Octopus dreams

 There were mountains where animals roamed and forests overflowing with roots, fruits, leaves and berries. The Jōmon knew about farming; their neighbours across the water in Korea were farmers. But they themselves didn’t need to break their backs hoeing the soil day and night, for they had abundant food all around them. Most peoples didn’t settle down until the advent of farming; but these hunter-gatherers were so prosperous that many stopped wandering and formed communities.

The Minoans developed their civilisation a few millennia later, between about 2000 and 1000 BC. They didn’t build stone circles but huge and splendid palaces painted with frescoes. But as an island nation they had much in common with the Jōmon, who were still thriving across the world in Japan. Legacies of Beauty: Archaeological Treasures from Japan, a wonderful exhibition at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum which closed on September 24th, celebrates the parallels.

The Man Who Slew Wat Tyler

The meeting seemed to start well. The King was amenable. What happened next is contested. Did Wat Tyler become over-familiar with the King? Did he spit, disrespectfully, in his direction? Did one of the King’s entourage respond by insulting Tyler? In a heated moment someone made the first move, perhaps Tyler, perhaps Walworth who had ridden out to Smithfield with the King.

According to one version of the story, William Walworth despatched Wat Tyler immediately with the thrust of a dagger. Another version is that Tyler, seriously wounded, was carried into St Bart’s hospital, but was soon dragged from there by Walworth’s men and publicly executed. Whatever the actual timeline, Tyler perished and his dispirited followers went home. It was effectively the end of the revolt.

Was Walworth a dagger-happy oppressor of working men or a good citizen and brave defender of his monarch? Whatever the truth, he was rewarded with a knighthood and a pension and is today counted as one of London’s worthies. The north-eastern pavilion on Holborn Viaduct, linking the viaduct to Farringdon Road by stairs, is named after him and bears his statue.

Caroline Herschel

Caroline was seventeen when she arrived in England. She had been very close to William and must have been devastated when he left home - particularly as her mother, who really only had time for her oldest son, Jacob, neglected the child. Caroline was treated as a servant: she contracted typhoid as a child, as a result of which her growth was stunted; she was tiny, just a little over four feet tall. But things took a turn for the better when William came back to Hanover and rescued her. He taught her to play music and to sing - so well that she was offered a post with an opera company in Birmingham.

But by this time, Caroline and William were both becoming fascinated with astronomy. (I've noticed that there's often a connection between music and science, though I don't know enough about either to understand why this is.) William learnt how to grind and polish lenses, and built increasingly large telescopes which he used to sweep the night sky. Caroline was initially his recorder and note taker, but she progressed to making her own observations. 

The Aspidistra Radio Transmitter #WW2

 The Shadow Network which forms the title of my latest book refers to the fake news radio stations set up by Sefton Delmer in WW2. These secret radio stations operating in WW2 pretended to be genuine German radio stations and employed German prisoners of war or other German speakers to make their broadcasts. The broadcasts were deliberately racy and were designed to capture the hearts of ordinary Germans and make them believe they were listening to a forbidden radio station from their own country. Their popularity spread, and they got wide audiences for their programmes.

The radio signal for these ‘fake news’ radio stations needed to be strong enough to appear as though it came from Germany and had to be more powerful than anything that was then available.

By coincidence, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had created two high-powered radio transmitters which could not be used in the US, because of a change in American law. The RCA were eager to sell them to Britain. So Harold Robin, (pictured above) a Foreign Office radio engineer, saw their potential, and travelled to America to examine them, and then worked to improve them. He adapted a transmitter so it was able to move frequency in a fraction of a second, at the flick of a switch.

The powerful ex-RCA transmitter, eventually installed in Sussex, England, was named Aspidistra, referencing the popular Gracie Fields song ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’, in which an Aspidistra houseplant grows until it ‘nearly reached the sky’.

In fact, most of the technology was buried underground at the site at Crowborough, though its antennae were visible – three guyed masts, each 110 metres tall, directing the signal broadly eastwards. The Art Deco–style transmitter building was housed in an underground shelter which had to be excavated by the Canadian army troops who were stationed nearby.

