ETHEL WHO? by Eleanor Updale

Last month, I was inspired by an old magazine to write about aluminium knickers.

I warned you then that the publication might prove to be a treasure trove for History Girls posts.  So here's something else from the June 1945 edition of Everybody's.

The magazine carried a full-page review of the premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes at Sadlers Wells.  

The article, though wildly enthusiastic about Britten's achievement, was in part a lament for the state of British music, and the failure of this country to appreciate its native talent.  The reviewer, Ronald Hilborne, put it like this:

With the twentieth century, English composers such as Goring Thomas and CV Stanford wrote opera after opera.  In vain.  Stanford’s “Much Ado About Nothing," music and words in our native idiom, was generously heard by London in 1901 - for two nights.  Then it was thrown out.  The late Dame Ethel Smythe, the finest woman composer the world has yet seen, composed a vigorous opera with a Cornish setting called “The Wreckers” It was eventually give an enthusiastic first night in 1906 - in Germany.

The bold type is the magazine's own.  Hilborne could not have been more enthusiastic about Dame Ethel.  I wondered why (as I thought) I had never heard a note of her music.

It didn't take long to find a performance of the overture to The Wreckers on YouTube.  It's wonderfully stirring stuff.  You can find it here.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maozbZsiK0c 

And there is a recording of the entire opera, although it doesn't seem to have originated in a stage performance.

The opera didn't receive its American Premier until 2007, more than a hundred years after it was written.

The story of The Wreckers is perfect for the new Poldark generation: salt of the earth starving Cornish-folk scavenge on wrecks for survival, and a love affair comes to a watery end.  It's no more far-fetched than European operas that are performed all the time.  Why has it been confined to near-oblivion?

The same question might be asked of Smyth's moving Mass in D, and many of her chamber works (which can also be tracked down on the internet).  

But who was Ethel Smyth?

Ethel Smyth 

by John Singer Sargent, 1901

[National Portrait Gallery]

Well, she was born in 1848, and died in 1944.  After battling against her parents to be allowed to study music, she learned composition in Leipzig.  She knew Schumann, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and was romantically involved with various well-known men and women of her era.  But she lived in suburban Surrey, near Woking.  Perhaps that explains the dismissiveness of the British artistic community about her work.
Smyth was not only a prolific composer. She wrote several books, and she was a leading campaigner for women's suffrage.  In 1910, she wrote to Mrs Pankhurst, lamenting her previous ignorance of the cause, and offering to do whatever she could to support it.

As well as taking direct action, Smyth donated her musical talent to the cause.  And it is in this context that I found I had, after all, known one of her works for many years.
Ethel Smyth wrote the famous March of the Women, which you can hear on YouTube, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65NuypEkg-4

Here's the first verse:

Shout, shout, up with your song!

Cry with the wind for the dawn is breaking.

March, march, swing you along,

Wide blows our banner and hope is waking.

Song with its story, dreams with their glory,

Lo! They call and glad is their word.

Forward! Hark how it swells

Thunder of freedom, the voice of the Lord.

The anthem was first heard at a rally in the Royal Albert Hall in 1911.
Years later, Smyth gave her own account of the event:
In those early days of my association with the W.S.P.U. occurred an event which, in her pride, the writer must recount ere the pace becomes such that a personal reference would be unthinkable, namely the formal introduction to the Suffragettes of ‘The March of the Women’, to which Cicely Hamilton fitted the words after the tune had been written – not an easy undertaking. A suffragette choir had been sternly drilled, and I remember Edith Craig plaintively commenting on the difficulty of hitting a certain E flat. But it was maintained that the interval is a peculiarly English one (which is true) and must be coped with. We had the organ, and I think a cornet to blast forth the tune (a system much to be recommended on such occasions), and it was wonderful processing up the centre aisle of the Albert Hall in Mus. Doc. robes at Mrs Pankhurst’s side, and being presented with a beautiful baton, encircled by a golden collar with the date , 23^rd March 1911.

Suffragette March in Hyde Park

[National Portrait Gallery]

It is said that in 1912, an impromptu performance of The March of the Women was conducted by Smyth from the window of her cell in Holloway Prison, using her toothbrush as a baton.

