From Enslaved Princess to Royal Protégée: Queen Victoria’s Forgotten Black Goddaughter by Emily Murrell

March 9, 2021March 9, 2021 Madigan771 Comment

Anyone who visited Osbourne House, Queen Victoria’s holiday home, in October 2020 wouldn’t have been able to miss Hannah Uzor’s elegant portrait of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the Queen’s forgotten goddaughter. The painting, based on the portrait above by Camille Silvy, was commissioned by English Heritage to commemorate Black History Month and is the first instalment of their developing scheme to reintroduce historical Black figures into their heritage sites.

Starting their campaign with Bonetta is no coincidence considering the remarkable life she led as a Black woman in Britain. Within a matter of a few months, her life as an orphaned slave was completely transformed as she became goddaughter and protégée to the most powerful ruler in the world. Her life was full of both tragedy and affluence, but, more significantly, she became a symbol for race culture in the Victorian era and should be offered the greater recognition within Victorian history today.

Drawing of a very young Sarah Forbes Bonetta in F.E. Forbes, Dahomey and the Dahomens, 1851.

Bonetta is believed to have been born in the Yoruba Empire – now Nigeria and the adjacent territories – in around 1843. Her misfortunes began at the age of five as she became an orphan during the Okeadon War and was taken as a slave by King Ghezo of Dahomey. Inter-tribal warfare was rife between West African kingdoms, fighting for land and a monopoly over the Atlantic slave trade. The slave trade was an indication of power and the source of wealth for many rulers in the region, particularly Ghezo, who claimed that he would do anything for the British aside from giving up his trading networks.

After being held as a slave for two years, her life in Britain began in irony as a ‘diplomatic gift’ to the Queen of a country that had recently abolished slavery. In 1850, Queen Victoria ordered Captain Frederick E. Forbes to travel to Dahomey and negotiate a deal with King Ghezo that would stop his involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The details of Forbes’ journey to Africa and these unsuccessful negotiations are outlined in his published journals, Dahomey and the Dahomens. It is here, listed among other gifts of ‘rum’ and ‘cloth’, that we first learn of the ‘captive girl’ that would be returning to Britain with him as a gift for the crown. Forbes later notes that she quickly became a favourite among the crew and emphasises his moral efforts to ‘save’ her from a worse fate in the hands of the Yoruban King. The speculation regarding her ‘noble’ origins also started in Forbes’ writings as he suggested that she must have been of ‘good’ blood to justify keeping her as a slave to the King. Before her journey to Britain, the girl was taken to be baptised under a new name, Sarah Forbes Bonetta, after the Captain and his ship, the HMS Bonetta.

Upon arriving in Britain, Forbes arranged an audience with the Queen who quickly took a liking to Bonetta and, as the captain had expected, offered to support her education and middle-class upbringing. In her diary, Queen Victoria describes her as ‘an intelligent little thing’, an opinion expressed with a surprise that many shared due to the common belief that Black people were incapable of being educated to a high standard. Bonetta’s life thus became something of a social experiment to either prove or disprove the scientists who created these misconceptions. Bonetta became a hot topic in phrenology circles, the members of which had long used skull measurements as evidence for intellectual inferiority in Black people. The Brighton Herald even noted her skull formation as ‘almost Caucasian in its regularity’ when discussing her life on the eve of her wedding, reflecting long-standing racial biases and the inability to move past stereotypical assumptions.

Portrait photograph of Sarah Forbes Bonetta by William Bambridge, 1856 (Royal Collection Trust)

Much of her early education took place at an all-girls missionary school run by the Church Mission Society in Sierra Leone. She was moved there after it was suggested that the British climate was damaging her health, yet another common racial stereotype. Sierra Leone already had an established history for Black British populations after the ‘Province of Freedom’ mission sought to resettle London’s ‘Black Poor’ there in 1787. This scheme was introduced to eliminate the new financial burdens that emerged after they became liberated from their slave positions. This first colony was doomed by disease, but the subsequent colony founded Freetown, where Bonetta would later be sent. As a missionary, her education became a tool for the British to exaggerate their new moral mission in liberating Black populations. Without choice Sarah would become the model for the ideal Black Victorian woman and the image of radical change the British wanted to display. After returning to England, Bonetta lived with a Christian family in Kent, who spoke fondly of her ‘lively disposition’, and she later moved to Brighton to live with Miss Sophia Welsh who oversaw her final introductions into society.

Now a ‘civilised’ member of British society, Sarah easily made a name for herself in Brighton’s social circles with her lively character and musical talents. Her popularity drew the attention of James Davies who requested to meet her with a view to making a proposal of marriage. As her guardian, it was Queen Victoria’s final task to find her a suitable husband, and the 33-year-old wealthy merchant from Lagos fitted perfectly. The wedding took place in August 1862 and was seen as one of the most diverse events of its time. The Brighton Guardian reported the wedding in a short article which was subsequently reprinted nationwide. Most notably, the report dedicated a chunk of its short account to comment on the ‘absence of that abruptness’ in Sarah’s features. The attention to her appearance continued as she was described to lack the characteristic ‘ferocity’ of the stereotypical African Victorian women. These sentences reveal the media’s efforts to seek a justification for Bonetta’s status by using racial stereotypes to highlight her separation from white society, but also to portray her an unusual within the black community. Defined as a ‘pleasant confusion’, the way she was present and perceived by British society was an indication of the deeply ingrained racism that continued to thrive during her lifetime. In signing the marriage certificate, Sarah wrote her full name to be ‘Ina Sarah Forbes Bonetta’, the Yoruban name being a nod to her African heritage and the culture she had lost along her journey to status in England. After the wedding, renowned photographer Camille Silvy captured several portraits of Bonetta and her new husband, permanently confirming her status in Britain and placing her as a symbol against the racial stereotypes at the time.

Bonetta with her husband, James Davies, 1862 by Camille Silvy (National Portrait Gallery)

Over the next decade, Sarah and James had four children. Their firstborn was named Victoria after the Queen, who also became goddaughter to her namesake. The final decades of Bonetta’s short life were much less remarkable than her early ones. Her husband came into frequent financial difficulties, ultimately losing much of their business and estate to bankruptcy. Despite moving to Madeira with her three youngest children to escape the stress, the burden continued to chase her. This, combined with her incurable tuberculosis, eventually drove her to her death bed in 1880.

Like many historical Black figures, Bonetta’s history has been overshadowed by her white counterparts, and even as we reintroduce her to the narrative we remain unaware of her private thoughts. What seems most striking is that as a member of the Victorian middle-class, her education and upbringing were not unique at all. The position she assumed in Victorian high society as a Black woman is therefore pivotal in understanding how race relations were changing in the Victorian era. In Black and British: A Forgotten History, David Olusoga describes the ‘great Victorian moral mission’ that came from the inflation of the British ego on the eve of the abolition of slavery. Her life therefore developed as something of a social experiment to see if the British were capable of acting as world moral leaders and she accordingly became the poster child for this changing racial conversation in Britain.

At the cost of her past and her cultural identity, Sarah Forbes Bonetta became a token representative of the Victorian efforts to lead the change in social and racial liberalism, though the reality of her treatment was far from enlightened. She’s an important figure representing the historic diversity of British culture and heritage, yet her story, along with those of many other Black men and women, has been largely ignored. The inclusion of her portrait as part of English Heritage’s Black History Month tributes is a step toward filling this void, but we must also be aware of its temporary nature and continue to work for more permanent incorporations of Black history within British history.

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

From Vanity to Insanity? The perilous battle for female beauty in Georgian Britain by Iona Bentley

February 9, 2021February 9, 2021 Madigan77Leave a comment

“The woman to whom nature has denied beauty, in vain endeavours to make it by art”
The World , 2 January, 1755

Stepping through the doors of time, and into the shoes of the Georgian lady, one may expect to be adorned with elegant dresses, glittering jewels, and striking accoutrements. The walls of the National Portrait Gallery and the cabinets of the V&A show us exactly that. For the Beau Monde – a particularly fashionable faction of eighteenth-century elite society – this was their reality. But, if by chance you did happen to find yourself fastened into the buckled straps of the eighteenth-century silk heel, you would most likely also find yourself smeared in grease, painted with poison, and coated in a crust of perfumed powders. Your eyes may itch. Your skin may burn. Your teeth may ache from rot. Ultimately, the battle for beauty in Georgian Britain was fraught with danger, sacrifice, and pain.

