The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 by Jessica Wadley

“On January 15, 1919, a two-million-gallon tsunami of molasses leveled Boston’s North end.

“Wait. Like, molasses … molasses?”

“Molasses.”

This is a common conversation I have when people discover I’m a historian. They often ask, “What’s your favorite crazy historical fact?”, and the Great Molasses Flood is a grade-A icebreaker. It is exactly what it sounds like. And that is, frankly, unbelievable.

In a nutshell, a five story-sized tank of sickly sweet, sticky syrup burst and a fifteen foot “tidal wave of death and destruction stalked through North End Park and Commercial St”. I love telling this story because it is so bizarre. At face value, it sounds almost whimsical, or like an urban myth or an episode of The Simpsons. But, as soon as you start to consider it, the horror sinks in. Molasses is well known for being thick, sticky, and slow. But this wall of treacle careened down the street at 35mph. And because it is 1.5 times denser than water, it would have behaved more like a landslide than a flash flood. In the days after the disaster, the Boston Globe reported:

‘There was no escape from the wave. Caught, human being and animal alike could not flee. Running in it was impossible. Snared in its flood was to be stifled. Once it smeared a head – human or animal – there was no coughing off the sticky mass. To attempt to wipe it with hands was to make it worse. Most of those who died, died from suffocation. It plugged nostrils almost air-tight.’

Report of the incident in Boston Daily Globe, 16 January 1919 (BDG Archive)

Ultimately, 21 people were killed and more than 150 others were injured. Of those 21, about half of them literally drowned in the molasses. Including two ten-year-old children – Pasquale Iantosca and Maria Distasio who were returning home from school for lunch with Maria’s brother Antonio, who survived. Pasquale’s father watched from their apartment window as the children disappeared into the sludge. Others died in the following days due toinfection or trauma. More still were crushed under rubble. Most of the victims, including little Maria and Pasquale, were Italian immigrants – who made up 90percent of the North End’s residents by 1900 – impoverished by prejudice and circumstance.

            I don’t tell this story merely because of its natural clickability. I think it’s an important case study on how we consider stories from the past. It feels other-worldly, and yet, placing it within its historical context sheds light on more than just the Molasses Flood of 1919.

            How does something like this even happen? What was anybody doing with that much molasses in the first place? Beforethe First World War, molasses was the favorite sweetener in America, dating back to the first European colonies. Its strong flavor makes it perfect for spiced bakes (like those delicious little molasses cookies) and even more commonly, rum. But a 2.5-million-gallon tank seems a little excessive for household use. In fact, king molasses was already beginning to be usurped by granulated sugar for its dropping prices and longer shelf-life. So, we ask again, why did anyone need so much molasses? In a word, the Great War.

Aerial photograph taken at tank site, showing destruction caused by molasses flood

            The tank was built by the U.S. Industrial Alcohol Company (USIA) which was in the business of fermenting molasses to produce  ethanol, one of the key ingredients in gunpowder. So, even though the war had ended, the US being only a few votes away from prohibition (no more rum), and the availability of granulated sugar being on the rise, molasses was in surprisingly high demand in 1919. This demand, lack of federal regulation, and a culture of big business bolstered by the Great War and the Spanish Flu pandemic caused a fatal lack of oversight when it came to the construction of the USIA molasses tank in Boston.

 It was 50 feet tall and 90 feet wide, capable of holding more than 3 million gallons of liquid. Although, I suppose ‘capable’, isn’t exactly the word. You see, the walls of the tank were less than an inch thick and the steel used had been mixed with too little manganese, making it devastatingly brittle in temperatures below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. A typical January day in Boston sits around 36° Fahrenheit (about 2° Celsius). After the flood, USIA claimed the rupture was caused by sabotage. They insisted that an exterior explosion was set up by an unknown individual as an act of terror against the company. The trouble, from their point of view, was that everybody already knew the tank was failing. Even before the fatal top-off in 1919, the tank had leaked. The leakage was so significant and well-known that kids and grown-ups alike would grab a free cup like it was a sugar fountain. The company responded by recalking some of the biggest cracks and painting the whole thing brown so you couldn’t see the sweet stuff seeping down the sides. Eventually, an employee of the company presented hunks of metal to the USIA executives as evidence of the danger to which they reportedly replied, “The tank still stands …” Given all this evidence, the residents of the North End filed suit and litigation lasting more than five years ensued. In the end, it was determined that the tank was structurally unsound, external forces did not cause the disaster, and USIA was liable for negligence. Ultimately, USIA paid more than $600,000 (the equivalent of more than $10.5 million today) in settlements. The victim’s families received $7,000 each. This was the first successful class action lawsuit in the United States.

            But beyond this being a bizarrestory, what’s the point of telling it? Well, this disaster served as a springboard for modern regulation and oversight and serves as a great case study for the need for corporate and industrial ethics. But the most important reason to tell this story is that despite it being such a fantastical event, almost no one I talk to has heard of it. Much of the period from 1900 to1919 is strangely vacant from public memory in the US. Author Stephen Puelo argues that the flood may have fallen out of memory because no one of social significance was affected. The property damage – besides USIA’s – was largely city and working-class residences and businesses.

Diagram of scene of ‘explosion’ printed in local paper (Boston Fire Historical Society Website)

Today, the North End is considered Boston’s “Little Italy.” With its saint festivals and divine cuisine with cannoli for days, it is one of the highlights of tourism in the city. It is also Boston’s oldest neighborhood. Before the Revolution, its proximity to the harbour provided a perfect place to settle and build a shipping empire. The population boomed, factories and industry moved in, and the poor immigrant residents did not move out. By the mid-19th century, the North End became one of the country’s first tenement slums. As the Irish community began to assimilate into social acceptance, the Italian immigrants were ruthlessly criminalized by American society. They only had each other, and the North End became a powerful community of (mostly) Southern Italians. The single square mile neighborhood was extremely overcrowded and covered in soot and grime, but it was the one place they could find housing and safety in numbers. However, most of the Italians of the North End were apolitical non-citizens and therefore had little power to speak out about injustices being imposed on them by big business and the state – like the recklessly swift construction of a three-million-gallon molasses tank right outside their front doors.  This likely was a major factor in USIA’s selection of the site. Proximity to the harbor, to be sure, but also the fact that no one was going to speak for the safety of these people until it was too late.

Another reason the flood has essentially disappeared from public memory is that there were so many other watershed events going on in the world at the time. The Great War had ended two months before, the 19^th amendment was nearing ratification, Prohibition was knocking at the door, and the Spanish Flu pandemic was raging through the nation. The Roaring 20s are considered a time of major social change in the US and the causes of that change were eclipsed by the political, cultural, and economic upheaval seen in the following years. So, while the smell of molasses lingered in the streets of Boston for decades, it too eventually faded.

Further Reading:

Stephen Puleo, Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 (Boston, Mass: Beacon Press, 2004).

Jessica Wadley is a student on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Viral Victorians, Undercover Journalism and Homelessness Today by Adela Davis

It’s January 1866, Victorian London is in the throes of an unusually bitter winter, and you are hurrying home. Although eager to escape the icy wind, you briefly pause to purchase some evening reading from a news vendor.

The paper is the Pall Mall Gazette, and as you flip through the pages, thawing out by the fire at home, a curious column catches your eye.

A NIGHT IN A WORKHOUSE

At about nine o’clock on the evening of Monday, the 8^th inst., a neat but unpretentious carriage might have been seen turning cautiously from the Kennington-road into Princes-road, Lambeth … From [the carriage] door emerged a sly and ruffianly figure, marked with every sign of squalor …

This mysterious figure was that of the present writer.

Would you believe that you have just read the opening of one of Britain’s first ever viral news stories?

*          *   *

James Greenwood, 1870s (NPG, London)

Over three days in January 1866, journalist James Greenwood released his ground-breaking exposé “A Night in a Workhouse” under the pseudonym “The Amateur Casual”. Each instalment documented the harsh conditions of the casual ward, a section of the nineteenth-century workhouse specifically reserved for the wandering poor – people we would refer to as ‘homeless’ today. They could receive one night’s accommodation in exchange for a day’s manual labour.

Reporting on this topic was not particularly innovative but Greenwood’s methods certainly were. He wrote from firsthand experience. How? By disguising himself as a vagrant and getting himself admitted for an overnight stay in Lambeth casual ward.A media frenzy ensued. Greenwood’s visceral descriptions of “weak mutton broth” baths, a ceiling “furred with … damp and filth”, and inmates lying “like covered corpses”, captured public interest like no story ever before. “A Night in a Workhouse” was reprinted hundreds of times, reached international audiences, and, bizarrely, even inspired its own theatrical production starring “Daddy”, a real-life pauper featured in Greenwood’s articles. Copycat journalists quickly caught on and Britain officially entered what the Daily News called the “exciting era of ‘amateur casuals’”.

