles on Ask Pickles; and Bambi, a two-year-old fallow deer, appeared in the film The Count of Monte Cristo.

There were issues with security. Two penguins escaped and were spotted by a motorist waddling along Croyland Road before being cornered in someone’s back garden. A sealion once got into the pond in front of the council offices at Swanspool and had to be enticed back into the zoo with live eels obtained from the fishmonger. Mrs Jean Knight, as a child, was abducted by a monkey that ate her ice cream and then dragged her by the hair past the Regal Cinema, which happened to be showing Tarzan and Jane, before being caught by the local constabulary equipped with a big net.

It was not in the least unusual then to encounter a lion walking the streets of Wellingborough. This was Simba, looked after by keeper Maurice Sharpe. Simba was so tame he lived with Mr Sharpe and his family at home as a pet alongside Tibby the cat, which apparently was the only member of the household never entirely at ease in his presence. Simba had the run of the zoo, visiting the busy café, picnicking in the Abbey grounds and, when the working day was done, going to the Red Lion pub at Isham. Mr Sharpe used to drive him there in his Morris Minor van and Simba would sit at the bar drinking bitter from his own tankard. There is a British Pathé newsreel from 1959 that shows him in the snug with the regulars. He once drank twelve pints in one evening but managed to get home without showing any signs of intoxication.

He loved going to the pictures and was often seen sitting quietly in the aisle at the ABC next to Mr Sharpe. Simba particularly enjoyed Westerns, Rio Bravo was a great favourite, Howards Hawks’ 1956 classic, with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson and Walter Brennan.

The zoo was taken over in 1963 and the old cages and enclosures were demolished and replaced by smart new ones in red cedar for cats, reptiles and monkeys. After another change of hands in 1969 standards rather slipped and invited the interest of the RSPCA. Unfortunately that was exactly the time the leopard chewed the intruder’s arm and that, added to falling numbers through the turnstile, led to financial difficulties. There was a short reprieve when the Welsh pop singer and animal lover Abe Franklin paid off all the zoo’s debt at the High Court, but it was in reality no longer viable and it closed for good in 1970.

The owner auctioned off its animals, but bidding was not brisk. Cleo the lioness went for £45, and only the penguins, unusually for their species, flew off the shelf, going for £85 the pair.

Croyland Abbey became the new Borough Council Offices, its gardens given to the townspeople for their perpetual enjoyment. The lions, penguins, polar bear and chimp are now commemorated with sculptures at the entrance made by staff and students from Moulton College’s stonemasonry department and carved from Weldon stone.

RC

Hoards

What do you do with your money or valuables if there are no banks or safety deposit boxes to place them in? For a very long time, the answer has been to bury them in the ground in hoards – deliberate deposits hidden for safekeeping and later retrieval. At least, that was usually the plan, but in many cases, their locations were lost or forgotten, or perhaps the owner died without retrieving them. Now, hoards are often found by metal detectorists or archaeologists and in many countries, laws dictate what happens to them. But even in antiquity, the thorny issue of the true ownership of such lost valuables was sometimes legislated. In the Roman period, law codes determined that if the owner could no longer be identified, the finder could safely take his treasure home.

The best-known hoards from history contain exceptional riches. In England, some of the most spectacular examples include the Iron Age Snettisham hoard from Norfolk – actually several hoards, containing a total of 175 gold torcs (neck rings) and numerous other artefacts – and the more recently discovered Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire hoard, which contained more than 4,000 items.

The Vikings were prolific hoarders. The Swedish island of Gotland, in the Baltic Sea, is an especially good example: more than 700 silver hoards have been found, containing an exceptional amount of silver, the material the Vikings treasured above all else. In 1999, metal detectorists on the island discovered two of the most spectacular Viking Age hoards ever found, containing a total of 67kg of silver, including more than 14,300 coins and 486 bangles and bracelets. Archaeologists later found out that they were buried within a building, probably the equivalent of a home safe.

Not all hoards contained money or precious metals. There are early examples from northern Europe where large caches of stone tools and raw materials were buried. A Neolithic hoard from Norway included twenty-six flint daggers, other tools and weapons, and more than 200 flint flakes. Other hoards contain iron tools and raw materials, with one containing a complete toolbox with over 200 tools.

But was the reason for burying such treasures always pragmatic, as a security measure? Possibly not. There are numerous cases where safekeeping could not have been the main purpose, because the hoards were deposited in locations where they could not be retrieved: in lakes and rivers, bogs and mires. Archaeologists like to call these liminal places, representing real or imagined boundaries, perhaps between mortals and the supernatural. Sometimes, hoards in these locations are found to contain objects that are deliberately broken or bent, especially weapons – a practical way to make sure they would not be used again in the mortal world.

Another interpretation is that those objects were ones you could take with you to the afterworld. In one of the medieval Icelandic sagas, this is explicitly spelt out. In what is known as Odin’s law, Odin decrees that those who arrive in his heavenly hall, Valhalla, can bring not just what they have with them on the funeral pyre, but also whatever treasures they have hidden in the ground. For someone going into battle, this must have been a relief: if you were successful, you could go back for your money, but if not, you would receive it again later.

We rarely come across similar examples of hoarding from our own times but a curious case came to light in 2009, when divers working in the River Wear near Durham Cathedral came across something unusual. Under the water, they found a collection of metal artefacts that they could identify as property belonging to Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who had died more than twenty years before. Ramsey had lived nearby after his retirement and the objects were very specific. They included a cross he had received from the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, a gold coin celebrating the renovation of the Grand Shrine of Ise in Japan, a silver trowel given to Ramsey when he laid the foundations of a church in India and several commemorative medals from the Vatican Council. Nobody knew why this collection had ended up in the river. They had not been reported stolen but perhaps Ramsey had failed to report a burglary? If so, the thieves might have realized the objects were too recognizable to sell. But another explanation was that Ramsey himself may have deliberately deposited them in the river, perhaps because he found his ownership of so many valuables problematic. A final suggested explanation was that Ramsey deliberately gave these objects as offerings to God, because the section of the church that he belonged to specifically approves of this. After all, if that is an explanation we are happy with in prehistory, could it not also be possible today?

CJ

St Vitus’ Dance

Do you remember that episode from the 1980s television series Fame when all the students burst out of the High School of Performing Arts in leg warmers and leotards and danced around the streets of New York to the pounding rhythms of the eponymous theme tune, stopping the traffic and startling passers-by?

Something like this happened in Aachen on 24 June 1374, the Feast of St John the Baptist.

People appeared in the streets, dancing maniacally, jumping and hopping, screaming, laughing and crying. They danced without cease, hyperventilating, falling into fits and hallucinating, some even suffering broken ribs before eventually dropping down dead from exhaustion. Others appeared dressed in garlands of flowers, or undressed; some made obscene gestures, others coupled in the street.

It was originally called St John’s Dance, appearing on the Feast of St John the Baptist, coinciding with festivities of Midsummer’s Day. The mania spread to Cologne, to Metz, to Strasbourg, Flanders and Utrecht, where it was observed some participants evidenced a violent dislike of pointy shoes and a dread of the colour red.

The authorities responded by exorcizing the afflicted, by playing soothing music to calm them down and by praying to St Vitus, the patron saint of dance (and oversleeping), whose intercession was believed to be particularly efficacious in these cases. Hence the name the affliction is most commonly called now: St Vitus’ Dance.

It spread to Luxemburg and even as far as Italy, where another form of wild public dancing, Tarantism, was believed to be a remedy for the bites of poisonous spiders. Eventually it abated, but recurred in 1375, 1381, 1418 and 1428, when a monk danced himself to death in Schaffhausen. It was not just the religiously intense. In that same year a group of normally rather staid Swiss ladies danced themselves senseless in Zurich.

Another notorious outbreak occurred in 1518, the Dancing Plague of Strasbourg, when a woman called Frau Troffea began to dance furiously in the street. She danced for a week and another forty joined in, and then more, and by August four hundred people were dead of heatstroke or heart attack. It abated in September after the authorities sent the afflicted to the mountains to pray for relief.

The last account I can find of an outbreak dates from the seventeenth century when Gregor Horst, a professor of medicine, wrote, ‘Several women who annually visit the chapel of St. Vitus in Drefelhausen [Treffelhausen] … dance madly all day and all night until they collapse in ecstasy. In this way they come to themselves again and feel little or nothing until the next May, when they are again … forced around St. Vitus’ Day to betake themselves to that place.’

What was happening? There are a number of explanations. Some think the dancers were suffering from ergot poisoning, known then as St Anthony’s fire. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and produces an alkaloid called ergotamine, which can have a similar effect on humans as LSD, causing hallucinations and erratic behaviour, the sensation of burning, convulsions and uterine contractions (Methergine, a drug used to help post-partum bleeding is derived from ergot).

It has been suggested that it was a cultural phenomenon, a stress reaction to disease or disaster in a world still recovering from the horrors of the Black Death. Others say it was caused by a peculiarly intense form of religious devotion, which may seem excessive to us but in most towns and cities of the United Kingdom today there are Christians who speak in tongues or dance and laugh during worship, believing these attributes to be charisma, gifts of the Holy Spirit. I remember being surprised to see Old Etonians in chinos doing this at Holy Trinity Brompton, the smart Anglican church in London that invented the Alpha Course, which gives basic instruction in a version of Christianity and claims several well-known converts, among them ‘Ginger Spice’ Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls and Sir Paul Marshall, the co-owner of GB News.

There is also the human propensity to join in, to copy another’s behaviour, to forget oneself in an intense activity (think of screaming teenagers at Beatles concerts), or express solidarity with those who share your values. There is evidence that the outbreaks of dancing occurred along trade routes, or within social networks, wherever people got together in the currents of political and cultural change.

All these factors were evident, I think, in the rave culture of the late eighties and nineties. Huge groups of young people would meet at illegal venues accessible from the M25, times and places disseminated through anonymous telephone numbers, or leaflets or social networks. Loud dance music would be played and ecstasy and LSD taken. In the hallucinatory intensity of that experience people would dance for hours and hours and then go on to after-parties and dance some more. At a rave, social barriers were dissolved, inhibitions lost, and from it evolved a culture not unlike a religious movement, at least until the drugs wore off.

Perhaps once in a while we are just gripped by collective madness and, in the impossible hope of an idealized existence, do embarrassing things?

RC

Alien Abductions

As a teenager, one of the highlights of my week was watching a new episode of The X-Files on a Thursday night, when the paranormal investigators Mulder and Scully were tasked to solve cases involving extraterrestrials and other unexplained mysteries. These would frequently include alien abductions, with certain features familiar from elsewhere: the victim is usually asleep or unconscious, lifted into the air by a mysterious force, often ending up inside a spaceship. Ghostly, alien figures may surround him or her and experiments often take place. Eventually, the abductee is returned to earth with only a vague memory of what has taken place, if remembered at all.

It turns out that the modern alien abduction is a relatively recent phenomenon with a very specific origin. While the concept of aliens and unidentified flying objects gained popularity from the 1940s onward, early reports of encounters with extraterrestrials tended to be relatively friendly. Those who had these experiences were dubbed ‘contactees’. This drastically changed in 1961 with the story reported by Betty and Barney Hill, a married couple from New Hampshire. In September that year, the couple were in their car on the way back from a holiday in Canada when they saw a white star in the sky that seemed to be chasing them. Although frightened, they stopped to investigate as the object descended: inside, they could see dark figures behind a series of windows. Rushing home, they suddenly realized their journey had mysteriously taken longer than expected. Later, Betty had disturbing nightmares and sought the help of psychiatrist Dr Benjamin Simon. Under hypnosis, the couple both revealed they had been taken onboard the vessel they saw that night by strange beings and subjected to examinations. Together with Dr Simon and a journalist, John G. Fuller, the Hills published a book on their experience which became an immediate bestseller: The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours Aboard a Flying Saucer. An important element was the fact that neither of the couple could remember their experience until hypnotized, a concept that became central to future accounts.

Over the next two decades, similar reports became commonplace and the next influential text was that of Budd Hopkins, a New York artist with a particular interest in alien abductions. Having sighted a UFO himself, he began investigating cases and published Missing Time: Documented Stories of People Kidnapped by UFOs and Then Returned With Their Memories Erased in 1981 – also a bestseller. The part of Hopkins’ book that resonated most widely was the idea that you could have been a victim without having any memory of the event whatsoever, which increased the number of people reporting abductions dramatically. More or less any event involving a blacked-out period of time could now plausibly be explained through UFO interference. Another key revelation was the story of a woman named Virginia Horton, who had experienced two abductions. Hopkins concluded that not only was it common for abductees to be monitored over time, but also that the frequency of probes being inserted into nostrils suggested they were implanted with some sort of tracking device. In a follow-up book, Intruders, he was convinced that these abductions formed part of an extraterrestrial breeding programme, in which women were impregnated and their foetuses removed at a later stage.

However, while most of these reports were tales of trauma for which the victims required treatment, others reported their encounters as something positive or even spiritual, renaming themselves experiencers; some even called the aliens ‘friends’.

Modern science has repeatedly explored whether – assuming the abductees were not, in fact, abducted – these reports have a medical or psychological foundation. One suggestion, which could explain the reports of being experimented with or operated on by hazy-looking characters, is the concept of accidental awareness under general anaesthesia. This means that a patient may have temporarily woken up during surgery and later regained unconsciousness. Later, vague memories or terrors of the experience can resurface, without the patient understanding what they remember. Instead, many may have reached for a plausible explanation and found one in the shape of an alien encounter.

However, the most common explanation is that those reporting abductions experienced a condition called sleep paralysis. Here, during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the patient resumes consciousness while the body is still in a state of muscle atonia, meaning that he or she is unable to use any part of their body. The state is usually accompanied by a form of hallucination, either sensing an intruder in the room, suffocating, or even floating up in the air.

In my X-Files-watching days, although I didn’t actually believe in them, I still used to wish I would see a UFO one day, as, in the words of Mulder and Scully: The truth is out there.

CJ

Marathons

There is a common myth that marathons were held at the ancient Olympic Games in Athens, to commemorate a feat by a Greek courier by the name of Pheidippides in 490 BC. The story goes that he ran from the town of Marathon to Athens, to tell of news of victory over the Persians. As soon as he arrived and delivered the message, he died from the effort. The story is based partially on historical sources: Herodotus wrote about the battle between Athens and the Persians that year and about a courier named Pheidippides. But the distance he ran was 153 miles over thirty-six hours, back and forth between Athens and Sparta, and in the end, he survived. While there were running races held at the ancient Olympics, they were all short, with the longest measuring twenty-four stadia, or around 2.85 miles.

The idea of the marathon as a long-distance running race was created in 1896 at the first modern Olympics in Athens, where a race was held over a 40km course. The runners had to race between Marathon and Pnyx, a hillside in Athens. The winner – the Greek Spyridon Louis – completed the race in a time of 2:58:50. The event was hugely popular and the following year, the first Boston Marathon was organized in what was to become the oldest annual marathon event in the world.

For several years, the marathon distance remained at 40km or thereabouts, though there was no officially prescribed distance. In 1908, the Olympic Games were held in London. The event had been organized in a hurry because the location was meant to be Rome that year, but it became clear the city would not be ready in time. On the other hand, London was exceptionally well organized, including an especially prepared stadium: the first ever. A key event was to be the Olympic marathon, which would finish at the stadium in front of the royal box, so that King Edward VII and his wife Queen Alexandra could easily see the finish line. The event was to start at Windsor Castle, giving a carefully measured distance of 26 miles (41.84km). However, the organizing committee then received a request from the Queen: could they move the starting line back to the east lawn of the castle, so that the royal children could see it from their nursery? The committee agreed, which added 385 yards (352m) to the course, making it 26.219 miles, a distance that was officially adopted by the International Amateur Athletic Federation in 1921 and still remains the standard. The 1908 race finish became controversial as the first finisher, an Italian pastry chef named Dorando Pietri, collapsed five times during the race and was assisted across the finish line. Apparently, the organizers did so because they were worried he would die in front of the royals, but this meant he was disqualified and the US runner Johnny Hayes received the medal.

Women were not officially allowed to compete in marathons until 1972, and it took until 1984 for a woman’s marathon category to be added to the Olympics. Before this, women were considered too fragile to run the distance and an experiment in the 1928 Olympics, where women were allowed to race in the 100m and 800m races, seemed to confirm this view: when some of the runners collapsed after the 800m race the event was banned until 1960. Even so, a woman did run the Boston Marathon in 1967. Kathrine Switzer was determined to race and entered using only her initials because, technically, there was nothing in the entry rules specifying gender restrictions. Although nobody prevented her from starting, during the race she was physically attacked by the race co-director, who attempted to pull her race number off, and subjected to aggressive questioning by the press. Kathrine finished in 4 hours 20 minutes.

Now, around 1.1 million people complete a marathon every year and the average marathon runner is about forty years old. The current world record for men was set in 2023 by Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum, with a time of 2:00:35 and the women’s record set the same year is held by Ethiopian Tigst Assefa, with a time of 2:11:53. Since the late 1960s, Kenyans and Ethiopians have dominated middle- and long-distance running events, and for the past twenty-one years have held the last nine consecutive world records. Researchers have tried to understand why: they have concluded it must be a combination of favourable physical characteristics that provide an optimal biomechanical and metabolic basis for this form of running, long-term exposure to high altitudes, usually from childhood, and a strong psychological motivation to succeed.

To recreate the legend of Pheidippides, you can now compete in the annual Spartathlon, an ultramarathon (i.e. a race that is longer than an ordinary marathon) between Athens and Sparti, covering a distance of 153 miles. The race has to be completed in thirty-six hours, after which the runners each receive a laurel wreath. So far, all competitors have survived the race.

CJ

Mount Stuart House

If you should visit the Isle of Bute in the Clyde Estuary, easily accessible by ferry from Wemyss Bay, where the bar has a real fire and shows highlights from the Scottish Premier League, visit first the Victorian lavatories at Rothesay, the most splendid public conveniences in the British Isles. Then make your way to Mount Stuart, one of the most extraordinary houses in Scotland, or anywhere.

It was built by John Crichton-Stuart, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, then the richest man in the empire thanks to his interests in the coalfields of South Wales and the export of coal from Cardiff. The house that stood on the site previously, built by the 2nd Earl of Bute, burned down in 1877, so the Marquess had an opportunity to build to his own exacting and perhaps eccentric specifications.

He was a man of energy, scholarship and commitment, a Scottish nationalist, an architectural historian, an ornithologist, a supporter of the rights of women and an anti-vivisectionist, but it was his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church when he was twenty-one (he inherited the marquessate aged six months) which shocked many and gives the house he built its particular and peculiar character – a Calvinist effort to revive the spirit of continental pre-Reformation architecture, if you like.

It was built in red sandstone by Sir Robert Roland Anderson, a pupil of George Gilbert Scott, and designed by the great William Burges, whose work on the interiors at the Marquess’s castle at Cardiff were described by his biographer as ‘three dimensional passports to fairy kingdoms and realms of gold’.

Mount Stuart has a marble hall, as splendid as any, made from two dozen kinds of marble. The vault, eighty feet above, sparkles with the signs of the zodiac, and is lit by stained-glass windows illustrating the seasons of the year. It is so designed that the movement of light through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year interacts with the fenestration and the decoration it illuminates. It is quite extraordinary.

Even more extraordinary is the neo-Gothic chapel, surmounted by what looks like the Scott Monument. It has a Cosmati pavement, like that upon which the sovereign is crowned in Westminster Abbey. Indeed, the chapel seems more a place for the coronation of a French king than the shriving of a Scottish aristocrat. Some have seen it as a rich man’s fantasy, like Mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein. This is misleading, for Lord Bute was also passionately interested in science and technological innovation.

Mount Stuart was one of the first houses to have central heating, electric light and an internal telephone system, and is believed to be the first in the world to have a heated swimming pool. This innovative attribute seems to be heritable. Crichton-Stuart’s son, the 4th Marquess, was the first person to have his wedding filmed, at Bellingham Castle in Ireland in 1905.

You would expect the 3rd Marquess, who died aged fifty-three of Bright’s disease, another family inheritance, to lie in the marble chapel like a sovereign awaiting the Last Trump. In fact he lies in the much plainer and simpler Shore Chapel, which looks like a Wee Free bungalow, beside the sea, accessed through the gardens to the east of the house. He was taken here on a hand bier, the way lit by flaming torches, and lay overnight with a company of nuns praying for his immortal soul. The next day a Requiem Mass was said and his coffin was placed in a room at the back. His widow then took his heart, for which a lovely silver reliquary-like container had been made, to the Holy Land, where it was buried on the Mount of Olives, like that of his ancestor Robert the Bruce.

The Butes have since built a company making textiles for industrial use, the biggest employer on the island. I once visited the R&D facility, where a machine mimicked the effect of millions of bottoms sitting on a very resilient fabric designed for London Underground’s trains.

The then 7th Marquess of Bute, Earl of Windsor, Viscount Ayr, Lord Crichton of Sanquhar and Cumnock, Viscount Kingarth, Lord Mount Stuart, Cumra and Inchmarnock, Baron Cardiff, Viscount Mountjoy, lived at Mount Stuart, but preferred to be known simply as John Bute. He was a former painter and decorator and a brilliant racing driver, winning Le Mans in 1988 as Johnny Dumfries, using the title the heir to the marquessate enjoys. In 2016 he had the great good fortune to discover in the library at Mount Stuart a First Folio of the plays of William Shakespeare published in 1623, the presence of which had been forgotten. One sold at auction recently for more than £3 million.

The 7th Marquess very sadly died of leukaemia aged only sixty-two in 2021 and the title was inherited by his son, the chef Jack Dumfries.

RC

Silk Road Diseases

The term Silk Road was coined by Ferdinand von Richthofen, a German geographer and geologist, in 1877 to encapsulate the intricate network of trade routes and connections established in Asia over millennia. The genesis of the Silk Road network traces back to the empires of Persia and China during the first millennium BC. Key catalysts were conflicts and trade interactions between the Chinese empire and nomadic tribes. Payment of tribute was customary along the steppes, dating back to the inception of the Silk Road routes: over 2,000 years ago, Chinese emperors bestowed luxury gifts upon Mongolian nomads in exchange for peace, including prized silk, valued for its unique qualities and abundant production in China. Silk transcended its luxury status to serve as a currency, particularly in regions where coins held little value or perishable goods were impractical. Introduced to the Roman empire around the first century BC, silk’s enduring allure as a luxury item propelled the development of trading routes running from the Far East to Europe. Silk was just one among many commodities traded along these routes, which facilitated the exchange of not only goods but also ideas, culture and religion between East and West. However, along the way, this extraordinary spread of people was accompanied by the spread of a less-desirable commodity: disease.

The best known illness to have travelled with people is the bubonic plague, or Black Death, that spread in the fourteenth century. Across Eurasia, the disease is estimated to have killed somewhere between 75 and 200 million people. The most common theory is that the disease was carried along the Silk Roads by infected rodents, reaching trade ports in Europe by 1346.

Other diseases have specifically been linked to these trade routes too, including Behçet’s disease, which causes blood vessel inflammation throughout the body and is popularly called the ‘Silk Road disease’, because the populations most affected are located along these ancient trade routes. It is thought to have emerged in Europe, brought by Phoenician traders, and later along caravan routes traced by Marco Polo. This time, rather than rodents being to blame, one of the hypotheses for its spread is that people who migrated along the routes carried with them a genetic ancestry profile that made them more prone to the affliction.

Another disease that might owe its global spread to the Silk Road networks is smallpox, the infectious disease caused by the variola virus. While we don’t know its earliest origins, it seems to have been present in Egypt in the third century BC, as Pharaoh Ramesses V seems to have displayed the characteristic smallpox pustules on his mummified body. The earliest written records of the disease date from the fourth century AD in China, and not long after this, the disease is known to have spread eastwards to Japan and Korea at the same time as trade along these far eastern parts of the Silk Roads increased. In the eighth century, a huge outbreak in Japan killed as many as two-thirds of the country’s population.

The disease continued as a blind-passenger into the Indian subcontinent by the seventh century, and when the Muslim population expanded into the regions around the Mediterranean, they inadvertently took it with them. And as for northern Europe, it seems the Vikings were to blame: from the eighth century onwards, their insatiable thirst for silver brought them into frequent contact with the Silk Road trading routes, and especially those nodes of it that served the Islamic caliphate, one of their key trading partners. We know smallpox followed along because the virus has been identified in ancient skeletal remains: when a team of geneticists analysed more than 500 samples from across the world, spanning 32,000 years, eleven cases of the variola virus were discovered – all from Viking graves, and many linked to either eastern routes or trading sites.

While all these examples are indirect, both in terms of how the diseases spread and what routes they took, a recent archaeological study has found something even more convincing: direct evidence of intestinal parasites on a Silk Road relay station. At Xuanquanzhi in north-west China, a relay station for travellers along the trade route was built in 111 BC and used until AD 109; it was also used for delivering messages as part of a postal relay system that relied on horses. Excavations in the 1990s uncovered a latrine and numerous hygiene sticks made of wood or bamboo wrapped with cotton cloth, which were used instead of toilet paper. By analysing matter preserved on the cloth, researchers found evidence of whipworm, roundworm, tapeworm and Chinese liver fluke. The latter was the most important discovery, as the parasite could not have been endemic in the dry north-west region of China, but must have travelled from a wet, marshy environment much further afield. Today, the nearest region where it can be found is at least 1,500km away.

CJ

The Apparitions at Fátima

In the fields around the little town of Fátima in Portugal a most unlikely thing happened on 13 May 1917.

Three children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were herding sheep when a lady, radiant with unearthly light, suddenly appeared to them, hovering over an oak. This was not the first time they had encountered a shining figure in those parts. The previous year they had met an angel thrice near the village of Valinhos, but what was different about this apparition was that she was the Virgin Mary and had news concerning the state of the world and the Church. Pray, she said, to bring an end to the war, say the rosary and devote yourselves to the mystery of the holy and undivided Trinity.

The children had decided to keep these apparitions to themselves but Jacinta mentioned it when she got home. Her parents thought it a lark at first, and told the neighbours about it, but when she said the Virgin Mary asked them to return the following month her mother went to seek the counsel of the parish priest, who said he thought it would be all right. They were given permission to go.

This time the Virgin Mary announced that Francisco and Jacinta would soon be taken to heaven, but she had plans for Lúcia, whom she wished to spread her message of piety and devotion. She also revealed a vision of hell which so scared them they started self-inflicting mortifications, including whipping with nettles. Finally, Mary vouchsafed a secret to them of great import for the entire world, the first of the Three Secrets of Fátima.

News got out and local people began to join them at the spot where the apparitions occurred. Then came the crowds, and eventually the local authorities intervened and had the children detained. They were accused of making it all up to destabilize the secular First Republic. Unperturbed, the children led the other prisoners in praying the rosary and would not budge from their story. They were soon released, and announced that Mary would make one last special appearance on 13 October in the dos Santos family’s field at Cova de Iria.

A great crowd numbering tens of thousands, joined by reporters and photographers, gathered there that day and witnessed the ‘Miracle of the Sun’, when the Virgin Mary made the sun change colours and dance around, while pools of water dried up and wet clothes were made instantly dry. The phenomenon was seen thirty miles away and reported in the national press.

The accounts were inconsistent, however. A photograph of the event was shown to have been taken somewhere else, and the sun behaved quite normally everywhere apart from Fátima, so a certain scepticism about the reliability of these accounts is understandable. None the less, after a long investigation, in 1930 the Catholic Church decided the phenomena were indeed supernatural and, as a gesture of endorsement, the statue of the Virgin Mary in the small chapel built in 1918 on the site of the apparition was given a crown. The chapel has since been enclosed within a large church in a complex with a hotel and a visitor centre. In 1940, by way of a follow-up, Pope Pius XII experienced a mini Miracle of the Sun in the garden at the Vatican Palace.

What of the three children? Sadly, the Virgin Mary’s prophecy was right. Francisco and Jacinta both died in the Spanish flu epidemic that followed a short while later. Lúcia dos Santos became a nun, a Sister of St Dorothy, and then entered the Carmelite convent at Coimbra and lived there until her death aged ninety-seven in 2005.

In 1941, at the request of her bishop, she revealed two of the secrets given her by the Virgin Mary: war and conflict were foreseen and a vision of hell described. Two years later he asked her to reveal the third, but she held out, unsure if it were the Virgin Mary’s will that she should, until she suffered a bout of influenza like her cousins and thought she might die. She wrote the secret down and sealed it an envelope with instructions that it remain unopened until 1960. The text was eventually released by Pope John Paul II. It was a prophecy concerning the assassination attempt made against him in 1981.

On the third anniversary of Lúcia’s death Pope Benedict announced that the normal five-year wait between death and initiating the process of canonization would be waived. In 2017 she was declared Servant of God, the first rung on the ladder to sainthood. In 2022 she ascended the second, when Pope Francis declared her Venerable.

Her cousins are already there, canonized by Pope Francis at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fátima on 13 May 2017, exactly one hundred years after the first apparition. They are the youngest saints not to die as martyrs in the Roman Calendar.

RC

Oliver Cromwell’s Children

Oliver Cromwell rose to become head of state after the English Civil Wars. He was Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland from December 1653 till his death almost five years later.

Cromwell was suspected by some of his collaborators in the overthrow, then execution, of Charles I of harbouring ambitions to become King Oliver – whether out of personal ambition, or because of a wish to offer his line as a perpetual alternative to the Stuart monarchy.

The Lord Protector was unique in importance. Cromwell was addressed as ‘Your Highness’. His daughters were accorded the title ‘Lady’ before their first name and were occasionally addressed as ‘Your Highness’ too. As someone fascinated by the ‘what ifs’ of history, I have always been intrigued by these progenies of the greatest man of his age, who could have provided the crowned heads of England for generations, but who are largely unknown today.

Oliver Cromwell married Elizabeth Bourchier in 1620. Letters between the two show a deep mutual affection. They had at least nine offspring, one of whom – James – died immediately after his birth in 1632. Their firstborn, Robert, died aged seventeen at a school in Felstead, Essex, which four of the Cromwells’ sons seem to have attended. The next child, Oliver, apparently succumbed to smallpox, aged twenty-one, in 1644, while serving as a junior officer in the parliamentary garrison at Newport Pagnell. One of his comrades in arms there was John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress.

The eldest daughter, Bridget, wed Henry Ireton, a close ally of her father. They had one son and three daughters in their five-year marriage. Ireton died from the plague while fighting in Ireland, soon after ordering the hanging of several leading royalists in Limerick. It was said that Ireton’s death ‘struck a great sadness into Cromwell’, though Bridget was less unhappy, having despaired of her husband’s ‘bloodthirsty cruelty’.

In 1652 Bridget took as her second husband another parliamentary stalwart, Charles Fleetwood, who served for three years as Lord Deputy of Ireland before the couple took up residence in Wallingford House, near Whitehall Palace. Bridget and Fleetwood were vehement anti-monarchists, and disapproved of the Lord Protector title taken by her father.

Oliver Cromwell’s eldest surviving son, Richard, was something of a disappointment to his earnest father. The only energy Richard displayed was in hunting and running up debts. He seems not to have been interested in politics till he was elected MP for Hampshire, then for Cambridge University. Nevertheless, Oliver bequeathed the Lord Protectorate to Richard on his deathbed.

Richard had no great support from the army. This led to an increasingly uncertain rule, during which detractors came to refer to him as ‘Tumbledown Dick’, or ‘Queen Dick’. When Parliament planned to trim the army’s power and exorbitant cost, a military coup ensued. Richard stood down as Lord Protector in May 1659 in return for an unfulfilled promise that his debts (of several million pounds in today’s money) would be paid and a pension provided.

Richard lived for decades in Europe, mainly in Paris. He used the name John Clarke, to avoid being pursued for yet more debts. Richard returned to England for the last twenty years of his life. After his death, in 1712, aged eighty-five, he remained the longest-lived British head of state until overtaken by Elizabeth II.

Henry Cromwell – abler than his older brother – served as a captain in the firebrand Thomas Harrison’s cavalry before commanding his own regiment in Ireland from 1649. Henry succeeded Charles Fleetwood as chief administrator of Ireland, managing to reform the judiciary and promote the role of the Protestant Church in that Catholic land. When his brother Richard resigned the Protectorate, Henry retired to Cambridgeshire, dying on his country estate there in 1674.

Cromwell’s younger daughters, Mary and Frances, wed into the old aristocracy with opulent marriages. These matches provoked disdain from Lucy Hutchinson, wife of a leading parliamentarian, who wrote: ‘Then the Earl of Warwick’s grandchild and the Lord Falconbridge married [Cromwell’s] two daughters, such pitiful slaves were the nobles of those days.’ Hutchinson felt such unions proved ‘that Cromwell now intended to confirm the government in his own family’.

Oliver Cromwell’s favourite daughter was Elizabeth, born in 1629. ‘Betty’ was a sickly, gentle child, who used her closeness to her father to seek clemency for royalist conspirators.

Betty struggled with illness in adulthood, one of her brothers-in-law noting that she suffered with ‘great pains in her bowels, and vapours in her head’. She had convulsive fits, during which she would rant at her father for his alleged past sins.

In 1658, at Hampton Court, Betty and her father were each treated in separate rooms for grave illnesses. When she died, probably of cancer, the news was so heartbreaking for the Lord Protector that he is said to have surrendered to death himself.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, Cromwell’s remaining children soon returned to obscurity. These leading lights of the Commonwealth were eclipsed forever by the triumphant Stuart Restoration.

CS

The Disappearance of Pulaski’s Masterpiece

In 1926, a man named Count Alexis Pulaski arrived in America as one of many exiles from Russia, fleeing after the Russian Civil War. Early newspaper accounts described him as a ‘White Russian’, meaning he was an anti-communist who had fought the Bolsheviks. His aristocratic background, however, has never been verified: in his immigration records, ‘Count’ is listed as his middle name rather than as a title. Within a few decades, Pulaski would become famous across America as the owner of the world’s most expensive dog, a story that ended in tragedy.

Back in Russia, Pulaski had bred and showed Doberman Pinschers, and he continued to do so in New York, where his charisma and gift of the gab had also made him welcome in the city’s high society. In 1939, however, Pulaski babysat his friend’s poodle and decided to switch breeds. Seven years later, having perfected his pedigree, he welcomed a litter with one particular dog whose characteristics he immediately took to: the dog he would register with the American Kennel Club under the name ‘Pulaski’s Masterpiece’.

In 1945 Pulaski had opened the exclusive Poodles, Inc. at 54 West 52nd Street: a grooming salon, boarding kennel and high-end dog furnishing shop catering only to poodles. He also continued to show his dogs, with Masterpiece making his debut at the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club dog show in 1947. The show, incidentally, has nothing to do with London as the name may suggest, but instead originates with a group of men who gathered at the bar in the Westminster Hotel in New York in the 1870s to talk about their hunting dogs, eventually setting up a kennel club and a dog show.

Masterpiece was not an immediate success, and it took a while for him to gather up enough wins at regional shows to achieve a championship title, although he was the first toy dog ever to achieve titles in obedience and utility too. The dog’s fame would come from elsewhere, though. Pulaski took his beloved pet to cocktail parties, where he would charm and entertain guests. Masterpiece’s most famous party trick was to answer the question ‘Are you a communist?’ by shaking his head vigorously. His popularity skyrocketed. Pulaski commissioned outfits for him and soon the dog acquired a personal entourage consisting of a beautician, a bodyguard, a professional travelling companion and the former lion tamer from Bronx Zoo to teach him further tricks. Poodles, Inc. thrived and was filled with impeccably pedigreed and trained poodles, with Masterpiece, who travelled in a carrying case designed to look like a picture frame, as the star. He soon started making a living as a stud dog and a model, earning a reported $11,000 a year (roughly $142,000 today) which was deposited into his own bank account. He performed on fashion runways and was inundated with press requests, and when he travelled abroad, crowds went wild. Upon leaving Paris after a visit, Air France organized a farewell party for him at the airport restaurant. He also took part in philanthropic events and charity shows. When the Pakistani Prince Ali Khan wanted to purchase Masterpiece as a gift for his wife, the actress Rita Hayworth, he offered $25,000, which equates to around $325,000 in 2024. Pulaski responded that the dog was not for sale, but if he had been, then the price would have been appropriate.

Then, on 29 May 1953, disaster struck. Pulaski and Masterpiece were both in New York, at Poodles, Inc. In the afternoon, a group of customers entered the store and Pulaski, who had just returned after a brief errand, called out for his pooch to come down to entertain them. But when the dog didn’t respond, Pulaski and his employees searched the entire building before concluding the unthinkable: Masterpiece was gone.

Despite an extensive police search that extended across thirteen states, volunteer helpers and 3,500 lost-dog flyers distributed by the Gotham Hosiery Company, they had no luck. The only credible clue to what happened was a witness who had seen a small grey dog at the heel of a dark-haired woman wearing a red coat leaving Poodles, Inc. The witness noticed the dog because it walked obediently without a leash, which seemed unusual – but would fit a dog like Masterpiece, who was used to trotting around in a show ring.

Pulaski put up a substantial reward for the return of his beloved dog, including the offer of one of his descendants, Just Johnny. But Masterpiece was never found. Poodles, Inc. was turned into a shrine and birthday parties were held in his honour. For several years, Pulaski produced an annual monograph about Masterpiece’s adventures, many written in the first person.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of this famous poodle was his role not just in popularizing a previously overlooked breed, but also in encouraging the rise of indulgent pet ownership, with accessories, grooming and furnishings.

CJ

The Phaistos Disc

At the Heraklion Museum in Crete, an enigmatic and controversial artefact is displayed among the finest objects recovered from the island’s Minoan archaeological sites. The object in question is a clay disc measuring around 16cm in diameter and about 1.9cm thick, which has been described as ‘the world’s first typewritten document’. Dubbed the Phaistos Disc, it was found on 3 July 1908, by Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier in a room in the older part of the Palace of Phaistos, which dated to around 1700–1650 BC. The disc is impressed with 241 signs, stamped into both sides of the clay with tiny seals and arranged in spiral patterns. On the outer edge of each side there is a vertical line with five dots, which marks the beginning and also explains the direction of reading, in towards the centre. The pictograms are arranged into sixty-one groups on each side, separated by vertical lines. The problem with the disc is that these pictograms – assumed to represent words – have never been deciphered and have never been found anywhere else: the disc’s language is entirely unknown. The symbols seem to represent objects that are either from the natural world or man-made, including ships, people, plants and animals. Numerous pre-alphabetic scripts existed on Crete, including prehistoric Aegean, Linear A, Cretan hieroglyphic and Linear B, yet nobody has ever conclusively proven a relationship between any of those scripts and the pictograms on the disc. At least two of those scripts were contemporary with the date of the artefact.

Will we ever be able to decipher it? Without any other examples of the same script, we might not. There are only forty-five signs in total, which would make it very difficult if it is a so-called logosyllabic script, much like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters: the former has over 700 in total, the latter tens of thousands, so the disc could hardly represent a full language. Using a mathematical formula, it is possible to work out a prediction of how many signs there would be in total: such estimates predict a total of fifty-six or fifty-seven signs. Some have argued that the disc was of foreign origin and was imported into Crete, because the symbols are so different from the native scripts. (There are some similarities with Linear A, but these are few and may be coincidental.) The symbols also seem very different from Minoan art, which too is unusual. And why has nothing else like it ever been found, especially in a location that is so rich in archaeological material?

There have been many attempts to decipher the text on the disc and many have claimed to have done so successfully. The official Heraklion Museum website states that the repetition of certain groups of signs seems like the refrain of a hymn or incantation, a suggestion first made by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans. He also suggested the content concerned a maritime expedition of a warlike kind, because of images including ships and what might be spoils of war, captives and manacles. In a more extreme interpretation, a book published in 1999 argued the disc was a sophisticated calendar which also revealed that Bronze Age Cretans ‘used telescopes to study the heavens at night’. Others, over the years, have attempted to link the text to specific deities in Greek mythology, or even gods from abroad, as well as named pharaohs. Elsewhere, interpretations include a political treaty, a palace site-plan description, a board game, a device for the manufacture of metal wares, or for a means of teaching reading. None of these seem particularly convincing.

The final interpretation of the disc is that it is, in fact, an elaborate hoax. Suspicions have been cast on the finder, Pernier, in a suggestion that he was hugely jealous of colleagues like Sir Arthur, who had found a vast quantity of incredible artefacts at the site of Knossos, including numerous Linear A and Linear B tablets. This may have spurred Pernier on to stun the archaeological community with his own unique discovery. His knowledge of historical languages could explain the similarities to both Cretan and other prehistoric scripts, to which there are similarities on the disc.

Many argue against it. Details of the disc were first revealed in an official excavation report by Pernier, who was a very reputable archaeologist. It was also found very close to other artefacts that were known to be authentic, including a Linear A tablet. A final piece of evidence in its favour is a number of errors and corrections on both sides, something many have argued would be too complex for a hoaxer to introduce. As the disc is made of clay, it is challenging to date it scientifically: the only method – which may or may not give a reliable clue to its age – is thermoluminescence, a procedure that would involve taking a small sample of the material. Heraklion Museum has so far said no, so it seems we have to wait a little longer to find out.

CJ

Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette did not say, ‘Let them eat cake’, when told of the starving French masses. Nor did she say, ‘Let them eat brioche’. These crass quotes were only hung round Marie Antoinette’s neck fifty years after the guillotine had neatly severed it. She is – with Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots – one of the great tragic quartet of beheaded European queens.

France and Austria had been at war, but both were concerned by the rise of Prussia and so decided on peace, which would be assisted by Maria Antonia – fifteenth of the sixteen children of Francis I and Maria Theresa, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire – becoming betrothed to Louis, dauphin of France. She received instruction from the Abbé de Vermond in French – both language and culture. The Abbé found his charge a reluctant student, but it was noted that the young archduchess was a good dancer and musician, excelling at the harp and the harpsichord.

Maria Antonia travelled to Versailles for the marriage, on 16 May 1770, and became Marie Antoinette as her Austrian identity was stripped away entirely. Two weeks of wedding celebrations ended ominously on 30 May, when a structure built for a firework display on the Place de la Concorde went up in flames, causing a stampede. One hundred and thirty-two people were crushed or drowned in the panic.