The Men who Ate Gold

 I was recently lucky enough to go to the enchanting country of Peru and was captivated by its extraordinary landscape and tragic history ...

The all-conquering Atahualpa
In November 1532 the emperor of all the Incas, Atahualpa, was marching south to his capital, Cusco, accompanied by an army of 80,000 men in a vast triumphal cavalcade. After a long civil war he had captured his half brother, the then Inca, and made himself emperor - Inca - of the whole vast land of Tawantinsuyu.

Deep in the mountains he ordered his men to pitch camp in a lush fertile valley outside the small city of Cajamarca. There were so many tents pitched across the hillside that it was like a city. Atahualpa and his women stayed in a beautifully-appointed residence a few kilometres away, at a hot spring where mineral waters hissed and bubbled out of the ground. There was a bathhouse, hot and cold running water and a garden. There he engaged in a ceremonial fast, took the waters and recuperated from a war wound.

Inca emperor and courtiers in a palace 
of Inca stonework, Museo Inkaryi

 Atahualpa was an incredibly impressive presence. His crown was a multi-coloured braid like a coronet from which hung the imperial fringe ‘of fine scarlet wool’ spreading across his forehead. When he travelled he was borne aloft in a gold litter with such majesty that people left the roads on which he passed and ascended the hills to worship and adore him. He was far too grand for his feet ever to touch the ground.

The Four Quarters of the World
His grandfather, the great emperor Thupa Inka, who died in 1493, had been an Alexander the Great, who expanded his territory across not just modern-day Peru but much of modern-day Ecuador and Chile, creating the empire of Tawantinsuyu, ‘The Four Quarters of the World’, which ran along most of the east coast of South America. 

This was an incredibly sophisticated empire with a network of roads built for llamas to walk on, carefully irrigated agricultural terraces, great monuments and

Performer depicting an Inca woman

public buildings of masonry, great blocks of perfectly smooth stonework that slotted together like pieces of jigsaw puzzle and were never toppled even by the most violent earthquake. The Incas were the last of a long line of peoples all of whom left their mark on Peru; the Inca themselves were only here for a hundred years.

After his grandfather’s and his father’s deaths, civil war broke out between various half brothers; the old man had had some sixty sons. Eventually Atahualpa proved victorious. Now the time had come to consolidate his empire and establish his rule.

He’d already had news of the extraordinary strangers who had landed on the coast.

Art, Colonialism and Change

 Moving round this exceptional exhibition, I was struck by how much more powerfully a single work of art – rather than any number of words -- can express the pain and contradictions of history. Yet at the same time, offer a fresh perspective on the brutally contrasting and intimately entangled pasts of Africa, India, Britain and the Americas.

Of which we still know so little.

Bust of a Man by Francis Harwood, 1758,
John Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

 

You enter the RA’s central rotunda to be greeted by a handful of fine portraits of Black men. Strong, handsome, elegant – among them works by Gainsborough, Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley. Each is accorded all the care and dignity, of any of their white sitters of their time. In the centre stands a black stone bust of a man from 1758 by Francis Harwood. Wonderfully lit, it is reflected up on a series of mirrors to alternate with busts of famous white men beneath the dome. The normal order of the white world has been subverted.

This is a show that makes its points with a light touch. Huw Locke’s Armada imagines the flotillas of craft engaged in the servicing of the plantation economy. At first these look magical. Mesmerising, tiny craft: fishing boats and lighters, miniature Spanish galleons. Look closer. High-rigged slaving ships, their sails, blackened and tattered, like the death ships they were. All are realised from abandoned lengths of string and cloth, plastic, wood and rubber and are suspended like flotsam and jetsam on uneven waves from the ceiling.

Hew Locke RA, Armada, 2017–19, Tate.
Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry. 