By 1922, she was no longer considered a risk to society, and she was made a Dame. In her last years, she became deaf, and stopped composing.  By the end of the Second World War, she was dead and, if the article in Everybody's is a guide, already on her way to being forgotten by the musical establishment.  

Maybe some opera house, perhaps inspired by the popularity of Poldark, will put on a full production of The Wreckers, and give her back her place in Britain's musical history.

Dame Ethel Smyth
[National Portrait Gallery]

www.eleanorupdale.com

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE GNOMES? by Eleanor Updale

When I was a History student (in the 1970s and again at the turn of the century) one of the things I liked most was being buried in the library.  In those days, part of the joy of historical research (and one of the main things we were being tested on) was slogging through cardboard indexes and untangling illegible handwriting.  We were looking for something no one else knew about, or which had been routinely overlooked.
In those days, it was perfectly in order to spend several years doing a PhD.  Some people never finished at all.  In the great mahogany stacks there were old men who never spoke to anyone, but shuffled to the same seat every day to slog away at a great work no one would ever see.  The true professionals sat in a strange huddled posture, their arms guarding their books and papers from the prying eyes of rival scholars, like children protecting their chips from hungry siblings.

Not much changed for four hundred years

Those of us who were on time limits of three or four years for delivering a thesis laughed about the Gnomes, as we called them, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who silently envied their secret world. I learned, like them, to feel a frisson of superiority when a new person arrived at an archive, unaware of the particular bureaucratic gymnastics that particular institution had invented for ordering something up.  I remember the thrill of finding letters and notebooks that ad languished, unread, for hundreds of years.
My excitement was only slightly dimmed by the knowledge that I was the only person in the world who cared.
I was even a little sad at the thought that when my thesis was done, anyone with the detective power to trace a copy, and the muscular strength to lift it down from the shelf, would be able to find the location of 'my' documents in the bibliography.

My idea of a fun place

But then, in the early years of this century, the grown-ups taught me to share.

I was lucky enough to be taught by some truly wonderful scholars.  They were all equally brilliant, but in academic esteem, some were more equal than others.  Those whose books were commissioned by commercial publishers and sold in normal bookshops were condemned by the Gnomes as 'popular' historians.  Their success in spreading their knowledge to people outside the magic academic circle was taken as proof of their intellectual inferiority.  It's not surprising that the collective noun is a 'malice' of historians.
The popular historians got their own back in the late 20th and early 21st century, when well researched, beautifully produced history books temporarily became money-spinners, but that was also the time when the Gnomes' contempt for such authors reached its highest point.

When broadband came along, even popular historians were tested in their belief that their work - and, more importantly, their source material, - should be available to the masses.  Many ancient documents are now online in facsimile form.  You can zoom in and out of indistinct lettering until a meaning emerges. You can compare documents housed a world apart, wearing your pyjamas or over a cappuccino. And you can do all this without any entrance exams, just for fun.

Try deciphering this by the light of a 40 watt bulb in a library

I know that is a good thing, and I love using the Internet. But I'm ashamed to say that somewhere deep in my heart, I am sad. I miss our old secret world.  I'd like to think that there's something noble in that sentiment, but if I'm honest it's founded on a pretty despicable form of snobbery.  I liked knowing things that other people didn't know - and stood little chance of finding for themselves.  I adored my old work tools (pencil, notebook, magnifying glass and silence).  I thrived on the simultaneous torture of being kept away from my source material when the library was shut and the blissful encounter with real life that the closure forced on me. 

Many professionals whose status depends on feats of memory are being undermined by our new world of information.  Imagine how medics feel when patients arrive having correctly diagnosed their own illnesses online. It is becoming more difficult for them to appear omnipotent, or to bury their mistakes.

It is still (just) possible to do an historian's work in the old way.  Some of the Gnomes are still there, bending over their books.  Many more must have died of starvation in a world that only rewards published results.  Others may have been driven out by the clicking keyboards of students using the library as a place to access the Internet while saving on heating bills at home.

I have said goodbye to my inner Edward Casaubon.  But sometimes I secretly wish that I'd been born a little earlier, and could have carried on gnoming forever.



www.eleanorupdale.com


pictures :Wikimedia Commons.  Library picture: Benjamin D. Esham / Wikimedia Commons.