_{‘Six Stages of Mending a Face’, Thomas Rowlandson, 1792 [British Museum]}

The women of the rarefied British elite during this period had access to a variety of cosmetics from across the globe. Cosmetics for personal hygiene were, however, used by both men and women, of the upper and middling ranks alike. Requiring time, resources, and an absence of physical labour unattainable to the lower sorts, cleanliness became a sign of social distinction. During the eighteenth century, cosmetics were often used in lieu of regular bathing, as hot water was believed to disturb the humours and foster disease within the body. Instead, Georgians applied substances such as oil of turpentine (now used in industrial solvents), beeswax, and bear fat to clean themselves. Powders were then required to soak up the excess residue produced both by the natural body and the cosmetic products. It is not hard to imagine (and yet difficult to bring yourself to imagine) how cloying the thick layers of oily product and scented powders would feel against the skin. Heavily perfumed products were necessary to conceal unpleasant odours – which would undoubtedly be present in abundance with such a poor hygiene regime. For the Georgians, however, this was particularly crucial, as bad air (miasma) was believed to cause disease. There were some practices of cleanliness that would be very recognisable in our own time, including tooth scraping, ear syringing, nail trimming, and plucking, although these were performed alongside other cosmetic techniques that would unlikely appear in the twenty-first century salon, such as bloodletting – popularly used to detoxify the blood in both cosmetic and medical procedures.

After cleansing the body, the second half of the Georgian lady’s cosmetic regime would be to paint her face. The early modern obsession with the white English self – as a representation of civility, virtue, and purity – heavily influenced notions of beauty and practices of cosmetics. Throughout the eighteenth century, these ideals of whiteness endured, whilst tanned skin and freckles continued to be negatively associated with the ‘lower’, labouring ranks. As a complete antithesis of the white English self, there was a common notion that those with skin coloured by the sun could only belong to the unrefined, uneducated, and unfortunate because they could only support themselves by toiling outside. To possess porcelain white skin was to exude social and ethnic superiority. The most popular means of whitening the skin was the highly toxic ceruse. Commonly associated with the sixteenth-century monarch, Elizabeth I, the white lead and vinegar paste not only acted as a whitening ‘foundation’, but also helped conceal smallpox scars, acne, and freckles. It was the perfect solution to achieving a smooth, porcelain white complexion; or at least perfect enough when overlooking the severe medical ramifications of coating oneself in lead. Rouge was then added to the cheeks and lips to accentuate the whitened face. Made of cochineal (crushed beetles), fucus (seaweed), and red mercury, the rouge was just as poisonous as the ceruse. Final cosmetic embellishments included: darkening eyebrows and lashes with lead shavings; inserting porcelain veneers over rotting teeth; stuffing balls of cork into the mouth to plump up sagging cheeks; and covering scars with beauty spots made of silk or velvet. Ranging from mildly uncomfortable, to categorically dangerous, these beautifying techniques no doubt had a daily impact on the lives of the women who used them. Peering into the portraits of eighteenth-century women, it is hard to deny their striking beauty. And yet we can only imagine the anguish and pain that this beauty must have caused them, lying just beneath their painted façade of serenity.

_{Matthew Darly, ‘The City Rout’, 1776 [British Museum]
Satire of two aged, unattractive women as ‘mutton dressed lamb’.}

Surprisingly, the dangers of lead and mercury were recognised even before the eighteenth century. As early as 1598 Doctor Fierovant claimed that women who applied these poisonous cosmetics “to grow more beautiful, become disfigured, hastening olde age before the time” with “black teeth … an offensive breath, with a face half scorched, and an uncleane complexion”. The horrific realities of lead and mercury poisoning are now ever clearer to modern medicine: neurological failure, blindness, breathing difficulties, mood disorders, miscarriages and hallucinations, to name but a few. Georgian women were permanently disfigured, or ultimately perished, in their battle for beauty. Kitty Fisher, a courtesan widely celebrated for her beauty, is one of many who reportedly died as a result of the toxic cosmetics she often donned. Yet, despite the notorious dangers, elite women continued to be drawn in by the addictive allure of cosmetics. Horace Walpole, like many of his contemporaries, feared the woman’s deadly fascination with “white lead, of which nothing could break her”. Only death. Many also proclaimed the immoral implications of artificial beauty. Face painting was linked to sexual promiscuity, self-indulgence, vanity, and deceit. In turn, ridiculing satires of ‘mutton dressed lamb’, ‘the world turn’d upside down’, and the absurdities of cosmetics lined the pages of periodicals and plastered the windows of print shops.

_{Kitty Fisher, oil on canvas, Nathaniel Hone, 1765}
_{[National Portrait Gallery, London]}

So, what drove elite Georgian women to ignore the social admonishments and lethal perils of cosmetics, and ultimately sacrifice their health and life for beauty? Despite the common misconception (or possibly even blatant condescension) of eighteenth-century critics and modern historians alike, this endeavour for beauty was clearly not attempted in vain – or in fact, solely for vanity’s sake. Appearance defined one’s identity: communicating wealth, rank, morality, marital status (or sexual availability), and temperament. As an “invisible standard” of pedigree and civility, to don the correct exterior was to ultimately claim and maintain social status. For elite women, beauty and power became inextricable. In a world of political patriarchy, physical beauty became a formidable weapon, and cosmetics acted as its ammunition. For Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, beauty was instrumental in her political authority. For Kitty Fisher and Maria Gunning (later Countess of Coventry), beauty brought them wealth, fame, and the independence that followed – but it also brought them death. Historians suggest that the fatal illnesses of both Kitty Fisher and Maria Gunning share a striking resemblance to the symptoms of lead poisoning, and when considering the prominent use of lead-based ceruse within their respective roles as courtesan and actress, it is highly likely that these toxic cosmetics were the cause of their deaths. Women sought beauty not only for beauty’s sake, but for the social inclusion and influence it afforded them. Yet, just as surely as beauty brought popularity, prestige, and power, pain, sickness, and disfigurement invariably followed. This was evidently a sacrifice many eighteenth-century ladies were willing to make. Ultimately, to argue that insanity or simple vanity drove women to such lethal ends of beauty, would be to entirely disregard the agency, admiration, and clout they fought so hard to attain. So, if you did happen to find yourself in the shoes of the Georgian lady, would that be a sacrifice you’d be willing to make?

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

What Do We Do with the Inglorious Dead? Remembrance and the British Dead of the Irish War of Independence by Edward Madigan

November 5, 2020March 23, 2021 Madigan771 Comment

This month sees the centenary of the interment of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey. This auspicious event took place on the second-ever Armistice Day, and was, by all accounts, one of the great public spectacles in modern British history. Vast crowds of people, numbering in their hundreds of thousands, lined the route and stood in silence as the gun carriage carrying the unidentified serviceman wound its way through the ancient London streets. Many of those watching the procession had lost loved ones during the Great War and for them, and millions of others across Britain and the wider empire, the Warrior represented lost sons, brothers, husbands and comrades. Shortly before arriving at the Abbey, the cortège paused in Whitehall so that George V could unveil the newly permanent Cenotaph, a simple but towering memorial to the absent dead designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. The laying to rest of one of the fallen among kings and princes in the great parish church of the empire seemed to confer profound meaning on the war. It also supported the consoling idea that the dead had given their lives in defence of honour, freedom and civilisation. For the millions still in mourning across the United Kingdom, it was reassuring to believe that the war had been worth fighting and worth winning and that their lost loved ones had not died in vain. This point was very clearly reinforced by the blunt, three-word inscription on the side of the Cenotaph, ‘The Glorious Dead’. The dead had been honourable, self-sacrificing and chivalrous, while their main battlefield adversaries – the Germans – had been ruthless, malevolent and wantonly destructive.

_{The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Westminster Abbey, 2017}

Popular attitudes regarding the meaning of the conflict have shifted a great deal since the 1920s, but our perception of those who died hasn’t really changed much at all and remains quite simplistic. In common with a lot of historians of the Great War, public and otherwise, I had hoped that the recent centenaries might lead to a popular re-imagining and re-appraisal of the conflict, but I don’t think in Britain we arrived at any particularly fresh critical understanding. One key reason for this was the persistent focus on the dead at the expense of other groups who were affected by the terrible violence of the war. Servicemen who survived combat but were psychologically traumatised or physically disabled, or both, received very little attention in commemorative ceremonies, centenary-related projects, or media representations of the war. Perhaps most glaringly, the bereaved themselves, with some notable exceptions, were written out of the commemorative narrative during the centenaries. On a more positive note, there was a good deal of new focus on the racial, ethnic and religious diversity of the men who served in the British forces during the war. David Olusoga’s fascinating book, The World’s War, published just as the centenaries began in August 2014, highlighted the degree to which the engine of war drew in millions of people from across Africa and Asia. South Asian soldiers received particular attention, with no fewer than four books on the Indian experience of the war published in 2018 alone. And just last year, Labour MP David Lammy presented a moving Channel Four documentary that exposed the way in which black soldiers and auxiliaries who died while serving with the British forces in Africa were consciously treated differently to their white ‘comrades’. These projects have introduced new characters to the public story of the ‘war to end all wars’ and greatly enriched our understanding of this devastating clash of empires. And yet these formerly forgotten groups of soldiers are now remembered and represented in much the same way as the servicemen of the Great War have always been remembered: either as victims to be pitied or heroes to be admired for their endurance and self-sacrifice. This rather two-dimensional ‘heroic victim’ view of the dead is complicated by the stories of the British veterans of the Great War who fought and died in Ireland in 1920 and 1921. These men continue to be almost entirely overlooked in British popular memory, but their experiences challenge the conventional narrative of the war dead and shed light on the human complexity of those honoured in Britain each November.