Four years later Louis XV died, Marie Antoinette’s husband becoming Louis XVI at the age of nineteen, while she was queen at eighteen. The new king seems to have been uninterested in sex (as opposed to being impotent or unwell) and the union was not consummated for seven years. The alliance between Austria and France depended on the production of an heir, and a daughter eventually appeared in 1778, followed by the longed-for dauphin in 1781, as well as a second son.

But by this point there were rumours that the king was infertile, and so the paternity of the royal children – whom the queen clearly adored – was questioned.

Louis XVI, unusually for a Bourbon, chose to have no mistress. This proved a problem for the young queen, since mistresses tended to draw criticism that would otherwise be directed at her. Also, courtiers could go through a mistress to get to the king’s ear; but with the foreign queen the only woman of influence, there were suspicions that Marie Antoinette was quietly exerting power on Austria’s behalf.

Dark propaganda was her constant enemy. France’s financial problems, partially caused by supporting American independence from Britain, meant that Marie Antoinette’s extravagance was particularly obnoxious. She spent 280,000 livres a year on clothes. Libelles were printed in Amsterdam and London, accusing her of vile misdeeds in pornographic detail. The French Revolution began in 1789, and by the time it had reached boiling point the queen was despised. To the many who believed that Louis was France, and who were pleased that he seemed to have adapted to the role of a constitutional monarch, it was easier to take aim at his ‘Austrian whore’ of a wife.

In June 1791 the royal family attempted to flee. But their carriage was large, and they were late to the rendezvous with their escort, so they were unprotected when apprehended. They were taken back to Paris, deeply distrusted, and were imprisoned in the Tuileries. When war with Austria then broke out, the royal family’s position became desperate. Louis was tried and guillotined in January 1793.

When Marie Antoinette went on trial, she was falsely accused of many things, her son even being made to testify that she had molested him. The one true charge was that she was in secret contact with her native Austria. She was sentenced to beheading in October 1793.

Such was the shock of her imminent death that the queen’s hair apparently turned white during the night before her execution. The same had happened to Sir Thomas More before his decapitation. This phenomenon may be a selective form of alopecia, which causes pigmented hair to fall out, leaving only white hairs behind. It is now known as Marie Antoinette syndrome.

Marie Antoinette had a kind side. In 1776 her carriage nearly ran over a young orphan, and she received permission from his grandmother to adopt him and take him to Versailles. Equally, when one of her chambermaids died, Marie Antoinette adopted her daughter. Also, when sent an enslaved child from Senegal as a gift in 1787, she freed him and had him baptized.

Sofia Coppola’s 2006 unconventional, highly visual, biopic of Marie Antoinette focuses on her emotional life, rather than historical facts. It shows the queen as lonely and purposeless, extravagant and misunderstood. The final scene has Marie Antoinette heading to her eventual doom.

Marie Antoinette was brought up to expect a life of privilege and leisure but ended up being sacrificed to an increasingly bloody revolution. She remains the most famous of the 17,000 people beheaded during the frenzy.

CS

Military Uniforms

Although we feel we can picture how the Roman soldier looked, he in fact had no specific uniform other than a military belt. A new recruit had to buy or make his own armour, while the various names on unearthed helmets suggest there was a thriving second-hand market in them. Equally, the third-century Terracotta Army is in clothing that is clearly military, but it is not standardized.

Uniform military dress dates to the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century nations selected colours for their coats: red for Britain, Hanover, Denmark and (till 1734) Saxony; blue for Prussia, Portugal, Sweden, Sardinia and (from 1777) the United States; white for France, Spain, Austria and Venice; sky blue for Bavaria; green for Russia.

The Winged Hussars of Poland were a heavy cavalry unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who wore huge, feathered wings, some of them said to be from eagles, as well as the skins of leopards, tigers or wolves.

The more understated khaki was first used by the British army in India, in 1847. Sir Harry Lumsden and William Hodson, two junior officers in the Punjab, are said to have been told to dress their men comfortably for field service. They doused white cotton material with river water and rubbed mud into it, following which Lord Napier, the British general, called Lumsden and Hodson’s men ‘the only properly dressed light troops in India’. Khaki thus became the uniform for British foreign-service troops from 1896, and for the homeland army six years later. Before that, in the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880–81, the red coats of the British army had proved disastrously prominent in the arid South African landscape: they were hard for the Boers to miss.

Many other nations followed the British lead, though the French persevered with blue and red – which contributed to their particularly heavy First World War losses. The Italians introduced telo mimetico camouflage into military uniforms in 1929. They cast brown and pale green blotches onto an ochre base on smocks and ponchos. The Second World War saw camouflage become commonplace. It was in use globally by the end of the Vietnam War.

The most dramatic military uniform still in use is that of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard, the unit that has protected popes since 1506. The Renaissance flourish of the Gala Uniform was resurrected by Jules Repond, the Guard’s commander from 1910 to 1921. He incorporated the blue, red and yellow of the House of Medici. One version looks more appropriate for a court jester than a bodyguard – with blue and yellow strips over a red cloth, and a Basque cap. The Gala Uniform is judged to be such a potential distraction for passing motorists that Swiss Guards wear dark blue exercise gear when on sentry duty in the Vatican at the entrance to St Anne’s.

At Christmas, Easter and swearing-in ceremonies, though, they are clad in seventeenth-century armour, with feathers sprouting from their silver helmets – red, purple or white, depending on rank.

The Mongolian State Honour Guard’s uniform harks back to the thirteenth-century dress of Genghis Khan. They wear red breeches and a red tunic, and a bright blue sleeveless overtunic with a small round metal plate on the chest.

It is similar in Greece, where the Presidential Guard are known as Evzones – light infantry units from ancient times. Their ceremonial uniform features a white skirt, called a ‘fustanella’, which uses 30m of fabric and has 400 pleats. It was worn by the klephts – Greeks who fled to the mountains rather than succumb to Turkish rule. They also don a wool fez, a white tunic under a black waistcoat, white leggings, and clunky red clog-like shoes that weigh 1.5kg each (they contain sixty nails in the sole).

The Spanish Legion (‘La Legión’) was formed by General Franco in 1920 to fight in Africa. In their early fascist days, their highest aspiration was to become ‘bridegrooms of Death’. They were to be objects of military and fascistic desire.

Members of this crack regiment – who are allowed to sport beards and tattoos – wear a tight sage-green tropical shirt, open at the chest, with sleeves rolled up to expose their biceps. They have leather braces, and their khaki hat has a red hanging tassel above and a leather chinstrap below. Physique is important still: in 2018, many of the legionaries were told to lose weight or risk expulsion. The Spanish Legion has a homoerotic appeal that is reflected by its social media following.

Military dress has long influenced fashion. The success of the French army in the eighteenth century inspired the adoption of braided accents, gold buttons and epaulettes on civilian clothes. In the nineteenth century, women’s fashion began to absorb the red hue of the military coat, as well as shoulder straps and brass buttons. The punk movement of the 1970s and 1980s borrowed camouflage and combat boots for its iconoclastic look.

CS

The Funeral Effigies, Westminster Abbey

Kept for years in a cellar at Westminster Abbey, its ‘ragged regiment’ is now on display in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries in the triforium. These are funeral effigies, life-sized likenesses in wood and wax of the great personages of England, dressed in the finest clothes, used at their funeral processions to remind us of their glory – and their appearance – in this world as they departed to the next.

The customs of creating effigies to honour the dead is very ancient, going back at least as far as the Etruscan civilization in the fifth century BC. In the Abbey the effigies date back to the 1300s and usually arrived with the body of the deceased for the funeral, carried in procession on the coffin under a canopy. They were intended to look as much like the person they commemorated as possible, a sort of supine Tussaud’s waxwork, made from wood at first, later from wax and stuffed cloths as art and technology made them more lifelike and indeed vertical. They were dressed splendidly – if a monarch, in coronation regalia; if not, in their very best clothes. The coffin and the effigy were left to lie in state in front of the high altar, lit by candles until the burial, when the effigy was discharged into the care of the Abbey.

Gifts to a church, even so splendid, can be a mixed blessing, because over time they start to take up more space than the dwindling reputation of the person they commend merits. Several were ‘lost’, many decayed, leaving only the frame, and the ‘ragged regiment’, as it became known, was stored in Abbot Islip’s Chapel in the early 1600s and not displayed until the Abbey museum opened in 1908. Unfortunately, several were badly damaged in the Blitz, not by Luftwaffe bombs but by the valiant attentions of the fire brigade, which so drenched Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York, they required restoration. This was undertaken by R. P. Howgrave Graham, Assistant Keeper of the Muniments, who was so shaken by the raid he proposed marriage, successfully, to his housekeeper Beatrice when the bombers returned to base.

Not all the effigies remained at the Abbey. The clergy may have been slow to see any value in the ‘ragged regiment’, but not so the gentlemen of the choir, who over the years sought to supplement their modest salaries by charging visitors to see a selection of effigies, anticipating Mme Tussaud by a century. Among their displays were William and Mary and William Pitt the Elder.

The oldest effigy is that of Edward III, dating from the fourteenth century, his facial likeness, in common with those of many of his successors, taken from a death mask. Also on display are Marys I, II and III, a startlingly lifelike Queen Anne, who is the only effigy to be seated smiling on the throne, and William III. Not all are of the blood royal. The Duchess of Richmond, wax-faced and splendid in coronation robes and three-inch heels, arrived in 1703 with her favourite parrot, an African grey that lived with her for forty years and died of a broken heart not long after she did. It is thought to be the oldest stuffed bird in the world.

The most recent is that of Lord Nelson, who was not buried in the Abbey but at St Paul’s Cathedral in a sarcophagus originally intended for Cardinal Wolsey. He lies in the crypt there, directly under the dome, and, as England’s greatest hero, drew tremendous crowds. In order to compete, the choirmen commissioned a wax effigy by Catherine Andras, wax modeller by appointment to Queen Charlotte. In spite of getting his blind eye wrong, Lady Hamilton declared it so lifelike she styled its hair.

Over the centuries some have lost their looks as wood and wax yellowed and decayed, and their clothes surrendered to the nibbling depredations of silverfish and moth, hence the ‘ragged’ epithet. This was especially unfortunate, for they had been dressed with great care in luxurious fabrics, trimmed with ermine, a full complement of petticoats, a corset; Charles II has silk underpants.

Evidence of efforts at restoration survives; there are dry cleaning labels from Sketchley’s in the Brompton Road sewn into garments when they were carefully cleaned in the 1930s. Others are still magnificent, even more so since restoration, and they tell tales of both splendour and poignancy.

Among them stands the Marquess of Normanby, who died in 1715 aged three, next to his mother, the Duchess of Buckingham. Robert is dressed in an orange velvet topcoat worn over an exquisite embroidered silk brocade waistcoat tied with a sash. He is wearing a chemise and a corset, a pair of tiny square-toed boots and – most moving – there are two little slits sewn into the back of the coat for his leading reins.

RC

Early Submarines

Cat and Richard would be completely unsurprised to learn that I was a military history nerd at prep school. My locker in that rather challenging institution was filled with a series of books that I could immerse myself in – one of them the tale of combat submarines. At the time I assumed I’d join the Navy – something of a family tradition, till my grandfather and father joined cavalry regiments during the two world wars. My interest was reinforced by my stepfather’s time in midget submarines in the Second World War. I have my father’s black-and-white photographs of me, aged six, excitedly at the periscope of a sub during a Royal Navy recruitment drive in our local town.

Tales of submarines go back surprisingly far. Alexander the Great supposedly used a glass diving bell in 332 BC at the siege of Tyre, the Phoenician city, which was then under Persian rule. According to an early fifteenth-century illustration of this fanciful tale, Alexander’s underwater companions were a cat, a dog and a cock.

The first operational, navigable submarine was built in 1620 – the same year in which the Mayflower transported the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World. The common link between the two vessels was James I – perhaps England’s most intellectually curious king – whose support of the Church of England persuaded some religious separatists to seek new lives overseas.

James was a patron of Cornelis Drebbel, a Dutch inventor and engraver, who also ground lenses for microscopes. Drebbel’s inventions included egg incubators, air-conditioning units and self-regulating ovens, while he astounded James’s court with the production of a perpetual-motion machine. James commissioned this brilliant Dutchman to make a ‘diving boat’.

Drebbel’s creation had wooden struts with a leather cover, smeared thick with grease. It was steered by a rudder while powered by oars protruding from slots made waterproof by airtight leather flaps. Bladders ensured buoyancy when filled with air, and took the craft down when weighted with water. The crew breathed through two snorkels, which had floats attached, and Drebbel seems to have used potassium nitrate to produce additional oxygen.

His third (and final) submarine had a crew of sixteen, and dived fifteen feet into the Thames, travelling from Westminster to Greenwich. Ben Jonson, the playwright and poet, was a witness to Drebbel’s invention, and called it an ‘invisible eel’. James I is recorded as a passenger during one of these underwater voyages, twelve oarsmen rowing the king and his companions for several hours.

The first wartime submarine attack was made by the Turtle, during the American Revolution. This one-man underwater craft was built by David Bushnell, a Yale graduate, in 1775. He used a two-blade screw propeller in his almond-shaped construction, which was 7ft tall and 5.5ft wide, and could remain submerged for half an hour. Isaac Doolittle, a clockmaker, perfected the time-bomb that the Turtle was to attach to the side of English warships. Bushnell’s invention was brilliant, but it was beyond the strength of one man to operate all aspects of this complicated invention, and the attack failed.

The first ship to fall victim to submariners was the Union’s USS Housatonic, sunk by the Confederacy’s submarine H. L. Hunley in the American Civil War. The Housatonic, a sloop-of-war, was a desirable target, being an efficient interceptor of important blockade-runners, while her howitzers had rained shells on Charleston, South Carolina. She was at her station four miles off that blockaded city when attacked on 17 February 1864.

The Hunley’s eight-man crew, commanded by Lieutenant George E. Dixon, had practised their attack for months, during which they had been delayed by poor weather. They operated a hand crank to turn the propeller, while crouched inside a small cabin within the 40ft craft. The most perilous part of their job was attaching a barrel of gunpowder to the side of their quarry with a 16ft prong. This had a rope, believed to be long enough to see the submarine safely away before detonation.

Although the attack took place at nine in the evening, the approaching submarine was spotted by Robert F. Flemming Jr, the watchman aboard the Housatonic. He recalled, ‘It had the appearance of a plank moving in the water.’

Unaware that they had been spotted, the submariners proceeded to activate the charge. However, they seem to have all been killed instantly by pressure waves on their brains and lungs. Only five on board the Housatonic perished, the rest managing to escape in lifeboats, or by clinging to the rigging till rescued.

The Hunley was an ancestor of Germany’s Second World War U-boats. Admiral Karl Dönitz told Hitler that, if given enough of these craft, he could starve Britain into surrender. Hitler failed to heed him, but Dönitz had a point. The most successful U-boat was U-48, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Herbert ‘Vaddi’ Schultze, which sank fifty-six merchant ships and a corvette – 322,478 gross tons of Allied shipping. Quite a tally for a solitary ‘diving boat’.

CS

Evelina Haverfield

The Hon. Evelina Haverfield was a suffragette, a horsewoman, a crack shot, LGBTQIA+ and a friend to the Serbs.

She was the daughter of Lord Abinger of Inverlochy Castle, an officer of the Scots Fusiliers who married an American, the niece of the splendidly vain Confederate General John B. Magruder, California’s most celebrated duellist.

Evelina was educated at Düsseldorf, and when she was nineteen married Henry Wykeham Brooke Tunstall Haverfield, a soldier twenty years her senior whom she called Jack, and moved to Dorset. They lived happily at Caundle Marsh in the Blackmore Vale, where Hardy set Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and had two sons. Evelina, a gifted horsewoman, rode with the Blackmore Hunt and with the development of the step-through frame, which enable the skirted to ride, became a bicyclist too, calling her machine Pegasus, for it was to her as flight to that other earthbound creature.

Henry then died, of the effects of syphilis, so she married his friend John Balguy, also an army officer, on 19 July 1899 at Caundle Marsh. She wrote in her diary for that day, ‘I married Major Balguy with no intention of changing my name or mode of life in any way.’

Her husband was stationed in South Africa during the Second Boer War and Evelina went with him. It was here she learned to shoot and also ran a retirement home for horses. The marriage was not a great success and Evelina returned to England, where she lived a separate life, retaining her first married surname, Haverfield.

In April 1909, radicalized by bicycling, she and Mildred Mansel founded the Sherborne branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Soon they joined the militant wing of that organization, the WSPU, and were arrested later that year during the Bill of Rights march for attempting to present a petition to Prime Minister Asquith in the House of Commons. They were described in the local newspaper as ‘West Country Amazons’ and at a meeting hecklers shouted ‘Go Home and Mend Your Stockings’ and ‘Blokes for Women’.

In 1910 Evelina was arrested for punching a policeman in the mouth. When challenged she said her only regret was that it was not hard enough and next time she would bring a revolver. That year she met another suffragette, the actress and male impersonator Vera Holme, whom she also called Jack, and they formed a relationship and set up a secret lesbian activist group called the Foosack League.

With the outbreak of the Great War Evelina founded the Women’s Emergency Corps but then she and Jack volunteered to go with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service to Serbia, where the army was in chaos and conditions were appalling. Four of her associates died in an outbreak of typhus and her unit elected to withdraw, but Evelina and Jack stayed and were taken prisoner by the advancing German army. Eventually they were repatriated to England, but Evelina then went to Romania, where she founded The Hon. Evelina Haverfield’s and Sert-Major Flora Sandes’s Fund for Promoting Comforts for Serbian Soldiers and Prisoners. Flora Sandes, the only woman to hold rank in the Royal Serbian Army, later became the first woman taxi driver in Belgrade.

Evelina and Jack returned to Serbia after the war and at Bajina Bašta founded a children’s hospital and orphanage, which was named after her. She and Jack worked there until Evelina contracted pneumonia in 1920 and died aged fifty-two. She is buried in the cemetery at Bajina Bašta.

She left Vera Holme a legacy of £50 a year for life, unsuccessfully challenged by her husband, the now Brigadier Balguy. Jack returned to England, where she ended up in a lesbian ménage à trois in a house called Sunny Burn near Lochearnhead. In Serbia, Evelina was honoured with a commemorative stamp in 2015.

Where did her radicalism and courage come from? Partly conviction, partly heritage. As the daughter of a peer she would have been quite formidable, and the Abingers were certainly a colourful adornment to the nobility. Evelina’s brother James inherited the title but died childless, falling downstairs in a restaurant at Paris, and the title passed to his cousin, who ran a spy ring in Spain during the First World War. He died childless too and the title passed to his brother, who married a woman who had been acquitted of murdering her husband, and – though this is disputed – was said to have caused the death of the French president Félix Faure. She was having sex with him on his desk at the Élysée Palace when he suffered a stroke and in the convulsion got so tangled they had to be separated by a third party.

RC

Shield Maidens

In the twelfth century, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus described, in remarkably negative tones, a group of women who once lived among the Danes, saying they ‘abhorred all dainty living’, dressed like men and devoted their lives to the pursuit of war. According to Saxo, these women were so skilled in warfare ‘that they might have been thought to have unsexed themselves’. This description may be one of few historical accounts of what we usually call shield maidens: female warriors from the Viking Age. Shield maidens have made it into popular culture with full force through the depiction of the legendary Lagertha, star of the drama show Vikings. She too makes an appearance in Saxo’s writings, as the wife of another legendary character, Ragnar Lothbrok, and is described as a ‘skilled Amazon’ who fought with her long hair flowing loose.

Debates have raged for decades on whether such fighting women actually existed. There is only one other roughly contemporary account suggesting they did: John Skylitzes, an eleventh-century Greek historian, described a battle taking place in 971 at Dorostopol (modern Silistra in Bulgaria), of a war of the imperial military against the Rus’, often known as Eastern Vikings. In an offhand remark, Skylitzes describes how, after defeating the Rus’, the Byzantine soldiers scoured the battlefield for anything they could scavenge from their enemies’ corpses. Among these, they found the bodies of women wearing armour, who had clearly been fighting alongside the men.

Otherwise, most of what we hear about fighting women comes from the Icelandic sagas, fictional accounts written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here, there are numerous women you wouldn’t want to start a fight with. There’s Freydís Eiríksdóttir, for example, sister of Leif Erikson, who is credited with first encountering Vinland, or North America. On a journey to Vinland, Freydís and her group were attacked by the native population, possibly Inuits, whom they referred to as the Skraelings, during the night. The men among them were terrified and fled in panic: the Skraelings were armed with slingshots. Freydís, however, was appalled at such cowardliness. Admonishing her compatriots, she picked up a sword and ran towards the natives, shouting and baring her breast, until the attackers retreated to their boats. Incidentally, she was eight months pregnant at the time.

Perhaps more significantly, Norse mythology is also filled with warrior women. The fearsome goddess Freya is associated with love, sex and war, and presides over the heavenly hall of Sessrúmnir, on Folkvang – the field of folk. There, she receives half of those who fall in battle (the other half go to Odin in Valhalla). Aiding her and Odin in this division are the Valkyries, who swoop down from heaven to take their pick on the battlefield. Perhaps best known from their depiction in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, in the mythology the Valkyries ride across the sky in full armour. They often fall in love with their chosen mortal men, acting as protective supernatural lovers with names like Geirskǫgul (Spear-Shaker), Sigrlǫðr (Victory-Hostess) and Randgríðr (Victory-Urger).

Until recently, the archaeological record was of little help in confirming or denying the shield-maiden legends. That changed in 2017, when a team of Swedish researchers analysed a Viking Age grave from the cemetery of Birka, near Stockholm. Here, burial Bj 581 was an elaborate underground chamber located right by Birka’s military garrison. The chamber contained a body near the centre, surrounded by an unusually extensive selection of weapons: two large shields, a sword, an axe, two lances and a fighting knife, along with twenty-five arrows of a type specifically designed to pierce chainmail. At the foot end of the grave there was a small platform, where the complete bodies of two horses lay – one of them fully bridled as if ready to be ridden in the afterworld. For more than a century it was assumed that this was the grave of a male warrior. Yet the new study used ancient DNA to determine the skeleton’s sex, discovering that the remains were, in fact, those of a woman. For many, this was the proof they needed, while others questioned whether grave goods really reflect someone’s role in life. But elsewhere in Europe in the tenth century, some extraordinary women yielded significant military power. In England, Aethelflaed, daughter of Alfred the Great, led military forces who fought against the Vikings. Over on the continent another woman did the same: Gerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany, organized the defence of Laon in northern France in 945–6 when her husband, Louis IV, was captured. Yet while it is clear that military and fighting roles were a possibility for tenth-century women, in reality, they seem to be few and far between – unless you make it to Sessrúmnir, or Valhalla.

CJ

Dollar Princesses

In the half-century between the end of the American Civil War and the First World War, industrialization boomed in the United States, and the number of millionaires went from a handful to 4,000. But American society was ruthlessly snobbish, and it was hard for the new rich to break into the elite clubs in the great cities, which were run by older families on a bloodline basis rather than a financial one.

There were some 500 marriages between the daughters of wealthy Americans and impoverished aristocrats. The Titled American was, essentially, a human stud book. It listed ‘A carefully compiled list of peers who are supposed to be eager to lay their coronets, and incidentally their hearts, at the feet of the all-conquering American Girl.’

The details of these lordlings were laid out with astonishing baldness. The entry advertising Lord Bertie, in 1888, read: ‘Eldest son and heir of the eleventh Earl of Lindsay. The entailed estates amount to 4,790 acres, yielding an income of $50,000. Lord Bertie is twenty-seven years of age, and a lieutenant in the army. Family seat: Uppington House, Stamford.’

Despite this wherewithal, Lord Bertie failed to attract an American heiress.

On the bride side of the equation, Mary Leiter was, socially, perhaps the most successful. Mary was the daughter of a prosperous dry-goods businessman from Chicago who co-owned the upmarket Marshall Field department store. Mary was a tall, eligible beauty of marked accomplishments: she was taught Chemistry, History and Mathematics by a professor from Columbia University, while she was coached in dancing, singing and art at home.

In 1895, she married the aristocratic George Curzon, and with her hand came a dowry of $5 million that saved the Curzon family’s estate. Four years later George – by now Lord Curzon of Kedleston – was sent to be Viceroy of India, with Mary his Vicereine, making her the most important lady in the British Empire after Queen Victoria. Being viceroy was very expensive indeed, since it was largely self-funding, and the Leiter money made it possible for Curzon to accept the position.

Mary died in 1906, after an illness contracted in India, and it is clear that the marriage had become truly loving. Lord Curzon erected a Gothic chapel in Mary’s memory, and he chose to be buried beside her rather than with his second wife.

Famously less happy was the union (also in 1895) between Consuelo Vanderbilt, a great beauty with access to the enormous Vanderbilt railroad fortune, and the 9th Duke of Marlborough. The duke had inherited a near-bankrupt estate, and received $2.5 million with which to restore Blenheim Palace, and an income of $100,000 per year. He started refurbishing his seat during his honeymoon.

Consuelo’s mother was particularly keen to have her daughter become a duchess – perhaps too keen, Consuelo claiming that she was locked in her room till she agreed to the match. For much of their loveless twenty-five-year marriage, Consuelo and her husband lived apart. She would write: ‘From my window I overlooked a pond in which a former butler had drowned himself. As one gloomy day succeeded another, I began to feel a deep sympathy for him.’ There were affairs on both sides, followed by a divorce that shocked high society on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some Americans were aghast at the loss of their most eligible girls to profiteering foreigners. Franklin Work, my maternal great-great-grandfather, had started life humbly in Ohio before becoming a millionaire, first through fashion, then by becoming a business associate of the Vanderbilts. He saw the marriage market as a patriotic issue: ‘I am an American to my backbone. Therefore I have only contempt for these helpless, hopeless, lifeless men that cross the ocean to carry off the very flower of our womanhood. When they win our girls they use them, humble them and dishonour them, and then cast them aside for actresses or adventuresses of their own real class. If I had anything to say about the matter I’d make an international marriage a hanging offence.’

Needless to say, his daughter – my great-grandmother ‘Fanny’ – fell for the feckless, handsome Jim Burke, who was addicted to pleasure and who became Lord Fermoy. The marriage was a disaster. Jim was paid off by his father-in-law, on condition that he would have nothing further to do with his and Fanny’s children. Jim agreed and the couple divorced, but Fanny then married a bogus Hungarian count.

The death knell of the American Dollar Princesses was sounded by the First World War, which further broke the aristocracy financially. Soon afterwards, Hollywood provided a glamour that was homegrown American, and a roster of beautiful people who proved rather more interesting than the English milords, with their endless tightrope walk above the sharp rocks of bankruptcy and their fusty traditions.

CS

Prince Obolensky

In Cromwell Square in Ipswich, just on the corner with St Nicholas Street opposite Trongs Chinese Restaurant, stands a striking monument: a thrusting stone plinth topped by a bronze figure of an energetic-looking man holding a rugby ball. He is His Highness Prince Alexandr Sergeevich Obolensky, the only Russian aristocrat to have played rugby for England.

He was a prince of the ancient Rurik dynasty, rulers of the Kievan Rus’, founded by a Varangian warrior at Novgorod in 862, according to tradition. Also members of his family were Prince Ivan Obolensky, a Governor General of Finland when it was under Russian rule, assassinated in 1910, the French Resistance heroine Princess Vera Obolensky, guillotined at Flossenburg by the Nazis in 1944 aged thirty-three, her husband Prince Nicholas, who survived Buchenwald and later became a priest at the Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, and Alexis Obolensky Jr, the Father of Backgammon.

Alexandr was born in 1916 in what was then Petrograd, formerly and latterly St Petersburg, his father an officer in the Tsar’s Imperial Horse Guards who had married a member of the Naryshkin family, favourites of the Tsars since Peter the Great.

The Obolenskys fled Russia after the Revolution in 1917 and settled in Muswell Hill in north London. Alexandr was educated at the Ashe School, now a Buddhist retreat, and the Trent College at Long Eaton, where he was so distinguished on the rugby field he played for Chesterfield (the school also produced the footballers Harry Daft and the Revd Kenneth Hunt, and two prime ministers of Thailand).

He won a bursary to Brasenose College Oxford in 1934, where he took an honest fourth in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, but most significantly won two rugby blues as a wing/three-quarter. He acquired rather a reputation as a playboy, which must have diverted him from his studies, as did playing for both Rosslyn and Leicester, where he scored twelve tries in seventeen games and was known as the Flying Prince.

He was so spectacularly talented that England’s selectors came after him, but he had to be naturalized as a British subject before he could play in an England shirt. This he undertook to do and made his international debut in January 1936 against the invincible All Blacks at Twickenham. Before the game there was an awkward encounter with another playboy prince, the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, who asked him ‘by what rights do you presume to play for England?’

Perhaps the best response to such a question is by deeds, not words. Obolensky scored two spectacular tries in a game that left the All Blacks vanquished 13–0, England’s first victory over New Zealand. His second try was so spectacular it is acclaimed as one of the greatest in English rugby. The Flying Prince mirrored the run of the fly half, slowed to catch the ball, and then cut back inside and sprinted around four players diagonally towards the corner flag and over the line. The crowd went wild. The match was filmed for newsreel, so you can see this for yourselves. It made Obolensky not only a star but also a hero, and rugby bestowed upon him the accolade of a nickname characterized by the inventive verbal brilliance typical of its aficionados – Obo.

The Flying Prince won only three more caps for England before his career was stalled by world events. War came in September 1939 and, again demonstrating unswerving loyalty to his adopted country, he joined the Royal Air Force. He was sent to train as a fighter pilot in Hurricanes at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk, which was later to play an important part in the Battle of Britain (Douglas Bader was one the pilots who flew from there).

Pilot Officer Obolensky very unfortunately was not among the Few who so distinguished themselves in that conflict. In the spring of 1940, still familiarizing himself with the rudiments of flying, he remarked to a friend that he was having trouble getting the hang of landing. On 29 March the Flying Prince overran the runway and crashed. His plane overturned, and although it was not badly damaged he suffered a fatal injury. A coroner’s inquest determined he had died instantly from a broken neck. He was twenty-four.

He was buried in Ipswich, the nearest town to his airbase, where his statue was erected after a public appeal in 2008. It was unveiled by his niece, the Princess Alexandra Obolensky, who runs a gift boutique at Farnham.

RC

Medieval Fear of the Sea, and Drowning

The first thing to remember, when attempting to understand the fearful medieval attitude to the sea, is that nobody then had a clear view of what went on under the waves. We have grown up with the images of all-seeing cameramen. Jacques Cousteau’s co-invention of the Aqua-Lung in the early 1940s in time led to increasingly stunning revelations from the deep, until the productions fronted by David Attenborough, say, have left us able to study life forms thousands of metres from the surface.

Many centuries before the SCUBA device, life underwater was almost completely unknown. Fish and other sea creatures were extracted from it, of course. But what it looked like down there was a mystery. With only a tiny minority able to swim, let alone dive beneath the already treacherous surface, the realm beneath was of the dark unknown.

Viking and Anglo-Saxon literature (including Beowulf) mentions warriors swimming competitively against one another in the sea, but the ability to swim seems to have become less common in northern Europe in the Middle Ages: when researching my book on the 1120 sinking of The White Ship – the ‘medieval Titanic’ – the only regular swimmers I could find in England and Normandy were those used to diving professionally in and around ports, unsnagging nets and the like. They were employed by the families of those trying to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones lost on The White Ship, in order that they might receive that essential postscript to a life well led – a proper Christian burial.

In the Middle Ages, a time of particular religious superstition, ignorance of what lay beneath the water begat fear, and even fostered terror. The huge surface area was the first point of concern. As the unknown twelfth-century writer of Partonopeus de Blois wrote:

See the sea which goes on so far

That we cannot see the end of it …

A century later, another anonymous hand wrote:

The man who enters the sea, on a journey,

Enters into great danger!

This water must be greatly feared, for it is so

Horrible, lengthy and wide.

Why did ships disappear on their voyages across this vast expanse? Surely malicious forces must be at play, when vessels could be tossed, upended and destroyed? This superstitious fear is evident from the maps of the oceans that survive from the time.

The most frightening land animals – mythical and real – were believed to have aquatic counterparts, lurking in the depths ready to strike: there dragons, snakes and lizards writhed and slithered dangerously, while bears and lions slavered in anticipation of humans falling into their clutches, defenceless in their watery domain.

Matthew Paris, born in around 1200, seems to have hailed from a wealthy family based in the landlocked county of Cambridgeshire. He became a Benedictine monk in St Albans, a monastery known for its fine recording of history. There Matthew developed skills as a chronicler, an illustrator of illuminated manuscripts and a cartographer.

His four maps, primarily of Britain, chart a pilgrim’s route from London to Rome. The most famous of these includes a clear written warning from Matthew about the seas off Scotland: ‘This part between the North and South looks out on a vast sea where there is nothing but the abode of monsters.’

These beasts threatened all those daring to head out on a vessel, as did sirens that would lure sailors onto destructive rocks. Once in the water, the victims would be flailing, helpless, trying to hold their breath before they could do so no longer.

Drowning was regarded as a uniquely terrifying death, an anonymous thirteenth-century poet writing:

Oh God, I very much have to doubt myself

And be afraid in case I fall

And tumble into this deep sea.

Adenet le Roi, a celebrated minstrel from Brabant performing in the second half of the twelfth century, had one of his heroines consumed by such agony that, he said, ‘She was suffering more from the heart than if one were submerged in the sea.’

One of the greatest of medieval European rulers, Frederick Barbarossa – Holy Roman Emperor and a leader of the Third Crusade, alongside Richard the Lionheart and Philip II of France – drowned in what is now the Göksu river, in Silifke, Turkey, in 1190, aged sixty-seven. A churchman accompanying him recorded how the emperor wanted to counter weeks of sweaty exertion in this watercourse that flowed into the Mediterranean: ‘He decided to bathe [in the] river, for he wanted to cool down with a swim. But by the secret judgement of God there was an unexpected and lamentable death and he drowned.’ Such was the superstition around this great man’s divinely inspired demise that it led to chaos in his army, many of his followers choosing to desert the Crusade before it even reached the Holy Land.

CS

Butter

It’s 2011 and Christmas is fast approaching. Throughout the snowy landscapes of Norway, the customary preparations are taking place, but this year is not like all others because the country is in the midst of a severe crisis: there is a shortage of butter. For Norwegians, this is serious, especially before the festivities where the home-baking of butter-rich treats (including the traditional seven kinds of cookies) plays centre stage. The shortage was caused by a combination of a surge in demand; a media frenzy; a cold summer leading to poor grazing for the cows; excessive exports by the Norwegian dairy conglomerate, which is essentially a butter monopoly; and government import tariffs. Internationally, the world looked on incredulously but butter has, in fact, been of cultural significance across the world for more than 3,500 years.

We know that dairy products have been in use since at least the Neolithic, around the seventh millennium BC. What might be surprising is that, from Britain and Ireland alone, there are nearly 300 samples of preserved butter, some dating back many millennia. These are known as bog butter because the foodstuffs were found deliberately buried – for unknown reasons – in bogs.

Most bog butters were found accidentally, the majority in Ireland, typically as lumps placed with no apparent covering, in wooden containers, or wrapped in a material like bark or animal skin. The containers include what we would immediately recognize as butter kegs or churns, similar to modern types. When found, the butters typically appear as whitish solid masses with a paraffin-like appearance and a very distinctive, pungent smell that is often described as offensive. One of the oldest known examples is a 50kg wooden vessel measuring about 60cm high and 30cm across that was found at a depth of around 2m at Ballard Bog near Tullamore, Co. Offaly, in Ireland in 2011. This is one of four Bronze Age examples, dating back as far as 1756–1635 BC. The practice of burying butter in bogs continued well into the Middle Ages.

The assumption is that butter was buried in bogs to preserve it, because of their cool environment, which was also low in oxygen and high in acids, creating perfect conditions for the preservation of organic materials. Butter was likely culturally important even then, and was in many periods a commodity that could even be used to pay taxes. This meant that keeping your supply safe, especially in times of drought or famine, was a very good idea. Another interpretation, much as with hoards and other deposits, is that the burial served a ritual or religious function as a gift to the gods (a favourite explanation for archaeologists when we can’t really explain a phenomenon).

The world’s earliest butters were made from the milk of yaks, sheep and goats, much like early cheeses. Butter has also been made from other types of milk, including horse milk and even the milk of reindeer, according to an account from a nineteenth-century traveller to Scandinavia, who observed the practice among the Sámi people. While a reindeer produces very little milk, the resulting butter is incredibly rich, as it yields up to 22 per cent fat.

Evidence for specialist butter-making tools goes back to 2500 BC and the Sumerians, who used specially made terracotta jugs and plungers for churning. Unsalted butter became a staple among Iron Age pastoralists in the Indus river valley and northern India, who made butter from water buffalo milk. This was simmered to make ghee, clarified butter much like that used in Indian cuisine today.

But while butter was highly prized in many societies, others scorned it. Along the Mediterranean, for example, olive oil was the alternative that made better economic sense. Culturally, several Greek and Roman sources even suggest butter-consumers were to be looked down on.

Elsewhere, butter was used for medicinal purposes. A sixth-century Byzantine physician explained it could be used to cure tuberculosis, while in ancient Egypt butter was used as part of the mummification process, especially to improve the appearance of a corpse’s skin.

Beyond these functions and culinary purposes, several cultures have allocated a spiritual function to the substance. In certain branches of Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, the practice of torma sculpting, where figures are made out of butter mixed with flour and/or wax, is carried out by monks. The sacred figures are used in ceremonies and festivals, following a practice that stretches all the way back to the seventh century. Butter makes an appearance as a sacred substance in Vedism (a predecessor of Hinduism) too, while the Hindu deity Lord Krishna is often referred to as ‘the butter thief’ due to his childhood pranks involving butter theft. With all of these historic examples, it would seem plausible that the bog butters might have had a ritualistic function after all.

As for the Norwegian butter crisis, it was eventually resolved through improved import tariffs and Christmas was, more or less, saved.

CJ

The Anglesey Leg

High above the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, famous for hosting the first meeting of the Women’s Institute in Britain (it actually came here from Canada), stands Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, looking out across the Menai Strait from a column near his ancestral home of Plas Newydd; but this is not his most enjoyable memorial.

Paget was the Earl of unromantic Uxbridge until he acquired the marquessate for his valiant actions commanding the British cavalry in the Napoleonic Wars. This in itself is worthy of note, but what makes it even more remarkable was the awkward personal dynamics in the British high command.

Paget, formerly MP for Carnarvon, was an extremely talented soldier, having fought with great distinction in the Peninsula War. Promoted to lieutenant general in 1808, at the battles of Sahagun and Benavente in December he wiped out the French elite chasseurs from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and captured two of their commanders. He was given command of British Cavalry during the retreat to Corunna in January 1809. Then his military career came to a juddering halt.

In 1809 he abandoned his wife, Lady Caroline Villiers, illegitimate daughter of George IV, and their eight children and ran off with the wife of the British ambassador to Spain, who also happened to be the Duke of Wellington’s sister-in-law. Lady Charlotte Cadogan, daughter of the first earl of that name, had married Henry Wellesley, the Iron Duke’s younger brother, in 1803, one of the few aristocrats to have survived the Terror when he was taken prisoner by sans-culottes in France in 1794.

All London buzzed with scandal. Lady Harriet Cavendish wrote, ‘It is in every way shocking and unaccountable. He has left his beautiful wife and eight or nine children and she a husband whom she married about five years ago, for love, and who is quite a Hero de Romance in person and manner, with four poor little children.’

Paget’s family blamed Charlotte, calling her a maudite sorciéré. The Duke of Wellington blamed her brother, George Cadogan, for exercising insufficient control over her, as if she were a jittery horse. Cadogan, stung, challenged Paget to a duel and honour was satisfied without injury to either party. Then it transpired that Lady Paget was also having an affair – who would blame her? – with her husband’s friend the Duke of Argyll. A double divorce followed, attended by the most lurid publicity, and both Pagets wedded again.

As you can imagine, this created an uncomradely atmosphere when Wellington and Paget, now restored to his Cavalry command, met at Waterloo to direct their troops from the same vantage point. While surveying the battle Paget was struck by a French cannonball, one of the last to be fired in that engagement, which took away a good portion of his leg. He remarked to the Iron Duke, ‘By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!’ Wellington, barely troubling to glance at him, remarked, ‘By God, sir, so you have!’ One wonders if shock rather than sang-froid might have occasioned that exchange, if indeed it happened at all in that most mythologized of battles.

What was left of Paget’s lower leg, however, was amputated above the knee at a nearby farmhouse and buried in a little leg-shaped coffin in a grave under a willow tree, which became an object of curiosity to visitors to the battlefield and the cause of some distress years later when Paget’s son went to visit it to pay his respects.

He discovered that the bones had been disinterred and were on public display in a glass case. When he asked for them back the farmer, a M. Paris, refused to part with them without payment. Paget refused and the matter was resolved only in 1934, when the widow of a later M. Paris came across them among her late husband’s effects and incinerated them in her boiler. Paget himself had a prosthetic limb made by a Mr Potts of Chelsea on his return to Britain, the first fully articulated wooden leg in the world, and it became a celebrity in its own right (and so efficient it was patented during the First World War).

Plas Newydd is now in the care of the National Trust thanks to the 5th Marquess, Toppy Paget, known as the Dancing Marquess, who squandered his family’s considerable wealth putting on shows starring himself dressed in fabulous costumes and sparkling with jewels. These were staged in the house’s chapel, which he converted and renamed the Gaiety Theatre, before dying bankrupt in Monte Carlo in 1905 aged twenty-nine.

The marquessate, and the house, was inherited by a more sober cousin, a former mayor of Burton upon Trent, who converted the theatre back into a chapel.

The Anglesey Leg, fortunately, survived this bonfire of the vanities and today is on display at Plas Newydd along with the 1st Marquess’s hat.

RC

Christian Missionaries in Japan

One of my favourite twentieth-century novels is Silence by Shūsaku Endō. It is the only non-fiction book that has made me cry.