An early and significant development was the rise of ‘lady amateur casuals’. Especially from the 1880s onwards, journalism became a more viable profession for educated women. With charitable work deemed an appropriate ‘women’s topic’, some of these new female journalists turned to undercover ‘social investigation’ writing. One such woman was Olive Christian Malvery. From 1904-1905, she issued a series of articles in Pearson’s Magazine that recounted her incognito escapades amongst London’s poor working women, along with photographs of her dressed in various working-class ‘costumes’

Olive Christian Malvery, dressed as flower girl, early 1900s (The Soul Market)

Some of the best-known male authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also went undercover to witness and write about the degradation and squalor with which the English poor had to contend; Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) are rightly regarded as classics of the genre. The heyday of the genre drew to a close in the 1910s, and it had mostly disappeared by the late 1930s, possibly corresponding with the formal end of the workhouse system. So ends the story of the amateur casuals. But there is still a crucial question to answer: why? Why did this ‘cross-class camouflage’ seem like such a good idea at the time? To understand, we need to unpack a few layers of Victorian and Edwardian society.

The amateur casual craze emerged during a general rise in middle-class enthusiasm for philanthropy. Industrialisation and urbanisation had caused huge social problems in nineteenth-century Britain. Millions were living in abject poverty, and improved statistical techniques had made this seem far more visible and alarming. This newly fashionable concern for the poor did bring about some important social reform, but there was a darker side too.

Data could only achieve so much. The lives and worlds of impoverished people still ultimately felt inaccessible to the middle classes, and some believed that the only way to truly understand the plight of the poor was to join them. Or, as one amateur casual put it, “Inspection is good, but experience is better”. Compassion and awareness-raising undoubtedly motivated many of these undercover stunts but, in reality, the resulting articles often perpetuated the condescending attitudes and sensationalist language that already surrounded the poor and working classes.

Meanwhile, the public and the press were uniquely well-positioned for a news story to spread like wildfire. Higher literacy rates, cheaper newspapers, and a shift towards more personal, reader-friendly writing meant that more people were reading the news than ever before. Technological advances also allowed publishers to meet this demand. Reporters who embraced the new commercial glamour of journalism with daring exploits and gripping plots could enjoy great success.

Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward after 1908 Sir Luke Fildes 1843-1927 (Tate Britain)

But does the appeal of the amateur casual story sit even deeper than this historical context? After all, don’t we find these stories compelling too?

Of course, we are intrigued by a journalistic practice we now find odd and uncomfortable. We might also feel the vivid descriptions of workhouse life offer a fascinating window into past lives. More unsettlingly,  we are perhaps somewhat drawn in by the sensationalism. After all, our society certainly isn’t immune to these tactics; indeed, we still grapple with the line between activism and ‘poverty porn’.

But, as some social investigation scholars have suggested, perhaps James Greenwood himself best captured the essence of the amateur casuals’ success. When asked what he most feared during his workhouse stay, he simply replied:

“This was it – What if it were true?”

To rephrase more directly, Greenwood really meant, “What if it were true – for me?”

It’s an impactful question, and one that may well have driven both the story’s popularity, and some public empathy and social action. Nineteenth-century journalist and sometime editor of The Times W. T. Stead believed that Greenwood helped secure “a definitive improvement in the treatment of the poorest of the poor”. Charities and change-makers also recognise this question’s power today. In fact, it lies behind one of our most pervasive refrains: ‘Homelessness could happen to anyone’. Or, in other words, ‘If it could happen to anyone, it could happen to me.’ But the amateur casuals leave us with a cautionary note as well. ‘What if it happened to me?’ can quickly turn from a useful equaliser into a distraction from the issue at hand. Amateur casual articles focus so much on the experience of the investigator that the voices of those they claim to represent are largely absent. For us, too, this question can divert attention away from real, lived experiences of homelessness. As policy researchers have highlighted, homelessness doesn’t just happen to ‘anyone’, and it’s unlikely to happen to you. But it is happening now for so many. Could that be enough for us to listen and respond?

            *          *   *

If you would like to respond, donating to a homelessness charity like Crisis or Shelter could be a good place to start. If you feel unsure about what to do when you see a homeless person on the street, this Big Issue article has some helpful advice. Lastly, you may be interested in the innovative work of the Museum of Homelessness, an activist museum run by people with direct experience of homelessness.

Adela Davis is a student on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Further Reading

Higgs, Mary, Glimpses into the Abyss (London: P. S. King & Son, 1906)

London, Jack, The People of the Abyss (The Floating Press, 1903)

Malvery, Olive Christian, The Soul Market (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1907

The Recent Legacy Bill Cannot Hope to Address Northern Ireland’s Difficult, Unresolved Past by Jack Hepworth

Between British troop deployments in 1969 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the Northern Ireland conflict cost in excess of 3,600 lives. More than 1,000 of these killings remain unsolved. In 2017, a report by the Northern Ireland Victims and Survivors Commission found that 26 percent of the adult population identified as victims, due to injury and harm experienced personally or through bereavement. Now undergoing its final review in the House of Commons, the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill proposes to transform how Northern Ireland deals with the conflict’s entangled legacies.

British soldiers watch Ulster Defence Association parade, Belfast 1972 (Daily Telegraph)

The current protocols for addressing this painful past stem from the Stormont House Agreement (SHA), signed in 2014 by Northern Ireland’s political parties and supported by the British and Irish governments. After nearly three months of negotiations, the SHA established several interlocking mechanisms to address legacy issues. Crucially, an Historical Investigations Unit – overseen by the Northern Ireland Policing Board – was set up to pursue criminal investigations into conflict-related deaths. Meanwhile, an Independent Commission for Information Retrieval enabled families privately to seek information about the deaths of their loved ones. Supported by all major parties in Northern Ireland except for the Ulster Unionist Party, the SHA was founded upon the principle of ‘upholding the rule of law’.

Although the UK government pledged up to £150 million to fund the SHA’s initiatives for five years, there were recurring problems with their implementation. For ten weeks in 2015, representatives of the British and Irish governments joined the parties in Northern Ireland’s devolved executive to establish their policy priorities. The so-called ‘Fresh Start’ talks agreed fiscal reforms for the devolved assembly, but lapsed without establishing a legislative framework for dealing with the past.

During the ensuing impasse, in 2018, Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, coordinated a public consultation on legacy issues. More than 17,000 citizens wrote to Bradley’s office, expressing their views on the way the history of conflict should be presented to future generations, and how to expedite post-conflict reconciliation. Most respondents declared ‘broad support’ for the SHA framework for pursuing prosecutions, indicating a clear preference for resolutions consonant with ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the needs of victims and survivors’. The British government’s review of the consultation held that ‘almost all respondents agreed that any approach to dealing with the past should be victim-centred’: the government insisted that it remained ‘fully committed’ to implementing the SHA.

However, despite the Historical Enquiries Team’s (HET) £30 million annual budget, the pursuit of prosecutions yielded limited results. Over a ten-year period, just three of the 1,615 cases reviewed by the HET resulted in murder convictions. Between 2015 and 2021, only nine people were charged in connection with Troubles-related deaths, and just one person was convicted.

The new Legacy Bill represents a profound change of tack, from pursuing prosecutions to offering de facto amnesties. The legislation will create a new truth recovery body called the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIC). Most contentiously, the ICRIC will be empowered to grant immunity from prosecution for perpetrators and ex-combatants who cooperate. Provided that they provide information ‘true to the best of [their] knowledge and belief’, republicans, loyalists, and British service personnel alike can access an effective amnesty. When the ICRIC becomes operational in May 2024, legacy inquests and investigations will cease. As such, the Bill threatens some twenty inquest cases currently awaiting a court date.

British soldiers survey the aftermath of a riot, East Belfast 1971 (Keystone)

The Legacy Bill has occasioned extraordinary unanimity across Northern Ireland’s divided political realm. Since the Bill was formulated in 2021, its proposals have united in opposition victims’ and survivors’ groups, as well as parties across Northern Ireland’s political spectrum. Aside from its Conservative sponsors at Westminster and British Army veterans’ organisations, the Bill has proved universally unpopular. On the Opposition benches at Westminster, where Labour has opposed the Bill outright, Keir Starmer has indicated that a Labour government would repeal the legislation. Leo Varadkar and Micheál Martin, the Irish Taoiseach and Tanáiste respectively, have been scathing in their criticism of [EM1] the Bill and reiterated their commitment to the SHA model. International human rights organisations have joined the chorus of opposition. Fabián Salvioli, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, and reparations, and Gráinne Teggart, Amnesty International’s Northern Ireland Deputy Director, have insisted that the Bill breaches the state’s obligation to investigate serious human rights violations.

