'Standing up for Beards' by A L Berridge

You can’t do history without doing beards. Only a few have obviously starring roles, such as the one grown by Philip II of Spain to be ‘singed’ by Francis Drake, but even the most ordinary set of whiskers can insinuate its way into the history books – like the one Thomas More laid carefully away from the executioner’s block on the grounds that it ‘had not committed treason’.

                     A flammable beard                                            An innocent beard                              

It doesn’t even have to work that hard at it. Beards make a difference simply by being there, and through the centuries their presence (or absence) has been used to distinguish married men from bachelors, warriors from novices, clergy from laymen, Protestant from Catholic, Royalist from Parliamentarian, Jew from Gentile, Orthodox from Dissenter, and master from slave. In different times and places beards have been taxed, forbidden, and compulsory, and even in the 19th century a mistake could be costly. In 1830 a certain Joseph Palmer offended the people of Massachusetts by sporting a full beard, and his attempts to defend himself from forcible shaving landed him in prison.

A beard in the wrong place

However we look at it, beards matter, and their presence is the very texture of the past. This next battered print is one of my very favourite historical photographs, depicting the Master of Peterhouse greeting the Master of Trinity outside the Senate House in about 1906 – and I defy you not to see what I love about it…

Two Learned Beards

What would this picture be without the beards? These are beards of gravitas, as important as the ‘philosopher’s beard’ of Sophocles, and they define these two gentlemen even more than the gowns of their official status.

It has always been so. The mere style of a beard could advertise one’s status and pedigree – as in Ancient Egypt, where even a woman might wear a false beard if she was of royal birth. Their very fashion is history, and the greatest legacy of some historical figures can be traced in the styling of a ‘Franz Josef’ or a ‘Vandyke’ or the ‘Imperial’ of Napoleon III. Whole studies have been devoted to the significance and variety of historical forms, from John Adey Repton’s 1835 magnum opus ‘Some Account of the Beard and the Moustachio’ to Edwardian Upton Uxbridge Underwood’s ambitious little booklet on ‘Poets Ranked by Beard Weight’. Beards are truly the stuff of history, and we ignore them at our peril.

The Stuff of History

So why do we? When we look at historical fiction on the bookshop shelves, how come so few of the covers depict men with beards? Is there a conspiracy on the part of publishers and cover artists to whitewash the whiskers out of history, and present only images of men that appeal to popular taste?

It certainly looks like it – especially when the potential readership is predominantly female. I googled ‘Mills & Boon Historical Romances’ and was instantly dazzled by the gallery of gleaming manly jaws. Period and subject matter made no difference. Even when it came to Vikings and barbarians, there was never a beard in sight.

Invisible beards

Perhaps it’s defensible in this particular genre. The primary function of these heroes is to be sexually attractive, and history must bow to the apparently common modern view that facial hair is acceptable only on bikers, real-ale drinkers, and sandal-wearing ‘beardy-weirdies’. Beards may have been a fact of historical life, but so were bad teeth and personal hygiene, and you won’t find many of those in a historical romance.

The action-adventure and military genres are obviously a different matter. Beards have always held special significance for soldiers and warriors, and nobody would expect writers to steer clear of them in their novels. Indeed in some areas - such as Vikings, pirates or some periods of Crusaders – the beard is all but compulsory.

Author Robert Low being told he can't have beards on his Vikings

But there are other ways, and even if the writer says ‘beard’, cover-artists still display considerable ingenuity in their determination not to show them. Whiskers are hidden behind helmets, lost in the distance, and done away with altogether by the use of symbolic artefacts. Every effort is made to ensure no-one could possibly look at the book and think ‘ugh – a beard’. 

That’s not to say we’re not allowed them at all. Beards are perfectly acceptable in supporting roles like ‘hero’s friend’, while in villains or wise old men they’re actually desirable. Comedy can take the curse off even the beard of a leading man, as we see with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, who regards his manly whiskers as part of his allure. In other words, we can have beards on any character we like – except someone we might aspire to imitate or go to bed with.

It seems to have always been that way. We’re brought up to expect clean-shaven heroes, and I remember being shocked to discover that the Lt Chard who commanded at Rorke’s Drift actually looked very different from the Stanley Baker who tightened his jaw through ‘Zulu’ like an advert for Gillette. 