Silence tells the tale of Sebastião Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit priest sent to Japan in 1639 to bolster oppressed Christianity there. The Japanese started a policy of national seclusion that same year. The Christian Inquisition Office identified this alien faith as a particular threat to national identity and set about flushing out covert Christians by making them stamp on fumi-e, carved images of Christ, or the Virgin Mary. If they refused, they were tortured, sometimes to death.

In the end, Rodrigues apostatizes, and stamps on a fumi-e to stop the further torturing of his flock. ‘Father,’ one of his enemies says, ‘it was not by us that you were defeated, but by this mud swamp, Japan.’

The first real-life Portuguese contact with that ‘mud swamp’ occurred in 1543, when three shipwrecked sailors were washed up on the shores of then-unknown Japan. Soon afterwards Francis Xavier arrived and set about converting Japanese Buddhists to Christianity: by 1600 there were around 215,000 Japanese Christians.

Some converted because they were disillusioned by the strictness and elitism of Japanese Buddhism. There was also no central power to control the large local landowners – the daimyo – who dominated their regions. Christianity offered these men a chance to bypass or undermine Buddhist power.

The first daimyo to convert was Ōmura Sumitada, of Yokoseura, in 1562. He burned down Buddhist temples and destroyed their statues. Six years later Oda Nobunaga, a powerful lord from central Japan, extended formal privileges to the Jesuits. In 1580 the port of Nagasaki was leased to them by another sympathetic magnate and became the centre of Christianity in Japan.

But political change threatened the shallow roots of the new faith. In 1582 Nobunaga was forced to perform seppuku, a ritual suicide through disembowelment, and was succeeded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who came to control most of Japan by the end of the 1580s. After an evening of drinking hard, Hideyoshi exiled the Christian leader of his guard when he refused to convert to Buddhism, before banning his feudal lords from converting to the Western religion.

When a Spanish galleon washed ashore in the late 1590s, its officers boasted of their empire’s power. Hideyoshi felt this was confirmation of his suspicion that Christianity was merely in the vanguard of European plans for control of Japan. He seized the ship, ordered the execution of all Franciscans and, in 1597, had a group of captured Christians taken from Kyoto to Nagasaki, where they were crucified before being finished off with spears.

There was a brief resurgence in Christianity, with perhaps 2 per cent of Japanese becoming Christian, after Hideyoshi’s death. But matters were complicated by the arrival of Dutch and British sailors – largely Protestants – who told the Japanese to be wary of the ‘untrustworthy’ Jesuits.

In 1614 Christianity was banned. Missionaries were expelled. If they stayed, they risked execution. Between 1627 and 1634 approximately 1,200 Christians were put to death in Japan – the dangerous background to Endō’s brilliant book.

In Silence, Endō based his principal character Rodrigues on Giuseppe di Chiara, an Italian missionary who was arrested in Japan in 1643. Chiara broke under torture in a special prison camp, the Kirishitan Yashiki (or ‘Christian Mansion’) in Edo, the ancient name for Tokyo, and later married the Japanese widow of a samurai.

We know from Japanese records that, apart from Giuseppe di Chiara, the only other Italian missionary imprisoned in the Kirishitan Yashiki was Giovanni Battista Sidotti. He was captured soon after his arrival on Japanese soil in 1708, despite his samurai disguise.

While Sidotti’s faith was seen as a threat, his knowledge was greatly valued by his captors. Japan’s leading Confucian scholar, Arai Hakuseki, questioned Sidotti closely on matters that were unknown to an island people who had turned in on themselves two generations earlier. Sidotti shared all he knew about global events, as well as geography and languages.

But Sidotti exasperated his captors by refusing to give up his faith, and was sent to a dungeon. While imprisoned there, he converted to Christianity the couple who tended to him, and his punishment for this was most likely grim.

Archaeologists found a skeleton in Tokyo, a decade ago. DNA from a tooth showed that it was the body of an Italian. Since Chiara was cremated, it is believed that it has to belong to Sidotti, who we know died there in 1714, aged forty-seven. His body was laid out in an impressive casket, rather than in the local manner of being seated in a large pot. This man of knowledge was accorded a respect in death that surpassed the threat he had been seen to represent in life.

Near his coffin were two Japanese bodies in the traditional seated pose. These are assumed to be the couple he managed to convert while in his dungeon.

CS

English Counties

There are forty-eight historic counties in England. The Office for National Statistics calls these historic territorial units the ‘stable, unchanging geography which covers the whole of Great Britain’ (there are a further forty-four in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).

They are also places of individual identity, set by their history, vernacular, dialect and traditions, which their inhabitants have long set great store by. Admiral Horatio Nelson declared: ‘I am a Norfolk man, and glory in being so’, while Jane Austen felt that there was ‘no finer county in England than Derbyshire’.

The Anglo-Saxons settled England in the fifth and sixth centuries, after which some kingdoms came into being. A record of those south of the Humber in the seventh to ninth centuries include East Sexena, Cantwarena, Suth Sexena, and West Sexena – Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex.

Wessex was the first English kingdom to divide its West Saxon lands into shires, so they could more easily be administered from the capital, Winchester. After Wessex annexed Mercia in 918, this custom spread. When, in 1086, William the Conqueror took full stock of his newly won English prize, in Domesday Book, Cheshire and Yorkshire were the only northern counties. Other counties were in place across England by the twelfth century, when their sheriffs enabled the Crown to administer justice, collect taxes and call up soldiers.

Rutland was, in Saxon times, a territory that kings traditionally gifted to their wives. It would be known as ‘Rutlandshire’.

The suffix -shire comes from the Old English scir – a district officiated by a shire reeve, or sheriff. A shire often had a town or city at its core – Bedfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire (the largest county), for example.

Other county names reference ancient kingdoms – Norfolk (‘the northern people’), Sussex (‘land of the South Saxons’) – or to Celtic tribes – Cornwall (‘the Corn Welsh’). Still others connect with a physical feature: Durham is from dunholm – Old English/Scandinavian for ‘island with a hill’. Berkshire derives from Berroc Wood – a place where box trees grew. Devon was a Celtic name for dumnonii – deep valley dwellers.

Each historic county has a flag. Kent claims that its white horse standard – established in the time of Alfred the Great – is the oldest. That of Essex has featured three Saxon seaxes – short swords – definitely since the seventeenth century, and perhaps 200 years before that.

Not all county flags are old: indeed, thirty of them have been created this century, with Leicestershire’s – which has a running fox below the arms of an earl of Leicester who died 800 years ago – being as recent as 2021. Gloucestershire’s cream flag represents the county’s pride in its Cotswold stone, while Cornwall’s white-on-black cross is believed to link back to the county’s tin industry – the black quarters symbolizing ore divided by white metal.

Abbreviations of county names are sometimes obscure: Shropshire becomes Salop, because the Romans called Shrewsbury, the county town, Salopia, and Oxfordshire became Oxon, as Oxonium was the Latin name for both the county and the town.

People from different counties have nicknames: Wiltshire folk are ‘Moonrakers’, relating to a tale of two rum smugglers who, when caught trying to retrieve casks of the liquor from a pond, said they were trying to recover some cheeses. The ‘cheese’ they pointed to was a reflection of the moon.

Inhabitants of Lincolnshire can be known as Yellowbellies. There are several possibilities for this name. It might be because the underside of the Lincoln mail coach was yellow. Or perhaps it refers to how the Lincoln longwool sheep collected yellow into their fleeces while wandering round the county’s mustard fields. Equally, it could be because they had a bacon that turned yellow if it was hung for too long, or even because of a local newt or frog with a yellow stomach. The romance attached to counties is endless, frequently unique and often lost in time.

Some ancient counties have been eaten up by others. Westmoreland was cannibalized by Cumbria fifty years ago, when Huntingdonshire was also consumed by Cambridgeshire. Having existed for 1,000 years, Middlesex became part of Greater London in 1965. Humberside was a non-metropolitan and ceremonial county in the north, created in 1974 but disbanded twenty-two years later.

Sykes Holidays has suggested what each county is best at, or most famous for. Rabbitholers might be tempted to dig deeper, once informed that Staffordshire is here linked to Marmite, Herefordshire to fruit orchards, Surrey to company headquarters, Shropshire to the tallest Doric column, Oxfordshire to prime ministers and Northamptonshire to ‘the first car chase’.

There is another survey that ranks counties in terms of desirability, and the top three are Dorset, North Yorkshire and Gloucestershire. The bottom three are (the administrative county of) Humberside, Essex and – to the Revd Richard Coles’ and my disbelief (our families both hail from there) – Northamptonshire.

CS

Doctor William Price

William Price, surgeon, Chartist, nudist, archdruid, inspiration for the National Health Service, is perhaps best known for conducting the first cremation in modern Britain, that of his son, Jesus Christ, in 1884.

Born in 1800 in Rhydri near Caerphilly, the son of a mentally fragile parson who kept snakes in his pockets and jumped into rivers fully clothed, he was descended from Rhys Fawr ap Maredudd, who fought valorously for Henry VII at Bosworth Field in 1485. His father married his grandmother’s maidservant, which caused a scandal. After the wedding William Sr ran into the street and danced around shouting, ‘Look at us, look at us!’

William Jr decided on a career in medicine and was apprenticed to a surgeon at Caerphilly in 1814 before moving to London, where he was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons aged twenty-one. He returned to Wales to take up general practice at Craig yr Helfa and rented a farm nearby, where he took such poor care of his livestock the landlord served him with an eviction notice. Price, infuriated, let all his animals out and then tied himself to his chair and refused to move. He was eventually carried outside and left at the side of the road.

He went to the Taff Valley and became radicalized, not that he needed much persuading, in the nationalist and socialist circles around Treforest, which resulted in him establishing a cooperative society to pay medical costs for working people in the newly industrialized south, a scheme that later was greatly to impress Nye Bevan, the father of the NHS.

Price’s circumstances, and more, changed after the failed Chartist Uprising of 1839, in which he was involved. He fled to Paris disguised as a woman, and to relieve the bitter bread of exile went to the Louvre, where he became convinced, quite without foundation, that the Greek inscription on an ancient stone was a Celtic hymn to the moon prophesying that someone would come to restore the Welsh language and the nation itself. Price thought that meant him, so to play a part in this great destiny he returned to Wales, where he alternated his dress between what he fancied to be Druidic garb and suits of emerald green, grew his hair long and went about in a headdress made of fox skin, which he thought conferred the power to heal. Opposed to the estate of marriage, for he believed it enslaved women, he took up with a woman named Ann Morgan and moved in with her. In 1842 they had a daughter, whom he baptized himself with the name Gwenhiolan, Countess of Glamorgan. When no one came to the eisteddfod he organized at Pontypridd in 1844 he inducted her as its bard, aged two. In 1855 he led a picturesque procession through the streets of Merthyr Tydfil proclaiming Welsh nationalism accompanied by a barely dressed man called Merlin, a goat and a deputation of the proudly nationalist Ivorites, who conducted their affairs exclusively in the Welsh language and greeted each other with a special handshake.

He launched a scheme to build a school and museum at Pontypridd but he fell out with the originally sympathetic landowner Sir Benjamin Hall. When the scheme collapsed he had to flee to France again to escape his debts. There he wrote passionate letters to the newspapers making absurd claims about the authorship of Greek classics, claiming the lordship of the southern Welsh and insisting on the authority of ancient Chinese literature that Homer built Caerphilly Castle. He eventually returned to Wales in 1866 and discovered Ann Morgan had died and their daughter was managing quite well on her own, so he settled at Llantrisant and established a successful medical practice.

Aged eighty-one, he took as his wife a farmer’s daughter sixty years his junior and they had a son, Jesus Christ, who tragically died as a baby. Without authority, and in the view of many at the time unlawfully, he attempted ritually to burn the infant’s body in a barrel, but the authorities intervened and the body was rescued. Price was prosecuted, but successfully defended himself and eventually the cremation went ahead, an event that contributed to the liberalizing Cremation Act of 1902. Price died aged ninety-two having fathered two more children, including Jesus Christ II, whom he hoped would become the Saviour of Wales, as prophecy foretold. It was not to be; Jesus II, known as Nicholas, became, briefly, a policeman in Reading. Price’s own cremation, on two tons of Welsh coal, was attended by 20,000 spectators.

There is a terrific statue of him in Llantrisant, erected in 1982. It shows him dressed in fox skins holding esoteric items in his outstretched hands.

RC

The Early Circus

The circus as we understand it today came about in the eighteenth century. Philip Astley, a former cavalryman and expert rider, is considered the ‘father of the modern circus’. He and his wife, Patty Jones, initially attracted audiences to watch their demonstration of extreme riding skills.

Their first public show (an open-air one) took place on 4 April 1768, Easter Monday, in Ha’penny Hatch in Lambeth – an area of London that started to open up to people north of the Thames when the restraints of its medieval horse ferry and tidal ford crossings were, in 1750, overtaken by the opening of Westminster Bridge. This was the first time that crowds paid to see derring-do on horseback, as well as complicated swordplay, in an enclosed space.

Although open to all, Astley and Jones’s performances had boxes for the rich, with gradations down to the cheap seats. They also set the standard for the ring – its 42ft diameter large enough for the horses to canter round.

It wasn’t till 1782 that the name ‘circus’ was coined by Charles Dibdin, a multi-talented rival to Astley and Jones. Dibdin was an actor, a playwright and a prolific singer-songwriter whose music was admired by Beethoven and Haydn: of his thousands of compositions, his folk song ‘Tom Bowling’ remains the most widely performed today.

Dibdin established a cornerstone of circus culture when he dressed Joseph Grimaldi – a gifted child actor who had become the most popular entertainer in Regency England – in gaudy clothing. Soon Grimaldi became the most famous clown of all: later performers were often referred to as ‘Joey’, in tribute to his trailblazing success. Grimaldi was the first clown to paint white make-up on his face and followers have also kept his catchphrases – ‘Here we are again!’ and the mischievous ‘Shall I?’ – alive down the generations.

Astley kept developing his circus shows. He lured acts over from the pleasure grounds popular in Europe, incorporating sword fights and card tricks. Patty Jones performed, with swarms of bees making up a beard on her face or settling on her wrists and arms to look like a muff. Exotic animals such as zebras were displayed as curiosities but did not perform. Travelling menageries had been popular in the eighteenth century, with lions and elephants gawped at, and big cats being subjected to rough handling to hiss and growl for the audience’s dark pleasure.

Earlier circus audiences seem to have enjoyed a story behind the spectacle: acts advertised in May 1782 included ‘Lilliputian World in six little acts’, and the plot-spoiling ‘The cats escape with the old woman’s dinner out of the porridge pot.’

The first circus in the United States was held in 1793, in an open-air ring in Philadelphia with George Washington in the audience. It was overseen by John Bill Ricketts, who had worked for Astley and Jones in London.

Travelling circuses became hugely exciting for those in far-flung areas. Parades of performers marched ahead, heralding the arrival of longed-for entertainment on a grand scale. But the expense of carrying, erecting and breaking down the wooden ring and its accoutrements was hefty, and in 1825 Joshua Purdy Brown introduced the canvas tent, making it possible to perform ‘one night only’ shows. Soon afterwards, the railway enabled circuses to travel significant distances in a short time.

In 1871, P. T. Barnum began his 100-wagon menagerie and circus that was known as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. In 1882 Barnum bought a huge elephant named Jumbo from London Zoo. People paid to ride the elephant, alongside his keeper. Jumbo became increasingly bad tempered – perhaps through an increase in his testosterone levels, or because he had toothache because of all the sugared buns given to him by the public.

Barnum also poached Rossa Matilda Richter from England. She had been a high-wire act since the age of four and became a sensation as the first human cannonball. Her career was ended by a fall from the tightrope, which broke her back.

Even less fortunate was Thomas Macarte, known as ‘Massarti the Lion Tamer’. He had already lost an arm to one of his charges before his final act, in Bolton, in 1872. He was mauled for fifteen minutes before he could be retrieved but died soon afterwards.

Along with danger, circuses have always involved a nomadic life, often with a multi-generational element. Parents train their children in their particular art, seeing it as the gateway to a future career. There is also a broader ‘family’ element, which persists today: performers have long been noted for preferring to socialize with their peers rather than venturing into the town or city where they happen to be playing that day.

CS

Runes

In 1861, archaeologists cut a shaft into a 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial chamber at Maeshowe on Mainland Orkney to explore its complex of stone-built passages. Once inside, they were surprised to discover they were not the first to have broken into it: when their torches shone across the flagstone slabs of its walls, the light revealed a total of thirty inscriptions of graffiti carved in runes. Runes are characters in an early alphabet, typically associated with the Vikings: these particular examples dated to the twelfth century, just after the Viking Age. When deciphered, it was revealed that some of the inscriptions described treasure (Happy is he who might find the great treasure), while others give the names of the carvers or of those they desired (Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women, written next to an image of a slobbering dog). Others again were even more blunt: Thorni fucked. Helgi carved. The Maeshowe inscriptions may have been the work of a bored raiding party waiting for a storm to blow over, as described in the Orkneyinga Saga, describing precisely this happening to a group staging a coup in 1150.

While runes are usually associated with the Vikings, they actually go back further in time, to earlier Germanic origins from at least as early as the second century. The letters are simple and convenient: formed of mostly straight lines because they were typically cut into wood, stone, metal or bone. Inscriptions were often short and sweet: a name on a comb, a maker’s mark on a sword. Some were more elaborate but they rarely extend beyond a few lines at most: runes were a way to communicate brief sentiments rather than extensive prose.

The runic alphabet originally consisted of twenty-four letters and is named after the first six of these: f-u-th-a-r-k. Over time, this developed in form from the Elder to the Younger Futhark (or Futharc). From around the fifth century, with the migration of the people we call the Anglo-Saxons to present-day England, runes followed along. Here, over time, they developed too and became used for new purposes, such as giving the names of kings on coins and being used not just on objects but to adorn the pages of manuscripts. Runes continued to be used long after the Latin alphabet became widespread: in England as late as the 1100s, and in Scandinavia to at least 1500. And wherever their carvers travelled, we can find inscriptions. On the smooth marble balustrade on the upper level of the Hagia Sophia church (now a mosque) in Istanbul, a bored northerner scratched his name – Halfdan – while another etched a Viking ship onto a column. Those particular inscriptions date back to around the ninth or tenth century, and the writers may have been members of the Varangian Guard; an elite military unit of Scandinavians tasked with protecting the Byzantine emperor.

I’m often asked if runes had magical power, and modern popular culture and folklore will easily convince you that they did. The actual word ‘rune’ means, variously, ‘secret, mystery, dark mysterious statement, (secret) council’ but there was never anything that was considered magical about the runes themselves, as far as we know: any magic they may have held lay in the words they conveyed. Some runic inscriptions relate to healing, suggesting they may have conveyed a spell or incantation that the carver believed would cure an ailment.

Some of my favourite runes are those carved onto small wooden sticks found during archaeological excavations of the medieval towns of Bergen and Oslo. Here, the runes appear to have been used as a late-medieval equivalent of text messages, giving us a glimpse into the everyday lives of ordinary people. The inscriptions from Bergen came to light after lightning struck the city’s ancient wharf in 1955 and four large building complexes burned down, leading to extensive archaeological excavations and the discovery of 670 rune sticks dating to the fourteenth century. Many are pretty simple. Here sails Hafdjarfr/the seabold, says one; Ingebjørg loved me when I was in Stavanger, says another. Others simply describe who a shipment of pepper came from, while one stick may have been intended for someone who spent a little too much time in one of the local taverns: Gytha tells you to go home, its inscription reads. But, humans being humans, such a short and simple system was also used for explicit content: Lovely is pussy, let cock fill it, states a particularly poetic example.

Some sticks like these were even written in code, and for fifteen years after its discovery in 1999 a particular stick with so-called ‘ice runes’ made the world’s runologists scratch their heads. When it was finally cracked, the code’s meaning was perhaps a little less subversive than many had thought: it simply read Kiss me.

CJ

Unusual Addictions

Shopping addiction is recognized – and its diagnostic tool is Norwegian. This will be a source of pride for Cat, but also troubling for her, as she has shared with our listeners how much she dislikes shopping. The Bergen Shopping Addiction Scale was developed in the University of Bergen in 2015.

Two wives of slain US presidents seem to have suffered from shopping addiction. Jackie Kennedy reportedly spent $1.25 million on clothes during the first year of her marriage to Aristotle Onassis.

It was said of Mary Todd Lincoln that, ‘like a drug for her tortured nerves, she indulged in her orgies of buying things’. A Washington merchant once presented her with a bill for the 300 pairs of gloves that she had ordered from him in the previous four months.

Mrs Lincoln would go to A. T. Stewart’s department store in New York and buy furs, jewellery, silks and laces in such profusion that it was politically embarrassing for her husband. When she died, fourteen years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, she did so penniless.

Music’s addictive qualities are connected to the release of dopamine. There was a Swedish gentleman who, in 2007, was successful in applying for benefits because of his addiction to heavy metal: in the year before this legal victory, he had attended 300 heavy-metal concerts.

In 1987 an eighty-two-year-old patient at Birmingham Moseley Hall Hospital surprised his carers by revealing his addiction to the music of Elvis Presley. Nobody else shared his passion, so he was prescribed a set of headphones.

A paper from 2013 reports how tango dancers can become dependent. Physical symptoms of withdrawal occurred in 20 per cent of the sample, and 33 per cent had strong cravings, but the negative effects were limited to unhappiness and hankering, so maybe this should fit under compulsion rather than addiction?

Compulsive carrot eating is a rarer addiction, but a 2009 report in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry records how it overwhelmed a forty-nine-year-old patient. Battling with marital issues and depression, she was also a heavy smoker, and both oral activities were seen to soothe her inner turmoil.

Withdrawal from excessive carrot consumption led her to suffer insomnia, nervousness, irritability and craving. She withdrew from care and only came back to the medics to report how – after an operation – she had successfully stopped eating too many carrots (and binned the cigarettes, too).

Too much beta-carotene can be seriously dangerous. In 1974, a London coroner recorded how Basil Brown, a middle-aged scientist with a penchant for health foods, had died from consuming too much of the stuff. Over ten days, he ingested an estimated 70 million IU of Vitamin A. The pathologist noted how cirrhotic Basil’s liver had become – it was in the same awful state as if he had died from alcoholic poisoning – and his skin had turned bright yellow by the time of death.

(Rabbitholers should please remember the catastrophic effects of too much Vitamin A: if they happen to be starving in the Arctic but have the opportunity to eat a polar bear’s liver: don’t do it! A polar bear’s liver weighs roughly 500g and contains 9 million IU of Vitamin A. Just 3 per cent of that dose is fatal for humans. Similarly dangerous to man are the livers of huskies, walruses and bearded seals.)

Compulsively drinking water can present as an addiction. A study from sixty years ago recorded one such addict drinking water from her hot water bottle, while another – who was weaning herself off barbiturates – carried a jug of water with her at all times: ‘The thought of not being able to get a drink of water when I need it terrifies me’, she admitted.

Nasal spray can become addictive. Back in the 1960s a forty-five-year-old paediatrician was admitted to hospital with severe depression, which he blamed on the sapping conduct of his patients’ parents. During his hospital stay it was noted that if he didn’t take phenylephrine (a leading component of Sudafed) every four hours, his temper would explode.

Further enquiries established that, during the Second World War, he had taken a voyage with four gallons of the stuff in his cabin and had become hooked on it. He initially refused treatment but, when eventually persuaded that he was an addict, he was weaned off the drug in just four months.

It was reported in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, in December 1939, that an inhabitant of a suburb of Bombay (now Mumbai) was addicted to a poison extracted from water weed.

When this plant was in short supply, he had another toxin to hand: ‘[he] always keeps a black cobra tied up in a bag in the folds of his massive turban. When he wants to take the “drug” he … takes out the cobra, opens his mouth, and makes his “pet” bite him on the tongue.’ Perhaps this man was confused about W. C. Fields’ dictum: ‘Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a snake.’

Internet addiction has been recognized since 1990, and it has been noted that women are more likely to become addicted to social media, while men can more readily become slaves to games, particularly the most high-risk MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role player games), such as World of Warcraft.

CS

1001 Nights

No Arabic or Eastern stories have become as ingrained into Western storytelling and folklore as the collection known as Alf Layla wa-Layla in Arabic and 1001 Nights or Arabian Nights in English. The stories are the source not only of characters such as Aladdin and Ali Baba, but also of terms like ‘genie’ and ‘ghoul’.

The frame story of the Nights – within which all the other stories are contained – is set somewhere in central Asia. A king by the name of Shahryar discovers that, during his frequent travels, his wife has repeatedly been unfaithful. In response, he kills both her and those she has betrayed him with, after which he is so filled with rage towards all women that he marries and murders a new wife every day, until he starts to run out of eligible candidates. But there are two women left – the daughters of his vizier – and the oldest, Scheherazade, has come up with a plan. Determined to stop the endless slaughter, she begs her father to let her marry the king. The night after they wed, Scheherazade tells the king a story so beguiling and compelling that he’s desperate for more; cleverly, she doesn’t complete the tale by daybreak but promises to continue the next night. She does this for 1,001 nights. By doing so, she saves her life and eventually convinces her husband that his paranoia and mistrust of all women is, after all, misplaced.

In 1704, Antoine Galland became the first European to translate into a Western language and comment on what he named Arabian Nights Entertainment, working from his own copy of its earliest known manuscript: a fourteenth-century Syrian text that was sent to him in France from Aleppo.

The Nights’ origins stretch back even further than the Middle Ages. We now know that the set of stories Galland translated was an amalgam of tales with different origins, but by the twelfth century these were circulating in book form under something much like the current title.

The very earliest reference to the stories is found on a fragment of a ninth-century manuscript discovered in Egypt in 1947. There, two pages of brown-coloured paper made from linen, later used as scrap paper with scribblings and drawings on top, include the title and the beginning of the first story. In 947, historian and geographer al-Masudi, the Herodotus of the Arabs, briefly mentioned a collection he called A Thousand Stories. Describing what is clearly the frame story of Scheherazade and the king, al-Masudi’s reference also states that it is a collection derived from legendary stories originating in Iran, India, Greece and other Arabic regions. There are protagonists appearing in the tales that are known historical figures, including the famous eighth- to ninth-century Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid – who once sent an elephant to Charlemagne – and his grand vizier Ja’far Barmaki. The most famous English translation is that of Sir Richard Burton, who published a ten-volume work from 1885 to 1888. Although the stories had by then been circulating in the West for quite some time, Burton’s version outraged the English literary community. His version was different from earlier translations to the extreme: his language was lurid and coarse and many translations literal. Scenes that were familiar and genteel now included sexual violence, but it was especially his included commentaries and footnotes that caused offence. Here, Burton – who had travelled extensively in the Arab world – included observations on what he said were Arabic sexual practices such as bestiality, eunuchization and sodomy, as well as commentaries on the size of African and Arabic men’s genitals. The reaction was so strong that his text was branded ‘pornographic’.

The Nights’ popularity in Europe no doubt owed much to the timing of Galland’s translation: it reached the readers just as fairy tales were springing into fashion. Prior to Burton’s approach, the gentle versions of orientalism that other editions provided suited Western readers very well.

And are there really 1,001 stories? No. In Burton’s translation, there are more than 300, but the original Syrian manuscript that Galland worked from contained 282 nights. In 987, the author Ibn al-Nadim wrote that the Abbasid scholar al-Jahshiyari began to write down a collection of 1,000 popular stories but died in the year 942 having completed only 480 of them.

Those familiar tales of Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sinbad were not included in any of the earliest manuscripts but originated with the European translators, especially Galland. It seems the Frenchman supplemented his initial translation with material from other sources after being pressed by his publisher to produce more. Some were, apparently, recounted to him by Hanna Diyab, a Syrian to whom he was introduced in 1709, and who promised to share with him ‘the stories he knew’. Whether they had anything to do with the original tales has never been determined.

CJ

Butlers

In 2019 a wealthy Russian family posted a particularly focused advertisement. They were seeking a bilingual butler, with at least a working knowledge of Russian, possessing diplomatic skills, an ability to deal with any schooling issues and an up-to-date knowledge of the best restaurants in London and the South of France. In addition, the butler must be a Sagittarius, Virgo or Aquarius – and be prepared to watch all episodes of the television show Jeeves and Wooster ‘to see what is expected’.

Jeeves, perhaps the most famous of P. G. Wodehouse’s literary creations, was technically a valet – more of an under-butler, concentrating on his master’s clothes and appearance – but he has come to be seen as the epitome of what a fully fledged butler should be. Intelligent, discreet and resourceful, Jeeves constantly has to come to the assistance of his clueless but well-intentioned employer, Bertie Wooster. Jeeves is the brains of the operation, while the amiable buffoon Wooster presses ahead in something of an upper-class haze of overexcitement and overindulgence. As Wooster once says, on waking after a night on the town: ‘I hadn’t the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself.’

This is suitable, since the original butlers of earliest Rome were said to be cup-bearers, on hand ‘to fill and present the cup to the king and princes’. This role continued into the early medieval period, with Saxon households having butlers who could be referred to as ‘dish-bearers’. A butler is mentioned in Beowulf, attending at a feast.

The word ‘butler’ comes from the Old French boteillier, from the word for bottle. In the later medieval household, the butler was a domestic officer in charge of the buttery, ale, beer, wine and cellar. It was always a prized position and, because it was held by a man, it outranked any female role in the household. In the 1290s the Abbot of Westminster’s household had five officers who were given the title of ‘esquire’ – the master cook, the marshal, the farrier, the body-servant and the butler.

In England a tax was levied on non-essential servants in 1777. These included butlers. By this stage the butler was head of any household that had no steward, and the role placed him in charge of the cellar, the silver, and the best china, as well as being the first figure to greet visitors to a grand house.

According to the British Butler Institute, half of all students there recently were female. Employees from the Middle East often prefer a lady butler, because of the strict gender separation demanded in some Muslim households. Experienced butlers earn £40,000 to £150,000 per year, with the highest paid of all seemingly earning £2.2 million, working for a billionaire in Miami. Some employees are so desperate not to lose their prized major-domo that they pay them an additional retainer for their continued service.

Butlers are still generally expected to wear a three-piece suit (like Jeeves), and to be prepared to polish silver, pack and unpack suitcases and be able to lay a table or shake a cocktail properly.

There have been controversial butlers. Bernard Lafferty was the semi-literate Irish-born butler to Doris Duke, the billionaire heiress and socialite. After she died in 1993, Lafferty was left $5 million by Duke, as well as $500,000 per year. He was also an executor of her estate.

Some said that Lafferty had used lawyers to trick Duke into this startlingly generous bequest, and a nurse claimed that Lafferty had encouraged a doctor to end Duke’s life with an overdose of morphine. In a court case, others swore that Lafferty had devoted himself entirely to Duke, who had disinherited her only (adopted) child. The judge agreed that Lafferty could keep his money but must relinquish his executorship.

Eugene Allen was one of the more famous butlers in recent American life, beginning in the White House in 1952 as a ‘pantry-man’ – cleaning dishes and polishing silver – and rising to become head butler during the Reagan presidency, eventually retiring in 1986. He never missed a day’s work in his thirty-four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Allen’s son remembers seeing the impact on his father of John F. Kennedy’s assassination: ‘My father came home late [that] day … But then he got up and put his coat back on. He said, “I’ve got to go back to work.” But in the hallway he fell against the wall and started crying. That was the first time in my life I had ever seen my father cry.’

Although invited to Kennedy’s funeral, Allen preferred to work that day, later saying, ‘Someone had to be at the White House to serve everyone after they came from the funeral.’ This is an attitude to the highest echelon of domestic service that might have persuaded Jeeves to beam with pride.

CS

Newport Arch, Bailgate, Lincoln

Newport Arch in the Bailgate at Lincoln is the oldest arch used by traffic in Britain, if not the world. It stands between a Chinese restaurant and the Methodist Church and was the old north gate to the city, built from lovely Lincolnshire Limestone by Romans around AD 200.

Lindum as it was then known, and which the Bishop of Lincoln still uses as a signature, was originally a legionary fortress in the reign of Nero. The 9th and 2nd Legions were garrisoned there and by the end of the first century it was a colonia, a settlement for former soldiers who for some inexplicable reason chose to live out their days on a hill overlooking the fens rather than Ravenna, where many of them came from. By the third century it had a forum, shops, baths and temples, city walls, and was a place of some importance. It is thought that a Bishop of Lindum may have attended the Council at Arles in 314 which excommunicated actors.

Newport Arch was part of that effort of enclosure and access, and through it the arrow-straight Ermine Street led towards the Humber, and beyond it York. It was remodelled in the fourth century, when Lindum became the capital of the province Britannia Flavia. It is handsome rather than beautiful, stands about 7m high from the Roman level it was built on and 5m wide, and is made from a semicircle of large moulded limestone voussoirs. On the east side is a smaller arch, or postern, for pedestrians.

Romano-Britons came and went until the fifth century, by which time it was largely deserted, though St Paulinus of York came through it in 629 to visit a fellow called Blaecca, described as Praefectus Civitatis, the same position as that held by Pontius Pilate in Judea in the time of Christ, although the powers of that office in Lindum colonia six centuries later were much reduced.

Another invasion improved the city’s standing, the Vikings this time, who made it one of the Five Boroughs of the Danelaw with its own mint, and by the ninth century it was prospering again.

Next to arrive were the Normans following the conquest of 1066. Remigius, the first Bishop of Lincoln, built a cathedral and died two days before its consecration in 1092. There was an unfortunate earthquake on 15 April 1185 that did great damage to all of Lincoln’s built environment and split the cathedral down the middle. St Hugh of Avalon, the next bishop, noted for biting off the finger of the preserved hand of St Mary Magdalene while visiting some French monks in order to add to his cathedral’s assortment of relics, rebuilt it magnificently. Lincoln became an important ecclesiastical centre, and many churchmen and scholars would have passed through the arch, among them Robert Grosseteste, the tenth bishop, who pioneered the fundamentals of scientific method and introduced the controlled experiment to the West.

Lincoln declined after the Reformation, when its monasteries were closed, but this was to the benefit of Newport Arch, for there was insufficient interest and resources to develop the city and it was left more or less undisturbed. There is a drawing of the south side of the arch by the Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley from 1722 which shows the pedestrian arch filled in and putlog holes in the masonry above for securing scaffolding poles.

It took modernity to really imperil Newport Arch, which has been threatened with destruction thrice in the motor age. In May 1964 a neglectful lorry driver for the Humber Warehousing Company attempted to go through it and nearly brought down the crown and part of the superstructure. When it was inspected it was found to be seriously damaged and the whole thing had to be practically rebuilt under the guidance of the City Engineer, assisted by the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments Works Department. It reopened in August that year.

Exactly forty years later, in 2004, it was struck by another lorry but fortunately suffered less damage. Yet another lorry delivering pallets got stuck under it in 2017 when the driver’s sat nav failed accurately to calculate a safe route into Bailgate. Officials at Lincoln City Council were notified and despatched a building control team which assessed the situation and advised the driver to let its tyres down, giving just enough clearance to reverse slowly away.

Also in 2017 Mr Steve Wiles, a fifty-seven-year-old photographer from Lincoln with a lifelong interest in Roman civilization, had the arch tattooed on his arm. He remembered it with great affection from boyhood visits to his Aunt Ivy, who lived nearby. He also had the Taurus, emblem of the 9th Legion, inked into his other arm in tribute to the grandeur that was Rome.

RC

The Lino King

James Williamson was born on the last day of 1842, the son of an alderman and one-time mayor of Lancaster who founded a firm manufacturing oilcloth and coated fabrics.

After leaving Lancaster Royal Grammar School, James went to work for his father and turned the company into an industrial giant, making himself colossally rich. In the 1870s he purchased a bankrupt shipyard for a song, and there built an enormous factory, Lune Mill, a twenty-one-acre site dedicated to manufacturing coated fabrics, floorcloth, blindcloth and, from 1887, cork linoleum. It had its own power supply and warehousing, and a railway link especially to receive imported cork arriving on ships from Portugal and Spain to meet demand for the low-quality lino he produced in huge volumes.

Before long Williamson employed a quarter of Lancaster’s population. ‘The mammoth works on the banks of the Lune at Lancaster,’ it was said, ‘are the most extensive in the universe, that are owned and controlled solely by one individual.’ Williamson became known as the Lino King.

Fundamental to his success was creating a near monopoly in lino, greatly to the benefit of his balance sheet. His workers were paid modestly, if over the odds, and kept on payroll when business was slack, but accusations of exploitative practices were levelled against him. He also had a tricky relationship with a former employee who left and formed a rival company, Storey Brothers, and they engaged in a ruinous price war that ended in negotiation, each leaving the other a slice of the pie.

Tough, businesslike, ambitious, he was also unusually mindful of public duty, a justice of the peace and high sheriff of the county, elected town councillor and then Liberal MP for Lancaster in 1886. A resolute supporter of Gladstone (the feeling was mutual), he was for free trade and home rule in Ireland, but his loyalty and material support were to prove awkward for him. In 1895 he announced he would not seek re-election and the reason for this became evident shortly after when, on the recommendation of the then prime minister, Lord Rosebery, he was raised to the peerage. In 1884 he had bought Ashton Hall for £100,000 – about £15 million today – just one of his many homes, but chose it for his title, Baron Ashton of Ashton.

News of his peerage was very well received at home at first, and 8,000 people came to greet him on his return from the capital. Then, as now, however, questions were soon raised about the propriety of politicians ennobling the rich. Rosebery felt it necessary to announce that speculation that Ashton had paid for his seat in the Lords was slanderous and contemptible. Ashton’s political opponents disagreed, and he had to write to the local newspaper suggesting the editor note that rumours of him buying his ermine for £40,000 were entirely false.

He was, in fact, an exceptionally generous philanthropist and gave to Lancaster its town hall, infirmary and a splendid park dominated by the magnificent Ashton Memorial, sometimes described as the Taj Mahal of the North. He built it in 1908 in memory of his second wife Jessy, at a cost, in today’s values, of about £8 million. Known locally as ‘The Structure’, it stands 500 feet above sea level looking like the central portion of a palace by Vanbrugh deprived of its accompanying wings. Made from Portland stone surmounted by a copper-covered dome, and approached by a grand flight of steps, it is surrounded by Herbert Hampton’s sculptures in praise of the defining enterprises of its age – Commerce, Art, Industry and Science – though the decision to build using a steel frame, cutting-edge technology in its time, caused some difficulties for those who sought to preserve it when it was damaged in a fire in the 1960s. Reopened, its interior of marble with paintings by George Murray restored, today it is a venue for concerts and weddings.

Lord Ashton, for all his notably public life, was very shy, and after the suggestions of his peerage being bought rather than earned he became paranoid and reclusive. Before the general election of 1910 he announced to the Lancaster electorate that unless his good name was defended he would no longer support the town with the generosity that so many of them had benefited from. A fawning letter was sent by the council but the damage had been done and he redirected his philanthropic giving to the East End of London and then, when Britain declared war in 1914, stumped up £3 million in cash as a War Loan.

He eventually retired to another of his mansions, Ryelands House, where he closed up most of the rooms and lived surrounded by towering piles of newspapers. His social skills, never great, diminished to almost nothing but his business sense never faded. When the man arrived to wind his clocks, one of very few people he admitted to the house, Lord Ashton timed him to improve his productivity.

He died in 1934 and left more than half a billion pounds in today’s values.

RC

Toilet Paper

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, and universal lockdowns were imminent, the UK experienced a relatively new phenomenon: panic buying. Chief among the desirable products was something we’d all taken for granted before, namely toilet paper. But how did those rolls become quite so ubiquitous around the world – apparently the average American uses 20,805 sheets per year? And when, for that matter, did humans begin to use paper for cleansing after toilet visits?

Understandably, before the invention of paper in China around year 100, numerous other materials were used for the same purpose, as they still are in many parts of the world, and even chimpanzees have been observed to wipe their young’s bottoms with leaves. Historically, the best known early man-made alternative to paper is probably the Roman xylospongium: a sponge on a stick. The Romans famously built communal latrines, where you would sit side-by-side on a stone bench with holes cut into it. A gully at your feet was fed by a running stream of water to allow the sponge to be cleaned after use. In the ninth century, the Muslim scholar ibn al-Hajjaj collected Hadiths, or stories attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, many of which include rules and customs. In his collections, Hadith #458 states that when someone uses pebbles to wipe his bottom, he must make sure the number of pebbles is odd. A follow-up includes the rule that at least three pebbles must be used, held in the right hand only.

The first written sources suggesting the use of paper for this purpose date to the sixth century, with the Chinese scholar and court official Yan Zhitui reporting that he would never use paper on which text is written for toilet purposes. Three centuries later, a Muslim observer travelling through China states that, there, paper rather than water is used. Toilet paper was produced on an impressive scale in China, including thousands of perfumed sheets produced for the Hongwu Emperor’s imperial family in 1393.

Elsewhere, once it became commonly available from the eighteenth century onwards, scrap printed paper was used for toileting purposes around the world.

Water, quite understandably, has continued to be a common alternative. The bidet found popularity in France in the eighteenth century, with the Marquise de Prie, Jeanne Agnès Berthelot de Pléneuf, being credited as the first reported user in 1710. While the bidet is still frequently used in some European countries, Japan took it to another level in the 1980s, when the Washlet was launched. The company Toto introduced a revolutionary toilet that had not only a heated seat but also a jet of water for cleaning your backside and a blast of air for drying. By 2009, a reported 72 per cent of Japanese households had installed one.

But the type of paper we panicked missing out on in 2020 did not come about until the nineteenth century. While there were some earlier manufactures, the man credited with bringing toilet paper to the masses was an American entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty. In 1857, Gayetty’s Medicated Toilet Paper, which was impregnated with aloe and printed with his name, first went on sale. To aid his marketing, Gayetty emphasized the product’s superiority over using old printed papers, claiming that ink was particularly damaging and could cause or worsen haemorrhoids. The paper was not immediately accepted as this claim, in particular, invited scorn among the public. In its April 1859 issue, the New Orleans Medical News and Hospital Gazette went so far as to call it ‘quackery’, bemoaning Gayetty’s invention and accusing him of taking advantage of innocent consumers. Another reason it wasn’t popular was that people were used to using scrap paper they already had lying around, and were unwilling to pay for something they didn’t feel they needed. But before too long, the paper caught on. Originally, toilet paper was sold in flat sheets until the technique of perforation enabled the toilet paper roll to be invented. By the late nineteenth century, production was well established in both the US and the UK.