The cycle of violence known as the Irish War of Independence began on 21 January 1919 when Sinn Féin’s secessionist parliament met in Dublin for the first time and republican volunteers killed two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Tipperary. The conflict escalated into a full-scale guerrilla war in the spring of the following year when paramilitary forces were deployed from Britain to reinforce the now seriously demoralised RIC and respond to the Irish Republican Army’s increasingly aggressive military campaign. These irregulars initially wore a mix of dark green Irish constabulary and khaki army uniforms and became known as the Black and Tans. About 10,000 of them were recruited between January of 1920 and the end of the war the following summer. A further escalation occurred in July 1920 with the deployment of a force known as the Auxiliary Division, which ultimately numbered some 5,000 men. The Auxiliaries were exclusively composed of ex-officers who operated in highly-mobile and heavily-armed units and wore distinctive Tam O’Shanter caps in the style of Scottish regiments of the British Army. In addition to these two paramilitary groups, the British campaign drew on units of the regular army, which were increasingly used in operations (and targeted by the IRA) in the last year of the conflict. The violence of the war intensified after the introduction of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act in August 1920; by the beginning of the following month, dozens of combatants and civilians were being killed each week as both the IRA and Crown forces stepped up their operations across the island.

^{Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and Chief Secretary, Thomas Hamar Greenwood, inspect temporary cadets of the Auxiliary Division in the grounds of the Foreign Office, London, 5 November 1920 (Irish Times)}

Although there were Irishmen in both the Black and Tans and the Auxiliary Division, the great majority of those who served in these paramilitary formations were British, hailing mostly from England and Scotland. Importantly, in the context of British commemorative culture, virtually all of them were veterans of the Great War and many had served with distinction on the Western Front and elsewhere. Most of the regular army personnel stationed in Ireland during the war were also British, often serving in distinctively English or Scottish regiments, and many of these regulars had seen extensive active service between 1914 and 1918. Just under 200 British army officers and other ranks were killed by the IRA in 1920 and 1921. A further 180 British-born members of the paramilitary police forces were killed by republicans during the same period. Virtually all of the latter were veterans of the world war and they often had distinguished records of service. The men who served in the Auxiliary Division alone had received over 633 awards for gallantry during the Great War, including three Victoria Crosses. Many of them, then, would have easily conformed to the popular vision of the war hero by the standards of the time, and indeed by the standards of our own time.

The men killed in a particularly violent episode that took place a century ago this month highlight the direct connection between the Great War and post-war paramilitary violence in Ireland. On the morning of Sunday 21 November 1920, IRA gunmen shot dead 14 officers and ex-officers, and one civilian landlord, in boarding houses and hotels in different parts of central Dublin. Most of the dead men had been serving in some capacity with the Crown forces, but although they had been targeted as spies, only about half were working for British intelligence. All but one of the thirteen former or serving officers killed on the day had been deployed overseas during the world war and several bore obvious scars or disabilities sustained while on active service. One of them, Capt. Leonard Price, the London-born son of a stockbroker, was twice mentioned in dispatches and awarded the Military Cross for gallantry under fire while serving on the Western Front before being posted to Dublin for intelligence work in June 1920. In response to the killings of Price and his comrades, members of the Auxiliary Division and the RIC descended on a Gaelic football match being played at Croke Park in north Dublin that afternoon. They began firing on the crowd, ultimately shooting about sixty unarmed civilians, fourteen of whom were killed or mortally wounded, including Mick Hogan, a Tipperary player after whom the Hogan Stand is named. At some stage later in the day, two senior IRA officers and a civilian were summarily executed while in custody at Dublin Castle. The killings at Croke Park naturally evoked outrage among the nationalist population in Ireland while the assassinations of serving officers, some of whom were still wearing their pyjamas when they were shot, caused an outcry across the water in Britain. On 26 November, just two weeks after the Unknown Warrior had been solemnly laid to rest, there was another major military funeral procession in London for nine of the officers shot in Dublin. Six of the dead were carried to Westminster Abbey, while the other three, being Catholic, were taken a short distance further to Westminster Cathedral. Price and his dead comrades were lauded in the press for their gallantry and distinguished service while their killers in the IRA were denounced as the ‘Murder Gang’.

^{Tribute to officers killed on Bloody Sunday in the Illustrated London News (ILN Archive)}

And yet although the killings of the officers on the morning of Bloody Sunday aroused widespread sympathy, much of the British commentary on the conduct of the forces of the Crown from the autumn of 1920 onward was deeply critical. A good deal of this criticism, which was mostly aired in the press and in the course of parliamentary debates, focused on the Crown Forces’ now open policy of ‘reprisals’ for IRA operations. Two months before Bloody Sunday, on the night of 21 September 1920, for example, a group of Auxiliaries and Black and Tans killed two unarmed civilians, set fire to numerous homes and wrecked a local creamery and hosiery factory at Balbriggan in north county Dublin. The ‘sack of Balbriggan’ was by no means the first or the worst incident of British paramilitaries killing unarmed civilians during the war, but it evoked a particularly negative popular reaction in Britain. Prominent journalists, clergymen and politicians, representing a curiously diverse variety of political opinion, condemned the events at Balbriggan and the men who had committed them in the strongest terms, and condemnation of British military policy continued over the following months. Importantly, both The Times and The Manchester Guardian made direct comparisons between the actions of the Crown forces in Ireland and those of German soldiers in Belgium and France in 1914. Former prime minister and Liberal MP Herbert Asquith echoed this view in the Commons, as did the Labour MP and former party leader, Arthur Henderson. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, a pillar of the British establishment and a major figure in the House of Lords, was also notably outspoken in his condemnation of the policy of reprisals.

^{Mixed group of Black and Tans and Auxiliaries outside the London and North Western Hotel in Dublin after an unsuccessful IRA attack, April 1921 (National Library of Ireland)}

The Dead of the Irish Revolution, a ground-breaking new book by Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, provides details on over 2,800 combatant and civilian deaths related to the struggle for independence in Ireland between the Easter Rising in April 1916 and the truce that ended hostilities in July 1921. The painstaking research the authors have carried out sheds new and often sobering light on the nature and extent of the violence that took place in Ireland both during and after the world war. Importantly, it highlights not only the intensity of republican violence, about which a great deal is already known, but also the sheer extent of the killing and destruction of property perpetrated by the forces of the British state. It seems clear, as O’Halpin observes in the introduction, that from early 1920 ‘the British government embarked on a policy of indiscriminate brutalisation of nationalist Ireland’. That process of brutalisation was spear-headed by British veterans of the Great War who had often served gallantly on the Western Front and elsewhere.

That such violence and intimidation – unleashed within the United Kingdom and in the name of the Crown – caused alarm in Britain should not surprise us. The criticism of the conduct of the Crown forces voiced by British commentators in 1920 and 1921 was directly informed by the strong sense that the recently-ended world war had been a righteous conflict in which the British had engaged in a moral crusade against the German enemy. The killing of thousands of unarmed civilians by invading German soldiers in Belgium and northern-France in 1914 greatly enhanced the British case for war in the minds of popular commentators and ordinary civilians. When British civilians fell victim to German military aggression in the U-boat campaigns and airship raids that began in 1915 and continued for the rest of the war, this crusading fervour was further reinforced. Ultimately, over three-quarters of a million British and Irish servicemen lost their lives in the conflict, but the bereaved found comfort in the notion that these extraordinary sacrifices had been redeemed by victory in a just war. The violence wreaked on the civilian population by British paramilitaries and regulars in Ireland in the years after the Armistice caused such discomfort in Britain partly because it undermined that consoling narrative. In an impassioned intervention during a debate on reprisals in the Commons in October 1920, Joseph Kenworthy, naval officer, war veteran and Liberal MP had the following to say:

In Germany the excesses in Belgium were excused in the Reichstag by stories of the Belgians firing from their houses on the brave German troops … The same defence is being made by the Government today for this system of burnings in Ireland. If we do not condemn it, we shall be as guilty as the German people, and worse. This House may not condemn it, but I hope the people outside will. If not, then Germany will have won the War. The Prussian spirit will have entered into us. The Prussian spirit at last will be triumphant, and the 800,000, the flower of our race, who lie buried in a score of battle-fronts will really have died in vain … and Germany has won and we have lost. That is the tragic, wicked part of it.
Hansard, Commons Debates, 20 October 1920, col. 962.

Those who fell in the Ypres Salient, the Somme valley and the other hallowed battlegrounds of the Great War are revered in British culture. Their stories are still told, their graves still visited, and the conflict in which they were killed remains the focus of intense popular interest. The Irish War of Independence, by contrast, has no place in British popular culture and its dead are not remembered. In a sense, this is perfectly understandable; the vast multitude who died between 1914 and 1918 are certainly more sympathetic than the few hundred who were later killed in a sordid fight to suppress a popular independence movement. Yet these men’s experiences in Ireland and the campaign they conducted there remind us of the valuable truths that our ancestors were rarely two-dimensional heroes or villains and that soldiers are invariably both perpetrators as well as victims of violence. Traditional commemorative culture doesn’t allow us to acknowledge such complexities but considering them may help us better understand the generation of the First World War.

