Stand in line - Michelle Lovric

Here's an almost entirely gratuitous picture of Mark Rylance, the thinking History Girl’s posset.

Just for your pleasure, and mine.

Please excuse the slightly intoxicated tone of this blog. I’ve only just finished watching Wolf Hall, and I am in love with every subtle crevice of Mark Rylance’s face.

When I informed Mary Hoffman of this parish about the new heart-fluttering inside my bodice, she told me tersely, ‘Stand in line’.

And when I mentioned it to Lucy Coats, history writer and fellow Guardian master class teacher, she snarled, ‘Stand in line. The whole internet is in love with Mark Rylance.’

I consulted a third researcher, who shall remain anonymous, only to hear that she nurtures a well accessorized fantasy in which she just won’t return all Mark’s calls and he is growing increasingly desperate. When I mentioned my own predilection for the doe-eyed boy, she growled, ‘Stand in line and take a number.’

I made a very small mouth.

I’m telling myself to sublimate, sublimate, sublimate. But all I can manage is snivel, and … substitute.

Apart from Mark Rylance’s, this is the face that draws me more than any other in the world and in time.

It belongs to Sultan Mehmet II. It was probably painted by Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, brother of the more famous, more luminous Giovanni.

A framed print of this portrait has pride of place in one of three rooms I’ve recently reclaimed for the light in my London home. Long ago, fellow History Girl Laurie Graham, who is a genius with names, christened the two other bedchambers ‘The Princess Grace Memorial Suite’ and ‘The Joan Collins Annexe’. So this new room needed a name of its own too.

We have decided, for obvious reasons, to baptize it ‘The Sultan Mehmet II Mini-Suite’, especially given that its proportions are not exactly palatial. I would estimate that it could host only one substantial eunuch or two medium-sized concubines at any one time. And the latter would have to be on particularly good terms with one another.

The room is both Venetian and oriental in flavour, as also befits one focused on this portrait, which was created at the exact moment that Gothic architecture, with its Arabian arabesques and stone lace, was flourishing in la Serenissima.

Background detail only endears Sultan Mehmet II. He was born in 1432, ascending to the sultanate in 1451. He is famous for his restoration of Constantinople to its former glory after a century of siege, violence and dilapidation. He employed artisans from the entire known world to beautify his city. He loved Italian art and sought an Italian artist to paint his portrait.

His reign was a time of diplomacy between the Ottoman empire and Venice. Sultan Mehmet’s court for a time included Gentile Bellini, whose mission, starting in September 1479, was as visiting artist in residence and general cultural ambassador. Also part of the diplomatic effort was a mission was Bellini’s friend Giovanni Dario (whose house is now known as the most haunted in the city). I have also seen writings that suggest that the arches Bellini painted around the Sultan are based on those inside Giovanni Dario’s house. If this is true, it is a pleasant metaphor … the stones of Venice curve protectively and decoratively over the former enemy, sealing the peace with beauty.

The attribution to Gentile Bellini is not without controversy. Some have suggested that there are suspicious similarities between the sultan and a figure in Marco Palmezzano’s Jesus among the Doctors in the Temple.

This need not concern us here, any more than the fact that … I once saw Mark Rylance walking down my street near the Globe.

Mark Rylance is unavailable but we still have Sultan Mehmet II and that sultry profile.

Another reason to admire our Sultan is that he spoke Turkish and Arabic Greek, Persian, Latin, and Hebrew.

Plus, I present this picture of him smelling a rose.

The picture is taken from the Sarayı Albums Hazine 2153, folio 10a, courtesy of Wikimedia commons. How many men can be painted smelling a rose without looking faintly effeminate? All that emanates from this portrait is a delicate, appreciative sensuality. Only Mark Rylance could smell a rose as sexily as Sultan Mehmet could.

Sultan Mehmet II even looks good in coy three quarter view … as in this ‘alternative’ portrait from an unknown artist that was placed on Wikimedia Commons in 2011.

But I remain committed to Bellini portrait as the perfect representation of a fascinating man. If you want to see the original, you haven’t far to go. It’s at London’s National Gallery. The catalogue entry says, 'The painting is almost entirely repainted, especially in the figure. An old inscription, lower right, gives the date 25 November 1480. The lower left inscription is a more recent reconstruction; it includes the names Mehmet and Gentile Bellini … There is insufficient evidence for deciding whether the picture is a copy or a very damaged original.'

How did it get to London?

Succession time was dangerous in the Ottoman empire. Once can imagine the portrait smuggled out of the imperial chamber in the dead of night after the death of its protagonist. The painting may or may not have been sold in the Bazaar at Constantinople by the Sultan’s heirs. Thereafter it appears to have stayed in what is modern day Turkey for a few centuries.

Constantinople, or Istanbul was the posting of the eminent archaeologist Sir Austen Henry Layard, the man credited with making the bible true, by his excavations at Ninevah and Nimrud … the site of recent Islamic State atrocities against art.