Across Northern Ireland’s divided society, there is no consensus on the causes and character of the conflict. For unionists, the Troubles represented a despicable republican ‘terrorist’ campaign; for nationalists and republicans, the conflict was the inevitable product of ‘undemocratic’ partition and of British rule in the north. Meanwhile, survivors and the bereaved indict paramilitaries and state forces tout court for perpetuating a conflict in which the majority of victims were civilians. But while interpretations of the conflict differ profoundly in Northern Ireland, there is widespread agreement that its difficult legacies remain to be addressed. Each political community has unresolved grievances. Unionists seethe as republican ‘terrorists’ released early from jail enter political office. Nationalists and republicans accuse state forces of whitewashing their deadly collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. Closing judicial routes to dealing with the past, the Legacy Bill unifies Northern Ireland’s political spectrum in opposition.

Legislation has rarely precipitated such a consensus of public and political opinion in Northern Ireland. On the one hand, unionists vehemently oppose a Bill which offers amnesties to the republican ‘terrorists’ responsible for 60 percent of deaths during the conflict. Democratic Unionist Party MP Carla Lockhart, for example, has castigated the ‘immoral’ and ‘unjust’ Bill which would ‘protect’ terrorists. Simultaneously, nationalists abhor a Bill which curtails judicial proceedings against former British service personnel, and prevents civil inquiries into claims of lethal collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Sinn Féin MP John Finucane – whose father, Pat Finucane, was murdered by loyalists in 1989 – alleges that the Conservatives have backed the ‘cruel and callous’ legislation to conceal the British Army’s record in Northern Ireland. Republicans regard the proposals as a case of the British state designing legislative cover for historical human rights abuses. After decades of judicial campaigning by determined activists, last month the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) formally apologised to ‘the hooded men’ – fourteen Catholics interned in 1971 – for torture under interrogation by state forces. Victims’ and survivors’ groups have also repudiated a Bill which would prevent perpetrators of all political stripes being brought to justice. The decision of the present Secretary of State, Chris Heaton-Harris, to appoint Sir Declan Morgan to chair the ICRIC – even before the requisite legislation was passed to create the commission – has raised further hackles.

For their part, the Bill’s Conservative backers primarily expound pragmatism, arguing that pursuing prosecutions more than half a century since the conflict erupted is simply impractical. The Command Paper which precipitated the Legacy Bill in 2021 arraigned the SHA as an ineffective mechanism which failed victims and survivors: ‘More than two thirds of deaths from The Troubles occurred more than 40 years ago… The prospect of successful criminal justice outcomes is vanishingly small… The divisive cycle of criminal investigations and prosecutions… is not working for anyone and has kept Northern Ireland hamstrung by its past’. The Legacy Bill’s most prominent parliamentary supporters, such as the military veterans Sir Iain Duncan Smith and Johnny Mercer, also highlight the SHA framework’s suboptimal outcomes.

Promoting the Bill also reflects the embattled Conservative government’s desire for a rapprochement with military veterans and their supporters. Founded in 2015 to pressure the authorities to ‘stop the prosecutions’, the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement (NIVM) identified the Tory government as its ‘main enemy’. The Conservatives’ general election manifesto in 2019 pledged to ‘tackle the vexatious legal claims that undermine our Armed Forces’ and to ‘give veterans the protections they deserve’. Introducing the Bill in the Commons in 2022, then-Secretary of State Brandon Lewis explicitly underlined how the legislation honoured that promise.

British Fusilier and child, Belfast 1981

British military personnel killed at least 150 unarmed civilians during the conflict, yet only six former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland have been prosecuted. The four soldiers convicted of murder were the subject of high-profile campaigns in Britain demanding their release: all four were freed on licence within three years, and allowed to rejoin the Army. These few cases have nonetheless garnered significant media attention and political controversy. Perceptions of a ‘witch hunt’ have impelled Army veterans to back the Bill to curtail criminal proceedings against ex-soldiers. The case of the late Dennis Hutchings became something of a cause célèbre. In October 2021, Hutchings, an 80-year-old former Corporal, died while standing trial on charges pertaining to the death of John Pat Cunningham, a young man with learning disabilities who was shot in the back while running from an Army patrol in County Tyrone in 1974. Reflecting on the case, prominent veterans’ activist Robin Horsfall said that Hutchings was a ‘hero’ who had been failed by the state that he served.

In November 2022, in an equally well-documented case, David Holden was convicted of the manslaughter by gross negligence of 23-year-old Aidan McAnespie. McAnespie was shot in the back as he crossed a border checkpoint in February 1988. Holden, who was serving with the Grenadier Guards, was found to have fired the fatal shot. Commenting after the verdict, Paul Young, national spokesperson for the NIVM, told reporters that the ruling was part of a ‘witch hunt’ against former service personnel: ‘That’s why we support the Legacy Bill that is going through parliament now which will stop any further prosecutions of veterans that have previously been investigated’.

But without political support beyond an enfeebled Conservative Party, and devoid of popular legitimacy, the Legacy Bill will pass parliament but remain incapable of functioning. Its operational prospects rest heavily upon a spirit of voluntarism, yet without public confidence and the institutional support of political parties, human rights organisations, and victims’ groups, the new truth recovery mechanism is unlikely to persuade ex-combatants to engage. The authoritative Belfast journalist Allison Morris reports that representatives of all but one of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups have already ruled out cooperating. In any case, the incentive for ex-combatants to seek immunity from prosecution is marginal at best: the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act of 1998 already established a maximum prison term of just two years for Troubles-related offences.

The problems facing the Bill are both political and practical. Legal experts from the Model Bill team at Queen’s University Belfast and the Committee on the Administration of Justice have suggested that in its current form the Bill fails to comply with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)’s Article 2 on the right to life. As Anna Bryson and Kieran McEvoy have shown, the ECHR allows for amnesties only where they are demonstrably ‘necessary’, and where they comply with victims’ rights to access truth recovery and reparations.

The controversy surrounding the Bill has illuminated once again among the British public the remarkable degree of indifference towards Northern Ireland’s fate. On the one hand, British responses to the Legacy Bill indicate residual defensive loyalty to the British Army’s record in Northern Ireland. Successive governments’ political justifications for military deployment from 1969 – ostensibly to keep apart two warring factions in Ulster – continually resonate with a significant proportion of the British electorate. When Hutchings and Holden faced criminal charges, right-wing tabloids led popular campaigns against the ‘witch hunts’. From 2018, the Daily Express fulminated against the ‘betrayal of our veterans’, who were ‘hounded’ over ‘Troubles-related killings’. By July 2022, Conservative leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss – both would serve as Prime Minister within three months – signed the Sun’s ‘veterans’ pledge’, vowing to support ‘our boys’ and to ‘end the witch hunts’. ‘It is absolutely right to support the men and women who have honourably served their queen and country’, said Truss. ‘As Prime Minister, I will make sure they are protected from being prosecuted for historic allegations and ensure that no new evidence can be brought towards them in court’.

There is certainly support in Britain for Holden, Hutchings, and their comrades. But such sympathy for ‘our boys’ does not necessarily mean enthusiasm for the union, less still a positive orientation towards Northern Ireland. A YouGov survey of 1,700 British voters in March 2020 found that only 37 percent of respondents thought that Northern Ireland should remain part of the UK, and some 54 percent said that they did not care whether Northern Ireland left the union. Even among Conservative voters, whose party officially maintains the ‘unionist’ moniker, there is major indifference where Northern Ireland is concerned: only 47 percent of Tory supporters said that the union should continue.

Given the Bill’s abject unpopularity across Northern Ireland, it is unlikely that its institutions can function, less still that they can deliver a robust mechanism for dealing with such a difficult past. The Irish government has also recently indicated that it will consider interstate legal action against the legislation, meaning that protracted disputes in the European Court of Human Rights could yet follow. The present Bill therefore risks becoming a dead letter, further delaying progress with the difficult legacy issues which have bedevilled a stalling peace process.

Jack Hepworth is Canon Murray Fellow in Irish History at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Ida Tarbell and the ‘Muckrakers’: Then and Now by Rachel Davies

How can we judge activism when we haven’t yet seen the results? In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, felt qualified to do just this, denigrating investigative journalists for their activism. He dismissed them for being too focused on the ‘muck’ of society and for refusing to look onwards and upwards. The so-called ‘muckrakers’ of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries called for political and economic reform and exposed a range of pressing social issues, including sex and racial discrimination, industrial malpractice and corruption; in so doing, they blazed a trail for Evelyn Cunningham, Bob Woodward, Ronan Farrow and a host of other modern investigative journalists .

‘Muckraking’, despite not being the first identifiable form of investigative journalism (which most historians date to the late 1700s), is regarded as the gold standard for modern investigative journalists (see, for example, David Sloan’s American Journalism). While these early journalists are generally regarded positively in 21st century discussions, the term ‘muckraker’ came from Roosevelt and other contemporaries’ much more critical attitude. The origin of the name, in contrast to their largely positive legacy today, reminds us how difficult it can be to judge activism when it’s happening rather than in retrospect, as perceptions of certain protests change over time. We might consider, for example, the recent Just Stop Oil protests, which have received widespread criticism.