HISTORY DOESN’T LOOK THE SAME ANY MORE by Eleanor Updale

When I was young, I watched a lot of black-and-white films. They were on the telly every wet weekend afternoon, and although I must have seen some of them many times over, I never lost the sense that the people in them looked odd. Those women with their cinched waists, full dark lips and tightly waved hair were peculiar. You ever saw anyone looking remotely like them anywhere else. The past really was another country.

Not one of us

Earlier fashions were even more foreign: skirts to the floor, flapper dresses, even men’s hairstyles such as buzz cuts and slicked-down college boy styles were unfamiliar on the eye.

Something has changed. The people around us in our everyday lives now wear such a wide range of clothes that almost nothing surprises. It seems to me that there is almost no distinctive ‘21st century’ style - at least, not yet.  Fabrics may be different and easier to launder, but almost all looks are (often deliberately) reminiscent of something that has gone before. Even school photos now feature blazers, badges and boaters that would have looked antiquated fifty years ago.

Until very recently, it was only the shoulder pads and big hair of the early 80s that looked comic to the modern eye. Now they are beginning to make a comeback, and soon nothing from the 20th century will raise a laugh. If you see television archive material from the 60s, 70s or 80s, the language and attitudes might be a clue to their date. The green tinge of the film (caused by the copying and storage customs of the time) will tell you it is old. But the clothes? it’s only the fact that everyone in shot seems to be wearing a version of the same style (and the presence of cigarettes) that suggests this isn’t the present day.

Of course, our lives have changed in many ways, the new role of technology being the most obvious. As I type this, a robot is vacuuming the floor for me. But innovations are not always for the better. The machine I am working on now makes me unhappy every day - and cost me more than the proceeds of the last piece of work I wrote on it. 

All of writers know that, thanks to the capabilities of our software, we are now not only composers, but editors, typesetters, and accountants. Our days are spent battling with printers instead of sharpening pencils. But, on the plus side, at least we can back things up, and don’t lose whole manuscripts on trains any more.  And, with a few clicks, we can actually see people from the past.

One of the influences my generation’s perception of near history was in the way we viewed old newsreel footage. Until recently, this was shown on ‘modern’ cine equipment, which ran at a slightly different frame-rate from the cameras on which it had been recorded. The result (as anyone over about 45 will remember) was a comic jerkiness. People in the past were not like us. They were less sophisticated. They couldn't even walk properly.  Their regrettable political judgements were somehow the product of their less formed minds.

Lloyd George with the King in a clip from 1922

You can see the whole thing here:

ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYeLTdW2b4c

Lloyd George was one of the first politicians to feature regularly in newsreels.  I always thought he looked a bit of a prat.  Now that we see the films at (almost) the proper speed, it’s easier to appreciate that people like him were, in most of the ways that really matter, just like us.

Last night, while doing the very 21st century task of assembling furniture using wordless instructions, I watched an old edition of Steptoe and Son. I’m old enough to have seen the first episode on transmission, in 1962. In those days, we laughed at the shambles of junkyard that surrounded Harold and Albert. Now the programme looks like an edition of the Antiques Roadshow. If the sad couple auctioned off the contents of their house, they would be made for life. 

What would a teenager of today make of it, I wonder? Almost certainly, they wouldn’t see anything remarkable in a man in his thirties still living with his father. That was a crucial ingredient in painting Harold’s pathetic character way back then.

Maybe I’ll try muting the sound and writing a 21st century script to go with the pictures.  It might be the story of a poverty-stricken academic caring for his dementing father (a retired doctor?) with insufficient help from Social Services.  The words will be different, but the set and the costumes can stay the same.


eleanor@eleanorupdale.com

ELECTRIC HISTORY by Eleanor Updale

In the orgy of television programmes about the First World War, one of the best things has been the archive film footage, some of which has never been seen before.  Now that digital technology allows the speed of playback to be adjusted, we no longer see figures from the early 20^th century as jumpy marionettes. We can concentrate on the hope and fear in people’s eyes, rather than the comic jerkiness of their movements.

For reasons to do with my new book, I have been delving into an even earlier collection of films, made as the 19^th century turned into the 20th.