It is said that Sultan Abdul Hamid II was unhappy when Layard was posted away from him in 1880 after a quarrel with Prime Minister Gladstone. Some sources claim that the sultan made a parting gift of this portrait to the exiting ambassador. Layard and his wife Lady Enid were shortly to settle in Venice, where they bought and restored a grand palazzo on the Grand Canal in the late 1870s. It became known as Ca’ Cappello Layard.

They moved their spectacular collection of Italian Renaissance art there and decorated the palace in sumptuous orientalist style. They were frightfully grand, as only English expats can be, with compulsory attendance at their soirees and parties by visiting luminaries.

Alternatively, there is the more picturesque version of the portrait’s provenance that one finds in John Julius’ Norwich’s excellent book, A Paradise of Cities. Norwich explains that Layard loved to tell the story of an anonymous man who accosted him in the street and tried to sell him the picture for the equivalent of £5. I love to think of it wrapped in brown paper with stained string. But the archaeologist refused, doubting its provenance. In the end, the man left the painting on the Layards’ doorstep like a foundling child. Layard was too grand to buy something that might have fallen off the back of a gondola, but he wasn't too fine to look a gift horse in the mouth. The painting was welcomed into Ca' Cappello.

Here is Sir Austen Henry Layard. Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Photographic Company, courtesy of Wellcome Images.

And here is his Vanity Fair caricature from Wikimedia commons. I'm posting it here because, unlike Mark Rylance or Sultan Mehmet, you won't find Layard at my house.

A nephew of Lady Enid recorded that the painting of Sultan Mehmet II was given a parrot for company at Ca’ Cappello Layard. One of the young boy’s duties was to go and cover the portrait with a green curtain at breakfast time, when the parrot performed ablutions that might otherwise have spattered the potentate.

Lady Enid’s copious diaries record many pet parrots. She even took them calling with her, and on holiday. She spoke of green parrots but their exact nature is not known. One was accused of giving her typhoid. Chains are also spoken of. This watercolour drawing of a ‘pet parrot on a perch’ (suitably oriental-looking) is from Wellcome Images.

There is a whole blog to be written about the parrots who lived with famous English expats and their friends on the Grand Canal at this point in time. But those birds are not kidnapping this one.

Henry Layard died in 1894, Lady Enid stayed on in Venice, continuing with a perfervid social life, entertaining Browning (whose parrot was called Jacko), Ruskin and royalty whenever possible.

The portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, like others in the Layard collection, was donated to the National Gallery after Lady Enid died in 1912.  But initially a 1909 Italian law on the export of art blocked the donation. Meanwhile Layard’s heir, Major Arthur Layard, pressed a claim for the Venetian portraits, based on an ambiguity of the wording of the will. Eventually he was compensated, and the Italian prime minister intervened to except the paintings from the export law. The dangers of World War I delayed the transport to London.

Sultan Mehmet II finally arrived on these shores in 1916 – and in my guest bedroom almost exactly a hundred years later.

 (Mark Rylance is also welcome at any time.)



Michelle Lovric’s website
the picture of Mark Rylance is from Wikimedia Commons
the original Sultan Mehmet picture comes from The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei, via Wikimedia Commons.

Romano-British Cloaks by Caroline Lawrence

Hooded cloak like my mother's

When I left California to study Classics at Cambridge, my mother gave me her fine hooded cloak of charcoal grey wool that she had bought in Chamonix on her honeymoon. Stylish as well as warm, the cloak protected me from the biting winds and frequent drizzle of East Anglia. I would cycle from Newnham College to my lectures with it billowing out behind me. One day I trustingly left it on a hook with other coats in the vestibule outside a lecture room. When I came out it was gone. I think it was the first time I have ever been robbed. At that moment I felt shock and a deep sadness. A precious link to my mother had been lost forever. I went to the police and put up notices but I never saw it again.

If I’d lived two thousand years earlier in Roman Britain, I would have been more than sad; I would have been mad.

replica Roman loom with "loom sword" at Fishbourne

In chilly provinces during Roman times, the theft of the cloak was not just a nuisance; it could often mean the difference between life and death. A person's cloak often doubled as their blanket at night. If you caught a chill through lack of adequate covering, you might die. And in those days you couldn’t just wander down to Marcus et Spencerius to buy a new one. Someone had to collect the wool, spin it into yarn, weave the yarn into cloth, then sew that cloth. That took time and skill, and a woollen cloak might cost perhaps a month’s salary. The purchase of a new or even second-hand cloak might have meant a trip to the nearest town on market day. 

a bardocucullus from the Roman Mysteries

In Roman Britain, cloaks were very popular. Some were short, others were long. Some were impregnated with lanolin, the smelly oil that made them waterproof. Some had hoods, others didn’t. Some were popular with soldiers, others with civilians. One thing Roman cloaks didn’t have were pockets, but the Romans didn’t miss them because they hadn’t been invented yet. The poet Martial wrote a two-line gift tag for the Saturnalia gift of a bardocucullus, which was just a hood that you could wear under a cloak. He also wrote about a hooded cape called a paenula: ‘Even if you go on a journey with clear skies, don't forget a paenula made of leather, in case of sudden showers!’

