Whither Whitsun?

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Diana Devlin

This year Whit Sunday fell on 18 May.  When I was a child, half term in the Summer Term was Whit Week, but it only occurred to me the other day that this is no longer the case.  Since 1971, we have had the Spring Bank Holiday on the last Monday in May, and most schools take the rest of that week off.  Whitsun seems to have been forgotten.

Since Norman times, Whitsun was the English word for the festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciples:

Tongues of fire

Tongues of fire

 

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.(The Acts, Chapter 2 vv 2-4) 

Whitsun Morris Dancers

Whitsun Morris Dancers

 

From at least medieval times, Whitsuntide was a holiday for agricultural workers, and there were many traditional celebrations, such as pageants, fairs and morris dancing.

There are at least two Shakespearean references to the festival. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia has disguised herself as a boy to follow her lover Proteus to Milan.  There, as Proteus’s  ‘page’, she has to deliver to his new love, Silvia, a ring which she herself gave him.  In the ensuing dialogue, she does not reveal herself but claims to know the unhappy ‘Julia’ well:

Silvia: How tall was she?

Julia: About my stature: for, at Pentecost,

When all our pageants of delight were played,

Our youth got me to play the woman’s part,

And I was trimm’d in Madam Julia’s gown;

Which served me as fit, by all men’s judgments,

As if the garment had been made for me.

She claims that ‘Julia’ played the part of Ariadne, betrayed by Theseus.  In The Winter’s Tale, the reference seems happier, but the scene will end in turmoil.  Perdita, the shepherd’s daughter, does not know she is really a princess, but has to dress up like the goddess Flora to be hostess of the sheep-shearing feast:

Perdita: Methinks I play as I have seen them do

In Whitsun pastorals.

In both scenes, Shakespeare uses customs typical of Whitsuntide to present a piece of play-acting that, unbeknownst to most or all of the characters, is nearer truth than fiction.

 

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A different kind of war service

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Barbara Selby

Recently I watched a news item about the unveiling of a memorial to the Bevan Boys who were conscripted to work in the mines during the Second World War.  I knew my grandfather had not served in the armed forces during the first war and, searching through my tin boxes, I realised I had the story of a different kind of war service to tell.

My grandfather, Herbert James Liversedge, who described himself as an engineering draughtsman specialised in mining and explosives.

National Registration Act 1915 Herbert James Liversedge

National Registration Act 1915
Herbert James Liversedge

He would have been 32 when war was declared.  His National Registration Act 1915 card gives his address in Llanelly; at this time the anglicised version of Welsh place names was used in official documents.  My grandparents must have only moved there recently as my mother had been born in Croydon not long after the outbreak of war.

authorisation to wear War Service Badge

authorisation to wear War Service Badge

The card exempting him from military service is undated but it certifies that as long as he is employed Nobel Explosives Company on work for war purposes he is authorised to wear the war service badge.   These were issued to protect the wearer from being harassed on the streets and handed a “white feather; a symbol of cowardice.

 

 

Herbert James Liversedge (1882-1928)

Herbert James Liversedge (1882-1928)

The note on the back of the photograph of my grandfather says that he is wearing the Crown Services Badge.  Although I cannot make out the details from the photograph I have guessed that it is similar to that shown in the picture which was specifically issued to munitions works.

 

War Service Badge (munitions workers)

War Service Badge (munitions workers)

 

 

 

Working in the munitions factories was not a particularly safe option, an estimated 600 workers died in accidents with thousands more injured.  The worst incident in Chilwell in 1918 killed 134 workers.  Many of those employed in the factories were women who had been conscripted for this work.

The factory in Pembrey where my grandfather was employed dated back to 1881[1], it was an attractive location; the sand dunes providing an effective screen as well as minimising damage in case of an explosion.

The fear of explosion was always present, in her diaries police officer Gabrielle West[2] describes searching workers at gates for cigarettes, matches and potentially combustible materials.  Despite these precautions explosions still occurred.   My mother remembered her father being called into investigate the cause of one particular explosion.  He discovered that a window cleaner had used a coin to scrape dirt of the window creating a spark.