The early paper was, however, far less gentle than today’s versions. Most were made of esparto grass, a material that was shiny, unabsorbent, and generally speaking uncomfortable to use: as late as the 1930s, toilet paper was manufactured to be ‘splinter-free’ for the first time.

The widespread adoption of toilet paper in the West brought with it some very clear health benefits. In warfare, especially, poor sanitary conditions once led to enormous losses of life from diseases such as dysentery and typhoid. In 1905, the US Surgeon General approved toilet paper for posts that had sewer connections. By the First World War, the incidence of typhoid among US soldiers had fallen dramatically, and this may be one of several reasons why.

CJ

Redheads

I had red hair from the age of four until my forties. As a child I was teased, in a relatively good-natured way – neither ‘copper knob’ nor ‘carrot top’ are among the worst things I have been called.

Perhaps I was lucky that my early decades preceded the South Park episode in the noughties called ‘Ginger Kids’, which led to the creation of ‘Kick a Ginger Day’ in 2008. Bullying incidents against redheads were particularly common in Canada that year and were still being reported around the world a decade later.

Being a redhead is genetic. Almost everybody with red hair has two versions of a gene called the ‘melanocortin 1 receptor’, or MC1R. Not everyone who has these two versions of the gene is necessarily a redhead, and a recent study found there are eight other genes that collaborate to switch them on and off to produce red hair. A gene variant associated with red and blond hair is confined mainly to Europe and the Near East and is mostly absent in Africa and East Asia. This strongly suggests that the mutation came about after humans ventured out of Africa, 60,000 years ago, and needed to synthesize more Vitamin D as they headed north.

There are 20.4 million British and Irish people who carry the red hair variants. While 1–2 per cent of people of European origin have red hair, this climbs to 6–12 per cent (perhaps more) in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. It has long been so: the Roman historian Tacitus, writing in around 100 AD, noted how the Caledonians (Scots) had red hair then. The Udmurtia ethnic nation in Russia claims to have the reddest hair of all and hold a redheads’ festival with the motto ‘Gingers of the World, Unite!’

Redhead Day has been held in the Dutch city of Tilburg since 2005. It started after an artist advertised for fifteen red-haired models to be part of an exhibition. When 150 people came forward, he took a group photograph of them. In 2013 1,672 took part in this celebration that entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest gathering of natural redheads ever.

Those born with red hair are more at risk of DNA damage from UV radiation – and therefore of skin cancer. Early onset Parkinson’s is a less well-known threat, too. There have also been observations that redheads have more frequent physical and mental health issues, though this may be connected to the pale skin of redheads, and to deficiencies in Vitamin D or folic acid.

Red-haired women have frequently been seen as promiscuous. A recent study found that redheadedness was associated with higher sexual desire and activity, but this is seen as a baseless stereotype that makes men more prone to try to have sex with them.

The sexuality stereotype goes back to Pan, whom the Greeks worshipped: he had the wiry physique of a goat, with red hair on his chest and head, and he was associated with lust. Promiscuous women were known as ‘Pan Girls’.

The first famous redhead seems to have been Ramesses II. This would have been seen as a good thing, as a tinge of red to the hair was viewed as a ‘godly trait’ in ancient Egypt. It is possible that Cleopatra was similarly blessed – she used henna, at least on her skin, and is also found depicted as a redhead at Herculaneum, and in the Cheapside Hoard in the Museum of London.

Alexander the Great was recorded, in the second century, as having light red hair, although others at the time called it dark blond. Nero seems to have been a redhead: his family name Ahenobarbus means ‘red-bearded’, and contemporaries said his hair was the same colour as a lion’s mane.

Although most Vikings seem, surprisingly, to have been dark-haired, Erik Thorvaldsson, a Norwegian Viking who discovered and colonized Greenland, was also known as Erik the Red because of his colouring.

Elizabeth I was redheaded, inspiring a trend for women to use sulphuric acid, lead and rust to emulate her. The queen wore wigs for much of her adulthood but kept them the colour of her youthful hair. It is said she even dyed some of her horses’ tails to match.

Vivaldi was called ‘Rossi’ by his father, because of his red hair. Mozart may perhaps have been a redhead, but the evidence is uncertain. His self-portraits suggest that Van Gogh started with red hair till it became increasingly blond.

Red hair was popular in pre-Raphaelite art. Rossetti intentionally engaged a red-headed model to be the Virgin Mary, to fly in the face of the convention then of red hair belonging to that arch traitor, Judas Iscariot, and the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

When Millais painted a boy Jesus with red hair in 1850, Charles Dickens was horrified and called the child ‘a hideous, wry necked, blubbering, red-headed boy’.

CS

LEGO

In my family, we have a collection of LEGO that has now spanned three generations. My Swedish grandparents were early adopters, buying sets for their two daughters; by the early 1960s, the toys had already taken off in Scandinavia. LEGO bricks have their origin in the small town of Billund in eastern Denmark. There, in 1932, a man by the name of Ole Kirk Christiansen decided to use his skills as a joiner and carpenter to produce high-quality wooden toys. That year, Denmark found itself in an economic crisis as a knock-on effect of the Wall Street crash in 1929, as US import restrictions had impacted Danish farmers. Christiansen needed to diversify and set up his own company two years later, which he named LEGO, from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means ‘play well’. Little would he know that, close to a century later, the brand would be responsible for producing 60 billion plastic bricks every year: there are now an estimated eighty-six LEGO bricks per person in the entire world.

The shift to plastic came in the late 1940s. By then, one of Ole’s sons, Godtfred Kirk, who had been designing wooden toys since he was seventeen, had assumed a large role in the company and would soon take over as managing director. On a worldwide scale, there were fast developments in modern plastics and manufacturing technologies in the post-war period. Ole Kirk jumped on the trend, ordering a British plastic injection-moulding machine from E. H. Windsor in London. The forerunners to the modern LEGO bricks were marketed under the name Automatic Binding Bricks in 1949. The Christiansens had been shown bricks made by a British company called Kiddicraft and decided to modify their design. They eventually ended up purchasing the rights to Kiddicraft’s bricks. The LEGO brick, as we know it today, was patented in 1958. The most significant development was the addition of tubes underneath the bricks, which made them more stable in combination with the studs on top. The combination of tubes and studs means that, for example, six 2 × 4 bricks can be combined in 915,103,765 different ways.

It was soon realized what enormous potential the plastic bricks could have, and the decision to abandon wooden toys and focus entirely on plastic bricks came in 1960, after the company’s woodworking factory burned to the ground. The Christiansen family disagreed internally but the decision to go with plastic was made by Godtfred Kirk. He also decided to buy his brothers’ shares in the business and continue as its sole owner – something that would soon prove to be a very wise financial move. The company began expanding abroad and before long it was a worldwide success. For many, part of the appeal of LEGO and the company behind it is its emphasis on stimulating play and creativity: as early as 1963, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen announced ten fundamental characteristics emphasizing those values in particular.

In 2023, the LEGO brand was valued at approximately $13 billion. Thirty LEGO sets are sold every second in the run-up to Christmas and around 340 million minifigures – the iconic yellow, round-headed little people – are produced every year. There are an estimated 4 billion of them in the world. Moreover LEGO manufactures the largest number of tyres in the world every year, albeit for tiny wheels.

So what happens to all those billions of pieces worldwide? The LEGO inventors wanted their toys to be durable, and that they succeeded in. Scientists have worked out that the bricks – made of acrolynitrile butadiene styrene – can survive in the ocean for as long as 1,300 years.

On 13 February 1997, the cargo ship Tokio Express was on its way from Rotterdam to the USA when it encountered rough seas along the Cornish coast. When, roughly twenty miles from Land’s End, disaster struck and a rogue wave tipped it beyond its balance point, sixty-two shipping containers slid off and were dumped into the ocean. One of these contained a shipment of 4,756,940 LEGO pieces destined to be made into sets in North America, many of them relating to seafaring adventures. Somehow, the container sprung open and the LEGO spilled out. Ever since, beachgoers in Cornwall have found plastic life rafts, octopuses, flowers, flippers and even dragons. These can all be traced back to the spill: there were 33,427 black dragons and 4,200 octopuses. While most of the beached pieces have been recovered in southern England, others have been found in Ireland, Belgium, the Channel Islands and even some in Australia and the US. So far, only one of the 51,800 missing sharks has been discovered. Perhaps the rest will be found sometime in the fourth millennium?

CJ

A Family Diary

When my great-grandfather, Robert ‘Bobby’ Spencer, died in 1922, he arranged for diaries that he kept for the last two decades of his life to be locked in a bank for seventy-five years before being passed to his heir at the end of that time. This proved to be me.

I keep these crimson, gold-embossed memories from a world long gone on a shelf in my study – a personal connection to major events in the reigns of Edward VII and George V, both of whom he served as Lord Chamberlain. The diaries bring alive an ancestor who still haunts Althorp through portraits, photographs, a bust and satirical sketches – Bobby had been the youngest MP in the Commons but he was famed more for his exquisite dandyism than for his political ability.

In middle age he was an eyewitness to royal occasions. During the summer of 1909, the Tsar and Tsarina of Russia visited the Isle of Wight, as King Edward’s guests. Bobby wrote in his diary how the Tsarina, Alexandra – one of Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughters – told him all about her children, with the loving pride of any mother. In turn, he shared with her his ‘great sorrow’ – the death, in his arms, of his wife (and my great-grandmother) Margaret, during childbirth.

The next day Bobby sat on her left at lunch: ‘The Tsarina [was] tired and less talkative than yesterday’, he noted, ‘but told me several things about her life back home. She ate nothing but a few vegetables. She told me what she wore at the opening of the Duma.’ It all sounds slightly stilted, stiff and rather humdrum. But it adds a human touch to the tragic Tsarina of history, who would be murdered in a cellar nine years later, in a hail of bullets that also claimed her beloved children and husband.

When Edward VII died suddenly at Buckingham Palace, late on 6 May 1910, the Times recorded: ‘We have to announce with profound regret that King Edward VII died … last night. The shock finds a nation wholly unprepared. Till yesterday no suspicion of immediate danger had disturbed the minds of his subjects.’

But my great-grandfather had witnessed Edward VII’s final days from up close, arriving at Buckingham Palace on what would be the king’s final day to be told there was ‘grave anxiety’ about the sovereign’s health: he was too sick to eat or sleep.

At 1 p.m., Bobby noted, ‘His Majesty had had a fainting fit … and it was very alarming.’ Although Edward rallied, the royal physicians told Bobby that they had ‘given up all hope, really’. A heart attack followed that evening, after which Edward took his last meal – ‘a beaten-up egg’, my great-grandfather recorded. Around midnight, the king died. ‘How beautiful his face was’, Bobby wrote, on seeing his master in death, while struggling to take in the speed of Edward’s demise: ‘Only one week since The King took me for a walk in the gardens at Buckingham Palace, and [he] was everything that was kind and appreciative.’

Two years later, on 17 April, Bobby noted: ‘The awful loss of life in the sinking of the Titanic … [an] appalling catastrophe – over 1,400 lost.’ These included a journalist acquaintance of his, W. T. Stead, who had given his life jacket to another.

Bobby wrote: ‘The acts of heroism shown on the Titanic are heart-warming – J. J. Astor parting from his wife & saluting – only 2 Italians showed cowardice and were shot … A splendid example of humanity at its best.’

He noted how the London newspapers were sparing their readers from none of the terrible details of the tragedy, while churches took the loss of life as the theme of their services on the first Sunday after the sinking.

When Britain entered the First World War, on 4 August 1914, Bobby’s take was: ‘Peace negotiations have failed … War declared – all too awful. Jack [his eldest son – my grandfather] gazetted to first [Life Guards] in the newspaper.’ Bobby was shocked by the rollcall of dead officers that followed over the next four years, and feared his sons – Jack, and also Cecil, a much-decorated motor torpedo boat captain – would also be claimed.

When the war ended, in November 1918, Bobby wrote: ‘Is this to be one of the most marvellous days in the history of the World? Seems likely, as the Armistice was signed at five this morning, & fighting was to stop at 11 a.m. Thanks be to God …’

To thank God for delivering his sons, Bobby gifted his marital home – the manor house at Dallington, near Northampton – to the local people, to be used as a convalescent home by men wounded in the Great War.

The final entry in his diaries is one you would wish on any ancestor: ‘A lovely day’, he wrote, before dying in his sleep.

CS

The Mystery of the Ice Valley Woman

On Sunday, 29 November 1970, two girls and their father were out walking in Isdalen – Ice Valley – about a two-hour walk from the city of Bergen. Locally, the valley has another name: the Valley of Death. The terrain is treacherous so accidents are common, but it is also a well-known suicide spot. As they came to a clearing, they made a gruesome discovery: between some large, soot-blackened rocks, they spotted the body of a woman lying on her back, with her head pointing down towards the valley. There was no doubt that something terrible had happened. The body was badly burned, and she was mostly undressed. When police arrived and started to investigate, they noticed some very curious circumstances. All labels had been removed from her clothes and her watch, laid next to her, had stopped at 10.10. Later, an autopsy revealed she had swallowed fifty to seventy sleeping tablets, with a first dose a few hours before her death. The last twelve had been taken just before she died. The evidence of burning showed that the remains had been set on fire: there was a matchbox lying next to her but no sign of an accelerant. Nevertheless, the police concluded she had committed suicide and three weeks later, the case was closed. But who was she, and could the verdict really be correct?

The woman had nothing on her body to identify her. A few days after she was found, the investigators made a breakthrough, after a locker at the Bergen train station was opened after the rental period expired. Inside, the staff found two suitcases containing women’s clothing and a pair of sunglasses, a fingerprint on which matched the Ice Valley corpse. The luggage, however, contained other, more mysterious items. There were several wigs, currency from five different countries, and a mysterious coded note. But there was nothing there to identify her, as all the labels from the clothing had been removed, as had the prescription sticker on a tube of eczema cream. It was a plastic carrier bag from a footwear store in Stavanger that would reveal her identity, or at least in part. The store owner’s son remembered selling a pair of boots to a woman with dark hair; boots that matched those found on the body. The woman had spoken English with an accent and the police could trace her to a nearby hotel, where she had checked in under the name of Fenella Lorch. Unfortunately, it turned out this was not her real identity but only one of several – they soon found out she had travelled across Norway for a number of months using no fewer than eight different aliases. Many speculated the woman was a spy. At the time, the Cold War was at its height and Norway’s proximity to Russia made this especially plausible. There were reports that she had been seen in western Norway observing military testing of new rockets, but this was unconfirmed. Eventually, the coded note found in her luggage, which contained a series of digits and letters, was cracked. It appears to have been a travel record, including visits in Norway, which matched hotel records, and also some to places abroad, including Paris. But this was as far as they got and the police still seemed content with the suicide verdict. On 5 February 1971, the woman was buried in a zinc coffin in a cemetery in Bergen.

Since the 1970s, the Ice Valley Woman’s death and identity has mesmerized Norway. In 2017, police and journalists decided to reopen the investigation to see if science could yield new proof. The woman’s jawbone had been kept deep in a cellar in the forensic archives of Haukeland University Hospital. The teeth had already attracted attention, because fourteen of them were filled and there were several gold crowns, something that was very unusual in Norway at the time. It was a method of dentistry much more common in central and eastern Europe. Scientists also sent off samples for DNA analysis and pieces of dental enamel to test for oxygen and strontium isotope ratios, which can tell us something about where in the world an individual grew up.

While a DNA profile was recovered, Interpol databases gave no hits, but the chemical analysis of her teeth seemed to imply she came from an area along the Franco-German border. Unfortunately, that was all they could conclude. We still don’t know who she was or whether she was murdered, and, if so, by whom. At the time of writing, a new lead has cast suspicion on a banker from Geneva with Nazi links and ties to Palestinian militants: suggestions even include that the woman’s death was related to Norwegian heavy-water deliveries to Israel that could have been used to develop a nuclear bomb. The only thing that seems very clear to me is that the verdict of suicide must surely be wrong.

CJ

Ghost Towns

I first became interested in ghost towns on a visit to Cyprus, when I peered over the barbed-wire fences surrounding a recent example: the Varosha quarter of the town of Famagusta, or Ammochostos, which was abandoned on 14 August 1974 when all its inhabitants were forced to flee. By definition, a ghost town is a town that was once an active community but has since been deserted by all or most of its residents. The reasons for abandonment are varied: sometimes because of a natural or man-made disaster, other times because of war or conflict or simply because it no longer made sense to settle there, usually economically. In the case of Varosha, the cause was the Turkish invasion of Cyprus about a month earlier, which led to the capture and occupation of the northern part of the island. The Greek name Ammochostos means ‘buried in sand’ and the town used to be a thriving and famous holiday resort with numerous glitzy hotels lining its seafront. Visiting in 1977, Swedish journalist Jan-Olof Bengtsson wrote that ‘breakfast tables are still established, the laundry is still hanging and the lamps are still on’. Despite resolutions established by the UN Security Council, Famagusta has not been returned to Cyprus.

The term ‘ghost town’ was first attested in 1908, possibly after an abandoned settlement in the California hills was dubbed ‘Spookville’ by the Philadelphia Times in 1894.

Perhaps the best-known deserted town is Pripyat in Ukraine, which once had a population of 49,360. On 26 April 1986, one of the reactors of the nearby nuclear power plant Chernobyl went out of control, causing an explosion and fire and a vast amount of deadly radiation to be released into the atmosphere. Because Pripyat lay only 3km away, the entire town was evacuated thirty-six hours after the accident took place. Pripyat, which was built specifically to house the workers at Chernobyl and their families, had been a well-off town by Soviet Union standards. The residents were given merely three hours to evacuate and the town’s clocks froze at exactly 11.55, the time when the electricity was cut. Personal belongings can still be found where they were left behind and communist flags and decorations offer a reminder of the USSR’s rule. But while Pripyatians were unable to move back in, others have taken their place: the local wildlife. With human predators gone, deer, elk and boar quickly moved in, followed by wolves and lynx. Endangered Przewalski’s horses have also been found and the site now seems to be something of a wildlife haven. Although the radiation levels remained high, the animals have been able to survive in this unlikely rewilding of a ghost town.

Elsewhere, residents have been forced to abandon settlements that ended up submerged under dams or artificial lakes. If you travel to Lake Reschen in Italy, you can see the spire of a fourteenth-century church strangely protruding from the lake: it forms part of one of the medieval villages deliberately flooded when the lake was created in 1950.

In archaeology, we have a fondness for what is popularly known as DMVs – deserted medieval villages. In Britain, there are around 3,000 of them known to us. Many DMVs remain only through evidence from written records, while others have been found during excavations or geophysical surveys. Others again can still be seen in the landscape as either subtle lumps and bumps or sometimes clear village layouts with remaining churches. The most famous and best preserved is Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire, a village used for six hundred years before it was abandoned at the start of the sixteenth century. Like many others, its population had suffered from depopulation caused by the Black Death, which decimated villages across Europe in the fourteenth century, but the nail in the coffin was apparently agricultural economics, when the rising price and profitability of the wool industry caused the owner of the land, Baron Hilton, to shift to sheep farming. He ordered an eviction of the families living there and the destruction of their houses around 1500.

Other towns were far shorter-lived. On private land in Monticello, Utah, lies what remains of a small settlement that was once a religious commune, abandoned and dissolved by the end of the 1930s. The colony, named Home of Truth, was formed in 1933 by Marie Ogden, a wealthy widow from New Jersey. She established it as a post-apocalyptic utopia where she and her followers could survive and welcome Christ’s second coming. There were around twenty buildings divided into three ‘Portals’, and at its height, the settlement was home to about a hundred people. The details of its demise seem unclear, but began when a woman, having been promised a cure for cancer, died and the cult members refused to bury her, instead feeding her corpse milk and eggs for two months. When Ogden died in 1975, the property changed hands and the current owner apparently plans to restore the site for public access, but whether it will be the place to go in the end times remains to be seen.

CJ

Ancient Ideals of Beauty

In his play The Clouds – written in 423 BC, it is considered the oldest surviving ‘comedy of ideas’ – Aristophanes cites how Greek men’s ideal form involved them having wide shoulders, strong buttocks and a gleaming chest – but also (less obviously) a short tongue and a petite penis. This presumably explains the outline proportions on their statues.

If men in ancient Greece were seen to be good-looking, their outer charms were viewed as a reflection of their inner goodness: someone described as kaloskagathos was considered very attractive and a profoundly good person.

Signs of feminine beauty in ancient Greece included a full figure (particularly with large buttocks), as well as red hair. There was a fashion in early ancient Greece for women to have their head largely shaved, with the remainder hanging in snakelike fronds.

Ancient Rome fawned over women with large eyes, flawless skin, a pale complexion and styled hair – their own, rather than wigs, since these were suspected of covering up deformities. But, the poet Ovid wrote in the first century BC, women must never let men witness their beauty preparations, since he viewed these as revolting.

The Romans were drawn to a statue of Aphrodite sculpted in Athens in the fourth century BC by Praxiteles – perhaps the first full-sized nude – which is probably based on his mistress. The many copies of this work were very popular indeed, with the second-century novelist Lucian describing three friends visiting Knidos to see one of these carved figures. One of them talks of her beauty, in terms of her rounded thighs, her perfect cheeks (‘neither too skinny, showing her bones, nor so voluminous to sag’), her sweet smile and her comely loins. The author Pliny the Elder, who rated this statue the finest in the world, records a man hiding so he could secretly access a copy of Praxiteles’ statue for his carnal pleasure.

There are ‘Venus’ figurines that, being from the Stone Age, predate the worship of that goddess by several millennia: most are from 23,000–25,000 years ago, and they have been found across Europe. They are generally small – 6–11cm – and made from bone, ivory or clay. They tend to celebrate corpulence, with genitals and breasts carved in exaggerated form. They show females from post-adolescence into middle age, some of them with child, and they concentrate on the torso, with heads often faceless, arms and legs small and feet often left off altogether.

They seem to be a celebration of beauty, twinned with fertility: women enjoying good nutrition would find procreation simplest. When the sites of their discovery are plotted against the whereabouts of glaciers at the time – a period of climate change – the larger forms are clearly associated with colder climes, since such women would have been more likely to survive pregnancy during harsh periods, when food was scarce. Figurines of men from this period are generally elongated and slim – the right shape to excel at hunter-gathering.

The wife of Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten was Nefertiti, which means ‘the beautiful one has come’. The spectacular bust of Nefertiti, created 3,500 years ago and discovered in 1912, originally showed her in middle age, with lines on her face and slightly sunken cheeks – but the sculptor thought better of this, and covered up these blemishes in its final iteration. It is suitable, then, that there is a cosmetic procedure called ‘the Nefertiti lift’, named after her.

Nefertiti’s statue remains a yardstick of feminine beauty – with its high cheekbones, long and slim neck, slanting eyes, arched brows and full lips among its remarkable features. When it was first shown to the public, in Berlin, it caused a frenzy. Across eras and cultures, the symmetry, harmony and balance of facial features are frequently viewed as markers of beauty, and Nefertiti has them all. An early appreciation of the supermodel Naomi Campbell referred to her as ‘the Nefertiti of the nineties’, while comparisons have shown the similarities of the facial measurement and ratios that tie Nefertiti’s bust to the features of another famous model, Christy Turlington.

By contrast Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt 1,300 years after Nefertiti, had an attractiveness that was less classical: contemporary coins show a masculine quality to her face, as well as a hooked nose – although it is possible she wanted to project a more masculine image, to reinforce her power. The Greek biographer Plutarch recorded her beauty as ‘not altogether incomparable’, and noted that her allure lay in suffocating sex appeal, while Cassius described her as ‘a woman of surpassing beauty’. This fitted the Roman narrative that the foreign temptress had lured Julius Caesar then Mark Antony onto the rocks with her looks, rather than her many impressive attributes as a female leader, including high intelligence. Hollywood has long foisted extreme beauty onto Cleopatra: she has been portrayed by Claudette Colbert (1934), Vivien Leigh (1945) and Elizabeth Taylor (1963).

CS

Bobby and Bum

Which is the most famous Skye terrier in the world? Some might say the lapdog that crept out from beneath Mary Queen of Scots’ petticoat after her botched execution at Fotheringhay Castle in 1587.

A model of loyalty certainly, but surpassed surely by the leading candidate, Greyfriars Bobby, born in 1855 and the dog of John Gray. Auld Jock, a nightwatchman for the Edinburgh City Police, would take Bobby with him as he went about his duties, as the regulations required, but in 1858 Jock died of tuberculosis and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in an unmarked grave. Unmarked by any marmoreal monument, that is. After the funeral the little dog was found waiting patiently by his master’s grave and he waited there for fourteen years, becoming such a personality that Sir William Chambers, the Lord Provost of the city and a director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, provided him with a collar and paid the cost of his dog licence. When Bobby died of cancer of the jaw in 1872 he was buried as close to his master’s grave as the Kirk’s rules allowed. A bronze statue of him was erected a year later by the George IV bridge at the expense of the philanthropic and sentimental Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts, the richest heiress in England and president of the British Goat Society. He stands there today, unstartled by the regular retort of the one o’clock gun from the castle, his nose turned to the colour of gold by the rubs of numberless tourists.

Two important notes follow: first, according to a book by a Mr Macbeth, president of the Dandie Dinmont Terrier Club of Canada, Greyfriars Bobby was not a Skye terrier at all but a Dandie. Second, according to Jan Bondeson, consultant rheumatologist at the Cardiff University School of Medicine, Greyfriars Bobby is just one of a number of cemetery dogs around which colourful stories circulate, and that steadfastness in churchyards may have less to do with loyalty to masters and mistresses beyond the grave than with regular feeding from those who stand to benefit from the visitors they attract. He also suggests that the unusually long-lived Greyfriars Bobby may have been more than one dog.

There is another bronze dog in Edinburgh, less controversial but also less often visited. It is of Bum, a St Bernard-spaniel cross, whose sculpted likeness may be found some distance from Greyfriars Bobby’s but at a spot thought to be one he frequented as he roamed the city between his graveside vigils. Bum never visited Scotland as far as we are aware, but arrived in San Diego as a stowaway with a Chinese fisherman in 1886. He seems to have had a most winning nature, for although he belonged to no one he was loved by everyone, fed with scraps by restaurateurs in Chinatown, allowed to sleep on front porches and looked after by a doctor when he lost a leg to an oncoming train during a fight with a bulldog. He struggled a bit after that and developed a drink problem, hanging around outside bars, but recovered sufficiently to go independently on sightseeing trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles, greet President Harrison on his 1891 visit to the city and to give rides to children. He was so well beloved that his image was used on dog licences when San Diego started issuing them. His was granted free and for life. He died aged twelve in 1898 after suffering a kick from a horse and was given a funeral paid for by public donations.

In 1977 San Diego twinned with Edinburgh, and the city authorities in both places were always on the lookout for tokens of their growing amity. Marie Hitchcock, a puppeteer in San Diego, started a campaign to twin the dogs as well as the cities and in 1990 the mayor of San Diego, Maureen O’Connor, and the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh signed an agreement to erect dog statues in celebration of their civic friendship.

Greyfriars Bobby v2 may be found in the Pocket Park at Fourth and Island Avenues, behind the Gaslamp Museum. The Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, with funding from the Sister City Society, has employed new technology so the dogs may narrate their own stories. Simply scan a QR code and your smartphone will relay their adventures voiced by actors.

Bum v2 was unveiled in Princes Street Gardens on 19 July 2008 in a ceremony attended by fifteen dignitaries from San Diego, led by a parade of members of the Skye Terrier Association wearing Victorian dress and dozens of children with their own dogs. Following the ceremony the visitors attended a civic reception in the City Chambers and later a celebration ceilidh.

RC

The Spanish Flu

The Great Influenza pandemic of 1918–20 got its more common name of Spanish Flu, not because Spain was the petri dish in which it started, but because Spain was neutral in the First World War, and so its press was free to report openly on the scourge. But different nations blamed others for being the source of the contagion: in Spain it was called ‘Naples soldier’, and British troops named it ‘Flanders grippe’ or ‘Spanish lady’.

It seems likely that the pandemic hatched in the United States. A flu outbreak hit Haskell County, in the southwest of Kansas, in the first two months of 1918, and it was noted how – unusually – the physically strongest patients seemed to fare worst, often contracting pneumonia and dying. (A theory would develop later that this was due to healthy young adults contracting secondary bacterial pneumonia after an inappropriately strong immune response to this flu variety.) This early outbreak was startling enough for public-health officials to report it, at a time when flu was not a reportable illness.

The First World War seems to have sped the disease’s progress to Europe. Men from Haskell reported for training at Camp Funston, west of Kansas City, in late February 1918. Funston was a 2,000-acre training centre for the US Army, onto which were squeezed 1,400 buildings. Soldiers were diagnosed with the flu in this packed environment from 4 March. Within three weeks 1,100 men were hospitalized, with thousands more also suffering. The troops from Camp Funston carried the outbreak across the Atlantic when deployed to fight in Europe, the disembarkation port of Brest being an early casualty.

Victims found their lungs congested with fluid, so their bodies suffered from lack of oxygen. If their fingers, toes, ears, nose and mouth turned bluish-purple, they were likely to die. Their bodies could then turn black.

Estimates as to how many died from the Spanish Flu vary from 20 to 100 million, with 40 to 50 million considered the likely range. That was more than 2 per cent of the world’s population at the time. It claimed various noteworthy victims, including the German political sociologist Max Weber, the Austrian artist Gustav Klimt and Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who fled from Bavaria to America to avoid military service. (After training as a barber, Friedrich made a fortune through setting up hotels and restaurants in goldmining areas, often located in red-light districts.)

Among those who contracted it but survived were Walt Disney, Mary Pickford and Franz Kafka. Kafka wrote: ‘I lay in bed with a fever directly related to my lungs … I’m temporarily suffering from short, heavy breathing, weakness – inducing sweats at night.’

In the United Kingdom 228,000 people died, making 1918 the first year on record in which deaths exceeded births there. In school playgrounds British children would sing:

I had a little bird

Its name was Enza,

I opened the window,

And in flew Enza.

George V caught Spanish flu in May 1918, a month in which the British Grand Fleet was unable to put to sea because 10,000 of its sailors were laid low by the infection.

Newspapers of the time issued their own advice, which ranged from avoiding crowds, to eating lots of porridge and keeping teeth extra clean. The pandemic struck in three main waves: the first in spring 1918, the second – the most deadly – from September 1918 till February 1919 and the last towards the end of 1919. These latter two were in periods during which troops were returning home from the front from the First World War. Some brought the flu in their backpacks.

The virus was examined in 2005, from bodies preserved in Alaska. It was found to be a member of the H1 influenza virus group, and is the ancestor of all subsequent flu outbreaks. It is probably avian in origin, but has adapted to humans. It seems to have jumped to pigs to become H2N2, which was behind another pandemic in 1957 which killed between one and two million people.

As an aside, Camp Funston where Spanish flu appears to have gained such strength before being unleashed on Europe, was also a detention camp for conscientious objectors. Many of these were Mennonites – Anabaptist Christians committed to pacifism.

Others held there were from the Hutterian Brethren, German-Russians who settled in North and (particularly) South Dakota. This sect, dedicated to communal living, sent their sons to army training camps rather than break the law summoning them there – but forbade them from enlisting, wearing uniforms or following orders from military personnel.

The Hutterians were suspected of being sympathetic to the Germans who shared their ancestry, and were further distrusted because they refused to contribute taxes that might help the war effort against the Kaiser.

CS

Taking the (Bath) Waters

According to legend, in the year 863 BC, a prince by the name of Bladud – later to become the father of King Lear – wandered around the south-west of England. Bladud had been banished from his kingdom because he had contracted leprosy, an incurable disease, while abroad. To make an income, he took to swineherding, but soon his pigs contracted the illness as well. One day, in a valley in what is now the city of Bath, his pigs discovered an area of ground covered in warm mud, which they wallowed in happily for hours. Not long after, Bladud noticed the pigs’ leprosy sores had mysteriously vanished. Realizing the hot mud must have had health-giving benefits, he rubbed it onto his own diseased skin and was soon cured. Now able to return to his kingdom, he became the ninth king of the Britons. Later, he came back to the hot springs and founded the city of Bath. The city would later become one of England’s Spa towns – towns that offered hydrotherapy of some sort, usually including mineral water treatments and geothermal baths. Across Europe, the Bader Lexicon guide published in 1854 listed a total of 652 of these. In 2009 UNESCO included eleven European Spa towns on its World Heritage list, including Bath.

The word ‘spa’ derives from the name of a health resort in eastern Belgium and means ‘medicinal or mineral spring’. That original town in Belgium has mineral springs that were known in Roman times and described in the writings of Pliny the Elder. Knowledge of the springs was lost in the early Middle Ages but they were rediscovered in the fourteenth century and used extensively since the sixteenth.

While Bladud and his story is probably just a myth, the areas around the three hot springs in Bath have been used since at least the Mesolithic period, according to the archaeological evidence. It seems the Celts worshipped a goddess by the name of Sulis around the springs, but it was the Romans who knew how to utilize the resource fully, turning the hot water into the city’s first spa. In their day, the springs were presided over by a goddess named Sulis Minerva and the town itself became known as Aqua Sulis – the Waters of Sulis. Bathing in general was a hugely important part of Roman culture, and thermal baths using water from either mineral or thermal springs could be found throughout the empire, often in places that also had a military presence. The concept of using hydrotherapy and drinking specific waters to cure illness was known among the Greeks before them, and the Roman and Greek physician Galen recommended the use of spring water to treat a wide range of diseases.

Bathing culture and its use for therapeutic purposes declined in the early Middle Ages as belief in the curative powers of religion took over. In Europe, it would not return fully until the thirteenth century, when public baths became common again, albeit largely for pleasure and relaxation. Inadvertently, these baths often ended up spreading rather than curing illness, because they were overcrowded and attended by people with contagious diseases looking for a remedy. From the sixteenth century onwards, hydrotherapy became increasingly prescribed by doctors and there was a newfound interest in exploring the mineral content of different sources of water, as well as in studying classical texts on the subject. The idea of ‘taking the waters’ for medicinal purposes became a matter of science for qualified physicians. In De Thermis, a survey of baths and hot springs published in 1571, the Italian scholar Andrea Bacci listed medicinal properties of these waters for various uses, including drinking cures. He also emphasized that the treatments should be taken over the course of fifteen days every year, while residing in pleasant surroundings with good food and wine. He also pointed out that these treatments were therefore not suited to the poor.

Bathing culture really took off in the nineteenth century, as did scientific interest in specific mineral waters. However, across Europe, spa resorts became popular more for the associated social aspects than the therapeutic: resorts all had their own theatres, casinos and promenades. This was especially the case in Britain. However, there, spas soon had competition from the seaside and many resorts were poorly run.

Was there really a scientific basis to the medicinal claims of these early resorts, and did the differences in mineral water matter? Eighteenth-century medical records from hospitals in Bath and Exeter seem to show that they did. Comparing spa treatments for colica Pictonum – lead poisoning – showed success at both spas but a much higher figure at Bath. Researchers have put this down to the Bath water’s high levels of calcium and iron along with the benefits of sitting in warm water. More recently, spa therapy has been shown to aid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis. Yet although it worked for Bladud and his pigs, nobody has yet proven that spa waters could yield a cure for leprosy.

CJ

The Death of Lord Kitchener

Not far from the village of Twatt on Orkney is Marwick Head. There you may stand and look out across the sea to the stretch where Field Marshal Lord Kitchener drowned with all but a dozen of those on board HMS Hampshire on 5 June 1916.

Lord Kitchener, victor of the Battle of Omdurman and commander-in-chief both of British forces during the Boer War and of the Indian Army, was made Minister for War in 1914. His face is still well known from the Lord Kitchener Wants You poster by Alfred Leete, famous for his advertisements for Bovril, Guinness and the London Underground, which was used in the great recruitment drive when the First World War got underway.

It was a turbulent ministry and he was blamed for supply issues, which resulted in his role being reduced. In 1916 he was invited by Tsar Nicholas II, Russian head of state and commander of its forces, to discuss the deteriorating situation on the Eastern Front. To put British money where its mouth was, the Chancellor of the Exchequer asked Kitchener to take with him a cargo of gold bullion.

He left London for Scotland by train on 4 June accompanied by his staff, including Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, his ‘constant and inseparable companion’ and the most favoured of his ‘band of boys’. They stopped for a congenial lunch the next day with Admiral Jellicoe on board his flagship HMS Iron Duke at Scapa Flow, Kitchener remarking that he was looking forward to visiting the Tsar as a break from the situation at home. He then embarked for Archangel (Arkhangelsk) aboard HMS Hampshire. Jellicoe, commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, appears to have misread a weather forecast and ordered the Hampshire to change course. This took it into an area west of Orkney where there had been reports of U-boat activity, but he seemed to be unaware of them.

It was a stormy night and it seems the ship decided to turn back, but before it could, at 7.30 in the evening in a force 9 gale, she struck a mine that had just been laid by the German submarine U-75. A telegraph message was received to say she was sinking and the lifeboat crew went to launch a rescue effort but were prevented from doing so by the army.

A crowd gathered on Marwick Head and saw what was happening, but when they offered assistance they also were held back by armed soldiers. It took four hours for a lifeboat to reach the ship, too late for Lord Kitchener and 736 others, including Captain Fitzgerald. The Hampshire sank in twenty minutes. Kitchener was last seen standing on the quarterdeck. His body was never recovered.

Kitchener was a national hero of unequalled renown and when news of his death was announced a Yorkshireman committed suicide in despair, General Haig said he did not know what we would do without him and George V ordered officers to wear black armbands for a week.

Before that week was out, rumours began to circulate about the circumstances of his death, rumours that brought forth a rich bounty of conspiracy theories. Some said he had been assassinated by the IRA; General Ludendorff, commander of the Kaiser’s armies, said it was the work of anti-Tsarist elements; others that Kitchener was never on board at all.

The most picturesque of the conspiracy theorists was Frederick ‘Fritz’ Duquesne, a Boer soldier who had tried to kill Kitchener in Cape Town and ended up being sent to Hinson’s Island, a penal colony in Bermuda, from which he escaped. He claimed he had posed as a Russian duke, boarded the Hampshire and, once they were at sea, signalled to a U-boat to sink the ship and rescue him. He was arrested by the FBI after running a spy ring in the United States in the Second World War, having previously campaigned to import hippopotamuses to the Louisiana bayous as a source of meat. Interestingly, Kitchener’s nephew later bought Hinson’s Island with a legacy from his uncle.

The most notorious of the conspiracy theorists was Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s former lover and one of the least appealing men of his age. He accused Winston Churchill of complicity in a Jewish conspiracy to murder Kitchener in exchange for a collection of fine furniture worth £40,000. The Crown, on behalf of Churchill, prosecuted him in the last successful case of criminal libel in British legal history. Douglas was sentenced to six months in prison and ended his days living in difficult circumstances in Hove.

A tower was erected at Marwick Head by the people of Orkney ‘on that corner of his country which he had served so faithfully nearest to the place where he died on duty’.

The gold was never recovered.

RC

Boudicca

Boudicca has emerged as one of Britain’s national heroes, owing to an event that took place 2,000 years ago: her rebellion against the Roman invaders who had recently taken over the country. Boudicca, a Briton, was married to Prasutagus, the king of the Iceni, a tribe that occupied what is now Norfolk and Suffolk. When Claudius invaded Britain in AD 43, the Iceni made a treaty with him, but when the Romans attempted to disarm them a few years later, they rebelled. The rebellion was not particularly successful and Prasutagus was installed as a client king under Roman control. However, when he died in AD 60 he was hopeful of imperial protection for his family: he had no male heir but left his wealth to be shared between his two daughters and Emperor Nero. The Romans, however, had other ideas. Remarkably for Britain at the time, the events that took place that year are described in three written records, by the classical writers Cornelius Tacitus and Cassius Dio. These texts inform us that on Prasutagus’ death, the imperial rulers seized the opportunity to annex his kingdom, launching a vicious attack on the Iceni. Boudicca was flogged, her daughters raped, and the Romans went on to plunder and enslave Prasutagus’ most powerful tribesmen. Yet Boudicca, it turned out, was not one to be beaten. Cassius Dio – although unlikely ever to have seen her – describes Boudicca’s fierce appearance: ‘In stature she was very tall,’ he says, ‘in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh; a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch.’ And not only that, he also explained that she possessed an intelligence beyond what was usual for women. These qualities enabled her to amass a force numbering some 120,000, leading a rebellion throughout East Anglia. With that, this de facto queen of the Iceni, whose name means something like ‘victorious’, proceeded to burn down vital cities such as Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans) and parts of Londinium. Dio adds a curious note to his account, revealing that before this happened, Boudicca released a hare from her tunic and used its direction of escape as a sign of her impending victory, something she thanked the goddess Andraste for. Tacitus went on to describe how her troops massacred no fewer than 70,000 Romans or pro-Romans, including the entire Roman 9th Legion.

While much of what we know about Boudicca comes from the written accounts, there are tantalizing clues that back up the story in the archaeological records. The existence of her tribe is known from coins and other objects, and the large golden necklace she is said to have worn is reflected in some incredible Iron Age torcs (neck rings) found in the Iceni heartlands of north Norfolk. There is also evidence of the destruction caused in her revolt: in Colchester, for instance, archaeologists have found human skeletons beneath excavated destruction layers associated with the event, some of which bear the irrefutable evidence of injury inflicted by sharp weapons. Alongside this is what appears to be a kitchen, preserved Pompeii-like after being subsumed by fire in a destructive tragedy. Beneath the high street lay the remains of a 2,000-year-old floor on which lay a fallen oak shelf as well as the remains of blackened and charred foodstuffs – lentils, grapes and herbs – alongside tableware, vessels and everyday items like a pair of sandals and fragments of a bone die.