Here’s part of a lead curse tablet found in the famous hot springs of Bath Spa:

drawing of lead curse tablet by Richard Lawrence

From Docilianus, son of Brucerus, to the most holy goddess Sulis: I curse the person who stole my hooded cloak, whether man or woman, whether slave or free, and I ask that you not allow him a moment’s sleep until he has returned my hooded cloak to your temple.

Docilianus of Bath Spa was angry, but not as angry as the man who wrote this curse from Caerleon in Wales:

To the goddess Nemesis, I give you my stolen cloak and a pair of boots; let the man who is wearing them now pay for them with his life and blood!

What a contrast to hear the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:40, And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. Or his words in Luke: ...from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. 

Looking at the gospel passages, I remembered the story of a young Roman soldier named Martin who became a saint after he took pity on a freezing and naked beggar by the town gate of Amiens, (in what is now Northwest France), and gave him half his cloak. In fact, the word chapel comes from one of the Latin words for cloak: cappa, because the very first chapel held the remaining half of St Martin’s cloak, now a holy relic.

Hooded cloaks have long been associated with Druids and other mysterious figures. The hood and voluminous silhouette of the garment can hide the wearer’s identity, age and gender.

terra cotta figure and bronze figure with hidden phallus

The most mysterious hooded cloaks in Roman Britain were those worn by curious figures known as the genii culcullati or ‘hooded spirits’. Some archaeologists have argued that they might be fertility spirits. Some of these ‘hooded spirits’ appear with a mother goddess. Others carry objects resembling eggs. Still others have an almost phallic appearance so that it is only one step from this to that. (above)

A relief from Corinium (modern Cirencester)

To the best of my knowledge, no inscriptions have ever been found with these mysterious hooded characters. Maybe one day we will find an inscription and solve the mystery. In the meantime the three mysterious hooded figures are providing inspiration for my new Roman Quests series. Who are the three mysterious figures? And where are they going? Watch this space to find out. 

'Nuns Behaving Badly' by Karen Maitland

For centuries, many noble women in Europe were forced into nunneries by their families either to safeguard their virtue until they could be married off, or to protect family lands by preventing them from marrying and splitting estates. Some women made the best of it, wearing silk gowns under their habits, and spending their days hawking, hunting, dancing and generally enjoying themselves in convents where abbesses would turn a blind eye, and money could buy any kind of pleasure or indulgence. Others found freedom within convents to make serious studies of the arts and sciences, write books, or practise medicine, liberated from the tedious obligations of marriage. But there were some women who refused to settle down quietly behind the cloister walls.

This was the case with two of the nuns of the Sainte-Croix (Holy Cross) in Poitiers in 6th century. The Frankish Princess Clotild, was the child of King Charibert of the Merovingian dynasty and his concubine, a wool-carder’s daughter. Clotild’s cousin, Princess Basina, daughter of King Chilperic, had also been sent to the nunnery, arriving at the tender age of seven, after an assassination attempt on her family. But by then Basina had already been raped by soldiers and had lost her lands too, so she had plenty of cause for anger.

King Chilperic and his queen

The princesses’ resentment of their lot came to a head early in 589 when they declared that they would no longer put up with the treatment they were receiving from their Abbess, Leubovera, who wasn’t showing them the royal respect they were due. They persuaded 40 fellow nuns to join in them in their rebellion and marched out of the convent, refusing to return until the abbess was expelled. Several bishops to whom they appealed refused to do anything, but finally a female relative of King Guntrum, Clotild’s uncle, promised to ensure a commission would be sent to Poitiers to look into the matter.

But the commissioners showed no sign of hurrying, so the nuns, now back at Poitiers, sought sanctuary at the church of St Hilary from where they recruited a small army of cutthroats and outlaws to defend them, including a notorious murderer Childeric, the Saxon. By the time the commission consisting of four bishops, deacons and clerics arrived, the Church of St Hilary had become a fortress for the nuns and their outlaw gang who were using it as a base to attack the abbess. When the outraged bishops came to the church to excommunicate the rebellious nuns, their whole party was attacked and the clerics, including the bishops, staggered from the church covered in blood and bruises.

Far from being repentant, Clotild urged her gang of mercenaries to seize all the convent’s lands and beat up any who tried to resist. She was only prevented from attacking the main building of the convent by the terrible winter weather which drove many of the nuns to seek shelter in other convents or homes. Clotild and Basina took no notice of the censure of their royal uncles and by Easter 590 were ready to attack the convent itself with the intention of dragging the abbess out, even threatening to throw her from the roof.

Abbess Leubovera, crippled by gout, took shelter in the oratory along with a precious relic of the Holy Cross, but the outlaws broke in during the night and she was only saved from being hacked to death with a sword, by another outlaw who presumably had some qualms about murdering an abbess in front of the relic of the true cross. In the dark and confusion, the Provost Justina, niece of Bishop Gregory, was seized in mistake for the abbess and carried off, but as soon as they realised their error, she was returned to the convent and Leubovera was captured and held prisoner in Basina’s chamber near St Hilary while the convent was looted.