Ida Minerva Tarbell, 1904 (Library of Congress)

Although she, unsurprisingly, resented being described as such, Ida Tarbell was one of the most celebrated of these ‘muckraker’ journalists. Tarbell’s life and career illustrate the achievements of early investigative journalism, and also raise timely questions about the kinds of activism we celebrate, and when. To what extent are we willing to tolerate disruption, and how do we measure the effectiveness of protest as it happens? Should our appreciation of Tarbell and her fellow ‘muckrakers’ encourage us to temper our judgment on the protests of today despite our immediate discomfort?

Ida Tarbell and the Oil Industry

Tarbell was born in 1857 to Esther and Franklin Tarbell, a teacher and successful businessman made wealthy by the Pennsylvania oil rush of 1859. Growing up around the oil fields, Tarbell held strong negative opinions about the oil industry from an early age, as she witnessed both the natural and human destruction caused by the production of the so-called ‘black gold’. Her father worked in several different areas of the oil industry, from his beginning making oil barrels to eventually owning his own small oil production company. The family’s fortunes took a turn for the worse, however, when the Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust embarked on a series of hostile takeovers, swallowing Franklin Tarbell’s oil company.

Like her father, Ida initially went on to work as a teacher. She also continued to hone her writing and journalistic skills, moving to Paris and contributing to several publications from there. Eventually, Tarbell would begin to contribute to McClure’s Magazine, an American illustrated monthly periodical popular at the turn of the 20th century, and wrote prolifically for the publication, leading up to her monumental exposé of the Standard Oil Trust and, in 1904, the publication of a book, The History of the Standard Oil Company. This series of works struck a major blow against the mega-corporation, exposing the same kind of hostile practices that had brought her father’s company down decades earlier. Most importantly, Tarbell’s investigative journalism exposed the dangers of Standard Oil operating as a monopoly, dictating the market with no regulation or oversight.

Tarbell’s articles shook the oil industry, and the wider American economic system, to its core. Her journalism helped to bring about a series of regulatory reforms, including the creation of the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. While Roosevelt was perhaps correct in noting that the ‘Muckraker’ journalists focused on the darker parts of society, Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company was instrumental in lifting the American economy out of the grips of the Oil Giant, and breaking up a ruthless and very damaging monopoly.

Ida Tarbell, Activism and Contemporary Opinion

Most of the traditional historical works on Tarbell focus on her as an adversary to big business, or as a forerunner of American investigative journalism. Some public history projects, such as Paul Lyon’s “The Diary Review,” have allowed for Tarbell, and particularly her archival material, to be re-examined in a way that challenges these dominant narratives. Few, however, have looked into Tarbell’s story as an example of evolving public attitudes towards investigative journalism as activism or protest.

Standard Oil Octopus cartoon, Puck, September 1904

Tarbell is quite widely celebrated now, yet at the time she was disparaged alongside the other ‘muckrakers.’ One can’t help but draw parallels between Tarbell’s protest, and the recent campaign by Just Stop Oil (conducting several protests, including roadblocks and infamously throwing canned soup onto Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery). Just Stop Oil have also been criticized by contemporary commentators, albeit for different reasons (being too divisive and chasing publicity rather than specific policy change). While the actions of Just Stop Oil certainly deserve their own examination, we can look at the trajectory of Tarbell’s legacy and consider whether this very contemporary protest will also go on to be widely celebrated.

Comparing Just Stop Oil’s form of activism with Tarbell’s reveals how attitudes towards various forms of protest change over time, as their context also changes. A hundred years ago, when Tarbell and the other ‘muckraker’ journalists thrived, print media was highly influential. In contrast, the 21^st Century has seen an explosion of highly accessible social media, a development that has arguably reduced the impact of Tarbell’s style of print journalism and thrown the impetus onto more direct action. Perhaps Tarbell’s form of activism is easier to celebrate now, as her protest is considered more palatable to our contemporary sentiment. However, looking at the push-back she got from society at the time should remind us that judging the reasoning for a particular protest action is difficult without the benefit of hindsight.

Theodore Roosevelt criticized Tarbell as he thought that her articles were ultimately just raking a respectable business enterprise into the muck, for little purpose. Few would agree with Roosevelt now, knowing that Tarbell’s activism contributed to the transformation of the American economy. Who knows what the final results of Just Stop Oil’s protest will prove to be?

Rachel Davies is an MA in Public History student at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Still Unheard? The Voices of African POWs Imprisoned in Wartime France

Among the sound of whispering trees and the squelch of mud underfoot, a soldier stares into a camera. Maybe the photographer, most probably a German soldier, called out to him. What do we see in his eyes? A sense of defeat? Hopelessness? Defiance? If only we could ask this man what he had seen, but to us he remains a silent figure, trapped in a single, unsettling moment. The photo was taken in June 1940, the month that France fell to the invading German forces and descended into Nazi occupation. Only a month earlier, the German army had launched its Blitzkrieg (‘Lightning War’) and pushed the stunned British and French forces back to the coast. By early June most of the British force had been evacuated from Dunkirk and the French army had been left to fight on alone.

French African troops of the French Army, captured by advancing German forces, France, June 1940 (Imperial War Museum HU 49148)

Almost nine per cent of the French Army were ‘Colonial Troops’ – drawn from the areas of Africa or South-East Asia that France had violently colonised. Some were willing to fight, but most had been forcibly conscripted into the army. The majority formed the ‘Senegalese Tirailleurs’ – men drawn from across Western, Central and Eastern Africa. About 35,000 men formed the ‘Malagasy Tirailleurs’, who were taken from Madagascar. There was also a small division of ‘Indochinese Tirailleurs’, men from present-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Map highlighting French colonial territories in 1920

During the Fall of France, a large part of the French army was taken captive and made Prisoners of War (POWs). While over one million white French servicemen were sent to POW camps in Germany, 120,000 African and South-East Asian soldiers were segregated into work camps within Nazi-occupied France, so as not to ‘contaminate’ German land. All POWs, regardless of race, were at risk of abuse. And yet men from Africa and South-East Asia were particularly vulnerable because many of their German captors fervently adhered to racist Nazi ideology. Indeed, there are numerous accounts of African soldiers being massacred by German soldiers instead of being taken prisoner.

How can we find these men’s stories? Have their voices not been lost to time and the prison walls? The short answer is no, because remarkably some men’s voices have survived.

The poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor, written in French, record his experiences of the work camps. The ‘Songs of the Shadows’ were published in 1948 and bring to life the horrors that these POWs endured. One particularly revealing poem is entitled ‘Camp 1940’:

‘They lie there stretched out by the captive roads, along the roads of disaster… / Senegalese prisoners miserably lying on the French land.’

‘Hatred and hunger ferment there in the torpor of a deadly summer. / It is a large village surrounded by the immobile spite of barbed wire / A large village under the tyranny of four machine guns / Always ready to fire. / And the noble warriors beg for cigarette butts, / Fight with dogs over bones, and argue among themselves / Like imaginary cats and dogs.’

Senghor also wrote a seven-page report on conditions in the camp in the summer of 1942. The document was only rediscovered in 2010 by the historians Raffael Scheck and it is a visceral reflection on the brutality of his German captors:

‘The most demoralizing thing is hunger… Captain Hahn… fires at a Senegalese who “chips” potatoes, and he is killed… It is the reign of arbitrariness.’

Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1949 (Picture Post)

Soon after writing this report, Senghor faked an illness and was released into Paris. Many men became terminally ill from tuberculosis and were removed from the camps. Senghor became a teacher in Paris, and after the war returned to Senegal and entered politics. His time as a POW shaped his political path as he had spoken to many Senegalese men – often peasants – while in captivity about their experiences of French colonial rule. He had also witnessed many men die in the service of their colonial master. He became the first President of the Republic of Senegal in 1960 and wrote their National Anthem.

We can also hear the stories of POWs through the work of Hélène de Gobineau, who was a volunteer in the wartime prisons and hospitals and recorded many of the men’s experiences. Her book, Noblesse d’Afrique (‘The Nobility of Africa’), was published in 1946. She wrote:

‘I knew them unhappy, harassed, cut off from everything they loved, fighting against death. … And each of these stories expresses the same common values: nobility, generosity, courage, a sense of equality and justice.’

The POWs’ voices, their thoughts, fears and hopes, shine through de Gobineau’s account. She not only preserved their experiences, but also their personalities and their humanity. The POWs that de Gobineau spoke with, believed that black soldiers were placed on the front lines deliberately, and ‘died by the thousands’ as cannon fodder. They also witnessed ‘the Germans [putting] the Whites on one side and loaded them into waiting trucks while the Blacks were lined up against a wall on the other side, and tac…tac…tac…’.