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

‘Black Lives’ under the Raj by Sarah Ansari

July 26, 2020July 26, 2020 Madigan77Leave a comment

The 2020 Black Lives Matter movement is rightly reinforcing the urgency of acknowledging in concrete and accurate ways the historical voices and experiences of Black people. That it is taking place against the backdrop of an effervescence in identity politics more generally also underlines the complex ways in which people see and label themselves in contemporary Britain. One of the current criticisms of the umbrella terms ‘BAME’/’BME’, for instance, is that these do not convey sufficiently clearly the spectrum of ethnic and other identities supposedly encompassed by them. What follows here, therefore, is not intended to suggest that people of African and South Asian heritage have had 100% identical past experiences, but simply to remind ourselves that, in the days of the British Raj, Indians could often be marginalised and oppressed as ‘black’. On the one hand, as historians, awareness of diversity is always important; on the other hand, so is the need to challenge ‘divide and rule’ narratives.

The whole business of ‘divide and rule’ (following hot on the heels of its close relation ‘divide and conquer’) is, of course, closely associated with the British Empire, and methods deployed there to limit and deflect the resistance of people subjected to imperial control. Such divisive tactics can be blamed for generating political responses that led – in due course, though never inevitably – to the creation of a separate state for Indian Muslims when South Asia secured its freedom in 1947. By officially sanctioning what were packaged as the ‘separate’ needs of Indian Muslims, British policy directly encouraged political separatism. In this case, the divisions nurtured and exacerbated by imperial policy-making were premised on religious difference, and they eventually helped produce Partition in August 1947: an event marked by enormous human suffering, around a million deaths, and something like 14-16 million displaced people moving between the two new states of India and Pakistan.

A tea party in Calcutta, 1890 — Colonists and servants at a tea party in Calcutta, 1890 (British Library)

But back to ‘blackness’ under the Raj. Racial identity (albeit infused with the added complication of class) was always a sticky issue for imperialists, with ‘whiteness’ intimately associated with the ‘running of empire’. Contact between the rulers and the ruled was kept as minimal as possible: for instance, clubs – the social hubs of empire – with few exceptions held Indians at bay for as long as they could. Anyone who has ever read a nostalgic book or watched a nostalgia-tinged film about the Raj, for instance, is likely to have come across the institution of the ‘cantonment’. Originally associated first and foremost with the military, these garrisons often mutated into the ‘separate’ locality within a town or city where the British resided, worked and played, usually with as much physical and psychological distance as possible put between themselves and Indians (other than the legions of local servants they employed). This was not just about creating hypothetical ‘safe cultural spaces’ for themselves. In British-controlled South Asia skin colour was always highly politicised, with the ‘blackness’ of local people contrasted against the ‘whiteness’ of the British and their world.

Map of Madras c. 1710, featuring ‘White Town’ and ‘Black Town’

Look at Presidency port-cities such as Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata), two of the earliest commercial bridgeheads through which British interests established themselves in the subcontinent from the seventeenth century onwards. Both for many years contained so-called ‘black towns’, areas in which local people lived and worked, and where British people rarely lingered for long. In the case of Madras, as a British Library webpage tells us:

‘Black Town was originally the old native quarter and grew up outside the
walls of Fort St George to the north on the seafront. … As Madras grew,
Black Town became the commercial centre of the city and developed a very
high population density. … Its name was officially changed to George Town
after a visit by the Prince of Wales in 1906.’

Calcutta, too, in its early colonial heyday was divided into two main districts – White Town, which was where the British resided and conducted their business, and Black Town, where local Bengalis were to be found. Kolkata today offers a ‘Blacktown walk’, which takes visitors on a guided tour of the old-world ‘heritage’ dwellings that make up this historic part of the city. In a similar fashion, Karachi, with its increasingly cosmopolitan population, came in the second half of the nineteenth century to be ‘demarcated’ along colour lines too, with Saddar Bazaar and Empress Market frequented by the ‘white’ population, and the Serai Quarter serving the needs of the ‘black’ town.

‘Blackness’ was thus intrinsic to how the British and other Europeans viewed Indians, but it was also part and parcel of the derogatory ways in which they frequently described ‘the natives’. People with a mixed European-Indian ancestry (nowadays called ‘Anglo-Indians’) were also troubling, since their very existence embodied ‘racial’ mixing, and, as in the United States and South Africa, those among them who could pass as ‘white’ frequently did their best to do so.

More controversial still for us today was the use of the ‘N-word’ to describe Indians under the Raj. As Sam Fortescue has highlighted, in his exploration of material written by British men and women during or soon after the so-called Mutiny of 1857-8, this deeply racist term was bandied about by contemporaries. Take William Russell, the London Times special correspondent, who was sent out to India in early 1858 to report on the Uprising, and who provided many vignettes of the British whom he encountered, satirical no doubt but all the same indicative of perceived realities:

”By Jove! sir,” exclaims the Major, who has by this time got to the walnut
stage of the argument, to which he has arrived by gradations of sherry,
port, ale, and Madeira, – “By Jove,” he exclaims, thickly and fiercely, with
every vein in his forehead swol’n like whipcord, “these n*****s are such a
confounded sensual lazy set, cramming themselves with ghee and sweetmeats,
and smoking their cursed chillumjees all day and all night, that you might
as well think to train pigs. Ho, you! Punkah chordo, or I’ll knock –
Suppose we go up and have a cigar!”

Moreover, as Fortescue goes on to explain:

Atkinson’s famous satire of ‘Our Station’ hinted at a more serious, endemic
double standard in the British. Take, for instance, his sketch of ‘Our
Judge’: ‘There you see him in his court – n*****s – ten thousand pardons!
no, not n*****s, I mean natives – sons of the soil – Orientals – Asiatics,
are his source of happiness.’ The implication is, that in spite of British
evangelism and Utilitarian rhetoric, and notwithstanding Government’s heavy
reliance on servants, native soldiery and pundits, officials tended to feel
that at heart, they ruled a land of ‘n*****s.’

British rule in South Asia, as elsewhere in the world, thus always hinged on the deployment of crude stereotypes, ethnic or otherwise, from the ‘salt-of-the-earth’ ‘martial races’ associated with the plains and mountains of the North-west, to the ‘too-clever-by-half’, inherently untrustworthy Bengali ‘baboo’. Indeed, according to 1890s Daily Mail journalist G. W. Steevens, whereas an Englishman possessed a straight leg, the Bengali’s was unquestionably that of a slave: “Except by grace of his natural masters”, Steevens duly asserted, “a slave he has always been and always must be”.

So whether Indians were “half-naked fakirs” (Winston Churchill’s insulting description of MK Gandhi in 1931) or loyal soldiers volunteering in enormous numbers on behalf of British interests in both world wars, the fact remains that – under the Raj – Indians could very often end up being labelled as ‘black’, with all the exceedingly negative connotations that such categorisations implied at that time.

Sarah Ansari is Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely on the history of South Asia and is currently writing a history of Pakistan for Cambridge University Press.

Facing Abe Lincoln: On Black History and Public History by Daisha Brabham

July 14, 2020July 14, 2020 Madigan77Leave a comment

When I was about 10 or 11, I was fascinated with the American Civil War. Indeed, I once begged my mother to buy me a fifteen-hour documentary about the battles and generals. She was convinced that I would not watch the entire thing but nonetheless relented. And I did. History had been a passion of mine from an early age, but I can attribute this indelible fascination with the Civil War to my history teacher, Mr. T. He performed in military re-enactments and had even at one time re-enacted the Battle of Gettysburg. The battles were a consistent theme in the classroom as we examined the various uniforms, the generals, and political leaders. I particularly liked learning about Abraham Lincoln to the point that I memorized the ‘Gettysburg Address’ and watched countless documentaries on him. The Great Emancipator who had defied the odds and saved the nation represented a thread between myself and my country. In a childlike fashion, I liked Lincoln, because he would have ‘liked me’, which made him stand out among the figures we studied. In Lincoln’s eyes, I was an American; the war he had led to free my ancestors proved that for me. So, in his eyes, I was whole.

My love for Abraham Lincoln resurfaced as I happened upon some of my old DVDs at 22. I began to research the Lincoln I had met in my seventh-grade classroom using the skills that I had since acquired as a historian To my horror, though, I discovered the real Lincoln; the Lincoln who believed in separatism; the Lincoln who would have preferred that my ancestors return to Africa, leaving the county to mend in our absence. Ultimately, Lincoln began to resemble the rest of the characters in the story of the Civil War. In the words of Fredrick Douglass, ‘In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man’. It was only then that I began to revisit my childhood memories and realize a terrifying fact. The one aspect missing from Mr. T’s and my own vision of the American past: slaves. I still cannot remember a single lesson on slavery. It seems we both ignored that part, but for distinct reasons. I had overlooked this distortion of the past in the same way I had I ignored the fact that Mr. T had once told me ‘I was one of the good ones’ compared to my black and brown classmates. It was easier to disregard those moments than to confront them. I simply cannot describe the gut-wrenching feeling I felt as that childlike thread that had once sewn me securely to the fabric of my country was severed. I cried like a child for the loss of belonging that had grounded me.