Bishop Maroveus of Poitiers ordered the townspeople to break into the house and release the abbess, but Clotild coolly handpicked a group of men giving them orders to kill the abbess at once should there be any attempt at rescue. In spite of this, a royal envoy managed to snatch the abbess back, but that only led to more violence in which men were slaughtered in the holiest places in the abbey including the shrine of the Holy Cross.

Basina quarrelled with her cousin and made her own peace with the abbess, but this sparked further hostilities between Basina’s supporters and Clotild’s. According to the chronicler of the time, not a week went by without a new murder. Finally, it took the king’s men led by Count Macco to put down the rebellion, slaughtering many of the mercenaries hired by the nuns, while the rest fled back into the forest.

A rather romantic image of the excommunication of a later
Frankish king, Robert II (972-1031), known Robert the Pious,
who invoked the Pope's wrath by marrying his 1st cousin.

The punishment for the royal princesses was excommunication, which was considered a terrible sentence by the Church, since they would be excluded from most normal aspects of life and if they died in that state, would go straight to the eternal fires of hell. But since the pair had been excommunicated several times throughout the rebellion without it curbing their behaviour in the least, we can probably conclude that it didn’t worry them too much. Clotild’s own father, King Charibert, had himself been excommunicated in his lifetime because of his violent behaviour.

In any case, thanks to intervention of King Childebert II, the Church Council was persuaded to restore them to grace a few months later. Perhaps the King intervened because he knew if the sweet little princesses were not readmitted to the Church he’d have no chance of banishing them safely to a convent again and he didn’t want to risk those two running around his kingdom uncloistered.

Radegund who founded Saint-Croix abbey

Basina did return to the life of a nun in Saint-Croix in Poitiers and, so the chroniclers say, lived there ‘in obedience’ for the rest of her life. But Clotild had no intention of meekly returning to a nunnery. Despite being illegitimate, she persuaded the king's mother, the infamous Queen Brunhilda, to grant her lands which she ruled until her death.

Incidentally, the abbey of Saint-Croix had been founded by an earlier Frankish Princess, Radegund, around 560, when she fled her murderous husband. The rule she established meant that the nuns were very strictly enclosed, but allowed many hours to read and write. Radegund herself wrote Latin poems which she gave to the poet Venantius Fortunatus and to the bishop and historian, Gregory of Tours, who both became great friends. So she was one noblewoman who was grateful for the peace of her seclusion.

THE AMERICAN CEMETERY in CAMBRIDGE by Adèle Geras

Back in 1962, when I was 18 years old, I was madly in love with an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge. On a couple of occasions, we went to the Eagle pub and the tales of young American airmen, stationed round Cambridge during World War 2, made a huge impression on me. Their names are there, and the pub nowadays makes a big deal, quite rightly, of the historical connection.

In 2010, when we moved to Cambridge after many years in Manchester, the American Cemetery was high on the list of places that my husband and I wanted to visit. His last illness and his death meant that he never saw this place, but the other day our friends Bob Borsley and Ewa Jaworska took me there and I wanted to write about it on this blog as a kind of tribute, both to those who are buried there and also as a kind of stand-in for my husband, Norman Geras, who would definitely have written about the visit on his blog, normblog  if he could have done.

The sun was shining on the day we were there. There are nearly 4000 individual markers,  each with a name, a rank and home state cut into the stone. The date of each death is there, but the dates of birth have been omitted. Most of the dead were in their twenties. 

On a long wall that stretches for yards, the names of the missing are inscribed. These are the people whose bodies were never recovered. 



There is a very interesting and well-organised exhibition in the visitors' centre, and I'm sure Cambridge schools visit it regularly. Around the Centre, a small area of the garden has been left to grow wild. The man we spoke to behind the desk told us that the gardeners in charge of the rest of the cemetery were a bit sniffy about this exception to the apple - pie order which prevails in the rest of this place 

Because that's the overriding impression. The lawns are beautiful: mown to absolute perfection. Every single memorial, every one that we saw, looks as though it went up yesterday: gleaming stone in a pristine state of shining whiteness. Not one single piece of litter, not one bird dropping, not one cigarette stub mars the landscape. We saw a man travelling between the graves on a motorised mower, but it must take many people all their time to keep the cemetery in this remarkable state.



It seemed to me that this clean and tidy and beautiful way of remembering the fallen was a loud and vigorous "ya boo sucks" to Death; a contrast to the blood and dirt and darkness of war. The tidiness of the cemetery is a counterbalance to the chaos of those years and it's clear that today's custodians feel a duty to maintain this and that's admirable. It's very hard to walk round without tears coming into your eyes. It's also worth remembering, alongside thinking about the dead, that many wars are still being waged. Sacrifices are still being made, and there are still freedoms that are worth fighting for.  This post goes up on the 10th  anniversary of the July 7th, 2005 terrorist atrocity in London and our thoughts should also be with those who died  that day and  those who mourn them. 

Anarchy in Fitzrovia by Lydia Syson

Nervous eyes on cloudy skies, last month I slid a garden cane into a homemade red flag and set off to Fitzrovia to lead my first ever history walk.