Now you see it........                      Now you don't

But maybe there’s a whiff of change in the air. When Hollywood last did Vikings we were subjected to the violently naked chin of Kirk Douglas, but the History Channel’s series ‘Vikings’ is almost as hairy as history could desire. Improbable film actors are beginning to sprout strange growths, almost as if the age of the Pretty Boy is beginning to give way to a new fashion for Manliness. If it is, I think it started with one particular man, who’s been my own saviour whenever I’ve been challenged about beards on my characters. ‘Beards?’ says my agent doubtfully. ‘Aragorn,’ I reply smugly. ‘Viggo Mortensen. Like that.’ ‘Ah,’ says my agent, visibly relieved. ‘Like that.’

Like this...

That’s good, I suppose – but I still can’t help feeling it shouldn’t matter. If the next fashion dictates that all heroes should have beards, does that mean we need to stick them on Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill? Fashion now should not dictate fashion then, and all I ask is the freedom to be true to my period.

Because it matters – and sometimes it matters a lot. It couldn’t be more important than in my present book on the Crimean War, when circumstances compelled our commanders to rescind the standing orders on shaving. By January 1855 every last root had been grubbed from the ground to feed the precious fires, men lost limbs to frostbite and froze to death in their tents – and I’m supposed to have a hero so vain he’ll use lifesaving hot water to shave?

I don't think so. And not just because it matters to history, but because it mattered to the men themselves. Those beards grew from endurance of life-shattering experience, and the men who came home went on wearing them as a badge of pride. A ‘Crimean beard’ was a proof of manhood and survival, and many men wore them right up to their deaths.

Maybe it didn’t suit everyone – and maybe that’s important too. We’re not writing fashion parades, we’re after character, and the levels of it in this single photograph are probably beyond anything I could ever hope to write.

This is Colour Sergeant Timothy Gowing of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, still showing the Crimean beard he probably ought to have removed as soon as he stepped off the ship. It’s a fine beard, but even years after the war it can’t disguise the fact that the face behind it is too young for such gravitas.

Or is it? The beard is of a mature man, the face of a young one, but behind the eyes is something sadder and older than either. This is the Gowing who wrote of the Grand Sortie ‘our bayonets were bent like reaping hooks’, and when we look behind the eyes we see an experience of hell itself.

And that’s what we write, isn’t it? What’s behind the eyes? I need the beards to capture not the look, but the experience, and there’s so much of it to be learned in Crimea. How did it feel for a lifelong clean-shaven NCO to have to allow the creeping growth of something he’s been trained to regard as filthy? How did it affect the rebellious soldier who revelled in the sudden independence of doing what he liked with his own face? Did discipline suffer? As officers and men grew physically alike, did the boundaries between them start to break – and did relationships change? These are all questions for individuals, but individuals are what I write, and if I’m to go there, be there, and feel it, then I can’t exclude so huge a part of what they experienced.

And that’s the key for me. Maybe Crimea is a special case, but whenever we write men then beards have to be part of it - if only because they have to be shaved. Ignore them, and we’re writing women in breeches. I use them constantly in the Chevalier series, and found they gave me another layer every time. I even liked the minor character of Thibault in ‘Honour and the Sword’, because I could show both his youth and his vanity in his concern for how his whiskers would turn out – then give the reader an extra stab at his death by recalling the weedy little bristles that would never now grow into anything at all. 

Tiny things sometimes. The disgusting nature of one character from the things caught in his beard, the vanity of another from the way he shaves his sideburns, the sound of a man’s hand playing with the little bristles that line his jaw. I grappled for ages with a scene where a man meets the beloved brother he thought was dead – until I remembered the physical reality of what would have happened in their year of separation and knew what he had to say. Nothing emotional, nothing embarrassing, he says ‘That’s a bloody terrible beard,’ and I’m in.

‘In’. That’s where we want to be, and why we shouldn’t be bothered by what our characters look like to outsiders. I don’t mind too much what cover artists do (and for the next book I’m steeled to expect a back view of men in the trenches) as long as I can do what I do within the pages. And sometimes, just sometimes, I'm afraid that’s going to mean beards.

***

Thanks to Dr Jeff Meek for the recommendation to John Repton's book

At 7.30pm tonight A L Berridge will be at the Old Bell in Finedon with J.D. Davies - discussing warriors and possibly their beards.