Montmrency Returns set more than a hundred years ago, and it’s almost an historical document in itself.  Although just published, it has been on the stocks for a very long time. The title, Montmorency Returns, is a bit of an in joke for the many Montmorency fans who have written over the past few years asking where it was.  The fourth book in the Montmorency series, published in 2006, ended on a cliffhanger.  I always intended to bash straight on, but the publisher had other ideas.  Now here it is, at last, alongside all the other books in the series, which have been redesigned to match, with better paper and better print than ever.  You can get them all on Amazon by clicking here .

Part of my plot involves the early cinema – in the days long before Hollywood, and just before the New Jersey town of Fort Lee became the heart of the American film industry.

The great inventor Thomas A Edison was one of the pioneers of the industry (both as a developer of hardware and as a producer and marketer of films).  When I first started thinking about the book, it was hard to get to see original films from his time.  You had to go to special events at arty or academic cinemas.  It was difficult even to find out what had survived, and where. In the few years of publishing hiatus, a treasure trove of material has appeared on YouTube, and here are some samples.  You can find them all easily just by typing a few appropriate words into any search engine.  They may seem a little crude, but they are fascinating, and I should perhaps warn you that, for reasons of taste, a couple may be a little difficult for some people to watch.

First, here’s a very brief re-enactment of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, made in 1895.  It’s one of the earliest e examples of editing for dramatic effect.  Although a little indistinct, it’s worth watching for the way the head rolls away after the chop. 

MQS with her head on, just to the right of centre

MQS, head off.  The head is just to the left of centre

Then there’s a whole sequence of films featuring the career and assassination of President McKinley in 1901.

 

McKinley’s death, and its consequences, are at the heart of my story, and I not only used the films for research, but also built them in to the plot.

Although Edison’s cameramen followed McKinley around intensively on his last days - as he visited the World’s Fair in Buffalo in New York State - there is no cinematic record of the assassination itself, nor of the capture of his killer inside the Temple of Music on the exhibition site.

What we do have is studies of the crowd before and after the event – remarkable for the uniformity of dress (especially the men’s straw boater hats) and for the the sheer press of people.

The Buffalo Fair lit by electric light

McKinley’s killer, Leon Czolgosz, admitted his crime, and was executed in the electric chair. 

Edison staged a reconstruction of the execution, which is chilling in many ways – not least for the nonchalance of all those taking part in the event.

A couple of years later, and in another film which some of you may not want to watch, Edison again demonstrated the power of electricity to take life by showing the killing of Topsy, a circus elephant, who had killed one of her trainers and been sentenced to death by hanging.

Edison offered to electrocute the beast, partly at the behest of those who regarded hanging as cruel, but mainly to show the lethal qualities of Alternating Current (he was marketing Direct Current at the time).  If you really want to, you can see both execution films online.

Topsy dying.  Seconds later, she is dead

McKinley’s assassination, following on from anarchist killings of European leaders,

 such as King Umberto of Italy (see Montmorency and the Assassins) led to a boom in secret service activity.  In Montmorency Returns, the secret service men scan Edison’s Buffalo films for the faces of anarchist sympathisers. 

But not before they’ve had a little light relief from another 1901 Edison film.  It shows a lady gradually disrobing on a trapeze, flinging her clothes to a couple of excited gentlemen.  Here are some stills from that one.

 Not very dignified, but rather cheerier than the elephant film, I’m glad to say - though it’s an early example of women’s place in films for some time to come.    Mary Queen of Scots, by the way, was played by a man.

www.eleanorupdale.com

A MYSTERY HISTORY CRACKER from Eleanor Updale

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Here we are again.  It's the History Girls' third Christmas, and if you are stuck for something to read, you could do worse than to work your way backwards through the hundreds of posts there have been so far.
Today, I'm giving you all a Christmas cracker.

Here's what's inside:
Instead of a silly paper hat, you're getting a crown.

This is the ancient crown of Polish royalty, known as the Crown of Boleslaw the Brave.  More than a thousand years ago, he was given it by Otto III, the Holy Roman Emperor.  Actually, this is a replica - one of many.  Several replacements had to be made in the first seven hundred years of its existence. Polish royalty being a pretty precarious thing, the crown jewels have been hidden, stolen, and taken into exile over the centuries.  In the 18th century Boleslaw's crown was melted down by the Prussians to make gold coins, some of which were used in the most recent reconstruction, early this century.
Of course, there's no one to wear the crown today, and it's held in a museum in Krakow.  Here's a picture of it atop King Stanislaus II August in the 1700s, shortly before the Prussian army arrived.