Douglass-Lincoln Mural (1943) — Mural on Recorder of Deeds Building, Washington DC, depicting Frederick Douglass meeting Abraham Lincoln, painted by William Edouard Scott, 1943

My first reaction to this revelation was to shed all materiality of an American heritage to which I was no longer tethered. I began to identify as an African, abandoning that hyphen that never truly fit. I at once felt whole embracing a new, more authentic history. I turned my focus to the Black Diaspora and its unique past and wrote and produced an entire play to immerse myself and others in the stories that I had never learned about in school. In many ways, my experience of dealing with the past mirrors the major shifts now occurring in America and across the Western world. The resurfacing debate about race has resulted in commercial brands, sports teams, and even States trying to distance themselves from their sordid history. While some have dubbed these shifts corporate activism, the sentiment is a common reaction to dealing with a problematic history. We believe that if we can all at once shed the physical ties of the history in which our narrative has been unsettled, we can rectify a past that has left so many broken. This process of unlearning or confronting a wretched past is by no means unique to the United States, as European countries try to burn some of the uncomfortable iconography of their own histories. As statues across the West are defaced and hurled into the sea, there seems to be a widespread desire to divest ourselves from what were once considered the good old days.

This process of severance worked for me until I arrived in the UK in 2019 to pursue an MA in public history. In this new world, I was American, and my history was a valued asset in discussing race. During my time in England, I was struck by how much African American history was referenced. Our history was discussed in my courses through the slave narratives and the role of slavery in shaping American culture. Our figures were highlighted in the curriculum for secondary school students. About mid-way through my time in England, I began recognising a similar method of elision to the one to which I had been exposed at school, and I realised that outside of America, our history has often been used to discuss race from a comfortable distance. It is far easier to discuss the KKK South or the white backlash against the African American Civil Rights movement than to address the financial investments of the slave traders or the ribbon-tied racism that is still prevalent in the Europe. My narrative supplies a comfortable distance to discuss race without confronting the pervasive structures that continue to marginalize the black community in the UK. In conversations with my black and brown British friends and through my work with the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, the results of this method of dealing with the past seem very similar to those I had experienced. For the first time in over five years, my closest friend Alex and I had a conversation about how dominant my African American narrative had been for him as a London boy, a dominance that meant he could never truly feel whole and a part of his country. His narrative could never be properly explored if ‘Black history’ was so inextricably linked to ‘African American history’. His past was in a sense erased by mine. History has a cost.

DB at NMAAHC — Daisha Brabham at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC

But what does this journey through various approaches to the past provide in the way of instruction for the public historian? Can we genuinely help in the current process of dealing with the past? Or are we solely fire starters who cause havoc and leave our public to grapple with flames? If the traditional approaches to uncomfortable pasts that I and others encountered at school have no substance, then what innovative approaches should we employ? To these questions, I can supply no concrete answers concerning the way forward. Many of the issues I am raising are not new or even unique to the profession. It often seems, however, that many of my colleagues feel no particular duty to contemplate them. What I do know is that none of us are free from or above the debate. There is no history that has no power. There is no aspect of our field that should remain untouched by this conversation.

So, where do we go from here? In the words Edward Baptist, the first place to start will be in asking the right questions and imagining a new way of doing and telling history. It is my belief that much of this work should focus on the classroom, an area often neglected by historians. If Mr. T had been armed with the proper educational tools, would we have covered slavery and not just the uniforms? If Alex could have learned about OWAAD in his secondary school, would he feel whole? Decolonisation must be a verb. It is a process of tearing down, but also a process of repositioning what we once thought was fixed and settled.

The murder of George Floyd was familiar. I opened the video reluctantly because I had seen it before. I had seen it when Tamir Rice was gunned down for having a toy gun. I had seen it when Freddy Gray was killed. I had felt it when 7-year-old Aiyanna Jones was shot for sleeping on her grandmother’s couch. I needed no reminders of what it means to be black in America, especially amid a pandemic in which my demographic had been disproportionately affected. I needed no rendition of the cost of my skin. But I still cried. I still thought of the reality of what it feels like. This was the America from which Mr. T, and I were running; the result of a tumultuous past, that left victims in its wake.

DB & Lincoln — Daisha Brabham contemplates the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC

When I think about my revelation about Lincoln, it was at that moment that I had finally reached adulthood, at least in a historical sense. I had finally faced the reality of my past. Against the backdrop of a nation on fire, it is still unclear if my country has, less to act on that revelation. But this work is inevitable, whether it is carried out peacefully or in turmoil. A couple of months after my discovery of the real Lincoln, I went down to Washington DC to take in the new African American History Museum constructed to remind the public of the impact of the African American past. The museum is massive, with over four centuries worth of history and culture within its walls. A visit can easily last a day, if not more. It stands as a physical reminder that African Americans have always been tethered to the fabric of the country. We have always been present. It is the legacy my ancestors fought for. But it is also offers method through which we can refocus our lens to see a different narrative. A different America. The retelling of the past.

After touring through the galleries, I made my way down to the Lincoln Memorial. I stood under the great statue of the man, rather than the myth of my childhood. I stared at him for a long while, taking in the weight of his existence and the hundreds of people who had come to visit him that day. The Great Emancipator. Eventually, I smiled and whispered, “It is great to finally meet you Mr. Lincoln.”

Daisha Brabham is a former teacher from New Haven, Connecticut, currently enrolled on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Justin Champion, Historian (1960 – 2020) by Graham Smith

June 16, 2020January 27, 2021 Madigan77Leave a comment

What we need is radical social change that redistributes the wealth of the very few to the many, and that will change life. We are inheriting, at the moment, the consequences of a long form of decolonisation. The British Isles, throughout the 18th and 19th, and most of the 20th century, colonised the world, raped it in one sense, and we are now confronted with the consequences of that. (Justin Champion, ‘The Big Questions, BBC1, 12 June 2016; 22.16-22:40).

Justin Champion was a consummate scholar, producing works that offered new ways of seeing the early modern world that were based on novel approaches to reading the past. In his writings, many of which he made open access, he broke new ground in the study of early modern radical thought. His debt to Christopher Hill was obvious and acknowledged. In his 2018 memorial lecture he restated the long tradition of civil rights struggle in England, countering revisionist criticisms of Hill by pointing out that he had pioneered a new way of looking at neglected materials that, in turn, had opened new possibilities for further research into radical discourse and action. Indeed, in Justin’s work, Hill’s project is followed so that space can be found for the voices of the marginalised and for their language of dissent to be heard. This was a part of the golden thread of liberty that Justin grew ever fonder of talking about. It was also why he became a valued ally of oral history and a proponent of public history.

There are multiple versions of the Hill lecture. There is a published version, ‘Heaven Taken By Storm’, which is a fantastic read, but it is the earlier spoken presentation that I like best. Justin’s lecturing style, with its autobiographical asides and occasional self-deprecation, points to his belief in communicating complex histories with a sense of humility and fun. It is also testament to his conviction that the historian’s life experience influences their methods and their understanding of the past. Conversely, it was people’s lives in the past that sparked his curiosity. His radio programmes included biographies of well-known historical figures such as Francis Bacon, but also less recognised individuals, such as Jacques Francis. It was this interest in Francis and Southampton, where he went to school, that led to his interest in black history.

There will be still other varieties of the Hill lecture recalled by colleagues and friends, as he regularly tried out how he might express his thoughts by casually dropping nuggets of weighty historical analysis into everyday conversations. Indeed, there must be hundreds of people who have fragments of Justin’s developing radio, television, and lecture ideas lodged in their memories. His radical networks were not only social networks that existed in the history he studied, but also were part of his everyday social relationships.

The public reception of the past was of key importance to Justin. He proselytised against academic insularity and for university engagement as a public utility. As far as he was concerned, people’s deep passion for the past was an opportunity for historians to help enhance and improve contemporary debate. He often found ways to gently chide those historians who thought that the past was too foreign a land for the masses. This was the view of a man whose father had found his way to study at Cambridge through the Workers’ Educational Association. Good history, for Justin, explained prejudice and inequality; it was critical and provoked debate. This passion for public history led him to fight for the founding of a pioneering MA in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London, the institution at which he was based for most of his career. The MA was ultimately launched in 2009 and is currently the most well-established programme of its kind in the UK. Justin’s collegiality and the warm-friendship he enjoyed with the editors of the site also led him to make numerous highly engaging contributions to Historians for History.

Justin in RHUL 2 — Justin Champion discussing Black History Month, Founders Buildings, Royal Holloway, 2017

His search for historical truth was an inherently aesthetic and ethical project and Justin’s public history was as much a moral as an intellectual venture. History mattered, he told his peers in 2007, because it has the capacity to produce better human beings. History could help the public deal with the difficult and the unknown, and quoting Hugh Trevor Roper from five decades earlier: ‘History that isn’t controversial is dead history’. His art of history was not only to be found in uncovering past lives but in conveying their historical significance. He rejected empiricism and objectivity, yet he loved his numbers, not only in his earlier work on ‘epidemics and the built environment in 1665’, but in later years, when he could quote visitor numbers to heritage sites in support of his argument for a citizens’ history.