Eventually, Boudicca’s luck ran out. Paulinus, the provincial governor, met the Britons in one last desperate battle, whose location is a mystery to us. This, however, is not for want of trying to establish it: scores of academics, authors and others, have given it a good go. Our sources, at least, agree that Boudicca’s forces had vastly grown: Cassius Dio claims her troops now included 230,000 Britons, and Tacitus calls their number ‘unprecedented’. Most believe the final battle was fought somewhere on the Roman road known as Watling Street, although since that runs from Dover to North Wales, that in itself doesn’t narrow it down very much. The most evocative suggestion is, to my mind, Mancetter in Warwickshire, purely for the reason that its Roman name, Manduessedum, is derived from a Celtic name meaning ‘The Place of the War Chariots’. In any case, Paulinus, despite being outnumbered, was successful. On losing, Boudicca died, although – as is now becoming a familiar theme – we don’t know how. Tacitus claimed she took poison to avoid being captured by the Romans, while Cassius Dio states she died of illness. Some writers have more poetically claimed she died from the shock of it all.

CJ

Two Pair of Pyramids

Just opposite Falmouth’s Maritime Museum on Arwenack Street you will find a pyramid. Indeed, standing at forty feet tall this steep-sided granite monument is difficult to miss. It was erected in 1737 by Martin Killigrew, of the family that had dominated life in Falmouth and the surrounding areas since the fourteenth century. Several were governors of Pendennis Castle, among them Sir Peter Killigrew, known as Peter the Post, a messenger of noted competence in the Royalist cause during the Civil War. Another was Sir John Killigrew, a murderous gentleman pirate, and according to a contemporary source notorious for ‘evil usage in keeping of a castle’. Martin Killigrew, who took the name when he married into the family, produced no heirs, and left the estate of Arwenack in 1725. Twelve years later he posted instructions to the estate steward, Mr Hall, for the pyramid’s construction, but, at his insistence, it bears no inscription, and has since been moved, twice. During one of these moves it is said that two sealed bottles were found hidden within, which some suggest may have contained directions to treasure hidden by another notorious pirate of the family, Mary Killigrew, who got sailors drunk, cut their throats and stole their money. This seems fanciful, but upon so blank a monument people tend to project whatever they like. In its present location, geographically and in history, it has a strange feel of dislocation and uncertainty.

The next pyramid, or pyramidal structure I should like to recommend is the Obelisk at Finedon in Northamptonshire. At the crossroads of the A6 and the A510, the Thrapston and Irthlingborough roads, you will find on the south-west corner an obelisk also of mysterious purpose. Made of local stone, a sandstone rich in iron that a silvery lichen seems to love, it stands modestly on a plinth which bore inscriptions, since weathered away. We know that the foundation stone was laid by its donor, the squire of Finedon, Sir John English Dolben Bt, in 1790, and from his correspondence deduce that it was the work of a Mr Sumpter, a mason in nearby Wellingborough. It appears to be in part a way-marker, and in part a thanks-offering for the felicities of the previous year, 1789.

No one is sure what these felicities might be, but the best suggestion is it refers to the deliverance of King George III from his second bout of madness. It is known that on 23 April 1789, St George’s Day, Finedon celebrated the king’s deliverance with fireworks, the ringing of bells and firing of ceremonial cannons.

Next we visit Hampshire, where a few miles west of Winchester stands Farley Mount. On top of it, next to a triangulation station, on a wooded mound, you will find a gleaming white pyramid with blank dormers on each face. It celebrates a horse with the unusual name Beware Chalk Pit.

It was erected by the horse’s owner, Paulet St John, and according to the inscription, ‘in the month of September 1733 [the horse] leaped into a chalk pit twenty-five feet deep afoxhunting with his master on his back and in October 1734 he won the Hunters Plate on Worthy Downs and was rode by his owner’.

Paulet St John was High Sheriff of Hampshire, Woodsman of the New Forest, MP for Winchester, another baronet, and the builder of Dogmersfield Park, now the Four Seasons Hampshire.

Our last example – ironically for a construction most readily associated with timeless endurance – is the least durable of the four; but the main stage at the Glastonbury Festival is perhaps the most recognizable of all English pyramids. Built on what was once a spring that watered the Glastonbury–Stonehenge ley line, the first pyramid was knocked up from scaffolding and plastic sheeting in 1971 by the theatre designer Bill Hardin. Based on the dimensions of the Egyptian pyramids, it was intended to transmit energy upwards from the apex while simultaneously drawing down the energy of the sun and the stars. It seemed to work for David Bowie and Marc Bolan.

In 1981 it was replaced by a permanent structure that could be used as a barn during the winter. It was built from redundant material used by the Ministry of Defence. Among the artists who performed on it were The Communards, Lou Reed and Rolf Harris. Unfortunately it burned down in 1994.

The present structure was built in the year 2000 by Bill Burroughs, who lives at nearby Pilton. It is based on the Great Pyramid at Giza and measures 40m × 40m at the base and stands 30m high. It was made from materials that were assessed by Greenpeace for their potential impact on the environment.

Among the artists that have performed on this most recent incarnation are Dame Shirley Bassey, Sir Paul McCartney and the Black Dyke Band.

RC

The All-But Forgotten Battle

Winston Churchill appointed General Bernard Montgomery to command the Eighth Army in North Africa on 13 August 1942. The wartime prime minister reminded ‘Monty’ that the date of this promotion fell on ‘Blenheim Day’, and said he hoped that this coincidence would prove auspicious.

Back then, as many well-educated Britons would have linked 13 August with the Battle of Blenheim as would have been aware that 18 June and 14 October were, respectively, the anniversaries of Waterloo and Hastings. Over the past few decades, as history has been demoted from a core part of the curriculum to an optional extra, Hitler and Henry VIII have taken centre stage, while the likes of Blenheim have faded into the wings. Perhaps, if it were not for the palace of the same name, Blenheim might be all-but forgotten now.

But this battle was one of the most crucial in European history. For, in the first half of 1704, it seemed inevitable that the doddery, 900-year-old Holy Roman Empire would fall to Louis XIV. The French king’s armies, with six decades of victories behind them, were poised to advance on Vienna, the seat of Habsburg power.

French military dominance was partly built on a code of drill championed by Jean Martinet, Inspector-General of the Infantry, whose surname remains a byword for rigid discipline. With his second eldest grandson ruling Spain as Philip V, it seemed that Louis would soon be, in effect, the emperor of Europe.

John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was alive to the desperate nature of the situation. Commander of the English and Scottish troops in the Grand Alliance facing France, he was repeatedly hampered by the refusal of his Dutch partners to risk their soldiers in battle. Once, when Marlborough had the French where he wanted them – facing him across the field of Waterloo, in fact – the Dutch refused to fight.

In 1704, the exasperated Marlborough effectively kidnapped the Dutch troops, taking them with his compatriots on a secretive 250-mile march from near Cologne down into Bavaria. There he joined up with allies from a patchwork of German lands, including Prussia and Hanover, and met the intriguing Prince Eugene of Savoy, with whom he would form one of history’s greatest partnerships in generalship.

Eugene was a French-Italian prince whose military services had been rejected by Louis XIV, who failed to see how the small, birdlike and unprepossessing Eugene could ever fit the bill of one of his valiant marshals. But Eugene had dazzled as an imperial general, his brilliant victory over the Ottomans at the Battle of Zenta in 1697 making him one of the most famous living commanders.

Eugene and Marlborough instantly hit it off, and set about bringing to battle the forces of two French marshals – Tallard and Marsin – and of the Elector of Bavaria. They managed to take the enemy by surprise. As the sun rose on 13 August 1704, the Franco-Bavarians were stunned to see columns of allies marching towards them. More than 50,000 men on each side prepared to fight for the future of Europe.

The French erred by sending too many troops to hold Blindheim – the Bavarian village that has given ‘Blenheim’ its anglicized name. They remained cooped up there, instead of being available for battlefield deployment. The allied infantry began to cross the Danube. Hundreds of them were killed by the French artillery, before they had sufficient numbers to advance, but they never faltered under fire, and their foothold on the enemy side of the river would prove crucial. The battle continued throughout that August day, until Marlborough led his cavalry in a late charge that drove the enemy into the Danube. Two thousand of them drowned.

Marlborough wrote a victory despatch from the saddle, which he sent to his wife, Sarah – then a great royal favourite: ‘I have not time to say more, but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen and let her know her army has had a glorious victory …’

At Blenheim, not only had the Holy Roman Empire been saved, but Louis XIV’s armies were shown not to be invincible. Queen Anne gave Marlborough the royal manor of Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, as his main prize for his astounding victory. On his new estate Marlborough built Blenheim Palace, laying out the 2,000-acre park in battle order, in a landscape designed to commemorate a victory that was the first major triumph by a British-led army in mainland Europe since Agincourt, almost 300 years earlier.

My favourite footnote to this great battle lies in the identity of Marlborough’s artillery chief at Blenheim. Holcroft Blood was an Anglo-Irishman whose father, Colonel Thomas Blood, had attempted to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London while disguised as a parson. Caught with the imperial state crown on his person, Colonel Blood was taken for punishment to Charles II, who not only pardoned him but also awarded him a pension of £500 a year.

CS

Guano

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an unexpected material more or less fuelled the economy of the Western world: seabird excrement, better known as guano – a word that has come to English via Spanish, originally from the Andean indigenous language Quecha’s word for ‘dung’. This too reveals something of the material’s history – while it only became of interest in the West relatively late, it had been used long before among indigenous Inca populations in Chile. Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish chronicler, wrote in 1609 that the Inca ‘use no other manure but the dung of sea birds’. There was even a system of assigning different towns their own islands, with households allocated a certain share according to their needs. This enabled the local kings to ensure not only that the resources were fairly distributed but also that the use of guano remained sustainable. The people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) appear to have done the same: new research has shown that they developed careful systems of agriculture that included fertilizing their soils. Theirs was also a society that valued the seabirds for everything they produced to such a degree that they created a cult around them.

The significance of guano lies in its exceptional chemical properties that allow it to be used as a very effective natural fertilizer. This is because guano is high in nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, all of which are needed for plant growth.

The first interest in guano in the West came through Alexander von Humboldt – a Prussian naturalist and explorer who would later lend his name to the Humboldt Current off the South American west coast. On his travels to Peru, Humboldt observed large shipments of the pungent material being moved around and took samples back to Europe in 1804. When he handed these over to a team of chemists, it was soon discovered just how powerful guano was, and as a consequence, the age of guano was born. It should be mentioned that this development came at a time when interest in fertilizers more widely was booming: both Europeans and Americans had become increasingly concerned with how depleted natural soils were limiting their sorely needed farming potential, especially for lucrative industries like the tobacco trade.

Pretty soon, the guano trade took off and commercial mining began in the 1840s, when it was exported and sold in Germany, France, England and the United States. One of the most spectacular sources was the Chincha Islands off Peru’s southern Pacific coast, where guano had accumulated to a height of 150 feet. Exploitation of the resource was big business, creating millionaires overnight. On the flipside, huge numbers of Chinese and Polynesian people, in particular, were severely exploited to carry out the excruciating work, in what in practice amounted to enslavement. The Peruvian government was in on it too, and essentially controlled the entire world’s fertilizer industry, including cutting a trade deal with Britain which drove up prices. As all of this coincided with the California gold rush, many ship owners cleverly took advantage of the fact that, when transporting people from the eastern US to the west to mine for gold, their journeys around the tip of South America left them with conveniently empty holds on the way home. It has been estimated that around 12 million tons of guano were extracted between 1840 and 1870, at a value of around $500 million.

In 1856, the US government passed the Guano Islands Act. This stated that, as long as there were no other claims or inhabitants, the US could claim any island they liked that had seabird guano on it. The guano mined from these islands had to be sold as fertilizer to American farmers for a reasonable price. Of the nearly 200 islands claimed by America, nine now remain as unincorporated territories, including Howland Island in the Pacific, which keen Rabbit Hole listeners might remember as the island on which Amelia Earhart attempted to land during her final flight.

However, the Western industry was short-lived as the practices used were completely unsustainable. By 1880, all the known guano deposits in the world were entirely mined out. Because of the extensive disruption the mining operations caused to the seabirds, they weren’t producing much more, so there was no way of replenishing the supply. At the same time, a global recession meant that guano prices plummeted, something that, in particular, had disastrous consequences for Peru. And with their fairy-tale fertilizer gone, the West had to turn to other sources to fuel their farming, eventually leading to the development of synthetic alternatives.

CJ

Ötzi the Iceman

When I was nine, my mother showed me a newspaper article that would profoundly impact my future choice of career. The article described how, on 19 September 1991, two German holidaymakers, hiking high up in the Austrian Alps at an altitude of 3,210m above sea level, came across a human corpse partially protruding from the ice. Thinking this was the recent victim of a mountaineering accident, the couple informed the police, who, unsuccessfully, attempted to remove the body. It took four days and the use of ice picks to get the cadaver out, and while doing so, the team found numerous curious objects surrounding it: an axe, pieces of leather, string, hide and a long stick of unknown function. It took five days for anyone to realize the true age of the corpse – it was the mummified remains of a man who had died several millennia earlier. Sometime later his true age was confirmed to be 5,300 years, meaning he lived during the Copper Age. An excavation of the discovery site followed.

The body – dubbed Ötzi the Iceman owing to his findspot in the Ötztal Alps – now lies in a specially constructed cold cell in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. To maintain the exceptional preservation of his remains, he needs to be kept frozen at –6°C and 99 per cent humidity.

Ötzi’s age at death is estimated to be around forty-five, and when alive, he would have been around 1.60m tall. His shoe size was a continental 38 and, although he now only weighs 13kg, when alive he would have been a slender 50kg. DNA analysis revealed that he had relatively dark skin, brown eyes and brown hair but a gene likely to lead to baldness. His genomes also showed that his ancestors came from Anatolian farmer populations.

We know that Ötzi was not entirely healthy. In his DNA were traces of Lyme disease, which is transmitted by ticks. He also had fleas in his clothing and the internal parasite whipworm in his gut. His joints showed evidence of wear, which would likely have caused him pain: the numerous tattoos found on his skin in many of these locations may have been made to counteract this. The geneticists who studied his remains could also show that he was predisposed to cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Archaeologists have naturally been very excited about all the objects found with the body, because in northern Europe it is exceptionally rare that organic artefacts of this age are preserved. Ötzi wore clothes made of leather, hide and braided grass when he died: a long coat of goat and sheep hide, trousers (technically two separate hide leggings knotted onto a belt and fastened to his shoes with loops), a loincloth made of sheep hide, a belt and a bearskin cap. His shoes were made of twisted string netting stuffed with grass for insulation with deer hide on the outside.

The equipment he carried the day he died included a copper axe hafted onto a yew handle with birch tar, tied with leather straps; a longbow, arrows and a quiver; a flint dagger; a retoucheur – a tool used for sharpening flint blades; birch bark containers; a stone disc threaded onto a tassel of twisted hide strips; two pieces of birch fungus likely used for medicinal purposes; and – excitingly for a Norwegian – a wooden backpack. By analysing pollen in his body and maple leaves found in one of the containers, it could be shown that he died in the early summer. It is assumed that he belonged to a cultural group given the name of the Tamins-Carasso-Isera 5 group, and the fact that he had a copper axe, a very valuable object, suggests he was a man of high status.

How and why did Ötzi die? Was this simply the result of a mountaineering accident? It took until 2001 for researchers to find evidence that this was, in fact, something much more sinister: death by murder. When Ötzi was X-rayed, it was discovered that a flint arrowhead was lodged in his left shoulder and a 2cm-long entry wound was found on his skin. Considering the location of the arrow, the researchers determined that it would have severed a vital artery, meaning that within minutes he would have bled to death. He had also suffered a serious head injury around the same time. But this was not all. Evidence elsewhere on his body showed a deep cut to his right hand, nearly down to the bone, interpreted as proof of hand-to-hand combat a few days before he died. The working theory is that he was pursued up the mountain and his attackers eventually caught up with him. The motive behind this exceptionally cold case, however, remains unknown.

CJ

The Pilgrimage of Grace

I have written three books in which I attempt to capture momentous episodes in past monarchs’ lives that I hope shed some light on a king’s wider character – the trial and execution of Charles I, the six weeks Charles II ran for his life in 1651, and Henry I’s loss of his only legitimate son when The White Ship was wrecked.

I have never tackled any of the Tudor monarchs, but if I were ever to write on Henry VIII, then the Pilgrimage of Grace would be my point of reference, because I view how he dealt with it as saying a lot about one of our most controversial kings.

The Pilgrimage of Grace was the only open rebellion against Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries. This monastic massacre started with a light cull, in 1535, when Henry VIII ordered a nationwide inquiry into the moral conditions of the monasteries. He claimed he was forced to act because of rumours of inappropriate behaviour and the misuse of funds.

This visitation resulted in attacks on those smaller monastic institutions with an income of less than £200 per annum. They either paid fines to continue on, or were dissolved and rolled up into larger, wealthier monasteries.

The loss of these bastions of the local community was deeply troubling to many honest Christians. Rumours spread about planned taxes on weddings and funerals. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, was considered responsible for the outrages.

On 1 October 1536 there were riots in Louth, Lincolnshire, and commissioners sent by Cromwell to close the smaller monasteries were assaulted. Lincoln was overrun, and demands were made by men – still insisting on their loyalty to the king – who begged Henry to stop the dissolution of the monasteries and to remove Cromwell as well as some of the bishops. Henry refused to listen to armed rebels, and the movement petered out on 19 October.

Worse trouble flared up a few days later when Robert Aske, a lawyer who was the son of a knight, took York. Thirty thousand men joined him in what was akin to a crusade, and Aske termed it the Pilgrimage of Grace, a movement whose flag paraded the Five Wounds of Christ.

Henry VIII had no standing army, so the best his man on the ground, the 3rd Duke of Norfolk, could do was play for time. Five weeks after Aske’s uprising began, they took most of the demands of the Lincolnshire movement and added an insistence on a return to Roman Catholicism, and for Parliament to be called without royal interference. Norfolk seemed to agree to all of this, and to a request for all the pilgrims to be pardoned. Aske dispersed his men and went south to Greenwich Palace, where Henry VIII entertained him over Christmas.

But Henry loathed this man who had defied his rule. When violence broke out sporadically in the north, in 1537, it had nothing to do with Aske, but Henry arrested him and the ringleaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace and put up to 250 of them to death. The lucky ones were hanged or beheaded, but Robert Aske was ordered by Henry to be taken to York – the city where he had dared to rise up against his king – where he was hanged by chains: a terrible way to go, the condemned man being suspended by chains from a gibbet and eventually dying of exposure, thirst and starvation.

The Pilgrimage of Grace not only failed, but it also seems to have encouraged Henry to embark on the full dissolution of the monasteries to fill the royal coffers. This became the single largest transfer of landed wealth in England since the Norman Conquest. Initial gains went to the aristocracy, but in time they sold land on to the gentry.

There were superstitious fears attached to taking on monastic land. Anthony Browne, owner of the Cowdray estate in Sussex, appropriated nearby Battle Abbey in 1538. One of the monks cast out from the abbey supposedly approached the Browne family while they feasted in the Abbot’s Hall at Battle and uttered a chilling curse: ‘By fire and water, thy line shall come to an end, and it shall perish out of this land.’

This curse seems to have had a long fuse. In 1793 the then head of the family, the twenty-four-year-old Viscount Browne, travelled to Germany while Cowdray House was being redecorated. Browne decided to try to shoot the falls of the Rhine at Laufenburg, in a boat with a friend. They drowned, and Browne’s body was never found.

Meanwhile, careless workmen decorating Cowdray allowed a small lump of charcoal to roll free. It started a fire that could not be contained. The buckets and hosepipes were kept locked up, and nobody could find the key to access them. Cowdray House was consumed by flames that many believed had been whipped up by a medieval monk.

CS

The Origins of Pasta

According to a study of eating habits during the pandemic lockdowns, a staggering 99 per cent of French, 98 per cent of German and 95 per cent of English people regularly eat pasta, although the average annual consumption is by far the highest in the homeland of the foodstuff: Italy. But is that really where it came from originally?

An enduring myth about the origins of pasta in Italy is that it was brought there by the Venetian adventurer and merchant Marco Polo, who travelled from Europe to Asia in 1271–95. As a part of his travels, he spent seventeen years in China, where noodles have more than 4,000 years of history: archaeological excavations uncovered a pot containing noodles made of millet grains dating to the Late Neolithic.

It is usually thought that the confusion stems from the fact that Marco Polo mentions eating dishes much like macaroni during his stay in the East. This, of course, does not in any way imply he brought the cuisine back with him, nor that it was even the same thing. Some have claimed that what he ate was actually a starchy food from the sago palm, not noodles at all.

The Marco Polo legend seems to have been created in 1929, when a version of it appeared in a publication called The Macaroni Journal, produced by the Macaroni National Manufacturers Association of America. Under the heading ‘A Saga of Cathay’, an extraordinary story is told. While sailing near the coast of Cathay (now China), Marco Polo’s ship ran low on water and, steering the ship to shore, he sent men out to fetch more. One of these was a Venetian sailor named Spaghetti, who, in his search, came across a village where a man and a woman were mixing together a dough in a bowl. The warm air hardened strings of their dough and Spaghetti realized how useful this type of food would be on a ship. Acquiring the quantities used, he returned to his vessel and experimented, eventually producing long, slender ribbons. To make it more palatable, he discovered that boiling it in salty sea water produced a superior flavour, to the acclaim of his shipmates. When he arrived home in Italy, the pasta was given his name and gained huge popularity.

We know for certain that pasta existed in Italy before Polo’s time. The Andalusi geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi was an adviser to King Roger II of Sicily, and the latter hired him to create an updated world map. The result was a book completed in 1154, entitled The Excursion of One Who is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World. In his description of Sicily, he added that in a town called Trabia ‘they made a food of flour in the form of strings’ – surely, an early description of spaghetti. He further goes on to say that this was exported both to Muslim and Christian lands.

Whether, then, pasta was a separate invention in Europe unrelated to the Asian noodles, or whether it was something imported from abroad, is a question we haven’t answered. One theory is that the Arabs played a key role in spreading the joy of pasta as a common food in the Middle Ages. The main basis for this theory is that there are numerous cookbooks found in the Arab world from the ninth century onwards that describe itriyya, a form of pasta. No similar recipes are to be found in Christian Europe until around 1300. Confusingly, the word itriyya, meaning something along the lines of ‘long thin strands of dried dough that were cooked by boiling’, appears to be of Greek origin, but again there is no evidence that Greece is where the foodstuff came from.

Another common argument for an Arab origin for pasta comes from the word lasagne, argued by some linguists to have come from the Arabic word lawzinaj, the name for an almond-paste confection.

Some argue for an early Etruscan invention of pasta, based on a wall relief found in a tomb dating to the fourth century BC. Here, there are allegedly depictions of tools and kitchen utensils that match those used to make pasta today. This interpretation, however, seems spurious or maybe just hopeful.

Regardless of its origin, by the fourteenth century, pasta had become an important part of Italian food culture, as is evidenced by the mention of dishes like macaroni, ravioli and lasagna in popular poems and tales. By the fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci had apparently invented a pasta-making machine, but due to technical issues, it failed to be a success.

While we don’t know just when pasta arrived in England, the word itself is a very recent one. It was first attested in 1874 but not in popular use until after the Second World War.

CJ

Wicksteed Park, Kettering

One of the greatest sensations of the early 1970s was caused by Donny Osmond of the musical Mormon family from America that dominated the international music charts of that period. The breakthrough came with ‘Puppy Love’, his 1972 cover of Paul Anka’s 1960 hit, and in what we would now call a video, though we did not call them that then, he can be seen singing his plangent hit in a playground. If you look at the swings you will see they bear the legend WICKSTEED KETTERING, a brand boys and girls of the period, and parents taxed with amusing them in the holidays, will recognize instantly.

Charles Wicksteed, the manufacturer of those swings, was not a native of Kettering. His father, another Charles Wicksteed, was a famous Unitarian minister at the Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, known as the ‘mayors’ nest’ because so many who attended it became prominent in the politics of that city. One of his brothers, the Revd P. F. Wicksteed, was a renowned Dante scholar, and another, Hartley Wicksteed, became President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Charles Jr, who was born in 1847, also trained as engineer and specialized in steam ploughs, which took him to Swaffham in Norfolk. He relocated to Kettering in 1872 and four years later established the manufacturing company that still bears his name (and today is run by his descendants) at Digby Street. There he invented the first automatic gearbox, a hydraulic hacksaw and a delightful machine for spreading sliced bread with butter. His enterprise prospered, but the company became famous around the world for manufacturing playground equipment.

He started designing and making it at the end of the First World War, when a rising national mood of celebration coincided with a pile of unsold metalwork manufactured for a conflict that had ended. Wicksteed had such a pile, of obsolete metal piping, which he ingeniously repurposed into slides, swings, roundabouts and that curious ride called the Witch’s Hat, a sort of conical roundabout that never quite delivered on its promise.

If you have amusements, then a park to enjoy them in makes sense. Wicksteed, in keeping with many philanthropic industrialists of the age, originally intended to build a model village for his workers, but this evolved into something bigger and he generously resolved to donate an amusement park that all the people of Kettering might enjoy free of charge. He had bought some land along the Ise valley, separating Kettering from Barton Seagrave, with its Norman church and castle mound and lovely hall.

Work began, and Wicksteed was on site every day with his beloved dog, Jerry, which never left his side. The dog became so much a part of his life that his daughter Hilda wrote a number of books from the dog’s perspective: ‘I love to ride in the car with my master’; ‘Today I went in the garden to try to catch the goldfish in the pond’.

The park grew in ambition and scale, with a narrow-gauge railway, a lake, a zoo and, famously, a water-chute that is believed to be the oldest white-knuckle ride in England. Pink knuckle, perhaps, for although it thrills passengers to this day, descending from a height of twenty feet into the greenish waters of its pond is not quite a circuit of Monte Carlo at the Monaco Grand Prix. Nevertheless, it was declared the best historic ride in England in 2022, beating Blackpool Pleasure Beach’s Ghost Train and Great Yarmouth’s Joyland Snails.

One day there came a real white-knuckle moment for Charles. Jerry went with him on a visit to South Africa in 1928 and disappeared. His master looked for him high and low, search parties were raised, but the little dog was never seen again. There was talk of someone having taken him, and a rumour that he had been run over and disposed of secretly for fear of alienating such a distinguished personality.

Wicksteed was devastated, and in grief erected a memorial to Jerry in the park. It can still be seen in the rose garden just in front of the park’s pavilion. On a plinth stands a sculpture of the dog, sitting up with a paw extended, with a verse his master wrote inscribed on its plaque:

Closely bound to a human heart

Little brown dog you played your part

In the levelling, building, staying of streams

In the park that arose from your master’s dreams.

Wicksteed never recovered. He succumbed to depressive episodes and took his own life in 1931.

RC

Alfred’s Pelvis

In the history of England, only two kings have been given the epithet ‘The Great’, and of those, the only non-invader is Alfred. This ninth-century, national hero is often credited with creating England as a country. Alfred was born in 848 in Wantage, as the fifth son of Aethelwulf, ruler of the kingdom of Wessex. Being the youngest, he seemed unlikely to end up on the throne, but in 871, when his brother Aethelred died, he inherited the kingdom. Alfred turned out to be a very successful and popular king. Much of his attention was, by necessity, taken up by fighting the Vikings, but alongside this, Alfred did a lot of good, including extensive cultural, educational and ecclesiastical reforms. With his popularity both among contemporaries and in more recent times, as well as the unusually large number of written records originating from his court, it is perhaps surprising that we don’t know where his body ended up after his death. What we do know is as follows: Alfred died of unknown causes in 899 and was buried in the monastic church in Winchester, Old Minster, in a tomb made of the finest porphyry marble. But only a few years later, in 903, his son Edward built a new religious institution next door, which became known as New Minster. As part of this work, he moved his father’s remains there. While modern historians put this choice down to a symbolic display of Edward’s political ambitions, the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury writes that Alfred’s spirit had wandered restlessly around Old Minster and therefore had to be moved.

As far as we know, Alfred rested peacefully in New Minster until the early twelfth century, when Henry I granted land for a brand-new monastery at the northern gate of Winchester. When it was complete and renamed Hyde Abbey, the entire monastic community of New Minster relocated, along with its collection of relics. While no contemporary sources explicitly state that the Wessex royal family’s remains were moved as well, it’s usually assumed that they were. By the sixteenth century, an antiquarian by the name of John Leland certainly thought they were: he stated they had been placed in a tomb in front of the high altar.

In 1538, Hyde was dissolved and any remains’ whereabouts lost as the site fell into disuse. According to a report made to the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1798, numerous coffins and bones had been found within the eastern end of the church, containing both lead coffins and the remains of garments. The lead had been sold, the coffins broken into pieces and reburied, and the bones ‘thrown about’. But nobody looked for Alfred’s remains until 1867, when the Hampshire Chronicle published a curious series of letters. An anonymous correspondent naming himself as ‘Q’ stated that a ‘so-called antiquarian’ had callously dug up remains in consecrated ground of what was once Hyde Abbey, leaving corpses exposed. In response, the antiquarian in question, a man named John Mellor, defended his actions by claiming he had been searching for the remains of Alfred the Great and his family in order to save them from ‘mutilation and violence’. Not only had Mellor been successful in finding the royals in question, he also found a sceptre and other precious artefacts and a plate of lead bearing the king’s name. All of this he claimed to have given into the safekeeping of the Hyde parish church. Incidentally, he had also discovered the skull of St Valentine, which is said to have once been kept in Hyde Abbey. Q, however, presented an alternative version, where Mellor had exhibited some of the remains in a hospital while others had been offered for sale, with some being swept into a dustbin by a housekeeper. Some of Mellor’s claims were soon disproven: the lead plates he had found were clearly modern fakes. Yet the real identity of the bones could never be ascertained, and some of them really were left in the parish church, St Bartholomew’s, where the churchwarden buried them in the grounds within a small brick vault. More than 140 years later, in 2013, a team led by osteologist Dr Katie Tucker attempted to find out if Mellor was right. Uncovering the vault beneath unmarked stone slabs, the team found a stack of five skulls and several long bones, which they analysed scientifically. It turned out the dates were all wrong: none of them dated to the ninth century. But that was not the end of the story because when trawling through the museum archives, Katie discovered that a later excavation at the site of Mellor’s investigation into what was once the abbey found other bones that he had missed, from a very prominent location. Among them: a pelvis that was radiocarbon-dated to the late ninth or early tenth century. Could this, as the team suggested, be the pelvis of none other than England’s most famed Anglo-Saxon king? Hopefully, in time, new analyses will give us the answers.

CJ

The Panacea Society

If you should find yourself at Albany Road in Bedford you will find a thriving allotment on a corner plot. This tiny but productive patch of land is claimed to be what’s left of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and were banished by God, perhaps to Luton.

This identification came about because of the Panacea Society, founded in the town in 1919 by Mrs Mabel Barltrop. She was the widow of a parson and came to believe that she was Shiloh, harbinger of the Messiah, and renamed herself Octavia. She gathered twelve disciples, middle-class ladies from Bedford like her, at 12 Albany Road.

She got the idea from the Devonshire Prophetess, Joanna Southcott, who in 1792 announced she was the Woman of the Apocalypse and moved to London, where she made a living selling tickets to heaven. At the age of sixty-four she announced she was pregnant with Shiloh, the Messiah, and the birth would occur on 19 October 1810.

It did not occur, discouraging to her followers, you might think, but when she died in 1814 they numbered about 100,000. They left her on her deathbed in the expectation that she would rise in new life, but when she did not and started to decay, arrangements were made for her burial and the disposal of her effects.

Among them was a box – a locked trunk bound with cords – in which she had placed a series of prophecies with strict instructions that it could only be opened at a time of national crisis in the presence of twenty-four bishops of the Church of England.

Mrs Barltrop formed an uneasy alliance with another of Southcott’s devotees, Alice Seymour, a member of the British Israelite Church, who was commanded by a spirit to write a biography of the Devonshire Prophetess in 1907. Eventually Southcott’s box ended up in the care of the Panacea Society, but precisely where is to this day a secret.

The Society grew and prospered. It offered miraculous healing for all kinds of conditions and ailments, inviting the afflicted to apply to 12 Albany Road for a ‘panacea’, a square of linen over which the members had prayed. If left in a jug of water it would release its therapeutic powers, and this liquor, Water A, was to be drunk four times a day. The dregs, Water B, could be diluted and used as an eau de toilette. More than 130,000 squares were posted out, but no charge was made for this service.

The Society’s wealth came from property, accumulated through the generosity of well-to-do followers, and as a charity the gains made were not subject to tax. Also their costs were limited, for their aims were so specific: to gather the bishops in a time of crisis and open the box. This proved a quorum too difficult to achieve, although in 1927 the psychic investigator Harry Price claimed to have opened a box in the presence of the suffragan Bishop of Grantham. It contained a nightcap, some earrings, a lottery ticket and a pistol.

A lady called Emily Goodwin joined and thwarted a plan hatched by a Mr Peissart to take control of the Society, which he wished to make congenial for his circle of gay friends. He was expelled with Emily’s prophecy of imminent death ringing in his ears. He then died, so Emily announced that she was now to be called ‘Divine Mother’. This was a challenge to Mrs Barltrop’s authority and caused a conflict that was only resolved in 1934 when Mrs Baltrop’s prophesy of her own immortality was proved unreliable by her death.

The Society faltered, its membership stalled, but when the clouds of war clustered in 1939 it rallied, and placed advertisements in newspapers and on hoardings at Piccadilly Circus urging the prelates necessary for the real box to be opened to come to Bedford, where Mrs Barltrop had ensured twenty-four bedrooms were maintained for their use.

The Society also maintained accommodation for Jesus Christ for his third coming (Mrs Barltrop believed her husband had been the second coming) in an end-of-terrace house called The Ark. There was some debate when it was refurbished over whether or not the corporeal but incorruptible Christ would require lavatory facilities. It was decided they should be provided for the needs of visitors.

The Society’s members continued to post advertisements – during the three-day week in the 1970s, for example – but dwindled in number until the last, a Mrs Klein, died in 2012.

It was then formed into a charitable trust controlled by trustees, who run a Museum at 9 Newnham Road, the Society’s former headquarters, where a replica of Joanna Southcott’s Box may be seen. It also funds research, promotes the Christian religion and distributes grants to charities. According to the annual report, its asset value in 2018 stood at £35,043,835.

The museum is open every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday between February half-term and the end of October.

RC

William Marwood

Horncastle, a handsome little town in the Lincolnshire Wolds, was once a famous centre for cock fighting and bull baiting. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was born nearby, later wrote, ‘of all horrors, a little country town seems to me to be the greatest’. These so-called sports were banned in 1835 by the Cruelty to Animals Act. Was a spirit of mercy conquering the hearts of Horncastrians? It may have been, for near the town three years later one of the most unusual Angels of Mercy in Victorian England was born. He was the hangman, William Marwood.

Marwood was a cobbler originally, and you will find a small blue plaque commemorating him on the wall of his tiny red pantiled house and workshop in Church Lane, but in 1870, when he was fifty-four, he resolved to embark on a new profession and wrote to the Governor of Lincoln Gaol asking for permission to conduct executions by hanging.

Until 1868 executions by hanging in England were performed in public and huge crowds would attend. In 1807 40,000 watched a triple execution outside Newgate Prison in London, so many that there was a crush and thirty-four spectators lost their lives in addition to the three condemned. By the 1860s campaigners, including Charles Dickens, were calling for reform, describing public executions as barbaric spectacles. In 1868 Parliament passed the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, which required the condemned to be executed ‘within the walls of the prison in which they were being held, and that their bodies be buried in the prison grounds’.

This had the unexpected consequence of traumatizing prison staff, who were now obliged to witness these slow and agonizing deaths close up. Hanging then was done with a short drop, which tightened the noose around the neck of the victim causing death by strangulation. It could take twenty minutes.

Marwood proposed a new method, the long drop, in which a calculation would be made of the condemned person’s height, weight and fitness and the distance they would need to fall from the gallows for sufficient force to be exerted by the noose to break their necks, causing instant unconsciousness, mitigating their suffering and that of those who had to watch it.

The governor of Lincoln invited Marwood to hang Frederick Horry, an hotelier who had murdered his wife in Boston. On 1 April 1972, at Lincoln Gaol, Marwood obliged, and with such efficiency he was commended to the authorities. In 1874 he was appointed hangman by the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex at a retainer of £20 a year plus £10 (about £1,400 today) per execution.

He conveyed into the hereafter 176 people in his eleven-year career as hangman (which would have earned him in today’s values more than £2.7 million), including the notorious housebreaker and killer Charles Peace, the four Irish nationalists who murdered Lord Henry Cavendish in Phoenix Park, Dublin, and the housemaid Kate Webster, who dismembered her employer and boiled the pieces in a copper to dispose of her body.

He became so famous there was a triplet written in his honour –

If Pa killed Ma

Who’d kill Pa?

Marwood.

– and he is one of only two British executioners whose name is used for the hangman puppet in Punch and Judy shows (Jack Ketch is the other).

Marwood died in 1883 of pneumonia and is buried in the churchyard at Horncastle. He was succeeded by his friend William Berry, who refined the method but later in life had a crisis and believed he had taken on the evils of those he despatched. This so weighed on his mind he resolved to throw himself under a train but an evangelist intervened and prayed over him for two and a half hours so earnestly a sort of vapour of sin rose from him like steam and he was saved. He later became a phrenologist and itinerant preacher.

Marwood, in my view, is England’s Dr Guillotin, the French surgeon who gave his name to the beheading machine that in France was used from the Terror of the 1790s until the 1980s. If used properly it ensured the head was severed from the body in one accurate blow, a great mercy when you consider how many beheadings by axe were botched.

The long drop was not without problems. Not all hangmen were as efficient as Marwood and after a series of executions in which the neck either did not break because the drop was too short or the head was decapitated because it was too long, the Home Office produced the Official Table of Drops in 1888, recommending a drop energy of 1,260ft-lb force. The figure was revised a couple of times but was used in the United Kingdom until hanging ceased in 1965. It remains in use in former British colonies that retain capital punishment.

RC

Tennis

My most humiliating moment as a TV reporter came at Wimbledon, while fronting a live update for NBC News’s breakfast audience from a rooftop at the championship. A colleague approached and – thinking I was merely rehearsing – she made some very surprising gestures from behind the cameraman which led to me completely losing my train of thought. Somewhere, out there, is footage of me standing silently, overlooking the home of lawn tennis, for what seemed an eternity.

Tennis evolved from the indoor racquet sport termed ‘real tennis’, which is recorded in France by the twelfth century. It was then played with the hands – rather like Eton Fives – but racquets were in use by the time Henry VIII took it up. The first real-tennis court in England was built for his chief adviser, Cardinal Wolsey, at Hampton Court, in the late 1520s, while the one still there today was installed for Charles I in 1625. Henry VIII’s nephew, James V of Scotland, was also a real-tennis enthusiast, and the court he built in Falkland Palace, Fife, in 1541 is the oldest one still in use.

Tennis was long seen as an aristocratic sport, the Italian renaissance scholar Baldassare Castiglione writing in his Book of the Courtier in 1528 that it was the most important physical activity that the ruling class could take, since it stimulated both body and mind. After Prince Rupert of the Rhine died in late 1682, this grandest of European aristocrat’s funeral procession was led by his huntsman, his gunsmith, his butler – and his tennis coach.

Three inventions allowed the nineteenth-century landed gentry to transfer tennis to the outdoors. The combination of vulcanized rubber, the lawn-mower and the garden roller led to more consistent surfaces and decent bounce. Major Harry Gem and Augurio Perera claimed to have invented lawn tennis and established a club for the sport in 1859 in Leamington Spa.

Tennis borrowed from two other genteel pastimes – croquet’s garden-party setting and cricket’s all-white clothing. In 1877 the All England Tennis and Croquet Club introduced the Wimbledon Championships (serving strawberries and cream, as it has ever since), and soon the sport was transported around the world, but still for the social elite.

It was only after the Second World War that professionalism entered the tennis world. ‘Open’ competitions allowed professionals to take part. Meanwhile, municipal parks made tennis courts available to a wider demographic.

From the 1920s, sponsors spotted the potential of piggybacking off tennis – via clothes, accessories, even cigarettes: Virginia Slims were associated with women’s tennis till the 1990s.

The first tennis star was Suzanne Lenglen, from France, the inaugural world no. 1 in 1921. She signed with an American promoter in 1926, and a tour was formed for her in which she took on other leading tennis players. Dolls were made in Lenglen’s image, and she was famous for her balletic style of play.

Sponsorship has remained huge business in tennis. In 2018 Roger Federer signed a ten-year deal with the Japanese clothing brand Uniqlo worth $300 million – one of many endorsements that have dwarfed his career earnings of $130 million.

The highlight of my less than stellar tennis coverage was interviewing Fred Perry, who won Wimbledon in 1934, 1935 and 1936. A brilliant table-tennis player as a youth, Perry only took up tennis aged eighteen. His working-class roots were problematic to the snobs who ran the English game, and when he went professional and joined an American tour in 1936, he was shunned by British tennis. He was not allowed to play Wimbledon again – it refused to admit professionals until 1968.

Fred Perry’s star waned as a player after the war, but the popularity of his clothing brand grew. His iconic polo shirt – later expropriated by the neo-fascist Proud Boys in the USA – came out in 1952. It was only after his statue was erected at Wimbledon, in 1984, that he was again recognized as one of the all-time greats.

Venus and Serena Williams are probably the most famous female players, with three Olympic gold medals among their myriad tennis triumphs, but Martina Navratilova is the only woman to be top ranked in both the singles and doubles for over 200 weeks.

The longest tennis match in history took place at Wimbledon in 2010. It lasted eleven hours and five minutes, the final set going to 70–68, despite the official scoreboard giving up the ghost at 47–47. John Isner was the victor, but he bowed out of his next match – presumably because he was a tad tired.

Many of the tournaments pay little prize money, and are expensive to play in, leading to temptation for cash-strapped competitors. Tennis is the third most wagered-on sport in the world, with more money bet on it than on American football and baseball combined.

Betting regulators say tennis is the world’s worst sport for match fixing. In 2018 Grigor Sargsyan was arrested for building a global roster of 180 professional players prepared to throw points, sets, or even matches for him.