Finally to return to the start, when researching munitions workers I found that a parliamentary debate had been held on 26th March 2013 to support setting up a memorial to munitions workers in the National Memorial Arboretum alongside those to the Bevan Boys and Land Girls  .  One of speakers in this debate was Nia Griffiths, MP for Llanelli in whose constituency the Pembrey factory was; the site is now a Country Park.

Barbara

[1] The History of the Pembrey Royal Ordnance Factory:  Llanelli Borough Council

[2] Women Munitions Workers in Britain during the Great War: Deborah A. K. Brobst, Lehigh University

 

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New Life in Life Writing: Part 2 – Specific issues

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Annie Hedington

Notes from a discussion, held at Senate House, 15 May 2013

Chair: Max Saunders: Professor of English at Kings College; Co-Director of the Centre for Life Writing Research.

Michael Holroyd: CV on literature.britishcouncil.org.

Sarah Bakewell: her first biography:- How to live: a Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty answers.

Wendy Moffat: American, Professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania.

*****

Part 2 – Specific issues

What about the boundary between creative life-writing and fiction?

Michael said he didn’t like debates about non-fiction versus fiction: when you write biographies you are not just writing the truth, you are writing about the subject’s dreams and fantasies and delusions, which were real life-experiences to the subject. Hence, he referred to “re-creation.”  He used quotations from letters to give the same immediacy as dialogue, but didn’t make up dialogue. He didn’t invent. You mustn’t “know better” than the subject, about their life. Wendy said she also never put words in the subject’s mouth, even in third person indirect discourse. Max said that transgressing that boundary in autobiography is even more problematic. However, Sarah believed that in memoir writing these conversations are made up all the time, because people actually don’t remember accurately. There is a tacit understanding that these are reconstructions patched together from fragments of unreliable memories – or should be, if you are communicating adequately with the reader.

What are the motivations for writing biography?

Max suggested a never-ending fascination with human nature is a characteristic of all biographers. Sarah believed that biographers are drawn to subjects who are ostensibly like themselves in some way – but then find that the subject lived within such a different set of socio-economic relations and in an age that had very different ideas, so then became absorbed in exploring the similarities and differences. Interest in how and why people’s views of a subject had changed over time was another fascination. Wendy agreed that identification with the subject was the draw for the biographer and the reader, but then there was the quest to see the world as their subject would have seen it. Michael said he hadn’t been to university and reckoned he’d been self-educated through writing biographies. Sarah commented that her readers (of her book on Montaigne) had told her they valued the tips for living they’d derived from it, which surprised her because she didn’t consider she’d written a self-help book! She was now writing a group biography, and thought the attraction of that form was to examine what pulled people together and what drove them apart. Max said his one biography was of Ford Maddox Ford, who he had enjoyed reading, and was written to counter previous biographies – both the hagiographic ones and the scathing ones.

To Be Continued – Part 3 – Questions for the Audience

Annie

 

 

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New Life in Life Writing: a discussion held at Senate House on 15 May 2013

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Annie Hedington

Chair: Max Saunders: Professor of English at Kings College; Co-Director of the Centre for Life Writing Research; Convenor of the MA in Life Writing. Edits the annual series of Ford Maddox Ford Studies.

Michael Holroyd: doyen of British literary biographers. See his CV on literature.britishcouncil.org. His latest biography (said to be his last) had mixed reviews: was about some women of not very great importance, connected by illegitimacy, place.

Sarah Bakewell: her first biography:- How to live: a Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty answers. A biography-cum-analysis of Montaigne’s writing.

Wendy Moffat: American, Professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania. Her first biography:- E.M.Forster: a New Life. She had access to Forster’s previously unpublished secret memoirs, so was better able to bring him to life as a human being, as well as a writer, than previous biographers.

********

Views on the current state of the field.

Max Saunders’ view was that publishers haven’t come to grips with changing technology and business models.   Financial constraints dissuaded them from financing biographies that take years to produce.