Benjamin West’s The Death of General James Wolfe – celebrated in my Canadian past as one of the nation’s great heroes – was painted twenty years after his death after defeating the French on the Plains of Abraham in Quebec in 1759. At his feet sits an idealised First Nation man. In fact he is a Delaware, rather than any of the native tribes to be found in the locale.

To Tate Britain - and Ellen Terry’s Dress

 The iconic portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth in her beetle-wing dress has been a favourite painting of mine for many, many years.

                                 

I am not alone in my enthusiasm as, with the detachment of someone who had been on stage almost all her life, the actress herself commented:

“The picture of me is nearly finished and I think it magnificent. The green and the blue of the dress is splendid, and I think the expression as Lady Macbeth holds the crown over her head quite wonderful.”

A while ago, studying Victorian theatre for my children’s novel, I learned that the beetle-wing dress still existed, and was kept as part of Terry’s costume archive at her last home, Smallhythe Place.

The property, a small half-timbered cottage with a tiny theatre, is deep in the Kent countryside, between Tenterden and Rye and now owned by the National Trust. However, the opening hours and parking were limited and Kent is a long way from my home in Yorkshire.

                     

Later, when I was passing through Kent for work, the website informed me that the Trust was now focused on a nearby archaeological site, that Smallhythe Place itself was under renovation and Terry’s dress away for conservation. Ah well, so be it, I thought. By then, my novel A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E was out into the world, other things were happening, and life moved on.

However, about fortnight ago, Ellen Terry came back into my mind. In ‘The Motive and The Clue’, Jack Thorne’s play about the tensions between ageing Sir John Gielgud and young hellraiser, Richard Burton, who wants direction as Hamlet. In response to Burton’s tirade about life as a miners son, Gielgud - most wonderfully played by Mark Gattis - says in a hollow, lonely voice something like “What else could I be, coming from a theatrical family like mine?” Which is when I remembered that Gielgud’s family tree included great-aunt Ellen Terry of the beetle-wing dress. 

Almost on the same day, in a series of tweets by fashion historian Dr Kate Strasdin, I read that, right now, both the Lady Macbeth portrait and that famous dress are on display in Tate Britain, which has prompted this History Girls post today.

2024 Spies, Lies & Deception

 Being interested in spies and all things spying, I just caught the end of this fascinating exhibition at The Imperial War Museum. 

I first visited the IWM in the Sixties and have been a regular visitor over the decades. In recent years, my visits were often focused on a particular exhibition which had direct relevance to something I was writing. Fashion On The Ration was really useful when I was writing Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook; Lee Miller: A Woman's War was invaluable as one of my characters was an American photojournalist. I like exhibitions. The mix of images: photographs, paintings, sketches, postcards, newspaper cuttings and the objects that people used, owned, carried and valued tell you a great deal about those people and their lived experience. To a writer of historical fiction, these things provide invaluable reference, enabling us to more accurately re-create and re-imagine past lives. 

I've also spent time in the Imperial War Museum Research Room, doing Real Research, reading contemporary accounts of life in Post War Germany for Miss Graham: diaries, letters, journals, log books and official documents. It's not just information, these documents provide really valuable details of people's lives. These are the 'nuggets' we depend on as writers to make our characters authentic to their time and make them come alive, details that it would be impossible, otherwise, to find or imagine. Even the paper, the handwriting, the writing instruments, pencil or fountain pen, the browning paper, the courier font of the manual typewriter are evocative echoes of past lives. 

The Imperial War Museum is also a place of inspiration. I was in another Spy Exhibition when I had one of those powerful moments when disparate strands of an idea come together and coalesce into something that you know will be a book, in this case Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook. 

Spies, Lies & Deception covered more than a hundred years of espionage through 150 different objects, photographs and interviews. It began with spying in World War 1 and went on to the interwar period and World War II: the deceptions, inflatable tanks and Operation Mincemeat; the gadgets dreamed up by MI9 the precursors of Q and the heroism of agents like Noor Inayat Khan who had to use those gadgets for real. 