One man, Zemba, only wished to die so his ‘soul’ could ‘fly unfettered back to his mother-country’. Another, named Diallo, would not leave the side of a ‘comrade dying of [tuberculosis]’. Fatoum wanted his photo taken, ‘standing to attention when facing death on the morning of his passing’.

When the war ended, while white French POWs found they could return home and collect their pay with relative ease, African men were not always rewarded for their services. In 1944, in the Senegalese town of Thiaroye, African veterans protested after the French authorities refused to pay them for their four years of captivity and forced labour. French soldiers fired on them, and historians estimate that over 300 men were killed – although the French government still maintains that ‘only’ 70 men died. Veterans were killed by the colonial power they had sacrificed so much for.

Afterwards, Senghor wrote a poem entitled Thiaroye:

‘No, you have not died in vain. / You are the witnesses of immortal Africa / You are the witnesses of the new world to come. / Sleep now, O Dead! Let my voice rock you to sleep, / My voice of rage cradling hope.’

Through both Senghor’s poems and de Gobineau’s writing some of the voices of the 120,000 POWs can still be heard today. But is anyone listening? The sacrifices of these African POWs are rarely commemorated in France. While there are some anonymous graves, they do not reflect the lives of the 120,000 men who were imprisoned on French soil. Today, in France, there is growing support for far-right politicians who have built their platform on anti-immigration policies and the rejection of multi-culturalism. For them, French citizenship only belongs to white Christians. The nations that sacrificed their people in the name of France, are not welcome on French soil. France’s colonial past has not only been forgotten, but also silenced.

‘They put flowers on tombs and warm the Unknown Soldier. / You my dark brothers, no one appoints you.’
 
Senghor, To The Senegalese Riflemen Who Died For France (1938).

It is no wonder that today the Black Lives Matter protests continually call for noise, for us to ‘Say Their Names’ and ‘Break [the] Silence’. If these men are not heard, they remain unknown; they become silent figures trapped in photographs with their voices erased from history. The silence needs to be shattered, not only for their memory to survive but for their relatives to receive justice today.

The ‘Songs of the Shadows’ need to soar once more … and we all need to listen.

‘The vast song of your blood will defeat machines and canons / Your speech throbbing deceptions and lies / No hate in your soul, you are not hateful, no cunning / …soul without cunning. / O Black Martyrs, immortal race, let me say the / …words that forgive.’
Senghor, Camp 1940: Assassinations.

Further Reading

Myron Echenberg, ‘Morts Pour la France’; The African Soldier in France During the Second World War’, The Journal of African History, 26.4 (1985), 363-80.

Raffael Scheck, ‘French Colonial Soldiers in German PRISONER-OF-WAR Camps (1940–1945)’, French History, 24.3 (2010), 420-46.

The Climate Emergency and the Inadequacy of the Historical Nation State by Markus Daechsel

Flooding in Sindh, Pakistan, 2022 (Ali Hyder Junejo)

The recent COP27 conference was dominated by discussions about the creation of a ‘loss and damage’ fund financed by the world’s richer nations to help poorer countries cope with the devastating effects of the climate emergency. The global South has been suffering disproportionally from rising sea levels, extreme weather events, crop failure and potentially deadly rises in temperature, despite having contributed far less to carbon emissions over time than the prosperous industrialised North. In Pakistan – a country with a relatively small carbon footprint – this summer brought the most devastating monsoon floods in historical memory, inundating as much as one third of the country’s populated area. Much of this year’s harvest has been destroyed, and millions of Pakistanis remain stuck in temporary camps. In the words of Sherry Rehman, the country’s new climate change minister and veteran ‘liberal’ voice, Pakistan has become the ‘ground zero’ of the climate catastrophe. While the international fossil fuel industry was raking in record profits and deceiving the public with ‘greenwashing’ spin, her country had the right to ask for ‘reparations’ to make up for the loss to infrastructure and economic productivity caused by others. This fiery rhetoric was subsequently dialled down by Rehman’s own government, but a tentative step towards a ‘loss and damage’ fund turned out to be the only tangible outcome of COP27. While the question of how to quantify and apportion responsibility to individual countries remained hotly contested, the assembled world leaders seemed to find it easier to negotiate ways to pay for the effects of greenhouse gas emissions than to make any meaningful commitments to limiting emissions themselves.

It is clear that the global North has to accept responsibility for global warming and is in a moral bind to the people of the global South. But whether government-to-government transfers akin to ‘reparations’ – if indeed they ever materialise in substantial amounts – should stand at the heart of a solution is a more complicated question. While the COP format by necessity regards negotiations between nation states as the most meaningful way to address global problems, historians should be much more sceptical about approaching global heating in this manner. The nation state may still be the most readily accepted building block of global politics, but it is worth remembering that it started its career as a legal construct designed to bring an end to the devastating religious wars of early modern Europe. When it comes to understanding large-scale processes of economic and social change such as the development of fossil fuel capitalism, a ‘methodological nationalism’ – thinking in terms of national units – can actually be less than helpful. And this is not even asking difficult questions about when and where the nation state concept ever adequately reflected real structures of power. It certainly only applied to a small proportion of humanity during the age of the modern European Empires from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and its conceptual validity remains at best limited in our own age of multinational corporations, international tax havens, transnational elites and global production chains.

Woman working in a Cotton Mill, Witney, Oxfordshire, 1898 (Historic England)

Histories of global capitalism such as the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein have alerted us to the need to understand global capitalism as a single integrated whole, where development in one place always has immediate and causal connections with ‘underdevelopment’ in another. While the debate about the local roots of Britain’s original industrial revolution rambles on, a more globalist vantage point suggests that industrialisation has rarely exclusively or even predominantly been a ‘national’ story. The flourishing of the Lancashire cotton industry, for example, was dependent on a supply of cheap cotton produced on the slave plantations of the American South. The workers toiling in Britain’s factories could not be fed, moreover, without cheap imported food from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, or a little later, the beef herds of Argentina and Uruguay. And British textiles would not have been so profitable if British colonialism had not first ruined highly accomplished artisan weavers in India, and then ensured tariff free access to the Indian mass market for British goods. Industrial capitalism is not an ‘advanced’ form of production, while plantation slavery, cattle-ranching or small-holding agriculture are ‘backward’. They are all equally ‘up to date’ in their time, and integral to the same stage of global development.

Indian Cotton Weavers, gouache drawing, c. 1840 (Wellcome Collection)

What is more, the winners and losers of the global capitalist system were never neatly divided between North and South, even if on the final balance sheet the system was decisively rigged in favour of Northern interests. It is easy to identify the biggest beneficiaries: European and North American capitalists, and the most exploited: racialised slaved labour. But there were a large number of social groups that fell somewhere in between, and whose balance of benefit and loss is not always straightforward to calculate or compare. Who profited more from industrial capitalism – the increasingly comfortable but still exploited working classes of Great Britain or the newly prosperous import-export trader conducting his business under British overlordship in colonial Bombay? In the area of British India that later became Pakistan, farmer-landowners producing rice or wheat for export could only become as politically and economically powerful as they did because British colonial policies restricted the ability of local bankers and financiers to become successful industrialists and create a new capitalist ruling class.

In recent decades, the growing interconnectedness of the global economy and the large-scale outsourcing of industrial production to countries with cheaper labour have made calculations of who benefits and who is responsible for harmful externalities like carbon emissions even more complicated. What about a chip manufacturer in Taiwan or an iPhone factory in China? Or, to return to flood-stricken Pakistan, a garment factory in the country’s own ‘Manchester’ – Faisalabad – or a sports good manufacturer in Sialkot, where most of the world’s footballs are stitched? In a remarkable irony of history, many international fashion brands are now producing their wares in unsafe and overcrowded factories in Bangladesh, only a few hundred miles to the East of where British colonialism had driven the world’s most accomplished makers of luxury cotton fabrics into ruin about 200 years earlier. Most of these outsourced products end up under global brand names in the shops, where the greatest share of profit accrues. But the governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh and many other countries, whose efforts to achieve their own ‘national’ versions of industrialisation had often spectacularly failed by the 1970s, have nevertheless courted these multinationals with soft-touch labour and environmental laws to maintain economic growth and support growing middle class aspirations.

The outsourcing of labour to South Asia and other parts of the world went hand in hand with the outsourcing of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation and urban overcrowding. Sherry Rehman could increase the moral pressure for climate ‘reparations’ by pointing out that some proportion of Pakistan’s modest global greenhouse emissions are not in fact Pakistan’s own, but emissions produced ‘on behalf’ of Europeans or North Americans. But such an argument shifts the overall thrust of policy making in the wrong direction. The interconnectedness of global capitalism as a single system, which easily goes as far back as the time of the first coal-fired steam engines, means that emissions must be cut everywhere rather than being outsourced with a conscience-calming ‘loss and damage’ payment thrown in as compensation. A fund to help the poorest nations still has an important role to play, but the most meaningful way the beneficiaries of centuries of capitalist development could address their historical debt to the losers is to genuinely eliminate carbon-burning from global supply chains.