Liberty’s Fire is a novel that could hardly be more firmly set in Paris, but in a sense, Fitzrovia is both where it began and where it ends.  I had found my way to the Paris Commune through the chance discovery that my great-great grandmother, Nannie Dryhurst, had worked as a volunteer teacher in the early 1890s at the anarchist International School set up by the legendary Communarde, Louise Michel – more about whom here.  And since this part of London was home to several generations of French revolutionaries during the nineteenth century, I don’t think I’m giving too much away to say that it made sense to gather my surviving characters here at the close of the novel. When the Fitzrovia Festival invited me to design a walk exploring the fates of Communard exiles in London, I happily agreed – and began to investigate.  Here's just a little of what I discovered and the route we took, and since I’m not now extemporising on the move, I can include some references word-for-word rather than summarised from memory…

Outside the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street,
 with some of the walkers before we set off.

First stop: Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre, Tottenham Street

A little background before I introduce my main characters….French political exiles came to London in several waves.  The first were known as the quarante-huitards, who took flight in the wake of the 1848 uprising (vividly – if partially – described in Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education) and a few years later in ’51 after Louis-Napoleon’s coup, when the Second Republic was overthrown and the Second Empire set up.  (Sticking with fiction, Zola’s The Belly of Paris/The Fat and the Thinopens with the return of his hero from a penal colony seven years later.)  Following the dramatic fall of the Paris Commune in May 1871, and the horrors of ‘Bloody Week’, over three 3,000 took refuge here, and were welcomed and looked after by the rump of the quarante-huitards who remained.  Some of course were involved in both revolutions, having returned to Paris in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war after the defeat of the Emperor and the declaration of the Third Republic.  They fled to escape firing squads, prison and transportation to New Caledonia.  Most were ordinary working-class Communards in their 20s and 30s, 1200 were children, and some were prominent political leaders like Lissagaray. Wondering why London’s oldest patisserie, Maison Bertaux, was founded in 1871? Wonder no longer. And then followed yet another wave, arriving in dribs and drabs in the decade after the amnesty of 1880.  Some, like Louise Michel, had tried going back to France to take up the revolutionary cudgels once more after eight years in the Pacific, and were fed up with constant arrests and imprisonment.  Not  all were necessarily anarchists before the Commune, but many embraced the movement in one form or another afterwards. 

Second stop: Newman Passage

Old Fitzrovia lives on in this atmospheric alleyway, pictured here in the illustrated newspaper, The Graphic, (2 February 1972).  

©The Museum of London

Most Communards arrived here with absolutely nothing, lucky to have kept their lives.  Many had had nothing to start with, which was why they were prepared to risk everything for the progressive Commune. As Constance Bantman puts it, ‘the comrades tended to the most basic needs of one another’, and as you can see here, this meant feeding minds as well as bodies.  This co-operative ‘soup kitchen’ allowed exiles to talk as well as eat, and carried on the principles of collective action and social reform established by Communards like Nathalie Lemel and her fellow Internationalist Eugene Varlin in Paris in 1868 when the Emperor’s restrictions on freedom of association first began to lift a little.  Both were bookbinders and trade unionists, and Varlin, one of the most popular delegates on the Commune’s Council, who had opposed the anti-democratic Committee of Public Safety with its echoes of the Terror, fought on the barricades in the 6^thand 10^th arrondissements during Bloody Week, and tried to stop the controversial execution of the Commune’s hostages.  However he was arrested after being recognised by a priest, tortured, and shot, and died with ‘Vive la Commune’ on his lips.  In 2007 a small (triangular) square in the Marais, just by the rue de la Corderie, was named after Lemel, who is credited with having converted Louise Michel to anarchism while they were both deportees. 

Newman Passage

Third stop: the Autonomie Club, 32 Charlotte Street

Later exiles found soup and comradeship just round the corner at the Autonomie Club, a forum for international anarchism in London founded by German comrades in 1886. In November that year it held a fundraising evening featuring speeches, song, dancing and a tombola to support a radical newsletter in Bohemia.  Later the club moved a few streets away to Windmill Street, and it may have been here that ‘chemistry lessons’ were held…a.k.a. instruction in the making of explosives.  The principle of ‘propaganda of the deed’ was beginning to divide the movement.  The police continued to raid the premises.

I imagine my great-great grandmother introducing her lover Henry Nevinson to the enticing world of the Autonomie club, as they both escaped unhappy marriages for the combined excitement of politics and romance.  In a crowded cellar, full of foreign refugees  and English ‘enthusiasts for anarchism’ Nevinson met for the first time the Russian anarchist, Pierre Kropotkin.
 