Marianne North - Victorian traveller and painter of plants

 Marianne North was one of those extraordinary Victorian women who wasn't content to follow the usual pattern involving marriage, children, and domesticity. Like the plant hunters, she travelled the world searching for exotic new plants - but in order to paint them, rather than to collect them.

Marianne North at work

What she did would be remarkable if she had been doing it today - but she did it in the Victorian Age, which makes her even more extraordinary. The conventional image of Victorian women is that they sat at home looking demure, painting water colours and doing embroidery. But some of them weren't content with that kind of life, and they not only broke the mould but utterly smashed it - by climbing the Alps, by writing great novels - and by exploring dangerous corners of the world: women such as Lady Hester Stanhope, Gertrude Bell and Isabella Bird.

Marianne North belongs in their company. She was born in 1830 into a comfortably well-off (and well-bred) family - her father was the Liberal MP for Hastings. Her first passion was for singing, but with a background like hers, a career in music wasn't an option. So then she turned to flower painting. Her sisters married, but Marianne thought marriage was a terrible idea, which turned women into 'a sort of upper servant', and she avoided it. Instead, when her mother died in 1855, she took to travelling with her father, who was also interested in botany. Then when he died some 15 years later, she, at the age of 40, determined to continue her travels, exploring far-flung corners of the world and painting the plants and flowers she found there. She usually travelled alone, finding companions a distraction and an annoyance, and she lived simply - it wasn't a case, obviously, of hopping on a plane and staying in a nice hotel: travelling was difficult, but she did it anyway.

FIGHTING FOR SPACE: A VISIT TO LEEDS ROYAL ARMOURIES

 Back in the late Nineties, and new to the North, I visited the Royal Armouries Leeds. I recall parking on an empty brownfield site, among broken brick outlines of past industrial buildings. Around the area, large hoardings offered investment opportunities and I could hear the constant rumbling from the cross-city routes and motorway junctions nearby. Edged by stunted bushes and brambles, that windswept space had not been inviting

However, among this emptiness, there stood what seemed a windowless fortress, created from vast blocks of smooth, steel-grey stone. Walking towards the roof-high glazed entrance, I saw it was marked by two copies of a strange curled-horn helmet.

This helmet is an emblem of the Royal Armouries Leeds. Opening in 1996, as one of several new ‘Northern’ museums, the building was designed to display and conserve the UK’s historic collections of armour and weaponry.

Inside were layers of galleries, filled with glittering, polished metal and craftsmanship, with different sections tracking the development of combat, armour, guns, pistols, and policing. Outdoors, but within the walls, was a tiltyard, an open area where exhibitions of combat, falconry and horsemanship were staged. I was interested enough during my visit but, no longer curious about the contents or place, had never returned.

And so it was, until this month, when a visiting friend with an interest in historical armour gave me reason to return. I went, wondering about that windswept site.

Years had passed, so how would the Armouries building look now? Did visitors still visit? Had any of that hoped-for regeneration happened? And was that ‘fortress’ still working as a place of cultural interest and inspiration?

I did not want keen to drive there by car this time, as the routes in, through and around Leeds are currently over-run with roadworks and redirections.

This time, we took the train from Harrogate to the 'new' Leeds Station. We left, as instructed, through a 'new' South exit, down gleaming escalators and sturdy glass doors. We arrived at the level of the Aire and Calder Navigation, and the place where the River Aire flows in a torrent between brick walls and under arches beneath the station. We were close to the famous dark arches of Granary Wharf, where quantities of goods were once loaded and unloaded, but where new businesses fill the renewed spaces.

Following signs to the towpath we arrived at a set of concrete steps and a short wait for the Waterbus. Opposite, on the far canal path, stood small groups, old and young, wrapped against the wet and weather. When the stretch of canal was clear, they cast large magnets on long ropes into the murky water, fishing for lost metal. They seemed more like characters from Mayhew or Dickens than proud examples of the city’s prosperity and regeneration, and I hoped the task brought them fun and occasional profits.

The friendly boatman helped us on to his twelve-pasenger ferry and, motor chugging, steered his craft through an area of the ‘new’ Leeds.