Most crackers come with a little present - maybe a something useful like a keyring or a miniature screwdriver.  You get one of my favourite objects from the Victoria and Albert Museum.  It's a lock made in around 1680 by the master craftsman John Wilkes.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

It has the most intricate mechanism for locking and unlocking.  The keyhole is hidden behind the man's right leg and, best of all, the dial records how many times the lock has been opened.

You can see a video of the lock in operation on the V&A site at /http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/videos/w/video-wilkes-detector-lock/

 I did think of giving you a really old joke in your cracker.  Instead, you're getting a very old film.  I've been researching the film company founded by the great inventor Thomas Edison (for my new book, Montmorency Returns, available on Kindle and as a real book very soon). In 1910, Edison issued a version of Dickens's A Christmas Carol with what were then amazing special effects.  Here are some frozen frames:

You can watch the whole thing (it's only about ten minutes long) at https://archive.org/details/AChristmasCarolhttps://archive.org/details/AChristmasCarol
And then you can return to your own family, and your own Christmas, a better person for having seen it.
As Tiny Tim would say,  "God bless us, every one."

eleanor@eleanorupdale.com

A STRANGE BEREAVEMENT by Eleanor Updale

I was going to start this post with an invitation to join me on a visit to an unusual member of my family - but suddenly he's gone. Without him, I wouldn't be here today, and my children would never have been born.  I can hear you sighing already (other people's genealogy can be as boring as their holiday photos) but stick with me.  The real reason I'm talking about this ancestor is that he lived at a site where something extraordinary happened.  The event is worth hearing about in its own right, but I've just come across a re-telling of it that raises an issue close to the heart of readers and writers on this blog: can fiction writers sometimes convey the feel of an event better than mainstream reporters or historians?

I may have mentioned before that one of the driving forces behind my latest book, The Last Minute, and the website that goes with it (www.eleanorupdale.com/minute) is the laziness of the way disasters are reported.  Too often, cliches of language, format and tone cheapen the suffering of those involved, reducing them to stereotypes, and inoculating us against horror.   There's one BBC correspondent, often sent to bloody or desperate locations, whose reports are all so similar, and so bathed in an apparent enjoyment of gloom, that I'm ashamed to say I have to suppress a giggle at the very mention of her name.  But she is simply the extreme.  I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels uncomfortable  about the how images of warfare, and the way they are packaged for us, have become so routine that any shock is short lived - or, worse still, replaced with a feeling of impotent despair which can too easily drift into indifference.

It shouldn't be possible to watch reports from Iraq, Egypt or Syria and continue with what you were doing before they came on screen, but I can, and do, day after day. And I'm ashamed of myself.

I was in the news business for many years.  I know some of the reporters, and I'm certain that they care desperately about the events amidst which they bravely work, but even the best of them can't always get though the screen.

When it comes to TV history, violence is often glamorised or used as wallpaper - with am-dram extras staging sanitised reconstructions to keep our eyes open as the pop professor yacks on.  The pain is no greater than in a children's cartoon.
That's why I was overwhelmed by a fictional account of an event in wartime London which suddenly made me realise what it must be like to be caught up in one of today's episodes of random, merciless killing.

At this point, I had better introduce my late ancestor.  He's about my height but even broader.  This is almost exactly what he looked like.
He was the mighty pillar box behind which my father took cover when a German V1 landed on the Aldwych in London on 30th June 1944.  It saved his life. 
From Edwardian times, he stood on the south side of the Strand in London, not far from St Clement Danes Church.
Now, as I think I've mentioned before, my father spent his entire childhood in institutional care and hadn't a clue who his parents were, so I grew up rather short of forebears.  As a result I have a (possibly rather unhealthy) attachment to some objects, and this pillar box (my 'grandfather') was one of them.
I always used to give him a loving stroke as I passed by. You could still see and feel where the shrapnel hit.  I assumed that he would be there forever, so you can imagine what a shock I got on Monday when I went to photograph him for this blog, only to find that he had gone. A massive building project is underway, and it seems he has  been a casualty of redevelopment.