Meanwhile her disappointingly hairless website is still here. 

'Making Fire' by A.L. Berridge

Historical novelists are generally a charitable bunch, but I suspect we each have our one pet subject that brings us out in historical hives when we see somebody else GET IT WRONG.
Mine, I’m afraid, is Fire.

Unfortunately it’s also the subject writers are most likely to fudge. This particular rant has been sparked by a scene in a Regency romance where the protagonists were strolling happily along a country lane – and then the hero ruined everything by lighting a cigar.

'Regency Love' by Dylan Meconis

The poor lovers hadn’t a chance after that. They could flirt as wittily as they liked, they could even thrash about madly in the bushes, but I was seeing only the glowing red tip of that cigar and thinking – HOW? How did he do that? Was he quietly rubbing two sticks together all the time they were talking? Did he whip out a monocle and catch the rays of the dying sun on his conveniently pre-charred handkerchief? Was the interesting bulge in his tight fitting breeches really a tinderbox, and when he set the heroine ‘on fire’ was he doing it literally?

I'm afraid I suspect the writer had in mind something as deceptively simple as this picture by the scarily talented illustrator Dylan Meconis. And unless the lover also had an asbestos bottle filled with sulphuric acid in his pocket, that simply could not happen.

I'm possibly going into geek-overdrive here, but it’s still a worryingly common mistake, even with writers whose research is otherwise impeccable. I’ve seen medieval heroes escape captivity with only the clothes they stood up in – and start their life on the run by making a fire in the woods. I’ve ‘critted’ a manuscript containing a brilliant description of a seventeenth century bomb – which the villain then lights by ‘striking’ a match. What is it about this one thing that shuts down our usual historical instincts and replaces them with a mindset where ‘making fire’ is an easy, even casual thing, about which nobody thinks twice?

Part of the problem may be that a ‘striking’ match is so ‘low-tech’ it’s hard to believe they weren’t invented until 1826. Another may be simply linguistic, in that not everyone will realize that the 'match' Guy Fawkes was caught carrying would have been only a length of 'matchcord' - hempen rope coated to make it ‘hold fire’ once it had been lit by something else.

17th century 'matchcord'

 Some of the problem may be visual. Sulphur sticks look like modern matches, they go back to the sixth century in China and do indeed ‘catch fire’ – but again, they need to be lit first. Like rope match, these are merely ‘fire-carriers’ rather than ‘fire-makers’, which is perhaps why even the first successful friction match was called a ‘lucifer’.

So how did people actually make fire before that? 

By a method that takes us right back to the dawn of time – the friction between flint and steel. No-one knows when the first caveman discovered sparks could be produced by rubbing flint against iron pyrites, but ‘flint and steel’ immediately replaced the method of ‘rubbing two sticks together’, and created a technique we still use to this day.

Honestly – we do. The fuel in this lighter is modern petrol, but the spark is produced by the action of a little steel wheel on a tiny fragment of flint. It’s effectively a modern tinderbox.

And the tinderbox is where it really started.

The ingredients are simple: a ‘steel’ in a bow shape to fit round the knuckles, a rugged piece of flint, some form of ‘tinder’ (amadou, dry hemp, ‘char-cloth’, or any other material that will ‘catch’ a falling spark) and either kindling or a sulphur ‘spunk’ to bring the spark to bloom.

 How it works is fairly obvious. It’s deliberately dark, but this little video starts with the striking of a spark by flint and steel, the catching of it in char-cloth, and then the transfer by sulphur stick to a beeswax candle.

If you can endure the whole 90 seconds, you’ll also see a musketeer using ‘slow match’ to ignite his charge. I’m sorry the fire-making part is speeded up, but we had to cut out the bits of my husband swearing when he gashed his knuckles on the flint. 

But perhaps I should have left them in – because in reality fire-making is both slow and difficult.  Even experienced re-enactors can be nervous of making fire at a public demonstration because it so rarely works first go. That’s what bothers me when historical fiction gets it wrong – not the lack of technical detail, but the fact that fire-making is tricky, that tinder could be expensive and hard to find, and that whatever different technique is used it can’t ever be casual. If we miss that, we’re not slipping up on a detail, we’re mistaking an entire way of life.