November 9th, 1989

 There are a few dates in history when the world turned. June 28th, 1914, when shots fired by Govrilo Princip in Sarajevo, set off a train of events which resulted in the outbreak of the First World War. April 19th, 1775, when the first shot fired on Lexington Green, Massachusetts, sparked the American Revolution, memorably described by Ralph Waldo Emerson as 'the shot heard around the world'. November 22nd, 1963, when another shot rang out across Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, killing John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States. 9/11/2001 when two Boeing 767 passenger planes flew into the Twin Towers. 

9^th November, 1989 is one of those dates: the day, or rather the night, when the Berlin Wall fell.

 

When these things happen, we immediately recognise their huge significance. Years later, we can say where we were, what we were doing, when we heard the news. In that moment, we can't always see all the ramifications, but we know something very big has happened. The actual causes of the world changing events that follow might be complex, go back years, decades, even centuries, but there is that one thing, one event, which causes the dominoes to fall. 

 

This does not have to be violent, it could be minor, trivial even. As small as the turning of a page...

 

On 9th November, 1989, at 6pm a News Conference took place in East Berlin...

 

'The News Conference was due to start at 6pm promptly, live on East German TV. The usual thing. TV cameras ranged round the back and sides of the small rooms. Reporters in the centre, milling about, taking their red plush tip up seats in front of the East German spokespeople, four of them, ranged behind a long press conference desk which was the same drab mid brown as the wall panelling and raised at the front to hide their papers from view. Muddy green floor to ceiling drapes provided the backdrop. Microphone leads trailed from each station but the only one speaking was Günter Shabowski, the East German unofficial spokesman. Middle aged, thick set with heavy features, grey hair, grey suit, he droned in monotone German  ... They were about an hour in and, so far, pretty routine, nothing much said, nothing new anyway, just the usual water tread, change was coming but not quite yet .... Someone even reached to switch off the set when Schabowski picked up a sheet of paper and read a statement: East Germans would be able to leave the GDR without preconditions at all border crossings with West Germany. Everyone leaned forward. There was a moment of absolute silence, as if they could not quite believe what they had just heard. On the screen, people looked to one another, as if for confirmation, and then the hubbub started. An Italian journalist stood up and asked the question: When is this going to happen? A collective intake of breath as Schabowski shrugged, shuffled thorough his papers and answered: Das tritt nach meiner Kenntnis... ist das sofort... unverzüglich - As far as I know… this is immediate… immediately. 

Schabowski frowned and looked over his glasses stunned, perhaps, by what he’d just said. Over the page was the detail: the need to apply for travel permits, present passports for stamping, beginning the next day. The 10th. But he hadn’t read that. 

 

In Praise of Martial

 Alas the month of October has passed. October is a great month, it is the bridge between autumn and winter, the final resting point before the shops decide it’s Christmas and force the festival season down our throats until we surrender and start humming Slade’s Merry Christmas Everyone and having nightmares about undercooked/overcooked turkeys. There’s also this thing called Halloween at the end of October which bloggers feel compelled to write about.

My History Girls slot is pretty darn close to the 31st October but I’ll spare you the Halloween blog post because the Romans didn’t have Halloween. They did have ghosts and ghost stories and festivals connected to the dead but I am not going to make any tenuous links between anything they believed in and children dressed up as tiny Harry Potters escorted door to door collecting sweets.

No what I want to write about is #Classicstober ! #Classicstober as you’ll gather from the # is a Twitter, (or as it is now known X) event, it is a whole month dedicated to promoting ancient Greek and Roman history run by @GreekMythComix and @DrCoraBeth. Each day of October was dedicated to a different man or woman from antiquity offering up the opportunity for Classicists and enthusiasts alike to big them up for the education of the wider X audience. I was flattered to be asked to nominate an individual for the 24th October and as Pliny the Elder had already been nabbed I went for the poet Martial. Because I think he’s brilliant and by the end of this article you’ll think so too.