Sarah Bakewell said that to appeal to general readers, it was advisable to either pick out a particular time period in the subject’s life as the focus, to ground the story in a particular place, or to approach a life through the objects associated with it; i.e. find a slightly lateral angle into the subject’s life. She thought that subjects in whom the reader could see a reflection of his or her own ideas and life-experiences were motivation enough to buy or borrow the book.

Group Biographies

Holroyd said group biographies were popular; but he thought all biography was in a sense “group” because writing about a person inevitably brought in those others with whom they had connections/entaglements – people don’t live in a vacuum. He thought creative (which he called re-creative) non-fiction had been affected by TV treatment of history – on TV there was lots of social history, but biography was superficial. There was more interest in telling the stories of disadvantaged groups – a “biography of redress” – a sort of doing them justice in retrospect. Wendy Moffat said that people would always be interested in narratives of people’s lives, because they were looking for narratives that would tell them more about human nature and their own identity, but it was important to bear in mind what today’s younger reader does not understand about the past, and that the young expect the visual and the multimedia/electronic. Lives were being fully self-documented (facebook, twitter, digital photography, deposited papers of politicians etc) and future biographers would be grappling with why the subject kept all that he/she did, and how it showed/explained the subject’s view of him/herself.

Saunders commented that the long biographical project seemed to have migrated from the “professional biographer”+ publisher partnership to academe – maybe because the “publisher’s sub” had dried up, the “research biographer” had an academic income and could research/produce the biography in their research and vacation time. However, academics are now under pressure to accommodate shorter research cycles and more publications, so big multi-volume works will be out of favour.

Biography is not a young person’s genre

Moffat said that biography is not a young person’s genre, and she couldn’t have been a biographer without tenure. You needed to have picked up a lot of life-experiences of your own, and have developed a nose for all sorts of odds and sods of detail that aren’t central to a life’s focus but form the content that will stick in the reader’s mind. You had to be able to learn about everything your subjects knew. Holroyd agreed, and added that you needed to have developed confidence in your own original points of view and your own language.

Moffat and Bakewell both found that literary critics and philosophers were wary of biography, as being reductionist – the totality of a subject’s ideas/writing being explained in terms of their life-experiences. They hadn’t set out to be reductionist, but were aware of these prejudices.

Growth in ‘Memoir’

Saunders suggested two further trends: if you go to conferences, about half the life-writers are actually writing (or proposing to) on their family; also, the memoir boom. Moffat agreed – the latter is huge in the US, and they have become formulaic and conventionally in the “victimhood” form. She reckoned the combination likely to attract readers was a group biography, in a slice of time, with a strong geographic grounding.

Bakewell noted a further trend to include the biographer’s quest in the biography that becomes about the author’s life experience too and can unbalance the work. A biography shouldn’t be about the author’s curiosity. Moffat said she’d thought of writing a book about how she wrote a biography – and was told by her publisher (with a sigh) that all biographers want to do that. She said there are good examples of the way to do it – mentioned Richard Holmes’ Footsteps.

To Be Continued – Part 2 – Special Issues

Annie

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The 70th Anniversary of the Dambusters Raid

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Nicola Stevens

The National Archives in Kew, London have just created an online exhibition to commemorate the 70th anniversary of ‘Operation Chastise,’ better know as the Dambusters raids. The exhibition uses records from their collection to tell the story of this daring Second World War raid that took place on the night of the 16/17th May 1943.

The dams were surprisingly quickly repaired and to all intents and purposes the Ruhr Valley industry was back to full strength within nine months.   This was not the expected result of the mission.   What the National Archives do not tell you is that there was a second bombing raid using the bouncing bomb a year later in 1944.    My father took part in that operation.   However, the damage and loss inflicted on the civilian population was great on both occasions, and this as with most things of such proportions affecting humankind, would not recover until years after the war.   It was not just the Dambusters mission that instigated the creation of a Protocol additional to the Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 relating to civilian populations – specifically Part IV, Article 15 – that forbade the attacking of amongst other installations, dams, where such an “attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses amongst the civilian population.”   It was the resulting damage from the second raid in 1944 that ensured such a Protocol was written.