“Anarchists do not have a chairman, but when enough of us had assembled a man stood up and began to speak.  His pronunciation was queer until one grew accustomed to it (‘own’ rhyed with ‘town’, ‘law’ with ‘low’, and the ‘sluffter field of Urope’ became a kindly joke among us).  He began with the sentence, ‘Our first step must be the abolition of all low’.  I was a little started. I had no exaggerated devotion to the law, but, as a first step, its abolition seemed rather a bound.  Without a pause the speaker continued speaking, with rapidity, but with the difficulties of a foreigner who has to translate rushing thoughts as he goes along…Comrade Kropotkin was then about fifty, but he looked more.  He was already bald.  His face was battered and crinkled into a kind of softness, perhaps owing to loss of teeth through prison scurvy.  His unrestrained and bushy beard was already touched with the white that soon overcame its reddish brown.  But eternal youth diffused his speech and stature.  His mind was always full gallop, like a horse that sometimes stumbles in its eagerness.  Behind his spectacles his grey eyes gleamed with invincible benevolence….He seemed longing to take all mankind to his bosom and keep it warm…” (Fire of Life, page 53)

Kropotkin, 'the Anarchist Prince'

Dryhurst was already a close friend of Kropotkin through the English Anarchist group centred around Charlotte Wilson, founder of the only recently defunct Freedom newspaper; later Dryhurst would translate his book The Great French Revolution, 1789-1793.  Nick Heath’s short biography of Dryhurst includes a description of her own first meeting with Kropotkin at a party given by William Morris.  Many readers of this blog will already know that Kropotkin – along with Stepniak – was the model for E. Nesbit’s Russian dissident in The Railway Children. A little later I waved my red flag and reminded my fellow-walkers of Bobbie's red petticoats.

Fourth stop: Colville Place

Surely the prettiest street in Fitzrovia?  I couldn’t resist this setting for the final chapter of Liberty’s Fire, although you have to imagine it without the window boxes and birdsong.  A wide, quiet empty pavement and a refreshingly flowery backdrop gave us a moment away from passing traffic and pedestrians to discuss why London was such a magnet for revolutionary exiles, and how we know about what they got up to when they arrived here.

London was an obvious destination for escaping communards: its size and publishing industry offered the best chance of work, not to mention political sympathy and French speakers.  Within the capital, Fitzrovia had plenty of cheap accommodation, and was already well established as a home of freethinkers. Cleveland Hall, for example, was a centre of secularism, where Harriet Law, a salaried public speaker and the first woman in the First International, had been lecturing since the 1860s. 

Patriotic libertarianism was a defining characteristic of Victorian Britain, a nation which utterly refused to kow-tow to despotic foreign governments.  This made it one of the few countries in Europe where you couldn’t be extradited for political crimes.  Communard, journalist and novelist Jules Vallès (another great source for Liberty’s Fire) was deeply critical of London, not least the lack of places the city offered for illicit sex, and the canoodling on park benches that resulted, but said London taught him ‘what Liberty is.’  Kropotkin became cynical about the joys of free speech, press and assembly, arguing to Emma Goldman that political liberties here were actually the best security against the spread of discontent: ‘The average Britisher loves to think he is free; it helps him to forget his misery.  That is the irony and pathos of the English working class.’ 

And the most fruitful source for academics researching French exiles in London? The police records.  Spies and informers flocked to Fitzrovia too, and anonymous agent reports found their way back to Paris.  You couldn’t step out onto Charlotte Street without bumping into a ‘mouchard’.  Not that their reports were necessarily reliable.  Denunciations and counter-claims were frequent. (Nick Heath paints a lively picture of the espionage scene here.)

Charles Malato’s satirical memoir of his time in the ‘small anarchist republic’, The Joys of Exile, (Les Joyeusetés de l’Exil) is extremely entertaining but also needs to be read with a small pinch of salt.  I would dearly love to find out more about Malato, a fascinating character who was exiled to New Caledonia with his father in his teens and ended up in London as a journalist, Henry Rochefort’s secretary, and also the French correspondent for Freedom.  He provides very lively descriptions of our next characters, and was also the author of a vaudeville play staged at the Autonomie Club called ‘Dynamite Wedding’, which mocked clueless spies and Parisian police agents.  The final chapter of his book, a guide to new exiles, includes a hilarious phrasebook, giving first the French, then the written English, then 'Anglais parlé' in a heavy French accent, with useful expressions like Bladé forégneur!, Oh! maille pôr belli and Ite iz improper you nême de mêlée of de henna, ouse nême iz olso given tou enne odeur tinge ('Bloody foreigner!'; 'Oh! My poor belly'; 'It is improper to name the male of the hen, whose name is also given to an other thing.') More practically: 'I have a friend in Wardour Street'; 'Sir, I am a political refugee'; 'Search my pockets, you will see I am not a minister'.

Fifth stop…via Goodge Street…59 and 67 Charlotte Street

67 Charlotte Street 

59 Charlotte Street

As we left Colville Place, I had to announce an on-the-hoof change of plan…a hasty discussion with Linus Rees of the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre about changes in street names – presumably the bane of all city guides’ lives – had just revealed that our next stop was not where we thought it was.  The Librairie Internationale, the bookshop and newsagent run by Armand Lapie, and probably the most heavily policed and spied-upon spot in Fitzrovia in the 1890s, was not actually at 30 Goodge Street but at 30 Little Goodge Street – now renamed Goodge Place, and precisely where we had begun our walk.  Actually, a much more atmospheric spot too – the street bends nicely, so you can imagine people hiding round corners – and it's one that’s changed less since then than many.  I’ve not yet been able to establish the numbering in the 1890s, so I’m still working on the precise location of the shop, which was a crucial crossnational hub for continental anarchists: Lapie has been revealed as by far the most densely connected individual in those circles.  Later, in Geneva,  Lapie published the memoirs of Victorine B. – Souvenir d’une morte vivante – another of my key sources. Madam Brocher  – as I subsequently discovered – was also involved in Michel’s school.  More and more links keep emerging….