"Goings-on" in medieval nunneries

 I have just finished writing the next book in my Meonbridge Chronicles series, set in medieval England. This story centres, not on Meonbridge, as the other novels do for the most part, but on a priory, to which one of the characters in the first Chronicle, Fortune’s Wheel, departed under something of a cloud. I always wanted to follow up what happened to her, but wasn’t sure that setting a novel almost entirely in a nunnery would make for an engaging story. So, I wrote other novels, about other characters, as the idea for this latest one gradually developed in my mind.

Then I discovered – or, actually, I think, re-discovered – Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535, a vast tome written in the 1920s by the well-known medieval historian, Eileen Power.

To digress briefly, I’ve often wondered who Eileen Power presumed her readership was… I have two others of her books, Medieval People and Medieval Women, and both include a few snatches of medieval texts, but I think I’m right in saying the quotes are translated into modern English. So perhaps those books were intended for a more-or-less inexpert readership. But Medieval English Nunneries is not only vast, with great quantities of notes, but is also littered with Middle English, Medieval French, and Latin, some of which is translated but a lot of which is not. Which overall makes it a challenging read for one who is not a trained, academic historian!

Nonetheless, I have read Medieval English Nunneries from cover to cover, and what I learned from it really opened my eyes, and soon enough I understood that writing a story about a medieval nunnery could indeed be engaging, not to say surprising and even exhilarating.

For what I read was that some medieval nunneries weren’t at all the havens of peace and prayer I might have expected them to be.…

Hildegard von Bingen and her nuns 13th century. Public domain.

There were apparently around 140 nunneries (priories and a few abbeys) in England in the later Middle Ages. Most were very poor, despite being largely inhabited by the aristocracy and gentry and, later, some women from upper-middle-class mercantile families. Many nunneries were small, very few with more than thirty nuns, a little over a quarter with between 10 and 20, well over half fewer than 10. As economic units, some of them must have struggled.

From what I gather, nunneries were not necessarily poor from lack of good management, but simply because their income was low. They would have relied on donations from benefactors, either permanent or long-term endowments, or shorter term or even one-off gifts from friends, relatives or people who wanted the nuns to pray for their or their loved-ones’ souls. The nunnery would also have the income from its estate, such as rents from tenants and money from the sale of crops. But their expenses were many: the costs of day-to-day living, food, clothing, candles, firewood; wages for servants (of which there could be several, even in relatively poor establishments); the costs of maintaining the buildings, which clearly could be huge; alms-giving to the poor, something nuns were supposed to do, albeit they were poor themselves! A few houses were wealthy, and presumably didn’t really struggle, but in many, if not most, the expenses often outstripped the income. Even in well-managed houses, the battle to keep their heads above the choppy waters of destitution must have been a real challenge.

That this was a problem can be construed from the measures put in place by bishops to safeguard nunneries’ financial health. The prioress was not supposed to make decisions by herself, but together with all the nuns – this communality of decision-making was a requirement of the Benedictine rule, and likely that of other orders too. Accounts were to be presented regularly to the bishop’s representatives, and it might seem obvious that a nunnery should have someone with specific responsibility for its finances (i.e. a treasuress), rather than letting the prioress have sole oversight. 

Cornelia Africana - What a woman

 My previous posts about Roman women have centered on victims (Lucretia and Virginia) and villains (Tarpeia and Tullia Minor) whose virtues and vices served as exemplars both good and bad. Today I write about another celebrated woman who was seen as the architype of a Roman Matron. Her name is Cornelia Africana. 

Unlike the other women who were legendary figures, Cornelia’s existence is verifiable through the writing of the Greek historian, Plutarch, who refers to Cornelia in his histories about her two famous sons, the Gracchi Brothers.

Born around 190 BCE, Cornelia Minor was the daughter of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the famed Roman general and hero of the Second Punic War, and Aemilia Paulla. Her name, ‘Africana’, derives from the cognomen ‘Africanus’ granted to her father after his conquest of the Carthaginians in North Africa. Like Lucretia, Cornelia is seen as an embodiment of civic virtue but she is a far more complex character given her interest in literature and ‘behind the scenes’ influence on politics.