Markus Daechsel is Reader in the History of Modern Islamic Societies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the history, politics and social dynamics of South Asia.

‘Rather Hoped I’d Get Through the Whole Show’: In Defence of Blackadder Goes Forth by Edward Madigan

       It was good to see a clip of the final scene of Blackadder Goes Forth doing the rounds on Twitter last week. If the thousands of likes and positive comments are anything to go by, the series clearly still resonates warmly with the public over 30 years after it was first broadcast in 1989. But not everyone’s a fan. Indeed, the show is something of a perennial bugbear for historians and other commentators who feel British people fundamentally misunderstand the First World War. Gary Sheffield’s hugely insightful 2001 book, Forgotten Victory, opens with a discussion of the series in which the author rightly notes that Blackadder ‘reflected and reinforced the majority of the public’s views and emotions about the Great War.’ Prof. Sheffield is a sort of revisionist’s revisionist and there’s a great deal of truth in his critique. The adventures of Capt. Edmund Blackadder and his comrades were a comedic and thus very potent expression of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ myth, which has been around in one form or another since the war itself but really crystalised during the 1960s. In this vision of the conflict, the British campaign on the Western Front was conducted with supreme incompetence by Douglas Haig and the other generals, who were brutally callous with the lives of their men. The staff officers in Blackadder are certainly portrayed as incompetent and callous, and, as Sheffield points out, the series’ portrayal of British strategy and tactics ‘is funny because everybody ‘knows’ that British generals were incompetent and their battles were invariably bloody failures’. And he is by no means the only military historian to take issue with the series. Max Hastings has dismissed the popular perception of the war as ‘the Blackadder take on history’, and the late Richard Holmes decried the extent to which ‘Blackadder’s aphorisms have become fact’.

       Blackadder Goes Forth has also been invoked in political commentary on public perceptions of the past. In an article anticipating the centenaries of the war that was published in the Daily Mail in January 2014, Michael Gove was scathing about what he regarded as the apparently dominant ‘Blackadder’ version of the war, which portrays the conflict as a ‘misbegotten shambles’ and thus denigrates the ‘patriotism, honour and courage’ of the fallen. Gove was Secretary of State for Education at the time and his article was essentially an attack on the way history is taught in British secondary schools. His comments quickly met with robust responses from his Labour counterpart, Tristram Hunt, and a range of other prominent commentators, including historians Richard Evans and Antony Beevor. Tony Robinson, who played Pte. Baldrick in the series, also weighed in, passionately defending British teachers. This particular quarrel has now been forgotten, but it reveals the degree to which ‘Blackadder’ has become short-hand in certain quarters for a crude misunderstanding of the ‘war to end all wars’. In very broad terms, the debate divides those who regard the war as a bloody but necessary conflict in which British servicemen heroically achieved a great victory and those who see the war as little more than a futile exercise in mass slaughter.

       And yet despite often heated disagreements about the meaning of the 1914 – 1918 conflict, and the persistence of the view that the war was futile, there is remarkable consensus in Britain that the war dead should be remembered with reverence and respect. Even groups that have been very critical of the official, government-driven culture of commemoration, such as the Stop the War Coalition and the No Glory in War Campaign, have stopped short of suggesting that the dead should not be honoured. And this is where Blackadder Goes Forth offers some valuable – and usually overlooked – insights into the British relationship with the First World War. The tension in the British memory of the war is quite unmistakable in the shift in tone we see in the final scene of the six-part series. For five and a half episodes, the series brilliantly lampooned the British war effort, and then, in the last ten minutes of the final episode, it paid a remarkably sincere and poignant tribute to the men who lost their lives on the Western Front. As Dan Todman notes in his own revisionist classic, The Great War: Myth and Memory, the closing scene rather undermines the more irreverent and cynical mood of the rest of the series. It is as though the writers, Ben Elton and Richard Curtis, felt that they couldn’t in conscience make a television show about the war, no matter how satirical, without ultimately honouring the dead.

The closing scene of the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth (Goodbyeee), first aired November 1989 (BBC)

       And the final scene is indeed moving. All of the main characters, with the exception of General Melchett, clamber over the parapet and advance heroically into German machine-gun fire. A slow, haunting piano plays the theme music in lieu of the brassy marching band of previous episodes, and, in the end, the image of the fallen heroes in 1917 fades to a tranquil scene of the Western Front in ‘our own time’, accompanied by the sound of birdsong. It’s an undeniably well-crafted piece of television. Yet, in much of the commentary on the scene, one of its most poignant and revealing elements is usually overlooked. The clip currently circulating on Twitter begins as Blackadder and Baldrick and the rest of the characters step into the trench and prepare to go ‘over the top’. In the originally-broadcast version, however, this moment is preceded by an unusual exchange in the dug-out between Blackadder and Capt. Darling:

Capt. Blackadder: How are you feeling, Darling?

Capt. Darling: Erm, not all that good, Blackadder – rather hoped I’d get through the whole show; go back to work at Pratt & Sons; keep wicket for the Croydon gentlemen; marry Doris … Made a note in my diary on my way here; simply says, ‘Bugger’.

Capt. Blackadder: Well, quite.

I honestly think you’d struggle to find a more moving passage in the whole canon of post-1960s First World War fiction. The scene is played with real pathos and feeling by Tim McInnerney and Rowan Atkinson and its power is heightened by the fact that their characters have been arch-enemies for the rest of the series. In the other episodes, Capt. Darling is a toadying junior staff-officer, skulking about in the regimental HQ, a foil for Blackadder’s cutting wit; now he finds himself very much at the sharp end. His wistful lament for the life he thought he’d live after the war is all the more poignant because this formerly unappealing character now has his back against the wall. His words also seem to capture what must have been a common state of mind for the men who fought and died during the war. ‘Rather hoped I’d get through the whole show’ would be a fitting epitaph for any number of the dead.

British soldiers eating on the Somme front, October 1916 (IWM Q1580)

        When I discuss this scene with my public history students each year, I also encourage them to consider Darling’s fiancé, Doris. She’s a fictional character, mentioned in passing in a sitcom, but she arguably represents all those left behind when their loved ones failed to return from the front. And her predicament is more relatable to most of us today than that of the men who served on the Western Front and in the other theatres of war. None of us will have to fight in an industrialised war, and few of us will experience military service. Yet all of us will suffer loss and know bereavement. The pain of grief is a fairly universal experience, and in it we can empathise with our ancestors more than we sometimes appreciate. Blackadder Goes Forth does not of course tell us much about the military dynamics of the First World War. Yet in reflecting the tension in Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and dramatically evoking the fate of the men who fought and died, the series offers us some genuinely valuable insights.

Dr Edward Madigan is Senior Lecturer in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London and co-editor of Historians for History.

So You Want to be a Public Historian? Forging Careers in the History and Heritage Sectors by Edward Madigan

       I don’t suppose it’s ever been easy to earn a living in public history, but the last few years have been particularly brutal. Museums, archives and heritage sites across the UK and the wider world struggled to survive throughout 2020 and ’21 as the pandemic led to extended closures, plummeting visitor numbers and extreme uncertainty in funding. We seem to be slowly emerging from the plague woods now, but tourist numbers still haven’t recovered, and the global cost of living crisis will ensure that it may be some time before they get back to pre-pandemic levels. All of this has been compounded by ongoing cuts in government funding for anything to do with history or heritage, and a growing right-wing hostility to public history that departs from patriotic bedtime stories.

        And yet, despite all of these challenges, this is a fascinating time to be a public historian. The re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the weeks after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 brought the questions of white supremacy, slavery, colonial conquest and imperialism very much to the fore in heritage and public history. The ensuing wave of protests in the United States and elsewhere forced many institutions and individuals who create narratives of the past for public consumption to pause and sincerely consider those narratives in a different light. In Britain, the dumping of the statue of the 17th century slave-trader, Edward Colston, into Bristol harbour reflected a pressing and popular demand for a more open, inclusive and honest public confrontation with the past. Over that tumultuous summer, the History Matters project documented evidence of a groundswell of popular support for a reimagination of the way the past is represented in public in light of these developments. The work of those who were already countering dominant historical narratives, such as the Museum Detox network, was given fresh urgency and new projects designed to historicise imperialism and the experiences of minoritised peoples were launched with real enthusiasm. Two years on, the public conversation about Britain’s past seems genuinely more critical and more dynamic than ever before. This makes for a very stimulating and intellectually vibrant atmosphere for anyone who hopes to create public narratives of the past, and the field is increasingly driven by younger historians who wear the ‘public’ prefix with pride. And despite the generalised doom and gloom, jobs in history and heritage are still routinely advertised in the UK, as the University of Leicester museum jobs web-page demonstrates.