So we hurried back to Charlotte Street, where Louise Michel lived at one point, at no. 59.  She had quite a few London addresses over the years, including one just round the corner from where I live now in South London, and seems to have shared most of them with one or more cats…she even came back from New Caledonia with several stray felines in her pockets, and was as incapable of passing an animal in distress as she was of walking by a suffering human being.  (Did you notice the cat - and the policeman - in the picture of the Newman Passage co-operative kitchen?)

A few doors up was another landmark to which newcomers were always directed, Victor Richard’s épicerie.  Malato paints the grocer in Rabelaisian terms – rotund in figure and character, he was bald, pink and charming – and joked that he’d been radicalised by prolonged contact with red beans and believed white ones to be reactionary.  He also claims that before his flight to England, his friend Richard had contributed to the defeat of the Prussians by supplying the French army with beans that made them fart and had advocated pickling the deputies of the Versailles government and feeding them to the hungry of Paris.  A great friend of Vallès too, and many other Communard leaders, Richard provided political exiles with a poste restante and staging post in London for years.

Sixth stop: 19 Fitzroy Street

And finally we came to the site of the International School where educationalist Margaret McMillan - named as a teacher on the prospectus - was shocked to find children gazing at pictures showing Communards lined up against the wall to be shot and the hanged Haymarket anarchists of Chicago.  I had been confused about exactly where the school was, as so many accounts put it in Fitzroy Square - where a suitable corner building still stands - and my hopes had been further raised by finding a painting in the Tate of that building by Henry Nevinson’s son Christopher (think Kit Neville in Pat Barker’s Life Class). But Fitzroy Square was actually the name given to the whole area in those days – ‘Fitzrovia’ wasn’t coined until the 1940s – and both the prospectus itself, and the two leading historians of the school, Constance Bantman and Martyn Everett, confirmed that the school was actually in Fitzroy Street.  

Nannie Dryhurst with her daughters Nora (left) and Sylvia (my great-grandmother- right - later Lynd)
in 1892. Photo by Frederick Hollyer ©From LSE Library Collections, SHAW PHOTOGRAPHS/1/12/899

The school itself definitely deserves a blogpost of its own, on which I will hold off until Everett publishes his research later this year.  All will then become clear, I hope, about the role played by Michel's colleague and school secretary, agent provocateur Auguste Coulon, the 'vile' spymaster Melville, and the bomb-making equipment found in the basement that seems to have got the school closed down.  Today I will leave you to admire the beautiful cover of the school's 1890 prospectus  designed by no other than Walter Crane. I first encountered Crane on my mother's knee at the piano, and introduced him to my own children the same way, singing nursery rhymes like 'Lavender's Blue' from the exquisitely illustrated pages of The Baby's Opera and The Baby's Bouquet.  Of course my mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother must all have sung from those pages too. I'd never even considered Crane's politics before I saw this:

©The British Library

I love the fact that this teacher plucks apples for her pupils from the Tree of Enlightenment rather than the Tree of Knowledge.  She wears a liberty cap while filling her lamp with the oil of Truth.  No surprise, looking at this, to find the name W. Morris among the Honorary Members of the school's committee.  'From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs', a slogan popularised by Marx, was actually first used by the French socialist Louis Blanc, who was not a Communard, but was in the provisional government set up after the 1848 revolution. Blanc lived in exile in London (in St John's Wood rather than Fitzrovia) until the Third Republic was declared in September 1870 when he rushed back to Paris.  

Turn the page, and the prospectus announces its principles to be those of Mikhail Bakunin, founder of collectivist anarchism, who believed 'the whole education of children must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and independence, not on that of piety and obedience. . . the final object of education necessarily being the formation of free men full of respect and love for the liberty of others.'  Louise Michel naturally does not forget her girls, and adds beneath: 'In a word, therefore, the object of the School is to make free and noble-minded men and women, not commercial machines.'

Tramping the streets looking for clues while you're researching a historical novel is a wonderful thing…tramping them after you've written it, in the company of curious and like-minded strangers and new acquaintances, even more so. Long may the Fitzrovia Festival and the Neighbourhood Centre continue to flourish. Thank you for having me, and thanks to everyone who came.

www.lydiasyson.com 

                                   

Follow links for sources mentioned. Others include Angela V. John's War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century: The Life and Times of Henry W. Nevinson (2006); P. Martinez, “A Police Spy and the Exiled Communards, 1871-1873,” English Historical Revue, Vol. 97, No. 382 (January 1982), pp. 99-112 and Thomas C. Jones and Robert Tombs, “The French left in exile: Quarante-huitards and Communards in London, 1848—80,” in Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, eds., A History of the French in London: liberty, equality, opportunity, London Institute of Historical Research, London 2013.  