He could also note in passing in an article about history on television that in A History of Britain (BBC, 2000), Simon Schama had spoken 300 times directly to camera. Justin’s ability as a public intellectual was based on studying the limitations and opportunities of different media and how others presented historical concepts through them. He was interviewed for many programmes, and appeared in at least seven television mini-series and documentaries from Fire, Plague, War and Treason (2001) to Charles I: Downfall of a King, which aired just last year. He loved making television programmes and would enthuse on the craft of production and revel in reaching new audiences. He enthused about television as a ‘platform for communicating its learning and moral integrity in an energized and enthusiastic public sphere’.

He was engaging on television, but he truly excelled on radio in explorations of complex historical ideas. A regular on In Our Time, the BBC Radio 4 flagship programme presented by Melvyn Bragg, he contributed to episodes on miracles, Calvinism, the trial of Charles I, the apocalypse, divine right, Bedlam, The Putney Debates, and the Quakers. There were other programmes on duelling, and toleration and a programme on the history of reading, based on marginalia and the defacing of books. He reviewed for Nightwaves and commented on various historical issues for the Today Programme and Radio 5 Live.

He also took his own responsibilities as a citizen historian seriously. As the President of the Historical Association from 2014 to 2017, he used his position to highlight the lack of black historians working in schools and universities. In response to being awarded the Association’s Medlicott Medal in 2018, he offered a hugely insightful lecture on ‘Defacing the Past or Resisting Oppression?’ in which he described the alterations and removals of statues and public art depicting controversial historical figures and actions.

He spent his final years dealing with cancer: ‘It is a bit annoying to say the least’, he noted in a memorable interview for Royal Holloway’s college radio, explaining, ‘that is the reason I’ve taken early retirement, and that’s a big loss for me. Not so much the routines of academic life, but the opportunity to distort and corrupt young minds is one, you know, you could never get tired of that’, he said, making one of his favourite jokes. ‘And the moments of revelation when someone gets it and goes on to have their own career is just fantastic’. He had an infectious love of teaching and a deep respect for students’ perspectives. While understanding the validation we receive from our teaching, he asked his colleagues to think beyond themselves. Passing a room where he was holding a class lightened the darkest of moods, such was the noise of laughter and discussion. He would frequently regale colleagues with insightful points students had made in class or tell of how they had responded to one of his teaching exercises. He wanted to learn from his students and was genuinely interested in their thinking, and the response to Justin’s death on social media has demonstrated the affection he was held in by former students as well as colleagues.

Listening to his voice again has made me deeply sad at his loss, but personally and profoundly grateful that we spent time together in long discussions that ranged from memories of music and politics, to food and sport, to College governance and union business. Listening to his voice reminded me that he excelled as a storyteller. He was so much more than a partial obituary can cover. The love for his daughter Alice and his partner Sylvia. The pride he took from managing Abbey Rangers Football Club Ladies team, a resilient and robust football team that was a personal passion for him. The loyalty to his friends, even when they did something stupid. If Justin had been asked if he had a role model, he might have said Joe Strummer or Stormzy, rather than an eminent historian, and we are greatly diminished by the loss of his cool rage against the ‘filth’, as he described it, of racism, inequality and inhumanity.

Graham Smith is Professor of Oral History at the University of Newcastle and co-editor of the Historians for History site.

‘No Votes, Thank You!’ The women who campaigned against their own suffrage by Chloe Binderup

May 26, 2020March 12, 2021 Madigan77Leave a comment

“We’d like to invite you to sign our petition regarding the question of women’s suffrage. Nearly three hundred thousand others have already signed their support; we do hope you’ll join us.”

It’s 1909 and three well-dressed women approach after your latest London lecture. As you’re handed a page already filled with scrawled signatures, your eye catches on the headline at the top of the petition, printed in bold block letters: WOMEN’S NATIONAL ANTI-SUFFRAGE LEAGUE.

Hang on a second – women’s anti-suffrage?

No, you haven’t stumbled into an alternate historical fiction or wacky Dr. Who episode. Indeed, by 1910, this British women’s group would collect over 337,000 signatures not in support of their right to vote, but against it. Four years later, the Anti-Suffrage Review announced that membership in the British National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage (or Women’s National Anti-suffrage League, WNAL) stood at 42,000 people, and five out of six of those were women.

no votes 1 — Sticker and pin-badge of the British Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, c. 1910 – 1912

Around the turn of the 20th century, as the campaign for women’s right to vote gained momentum, large numbers of women in both Britain and the United States wrote, argued, and campaigned actively against suffrage. And this was no weak or meek opposition either, but consisted of well-organised groups and included many determined, educated and passionate middle and upper-class activists. These ladies were serious.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, just after the hundred-year anniversaries of the UK’s Representation of the People Act and United States’ 19th Amendment, it can be difficult to understand these women. Why would they work, often passionately, against their own self-interest? Wouldn’t women invariably want to support women’s rights?

In their minds, they did: those who argued most stridently against female suffrage actually presented themselves as defenders and supporters of their fellow women. Writer Violet Markham worked for social reform and societal improvement, and saw her campaign against the vote as part of this mission. In 1912 she wrote of her fellow ‘Antis’: “We do not depreciate by one jot or tittle women’s work.” It was rather a matter of encouraging “proper channels of expression for that work”.

Interestingly, similar arguments emerged on both sides of the Atlantic as the United Kingdom and the United States grappled with increasing public debate on female suffrage. Just as suffragists from either country visited one another to educate, fundraise, and support, so too did anti-suffragists gain inspiration from visiting sisters across the sea. Numerous letters from future leading Antis show that American anti-suffragism was an important influence on the founders of the WNAL. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that British and American anti-suffragist women shared the key arguments against their vote:

Women are Not Men

“We believe that men and women are different – not similar – beings, with talents that are complementary, not identical, and that they therefore ought to have different shares in the management of the State”
WNAL Manifesto

no votes 3 — Postcard depicting a very feminine personification of womanhood politely declining the vote. Behind her, a much less demure figure storms by with hammer in hand (Bird, Harold and J. Miles and Co., 1912)

To understand anti-suffragists, it’s essential to understand the rigidity of their society’s perceptions of gender, and how important they thought it was for men and women to stay in their respective lanes. As they saw it, men were in one sphere of society doing their manly things (government, industry, military, religion), and women were in another doing theirs (raising families, managing households). “Because the spheres of men and women, owing to natural causes, are essentially different”, argued the WNAL, their relationship to government should be different.

Anti-suffragist women did not necessarily believe that men were better or smarter – they just weren’t women, and this meant they naturally ought to do different things. So, if men could influence the state by voting, women could contribute in the domestic sphere.

Women are Better Than That

“It would be a bigger feather in a woman’s cap – a brighter jewel in her crown – to be the mother of George Washington than to be a member of Congress.”
Jeannette Gilder, Why I am Opposed to Women’s Suffrage

British writer Ethel Harrison viewed herself as a strong supporter of her own sex, and saw no irony in titling her 1908 book The Freedom of Women whilst arguing passionately in its pages against their vote. In her mind, women had much more important tasks than dirtying their hands with politics: they were the moral guides of the family, and so had a special role to play in guiding society and the nation. “It is in no sense because we undervalue the importance of women’s contribution to public life that we depreciate and deplore the agitation for the vote,” she wrote. Rather: “We think women can do better for themselves and the world.”

As this argument went, women’s moral and emotional strengths gave them better and stronger political influence by not voting: instead, they could effectively and appropriately influence politics as really excellent mothers who raised and married responsible voters and good politicians.

Danger! Danger!

“The admission to full political power of a number of voters debarred by nature and circumstances from the average political knowledge and experience open to men, would weaken the central governing forces of the State, and be fraught with peril to the country.” -WNAL Manifesto

Finally, it would be outright dangerous for women to have a say in state affairs. Women, the argument went, did not and should not take part in the business of government. Without experience in financial, diplomatic, industrial, or military careers, how could they tend to affairs of state? It would be dangerous for their votes to affect arenas about which they knew nothing, and make laws they could not enforce.

In hindsight, of course, votes for women seem inevitable, and historical narratives mostly focus on the heroic struggles of the triumphant suffragists against misogynist male efforts to block equality. But history continually refuses to obey the simple categorisations and reductive assumptions it is so easy to make.

Women's first vote - F. Matania — ‘Women Voters Recording their Votes for the First Time’ by former war-artist, Fortunino Matania, December 1918

The journey towards female suffrage in the US and the UK involved substantial debate, discourse, and disagreement – even violence – but was not a clear-cut battle between the sexes. Suffragists could be either men or women; so too could the anti-suffragists who opposed what they viewed as a radical and problematic idea. Certainly, they grew up and lived in a world reinforced with fixed views and beliefs, and it would be easy to dismiss these women as brainwashed pawns in an unequal, unenlightened era. But to do so belittles a huge number of passionate and intelligent women who truly believed they were supportive of, and working for, their fellow women.