Becky Tabrar speaking at the LCPH Public History Early Career Workshop, 9 September 2022

       The prospect of establishing a career in this burgeoning field nonetheless remains daunting and budding public historians need all the help they can get. With this in mind, the London Centre for Public History recently held an early career workshop at Stewart House in Bloomsbury. Over the course of an afternoon, three established public historians spoke about their experiences of forging careers to a highly engaged group of people working, or aspiring to work, in the history and heritage sectors. The first speaker, Becky Tabrar, is a graduate of Royal Holloway’s pioneering MA in Public History programme and has been a curator and public engagement officer at the Windsor & Royal Borough Museum since 2017. In a fascinating presentation, Becky really emphasised the value of starting out in a relatively small local museum, where there’s likely to be much more scope for gaining experience and making an impact than in a larger institution. She also spoke of the need for self-care and balance in a career in which a junior curator, new to the team and eager to show willing, can easily spend too much of their own personal time working on museum projects.

Becky was followed by Dr Ayshah Johnston, the Learning and Engagement Officer at the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton. The BCA is the only national institution dedicated to preserving and disseminating Black British history and Ayshah has played a pivotal role in its outreach and engagement work over the past number of years. In a very rich and varied talk, Ayshah reminded us that the public historian has the power to inspire groups and individuals as well as to educate them. This is perhaps especially true for the historian who engages with traditionally marginalised communities. With their distinctive experience and expertise, Becky and Ayshah really complemented each other in the ensuing discussion, chaired by Dr Matthew Smith, which was full of insights from both the speakers and the floor. One of the themes that emerged was that the public themselves can sometimes be challenging, particularly when you’re threatening established narratives that they hold dear and they respond accordingly. The public historian is therefore often required to be confident and authoritative on the one hand and tactful and diplomatic on the other.

Dr Ayshah Johnston, Becky Tabrar and Dr Matthew Smith in discussion at the workshop.

The second session was led by Hannah Greig, who, over the course of a career that no doubt evoked a certain amount of envy in the room, has worked as the main historical consultant on a whole series of major TV and film productions, including The Duchess, Poldark, Bridgerton, and the academy-award winning The Favourite. In a hugely enlightening presentation, Dr Greig stressed how much she enjoys working in film and television, an industry which has become notably diverse in recent years, especially by comparison with academia. She also emphasised the valuable insights she has gained into the history and culture of early-modern England through working with directors, script-writers, set-designers and actors whose questions have inspired research that she probably wouldn’t have otherwise undertaken. This struck me as a particularly useful point for early career public historians, who often understand their role as a case of bringing their expertise to the uninformed man or woman in the street. It is of course partly that, but at its most meaningful the process of creating public narratives of the past involves a mutual exchange of insight and understanding.

            We’ve only very recently begun to use the term ‘public history’ in the UK and Ireland, so there’s no tried and tested blueprint for this sort of a career. Yet something that came across quite strongly in each of the presentations, and in the discussions that followed them, was the importance of adopting what Hannah referred to as a ‘portfolio approach’ to career progression and development. For the up-and-coming public historian, this means having an open mind about your ultimate destination and keeping as many irons in the fire as possible. And for better or for worse, networking is crucial. But what does this mysterious term mean in practice for the newly-minted public historian? Well, making yourself and your work known to more established practitioners in the field is of course helpful. Influential movers and shakers can certainly provide opportunities for more junior colleagues. But a willingness to form relationships and collaborate with your peers is just as important. A circle of friends and colleagues who work in public history can provide valuable support, advice and commiseration. And as they progress in their careers, they may be in a position to offer employment and funding opportunities. Perhaps more than anything, though, your peers invariably share your passion for the public interpretation of the past, so they can act as a healthy source of inspiration and collaboration as you make your way in this often daunting but always exciting field.

Dr Edward Madigan is Senior Lecturer in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London and Co-Editor of Historians for History.

Sweet Memory: Extracting Oral Histories from Unwritten African American Recipes by Andre Taylor

You can only preserve the elements of cultural heritage that you share. One way of hiding cultural heritage and natural history in plain sight is through foodways and recipes. Long before their arrival in the Americas by way of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Black people have transmitted histories and other pertinent information orally. This tradition was passed on by generations of enslaved Blacks and, ultimately, morphed into something more than even the ancestors imagined. The emergence of the internet and cell phones has made most information readily available to anyone with a handheld device; however, the oral tradition of sharing in close quarters remains closely guarded. Not every family member gets grandmom’s recipes. It’s only the individuals who have proven they have a passion for cooking, and they can flat out burn (slang for cook).  

The kitchen, cookhouse, mess, or galley are more than just areas in which we create delectable meals, they’re places of sharing. Stories pour out of the kitchen, especially around the holidays, and into the minds of generations of family within the space. However, these innate stories mask the real histories that are hidden in plain sight. With every whisk, churn, flip, and fry in the kitchen, is an oral history of untold family knowledge. These stories, hidden in the unwritten recipes passed down orally within families, provide understanding of the very people we call family.

An oral history project I began in May seeks to capture the stories of African American families, as well as the unwritten recipes circulating in their families. Titled ‘Black folk and our food: Extracting traumatic memory hidden in unwritten family recipes through oral histories’, the project is a deliberate mission to preserve recipes, cooking methods and histories. Utilizing oral history collection as my primary methodology, the challenge is extracting the stories trapped between a pinch of salt and a handful of flour. The goal of this project is to use orally transmitted recipes as the vehicle to narrate often taboo family stories to better understand the functionality and adaptability of African American families. The project will also develop a narrative of the contemporary southern African American family.

Dr. James Avery, a Portsmouth, Virginia resident, had a very special relationship with his grandmother, Ollie Pearl Hassell. Faith, family, and food were at the heart of their relationship. As a child in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dr. Avery was his grandmother’s sous chef, studying her ways of preparing foods: deviled eggs, baked chicken wings and her cabbage. It was the cabbage he prepared during his oral history interview for the project. Seasoned meat, diced onions, salt, pepper, ground mustard, black pepper, garlic powder, Adobo seasoning (an addition made by his aunt), and pepper flakes (his own addition to the recipe) all ended up in a pot atop his stove, and all were added without a single measurement. While this may be considered an unorthodox way of cooking by trained culinary experts, in the African American culture, it is the direct connection to their ancestors and heritage. For Dr. Avery, sharing these moments in that space with his grandmother were a training ground and listening session.

Dr. James Avery prepares cabbage next to a picture of his late grandparents Clyde William and Ollie Pearl Hassell (Andre Taylor).

One of ten grandchildren to Ollie Pearl, Dr. Avery learned about the lives of people in the church, the neighborhood, and sometimes about his grandmother’s sister, who she’d considered mean, all the while, she was passing down family recipes to the chosen grandchild. She never discussed what it was like growing up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and there was a lot to unpack regarding her city. Greensboro, the epicenter of the sit-ins in the United States, has always grappled with its dark, racist past that existed long before Ollie Pearl’s birth on June 12, 1924. In Greensboro, the color line is simple: whites to the west of Elm Street and Blacks east of the street. On February 1, 1960, on Elm Street, an F.W. Woolworth lunch counter became the center of attention as four freshmen male students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, marched from campus to the store and staged the first sit-in to desegregate the lunch counter. They were successful in desegregating Greensboro in July of that year, and their actions spawned a wave of similar acts around the country. By the time the sit-ins had begun in Greensboro, Ollie Pearl had already left the city and was residing in Virginia.

Avery removes smoked neckbones from a pot following a recipe he received from his late grandmother, Ollie Pearl Hassell (Andre Taylor)

Ollie Pearl never spoke of who taught her to cook, but she basked in her culinary talents, preparing food to take to church and having a meal prepared for anyone who stopped by the house. As she aged and her health began to deteriorate, and Dr. Avery matured, Ollie Pearl would instruct him from the living room in preparing either breakfast or lunch. She could tell if he was using a pot that was too small, if water was boiling too fast or the pan was too hot, all by sound. From the living room, she would tell him to turn the burner down, and he’d follow every instruction. The reward was more than the appreciation of knowing he had prepared a meal for his grandmother; it was the time spent and the lessons learned. Those deeply personal meetings came to an end in February 2008 when Ollie Pearl died. She was 83.

The memory of Ollie Pearl lives on in the recipes she left behind that yielded awe-inspiring stories. In particular, the cabbage recipe tells a love story. Before he passed, Clyde William Hassell, Ollie Pearl’s husband, grew vegetables in their backyard. Green cabbage was one of the more easily-cultivated crops and there was plenty of it. Even after his death, Ollie Hassell still prepared cabbage, though she had to buy it from the grocery store. But although his grandmother continued to prepare the dish, Dr. Avery still wasn’t a fan. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her cooking, he revered it; he just wasn’t big on cabbage. That feeling, too, would change.

