InfoBritain - Travel Through History In The UK :
Personal Note Archive October 2007
Personal Note Archive October 2007
5th October 2007
Statue of Emmeline Pankhurst outside the Houses of Parliament
Over the last few days, against the background of Gordon Brown's can't make up my mind election plans, we have highlighted women's suffrage, as the final step in the history of universal suffrage. Strangely the history of women's rights shows that a number of the most powerful women were not sympathetic to women being allowed the vote. In the nineteenth century the best selling novelists George Eliot and Mrs Humphrey Ward, were not supporters of women's suffrage, and neither was Beatrice Potter, co-founder of the London School of Economics. In the twentieth century Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were both well known for excluding women from positions of power. Perhaps this reveals the nature of power, which let's face it depends on some people not being powerful. Interestingly Hilary Clinton the front runner in the approaching US election does seem interested in women's rights. In a famous speech she gave in Beijing she pointed out that women make up 50% of the world's population, 70% of the world's poor, and two thirds of those who are not taught to read or write. But she also said that women's rights are human rights. This was an interesting turn of phrase. In one sense she is bringing women's rights out of the backwoods into the mainstream. In another sense she is saying that women's rights are nothing special; they are merely part of the long struggle of people in general to find a better life. Power is a contradictory thing. You can help one set of people by highlighting their problems, which in a way cuts those people off from the mainstream,which is where they are trying to go. And if you say one set of people have problems shared by everyone, then maybe those problems aren't so special and don't need special attention. Once powerful women such as Beatrice Potter, Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir entered the mainstream, perhaps they simply did not feel that the problems of women were special anymore. Perhaps in a way that was an indication of progress, or of regression. Perhaps history is always like that, going in circles as it rolls into the future.
10th October 2007
142 The Strand
A new article with a biography and suggested visits for George Eliot has just gone up onto the site. Recently, with Gordon Brown's stop start election plans in the background, I've been thinking about the history of Parliament, and the history of votes for women in particular. George Eliot, or Mary Ann Evans, was an ambitious intelligent nineteenth century woman who was determined to live her own life. But this determination led to all sorts of complications. When she was young she was an earnest Christian. Then after reading the latest discoveries in natural science, she became equally earnest in her rejection of Christianity. Mary refused to go to church. Her father was horrified: apart from anything else how was this headstrong young woman going to meet a husband if she didn't go to church? Family and friends were sent in to try and talk her round. Eventually after months of "Holy War" as the family called it, Mary started going to church again to spare her father's feelings. Mary Ann Evans would eventually use her great abilities and energy to become George Eliot the novelist. In her greatest book Middlemarch, written in a house beside Regent's Park, George Eliot wrote of Dorothea, an intelligent ambitious woman who gives up her independence and fortune to marry a man. Dorothea didn't want to rattle around on her own in a big mansion, able to do anything, but having nothing to do. We cannot live alone with our own view of the world, no matter what that view might be. In George Eliot's view we all have to live together, and that means not living according to any strict creed or theory. We rub along together somewhere in the middle. This philosophy meant that while George Eliot lived a revolutionary kind of life, earning her own fortune, living with a married man, rejecting religion, she did not believe in votes for women. Her story is a fascinating insight into the way someone with revolutionary ideas accommodates themselves to society. She was very British in that sense.
14th October 2007
Congratulations to the England rugby team (on winning their semi final against Australia in the Rugy WorldCup). The following is the section on Rugby found on our sporting history page:
The early history of rugby overlaps with that of football, in which there was no formal rule about carrying the ball, or any formal rules at all. The idea that William Webb Ellis picked up the ball at Rugby school makes a good story, but that is all it is. The game does not have a clear beginning, even though such clear origins are attractive enough for the world cup of rugby to be called the William Webb Ellis trophy. Rugby was originally a public school game, and the game of football played at Rugby school did allow handling of the ball but not running with it. The innovation of running with the ball was introduced some time between 1820 and 1830, though it is not clear who came up with the idea. From the 1870s onwards an enthusiasm for rugby developed in Wales, the part of the British Isles most associated the the game. In the early nineteenth century religious extremists had virtually eliminated many of the traditional Welsh games and pastimes. Rugby came into this vacuum. At first the game was played by the professional classes and the upwardly mobile. It soon became popular with working men, particularly miners. By the 1890s rugby had become the national sport of Wales, despite condemnation from religious leaders. The Welsh team won the Triple Crown in 1893, and won again six times between 1901 and 1912. The game stirred deep patriotic emotion in a country that was looking for its own identity with the United Kingdom. The 1905 victory over the New Zealand All Blacks led to a massive outpouring of national fervour. The rugby song Sospan Fach became a second national anthem in south Wales.