Cornelia and her jewels by Angelica Kauffman, 1785

Cornelia grew up in luxury within an aristocratic household where her father encouraged appreciation of Greek culture and art. She was also schooled in Stoicism, a philosophy which espouses facing the vicissitudes of life with equal fortitude.

At seventeen she was married to the middle-aged Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in what appears to have been a happy marriage. There is an apocryphal story her husband discovered two snakes in his bed chamber, a male and a female. He consulted a seer who told him that he must kill one and let the other go. If he killed the male, he himself would die, and if he killed the female, Cornelia would perish. Such was his love for his young wife, Tiberius opted to kill the male snake, and he passed away not long afterward.

During their marriage, Cornelia bore twelve children of whom only three survived to adulthood –a daughter, Sempronia (later married to her notorious cousin Scipio Aemilianus to maintain the Scipio dynasty), and two sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (born nine years apart). She proudly claimed her children as ‘her jewels’.

When her husband died, Cornelia refused the hand of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes of Egypt and chose not to remarry, thereby fulfilling the role of the dutiful ‘univera’ ie a ‘one man woman’ loyal to her husband in life and death. Yet such a choice may well have been a shrewd way to ensure her own independence as well as control over her children’s lives. She already held an esteemed reputation due to her bloodline, and therefore could make choices for herself, a rarity in the ancient world. She thereafter devoted herself to her children’s education. Emulating her famous father’s Graecophilia, she hired the Greek philosopher, Blossius of Cumae, and the rhetorician, Diophanes of Mitylene, as tutors.

The Gracchi Brothers would go on to leave significant marks on Roman history as reformists who proposed the Roman State and wealthy landowners give land to poorer citizens. As a result, Tiberius and Gaius died, a decade apart, in bloody fashion. And this is where the story of Cornelia becomes particularly interesting. Fragments of letters reputedly written to her son, Gaius, were included in the manuscripts of Cornelius Nepos, one of the earliest known Latin biographers. In these fragments, Cornelia is seen as harshly admonishing Gaius for his rebellious actions which had caused unrest in Rome. For he advocated extending citizenship to Latin speaking allies and giving greater freedoms to the plebeians thereby undermining the power of aristocracy.

“No enemy has caused me so much annoyance and trouble as you have because of these events – you who ought, as the only survivor of all the children that I have had in the past, to have taken their place and to have seen to it that I had the least possible anxiety in my old age; you who ought to have wished that all your actions should above all be agreeable to me, and should consider it impious to do anything of great importance contrary to my advice, especially when I have so brief a portion of my life left.” (Nepos, Fragments 1.2)

Cornelia’s voice is forceful and there is an assumption she gives her advice freely and expects it to be heeded. It seems this could be true. In another letter, she advised Gaius not to punish a politician who had been an enemy of his brother which he duly obeyed.

More Venetian than the Venetians

 There is a little corner of Venice that is forever Slav.

I’m devoting this blog to that corner, which is best known for its jewel-box of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio, the artist commissioned by the Slavs of Venice to depict their own saints in their own sacred place, the Scuola Dalmata dei Santi Giorgio e Trifone.

It’s a thousand years since Venice and the Slavs, known as the Schiavoni, were first drawn into a warm and symbiotic relationship by proximate geography and mutual interest. With the Ottomans encroaching ever further west and Mediterranean pirates increasingly audacious, Venice represented both a place and source of safety for the threatened Christian populations of the western Balkans. And Dalmatia in turn stood as Venice’s last line of defence against a Turkish domination of the Adriatic.

In 998 AD, the Dalmatian city-states appealed to Doge Pietro Orseolo for protection. The Venetian fleet swept in, hunting down and suppressing the pirates. Orseolo was welcomed as a liberator. He and his successors took the title ‘Duke of the Dalmatians’.