Fire has always been precious, and its original importance is beautifully illustrated in William Golding’s The Inheritors, which follows a band of Neanderthals on their summer migration. The ‘old woman’ of the group carries what is only ever referred to as her ‘burden’, but is in fact a clay pot containing the fire they need to keep them alive. The impression we have is that none of them have fire-making skills, and if the fire ever went out they could never relight it.

The advent of the tinderbox changed all that, but the value of fire persisted through to the 18th century. Once lit, fires were kept burning forever. At night they would be ‘banked’ for safety, using a metal hood drilled with tiny holes which the French called a ‘couvre-feu’ – and the English corrupted to a ‘curfew’. 

The original ‘curfew call’ had nothing to do with martial law, but was simply a night-watchman reminding the citizens it was time to cover their fires for the night.

It sounds wasteful of fuel, but only one fire was needed for a household, and from that single source would come all the hundred other usages needed in the course of a day. Burning coals or timber from one fire would be carried in a bucket to light another. A taper from the fire would light a lamp or a candle, a spill from the candle would light a pipe or a cigar. That’swhy we never see Mr Darcy or the Scarlet Pimpernel hacking away with their tinderboxes – the fire is already lit, and all they ever need to do is borrow a little from an existing flame. 

And how important it makes that one fire! For Golding’s Neanderthals the location of the fire defined their home, and in many ways it still does today. The Romans used the word ‘hearth’ to define a home, and it still forms the centrepiece for most houses built before 1970. Central heating has mostly removed the physical need for a fire, but nothing (for me) compensates for the spiritual loss. I can still remember when a family sitting room wasn’t arranged around the position of a television, but around something like this:

 Fire transcends its physical properties, which is why our attitudes to it remained unchanged for so long. The invention of cheap matches should have done away with most of them, but am I the only one who remembers seeing on her grandparents’ mantelpiece something that looked like this?

It’s a jar of spills. My grandmother used them to light the candles, and my grandfather to light his cigars. In Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a key clue actually depends on the position of a jar of spills on a mantelpiece. That seems ridiculous in a novel set during the First World War, but fire was still precious, and even a match wouldn’t be wasted if there was an existing fire source to be used.

That’s the mindset we need to hold when we’re writing historical fiction. I made a whopping great mistake in an early draft of Honour and the Sword when I had a character light his pipe using a tinderbox – when there was a fire already lit in the room. After much thought I actually left it in, because it perfectly illustrated the character’s agitation at the time – but it still originated in a mistake, and one I was determined not to make again. In In the Name of the King I had an officer bring his volunteer musketeers a handful of matches already lit, because it would have made more sense to light them all from one flame than to hang about while a dozen women all got busy with tinderboxes.

That’s what I love most about writing historical fiction – getting inside the heads of long dead characters and seeing a problem as it was in their day. I’ve even learned from it, and when I ran out of matches and was reduced to that hideously messy business of lighting a cigarette from the gas cooker, I put on my ‘historical head’ and made a spill out of screwed paper instead. I used that to light a slow-burning candle, which gave me a light whenever I needed it for the rest of the night. One fire to light a dozen others.

Or a million. Few or none will remain of those fires that were once kept burning day and night, but the idea remains and its spiritual power is as strong as ever. Candles are still lit and kept burning to maintain a vigil. A torch lit from the Olympic flame is carried hand to hand to keep the same fire burning all over the world. Unlike ourselves, a fire that is fed will never die.

 Neither will its history. History for most of us is a broken chain, a series of fragments connected by gaps. Our landmarks might be those of 1066 And All That, lurching from the Roman Occupation to the Memorable King Henry VIII with only minor stops for Alfred to burn the cakes and John to lose his laundry in the Wash. The landmarks of a specialist can be even wider spread, and my dad had Victorian Church History at one end and Mediaeval Law at the other with only the vaguest blur in between.

Fire is different, the universal element that has been with us all the way. We can follow it through our steel-and-flint lighters to our grandfather’s spills, through the lucifers of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ to the matchlock musket, through the sulphur matches and tinderboxes all the way back to a caveman rubbing two sticks together and making a spark that would change the world.

And when we can stand on the edge of that world and see right back in time to its beginning, then that, for me, is when history itself catches fire.

***

A. L. Berridge's website

Website for Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King