Please don't reproduce copyrighted images without permission of the copyright holders.

26 Pairs of Eyes by Joan Lennon

Back in February I posted about My Foundling Girl - the object I'd been assigned as part of 26 Pairs of Eyes: Looking at the Overlooked.  This project was a collaboration between the writers' collective 26 and The Foundling Museum in London.  The curators chose 26 objects which were then assigned at random to 26 writers for their response.  The resulting exhibition runs all summer.*  If you possibly can, go and visit - the museum is fascinating - humbling, heartbreaking and hopeful in equal measures - and the sestudes (62 word pieces - 62 being 26 backwards) offer new insights into the chosen artefacts.

If you can't visit, though, there's an online alternative here, where you can browse through the objects the curators chose, the authors' responses and background pieces on the process as well.  

My object was a marble bust called "The Foundling Girl" made by David Watson Stevenson in 1871 - 

and my response to her is here.  Is she my favourite object in the whole museum?  Absolutely. 


* The exhibition runs from 4 June to 6 September 2015 at The Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.

Hardknott and the Dalmatians - by Katherine Langrish

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone... 

From Roman Wall Blues by WH Auden

On holiday in the Lakes last year, we decided to take our car up and over first the Wrynose Pass and then the frankly terrifying Hardknott Pass, one of the two steepest roads in England - I mean, look at it - and stop at Hardknott Roman Fort, which is over the other side. 

I was glad I wasn't driving. And I'm a Yorkshire girl who learned to drive on the steep and twisting roads of the Dales - but at least with those you've got nice solid drystone walls between you and any drop. This is nothing but hairpin bends, most of it single track, and nothing but rock and air on either side. And lonely... oh, so lonely!

Not even the Romans could have made a straight road up here.  There's every chance that, way back in the first century,  the cohort of unfortunate soldiers who had to construct and then live in the fort on the other side of the pass, trudged up this very series of bends. At last they had their feet on the ground. I shut my eyes for most of the journey.

Diving down the other side it was a relief to spot the Roman fort below (you can see the walls snaking over the contours at the top of the picture above). We pulled over on to a narrow gravel shoulder and got out. Our dog jumped happily out of the back.

And we had brought her to the right spot. The fort was built in the early second century on a road (Roman or earlier) which runs all the way from the inland forts at Kendal and Ambleside and down Eskdale to the coast at Ravenglass, where there's another fort with a sumptuous bathhouse.  'Recalling [William] Camden's remark that there were some who thought the old bathhouse at Ravenglass to be the court of the legendary King Eveling, [RG] Collingwood expanded in his guidebook: "...people thought it was the Lyons Garde of the Arthurian romances... or they said it was the castle of King Eveling or Avaloc, the husband of the sea-fairy Morgan le Fay, who was king over the island where the blessed dead dwelt."'  Under Another Sky, Journeys In Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins, 2013.

The Roman name for the fort was Mediobogdum. It was built under the Emperor Hadrian and would have formed a base for troops patrolling the potentially hostile native population in the valleys and on the lower fells. It was abandoned during the Antonine advance into Scotland, but then re-occupied:  according to an inscription now preserved in the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, the garrison here in the mid fourth century was a detachment of 500 cavalry of the 6th Cohort of Dalmatians from, of course, the Roman province of Dalmatia on the eastern Adriatic.

Fortunately we had a Dalmatian with us, and she wasted no time in exploring all over her ancestral home.

Here she goes, running past the beautifully preserved outer wall...

 
 ... and in through the main gate...

 
... to explore inside the fort, where the outline of three buildings are still clearly visible above ground: a granary, a garrison headquarters building and a house for the commander.

The fort has the most stunning views. It's at an altitude of 800 feet, perched on a rocky prominence above Eskdale.  This is the view from the rear of the fort, and my photo really hardly does justice to the precipitous drop.

Did the soldiers of the Fourth Cohort of Dalmatians appreciate the view, though?  It's hard to imagine that they did. Unusually for a Roman fort, no trace of any vicus has ever been found around it; either the site was too remote or the population too unfriendly for a civilian village to spring up around the walls. It must have been a severe, lonely, isolated posting.There is supposed to be a rare example of a parade ground built higher up the slope, a levelled area enclosed with a raised bank; we went looking for it but honestly we couldn't find it. To my eyes the ground was either lumpy with rock and bracken, or else reedy, spongy turf running with water.  I couldn't imagine the soldiers having much fun carrying out their manouevres under the eye of their commander, with the wind taking their ears off and their hobnailed leather boots soaking up the wet. Incidentally, several preserved leather shoes or boots were discovered at this site at a dig in 1968.

It was probably a necessity rather than a luxury that this fort has a fine bath house with a vaulted circular sweatroom, a suditorium, in which the cold and clammy soldiers could bask in the only real heat for miles and miles.

But I do I wonder if any of them ever got home to sunny Dalmatia?



Picture credits.

All photos copyright Katherine Langrish except for the photo of Hardknott Pass, which is a personal photograph taken by Christopher Kennett on 18th June 2004, Wikimedia Commons