'My' postbox was where the envelope sign is, by St Clement Danes church at the right of the map.  The other double box is marked by the envelope by St Mary le Strand at the bottom left.

There's another box, a little further down the Strand, near King's College and St Mary le Strand.

I'm afraid that one has a rather doomed look too.  Even so, I think I will adopt him as an honorary uncle.

As you'll have gathered, I always thought of 'my' pillar box as a rather jolly thing, and of the bombing as a minor event at the fag end of a long war.  As far as I could tell on Monday, there is no memorial anywhere nearby.  The attack is unmentioned in St Clement Danes church (which had already been bombed in the earlier Blitz). There's no memorial at the building on the corner of Kingsway which took the worst of the blast, and in which many died (it was then the Air Ministry, and later - as St Catherine's house - the registry of births, marriages and deaths.  Now, it's a rather austere office). For me, my father's V1 was the bomb that didn't kill, and my mother's story of him staggering into a pub in Essex street caked in dust seemed rather comic. I didn't know they were protecting me from the truth.

It took a fictionalised account of the blast, in the novel The Secret Fire by Martin Langfield, to bring home what it was really like to be in that London street just a few weeks after the exhillaration of D-Day.  Of course, The Secret Fire is a novel, and you don't have to read far to realise that much of the plot must be pure invention, but when it comes to the framework in which that fiction operates, the feel seems to me rock-solid, and the more official records I've looked at since finding the novel bear this out.  The stark facts (at least 48 - perhaps 200 - dead, hundreds more injured, tremendous damage to buildings) bear out the strategic significance of the strike, but Langfield's account of the human consequences is compelling.
Here are some extracts:

The Air Ministry’s 10-foot-tall blast walls, made of 18-inch-thick brick, disintegrated immediately, deflecting the force of the explosion up and down the street. Hundreds of panes of glass shattered, blowing razor-sharp splinters through the air. The Air Ministry women watching at the windows were sucked out of Adastral House by the vacuum and dashed to death on the street below. Men and women queuing outside the Post Office were torn to pieces. Shrapnel peppered the facades of Bush House and the Air Ministry like bullets...

Part of the casement of the bomb lay burning at the corner of Kingsway. The dead and dying lay scattered in the street. Groans and cries of pain filled the air, though many could not hear them, deafened by the concussion. Some of the victims were naked, their clothing blown from them by the blast...Banknotes blew in the breeze...

People walked around dazed, blood pouring from wounds some didn’t know they had, the crunch of broken glass under their feet ubiquitous. One woman walked down seventy-nine steps of an Adastral House stairwell to the street, not realizing her right foot was hanging sideways, feeling no pain, stepping over bodies...
 
One man stepped from a doorway after the blast and was sliced vertically in two by a sheet of falling glass.

A news editor of the Evening Standard who came upon the scene couldn’t take his eyes off the trees. Their leaves had all been replaced by pieces of human flesh...

At the end of the book, Langfield describes his sources for this passage.  He has done his research, just as any serious writer would.  But there's something in the writing that gives his account a charge that is lacking from the 'official' sources. 
You can read more in the book, or visit http://secretfire.wordpress.com/the-aldwych-v-1-blast-june-30-1944/
There are some photographs (not used here for fear over copyright) at this site: http://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspxhttp://www.westendatwar.org.uk/page_id__10_path__0p28p.aspx
And there are better pictures at http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/V1_maintxtd.html though sadly on this (and only this) page of that site, the date of the attack is wrong.

When I knew my father (who died more than thirty years ago) he was passionately opposed to the glamorisation of conflict.  I always assumed that was because of his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War.  Now I wonder whether it wasn't, at least in part, due to what he saw in his lunch break in London on that summer day in 1944 - horror he never spoke about In detail.
This chimes in with the immediate reaction of the poet Danny Abse, who was also in the street when the bomb hit.
...the Aldwych echo of crunch
and the urgent ambulances loaded
with the fresh dead...
Abse, then a medical student at Kings College, carried on with his day, walking though the mayhem to get to the dissecting room. It was nearly fifty years before he felt able to analyse his response to the event in his poem Carnal Knowledge, which you can read here.
http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.htmlhttp://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/carnal.knowledge.da.html