The other results of these two successful bombing missions sadly ensured that there was no Bomber Command medal struck to commemorate the young men’s contribution to WWII or acknowledge death of nearly half of them killed in action.     There are many paradoxes of moral issues in war.   Finally however, on 28th June 2012 a memorial to Bomber Command was unveiled by the Queen.   It is a colonnade of Portland stone erected at the corner of Green Park and facing Piccadilly, its centre a sculpture by Philip Jackson in bronze: seven men, a typical bomber crew, young but weary after tense hours over enemy territory, parachute packs in hand. Five scan the sky for friends who may or may not return; two look to the ground, old before their time, reflecting on another night survived.    http://www.rafbf.org/2052/visit-the-memorial.html

The number of such operations on a typical Bomber Command ‘tour’: 30. The chance of being shot down each time: 1 in 20.   My paternal grandfather had stipulated that he did not want ‘a war widow on his hands’ so my father volunteered and survived a second tour (60 operations) by the time of his 23rd birthday on 1st September 1944. Two days later he married my mother.

Nicola

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A lasting memory of a conversation

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Clare Travers

The photograph posted here has been in my mind this week as I had a visit from my aunt Clare, (always known as big Clare in our family,making me baby Clare),the one in the picture.  She is my mother’s youngest sister and of the four daughters and one son that made up the Jennings family, she is the only one who never married or had children. She has made up for it by being the most extraordinary aunt to her 31 nephews and nieces and their numerous children and grandchildren and now approaching her 80th birthday shows no signs of slowing down or becoming less interested in our lives.  We were talking at breakfast last Friday and I was telling her about this blog and showing her the bits and pieces I have contributed over the past few months. Like my mother she has kept some of my letters from far-flung places (how flattered I feel) and is going to look them out to send to me.

My aunt Clare and her parents, Charles and Margery Jennings c.1965

My aunt Clare and her parents, Charles and Margery Jennings c.1965

She then told me a poignant story of how in September 1975 she was driving her parents down to London from their annual visit to North Yorkshire where she has a cottage.  At the time she was living and working in London, at the House of Lords, and my grandparents lived in Sussex, so after doing the first leg of the journey, another daughter (not my mother who had an awful cold at the time) was deputed to drive them home from Barnes, where Clare lived.  The conversation in the car as they drew closer to Barnes turned in no particular seriousness to death and Granny said “Oh, just bury me where I drop, I don’t mind where.”  Later that night, upon getting home, Granny collapsed and died early the next day in hospital, so Clare was never to see her or speak to her again.  The last conversation between them had been suddenly and very sadly prefigured and when Clare told me last week I could well imagine how extraordinarily coincidental, if not prescient it must have seemed, and still does, to be remembered nearly forty years later.

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24th May – Day of the Slavic Writers

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Kristina Tzaneff

The “Day of Bulgarian Education, Culture and Slavonic Script” is a traditional Bulgarian holiday which takes place annually on 24th May.  A national holiday, it celebrates Bulgarian culture, literature and the Cyrillic alphabet.  The “alphabet” part of this holiday is important and sometimes the day is referred to simply as “Alphabet, Culture and Education Day”.

Sofia, Bulgaria- Celebrating 24th May

Sofia, Bulgaria- Celebrating 24th May

The Cyrillic script is an alphabetic writing system and was created during the First Bulgarian Empire (680 – 1018 A.D.).  Today, Slavic languages such as Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian and Ukrainian still use the Cyrillic form of writing.   Cyrillic writing is derived from Saints Cyril and Methodius, two brothers and Byzantine scholars credited with writing the first Slavic alphabet in 855 A.D.  They are among the most celebrated saints in the Bulgarian Orthodox church.

Revered as outstanding theologians and linguists, Saints Cyril and Methodius first devised the “Glagolitic” alphabet.  The early Glagolitic alphabet as well as what followed it, the early Cyrillic alphabet, was based primarily on and most closely resembled the Greek alphabet.  The Glagolitic alphabet was considered the first Slavic alphabet and its letters were based on the three holy elements for Christianity namely, the cross, the triangle and the circle.  The Glagolitic alphabet was said to be devised for sounds not found in the Greek language and is thus regarded as the first Bulgarian alphabet as it was said to more accurately reflect the sounds of the Bulgarian language.