CS

Double Agents

Juan Pujol was born in Barcelona in 1912. He reluctantly fought in the Spanish Civil War – apparently on both sides – and emerged with a particular loathing for Nazism.

He liked what he knew about the British and wanted to help their cause ‘for the good of humanity’. But when he offered to spy for them in 1941, he was rebuffed. So he offered himself as a spy to the Germans. They accepted his feigned pro-Nazi fanaticism, trained him up, codenamed him Alaric (a German male name, meaning ‘all-powerful ruler’), and told him to get to work in England.

Instead, Pujol went to Lisbon, where he created a network of fictional agents that he concocted after studying his collection of guidebooks and newspapers. The Germans accepted their authenticity and called them the Arabal – the Spanish word for suburb.

In 1942, MI6 accepted that Pujol might be of use to them and brought him to London. He was given another codename – Agent Garbo – and worked with a Spanish-speaking handler, Tomás Harris, to craft backstories for their fake agents.

Agent Garbo took part in Operation Fortitude – helping to disguise the true destination of the Allied attacks that would become D-Day. Garbo convinced his German handlers that there was an army of 150,000 American troops hidden in Kent and Essex that would spearhead the invasion. He also claimed that the Normandy landings were a diversionary tactic to draw German troops away from the true target. Despite his information being patently wrong, the Germans invested Pujol with the Iron Cross for his ‘extraordinary services’ to their cause. He also received a more merited MBE from Britain.

La Chatte (‘the Cat’) was one of the many pseudonyms given to another Second World War double agent, Mathilde-Lucie Carré. She was recruited by a Polish Air Force officer stranded in France, Captain Roman Czerniawski, and became second-in-command in the resistance group he led, Interallié.

A year later Carré was captured. She chose to become a double agent rather than be shot, and became the lover of the German officer who had overseen her arrest. Within nine months, thanks to her treachery, 100 Interallié agents were captured: Carré often accompanied the raids that rounded up her former comrades. Four of the Interallié’s radios were also found and used to transmit false information back to SOE in London.

Carré was taken to join a British network next, but the operatives noticed her stories did not add up. She was interrogated at length, switched loyalties again, and supplied valuable information to the Allies.

When France was liberated, Carré was sent home to be tried for treason. Parts of her diary were read out in court, including a passage that said: ‘What I wanted most was a good meal, a man, and … Mozart’s Requiem.’ She was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to twelve years in prison, but she was released early, in 1954. She brazenly published an autobiography, I Was the Cat, and eventually died in Paris, aged ninety-eight.

Robert Hanssen, from Chicago, was an FBI special agent who worked anonymously for the Russian KGB from 1979. In return for information on American counterintelligence techniques and investigations, Hanssen received $1.4 million.

Hanssen let the Russians know the identities of spies in their ranks, including Major General Dmitri Polyakov, who was executed for working for the CIA. Hanssen also informed the Russians about an eavesdropping tunnel built by the FBI under the Soviet embassy in Washington DC.

In the 1980s he was rumbled by his wife. She made him donate his Russian earnings to charity, and insisted he talk through his sins with a priest. But he returned to his old ways and was reported by his suspicious brother-in-law – another FBI agent – in the 1990s.

Hanssen was not arrested, and remained dormant with the FBI till 1999, when he became active again for Russia. After his voice was recognized on an audiotape, he was moved into an office with a colleague tasked with keeping an eye on him, who noticed Hanssen was storing information on his Palm III PDA. This was crucial evidence.

When arrested, Hanssen said: ‘What took you so long?’ The Department of Justice called Hanssen’s espionage ‘possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history’. He was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences, without parole, and died in June 2023 after twenty-one years’ imprisonment that saw him spend twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement.

There is a recent, highly effective, double agent whose identity remains unknown. ‘April Fool’ was, according to General Tommy Franks, the US commander in Iraq, a US Army officer who pretended to succumb to the approaches of an Iraqi spy. He sold this man faked military plans, which gave the wrong location for the coming US invasion. April Fool helped confuse Saddam Hussein’s commanders, helping the Iraq war to be a short-lived affair: Baghdad fell in less than three weeks.

CS

The FANYs

The churchyard at St Paul’s Knightsbridge in London presents a mixed experience. By day luxurious cars are parked there in a prudent monetization of available space by the vicar and churchwardens. By night it is occupied by some of London’s street homeless, who bed down under its portico and along its walls. One of the regulars, the only woman, had a spot by a memorial on the south wall, where she would sleep under a golf umbrella sitting on a narrow ledge. How she managed to sleep at all I do not know but it was fitting that the memorial was to other women of enterprise and resilience, the FANYs who lost their lives in the line of duty during the Second World War.

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry was the idea of Edward Baker, a warrant officer of the 21st Lancers who served in the Boer War and was wounded at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. Shot in the shins, as he awaited the medical orderlies and their cart to get him to a casualty clearing station, it occurred to him it would be quicker for a nurse on a horse to get to an injured soldier than for a horse-pulled ambulance to get the soldier to a nurse. In 1907 he began to recruit women for the FANY – bring your own horse was a stipulation – and train them to be battlefield medics. Although they were not part of the army they became expert in the dynamics of combat, as well as administering first aid and evacuating casualties in the most testing circumstances. The War Office declined their services when the Great War broke out in 1914 but their sergeant-major, Grace Ashley-Smith, who won an Empire Medal for shooting in 1911 and later became the first woman to be married in khaki, bumped into the Belgian Minister for the Colonies on a ship to Africa, who said he would be delighted if they would oblige Leopold III and his armies with their services. Ashley-Smith acquired an ambulance called Flossie and went to war in it with six FANYs. They served with such distinction that British ministers changed their minds and they were incorporated into the British Army in 1916 to drive ambulances for King George instead. When the armistice arrived they had acquired seventeen Military Medals, twenty-seven Croix de Guerre, one Légion d’honneur and eleven Mentions in Despatches.

Winston Churchill, impressed by their bravery and performance in the first war, saw that they would make ideal candidates for special duties in the second, and for this reason accommodation at the vicarage of St Paul’s Knightsbridge was leased for their HQ.

What special duties? The answer is in the names carved into the tablet of Portland stone, among them N. Inayat-Khan GC, Violette Szabó GC and several who sound like heroines from Betjeman poems followed by ‘CdeG’, the Croix de Guerre. From 1940 part of the FANY served with the Special Operations Executive, in Signals and Ciphers, run from a listening station at Grendon Underwood near Olney, and recruiting, training and running female agents mostly in occupied territories. At Arisaig in Scotland they were trained in silent killing and sabotage, in parachute jumping at Ringway aerodrome, and at Beaulieu, known as the Finishing School, they learned espionage and cryptography.

Of the fifty women agents in occupied France, thirty-nine were FANYs. Fluent in French, they were dropped by parachute, equipped with radio transmitters disguised as suitcases and issued cyanide pills to be taken if captured. Among them were the ‘White Mouse’, Nancy Wake, so named by the Gestapo, who cycled hundreds of miles from the Pyrenees to the Auvergne with a critical part for a radio transmitter for the 1,500-strong Maquis unit she commanded. She became the most highly decorated woman of the Second World War. Thirteen of her fellow FANYs were captured, tortured and shot at Ravensbrück and Dachau. Among them were Szabó and Inayat-Khan.

During the war their existence was top secret, but after the victory they became celebrated, especially Odette Hallowes GC, who survived despite being horribly tortured by Gestapo interrogators, who pulled off her toenails and burned her with a red-hot poker. She pretended to be a relative of Winston Churchill, which may have mitigated their cruelties.

Her story was turned into the film Odette in 1950, starring Anna Neagle in the title role.

The FANY are today about 150 strong and were deployed following the terrorist attacks in Manchester and on London Bridge and in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. In 2020 they paraded for their commandant-in-chief, HRH the Princess Royal, who presented them with commemorative coins for their work in the Covid-19 pandemic.

They meet each year at St Paul’s for a memorial service. Among them, until very recently, was a small group of mild-looking old ladies with medals for extraordinary gallantry pinned next to cameo brooches on their lapels.

RC

The Assassination of Sidónio Pais

The great and mysterious Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa described Sidónio Pais, fourth president of the First Portuguese Republic, as the nation’s president-king. This would have surprised not only those who knew him before he acquired power, but him too, for he ended up becoming someone very different from the someone he used to be.

He was born near Sertã in central Portugal in 1872 to a Jewish father. A bright and able boy, he joined the army in 1888 and became the Military Academy’s most distinguished student. As well as being a brilliant artillery officer, he had a parallel career as a mathematician, and was simultaneously a captain in the army and a professor in the Faculty of Differential and Integral Calculus at Coimbra University. He also became an enthusiastic republican and a not very enthusiastic Freemason.

I suppose he would have remained just another internationally significant mathematician holding rank in the army until the collapse of the monarchy and the formation of the First Republic. In 1908, a time of great foment, King Carlos I of Portugal, his queen Amelia and the Prince Royal were driving in an open carriage through Lisbon. A bearded teacher with a Winchester rifle hidden under his overcoat lay in wait and shot the king as he passed. An accomplice shot and wounded the Prince Royal, but the Queen lashed him round the head with a bunch of flowers, shouting ‘Infamy! Infamy!’ The wounded prince drew his own revolver and shot his assailant, but was himself then shot in the head by the first attacker. He died twenty minutes later and his little brother was proclaimed king. In a macabre coda, the bodies of the king and his son were placed in carriages, propped up between members of the royal family and driven in state, as if alive, back to the palace to send a message of business as usual. Within three years Portugal was a republic.

Professor Captain Pais was elected as a deputy of the National Constituent Assembly charged with drafting the new constitution of 1911. The sitting government fell and in the next he was appointed finance minister and then, in the tensions that preceded the outbreak of the First World War, ambassador to Berlin, a Germanophile representing an Anglophile government until Germany declared war on Portugal in 1916.

He returned to Portugal and led the short, small but bloody coup of 1917. He formed a military junta and deposed the president, government and parliament. Appointed president after an illegal plebiscite in 1918, he immediately undid the constitution he had helped draft and gave himself dictatorial powers, creating the model of governance that was later to give Portugal António Salazar, another dictatorial former university professor, whose regime lasted for nearly fifty years.

Things went wrong for Pais after the humiliating defeat of the Portuguese Expeditionary Force at the Battle of the Lys in 1918, despite the heroic example of Aníbal Milhais, ‘Soldier Millions’, who, armed only with a Lewis gun, single-handedly repelled two German assaults until he was relieved by the British 11th Cyclist Battalion.

Pais soon lost his grip on power and on 5 December 1918 an unsuccessful assassination attempt was made. His opponents got lucky nine days later. After dinner with his son in Lisbon, at the Silva in the fashionable Chiado district (chiado, by the way, means ‘squeak’), he arrived at the Lisboa-Rossio railway station to take a train to Porto, where a socialist activist with a pistol concealed in his Alentejo cloak – a long coat with two capes, very fashionable now, but originally made for shepherds – broke through the cordon of Republican Guards and shot him twice. Panic ensued, and four bystanders were shot dead by the guards in spite of the assassin offering no resistance. He was savagely beaten by the crowd before being arrested. Pais was rushed to St Joseph’s Hospital but died of his wounds on the way. His assassin was incarcerated without trial in a psychiatric hospital and died there in 1946.

Pais endured, and still endures, in the imagination of many Portuguese today, as Pessoa’s president-king, a saviour-martyr, with a popular cult, although he was not a particularly religious man and certainly no monarchist.

Turbulent politics can turn us into previously unimaginable versions of ourselves. Think of the ophthalmologist from Marylebone, Bashir Assad, now the dictatorial President of Syria, or the poet and psychiatrist Radovan Karadžić, former president of Republika Srpska, currently serving a life sentence for war crimes at Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.

Pais’s great grandson, by the way, was the jazz musician Bernardo Sassetti, whose band plays in the film The Talented Mr Ripley. In 2012, taking photographs on a cliff, he somehow lost his footing and fell to his death.

RC

Sunbathing

Sunlight was linked to improved health in several ancient cultures. ‘Heliotherapy’ was recorded by ancient Egyptians 3,500 years ago. The Ebers Papyrus shows how vitiligo (an autoimmune disorder that robs parts of the skin of colour or pigment) was treated by such early forms of what would become known as phototherapy.

Charaka, an ancient Indian physician from the fourth century BC, who was an architect of the alternative medicine system ayurveda, recommended sunlight in the treatment of a range of diseases. In ancient China sunlight, reflected through sheets of various colours, was deployed to aid healing in men. (Chinese women had the moon’s light used on them, similarly.)

In ancient Greece, a pale complexion set upper-class ladies apart because it proved they did not work outside. A pale complexion was also seen as attractive on women in ancient Rome – especially if the skin enjoyed a hint of pink. This prejudice continued throughout European culture till the 1920s, when Coco Chanel was accidentally sunburnt while on a yacht in France. A few years later she declared, ‘The 1929 girl must be tanned. A golden tan is the index of chic!’ Despite the link between the sun and skin cancer having been established the previous year, the suntan did catch on as a status symbol – a winter tan, in particular, indicating that you could afford to see out the colder months somewhere warm and exotic.

The first tanning oil with UV filtering properties was Ambre Solaire, which was available from 1935. The Second World War sped up research into this protection, with the US Air Force launching a programme in 1942 on how best to stop their troops being badly sunburnt if exposed on a life raft or in the desert. Red veterinary petroleum was found to do the job, and two years later an airman concocted a consumer-friendly version by mixing in cocoa butter and coconut oil. In 1946 Franz Greiter, a Swiss scientist who was sunburnt while climbing in the Alps, invented ‘glacier cream’, which was the first modern sunscreen. He called it Piz Buin, after the mountain on which he had suffered his sunburn.

SPF was adapted as the standard test for sunscreen formulations in the 1980s. By 2008 it was proven that some sunscreen ingredients were bleaching coral in areas with high-level human recreational traffic. In 2018 Hawaii became the first state to ban the sale of sunscreens containing coral-harming components of most commercial sunscreens – oxybenzone and octinoxate.

Tuberculosis became one of the dominant health issues in the eighteenth century, as cities became increasingly crowded and unsanitary, and mortality rates from TB could grow to 900 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year. Notoriously infectious and hard to treat – medieval doctors had resorted to bloodletting, which was generally harmful for sufferers – the first TB sanatorium opened in 1863. Forty years later Auguste Rollier, a Swiss physician, opened a sanatorium based on the healing properties of sunlight. Each room had a south-facing balcony, with sun tolerance built up slowly during the convalescee’s fifteen-day stay, with the therapy starting early in the morning and finishing before noon. Vitamin D and nitric oxide both proved beneficial to patients, stimulating their immune systems.

In England, the Lever brothers wanted to connect with the growing appreciation of the beneficial effects of cleanliness and the sun by launching Sunlight soap in 1884. Such was its success that production reached 450 tonnes per week by 1888 – the year in which they set about building a model village for their workers, which they called Port Sunlight.

In the 1920s, societies sprung up that advocated the benefits of sunbathing. The Sunshine League was the creation of Caleb Saleeby, a doctor. Saleeby wrote to The Spectator in May 1924: ‘The restoration of sunlight to our malurbanized millions is the next great task of public health in our country.’ Saleeby confided to friends that his further aim was to stimulate the nudist movement, under the respectable guise of sunbathing.

He believed in eugenics – as did the founders of the Men’s Dress Reform Party, which was established in 1929. The eugenicists behind this organization said that men’s clothing was unattractive, uncomfortable and (being hard to clean) unsanitary. They advocated clothing that allowed more sunlight onto the skin: shorts, sandals and loose tops.

Despite the risks of skin cancer, people who are exposed to a lot of sun tend to live longer lives. In 2014 a twenty-year Swedish study of 30,000 women claimed that those who spent most time in the sun lived for an extra year or two – even when exercise, wealth and education were controlled for. It particularly helped counter type 2 diabetes, autoimmune disease and chronic lung disease. Indeed, these people who soaked up the sun were found to have a 14 per cent decreased likelihood of contracting cancer. This has led some to advocate for sunscreen not to be used in northern Europe, but to be relied on when living in or visiting sunnier climes.

CS

The Exploding Whale of Oregon

On 9 November 1970 the body of a 45ft-long sperm whale was found on the beach at Florence, Oregon. It was the responsibility at that time of the State Highway Division to dispose of it. No easy task, considering its carcass weighed about eight tons.

Unfortunately the man in charge of whale disposal was away hunting that weekend, so the job fell to an inexperienced deputy, Mr Thornton. It was decided the whale was too big to bury, too decomposed to ask anyone to come and cut it up, and impractical to burn, so he phoned a friend in the US Navy, who recommended using dynamite to reduce it to small pieces that could be left to scavenging wildlife to dispose of. Mr Thornton had no explosives experience, but estimated ten cases would do it, then he doubled it to make sure. A charge was prepared of twenty cases, about 450kg of dynamite, and on 12 November the bulk of it was packed around the leeward side of the whale in the belief that most of the remains would be blown out to sea.

A small crowd came to watch, among whom was an army veteran with explosives experience. He advised the charge was far too powerful and that twenty sticks – at 4kg about a hundred times smaller – would be ample. Mr Thornton ignored this advice and trusted his gut instinct, which told him to opt for the larger amount so all could have confidence that the job would be efficiently done.

The crowd was moved back by police to a perimeter in the sand dunes a quarter of a mile away and at around four o’clock in the afternoon the charge was detonated. It caused an explosion roughly equivalent to that of a tomahawk cruise missile.

Decomposing blubber landed as far as 250m away. One large chunk fell on the explosives expert’s new car, just bought from a dealer with an eye for the local news, who sold it as part of a ‘whale of a deal’ promotion. It was written off.

Unfortunately the blast, though intense, was highly focused and not distributed equally through the carcass, so most of it was left intact on the beach. It also scared away all the seagulls and other scavengers, so the rotting blubber chunks had to be collected by volunteers and householders and business owners, both from the beach and from their property upon which these ghastly projectiles had landed.

There is a marvellous film of the explosion which was made by local TV reporter Paul Linman, who delivers what should have been a Pulitzer Prize-winning line – ‘the blast blasted blubber beyond all believable bounds’. The report is now available on the internet and has been viewed about 350 million times.

Mr Thornton, in an interview later with a local newspaper, claimed the operation had been a success, but poor reporting had left people with the false impression that it was not. He was promoted shortly afterwards but from then beached whales in Oregon have been disposed of by burial and burning.

There was another exploding whale, by the way, in 2004 in Taiwan. A sperm whale beached and died near Tainan City and a crowd came to watch the authorities haul it onto a truck to take it away to be examined, Unfortunately, due to a build-up of gases in the carcass the whale exploded in transit and motorists and passers-by were splattered with stinking blubber fragments.

In 2020, marking the fiftieth anniversary of their own event, Florence residents voted to name a new recreational area Exploding Whale Memorial Park. They gathered on the beach dressed as whales and the local television company, KATU, reissued the original film remastered in 4K.

Incidentally, Florence, pop. 9,553, made the national news again in November 1977 when the City Council accidentally banned sex. It approved a piece of legislation intended to make it unlawful to have sex in public, but it was drafted in such a way that sexual intercourse would be deemed illegal if it occurred ‘while in or in view of a public or private place’, i.e. everywhere. When this was brought to the attention of council officials some time later they sensibly decreed the ordinance would not be enforced until a suitable amendment had been made.

RC

Cowardice

Famously, in the First World War, British women would hand white feathers to men of fighting age they encountered who were not in uniform. The white feather has been a symbol of cowardice since cockfighting reached its peak popularity in England in the late eighteenth century. If a bird had a white feather, it was disparaged as being ‘not of the true game breed’. Come 1914, and this coward’s emblem was used as a shaming recruitment tool.

Many of those found to be ‘cowards’ in the First World War are now believed to have been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and combat stress reaction – including some of the nearly 300 British and Commonwealth troops shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion. The executed were often not given a fair trial. Some were minors.

Meanwhile the German army executed only twenty-five men for the same two crimes, but its military psychiatrists viewed war neurotics (or ‘hystericals’) as degenerates. They were often prescribed electric shock therapy, which was viewed as suitable punishment for genuine sufferers, and for those merely feigning ‘weak nerves’.

History has awarded white feathers to many from the past. Aethelred the Unready became king of England in 978. Aethelred’s lack of judgement (his epithet ‘the Unready’ means ‘poorly advised’) or of military prowess saw him tackle the increasing ferocity of Viking raids through diplomacy rather than warfare. He paid the enemy exorbitant sums in Danegeld – a bribe, to prevent aggression – and in an age when princely virtue was judged by the bloodiness of the sword, this was viewed as shameful.

In the summer of 1864, during the American Civil War, the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia, had sunk into stalemate till coalminers in the attacking Unionist force dug a 500ft tunnel, then packed four tons of gunpowder under the Confederate position. After detonation they planned to unleash specially trained African-American troops into the resulting crater. These were commanded by Major-General Edward Ferrero, a famous choreographer and dance instructor.

At the last minute, perhaps because of racist concerns about the ability of the African-Americans, they were replaced by Brigadier-General James H. Ledlie’s untrained white troops. After the explosion blew 300 Confederates to kingdom come, Ledlie’s men emerged in the crater. They meandered around aimlessly, and were picked off by the enemy. Ledlie was found to have been drinking behind the lines, rather than leading his men into battle, and that was the end of his military career. (It also emerged he had turned tail during a previous engagement, while his men engaged with well-defended Confederate trenches.) Ledlie resigned his commission at the start of 1865, unable to ride out his ignominy.

Cowardice is the underlying theme of Steven Crane’s Great American Novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Published in 1894, and also set in the American Civil War, it follows the fictional teenaged Private Henry Fleming as he contemplates battle, worried sick how he will react in the face of gunfire.

He flees during his first encounter with the Confederates and sustains a blow to the head, which his comrades mistake for the graze of a bullet, and so he is spared from being branded a coward. Soon Fleming finds his heroic side, when his unit’s flag-bearer is slain and he holds the regimental colours aloft – leading his comrades forward till the enemy take flight.

In the final paragraph Crane writes of Fleming’s transformation from coward to hero: ‘He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare [of cowardice] was in the past … Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.’ This is the traditional view of bravery’s aura, countering the greyness of cowardice.

Confusingly, in the US military white feathers can be seen as symbols of courage. One of the United States Marine Corps’ most celebrated snipers, Carlos Norman Hatchcock II, had ninety-three confirmed kills in the Vietnam War (although he estimated he had actually done away with three or four hundred of the enemy).

The Viet Cong put a bounty of $30,000 on Hatchcock’s head and told their men to look out for the white feather that he wore in the band of his bush hat.

Hatchcock only removed this white feather once. This was on a mission that lasted four days and three nights, during which he crawled nearly a mile across a field before killing an enemy general with a shot to the chest. His active career came to an end in 1969 when the vehicle he was in struck a landmine. He helped pull seven of his Marine comrades from the flames but was horribly burned while doing so. The M25 White Feather sniper rifle, designed for the US Army Special Forces and the US Navy SEALs, is named after Hatchcock and his military feats.

CS

Bald’s Leechbook

At the British Library, a book nicknamed Bald’s Leechbook is one of the oldest medical treatises written in England, and the text has been dated to the tenth century. It seems likely it was created in Winchester, possibly influenced by Alfred the Great’s educational reforms, when a large number of important works were written and distributed throughout the country.

Confusingly, the name does not refer to leeches as such: the Anglo-Saxon word leech translates to ‘doctor’ or ‘physician’. The bloodsucking aquatic worm was named later, possibly because of the use of the creatures medicinally. As a verb, the word was used in the sense of ‘to cure’ or ‘to heal’ from around 1200.

Bald’s Leechbook is actually a collection of three books, two that form a distinct unit and a third that is more of a collection of medical recipes. The first of the two deals with illnesses that are mainly external, affecting body parts like the head, ears, eyes, skin and limbs. The second book considers ailments involving internal organs, especially the stomach, liver, spleen, bowels and urogenital system. The chapters are set out quite clearly, with an introduction about the content followed by specific recipes to be used to treat conditions, as well as a description of symptoms, diagnosis, causes and even dietary recommendations: more or less what you would find if you searched for an illness online today.

The compilation is drawn from many different sources, some of which are known to us. Many of them are Latin or Greek medical texts – some sections are direct translations of recipes – but it is clear that the Leechbook itself is a bespoke edition. It also seems to be tailored to an audience based in England, in terms both of the conditions selected for inclusion and of the ingredients used for treatment. Although there are many exotic elements not readily available locally at the time, such as pepper, ginger, cinnamon and frankincense, trading connections with the Mediterranean and beyond would have made them viable to obtain. At the same time, the compiler has omitted recipes that include perishable imported ingredients that would not have been available in England, such as asses’ milk. In terms of the diseases covered, much attention is given to conditions like dysentery, which is likely to have afflicted Anglo-Saxon populations greatly, and illnesses affecting the liver and the spleen. The latter could well have related to malaria, a condition thought to have been prevalent at the time in Britain, especially in wetlands and marshy areas.

We don’t know who wrote the Leechbook. Within it, a statement says that ‘Bald owns this book which he ordered Cild to compile’, but whether Cild was just a scribe or the actual author is unclear. It was certainly written by someone with medical expertise, as many of the chapters draw on personal experience. The writer also subscribed to scientific approaches to treating illness, as opposed to religion or superstition. There are sixteen charms listed, which is a relatively small number compared with similar works, and those mentioned are prescribed only for those conditions that could not be treated with more rational methods.

The question of how effective these thousand-year-old treatments really were was in part answered in 2015, when a team of scientists, working with specialists on Anglo-Saxon medical texts, recreated one of the recipes found in the book. The chosen remedy was a salve used for treating a ‘wen’ or a lump in the eye – probably a stye, a condition that modern medicine recognizes as caused by a bacterial infection. The team was especially keen to see if it could be used as an alternative to modern antibiotics.

Bald’s remedy gives the following instructions: crush garlic along with another species of Allium, combine these with wine and ox gall, and leave in a brass or bronze vessel for nine nights, then apply the mixture to the eye at night with a feather.

When the scientists reconstructed the recipe, they tested it on bacterial cultures and found it to kill the germs. Most importantly, it effectively treated tissues from mice infected with the bacterial infection MRSA, which can cause severe illness and is difficult to treat with ordinary antibiotics.

The scientists also discovered that the remedy was effective only when the recipe was followed to the letter: using a brass vessel, for instance, likely avoided outside contamination.

The study is remarkable as it proves that early medieval physicians had access to genuine, effective treatments. Nevertheless, some of those in the Leechbook are more confusing than those treating a stye. In a section under gynaecological conditions, for instance, there are treatments suggested for use ‘if you wish a woman to have a child or birth a bitch cub’. The meaning of the latter is somewhat lost in translation.

CJ

Cosmetics

The beauty industry was worth £20 billion to the UK economy in 2023 – against a global revenue for beauty and personal care products of $625 billion.

The reason many department stores have such items on sale on the ground floor is because of their extraordinary mark-up: they want as many people as possible to be tempted by scents that cost a negligible amount to make (some luxury brands refuse to pay more than $1 per bottle to the growers) and a fortune to buy.

The earliest cosmetics were found by archaeologists across Slovenia, and date from 4400 BC. They were stored in small ceramic bottles in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages and appear to have been hung from the waist. They were made from cerrusite (lead carbonate) – an important component of bright white pigments throughout much of history – and beeswax, another hardy perennial of beauty products, that thrives today.

Ancient Egyptian examples are known to have abounded 1,000 years after the Slovenian ones. From the late fourth millennium BC, the most common Egyptian cosmetics were malachite and galena, found in graves, with residue traceable on the palettes and stones where they were ground. Galena was later replaced by carbon black sticks of kohl.

By 1187 BC, kohl was made from the soot of burned safflower, and was applied by moistening the powder and using a small bone or wooden stick. Red ochre was used to rouge the cheeks, while fats mixed with the oils and juices of bitter almonds, cardamoms and turpentine were used to oil the face.

The Greco-Roman period of the fourth century BC to the fourth century AD saw lead oxide and slaked lime being used to dye hair. Lead was also used in Egyptian eyeliner – as famously used by Cleopatra – with lead chloride being relied on by Egyptians against eye ailments. Surprisingly, 2010 research showed that there may have been some truth in this, as it can – in the right quantities – stimulate the body’s defences.

The Romans had a wide array of skincare and cosmetic ointments, with honey and barley mixes often used for softening the skin. Frankincense was added to tackle growths, and beanmeal paste was administered to smooth out wrinkles. White lead, eggs and dried rose leaves were also deployed.

Animal products were used widely, with ground staghorn a common additive. The oil from unwashed sheep’s wool was harvested as a cleansing salve. The intestine of a small land crocodile was ground up and used on spots. Wine tainted with dead newts was said to erase freckles. The ashes of a wolf’s head or dogs’ teeth, mixed in wine, were Roman tooth whiteners.

Women and priests wore white cream on their faces when visiting a temple. A canister of something along these lines was recently found in Southwark, London, at the junction of two Roman roads. A pair of Roman temples stood near this spot. Fingerprints were still visible in the cream, which was tin-based rather than lead-based.

In the Middle Ages we find evidence of deer fat being boiled in water, with juniper added, to form a cosmetic remedy for skin roughened by exposure to the sun and to the wind. A deep peel was achieved by applying onion, scilla and goat fallow, and then removing the lifted skin. Other medieval ointments contained cuttlefish, breadcrumbs, ginger, cumin, honey, lily root and marshmallow.

Elizabeth I of England accentuated her famous pallor with ‘ceruse’, made out of white lead and vinegar. Others copied the queen, and some Elizabethans used mixes of turpentine and mercury to bleach their freckles. The resulting damage to the skin could be smeared with raw egg yolks, and people learned not to smile so as to keep the dried sheen in place. In the mid-seventeenth century, the celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys’ wife experimented with puppies’ urine, hoping to soften her skin.

Arsenic, the deadly poison, was often found in beauty treatments. The late-eighteenth-century Toilet of Flora – a collection of extracts about preparing baths, essences, powders and perfumes – lists arsenic among the ingredients of nail treatment. A hundred years later, arsenic was in tooth cement, cosmetic wash and hair-dye recipes.

Off-the-shelf arsenic products were even marketed as approved by doctors, such as Dr Mackenzie’s ‘medicated’ arsenic soap, or Dr Campbell’s ‘safe’ arsenical complexion wafers, which were designed to be eaten. Many arsenic products survived into the twentieth century.

CS

The Martyrs of Namugongo

Most of the Martyrs of Namugongo were pages in the court of the Kabaka of Buganda, Danieri Basammula-Ekkere Mwanga II Mukasa, ruler in the 1880s of what is now part of Uganda.

In 1877 Christianity arrived in that part of Africa. English missionaries of the low church Anglican Church Missionary society arrived first, at the (disputed) invitation of the then Kabaka Muteesa I, and Roman Catholic White Fathers came soon after. Before this, Islam had arrived from Zanzibar and a three-way struggle for the souls of Buganda’s leading chiefs followed. By the time Mwanga II acceded the throne in 1887 there were converts to all three in the royal court, which gave him the jitters. He was most concerned with the Christians, who sought political as well as religious reform, and when Germany annexed what we now call Tanzania he resolved to resist the spread of Christianity eastwards – a prophecy warned that trouble would come from that direction – and had the Anglican bishop and missionary James Hannington executed when he arrived at the eastern border in 1885.

It is a commonplace that those who seek to curtail the appeal of Christianity by martyring its adherents very often produce the opposite effect, intensifying its appeal and stiffening the resolve of its converts. Mwanga’s pages, a mixture of Anglican and Roman Catholic youths, were outraged by the murder of Hannington, and refused to abjure the faith when he demanded it. This was an intolerable affront to royal power and to the royal prerogative of sexual submission. Among the pages’ duties was to give sexual pleasure to the Kabaka and senior officials. The Christian Masters of the Pages, Joseph Mukasa Balikuddembe and Charles Lwanga, repeatedly defended the boys from this sexual exploitation and on 3 June 1886 they were arrested, the pages rounded up, and all were sentenced to death for insubordination.

They were taken to Namugongo, about seven miles from present day Kampala, where a large pyre was lit. The boys and their masters were wrapped in reed mats and thrown alive into the flames. It is not certain how many suffered death on that day, but the Catholic Church lists twenty-two, most of them teenagers.

They were immediately proclaimed martyrs by the Church, and as the secular equivalent by the colonial powers. Mwanga resolved to exile the remaining Christians and Muslims with influence to an uninhabitable and crocodile-infested island in Lake Victoria and leave them to their fates, but the discovery of his plan led to him being deposed and replaced by his brother Kiweewa, the Muslim candidate. Kiweewa refused circumcision, however, and was replaced by another brother, Kalema. Mwanga meanwhile regrouped, and with Protestant support – anything other than Islam, I suppose, was the calculation – retook power. Not for long; following a treaty between Britain and Germany settling their claims to the colonial exploitation of Africa, agents of the East Africa Company arrived in Buganda, in the British sphere of influence, and eventually in 1894 it became a British protectorate. Mwanga declared war on his protectors in 1897 but was defeated and eventually exiled to the Seychelles in 1899. There he was ‘received’ into the Anglican Church, probably by forced baptism, and died aged thirty-five in 1903.

Back to the martyrs. The twenty-two martyred Catholic boys were canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1964, but there has been speculation ever since that some of the victims were not in fact Catholics: we know that some converted by the Church Missionary Society suffered martyrdom too, which raises the interesting possibility that the Pope may have accidentally canonized some Anglicans.

This may seem a technicality, and it is certainly not a lively issue for those attending the festival which takes place at Namugongo every 3 June commemorating the martyrdom, with pilgrims from all over East Africa attending in the hundreds of thousands.

It is not only for their heroic witness to Christ that the pages are remembered but for their challenge to the king’s authority, which helped to inspire the independence movement of the twentieth century. It also sheds light on attitudes to homosexuality in Uganda today. Evidently it was not an import of the colonial powers – a Western aberration – as some opposed to liberalization in that country and elsewhere argue today; and it helps explain why homosexual acts there tend to be seen as abusive and coercive.

Conservative Christians from the West still seek to exploit Uganda for their doctrinal purposes. I was there in 2004 and encountered some American evangelicals whose mission was specifically to weaponize anti-gay sentiments for ideological purposes, which they did with a ruthlessness that was quite breathtaking, actively encouraging a hostile Church and government to impose the harshest legal penalties, including the death sentence, for those discovered having sex with people of the same gender.

RC

Crosswords

The first crossword appeared in the ‘fun’ section of New York World on 21 December 1913. It was a Christmas treat for loyal readers, composed by Arthur Wynne, who had emigrated from England to America as a nineteen-year-old.

Wynne, son of the editor of the Liverpool Echo, based his crossword on ‘Magic Squares’, a children’s puzzle popular in the second half of the nineteenth century: a group of words had to be arranged so the resulting letters would be the same whether read across or down. Magic Squares was believed to expand young people’s vocabulary.

Wynne’s derivative of this puzzle was diamond-shaped, and he called it a word-cross – but someone in the proofreading department changed the order of the two words. Wynne’s first clue was: ‘What bargain hunters enjoy’ (five letters). (Answer: sales.)

The popularity of the crossword underpinned the success of American publishers Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. In 1924, Simon & Schuster’s first year of trading, Simon’s aunt persuaded him to publish a collection of crossword puzzles. The initial print run was 3,600, but 100,000 copies were sold.

Simon & Schuster recognized they had struck gold. They set up the World Puzzle League of America, then lured the puzzle proofreader from Sunday World to come to work for them. Margaret Farrar was editing her 134th book for the publishers when she died, aged eighty-seven.

The most prolific crossword setter was Roger Squires – known as ‘Dante’ in the Financial Times, ‘Rufus’ in the Guardian, who also worked for The (London) Times and the Independent, and set the Telegraph’s crossword each Monday. He was known by rivals as ‘the Mozart of setters’.

By the time of his 2017 retirement, after thirty-five years, Squires had set more than 77,000 puzzles and composed over 2.5 million clues. If you tackled his output and cracked one clue a minute, it would take you four years and eight months to complete his work – if you had no rest or sleep.

Squire’s longest one-word solution, with fifty-eight letters, had the clue: ‘Giggling troll follows Clancy, Larry, Billy and Peggy who howl, wrongly disturbing a place in Wales.’ (A startling knowledge of Welsh towns would help you to reach the answer: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.)

Reputedly the hardest ever crossword was created by Mark Breman in 2018. It has been judged to be one hundred times harder than any regular crossword, and it was believed it would take a year to crack, although thirty-two people defeated it within a week. (One of his clues: ‘Woman stares madly at catastrophe’, had the answer: ‘DISASTER’ – DI + an anagram of ‘stares’.)

American crosswords tend to be straightforward, while English ones delight their contestants by being cryptic and, unless ‘quick’ crosswords, are often set in a 15 × 15 blocked grid. The New York Times is an exception, and the anglophile Broadway lyricist Stephen Sondheim created several cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine in the late 1960s. He decried American crosswords as: ‘a mechanical test of tirelessly esoteric knowledge’.

Sondheim was a young devotee of Margaret Farrar’s ‘Puns and Anagrams’ – a column the doyenne of Simon & Schuster’s crossword compilations edited in the New York Times from 1942, in an attempt to lift morale in wartime: he remembered the joy of working out that ‘Here there is rain, too’ had as its answer Ontario – an anagram of ‘Rain, too’.

Sondheim passed on the bug for crossword-solving to Leonard Bernstein, during their collaboration on West Side Story. Sondheim received the Wednesday copy of The Listener magazine, which contained the toughest weekly crossword in England, in New York on the following day. He would recall that: ‘[On] Thursday afternoons no work got done on West Side Story. We were doing the puzzle.’

There is an intellectual snobbery attached to your choice of crossword. The American comedian and commentator Jon Stewart channelled his highbrow followers’ contempt for USA Today, with its simple presentation of the world to a general readership, by comparing its puzzle with a sleazy affair: ‘I’ll solve a USA Today [crossword] in a hotel, but I don’t feel good about myself after.’ Equally, traditional fans of the New York Times’ iconic crossword have recently decried the introduction of clues relating to the Kardashians, and to rap and hip-hop culture. Ironically, perhaps, the composer of the New York Times crossword since 1993, Will Shortz, is a celebrity who has been interviewed on Oprah and The Colbert Report, and has appeared on The Simpsons, How I Met Your Mother and Jeopardy. Using the original designation of the pioneering Arthur Wynne, Shortz is the world’s most famous word-crosser.

CS

Lucca’s Last Levitator

St Gemma Galgani, the Daughter of Passion, is one of the very few attested levitators of the twentieth century.

Saints rising up and floating around are not unusual in the hagiographies of the Middle Ages. There are two or three spectacular ones of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; St Gerard Majella once flew two of his companions three-quarters of a mile; St Paul of the Cross hovered in his chair as he prayed; and St Joseph Copertino, my favourite, once levitated to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel during an audience with the pope and had to be crossly ordered down by his superiors. Post-Enlightenment, however, most saints demonstrate their miraculous powers in less eye-catching ways.

Not Gemma Galgani. She was born in Tuscany in 1878, the fifth of eight children of a wealthy pharmacist. She grew up in a comfortable middle-class household in the lovely city of Lucca – nicer than Siena in my view and much less visited – but her mother fell ill with tuberculosis and Gemma was left in the care of a private nursery school.

Four of her siblings died and she contracted meningitis. Everyone braced themselves for another death but she survived – a miracle, they thought, a healing attributed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the intercession of Venerable Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows. He was another most unusual saint. Born in Assisi in 1838, he was impossibly vain, adored dancing and was given to tantrums. After he was nearly hit by a stray bullet while out hunting he felt the stirring of vocation; a throat abscess, his brother’s suicide thanks to an entanglement with some Freemasons, and a vision of the Virgin Mary convinced him finally to join the Passionist Order. He began to study for the priesthood but was struck down by tuberculosis and died before he could be ordained, aged only twenty-three. That ballistic episode has led to some in the United States proposing him as patron saint of the Gun Lobby.

Gemma’s piety and devotion intensified. She went to boarding school and excelled at her studies but was orphaned aged nineteen and took on responsibility with her aunt for bringing up her brothers and sisters. She was very beautiful and very pious and had declined two proposals of marriage when, aged twenty-one, she received the stigmata.

It happened on the eve of the feast of the Sacred Heart. She was praying and Jesus appeared to her. Flames shot out from the wounds in his hands and touched hers. She fell into a trance and the Virgin Mary appeared and helped her into bed. When she woke she found she had wounds in her hands too. The wounds appeared regularly, on her feet and brow as well, but when the family’s doctor examined her he concluded they were self-inflicted. Her aunt discovered a sewing needle in her room, which she suspected Gemma had used to injure herself. It seems her family, especially her younger sister Angelina, thought her, in the language of the time, an hysteric, and rather an irritating hysteric. ‘Stop showing off!’ was a constant refrain and Angelina used to mimic her unmercifully. The neighbours too found her tiresome and self-dramatizing, so she went to live with a sympathetic family, the Gianinnis.

Gemma’s mystical experiences multiplied. She would write notes to her confessor and instead of using the postal service leave them in a little shrine dedicated to the Christ Child, from where they would be miraculously collected and delivered by Gabriel.

She became intensely devoted to the passion of Our Lord, hence Daughter of Passion, and in September 1901 she fell into prayer before a large crucifix hanging on the wall. She was overwhelmed with a desire to unite with the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. ‘Let me come to you!’ she said, and the figure came to life and extended a hand towards her. She immediately floated up towards him and kissed the spear wound in his side. Her spiritual biographer, Father Germano Ruoppolo, wrote, ‘Gemma, keeping tight to Him with both arms, drank plentifully out of that divine spring, while remaining with her body as if she rested upon a cloud.’ This makes her, as far as I can establish, the only attested levitator of the twentieth century.

Then, in 1903, she also caught tuberculosis and after enduring agonies on Good Friday died aged twenty-five. One of the nuns looking after her said, ‘We have cared for a good many sick people, but we have never seen anything like this.’

In 2003, the centenary of her death, she appeared to a Palestinian motorist attempting to cross a heavily policed border in Israel, where every car was being stopped. She jumped into his car and they were waved through by the guards. When they got to the other side she said, ‘I am Gemma Galgani,’ and disappeared.