Domenico Tintoretto, ritratto dei dogi

Pietro Orseolo II ed Ottone Orseolo, Palazzo Ducale,

courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Over the next four hundred years, the whole Dalmatian coast became part of the Stato da Màr, the name given to la Serenissima’s overseas possessions. Trade relations flourished; so did the population of Schiavoni living in Venice.

 

In 1368, Perast – in modern Montenegro – was named Venice’s "FEDELISSIMA GONFALONIERA" – most faithful flagbearer. In peace-time, the Venetian war standard was held by the Captain of Perast. In times of war, that banner was hoisted on the navy’s flagship. Each year, twelve Perastini, chosen from the most valiant, swore to die rather than allow the Venetian flag to fall into enemy hands. More on this later.

Foundling Stories - Stacey Halls and Rose Tremain

 In 1747, in a fine room at the splendid buildings of London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright holds her one-day-old baby girl. Alongside other mothers, Bess draws a ball from a bag in a lottery held to decide who will win a place for their child as a pupil. This game of chance is played out under the eyes of invited benefactors, wealthy ladies and gents, who witness the show of human drama. Thus starts ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls. 

In 1850, a baby, wrapped in sacking is abandoned at the gates of a wintry park in London where she is scented by wolves from the Essex marshes. She is found by a policeman, who hears the wolves’ howling and takes her to the Foundling Hospital. Thus begins ‘Lily’ by Rose Tremain. 

A separated family is a powerful engine to drive a story and perhaps the most poignant separation of all is that of a mother and baby. Stories of ‘foundlings’, babies found abandoned by parents or handed over in desperation to foundling hospitals, start with this heart-breaking premise and immediately fire the reader with a strong desire to see parent and child reunited. For me, this desire would probably be enough on its own to keep me reading but the two books above offer so much more in their examining of the relationships of adults caught up in the drama.

THE FAMILY DOLL

 In the earlier days of THE HISTORY GIRLS, we used to have a 'Cabinet of Curiosities.' I think this family heirloom I am briefly going to talk about would make an interesting addition to the said cabinet.  

 My family has a wax doll that has been handed down the generations in the female line (of my father's side) to the youngest daughter in the family since the mid 19th century. It's first owner was a little girl called Mary Lees, who was born on June 9th 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution. On her tenth birthday, her uncle presented her with a wax doll in a glass and wooden case and she kept it and passed it on to her daughter in due course. We know this because there is a note inside the doll's case that tells us her intentions for the doll for when she had passed away. 

"This doll is the property of Mary Blunt and was presented to her by her uncle on her 10th birthday in the year 1785. And at her death she wishes it to be for her youngest daughter Elizabeth. October 24th 1857"

 Mary Lees married a William Blunt, and the doll became the property of their youngest daughter Elizabeth, born in 1823. Elizabeth passed it to her youngest daughter, Martha, who in turn passed it on to her own youngest, Elizabeth, my great aunt, born in 1901,and now it has come to me. 

We don't know the purchase place of the doll. Oral family history says Paris, but it wasn't written down. She stands in her glass case, blue eyes, bright rosy cheeks and ash-blonde hair, surrounded by a hoop of artificial flowers, and two delightful, smiling china poodles either side of her body -which is stuffed and encased in linen. The face and the hands are the only parts made from wax as far as we can tell. She was never a child's toy in the way that toys are played with today, but certainly a treasured piece handed down from mother to daughter through the centuries. Who knows what she has heard and seen! 

 Her flocked gown is in two layers and the white, semi-transparent upper fabric turns her gown a soft pink. The under-dress is a fabulous rose-coral. She has stood in her case down the generations of my family and with her written provenance for two hundred and fifty years. The next custodian will either be my niece or my granddaughter, but that will be decided in time. For now she dwells with me. It has been said that she is a bit creepy, but when I look at her smiling poodles, I am totally reassured that she is a benign heirloom.

  I wonder if my great, great, great, great grandmother's uncle ever thought when he gave his niece Mary Lees this doll for her 10th birthday in 1785, that although generations have come and gone, his gift would still be here now, seeing in 2025 with her family.