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

Further Reading:
Incredible Pro-and Anti- Suffrage Memes in The Atlantic
The British Library’s Votes for Women Archive
Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain by Julia Bush

Mickey Mouse History? Disney’s America: The Theme Park that was Never Built by Tom Farrell

April 28, 2020March 12, 2021 Madigan771 Comment

With twelve parks worldwide, Disney have an empire on which the sun never sets, and the fun never stops – until now. Back in March, all Disney Parks worldwide were simultaneously closed for the first time, due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis that has impacted just about every aspect of our lives. In time, of course, their gates will reopen, and Mickey will welcome us back with open arms (or perhaps just a friendly wave if social distancing is still in force). But for one park, its gates will remain firmly closed regardless of the coronavirus pandemic, because they were never opened in the first place.

Imagine this – a Civil War re-enactment pitting brother against brother; a Native American village, soon to be razed by the encroachment of the federal government; a nineteenth-century town where slaves are auctioned off like animals amid the reverberations of the crack of the whip. Welcome to Disney’s America, the theme park that was never built!

In 1993 Disney announced plans to build a park based entirely on American history – Disney’s America. It was due to be built near the town of Haymarket, Virginia, twenty miles from Washington D.C., and was expected to draw 30,000 visitors daily who would be able to enjoy various themed areas or ‘playlands’, including a Civil War fort, an authentic family farm, and a reconstruction of Ellis Island. However, just one year later the project was dead in the water. Why did the park never materialise, and how are the central issues it highlighted relevant to public historians today?

Disney_america — Logo for proposed Disney’s America park

Sacred Soil?
Almost immediately, Disney’s America came under fire from historians who opposed the project on the basis of its proposed location. The park would have been situated four miles from the Civil War battlefield of Manassas and so many scholars mobilised against the project, forming the Protect Historic America (PHA) organisation. Drawing on Lincoln at Gettysburg, they argued that the Virginia Piedmont region was hallowed ground, and that Disney would not add, but would certainly detract. Historian David McCullough’s forecast was almost apocalyptic: ‘Once this commercial blitzkrieg comes, it will never be the same again.’ However, it seems this “Sacred Soil” argument is somewhat of a red herring. Had this been the only reason for opposition, surely another site could have been found; America is not short of vast open spaces ripe for development. Indeed, focus on the preservationist movement detracts from another, potentially more important reason the project never came to fruition – the question of who owns history?

Disney's America Site Location — The proposed site was just four miles from the Manassas National Battlefield Park

Another source of hostility was a certain intellectual arrogance that questioned Disney’s right to teach history at all, bearing in mind that the company has a long history of providing the public with romanticised representations of the past that have featured prominently in their motion pictures and theme parks. Influenced by this utopian track record, some historians were concerned that Disney would be disseminating “Mickey Mouse” history and therefore wished to gag the world’s most famous rodent before he gave any history lessons. Linda Shopes was one such censor, arguing ‘I simply do not believe such ventures can do good history.’ In fairness, there was some cause for concern. Firstly, the name Disney’s America implied the park would be a Disneyesque view of American history. Then there were the park’s nine “playlands”, suggesting that history is a toy, designed for entertainment and distraction, not a serious intellectual discipline. Fears were further fuelled when Peter Rummell, president of the Disney Design and Development Company, said Disney would not apologise for its belief that ‘the American story is profoundly positive and uplifting’.

Disney tried to address these concerns but did not help themselves. Rummell promised ‘the park will not whitewash history or ignore the blemishes’, but was soon undermined by Bob Weiss, Disney Senior Vice President, who dropped this clanger: ‘We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what is was like to be a slave …’ In his attempt to appease critics, he only managed to trivialise issues of great historical significance. One African-American journalist was moved to report that if he ever visited, ‘my main concern there will be keeping the kids away from the slave show’.

Yet, despite all these blunders, were scholars right to appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of history? As the great proto-public historian G. M. Trevelyan said, ‘if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except insofar as it educates themselves.’ Whilst opponents were right to worry about historical accuracy, Disney’s America undeniably had great potential to get people interested in the past.

Walt Disney - Disneyland Plans — Walt Disney with plans for the original Disneyland, Los Angeles, 1954

“The Greatest Pedagogue Of All”
In 1965 the American educationalist, Max Rafferty, described Walt Disney as ‘the greatest pedagogue of all’, and he had a point; Disney’s educational potential is immense. Over one billion people have passed through the gates of Disney theme parks since 1955, and historian Mike Wallace has suggested that ‘it’s possible that Walt Disney has taught people more history, in a more memorable way, than they ever learned in school’. Bearing this in mind, perhaps if historians truly want to educate the public, they should help plan Disney’s history lessons. There is some precedent for such a collaborative relationship. In 1993 Columbia history professor Eric Foner worked with Disney on The Hall of Presidents renovation, helping to transform the show from a glorification of the presidents and the Constitution, to a story of America’s constant struggle to extend democratic rights, which is still an unfinished agenda. Such partnership could also have helped ensure Disney’s America was a responsible historical medium and it was even something Disney appeared to desire. After retreating from Virginia, project chairman, John Cooke, claimed the company would be ‘reaching out to historians who have opposed us to make sure our portrayal of the American experience is responsible’.

“Join the Jamboree”
All in all, it is a shame that Disney’s America never materialised. Although we can speculate what it would have been like as an outlet for public history, we cannot actually experience it and say for certain whether it would have been a success in terms of historical education as the concept is a relatively unique one. Whilst living history attractions such as Colonial Williamsburg have demonstrated that education and entertainment are not mutually exclusive and that history can be “brought to life”, other institutions do not have the might of Disney at their disposal. With Mickey’s piggybank and the combined creative genius and technological wizardry of all the Disney imagineers (those who design and build Disney attractions), a completed Disney’s America would have been in a category of its own. Indeed, “Mickey Mouse history” or not, there is no denying the great potential the project had as an innovative approach to teaching history. Walt Disney once said that he wanted Disneyland to be a place ‘for teachers and pupils to discover greater ways of understanding and education’, and it appears Disney’s America was envisioned in the same vein. Crucially, for historians, joining the jamboree does not have to mean chanting M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E. Perhaps through collaboration the chant can change to R-E-S-P-O-N-S-I-B-L-E H-I-S-T-O-R-Y. Indeed, if we move beyond academic cynicism and achieve positive co-operation between scholars and creative partners, this attempt to bring the past into the present could become the future.

Tom Farrell is a history graduate of the University of York currently enrolled on the MA in Public History programme at Royal Holloway.

Perils from the East: Medieval Reflections on Existential Threats in a Time of Crisis by Andrew Jotischky

March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 Madigan77Leave a comment

Almost from the moment that the Covid-19 virus began to spread in Hubei province in China, public discourses about the disease have focused on its geographical origins. As it swept westward to Europe and the USA, the geographical source of the virus became widely politicised. Even when challenged publicly on this point, President Trump has insisted on referring to Covid-19 in speeches and press conferences as ‘the Chinese virus’, while the term ‘Wuhan virus’ has been adopted by members of the US administration, and the derogatory ‘Kung Flu’ has been shared on social media. To an historian interested in identity formation, this desire to label threats according to geographical profiling is nothing new. As a medievalist, I am particularly struck by contemporary congruences about perceptions of the sources of danger and pestilence. It is, of course, a fact that Covid-19 originated in China, just as the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century spread from central Asia to Europe. Yet both in the Middle Ages and today, the source of disease as ‘eastern’ played into fears about existential threats posed by ‘the east’ less as specific geography than as dangerous ‘other’.

Chinatown Protest - anti-racist — Protesters in San Francisco’s Chinatown last month calling for an end to anti-Chinese sentiment arising from advent of Covid-19 virus (Time)

It did not take the spread of a disease to bring these ideas to the fore in the Middle Ages. In the mid-eleventh century the monastic chronicler Ralph Glaber described a famine ‘that ravaged the whole earth.’ This famine, he declared, ‘began in the east, and after devastating Greece passed to Italy and thence to Gaul and the whole English people.’ Famine, to Ralph, had a pathology in the same way as disease: not only did it require a geographical point of origin, but that point was ‘the east.’

guibert-presenting-book-450x506 — Image from Guibert of Nogent’s commentaries on Hosea, Amos and Lamentations depicting Guibert himself clothed in black offering his book to Christ.

One of the contemporary chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095-9), the French monk Guibert of Nogent, began his account with a reflection on the dangers posed by the east. The east, to Guibert, was an amorphous region that gave rise to all kinds of threats, both spiritual and bodily. It was no coincidence, he thought, that the Turks, the enemies of Christendom, came from the east, a place of confusion, doubt and error. Moreover, Christians living in the east were unable to combat this because they were weakened in body and mind by the lighter atmosphere of the eastern climate. The overriding psychological characteristic of eastern people, according to Guibert, was ‘lightness’ (levitas). This made eastern people, of whatever religion, clever and argumentative, but psychologically and spiritually unstable, and physically weaker than westerners whose blood was heavier. In consequence it fell to Europeans to rally to defend Truth by taking up arms to recapture Jerusalem. The motif of the easterner as essentially ‘unstable’ resonated among medieval Europeans. The early thirteenth century bishop James of Vitry echoed this view when he described Arabic-speaking indigenous Christians as inherently untrustworthy and mendacious, ‘prone to saying one thing while thinking another’.