She is the patron saint of paratroopers, pharmacists and those afflicted by migraine.

RC

Female Literary Detectives

The earliest female literary detectives appeared in 1864. First that year was Andrew Forrester’s The Female Detective. ‘Mrs Gladden’ is her name in the seven short stories, but we are aware this is not her true identity, and her character is painted thinly. The book is presented as a sharing of her experiences, after retirement. Her gender and charm allow her to get close to the villains, and she is shrewd at deducing solutions from her observations.

Revelations of a Lady Detective, a book with ten episodes, was published in serial form six months later. Its heroine was a Mrs Paschal – the creation of William Stephens Hayward, a prolific author despite dying when only thirty-five. Hayward gave Mrs Paschal no first name, but took for himself the feminine-sounding pseudonym of ‘Anonyma’.

As was often the case with early female detectives, Mrs Paschal came to her calling through misfortune rather than inclination – she was a widow who hired herself out as a private investigator while also helping the police. Mrs Paschal is a mistress of disguise and relies on a trusty pistol, a Colt. She is shown on the book’s cover smoking a cigarette, with a knowing look in her eyes.

Murder, kidnap and robbery are Mrs Paschal’s beat, and in one of her escapades she survives apparent certain death. Her first readers must have been surprised by her grit, and probably saw such work for a middle-class woman as unladylike: there were no real-life female detectives in the English police force before 1883. Hayward doesn’t invest Mrs Paschal with the cold logic of, say, Sherlock Holmes – he portrays her as stumbling on solutions to the crimes, usually by accident; a reflection on how women were too often viewed back then.

The first female detective to be created by a female author was Loveday Brooke – the invention, in 1893, of Catherine Louisa Pirkis. Brooke’s advantage lay in her unremarkable presence: ‘She was not tall, she was not short; she was not dark, she was not fair; she was neither handsome nor ugly … Her dress was invariably black, and was almost Quaker-like in its neat primness.’ She (again) adopted disguises, to question the targets of her investigation, and worked alongside Ebenezer Dyer, the slightly dim principal of a detective agency.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis wove her animal liberation beliefs into the plot of The Murder at Troyte’s Hill, when Loveday Brooke encounters vivisection in all its grimness.

The late nineteenth century saw the additions of Dorcas Dene – an actress who resorted to detection after her father died and her artist husband lost his sight – and of Amelia Butterworth, America’s first spinster sleuth.

Young female fictional detectives appeared from 1915, when the New York City debutante Violet Strange set about her high-society cases in cosseted style, being driven by her family’s chauffeur.

Sylvia Silence followed, her character the backbone of the magazine Schoolgirls’ Weekly from 1922 to 1924. Silence is presented as her father’s assistant, but he is peripheral to her drive for moral justice and her great inquisitiveness.

The 1920s and 1930s are viewed as the Golden Age of detective fiction, with Nancy Drew one of the most famous figures from that era. Her creator, Edward Stratemeyer, conceived her as: ‘an up-to-date American girl at her best, bright, clever, resourceful and full of energy’. Other possible names for her, before Nancy Drew was settled on, included Diana Dare and Stella Strong. Nancy Drew has never been out of print, and has appeared in 250 books, as well as games, films and TV shows.

The grande dame of female detectives is, of course, Miss Marple, the lynchpin of twelve novels and twenty short stories by Agatha Christie. Like the nineteenth-century female detectives, the elderly spinster from St Mary Mead, an avid knitter, is presented as all but invisible – giving her the opportunity to see and hear things imperceptibly, to be processed by her natural high intelligence.

The spinster sleuth archetype has lost popularity since the 1970s (when Agatha Christie died).

The novelist Alexander McCall Smith chose Precious Ramotswe as the protagonist of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. The setting is Botswana; Precious has been abused and abandoned by her husband, and she – warm, clever and independent, with a reluctant approach to technology – employs only women to do the sleuthing.

The aggressive, outgoing Clarice Starling appeared in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs in 1988. She seems to have been inspired by Jana Monroe, the only woman then serving as an agent in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. Clarice is an all-American hero, described as ‘hardworking, chaste and Lutheran’. Her appeal, amplified by book and film, is believed to have led to an increase in women serving in the FBI: from 10 per cent in the early 1990s to nearly 45 per cent of the workforce in 2020.

CS

Olga of Kyiv

It’s the tenth century, in what is now Ukraine. Queen Olga of Kyiv travels up the treacherous Dnieper river on her way home from a visit to the bustling city of Constantinople, to the south. There, she has just turned down an offer of marriage from Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the Byzantine emperor, who is one of the most powerful men in the northern hemisphere. Olga could turn him down with confidence, as she doesn’t need him: she is the sole ruler of the kingdom of the Rus’ and the head of the burgeoning Kyiv state. The potential alliance formed by their marriage would have strengthened his position but weakened hers.

Olga of Kyiv is a remarkable and unusual character. She came to power in 945, following the gruesome murder of her husband, Grand Prince Igor, at the hands of a Steppe tribe known as the Drevlians. Igor was the son of the legendary Rurik, founder of the Rus’, while she herself may have been of Scandinavian heritage – in the Icelandic sagas she is known as Helga. At Igor’s death, the couple’s son and future heir, Svyatoslav was too young to rule, so Olga took his place and became the regent of his territories. When she first learned of her husband’s death, Olga swore revenge on the Drevlians. Their ruler wanted to marry her now that she was a widow, and Olga used this to her advantage. The Russian Primary Chronicle, a historical source that was compiled sometime between the mid-eleventh and the early twelfth centuries, describes how her revenge was meted out with particular cunning and brutality; although we should probably take the account, by an unknown author, with a pinch of salt.

Olga’s payback was threefold. The first part of her plan involved the proposed marriage: when the Drevlian prince officially asked her to marry him, she agreed. To organize the details, a delegation of the Drevlians arrived in Kyiv by boat, but the moment they arrived, Olga arranged to have them all thrown into a deep pit and buried alive. Before news of this massacre could travel, she requested the noblest of the Drevlians to come and escort her to meet her new husband, as she could not possibly travel on her own. But when the aristocrats arrived in Kyiv, Olga had a surprise in store: inviting them to wash up, she ushered them all into a bathhouse and swiftly locked the door behind them. Then she set fire to the building, killing everyone inside. The third and final part of her plan involved taking out as many of the remaining Drevlian population as she could. She gathered up a large army and headed north to their capital, Iskorosten. There, her unsuspecting fiancé, Prince Mal, prepared a feast for her and her troops, which they accepted. Yet after eating, things turned gruesome as her army slaughtered as many citizens as they could. Those who survived the massacre asked Olga for leniency and offered tribute. Olga agreed and declared that all she wanted was three sparrows from each household, as, she said, she could see the Drevlians had already suffered. The townspeople complied, and when the birds were delivered, Olga had her men tie a piece of thread to each of them along with a piece of sulphur. By nightfall, the birds were released, and made their way back to their nests up in the rafters of the town’s buildings. This led to disaster: the sulphur caused the roofs to catch fire, burning the whole of Iskorosten to the ground. At last, Olga’s revenge was complete.

Strangely, despite this sadistic legacy, Olga is still venerated today as a saint in both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Church. This is because, after her acts of vengeance, she converted to Christianity, the first ruler of the Kievan Rus’ to do so – previously, they had all been pagans. It is possible that it was Constantine, her Byzantine suitor, who converted her, as they clearly spent a lot of time together, as the Primary Chronicle describes. When she returned from Constantinople after turning him down, she brought with her extensive gifts of gold, silver, silks and various vases. When she got home, she received a letter in which the emperor reminded her of a promise she had made him, to send back to him presents of slaves, wax and furs as well as soldiers. Olga declined, saying that she would do so only if he were to spend as much time with her in her territory as she spent on the Bosphorus.

When he came to age, Svyatoslav co-ruled with his mother and the two were on the nexus of several powerful worlds, although her son remained a pagan.

CJ

Philip II and His Spanish Armada

At the back of the Deer Park at Althorp, my family’s home since 1508, lies Sir John’s Wood. At its heart stands a memorial whose words have always intrigued me: ‘This Wood was Planted by Sir John Spencer, Knight … in the Yeare of Our Lord 1589.’ The year is both significant and relevant for, according to family legend, my ancestor planted his oak trees in response to the Spanish Armada, which had sailed to conquer England the previous year. Sir John intended to supply the Navy with timber to counter any similar threat in the future.

Another sixteenth-century man with a vision was Philip II of Spain, for he conceived that Armada invasion – the greatest naval force of its time. Philip saw himself as the champion of Roman Catholicism – ‘the true Faith’ – in the face of significant Protestant encroachments in much of northern Europe.

Although known as ‘Philip the Prudent’, when it came to being the sword arm of the papacy Philip was prepared to take great risks. After his father, the Emperor Charles V, abdicated in 1555, Philip followed him as ‘Lord of the Netherlands’ and set about imposing Roman Catholicism on his subjects in those seventeen provinces. As he once instructed an ambassador to reassure the pope: ‘I do not propose nor desire to be the ruler of heretics’. He initiated what would become known as the Eighty Years War in his Dutch lordship. In 1580 he took the throne of Portugal, and greatly reinforced his naval resources. Five years later, England allied with the Dutch rebels.

Protestantism’s progress in England was a concern to the Spanish king. Henry VIII broke with Rome in the early 1530s when divorcing Catherine of Aragon – Philip’s great-aunt – and Henry’s heir, Edward VI, became England’s first Protestant ruler. When Edward died (probably of tuberculosis), in 1553, aged fifteen, he bequeathed the throne to Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant relative. But Edward’s Catholic half-sister, Mary – who was Catherine of Aragon’s daughter – soon overthrew and replaced Jane.

Philip would marry four times, each with Roman Catholic advantage in mind. His first wife (and first cousin, twice over), Maria Manuela of Portugal, had haemorrhaged to death four days after giving birth. This freed Philip to marry for a second time – in 1554, to another cousin, Mary, the new queen of England. While she had married for love, Philip’s motive was his wish to return England to Roman Catholicism.

After two phantom pregnancies, Mary died childless, five years into her reign. Elizabeth, the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, now became queen. Philip offered Elizabeth marriage – again, with Catholic duty in mind – but she rejected him.

Tensions between England and Spain grew during Elizabeth’s reign as the nations’ ships clashed during the scramble for trade with the New World. Sir Francis Drake was the first English captain to circumnavigate the globe, between 1577 and 1580, when he claimed California for England. On returning to Plymouth his ship, the Golden Hind, was laden with Spanish treasure. In 1585–6 he caused further havoc for the Spaniards in the Caribbean.

Philip intended to despatch his Armada in 1587, hoping to gain England for his creed, and to end what he saw as its piracy. But between April and July that year Drake led a series of successful raids on Philip’s Portuguese coast. The most dramatic was an attack on Cadiz harbour, when he sank twenty ships earmarked for the upcoming invasion. This series of humiliations was seen as a personal affront to Philip and was referred to as the ‘singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’.

Philip planned revenge, and had 30,000 men shipped to Spain from the Spanish Netherlands. After the Marquess of Santa Cruz – Spain’s naval commander – died in February 1588, Philip insisted that the Duke of Medina Sidonia replace him. This despite the duke begging to be spared the honour, feeling himself inadequate to the task.

The combination of Medina Sidonia’s inexperience, the speediness and superior gunnery of English ships and – most importantly – punishing storms, saw the original Armada of 130 vessels reduced to sixty, many of them limping home beyond repair. Philip lost 15,000 men, Elizabeth just a few hundred.

Both sides recognized the storms as pivotal. Philip II took them as a sign that God did not intend him to rule England. He publicly stated, with sanguine humility: ‘God himself is my witness that it is not the hope of gaining new kingdoms that has guided me, but zeal in His service and the desire to glorify the Holy Faith …’

It is worth noting that the last of the original oaks from Sir John Spencer’s wood at Althorp were felled to the benefit of Britain, being cut down for use by the Royal Navy in the Second World War. Sir John’s forward planning had paid dividends for 350 years.

CS

Walled Gardens

My favourite walled garden is fictional. The Secret Garden, the 1911 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is set in Yorkshire, and tells of how a spoiled orphaned girl comes from India to live with her reclusive uncle. A robin leads her – unhealthy and unhappy – to a key, with which she unlocks the door to a neglected walled garden. Here, she learns, tragedy has struck, and this is where redemption now slowly begins, with the returning flowers helping to lift the spirits – and health – of those entering this enchanted enclosed world.

Walled gardens were originally constructed for privacy, and to stop destructive encroachment by rabbits and deer. But, in time, gardeners realized that such spaces could generate microclimates, the ambient temperature in the enclosed areas being raised sufficiently to allow cultivation there of species that would otherwise be unviable. South-facing walls were particularly good at soaking up the sun and extending the growing season. The walls were generally made of brick, being both efficient at retaining heat, and easy to nail into.

The medieval enclosed garden – the hortus conclusus – had religious undertones. It was associated with the Garden of Eden and also served as a symbol of the Virgin Mary. These gardens were often enclosed with hedges, rather than walls. Meanwhile, walled gardens of this period were frequently constructed beneath bedroom windows, with plants laid out in ornamental patterns. These would often become the knot gardens of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

We have a walled garden at Althorp that was constructed in the early 1730s. It sits atop a hill in the park, half-a-mile from the main house, for which it provided an abundance of flowers, fruit and vegetables. The basics needed for such cultivation include manure and other evil-smelling or unsightly supplies. This did not bother the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century members of my family, who had their walled garden close by. But by the start of the eighteenth century it was thought best to move such a mucky and busy workplace a decent distance from the family home. Meanwhile, the head gardener was of such status in the hierarchy at Althorp that he was given a small gem of Palladian architecture for his home.

The Victorian head gardener who lived there, Silas Cole, experimented with his plants, and produced the Spencer sweet pea varietal that is still popular today. He only had a limited supply of seeds to start with, and so was miffed when mice ate several of them before they could be planted. Others were packed off to California, where they prospered in a climate that was superior to any to be found in English walled gardens.

Althorp’s central glasshouse was bulldozed on my grandfather’s instructions in the early 1960s, since he could not afford to maintain it. In his Second World War diary, when too old to fight, but with the gardeners away on active service, he recorded pottering around inside, plucking apricots that grew on untended stems.

We uncovered the remains of Althorp’s glasshouse last year and found much of the subterranean structure intact: you could see where the exotic trees’ roots were planted outside, while the branches, with their delicate leaves and tendrils, were twisted over so they could flourish within, in the heat produced by furnaces stoked by the dozens of gardeners. Only later were hot water pipes introduced for the same task. We even found some old glass bottles of weedkiller – dimpled so even illiterate people could be warned that the contents were deadly.

The largest Georgian walled garden in England is the seven-acre example at Croome Court in Worcestershire. As at Althorp, Croome had hothouses for melons, pineapples, peaches and vines. It has been painstakingly restored to its former glory in the past twenty years, and the five furnaces that stand by the 13ft-high freestanding wall are still fired up on special occasions.

Queen Victoria had a huge walled garden of thirty-one acres at Windsor Castle, which required a regiment of 150 gardeners. The line of hothouses ran for nearly a kilometre and were once described as ‘the finest range of glass in Europe’. Windsor Castle’s walled garden cost £50,000 to build – Victoria sold old kitchen garden land at Kensington Palace in London to help fund it, and mansions were built there instead.

Louis XIV had a twenty-five-acre kitchen garden at Versailles, to provide for his banquets. This took the form of twenty-nine enclosed gardens, which needed substantial drainage owing to Versailles’s marshy soil. The whole was enclosed by a high wall.

Persian gardens from the sixth century BC were similarly laid out behind tall walls. They were often divided into four areas and had complex systems guaranteeing the crucial supply of water. These spaces were meant to represent the pinnacle of achievable beauty: the word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian word pardis – the name for a beautiful garden that lies behind a wall.

CS

The Memorials of Cathays Park, Cardiff

Cardiff, that most Edwardian of cities, has a marvellous suite of memorials in its civic gardens, Cathays Park. Once the gardens for Cardiff Castle, so extravagantly upgraded by William Burges for the 3rd Marquess of Bute, they were bought from him for the purposes of adding dignity to what became the Welsh capital. The 3rd Marquess, an architectural historian of note, imposed conditions for their character and maintenance and they remain not only a civic adornment but a place of national significance. Here on plinths stand great Welshmen preserved in bronze: David Lloyd George looking like a Victorian actor-manager, dressed in a cloak with his arm extended; Viscount Tredegar, ‘Godfrey the Good’, veteran of the Charge of the Light Brigade, who buried the horse he rode there with great ceremony in the gardens of his house near Newport; and Lord Aberdare, Gladstone’s Home Secretary, who reformed the licensing laws to make pubs less rowdy and less accessible.

In Alexandra Gardens, which lie behind City Hall and the Museum of Wales, you will also find the Welsh National War Memorial, by the great twentieth-century church architect Sir Ninian Comper. It is his only secular construction, inspired by the monuments of Hadrian in what is now Tunisia. Surrounded by a lovely colonnade in Portland stone, on a central plinth stands Victory, a bronze male nude with wings holding a sword like a cross, by the sculptor Henry Alfred Pegram, a former assistant to Sir Hamo Thorneycroft (the Gordon of Khartoum statue on Victoria Embankment in London is his) and an advocate for the New Sculpture movement. Around the plinth stand three more male figures, a soldier, a sailor and an airman, holding up wreaths to the prospect of eternity. These were modelled by a sailor, Fred Barker, who was selected for this job following an audition of the crew of two battleships ordered to attend Pegram at the Union Jack Club in Waterloo. Thus an ordinary able seaman, in uniform and in the nude, has become the most admired figure in the park’s bronze pantheon.

This trend, towards celebrating the memory of those less significant in prestige if not achievement, continued as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries offered more dead for remembrance. Instead of giant bronze figures in robes and senatorial poses on plinths, the next generation of memorials are mostly lumps of rock, monoliths, symbols of a different kind of durability, and dedicated to the memory of those whom history would not have been ready to remember, I think, until our own time.

There is a memorial to Welsh veterans of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, mostly miners from the South Wales valleys, thirty-three of whom died in that conflict. On a plaque the words of Dolores Ibárruri, La Pasionara, are recorded: ‘You are the heroic example of democracy’s solidarity and universality. We shall not forget you, and when the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves again – Come back!’ The olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves patchily; the plaque was attacked with acid in 1994 and an attempt was made to split the stone. Acts of indifferent vandalism or an alternative view of history?

These matters are always subject to revision, and the Manic Street Preachers paid tribute to the thirty-three on their 1998 number one single ‘If You Tolerate this Your Children Will be Next’, according to the Guinness Book of World Records the longest title of a number one without brackets.

Not far from the Spanish Civil War memorial in Cathays Park’s Alexandra Gardens stands another monolith, the Thalidomide Memorial. Unveiled in 2016, it commemorates Thalidomiders, people whose lives were impaired as a consequence of the drug prescribed to many pregnant women for morning sickness in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thalidomide was promoted as a wonder drug, efficacious and without harmful side effects, until the children of women who took it early in pregnancy were born with malformed limbs and deformed hearts and a host of impairments that resulted in the death in infancy of around half of them. Adding insult to injury, the drug companies resisted taking responsibility for their actions for years, and it was only after a dogged campaign that the scandal finally broke. It changed the way many countries test and regulate drugs and hold drug companies to account, and eventually secured compensation for the Thalidomiders. The Cardiff memorial came about thanks to that activist spirit, the result of seven years of campaigning led by the artist Rosaleen Moriarty-Simmonds, her husband Stephen and friend Eddie Freeman, all Thalidomide-impaired. They were determined that the story should not be forgotten as Thalidomiders, so visible today, begin to fade to invisibility.

Memorials, designed to be resistant to the passing of time are, of course, timely things themselves. You get a strong sense of this in Cathays Park, with its bronze lawyers and soldiers each year a little more obscure, their campaigns and victories forgotten, turning the heroes of their day into the Ozymandiases of ours.

Not far from the Thalidomide Memorial is another unusual monolith, dedicated to organ donors.

RC

Stealing The Scream

In February 1994, the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, were about to begin when an alarm went off in the National Museum in Oslo. A guard alerted the police but when they arrived only a few minutes later, they found a window smashed and one of the country’s most celebrated and valuable paintings – The Scream by Edvard Munch – gone. When they watched the security footage, they saw that the heist had been embarrassingly simple. In the space of fifty seconds, two men leant a ladder up against the museum wall, broke the window, climbed through and cut the painting down from the wall using wire cutters, then escaped. To make matters even worse, a postcard was discovered with the words ‘Thanks for the poor security’. A few weeks earlier, in a controversial move, the museum had moved the painting from its more secure location to the ground floor, to show it off to the hordes of international visitors descending on the country.

The Scream – which exists in numerous versions – is exceptionally valuable. One version of the painting, a pastel-on-board from 1895, became one of the most expensive pieces of art ever sold. The auction at Sotheby’s in 2012 brought in $120 million.

But this also means that it would be extremely difficult to sell. Nevertheless, the thief tried to do just that. Not too much later, art dealer Einar-Tore Ulving was enlisted in an attempt to fence the artwork to a man who said he worked for the Getty Museum. This was actually an undercover officer from Scotland Yard, who, when agreeing to buy it for $400,000, was taken to a cellar in Åsgårdsstrand, where it was recovered. Ulving was arrested and soon the police ambushed the thief: a man by the name of Pål Enger.

Enger was once a promising professional footballer who turned from petty crimes in his youth to more advanced robberies. Remarkably, this was his second attempt at stealing it. The first time, in 1988, he teamed up with his friend Bjørn Grytdal, who helped him in 1994 as well. That first time, though, they were only partially successful: they used exactly the same method of breaking through a window but miscalculated, meaning that they entered the museum too far away from The Scream. Instead, they landed in front of Munch’s Love and Pain, and decided to take that instead. They got away with it for a while, until Grytdal spilled the beans to a neighbour who was an informer for the police. Love and Pain was found hanging on the wall in Enger’s house and he was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison. It was during this time that he made up his mind to try again.

He had been obsessed with The Scream since he first saw it in school. The expressionist painting, which features a swirling figure with its hands either side of a face, with its mouth wide open in what appears to be a scream, is usually interpreted to represent feelings of fear and anxiety. Enger claimed the painting was a reminder of how his violent stepfather made him feel. Eventually, he was sentenced to six years and three months in prison, along with three of his associates. But in an embarrassing twist, three of their convictions were overturned because the British detectives who had helped catch them had entered Norway under false identities, which was illegal under Norwegian law.

The Scream would be stolen once again ten years later. In the late morning of 22 August 2004, two men wearing masks and carrying a gun walked through the doors of the Munch Museum in Oslo, where the painting then hung. They went up to the artwork, pulled it off the wall – it was only hung with a wire and had no alarm system – and walked out, grabbing Munch’s The Madonna on their way. The culprits were identified early the following year and a number of arrests were made in spring 2005. In May 2006 three of the thieves were convicted of the crime and two were ordered to pay the estimated value of the paintings – 750 million kroner – to the City of Oslo because the paintings had yet to be recovered. Both The Scream and The Madonna turned up again on 31 August 2006, but the details of how have yet to be fully revealed.

Since then, The Scream has remained safe. Three versions – a painting, a drawing and a print – are now exhibited in the brand-new Munch museum in Oslo, and have been given considerably better security than in the 1990s and 2000s, with at least one guard stationed by them at all times. It would take a lot more than a ladder and a smashed window to steal them today.

CJ

The Brazilian Vaccine Revolt

As the twentieth century dawned in Brazil the infrastructure of Rio de Janeiro, a picturesque colonial city of narrow streets and steep hills, began to creak under the strain of a rapidly growing population. There were outbreaks of yellow fever, which killed so many immigrants the city was known as the Foreigner’s Grave. Then came bubonic plague followed by a deadly epidemic of smallpox. President Alves ordered a double programme of reconstruction and public-health measures to mitigate and modernize.

The reconstruction was entrusted to the mayor, Pereira Passos, an engineer by profession. Under his direction roads were widened, necessitating the demolition of buildings in which many families lived crammed into single rooms. Whole slum districts were torn down and the poor who lived there were displaced to the suburbs and beyond, causing a housing crisis and considerable resentment. Also, the port was inadequate to handle the surge in trade after the stabilization of coffee prices. Ocean-going ships were too big for the piers and anchored offshore, which obliged a very complicated, time-consuming and expensive system of transferring passengers and cargo from one vessel to another. There was insufficient warehousing dockside so goods had to be moved by train to railway junctions, causing cabotage issues. The need for modernization was paramount, and Passos was a modernizer, perhaps with insufficient regard for those who were squeezed rather than liberated as a result.

The public-health measures were the responsibility of another modernizer, Oswaldo Cruz, an epidemiologist who ran the General Directorate of Public Health. He sent officials, with the support of the police, to disinfect streets and houses, to which they were granted automatic right of entry. To eradicate rats and the bubonic plague their fleas transmitted, Cruz had powers to oblige landlords to carry out renovations, especially to cellars and yards. These measures too increased pressure on housing. Then, in 1903, he proposed a law to make vaccination against smallpox mandatory. There was a lively debate in which opponents protested the infringement of the rights of the individual, the lack of respect for the modesty of women and girls forced to undress for vaccinators, and even the potential for damage to be done to pots, pans and kitchen utensils, but Cruz and Alves prevailed and in October of that year the law was passed.

More protests followed, formally in parliament and press and informally in outbreaks of disorder, but on 9 November 1904 the newspaper A Notícia published details of a plan to effectively enforce smallpox vaccination: anyone wanting to enrol in school, or apply for a job, or to stay in a hotel, would have to show a certificate of proof. Failure to do so would result not only in services being denied but fines levied. This precipitated a crisis, and students from the Polytechnic School marched to Praça Tiradentes, where there was a confrontation with police cavalry units and a number of arrests made. On the evening of the twelfth there was a large demonstration organized by the League Against Compulsory Vaccination and over the next couple of days disorder broke out in many districts of the city. Trams were overturned, threats made against government ministers and shots fired; the houses of Passos and Cruz had to be surrounded by guards. The marines were called in and there was a fierce battle between protestors and the military on Rua Regente Feijó. The Petrópolis ferry was attacked by a crowd 2,000 strong, though no harm was done to life and limb. That came on 14 November, when a group of Florianist soldiers, admirers of the Iron Marshal and former president Floriano Peixoto, attempted a coup. The Florianist forces clashed with government troops near the Catete Palace but because the street lamps had been smashed nobody could see what they were doing and in the end everyone ran away. President Alves was advised to embark a warship in the harbour, but he declined and declared a state of emergency. Eventually order was restored, with thirty dead, a hundred injured and a thousand arrested – but Alves also suspended the vaccination programme.

Not for long; a smallpox epidemic tore into the city in 1908, killing around 7,000, and everyone flocked to Cruz’s vaccination hubs. He went from being a figure of hate to a popular hero, granted his own Institute (which still exists) and awarded a gold medal by the 14th International Congress on Hygiene and Demography in Berlin in 1907.

He went on to eradicate yellow fever in the city of Belém (where, incidentally, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was invented by Hélio Gracie), and thanks to him construction was completed of the Madeira–Mamoré railway, known as the Devil’s Railroad on account of the thousands of navvies who died of disease during its construction.

Cruz died aged forty-four of kidney failure and is commemorated on the country’s 50 cruzados banknote.

RC

Trolls

In Scandinavia, trolls go all the way back to Norse mythology and written sources, where they are associated with other supernatural beings like Jötunns and Risi, most of which are evil or hostile. The word ‘troll’ itself has an old Norse origin, meaning ‘giant being not of the human race, evil spirit, monster’. The oldest source giving us a description is from the Prose Edda, a thirteenth-century Icelandic text, detailing an encounter between a ninth-century skald (poet) and a troll woman who describes herself as follows: ‘Trolls call me moon of the dwelling-Rungnir, giant’s wealth-sucker, storm-sun’s bale, seeress’s friendly companion, guardian of corpse-fjord, swallower of heaven wheel; what is a troll other than that?’ Unfortunately, her explanation makes little sense to us. Old Norse trolls could be both male and female (although a surprisingly large number are troll-women) and were, as in later times, associated with disorder, chaos and the non-human. Moving into the Middle Ages, Norwegian law codes even forbade – with severe punishment – calling a man a troll or a witch.

The troll later played a significant role in Scandinavian folklore. Now, they took on many different forms but importantly, they were associated with nature and were beings that could typically be found embedded in the landscape. Although most troll encounters were negative, there were also legends recorded by folklorists of kind trolls, who would even lend humans beer and other items. More severely, trolls would often kidnap humans or otherwise engage in sabotage and destruction. Most trolls could only come out at night and, especially in Iceland, they would turn to stone if caught in daylight.

Trolls remained almost exclusively a Nordic concept until the nineteenth century but were known of in Shetland and the Orkneys since the Viking Age. There, the creatures are known as ‘trows’. Sometime around 1200 a poet from the Orkneys wrote the following lines: ‘All exaggerations seem short; not much is worse than trolls’. Orcadian trolls dwelled in earthen mounds, known as howes or knowes, which were sumptuously decorated inside and where they would hold frequent parties. The stories remained in local folklore and legends there, but in English the use of the word ‘troll’ became popularized by antiquarians only in the nineteenth century. The key to the change was a set of fairy tales recorded in the 1840s by the Norwegian duo Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. In 1859, these Popular Tales from the Norse were translated into English and knowledge of trolls quickly spread beyond Scandinavia. The most famous of these is the troll that lives under a bridge and threatens the Three Billy Goats Gruff who try to pass to get to their pasture on the other side. The collection became hugely popular with Victorian readers, who now also had a visual description of what a troll really looked like: ugly, with eyes as large as saucers and a nose as long as a poker. Hans Christian Andersen, the prolific Danish author who wrote down some of the world’s most famous fairy tales like ‘The Princess and the Pea’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, is the origin of another famous troll: in his tale ‘The Elfin Mound’, he introduces an old troll living in the Dovre mountains, whom Henrik Ibsen would later use as a key character in the play Peer Gynt. The King of the Trolls – who is also the titular character in Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, commissioned for the play – captures the protagonist Peer and tries to get him to marry his daughter. This would turn Peer into a troll but he refuses, as he is already in love with a girl he met and wanted to marry back home. Andersen’s troll, however, is quite different from the bridge-dweller: he is described as a king who wears a crown of icicles and polished pine cones and dresses in furs.

In modern popular culture, the troll has taken many different guises. Online, the practice of trolling means to intentionally antagonize someone by posting comments that are disruptive, offensive or inflammatory. The word has been used in this way since at least the 1980s and may be a combination of the fairy-tale troll and the verb to troll, which means to fish by trailing a lure or baited hook from a moving boat.

The most famous recent iteration is perhaps the troll doll, the deliberately ugly plastic toys with brightly coloured, up-combed hair. The figures originated in Denmark in the 1950s, created by Thomas Dam, a baker who needed to find a new job after his local flour mill shut down. Dam created and sold curious wooden figurines and was eventually commissioned to create a Santa Claus sculpture and a window display for a Swedish department store, which led him to invent an early version of the troll doll. By 1962 his trolls were mass-produced and an international hit, with the US distributors encouraging children to rub the doll’s hair for good luck; something you would certainly not try if you encountered one in the ninth century.

CJ

Egyptian Animal Mummies

Anyone with a beloved pet will, at some point, have to deal with the thorny problem of what to do with its remains once it has passed away. This is not a new issue. There are prehistoric burials from across the world where a human has been accompanied by what must have been a beloved pet, presumably to be together in the afterlife. But the ancient Egyptians took the issue of dead animals very seriously.

In 2021, archaeologists discovered what may be the world’s oldest pet cemetery in ancient Egypt. During excavations at the outskirts of Berenice, an Egyptian port on the Red Sea, they kept finding animal skeletons and soon realized they had been placed there deliberately. Eventually, the excavations revealed a total of 585 animals: 536 cats, 32 dogs, 15 monkeys, a fox and a falcon. The remains all dated to Egypt’s early Roman period, in the first and second centuries AD. It was clear that the animals were buried with care as some were placed in makeshift coffins. Others had evidently been pets as many of the cats were buried with collars made of iron or even beaded necklaces, some of precious and expensive materials.

The history of burying pets in Egypt, however, goes back much further, and animals were frequently mummified and interred in ordinary tombs and cemeteries. Animal mummies were created for several different purposes, sharing how they also serve different functions in life. In a few cases, the mummies were included in tombs not as companions but as food: Tutankhamun was buried with over forty food mummies to feed him in the afterlife. Food mummies are usually easy to spot because they are only parts of animals, like a joint of beef, or birds that have been prepared for roasting. But when animals were mummified completely it seems more obvious they may have been pets. Tombs carry paintings of Egyptians with their pets alongside them, occasionally even with the animal’s names carved above their image. The earliest known such dog is named Abutiu, who was the guard dog of a king and was interred in his own special tomb. He was also given a coffin as well as fine linen and incense. Elsewhere in the Valley of the Kings, two tombs contain several mummies of baboons, all having had their canines removed to make sure they would not harm their owners.

Great care was taken in the animal-mummification process, which was very similar to that carried out on humans, including the addition of amulets placed within the linen wrappings.

It is hard to say for certain whether the animals buried in Egypt were truly pets, or whether they were venerated as gods, because throughout history animal worship was practised in a large number of ancient Egyptian religious cults. These typically focused on one particular species within which it was believed that the spirit of a god resided. Such animals were therefore worshipped both when alive and after death. The best-known of these cults were the bull cults, some of which date back at least to the First Dynasty (c.3000–2800 BC). Other sacred animal cults included the ram gods Banebdjedet and Khnum, as well as several sacred crocodiles, and even mummified lions. Naturally, none of these species is likely to have been kept as pets. Cats, however, may have been somewhere in between: family pets but also magical creatures linked to the gods. The deity Bastet, for instance, had the power to turn herself into a cat.

The final and most common category of animal mummies numbers in the millions. These are usually referred to as votive mummies and may have been placed in tombs dedicated to a particular god. Somehow – we don’t know how, exactly – they were associated with the deities, one suggestion being that they lived alongside humans within sacred precincts. But there is also evidence suggesting the animals were bred specifically for this purpose. At Saqqara, it is thought that over 10,000 birds were interred annually. It seems that pilgrims to temple sites could buy the animals when they got there, for them to be killed and mummified as offerings to the relevant god. Modern analysis has shown this must have been a profitable business because there were even fakes. This was especially the case with mummies meant to be hawks, the bird that represented Horus, the son of Osiris. The mummy looked like a hawk externally, but contained the remains of other birds either completely or in part, and in one case even those of a giant musk shrew. Birds of prey would have been tricky to breed in captivity or even to trap, so it is easy to understand why shortcuts may have been taken. The question is whether the unwitting purchaser or the dishonest embalmer got the blame of an angry, deceived god.

CJ

Signet Rings

Signet rings are closely related to seals, sharing a common purpose. They are both tools for proving unique identity, with the signet ring being (in the truest sense) the ‘to-hand’ version of such a device. In time, the signet ring would blossom from functionality into a piece of conspicuous jewellery.

The pressing of a unique design on the seal or signet ring into clay or wax demonstrated the wearer’s full support for the contents of the document or tablet presented, whether it was personal or commercial. Especially in times when literacy was rare, sealing was a visual, tactile way of underpinning a communication or transaction with the binding weight of a gentleman’s word.

The earliest stamp seals appear in the sixth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia. In the third and second millennia BC we find cylinder seals, which could be rolled over clay to deliver the distinctive design on their imprint – whether on doors, containers, tablets, or vessels. Some of these employed symbols of humans and animals. The best I have seen shows the outline of a bull.

In the second chapter of the Old Testament book of Haggai, which records events in 520 BC, the author references the reliability and the individuality of the signet ring: ‘In that day … I will take you, Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel … and will make you like a signet ring; for I have chosen you,’ says the Lord of Hosts.

Ancient signet rings have been discovered in Egypt, and in pre-Hispanic South America. An eleven- or twelve-hundred-year-old ring found in the Andean Tiwanaku civilization – the illiterate forerunner of South American society, which lasted from 500 to 1000 AD – seems to have been used for communication that perhaps related to trade in the area.

‘Signet’ stems from the medieval Latin for ‘small seal’, and also derives from signum, meaning ‘sign’. The word ‘signature’ comes from signaturum, which is translated as ‘something about to be sealed or marked’. The trustworthiness of a signet ring’s stamp is still recalled in the expression ‘seal of approval’. We also refer to somebody lending their ‘imprimatur’ as the ultimate form of authentication.

After Edward II became king of England in 1307, he insisted that documents sent out in his name required an impression from his royal signet. That has been the case ever since.

The coats of arms that often adorn an ancient signet ring are symbols of distinguished lineage, for the few who had the right to coats of arms. Such family jewellery was passed down with care from father to son as a sign of importance.

Now, anyone can wear a signet ring. Some do so because they see the look as stylish. Many signet rings are produced today without their design being in relief, so there is no intention that they will be used for their original purpose. They are comforting to the nostalgic and reassuring to the snobbish. Tatler magazine recently ran an article that read almost as an ode to the signet ring.

Famous twentieth-century wearers of signet rings include Sir Winston Churchill: his full surname was Spencer-Churchill, and the square front of his signet ring bore both the Spencer griffin and the Churchill lion.

The signet ring became popular in the United States after the Second World War, when new wealth spread, and kings of style led the way: Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen were both famous wearers of signet rings. In England, Michael Caine still is.

The much-twirled signet ring on King Charles III’s finger is 175 years old and was given to him by the late Queen Elizabeth II when she invested him as Prince of Wales in 1969. On it is written ‘Ich dien’ – I serve. Kate, the current Princess of Wales, wears a signet ring with the Middleton coat of arms on it. This was also given to her by the late Queen, in 2011, before her marriage.

Signet rings have also appeared in fiction. SPECTRE rings have adorned the hands of several of James Bond’s adversaries – in From Russia with Love (1963), Thunderball (1965) and You Only Live Twice (1967), before resurfacing (during Daniel Craig’s time as Bond) in Spectre in 2015. The Green Lantern’s version is called a Power Ring, with a lantern carved on it, symbolizing the power of light to dispel darkness.

Signet rings remain particularly popular in Jamaica, as a hangover from the island’s 300-year history as a British colony.

Different nationalities wear signet rings on different fingers: in Britain, it is normally seen on the little (‘pinkie’) finger of their less dominant hand, or perhaps alongside their wedding ring; the French prefer the right finger of their left hand; Americans often wear them on the middle finger; and the Swiss place theirs on the right finger of their right hand.

CS

The Assassination of George Villiers at Portsmouth

Not far from the cathedral, just past the Duke of Buckingham pub in Old Portsmouth’s High Street, you will see on the opposite side an interesting building, architecturally complicated, now a private house, but in the seventeenth century the Greyhound Inn (sometimes given as Ye Spotted Dogge). Here, George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, was assassinated by John Felton in 1628.

Villiers’ strawberry leaves were recently acquired. He rose vertiginously from the minor gentry of Leicestershire to duke, chief adviser to the king and Lord Admiral, a rise that had much to do with his extraordinary good looks. The Bishop of Gloucester thought him the hottest man in England, and he caught the eye of the king, James I, when they met hunting at Apethorpe in Northamptonshire. Enemies of the king’s then favourite, the Earl of Somerset, saw a chance to displace him at court and they kitted out Villiers in gorgeous clothes and invited him to masques attended by His Majesty, who was so enchanted by his wonderful dancing he fell in love with him and called him ‘my sweet child and wife’. With characteristically fine footwork, Villiers went from Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Duke of Buckingham in only eight years. He also married the richest woman in England, Lady Katherine Manners, in spite of the king at first denying permission.

Then King James died – always tricky for an overpromoted favourite, and especially one who had become very active in state affairs – but Villiers had taught the Prince of Wales, now Charles I, how to dance and he was the only courtier to retain his position when the regime changed.

Cutting a fine figure on the dance floor is not necessarily a transferable skill where statecraft is required, and after a number of blundering interventions in the long-running battle between Catholics and Protestants in France, Villiers so alienated Parliament that it tried twice to impeach him. He became extremely unpopular, suspected of crypto-Catholicism, corruption and effeminacy. His doctor, John Lambe, was suspected of exerting a sinister influence over him and was attacked and killed by a mob.

In the summer of 1628 Villiers was called away to Portsmouth on navy business and lodged at the Greyhound. After breakfast on the morning of 23 August he encountered one John Felton. Felton was a soldier, a veteran of several of Villiers’ fruitless campaigns, but had been passed over for promotion and unpaid. He thought the duke sordid, decadent and unpatriotic. When he saw Villiers he produced a dagger and stabbed him. Villiers staggered towards him, shouted ‘Villain!’ and expired. He was thirty-five.

Felton surrendered without offering any resistance and was taken into custody. A note was found sewn into his hat in which he claimed sole responsibility for the murder (it sold at auction in 2016 for £450), but the Privy Council signed a torture warrant to have him racked in the belief he had accomplices. A judge denied their request on the grounds that it was contrary to English law. It was the last time such a warrant was ever issued.

Felton was acclaimed as a hero by the public, poems in his praise were circulated, his manly virtues contrasted to the vices of his victim. The son of the High Master of St Paul’s was heard to raise a toast to him and fined £2,000 and the forfeiture of his ears (the sentence was commuted); but for Felton the king could not be moved to mercy and he was hanged at Tyburn on 29 November. His body was returned to Portsmouth and hung in chains not far from the scene of the crime, but to the chagrin of the authorities it was venerated by crowds.

The murder weapon passed into the possession of the Earls of Derby when the 1st Earl married Villiers’ sister. It was displayed at their house, Newnham Paddox in Warwickshire, until it was demolished in 1952 following extensive damage caused by burst pipes, and insufficient funds to repair it caused by death duties. However, in the 1980s another dagger thought to be the murder weapon, only with a different provenance, was acquired at auction by the then owner of the Greyhound Inn in Portsmouth. It is now a hotel, Ye Spotted Dogge, and the dagger is displayed there.

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was buried in a splendid tomb at Westminster Abbey. Attended by black marble sculptures of Mars and Neptune, in acknowledgement of his career as soldier and sailor, the duke’s bronze-gilt effigy, dressed in armour and ermine, lies next to his wife’s, the Enigma of the World, according to a Latin inscription.