Saints Cyril and Methodius used this first alphabet to transcribe Old Church Slavonic, thereby allowing a greater part of the population to understand the mostly highly revered text of the time, the Bible.  The alphabet was subsequently used to translate other important documents and books for government and religious works.  In this way, Saints Cyril and Methodius not only brought Christianity to the southern Slavs but were also able to enlighten the masses and influence the cultural development of all Slavic people.

“Saints Cyril and Methodius holding the Cyrillic alphabet,” a mural by Bulgarian iconographer Z. Zograf, 1848, Troyan Monastery.

“Saints Cyril and Methodius holding the Cyrillic alphabet,” a mural by Bulgarian iconographer Z. Zograf, 1848, Troyan Monastery.

The greatest significance of the alphabet came to play when, after 886 A.D., the brothers were commissioned by Tsar Boris I of Bulgaria to instruct the future clergy of the state in the Slavonic language.  For thirty years up until then, since the adoption of Christianity in 865, clergymen sent from the Byzantine Empire conducted Bulgarian religious ceremonies, the root of culture at the time, in the Greek language.  Tsar Boris I feared such practices would allow the Byzantine influence to grow, thus weakening the state.  In the interest of preserving the political independence and stability of Bulgaria, Tsar Boris I pressed for the adoption of the Old Slavonic language and established two academies where theology and literature were to be taught in the Slavonic language.

Some historical accounts put forward that while Saint Cyril codified and expanded Glagolitic, his students are the ones who, in 890 A.D., develop Cyrillic from the Greek letters as a more appropriate script for church books.  Cyrillic later spread from the Bulgarians to other Slavs namely the Russians, Serbians and even non-Slavic peoples such as the Moldavians and Vlachs and eventually dominated Glagolitic in the 12th century.  Soon after, literature produced in the Old Bulgarian language extended all over the Balkans and became the lingua franca of Eastern Europe.  Modern day Church Slavonic still resembles early Cyrillic and today the Cyrillic we know is a developed form, adapted to the changes in spoken language since that time.

According to historical Bulgarian texts and chronicles, the 24th May holiday was celebrated ecclesiastically as far back as the 11th century, however, it wasn’t until the mid 19th century that the holiday was fêted as a secular celebration of “Day of the Bulgarian Script”.

While the Cyrillic alphabet has existed for over eleven centuries, it was only introduced into the European Union as a language in 2007, when Bulgaria obtained full membership to the EU.  With the adoption of Bulgarian as a European language, the total number of “linguae europeae” became 23.

 

© Kristina Tzaneff

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Olga’s Story

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Susie Gutch

I have been reading ‘Olga’s Story’ by Stephanie Williams[published by Viking in 2005 and subsequently by Penguin in 2006].It is a detailed and very readable account of the life of her Russian grandmother, Olga Yunter, who was  born in Siberia in 1900. She was brought up in a large, lively and educated family, her father being a merchant who traded in goods from all over the world, with the Cossacks and the Chinese. Olga just managed to escape to China during the Russian revolution. Two of her brothers were killed during the violence that followed as the revolution swept through eastern Russia. She met and married an Englishman, Frederick Edney, in Tientsin in 1923. They survived the political upheavals in China and escaped the worst atrocities of the Sino-Japanese war. Olga managed to get to Canada with her daughter in 1941, but her husband was interned by the Japanese. [He was a civilian working for a British/American company in Shanghai.] He survived, and was released when hostilities ended in 1945, but his physical and mental health had been badly affected by the harsh conditions in the camp.

It is a powerful and moving account of how one woman managed to survive  some of the most violent upheavals of the twentieth century, set against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the Second World War [especially events in the Far East].

Stephanie Williams' biography of her Russian grandmother's extraordinary life

Stephanie Williams’ biography of her Russian grandmother’s extraordinary life

With the aid of photographs and letters, as well as detailed archive research, Stephanie Williams managed to rediscover her lost maternal grandmother’s Russian family, and to find out what happened to them during the terrible years of Stalin’s rule, the spread of communism and the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe.