Martin Langfield's image of the body parts in the trees, and the sense of an 'ordinary' day transformed will colour the way I watch and listen to news reports now.  That scene could be a street in Baghdad or Damascus. Just as constraints on reporting during the war meant that the true horror of 30th June 1944 was not widely known at the time, our sensibilities limit what can be shown on the screen now.  The panting reporter, often taking up much of the frame, tells us an event is shocking - and we may even be warned in advance of distressing scenes before a news item starts- but sadly I have to admit that it took a fictionalised picture of an event almost seventy years ago to make me realise how numb I had become to the horrors of our own day.  That's just one reason why it's worth reading, and writing, historical novels.

Map from OpenStreetMap.org

www.eleanorupdale.com
I'll be back with you on Christmas Day - and I promise you something more cheery.

CLICK FOR HISTORY by Eleanor Updale

I was planning something pretty earnest for this month, but it needed a photo specially taken in London, and a change in my travel plans means it will have to wait for another time.

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING

Photo by Adam Jones adamjones.freeservers.com
via Wikimedia Commons

My first idea for a replacement was something equally worthy.  I thought I’d give an example of how profoundly the Internet has affected the research process.  I was going to illustrate it with the story of my own quest, ten years ago, to find a fragment of a torn 17th century letter, which turned out to be in the archives of an ancient British bank (the main body of the sheet being in Australia). 

Back at the turn of the century (and even though the Internet was beginning to make our lives easier) the shoe-leather side of historical research took ages. We still had to consult card indexes, with all their vulnerability to misfiling, illegibility and loss. Sometimes, a long journey to an archive would result in disappointment: either the thing you were looking for was not there, or there was a policy that only the staff could undertake a search. They were unfailingly helpful and polite, but they were inevitably operating at a disadvantage – not really knowing what you were after, no matter how good the brief; blind to the resonance and inspiration of apparently irrelevant items; prisoners of the little summaries written by the original cataloguers, who had read the documents with the preconceptions and value judgments of their own time. 

 

Photo: Dr. Marcus Gossler, via Wikimedia Commons

Even then, some libraries would communicate only by post, and demanded written references to show that you were entitled to ask a question in the first place.

So much of that has gone.  If anything, the problem now is wading unaided through a superfluity of undersourced information.  But uniting the two halves of that letter would probably be a quick job these days...

... Or so I imagine.  I didn’t get as far as that comparatively simple task.  Instead, caught up in the egg-whisk of the search engine, I hit on the idea of seeking out a digital image of a random 17th century letter from anyone, anywhere, and unpicking it for you. So I put in some very broad search terms (digital, letter, archive, university etc) just to see what would pop out of the Internet Lucky Dip.

 

The very first search result was from Duke University in North Carolina, USA.

As it happens, there are some distinguished researchers in my period there, so I thought it was all ‘meant’, and I clicked on. And that’s when you were rescued from my plan, because what I hit on was the most wonderful archive of AmericanTV advertising.  Duke has put online thousands of television commercials created or collected by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles advertising agency.  They date from the 1950s to the 1980s.

 If you know my book Johnny Swanson, you will understand why my heart leapt.   

Part of the plot of that book is based on 1920s classified ads, so I was already primed to relish diving in to one of the best resources for getting a feel for the social tone of a time and place.

If ever you fancy a lost afternoon, this digital archive is the place to go. It’s the reality behind Mad Men, with all the deification of doctors, flagrant peddling of bogus science, and manipulation of maternal concern.  Everything is interesting: the scripts, the camera angles, the clothes, the narrative structure of the ads, and the extensive exposure of children’s bodies, in a purely innocent way that would be unthinkable today. As you would expect, the unintentional humour trumps any real jokes.

I would love to embed some of the films here, but there are threats about copyright, etc, so here’s the link:

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/

I particularly recommend the ads for Vick’s vapour rub:

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews_vicks/

Of course, my interest was entirely academic and soberly historical (ahem). Duke University is, without doubt, a highly respectable place with a serious and important archive. These advertisments are just as important historical sources as the letter I meant to look for.  But they're fun too.  If you need a bit of a diversion from real life, and don’t mind losing a huge chunk of work time, give this archive a click.

www.eleanorupdale.com