Rugby Union is unusual in British sport in its continued adherance to the old amateur ethos.
The biggest collection of rugby memorabilia in the world can be seen at the Museum of Rugby in Twickenham in Richmond, west London.
16th October 2007
The papers this week carried a story about the Great and the Good signing a petition to reduce traffic through villages, and the village of Selborne in particular. Selborne in Hampshire was the home of Gilbert White, the eighteenth century naturalist and author of The Natural History of Selborne. Apparently there has been a loss of tranquility in the village where White lived and worked. I would suggest that this idea of Selborne as a lost ideal has itself a long history. Even as The Natural History of Selborne was being published the Industrial Revolution had begun, and villages were quickly becoming fanciful refuges from the new age. Reality did not correspond with fantasy. People working in the industrial towns were better paid than their rural counterparts, and inspite of the well documented problems of life in early nineteenth century industrial towns, it was rural people who were driven to riot. The Swing riots of this early industrial period involved rural workers, not people living in towns and cities. It is no accident that the first organised union activity, that of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, took place in a Dorset village, and not in a big city. Only a few years before the publication of Gilbert White's famous book, Selborne had been involved in the Swing riots, so we can be confident that life there was as difficult as it was in most rural areas. And yet only a couple of years after the riots, a journalist from the New Monthly Magazine visited the village and chose not to see such problems. Instead he presented the traditional idealised picture: "Chimneys reeking with evidence of clean hearths in full activity, walls neatly covered with vine and creepers, in full bloom, and trim little gardens prank'd with flowers, seemed here to tell only of cheerful toil and decent competence." (New Monthly Magazine Dec 1830: Quoted in Gilbert White by Richard Mabey) Selborne and villages like them are lovely, and interesting to visit, but they are not lost idylls. Villages are echoes of the settlements where medieval tenant farmers lived, a convenient central place amongst scattered strips of land. Once farm land was enclosed in large farms, villages didn't make so much sense anymore. Those who could afford their own farms lived on them. The poor landless labourers continued to use the village houses, until industrialisation reached the point where villages became rural homes for people who worked and made their money in the towns and cities like everybody else. Now villages tend to be inhabited by the well off, and they don't like noisy traffic, and write to
18th October 2007
We've recently completed a new article on the history of castles. I think there's a gap in the market for a good history of castles. The ones I've read are all about which castles have keeps and which ones don't, and I tend to fall asleep after a while. I've long pondered on how a better story of castles could be written. I wouldn't say I've had a eureka moment, but over the summer it did slowly become apparent that since the earliest times castles have looked like churches. I've looked at Iron Age hill top castles that look like sacred sites at Stonehenge or Avebury. I've wandered past Exeter Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, and the local church near where I live, and they are all decorated with battlements, and towers. I'd read alot about perpendicular Gothic and so on, but no one had explained to me why churches look like castles. This question got my attention, and that's what I wrote about. So if you want to know why churches look like castles, see our History of Castles.
22nd October 2007
The recent troubles in Burma illustrate the problems that occur when the military try to run a country. It must seem so easy. There they are, all those feckless civilians, and what they need is a bit of discipline. Britain faced a similar, though not as extreme situation, in the 1820s when the Duke of Wellington became prime minister. Being prime minister was very different to being a general. As PM Wellington had to put up with debate: "They agree with what I say in the morning and then in the evening they start up with some crotchet which deranges the whole plan... I have been accustomed to carrying on things in a quite different manner. I assembled my officers and laid down my plan, and it was carried into effect without more words." For more words on the Duke of Wellington as Prime Minister, see our page on Apsley House.
26th October 2007
A small part of the Brogdale collection displayed at an East Malling Research Station open day.
The French writer Marcel Proust found that the past came back most powerfully not through photographs, or diaries, or learned history books, but through taste and smell. Crumbs of madeline cake soaked in tea are the way into the past for Proust. Proust explored his personal history via cake and tea, and sometimes even in a more general sense it is possible to visit the past via taste and smell. Autumn is the time of year when apples ripen on the trees in southern England, and apples offer an unexpected route into the past. Read more on our National Fruit Collections, Brogdale page.