Starting with the author’s own memories of her grandmother telling stories about her childhood in Siberia, it took ten years to research and write this moving and rewarding  account. The historical research is meticulous, and the range and scope impressive – yet it remains at heart a moving family history and one which I can recommend highly to anyone embarking on such a project. However, the sheer scale of the research involved is a daunting prospect for any aspiring writer, and makes Stephanie Williams’ achievement all the more remarkable.

Susie

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‘ …. a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire ..’

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Margaret McAlpine

The line above is from T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, published in 1922, which mocks the habits of Bradford businessmen who wore top hats to attend auctions at the Bradford Wool Exchange.  Was my ancestor Thomas William Burnley among them?  More than 100 years earlier the top hat had begun its association with the upper classes – royalty even – but by the 20th century was also a target for satirists and social critics, and a symbol of capitalism in socialist cartoons.  Eliot is tapping into widespread social snobbery about the nouveau riche aping the style of their superiors, but achieving only incongruity.  The full line is about a lowly awkward clerk, ‘one on whom assurance sits, like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire’.

The only Bradford millionaire Eliot, in his post as a bank clerk, might have met was Sir James Roberts, (by then the owner of Saltaire).   Sir James was a regular visitor to Eliot’s bank to press his case for

The item in question

The item in question

reparations for the large financial losses his business suffered as a consequence of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917.  Sir James was one of 18 children of a tenant farmer, whose schooling ceased at age 12.  Diligent and able he soon prospered in business and by 1900 was the sole owner of Saltaire – sold in 1920 for the then huge sum of £2 million.  Sir James had a distinguished public life, and was a well-known philanthropist.  He was the one who bought the Bronte family home of Haworth Parsonage for the nation.  But Victorian attitudes to social mobility hardly budged for another 50 years.  While many approved of ‘getting on’ in life that meant working hard and material success, not moving out of the social class into which you were born.   Everyone knowing their place and staying in it was a common view.  Vicious snobbery and snide comments served to enforce this class system.  What Sir James and other Yorkshire businessmen made of this I have yet to explore.

 

Margaret

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Past or present – a tense situation

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Diana Devlin
Vienna - then or now?

Vienna – then or now?

A few weeks ago, there was an item on BBC Radio 4 Today about the importance of Vienna at the beginning of the last century.  The  historian who was being interviewed said ‘Vienna is the centre of European  culture’ and John Humphreys, clarifying,  said ‘You mean it was the centre, whereas it isn’t now,’ but the historian insisted on using the present tense.  This obviously intrigued Humphreys, because a couple of days later there was another item where the whole question of the ‘historical present’ was discussed.  The professional historian who’d been invited to defend it claimed that using the present tense makes history more immediate for people who find it too remote, but the lay person who was interviewed pointed out that it was just confusing to speak or write as if something in the past was actually in the present.

The discussion set me thinking, and I wonder what are others’ views on this.  For myself, I much prefer to use the past tense about the past.  Even in fiction, I don’t much like novels that are written in the present tense.  Is this just nostalgia for childhood tales?  – ‘Once upon a time there was . . .‘   You know that a story starting like that will have a beginning, a middle and an end, and that is satisfying in itself.  Perhaps it’s because ‘history’ doesn’t have an end, that some historians prefer not to write as if it’s done and dusted.

The challenge, both in fiction and non-fiction, is to make the past believable, but it cannot be done by pretending it is just like today.  I’m with L P Hartley on that: ‘The past is a foreign country.’  On the other hand, all my working life I have been concerned with play-texts, where the stage directions are always stated in the present tense: Enter Ghost; The trumpets sound; Exit pursued by bear.   And I remember there was a wonderful schoolteacher called Dorothy Heathcote, who used drama to teach history.  ‘There is plague in the next village,’ she might tell a class of 9-year-olds, ‘What do you think we should do?’

It’s a quandary. Perhaps I should just leave it to Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, when Mr Jaggers asked him (asks him?) if he understood (understands?) about Pip’s new situation:

“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood.  And it ever will be similar according.”

Diana

©Diana Devlin

 

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