The idea that western Europeans bore the burden of responsibility for ensuring stability in a dangerous world informed the historical viewpoint of the Cistercian monk and chronicler Otto of Freising (1114-58). Otto’s book The Two Cities was written as guidance for his nephew, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Otto was convinced that successful and wise rulership was only possible if rulers knew their history (and who would argue with that?). Otto saw the history of human society as a geographical progression form east to west. Civilization had begun in the (Middle) east among the Assyrians, but had passed successively westwards to the Greeks, then the Romans, and now lay with western Europeans, whose task it now was to maintain Christian rulership as an earthly simulacrum of heavenly order.

Prester John from 1599 engraving - BM 2 — Late 16th century portrait of the legendary Prester John, Christian King of medieval Ethiopia (British Museum)

Medieval Europeans were deeply ambivalent about ‘the east’. Otto of Freising was one of the earliest writers to comment on the legendary priest-king of the Indies, Prester John. This figure, fabulously wealthy and powerful, represented and transmitted a kind of fantasy world for medieval Europeans. At the height of the legend, Prester John was thought to rule over vast territories populated by fabulous flora and fauna, in which precious stones with magical properties could be picked up from river beds. The east was objectified as a place of marvels and wonders unknown in the West, a place of wealth and the source of the spices that Europeans were starting to crave in their diets. But it was also as a place of danger: the spices were guarded by fabulous beasts that included poisonous reptiles, snakes and dragons. Gerald of Wales, describing Ireland in the late twelfth century, contrasted its homely and pleasant but rather tame landscape with the east. There may be no marvels, no precious gems and no spices in Ireland, Gerald acknowledged, but at least one did not have to watch out for danger with the approach of every animal.

A hundred years after Gerald was writing, some Europeans were experiencing the East for themselves. But even the largely factual reports of Marco Polo and others could not dispel the idea that the east was the origin of unpredictable and uncontrollable marvels. One of the most widely-read books of the late Middle Ages, the Travels of John Mandeville, deliberately mixed heavy doses of this kind of fabulous material into an account of travel purporting to be factual. It seems that Medieval Europeans wanted their east to remain a place of fantasy even after more rational truths were available. What might seem merely absurd, even amusing, as a set of attitudes among people hundreds of years ago, however, is far from innocent in the twenty-first century. Social media posts about Covid-19 being the inevitable consequence of exotic Chinese tastes for bat soup and other supposedly ‘traditional’ delicacies using wild food play into stereotypes of the ‘oriental other’. Historians, especially, should know where such racial profiling can lead.

Andrew Jotischky is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research has focused on religion, especially Christianity, in the middle ages and his publications include Crusading and the Crusader States (2004), A Hermit’s Cookbook (2011) and, with Keith J. Stringer, The Normans and the Norman Edge (2019).

Foundation Stones: Can public participation in national commemoration form the building blocks for the future of Holocaust memory? by Hollie Witton

December 11, 2019December 12, 2019 Madigan77Leave a comment

In recent years, perhaps the most powerful window into the Holocaust, one of the defining events of the 20th century, has been through the memories of survivors. Most are now in their 90s and these invaluable voices won’t be with us for much longer. We have therefore reached a pivotal moment in the sombre legacy of the Holocaust. As oral historians race to record and store the experiences of survivors, living memory is becoming testimony and life stories are being transformed into histories. It is thus worth considering how we will keep such a vital part of history alive and relevant for future generations when those who witnessed the Holocaust are no longer us? In essence, how do we educate and commemorate when we no longer have access to living, breathing history?

The power of commemoration at a time when events are passing from living memory can often be underestimated. Foundation Stones is a creative commemoration partnership between the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation and Big Ideas, an innovative community engagement organisation. As part of this ongoing project, members of the public are invited to paint a stone commemorating the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust and all victims of Nazi persecution. People can also choose to dedicate their stones to victims of subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The project draws inspiration from the Jewish custom of leaving stones and pebbles on the headstones that mark the graves of loved ones as a token of respect and remembrance. These stones will be laid in the foundations of the new UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning centre to be built in Westminster in central London.

As far as I am aware, this is a unique approach to the creation of a national memorial and allows each individual participant in the project to make a pledge to remember and learn from the past. In a moving speech he gave at the United States Holocaust Museum in 1993, Elie Wiesel urged people to remember that ‘not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we are doing with those memories’. Instilling this sense of accountability into those who inherit the testimony of genocide survivors is a significant part of the power of the Foundation Stones project.

The permanency of stones serves, in the words of Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, to remind us ‘that the memory and legacy of those who perished in the Holocaust will endure forever’. The physical marking of this legacy with a foundation stone is particularly significant, as most of those killed in the Holocaust were not given their own graves. The Chief Rabbi, who supports the Foundation Stones project, has emphasised the ‘powerful and deeply symbolic act’ of incorporating so many individual stones into the foundation of a national Memorial and Learning centre and indeed, the beauty of each foundation stone lies in the individuality of its design. The impact upon the creator of each stone in those already submitted, particularly in the care taken with each mark made, is clear to see. Some stones are stark and simple messages of heartbreak and others a beautiful expression of colour and brightness, love, shock and empathy poured into a small, unexpected token of promise. A promise to never forget.

Although many participants have so far chosen to dedicate their stones in a commitment to peace or to all victims of genocide, some have been inspired by specific stories. One particularly moving tribute is a stone dedicated to the memory of Sonja Jaslowitz, a young Romanian woman who created poetry and art while enduring imprisonment in two concentration camps. Her work, written in a mixture of Romanian, German and French was preserved by her brother, Harry and translated into English by her mother, Lotte. The example below is an excerpt from a poem written on the 7th of March, 1944.

‘How can the sunshine glare so bright, when in my heart, there is no light?
Lilies of the valley, with fragrant breath, while my sobbing soul, embraces death.’(1)

Sonja was killed later that day, during a British Air Raid. She was 17 years old.

The Jaslowitz family, from left Sonja, Adolf, Lotte — Sonja Jaslowitz with her parents before the war [Wiener Holocaust Library Collections]

Although she was clearly talented, Sonja’s circumstances render her words all the more powerful. She suffered unimaginably through her short life but her work shares her experience of being a sister, a daughter and ultimately a child. The ‘ordinary’ stories of people who were victims of the Holocaust serve to remind us how quickly disaster can strike when intolerance is allowed to thrive. In understanding the horrors of that time, we must acknowledge the number of people who were complicit in the suffering of the past and ask ourselves how we can make the choice not to be. Sonja’s story and those of literally millions of others are now the responsibility of all of us, a generation who, for the most part, have never had to live through such persecution and, we hope, never will.

Sonja Jaslowitz Stone — Foundation Stone dedicated to Sonja Jaslowitz

What can we do with this responsibility? Collective acts of commemoration such as the Foundation Stones project provide an excellent impetus for people to engage in public history, as the stories of so many individuals, both living now and living in memory, are given space to come to the fore. The construction of any new public building has the potential to be divisive, but the Foundation Stones project has a unifying sense of purpose and allows for the creation of a memorial that will be built on the hopes and commitments of people who have painted stones. A selection of Foundation Stones was exhibited at the reception to the Gedenkstunde zum Volkstrauertag (national day of mourning memorial service) held in the Bundestag in Berlin on 17 November, 2019. The positive response to the project at such a deeply moving and significant event suggested that the appeal of Foundation Stones is not only personal but universal. In the process of creating their individual stones, participants are encouraged to explore not only local history but the extensive existing pool of historical knowledge relating to the Holocaust. The stones displayed in Berlin were in part designed by young football players from England, who were also attending the commemoration. The young men were delighted to see that their contribution to the project had travelled so far and were keen to share their stories of commemoration with others at the service. This touching moment perfectly demonstrates the unifying potential of Foundation Stones, a project that enables people to make links that are both intergenerational and international.

Commemoration has the potential to provide a powerful connection not only with others in our own time but with history, allowing individuals to creatively engage with past events and, just as importantly, to question the present. Big Ideas is in the process of creating a digital record of all the stones created, in the hope that when participants visit to view their own stone, they may also engage with the stories that have inspired others. Throughout the darkest days of her life, Sonja Jaslowitz, as described in Memory Unbound, retained a ‘persistent sense of hope in the future’. With the ambitious commemoration project of the new UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, significant public attention will be drawn to her story and those of so many. Each Foundation Stone that is made in connection with this memorial is the opportunity for a personal pledge about standing up against all forms of hatred and prejudice, both in honour of the past and in hope for the future.

(1) Harry Jarvis Family Papers 1617/3/4. Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.

Hollie Witton is an Assistant Producer of projects at Big Ideas, a London-based community interest organisation dedicated to promoting engagement with history and culture