The aromas of cabbage cooking conjure memories of Ollie Pearl. The windows in his home don’t sweat like they did in his grandmother’s kitchen, but the smells of her recipes being prepared in his spacious kitchen, with air vents, prompt memories of conversations with her. The smell of boiling neckbones brings forth stories of Ollie Pearl talking about her uncle who made moonshine in the woods of North Carolina and her message of don’t let people see what goes into your food for seasoning. The kitchen was not just a sacred place where meals were prepared, it is a repository for the stories, lessons, and memories of Ollie Pearl.

Dr. Avery was not forced to be in the kitchen with Ollie Pearl, he pushed his way into that space. He wanted to be in there to learn and spend time with his grandmother and by default, has become the “neo-griot,” for his family, equipped with the stories that exist in the unwritten recipes that she passed onto him. By participating in this project, Dr. Avery not only preserved this recipe for future generations of his family, but he also offered further, critical insight into the functionality and hierarchy that exists in African American families, whereas individuals in the family have specific roles. Though she shared many stories with him, there were stories he says he wished she would have told about her relationship with her parents and other relatives.

At its best, comfort food can deliver us from the ills of the world and brings forth a euphoric state in which we can escape and live in a blissful, stress-free world. This concept of comfort food is critical to this project in that the very vessels for the stories I am searching for rests in the recipes and dishes of the participants. Several other narrators have, like Dr Avery, shared elements of their lives and those of their ancestors through recipes. These recipes are far from average fare. They are glimpses into a time when Black people were subjected to segregation, marginalization and, in some cases, enslavement. We cannot simply look at recipes as resources that fulfill our hunger, we must look at them for what they are: cultural heritage, natural history, and oral histories. Without her recipes, we cannot fully contextualize Ollie Pearl. Within her recipes lies the pragmatic origins of a family, a story of triumph, love, and faith. At the core, these are the makings of African American families and offer an extraordinary window into our past and present. The “Black Folk and our Food,” project will continuously bring forth the stories of people like Ollie Pearl as examples of the courage and strength of Blacks in America represented through our food.

Further Reading

Smith, Graham, “The Making of Oral History: Sections 1-2”, University of London

Twitty, Michael. “The Cooking Gene: A journey through African American culinary history in the old south,” 2017 (Harper/Collins Publishers)

Andre L. Taylor is the oral historian and Ph.D. student in American Studies at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virgnia.

‘This is all that Australia has left of my people’: The Trailblazing Aboriginal Activist of 1920s London by Ruby van Leer

‘Against the solid stone of Australia House stands … a black man, hatless and with a grey beard, a mere handful of a man, with the fine bones of an Australian Aborigine. [On his] great coat is pinned from top to bottom … scores of those little white penny skeletons that the street vendors sell to children….Good Lord- the man is a walking graveyard! Yet his eyes are on fire. He points to the penny skeletons and shouts as the people pass: ‘This is all that Australia has left of my people.’

So Dharug man Anthony Martin Fernando is said to have cried out to passers-by during his visceral ‘penny skeleton’ protest, intended to draw attention to the lethal implications of British settlement on Aboriginal Australians. Such a protest would not appear out of place in Australian popular historical and geographical memory, side-by-side with Charles Perkins’ Freedom Rides of 1965 through northern New South Wales, or the pitching of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Parliament House in Canberra in 1972. However, the location is London, the corner of the Strand and Aldwych, outside the Edwardian façade of Australia House; and the year is 1928. While more than 120,000 Australians live in the UK today, Fernando blazed the expatriate trail at a time when few from his nation would have been traversing the globe, particularly Indigenous Australians, who were increasingly confined to reserves and missions on the Australian mainland and were hence largely absent historically and politically. Fernando’s extraordinary story of global travel and solitary protest is therefore an important statement of survival and resistance that confronts imperial imaginings of movement and activism in the early twentieth century; ideas that have very much (mis)shaped our understanding of the scope and geography of Aboriginal activism to the present day.

Indigenous Rights Activist Bob Maza addresses the Crowd, Canberra, 1972.

Much of Fernando’s life can only be reconstructed from fragmentary evidence; three small notebooks, some surviving letters and government petitions, an interview with a Swiss newspaper, court reports from his brushes with the law, and the recollections of people such as Indigenous rights activist Mary Bennett, who witnessed his London protests. This perhaps goes some way towards explaining why his story, while remarkable, has remained relatively unknown. According to his own account, he was born in 1864 in Woolloomooloo, Sydney, to an Aboriginal woman named Sarah. He recalled his “bitter education in white brutality” through separation from his mother at a young age, an unfortunately common experience for Indigenous children well into the twentieth century. Letters reveal he spent some time in Western Australia, observing the profound cruelties of the mission system, before leaving for Europe in the late nineteenth century. He attributed his departure to being refused the right to give evidence against a white man accused of murdering several Aboriginal people, due to his own indigeneity.

Australia House, The Strand, London, c. 1920 (London Metropolitan Archives)

Fernando was already blazing a trail of activism long before he arrived in England. After a period living in Austria, where he was interned as an enemy ‘alien’ during the First World War, he moved to Geneva, where he hoped to petition the newly formed League of Nations’ General Assembly to assist in the establishment of an autonomous Indigenous state in the north of Australia. Although barred from speaking at the assembly, Fernando did secure an interview with Swiss newspaper Der Bund, in which he countered popular assumptions that indigenous populations were ‘primitive’ or ‘less than human’, emphasised the intelligence and intellect of Aboriginal Australians and further promoted his request for the League of Nations to intervene in securing an autonomous state for Indigenous Australians. He next emerged in Italy, where he attempted to petition the Pope to support his cause, but was turned away. Indeed, he was arrested in Italy in 1923 for handing out pamphlets accusing the British of the extermination of Indigenous Australians, and was subsequently deported to Britain, where his most memorable form of protest was to begin.

Fernando was in his sixties by the time he began picketing at Australia House, a pertinent location as the London headquarters of the Australian government. European perceptions of Indigenous people at this time had been largely formed from the collection and display of Indigenous bodies as exhibits, either living or dead, on the peripheral stage of the museum. Notably, the population of London in the inter-war years was also overwhelmingly white. Yet here Fernando stood as a ‘living ghost’ of colonial enterprise at the precise location in the capital where metropolis met the colonial frontier. At this point he had taken up one of his previous occupations as a toy-maker, and was selling the toy skeletons that he attached to his coat as part of his ghostly protest. On a bleak London street in mid-winter, Fernando must have cut a haunting and striking figure as he implored would-be customers, gesturing to the skeletons, “this is all that Australia has left of my people”.

Imagined portrait of Anthony Martin Fernando by Raj Nagi (ABC News Australia).

Fernando’s death scene protest shrank the distance between the suffering of Aboriginal Australians and the heart of the empire, forcing accusations of genocidal activity to the forefront of imperial consciousness. He garnered enough attention for the embarrassed employees of Australia House to have him arrested on multiple occasions, and even to attempt to have him certified insane, a common tactic of political silencing. Doctors refused, however, stating his views were a sign “not of insanity but of an unusually strong mind”. His diaries describe the racial abuse he received daily as a street vendor selling his toys, which led to successive court appearances from 1929 to 1939 as he fought back, once pulling a handgun on a fellow street vendor who taunted the colour of his skin. During this time, a burgeoning Aboriginal rights movement in Australia, headed by activists such as Jack Patten, William Ferguson, William Cooper and Pearl Gibbs, began conducting protests including the first Day of Mourning in 1938. Indeed, Pearl Gibbs even saved newspaper clippings of Fernando’s court testimonies reported in the Australian press. However Fernando was never to return home to join their ranks; he remained in England, and by 1948 he had been admitted to Claybury hospital, suffering from senile dementia. It was here that he passed away in 1949, aged 84.

Startling in its trailblazing and audacious nature, Fernando’s remarkable story predates by several decades, and extends by half the globe, our commonly held understandings of Aboriginal activism. He challenges images of passivity and victimhood that tend to arise from this period; just as the Aboriginal Land Rights movement coined the phrase “always was, always will be Aboriginal land”, Fernando reminds us that there always have been defiant acts of Indigenous self-representation and activism, even in the most unlikely of settings. Sadly, his activism is no less relevant today than it was in 1928, as Aboriginal Australians continue to advocate for adequate cultural and historical recognition of the violence and displacement that accompanied British invasion and settlement, not least by being formally acknowledged in Australia’s Constitution; a victory that is still yet to come.

Further Reading

Browning, Daniel, ‘Fernando’s Ghost’, Awaye!, ABC Radio National, May 2010

Paisley, Fiona, ‘Death Scene Protester: An Aboriginal Rights Activist in 1920s London’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 110.4 (2011), 867–83

Ruby van Leer is a student on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London