The Duke’s London mansion, York House, situated on the Strand, was sold by his son on the condition that the family’s name and estates are remembered in any future development. For this reason Heaven, the nightclub, where many a handsome young man has enchanted another with dance, is situated in Villiers Street.

RC

Doubly Thankful Villages

Step with me, if you will, to the uplands of north Herefordshire. I always find this a ravishingly beautiful but melancholy part of England because I love so much the poetry of A. E. Housman, whose heart-piercing verses about soldiers who went out from those blue remembered hills to war and did not return throb in my memory.

There is a corrective to this, and you will find it at the parish church of St Mary the Virgin in Middleton-on-the-Hill, which is situated between Leominster and Ludlow, not far from the border with Worcestershire.

It is one of a handful of Doubly Thankful villages in Britain. In the churchyard you will see why. Standing among its graves is the war memorial, a striking and atypical structure. Most war memorials are surmounted with a cross or a sword or both – among the exceptions are Burton Latimer near Kettering, where it is St George dressed for battle, and at Hyde Park Corner the naked and shapely bottom of David, viewed from Park Lane, commemorates the dead of the Machine Gun Corps – but at Middleton a stone column supports instead a lantern. Its inscription is even more unusual because it lists no names. ‘A thank offering to Almighty God’, it says, ‘At evening time it shall be light for the safe return of all the men from this parish who fought in the Great War 1914–1918 and 1939–1945’.

There are no names inscribed because no one from Middleton who fought in either the First World War or the Second lost their lives, making the village Doubly Thankful. There are fifty-three Thankful villages that lost no one in the first war, but only thirteen that share Middleton’s distinction. These figures are subject to revision, however, partly because the numbers of combatants are not fully accounted for, and partly because a Thankful village, surrounded by less fortunate communities, may not have wanted to be known as such.

The designation Thankful village (Pentrefi diolchgar in Welsh) was popularized by Arthur Mee, creator of the very popular Children’s Encyclopedia and Children’s Newspaper (in spite of this, and being a father himself, he said he had no particular affinity with, or interest in, children). In 1936, for adults, he wrote Enchanted Land, an introductory volume to his popular county guides The King’s England, hailed as a modern Domesday Book and for which his researchers travelled about half a million miles.

After the Second World War some of the Thankful villages became Doubly Thankful, among them the misleadingly named Upper Slaughter in the Cotswolds, which has no war memorial at all.

A Doubly Thankful village that does, of a unique kind, may be visited if you should take a motor-tour of the East Riding of Yorkshire and visit Catwick on the A1035 between Leven and Seaton. Catwick remembers those who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for King and Country, but were not obliged to, in a most unusual way. In the first war the village blacksmith was a Mr Hugill, who had a horseshoe nailed to his doorpost, the symbol of his trade, like three golden balls for a pawnbroker, or blood and bandages for a barber. For each of the thirty men who went to war he nailed a coin next to it – pennies, ha’pennies, farthings – perhaps the association of horseshoes with good luck played a part? He literally counted them all out and counted them all in. They all returned, one minus an arm, so Mr Hugill marked that by cutting a notch into the relevant coin.

Three decades later and another generation of young men went to war, another thirty each marked by a coin nailed round the horseshoe, and again thirty returned.

The horseshoe and coins are now preserved on a board in the care of Mr Hugill’s grandson, but it is not on display, for he thinks it might be misunderstood as an effort to glorify war. You do not need to lose two generations of your neighbours to war to wish to avoid that.

A million British lives were lost in the First World War alone, and in Scotland, where the losses to its regiments were particularly heavy, there are no Thankful villages recorded, let alone Doubly Thankful. There are only twelve Thankful in France, which suffered higher casualty rates in both world wars than Britain, and no Doubly Thankful; but there is one Quintuply Thankful, Thierville in Normandy, which sent men to fight in the Algerian War, the First Indochina War, the Second World War, the First World War and the Franco-Prussian War. All returned safely.

RC

Trepanning

For four years in the late 1960s Amanda Feilding – a glamorous English art student in her mid-twenties – tried to persuade surgeons to drill a hole into her healthy head. An enthusiastic consumer of hallucinogenic drugs, she hoped this would open up her brain’s consciousness.

Turned away by every single doctor, she decided to do it herself. Feilding bought a pair of drills, a bath cap and plenty of bandages, and recorded the operation in a short film called Heartbeat in the Brain. She controlled the drilling with a foot pump, stayed calm when huge drops of blood splodged onto her smock, then mopped up her wound, popped on a turban, and went to a party.fn1

Feilding had performed a trepanation on herself – the earliest form of surgery that we know of, dating back at least 7,000 years to Neolithic times. A fifty-year-old man from that time was trepanned, and it is evident from his skull – unearthed in northern France, in the late 1990s – that he lived long enough for the wounds to part-heal before his death.

The term ‘trepanning’ is derived from the Greek word trypanon, ‘to bore’. In primitive times, it was often achieved with stone or shell implements. Hippocrates writes approvingly, in the fifth century BC, of the procedure in On Wounds in the Head – mainly because he believed that blood, like water, could spoil, and so it was imperative to drain it away before it turned into pus. The Hippocratic writer did recommend that the surgeon undertaking the trepanning must ‘plunge [his instrument] into cold water to avoid heating the bone’. By the second century BC, Greeks looked to trepanning for the cure of epilepsy and as a way of letting out the ‘evil air’. Many cultures seem to have seen it as a way of releasing malevolent forces from round the brain.

A thousand years later Roger of Parma hailed it as a treatment for ‘mania or melancholy’, that could ‘permit the noxious material to exhale to the outside’. Its performance was shown in medieval art, most notably in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting Cutting the Stone, which is also known as The Cure of Folly.

From the Renaissance onwards, when guns and cannon were increasingly used in battle, trepanning was used to treat penetrating head wounds and depressed fractures. In the late seventeenth century, the great Royalist warrior Prince Rupert of the Rhine undertook two such operations, to tackle chronic wounds received in battle.

Trepanation remained popular until the mid-nineteenth century. Hospitals became more common then, but the often-putrid conditions in these crowded settings lowered survival rates for such invasive operations from above 50 per cent to just 10 per cent. It became the last resort.

Trepanning was a popular procedure with Cornish miners in the eighteenth century. Many of the surgeons there were trained by Percival Pott, a keen believer in trepanning, and many of them kept boxes of extracted bits of bones as souvenirs. Trepanning started to die out in Cornwall in the 1870s, when mining reforms and better head protection led to fewer serious skull injuries.

Trepanning evolved around the globe, with styles varying locally. Skulls found in Africa, Peru, Israel and France show intersecting rectangular incisions, performed with obsidian, flint and other hard stone implements, before metal knives came into being.

In Renaissance Italy the skull was worked on with a flint, but with a scraping technique. The Gusii people of the Kisii District of western Kenya still perform a scraping form of trepanation, skilled practitioners employing a hooked knife.

It has always been seen as a startling proposition. A historical novel written in the fourteenth century relates how the Later Han warrior prince Cao Cao was suffering from a terrible headache. The eminent physician Hua Tuo said medicine was no good, and air and fluids had to be released: ‘After general anaesthesia, I will open your skull with a cleaver and remove the excess matter.’ Cao Cao replied: ‘Are you trying to kill me?’ and Hua Tuo was imprisoned and interrogated, and quickly died from his rough treatment.

Paul McCartney has recalled how, in the 1960s, John Lennon tried to persuade him and his wife Linda to try trepanning with him. ‘John was a kooky cat,’ Paul recalled. ‘We’d all read about it. The ancient art of trepanning, which lent a little bit of validity to it because ancient must be good.’ Paul was firm in his reply: ‘And I wouldn’t go so far as to say [to John], “You’re fucking crazy,” because I didn’t need to say that. But, no, I’m not gonna trepan, thank you very much. It’s just not something I would like to do.’ McCartney’s refusal to try it stopped Lennon from giving it a go.

CS

Rongorongo

Few places on earth have so frequently been described as ‘enigmatic’ and ‘mysterious’ as Rapa Nui, the island named by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen as Easter Island. Yet the so-called mysteries this usually refers to – how and why the island’s statues were built and moved, and what happened to the island’s population, which practically vanished – are not actually mysteries at all. The latter, for instance, can be easily explained through eternal slave raids and decimating introduced diseases. But what really does remain as a mystery is what is written in its unique script, Rongorongo, now surviving only on twenty-seven wooden objects, mostly tablets. The script, which consists of long lines of pictorial signs, has never been deciphered and the information the objects convey is completely unknown. More importantly, until very recently it has been unclear how old the writing system is: did it originate on the island before or after contact with the West? If the former, this could make it a completely independent invention.

Rapa Nui is a tiny, remote volcanic island around 3,800km from the coast of Chile. It was settled sometime in the twelfth or early thirteenth century, and its population, the Rapanui, seemed to live relatively stably until the arrival of European seafarers in the eighteenth century. The external contact would turn out to have disastrous effects for the islanders, who were enslaved and in many cases forcibly removed from the island. This may have been the reason why, when Westerners began to show an interest in the script, there was nobody left to decipher it. The tablets ceased to be made in the 1860s.

Like so many other undeciphered languages, many have tried to connect it to other scripts. One of the earliest to make such claims for Rongorongo was a Hungarian engineer living in Paris, Guillaume de Hevesy. In 1932, de Hevesy claimed he could show, by pointing out similarities in several of the glyphs, a direct link with the script of the Indus Valley civilization, which had just been discovered. Incredulously, French scholars, and subsequently the press, believed him: reports followed in highly esteemed British publications. This was despite the fact that the two scripts were separated by around 3,500 years and around 21,000km. The debates around the script’s origins were so intense that a Franco-Belgic expedition was launched to the Pacific to try to resolve it. Eventually, most agreed that de Hevesy was wrong.

Nobody has ever successfully managed to work out where the script originated. It is likely that the symbols represent a Polynesian language related to modern Rapanui. There is an oral tradition on the island, first told to incoming missionaries and anthropologists, that the script arrived from elsewhere in Polynesia, with the island’s first settler, the legendary Hotu Matu’a. When he arrived, he allegedly brought with him a total of sixty-seven tablets from his homeland, and those that remained were linked to these. Yet Hotu Matu’a remains mythical and, crucially, nothing that even vaguely resembles the script has been found on any other Polynesian island. The only genuine examples of something similar are a small number of petroglyphs, rock carvings, on Rapa Nui itself, including several on cave walls.

When Roggeveen and, later, Spanish ships arrived on the island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they reported that no evidence of writing could be found. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the first attempts to understand Rongorongo were made. The then bishop of Tahiti, Florentin-Etienne ‘Tepano’ Jaussen, was sent four tablets by missionaries and was curious to understand their meaning. He enlisted a Rapanui labourer, Metoro Tau’a Ure, to read them out loud while Jaussen faithfully took down the sounds he heard phonetically. Unfortunately, when asked what it meant, Metoro was unable to help, responding only that he read what the priests used to, without understanding what they said. We still don’t know if the sounds he uttered were real or made up. Later decipherers have tried both with and without Jaussen’s notes to make more sense of the glyphs, but to date nobody has had any luck. There is even disagreement over what the symbols really are: are they logosyllables – characters representing words – or merely mnemonic devices? Nevertheless, the symbols have fascinated the world and inspired the painter Paul Gauguin to use them in the background of a portrait of his Tongan lover.

While we may never understand their meaning, we have recently had some success in understanding the origin of the script: new radiocarbon dates taken of the extant tablets, to test if they were made before or after European contact, showed that one of the tablets dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. This could mean that Rongorongo was, in fact, independently invented – possibly the latest invention of writing in human history.

CJ

Lancashire Dialect Writers

Rochdale has long been the Athens of Lancashire. It is not often noted that Byron was Lord Byron of Rochdale, although his association with the town was not close; among others who were born or lived there are John Peel, Gracie Fields, Nicholas Blincoe and Bill Oddie. And if the Lancashire dialect writers of the nineteenth century could be said to have a home town, it would be here. They are commemorated with a red granite memorial in Broadfield Park, among them Edwin Waugh, the Burns of Lancashire.

Waugh was born there in 1817 in Toad Lane, the son of a shoemaker. He became a journeyman printer and a voracious reader, eventually moving to Manchester, where he was appointed assistant secretary to the Lancashire Public School Association. He struggled with a difficult marriage and an addiction to snuff, but life took a turn for the better when he returned to Rochdale and separated from his wife. He made his name writing accounts of his visits to the Lancashire countryside in the dialect of those parts, published in the Manchester Examiner. His poems and songs are perhaps best known, first among Them ‘Come Whoam to Thi Childer An’ Me’, written in 1856 in the Clarence Hotel in Manchester.

Aw’ve just mended th’ foire wi’ a cob;

Owd Swaddle has brought thi new shoon;

There’s some nice bacon-collops o’ th’ hob,

An’ a quart o’ ale-posset i’ th’ oon;

Aw’ve brought thi top-cwot, doesta know,

For th’ rain’s comin’ deawn very dree;

An’ th’ har-stone’s as white as new snow;

Come whoam to thi childer an’ me.

This, being freely translated by me, gives the following:

I have just fuelled the fire with a lump of coal

New shoes have been provided for you by an intimate.

A dish of tasty bacon is cooking on the stove

And a large pudding made with beer is in the oven.

Are you aware that I have obtained an overcoat?

The rainfall is relentless,

And the hearth is white and pristine.

Come home to your children and me.

As you can tell, it is far more effective in dialect than in everyday English. Effective and affecting, thousands were sold in penny broadsheet form, and the philanthropist Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts liked its themes of the sacredness of family life and the virtues of temperance so much she bought 20,000 copies to distribute gratis. It was set to music by Prospero Delavanti, whose son Cyril later played Ted in The Killing of Sister George.

Waugh greatly admired another writer in Lancashire dialect, Margaret Rebecca Lahee, who arrived in Rochdale from Ireland in the 1850s to learn dressmaking but became a writer instead. At first she published under her initials MRL, to disguise that she was first a woman and second Irish, but her first novel, Owd Neddy Fitton’s Visit to the Earl o’ Derby, based on the true story of a man who refused to pay a swingeing rent rise, was such a success – Waugh thought it the best dialect story of all – she thereafter went by her real name. Her achievement is all the more remarkable because she was not Lancastrian by birth. She lived in Rochdale for thirty years with Susannah Rothwell Wild and they were buried in the same grave. Lahee asked for an inscription to be chiselled into the headstone, They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were undivided, but this was not permitted.

Also especially notable are Allen Clarke, who published as Teddy Ashton, whose indictment of the terrible conditions in Lancashire’s cotton mills so impressed Leo Tolstoy that he had them translated into Russian; John Trafford Clegg, known as The Owd Weighver, who was also choirmaster and organist at St Mary’s Church at Wardleworth before tuberculosis obliged him to move to Bournemouth, where he wrote an acclaimed novel, David’s Loom, and died aged thirty-eight; and Oliver Ormerod, a Methodist tanner, editor of the radical Rochdale Spectator and author of Ful, Tru, un Pertikler Okeawnt, about a Lancashire lad at the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The monument in Broadfield Park was erected in 1896 ‘in grateful memory of our Rochdale writers of the Lancashire dialect, who have preserved for our children in verse and prose that will not die, the strength and tenderness, the gravity and humours, of the folk of our day in the tongue and talk of the people’.

A number of the commemorative bronze plaques have been stolen in recent years, but have been replaced thanks to the generosity and skill of local artist Tony Smart.

RC

Guard Dogs

When, half a lifetime ago, I lived for five years in South Africa, I followed my neighbours’ lead in protecting my family with high walls, electric wire and a myriad of infra-red beams.

My final line of defence was canine: Cybill and Delia, pet Rhodesian Ridgebacks possessed of the fearlessness of a breed once used to hunt lions. Their innate loyalty to their pack – my young children and me – meant I could sleep better at night.

South Africa having such a terrible crime rate, domestic guard dogs were everywhere.

Once, when collecting my children from a birthday party, I was unconcerned when two Great Danes approached me. I expected them to sniff me before moving on. But they instead seized my limbs and pulled me down to the ground. I was saved from a mauling only by the timely arrival of their owners. I had always viewed Great Danes – the so-called ‘Apollo of Dogs’ – as gentle giants. But this massive breed – they generally weigh 80kg and stand a metre tall – has been around for 400 years. They were bred to guard.

If I had spotted a brace of Boerboels approaching me that day, I would have been less nonchalant. This traditional South African guard dog, of immense power, has an air of focused menace that screams danger. Indeed, the Boerboel is banned in many countries, including France and Singapore, and is marked down as ‘an especially dangerous breed’ in Russia.

Humans have probably harnessed dogs’ protective aggression since they first domesticated canines 15,000 years ago. Ancient cultures used ‘war dogs’ in battle. These were trained to attack, and often proved particularly effective against enemy cavalry. In 600 BC Alyattes of Lydia set packs of war dogs against the Cimmerian soldiers of what is now south Russia. There are also records of Magnesian warriors (from modern day Turkey) attacking the infantry at Ephesus with terrifying dogs that broke the foot soldiers’ defensive line. Such fierce animals were useful off the battlefield, as guard dogs.

The Cane Corso is a breed of mastiff descended from Molossian war dogs, which were bred for combat in Greece. They were adopted by ancient Romans as four-legged guards. Cane corso is the Latin for ‘protector dog’ and, with their imposing muscularity and serious air, they make natural bodyguards. Like many breeds adept at protecting humans, they need firm handling, as well as plenty of socialization and exercise from puppyhood to stop them becoming a menace.

Around the world, armies and prison or police forces rely on guard dogs for a range of critical tasks, including patrolling and crowd control.

The German Shepherd is, of course, one of the most widely used guard dog breeds, being known for its intelligence, loyalty and versatility. Its keen sense of smell also makes it ideal for tracking down suspects, or for detecting narcotics or explosives.

Similar breeds from surrounding countries – Belgian Malinois, Dutch Shepherds and Belgian Tervuren – have many of the qualities, and even the appearance, of the German Shepherd. They have the same agility, intelligence and strong work ethic, as well as boundless energy and courage.

Dobermanns, also known as Dobermann Pinschers, are famous for their loyalty and protective instincts. They were bred with these qualities in mind, in the late nineteenth century, by Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann, a tax collector from central Germany who had access to various breeds because he controlled a dog pound. The ancestors of the Dobermann are believed to include the Manchester terrier, the Great Dane, the German pinscher, the Weimaraner and the Rottweiler – the latter a robust breed that came to Germany as cattle drovers and guards of the ancient Romans.

The most poignant tale about a guard dog has to be that of Gelert, who belonged to Llywelyn the Great, a thirteenth-century Welsh prince. Upon his return from a hunt, Llywelyn was greeted by a horrifying sight: Gelert was splattered with blood, and Llywelyn’s infant son’s cradle lay overturned. Assuming the worst, Llywelyn drew his sword and, in a fit of rage and grief, killed Gelert.

Just then, Llywelyn heard the cries of his son coming from beneath the overturned cradle. Relief merged with horror, when he discovered the lifeless body of a massive wolf nearby, its blood pooling onto the ground. Llywelyn realized that Gelert had heroically defended the infant from the wolf, risking his life to protect the child.

Overwhelmed with remorse and grief, Llywelyn buried Gelert with great honour and erected a tombstone to commemorate his dog’s bravery and sacrifice. The place where Gelert was buried became known as ‘Beddgelert’, which means ‘Gelert’s Grave’ in Welsh. It is a timeless memorial to perhaps the finest guard dog of them all.

CS

Window Glass

While the invention of glass goes back to Mesopotamia in around 2500 BC, the material was not used for windows until adopted by the Romans during the first century AD. Our earliest evidence is from Pompeii, where buildings built or restored after the earthquake of AD 62 have remains of window glass still within their frames. Why glass was used only for making vessels and objects like beads in the preceding two millennia is unclear. It is possible that in the climates where glass was prevalent in those early phases, it was simply not helpful: reducing glare and protecting the interior from heat was more important than being able to see out on a rainy day. To let in light, it was possible to cover openings with different materials, including stretched animal skins or bladders, or even panes made of minerals such as alabaster or mica. The latter, described by Pliny the Elder, were referred to as lapis specularis or ‘windowpane stones’.

In antiquity, there were three different ways you could produce window panes: casting, cylinder glass and crown glass. Molten glass could be poured onto a flat surface and spread out to produce a sheet, although the result would generally be opaque, relatively thick and have only one smooth side. The underside would be left with the impressions of the surface the glass was poured onto, which often included sand to prevent it from sticking.

Around the second century AD, glassblowing was invented, paving the way for the cylinder-glass method. With this technique, glass is first blown into an elongated balloon, then rolled and extended on a flat surface while hot and elastic, as if creating a bottle. The resulting cylinder is then cut open at both ends, before a cut is made down the long side of it and the glass unfolded and flattened. Glass panes made in this way are generally fairly translucent, but have tell-tale signs: you can see trapped air bubbles that have become elongated as a part of the process. In Britain, this type of glass is often found at the site of Roman villas.

The creation of crown glass begins with blowing a sphere of glass, which is transferred onto a metal rod, or pontil, and one end cut open. The rod is then spun around quickly, which causes the glass sphere to open up and eventually flatten into a circular disc. When the pontil is cut off, a raised mark known as a bullseye is left in the centre. This central part of the glass pane is thicker and uneven, so it would usually have been used in less expensive windows. The flatter outer edges were often cut off into smaller rectangular or diamond-shaped pieces, and placed into a framework of lead in finer properties.

While this type of window is often associated with later medieval Europe, archaeological excavations have revealed crown glass fragments from buildings in the capital of the medieval kingdom of Alwa in central Sudan.

In most parts of the world, window glass was reserved for high-status buildings up until relatively recently. In Britain, glass was mainly used for religious buildings after the fall of the Roman empire, especially monastic buildings and churches. Here, the glass was often created in various colours and arranged into patterns set within lead frameworks. Scientific analysis has shown that this early medieval glass was not always made from scratch, but instead, glassmakers used scraps of the material salvaged from Roman sites and recycled it. Furnaces built at Glastonbury seem to have been used for precisely this purpose in the late seventh or eighth century.

While it may seem like the brightly coloured glass adorning churches would be particularly desirable, it was actually much trickier to produce completely clear glass, as it relied on being able to remove all forms of contaminants from the raw materials. Clear glass is made from quartz sand, soda and lime, but these are rarely found in pure form. The greenish tint found in many early glasses – including so-called ‘forest glass’ produced in north-western and central Europe – is caused by iron-rich sands.

It took until the late seventeenth century for new techniques for producing larger panes to develop, using cast glass. Improvements in polishing techniques meant that this could now be turned into panes that were completely smooth and transparent. It was still a laborious process that was largely reserved for mirrors in stately homes.

With the advent of machine-made glass in the twentieth century, the possible dimensions for windows increased dramatically: the Guinness world record for the largest pane of glass now measures around 50m^2. It was installed in one of the tallest skyscrapers in Beijing and took three months to manufacture.

CJ

The Wigtown Martyrs

On 11 May 1685 a farmer’s daughter called Margaret Wilson, aged about eighteen, and a carpenter’s widow called Margaret MacLachlan, were executed just outside Wigtown in south-west Scotland. The place of the deaths is marked with a weathered and rather brutish post of stone, which stands on the mudflats where the Solway becomes the River Bladnoch. It may be accessed via duckboards.

The two Margarets had been arrested for attending ‘conventicles’, unauthorized worship led by ministers who had been deposed from their parishes after the Restoration, when Charles II reneged on his promises to preserve the Presbyterian model of church governance in Scotland and replace it within the old model of bishops appointed by the Crown. Refusal to acquiesce was tantamount to treason, but Presbyterian feeling ran deep and strong in the towns and villages between Dumfries and Whithorn. So many Scottish Covenanters, as they were known, gave up their lives rather than submit to the king’s majesty that the period between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution is known as the Killing Time.

Margaret Wilson, her sister Agnes and brother Thomas, grew up on their father’s farm near Newton Stewart. He was no Covenanter, but they refused to go to church and took to the hills instead to worship with psalm-singers and renegades. In the February of 1685 the two sisters secretly went to Wigtown to see the widow Margaret MacLachlan and other Covenanters in her circle. There the sisters were arrested after refusing to drink to the king’s health when asked to do so by a man they mistakenly thought a friend. They were thrown into the Thieves’ Hole, the town dungeon. They then refused to take the oath renouncing the Covenant and were held in prison with Margaret MacLachlan, who also refused, until they were brought before the Government Commissioners for Wigtownshire on 13 April 1685 and convicted of rebellion.

For this they were sentenced to be ‘tied to palisades fixed in the sand, within the floodmark of the sea, and there to stand till the flood o’erflowed them’.

Gilbert Wilson, their father, went to Edinburgh and appeared before the Privy Council of Scotland to plead for mercy. He obtained a pardon for Agnes, for the sum of £100, and reprieves for his other daughter and Margaret MacLachlan, but unfortunately the reprieves were ignored by the zealous Sir Robert Grierson of Lag, a favourite of the unmerciful King James II and VII, who had convicted them.

On the day appointed, ‘Cruel Lag’, as he was known, and his dragoons chained the two Margarets to stakes and watched as the tide came in. The women sang hymns and psalms as the waters closed around them. The older woman was staked to die first, which Cruel Lag thought might encourage the younger to repent, but although she offered a prayer for the king, she would not abjure the Covenant, so her executioners forced her head beneath the water and she too drowned. In some accounts it was said a soldier cut her throat to hasten her death.

The two Margarets were buried at night, alongside three men hanged for the same offence that day, in Wigtown kirkyard, a short walk from the Martyrs’ Stake. The stone records in some detail the iniquity of their deaths.

There is another monument, but a misleading one, to the Wigtown Martyrs at Stirling, in the Old Town Cemetery, one of the best necropolises in a country famed for them. Wordsworth visited in 1803 and wrote that ‘we know of no sweeter cemetery in all our wanderings than that of Stirling’. The graves of merchants are dignified by carvings on their headstones indicating their trade. Another rather startling carving shows body snatchers at work, marking the remains of Mary Stevenson who was dug up by the gravedigger who had laid her in the earth two days previously (he was tried but got off on a technicality).

My favourite section, however, is the Drummond Pleasure Ground, laid out in the 1850s, ambitious not only as an amenity, but also as a sort of sepulchral endorsement of Scottish Presbyterianism. The best monument there is the Martyrs’ Memorial. It looks, at first, rather out of place, like a tiny summer house or gazebo, made from ornate cast-iron pillars extravagantly glazed, with an exuberant dome. But within are three female figures in flawless white stone, one a grief-stricken gendered angel, a hand held to her brow, the others a young woman and a girl reading a Bible.

These are Margaret and Agnes Wilson. So greedy for glory were the Presbyterian memorialists they overestimated the number of sisters who lost their lives that day. It was one, not two, Agnes being spared, which makes her, unusually, a Scottish martyr to be remembered without actually suffering martyrdom.

RC

HHMOs

HHMOs, Houses in Historic Multiple Occupation, are houses where more than one notable has lived at different times. Some are so obvious they do not invite our attention – Windsor Castle or The White House, for example – but there are a few where the distinction is not as a result of the purpose of the building. At St Margaret’s Bay near Dover, at the foot of the cliffs, is a white art deco building – White Cliffs – which was the home of Noël Coward, Ian Fleming and the Duke of Kent. The Villa Grasse on the Côte d’Azur was the home of the American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and later the harpist and composer Germaine Tailleferre. Actors Ann Miller and Marlon Brando both lived at 8142 Laurel View Drive in Los Angeles.

If you wish to find some of the HHMOs for yourself I would propose a trip to London, where you will be assisted in this by the 900 or so Blue Plaques of London, not all blue actually, which first appeared in 1866 and are now the responsibility of English Heritage. Naturally they proliferate in districts where the great and the good and the fascinating chose to live.

For Bloomsbury, the district and the set, this is especially the case. On Fitzroy Square, a block back from the Euston Road and overshadowed by what we used to call the Post Office Tower, at number 29 lived both George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. She has a Blue Plaque, identifying her as Virginia Stephen in lower case and Virginia Woolf in upper case, and he a bronze plaque that proclaims ‘from the coffers of his genius he enriched the world’. I wonder if the bounty of his genius is today seen as surpassing hers? Whatever their merits and historical significance, either would have been an exhausting enough neighbour, you might think, but two in succession – he preceded her with a ten-year gap in between – must have been particularly taxing. According to another Blue Plaque, Roger Fry founded the Omega Workshops at number 33, just round the corner, two years after Virginia Woolf moved out in 1911. There you might have found Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Dora Carrington and Wyndham Lewis, and – on Thursday evenings, when they held a club night – George Bernard Shaw, formerly of number 29.

There are eighteen other double blue-plaqued houses in London, among them 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead, home to both Sigmund and Anna Freud, and 48 Paultons Square in Chelsea, which has been home to two Nobel Laureates. The writer Samuel Beckett lived there while undergoing psychoanalysis in 1934 and there wrote the short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, and remains the only Nobel Laureate to have played first-class cricket. In the fifties and sixties number 48 was lived in by the physicist Patrick Blackett. J. Robert Oppenheimer, in mental distress, tried unsuccessfully to poison him with an apple laced with toxins when Blackett was his supervisor at Cambridge. Blackett, who made a significant contribution to the detection of U-boats in the Second World War, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1948 for his research into cosmic rays. He also co-discovered the positive electron.

Number 4 Carlton Gardens in St James’s is a triple, home from 1846 to ‘Pam’, Lord Palmerston, home secretary, foreign secretary and twice prime minister in the period of Britain’s Imperial expansion, and the last prime minister to die in office. Another prime minister and former foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, lived there too in 1907, and in 1940 it was occupied by General de Gaulle when it was HQ for the Free French government in exile after Hitler invaded France.

I found one double in Birmingham, two blue plaques side by side not on a house but on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre at Centenary Square. One is to the company’s founder Sir Barry Jackson, the other to the surgeon J. Sampson Gamgee. Both, one could say, are misplaced. The company Sir Barry Jackson founded was based at the Old Rep on Station Road, the theatre he built in 1913 (he died in 1961, ten years before the present theatre was built), and J. Sampson Gamgee lived in a house on that site a hundred years before that. He was from an old Leghorn family, a vet turned surgeon, and was a pioneer of aseptic surgery. His name is remembered doubly too, with the Gamgee Tissue, a sort of dressing familiar to J. R. R. Tolkien, who named the hobbit Sam Gamgee after it.

RC

The Peculiar People

In the main street of Tillingham, near Maldon in Essex, stands an old chapel. This neat, timber-framed building, set a little back from the street, was erected in 1867 for the Peculiar People, a once popular Christian sect in south Essex. At their height, the Peculiars numbered around fifty congregations from Plumstead to the coast, and there are several chapels, now converted, which stand as monuments to what a contemporary described as ‘a sect of very ignorant people’.

The Peculiar People were founded by James Banyard, a farm labourer born in Rochford in 1800. Described as ‘an ugly man’ and loud, he loved the pub and there entertained the locals with magic tricks, impressions and smutty comedy songs he composed himself. One, ‘The Syren Wrecked on the West Knock’, was especially admired. He was a drinker, a roisterer and a poacher, and for practising this last occupation he was apprehended and sent to gaol. There he learned the rudiments of shoemaking, which he attempted to make a living from on his release. He also married Susan Garnish, but the old Adam was irrepressible and before long he was drinking and in trouble again. She, at her wits’ end, made him attend a Methody meeting where he heard a sermon, and ‘a change came over him’. He immediately stopped drinking, signed the pledge, started attending chapel and became a lay preacher at Rochford Methodist meeting.

Like many who wax zealous with conversion he soon found the mainstream a bit underpowered. Then he met a hat-block maker called William Bridges whose sister lived at Rochford and saw a way to remedy that. Bridges, founder of the Plumstead Peculiars, had been evangelized by Robert Aitken, a Scottish parson who had left the Church of England to do his own thing in the service of the gospel. He took Banyard to meet him and in an upper room at 8 Gravel Lane, Southwark, Banyard was born again.

He returned to Rochford determined to do his own thing too, and in 1838 took a lease on the old workhouse and there founded the Banyardites. They were noted for strictness of doctrine, liveliness of worship and feats of healing so spectacular that the church started to grow in the 1850s, sprouting new congregations in neighbouring villages and towns and reminding us, if we needed reminding, that passionate intensity will always find a following. There were setbacks. Sometimes miraculous healings did not materialize and when in 1848 Banyard could not save a child at Prittlewell he had to be escorted out of the village by the constabulary.

In 1852, with more than forty churches established, Banyard appointed himself and three friends bishops and announced that henceforth they were to be known as the Peculiar People. The name is taken from the first letter of St Peter in the New Testament, ‘But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people’. Peculiar, in this context, means distinctive, but they were quite peculiar too in the everyday sense. They believed not only in the literal truth of the Bible but also in the literal truth of the Authorized Version, the King James Bible, as if the will of God could be expressed in its most perfect form only in Jacobean English.

The Peculiar People dressed soberly, the men in bowler hats and the women in black, and practised faith healing with such rigour they declined medical treatment on the grounds that it would show impertinence to God. Susan died and he married again, but when in 1855 his little boy Josiah became seriously ill, the doctrinal became personal, and he changed his view, declaring medical intervention acceptable as a kind of complementary therapy.

This caused a rift, and he was eventually deposed from leadership, but preached to a faithful remnant until his death in 1863.

The majority of the Peculiar People continued strictly to eschew medicine in favour of the power of faith and this led to a confrontation with the authorities in the diphtheria epidemic of 1910. Parents were obliged to take their sick children to the doctor, but many refused, with fatal consequences, and some were imprisoned. In the arguments that followed, the church split into ‘Old Peculiars’, who absolutely refused to accept medical intervention, and the ‘New Peculiars’, who reluctantly agreed to consult a doctor in certain circumstances. The schism was healed in the 1930s, when the New Peculiars prevailed.

By the 1950s the Peculiar People were in marked decline and so they changed their name to the Union of Evangelical Churches. Around a dozen are still in existence. Perhaps their most famous member was the historical novelist Bernard Cornwell, creator of Sharpe, who was adopted by the Wigginses, a family of Peculiar People at Thundersley, and grew up to become a very firmly convinced atheist.

RC

Tattoos

A recent survey revealed that 32 per cent of the US adult population has a tattoo, with a majority of these, 69 per cent, stating the reason for acquiring it was to remember or honour something or someone. Unsurprisingly, the survey showed that the frequency of the respondents’ body art depended on demographic and social factors, including sex (more women than men have them), level of education, economic status (twice as common among lower-income groups) and sexual orientation (51 per cent of those identifying as lesbian, gay or bisexual). However, 24 per cent of respondents said they had regrets about their body art. This is unlikely to include the current world record holder for the most tattoos, Charlotte Guttenberg from Florida, who has 98.75 per cent of her entire body covered by them.

The earliest known tattooed individual dates back at least 5,300 years: Ötzi the Iceman, the exceptionally well-preserved body of a man found in the Austrian Alps in 1991. As his skin was preserved, scientists were able to make out a number of black lines and crosses in different places on his body – sixty-one of them in total. Most of Ötzi’s tattoos were on his joints and spine, and places that may have caused him pain, leading the researchers to believe they were there for therapeutic reasons, like pain relief, rather than for mere decoration.

In ancient Egypt, numerous mummies dating back as far as 4,000 years also displayed tattoos on their bodies, although the practice may well be older: there are wall paintings in tombs that show people with designs on their skin predating preserved corpses.

The practice of permanent body art may well go back even further in time. Some archaeologists believe tattooing originated during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa (c. 300,000–30,000 years ago). At the site of the Blombos Cave at the tip of South Africa, large quantities of ochre, a pigment, were found alongside numerous pointed tools made of bone. These were similar to implements known ethnographically to have been used for body art.

The word ‘tattoo’ is of Tahitian origin and was first attested in 1769 in the writings by Captain Cook following his travels to the Southern Seas. In Polynesia, tattoos – or tatau – are of huge cultural significance in a practice thought to go back 3,000 years. Different archipelagos and islands have different practices and symbols, and markings can reveal information about lineage, and placement in a tribe, village or community.

It was from this contact with Polynesians as well as with native Americans that the art of tattooing was rediscovered in Europe. Initially, the marks appeared on the skin of European and American sailors: around a third of British sailors had at least one tattoo by the nineteenth century. Many sailors’ tattoos were commemorative of battles and ships, including the very popular slogan ‘Remember the Maine’ to commemorate the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbour in 1898 during the Spanish–American war.

In 1891, the first electric tattooing implement was patented in the United States by Samuel F. O’Reilly of New York. This provided a vast improvement in efficiency compared to the numerous manual techniques used before, although in many cultures, so-called hand-poking methods remain standard even today.

Beyond the use as decorative body art, familiar examples of tattoos as a form of punishment include the identification numbers that the Nazis cut into the skin of prisoners at Auschwitz. This was the only concentration camp complex where the practice was carried out and only those selected for work were given serial numbers, which were also sewn onto their prison uniforms.

Previously, a similar practice had started in the nineteenth century as a way of identifying released US convicts and British army deserters, but it is known to go all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome. There, tattoos were given to slaves, criminals and prisoners of war and the Greek word used for the mark made by the inked pricking was stigma, a sign of wrongdoing that has transformed into the meaning given to it today.

An alternative use among the Persians was described by the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC. There, he says, a slave tasked with delivering a message through dangerous territory would, to avoid it being intercepted, have his head was shaved and the message tattooed onto his scalp, then sent on his way once his hair had regrown.

More positively, numerous scientists have worked to develop medical uses for tattoos. In Germany, a team developed an intradermal tattoo that changes colour in response to certain biological conditions, such as high or low glucose or albumin levels. This could be used to monitor chronic diseases, such as diabetes, without the need for an external device. Elsewhere, doctors trialled internal tattoos of the colon, in order to mark areas for surgery. To date, however, both of these have only been used on pigs.

CJ

Famous Last Stands

The British in India in the 1890s set about building a string of forts across high ground bordering India, hoping to bring the Pathan tribes there under control. With telegram wires so vulnerable, communications between these outposts were by heliograph – a system usable only during the daytime when the sun was out.

The forts were manned by troops from the 36th (Sikh) Regiment of Bengal Infantry, drawn from the Majha region of Punjab – some recruited after making the mistake of wrestling Captain Henry Holmes, who insisted that any man he beat must enlist.

On 12 September 1897, 10,000 Pathans attacked Saragarhi, an outpost with a garrison of twenty-one Sikh soldiers who were tended to by a cook-cleaner. Cut off from reinforcements, the Sikhs resisted stoutly, killing sixty of the enemy in their first assault. A signaller flashed out a plea for help, but he did not see the warnings returning his way – that the Pathans were digging at the base of Saragarhi.

After six hours of fierce fighting a wall collapsed, and some of the Sikhs were killed by the Pathans pouring in while others retreated to the inner defences. They fought to the last man – taking 180 attackers with them – the signaller leaving his post to join in and the senior sergeant going down in hand-to-hand fighting. They were each posthumously awarded the Indian Order of Merit, the highest order of gallantry available to an Indian soldier. The 12th of September remains a day when the bravery of the men of Saragarhi is remembered by the Indian Army’s Sikh Regiment.

The details of Custer’s Last Stand are less well known. It took place in June 1876 during the Battle of Little Big Horn, in Montana Territory. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, which belonged to the Lakota, saw illegal white settlers encroach onto tribal land, with the US Army protecting them.

In mid-June 1876, 10,000 Native Americans massed along what they called Greasy Grass – the Little Bighorn River. Three advancing columns of US soldiers were pushed back by the men from the reservations.

Five days later Lieutenant-Colonel George Custer led 600 men from the 7th Cavalry forward. They rode into an encampment of Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, called together by Sitting Bull – a Lakota holy man and leader who had recently had a vision in which he saw soldiers falling ‘as thick as grasshoppers’. His followers felt this heralded a great victory.

Custer’s force split into three, with Custer killed and his detachment of 200 men annihilated. Nobody recounted the details of the massacre, but Custer’s widow expended huge energy successfully ensuring that her husband’s sacrifice was glorified down the ages.

Richard III made his last stand at the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, when defeated by Henry Tudor – who consequently became Henry VII. When famously found under a car park in Leicester, Richard’s body was examined by archaeologists who established how he most likely died.

With the battle running against him, it seems that Richard spotted Henry and some of his followers detached from the main Tudor force. Richard seems to have charged, realizing that the only way to turn the day was to kill his opponent. But Richard’s skeleton reveals what happened next: he received ten wounds around the time of death, eight of them about his head – which shows he was not wearing a helmet by this stage of the battle.

It was a vicious end. One blow would have left part of his brain exposed, while another went into his brain – probably guaranteeing unconsciousness in the brief moments before his death. He was then stripped naked and thrown over a horse, where his body was subjected to further indignities – including the insertion of a blade so deep into his buttocks that it penetrated his pelvis.

One of the bloodiest battles fought by the United States in the Second World War was that for Iwo Jima – a tiny Pacific island of ten square miles. The Americans wanted control of it, so they could bomb Tokyo, 750 miles to the north. The Japanese force of 21,000 determined to fight to the last man, to block – or at least delay – such a disaster.

The battle lasted thirty-six days, during which the Japanese general, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, used the tunnel network that he had had constructed, knowing the Americans would inevitably come for his island. The Japanese killed 6,000 Americans. The invaders’ victory is, of course, commemorated by the statue of US Marines raising their flag on Iwo Jima’s highest point, Mount Suribachi.

At the end Kuribayashi sent a message from his bunker to his superiors that ‘arrows and bullets are exhausted’ and noting ‘sorrow comes as I fall’. In those poetic words he was summoning the spirit of the Samurai, who placed honour and loyalty at the core of their code – qualities required in a military last stand.

CS

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First published by Penguin Michael Joseph 2024

Copyright © Richard Coles, Cat Jarman and Charles Spencer, 2024

Chapter illustrations © Inez Skilling

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ISBN: 978-1-405-96404-3

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Footnote

Trepanning

fn1 When Feilding later showed the film at a New York gallery, a member of the audience noted those around him passing out – ‘dropping off their seats one by one like ripe plums’.