Historians and Riots

Mousehold Heath, site of 1549 Norwich camp
Photo by Evelyn Simak

On the morning after the worst of the English riots this month, I was rather unimpressed to hear the BBC newsreader announce in the 7am headlines that the UK had woken up ‘to the aftermath of the worst rioting seen in Britain for years.’ Well, how many years? The worst riots since Brixton in 1981? Or since the 18C London Gordon riots? Or the 16C London Apprentice riots? It’s hard to understand events around you if you lack any comparative perspective at all.

At times of national crisis or alarm, there is a certain expectation of historians to use their expertise to speak intelligently about present events. Most historians are, however, wary of making comparisons between past and present phenomena (e.g. riots) which might come across as glib or banal, like a bad undergraduate 'Comparative History' essay. The most prominent historian’s intervention in the riots debate so far, that of Dr. David Starkey, wasn’t a happy one – his comments about underclass culture on the BBC’s Newsnight have caused a storm of controversy. (David Starkey on the riots)

Unlike many of my Oxford colleagues, or indeed Dr. Starkey,  I’m not a research expert on Tudor England, but for what it’s worth during the August Riots I kept walking around my house muttering ‘it’s just like 1549’. 1549 not only saw major rebellions in the West Country and East Anglia, but also – as Amanda Jones demonstrates in her forthcoming book 'Commotion Time' -- witnessed protest/rebel camps springing up all over England, in 25 different counties, from Cornwall to the Pennines. For contemporary elites, it was a terrifying and totally novel experience of popular disorder, which spread like a virus. The camps of 1549, like the August 2011 riots, were so geographically widespread, numerous and piecemeal that it was (and is) difficult to synthesise them into a single narrative. Historians, you might not be surprised to know, have always been massively divided about the causes of the 1549 ‘commotion time’ – culprits include enclosure of common land (causing economic hardship), violent support for or dissent from the Reformation, the break-down of local feudal relationships, the rise of new economic groups, or alienation caused by government centralisation, etc. But at the time, of course, contemporaries blamed simple human greed and wickedness - they talked of a moral crisis.

The Fifth Cellar

Paris Opera House, by Scarlet Green

I’ve come back to Oxford from North America to find the Bodleian Library strangely changed. While I was away, the Bodleian finally replaced the old Telnet catalogue which I’d used since 1995 with a more 21^st century interface, which has made the fruits of the digital revolution more accessible. But in particular, a space called the Gladstone Link has been created. As an undergraduate, one heard rumours of a subterranean tunnel which ran under cobbled Radcliffe Square, linking the Bodleian's different buildings, and of five layers of underground book stacks, peopled only by silent librarians pushing books on little creaking trolleys, like pit ponies.

Some of this quasi-legendary, unseen world has now been opened up to readers. In the Radcliffe Camera, a stairwell lit with strange blue-white lights opens up at your feet, and you can follow it down into the stacks, into low-ceilinged levels with early twentieth-century wheeled book stacks, and climb up a wrought iron Edwardian staircase, follow a very narrow corridor which invokes the older stations of the London Underground, and emerge in the main Bodleian, as if by magic. The Gladstone Link has not only transformed my sense of the Bodleian Library as a great, labyrinthine connected network of reading rooms, tunnels and deep underground spaces, but has also put me in mind of the Phantom of the Opera. I recently reread Gaston Leroux’s 1911 gothic thriller, with its descriptions of people bravely descending down through the five layers of cellars underneath the massive neo-baroque edifice of Charles Garnier’s Opèra de Paris. So the revamp of the Bodleian, as well as making life more efficient and exciting for researchers, has also added a touch of the literary Gothic to the Oxford landscape.

Seeing is believing

The Enola Gay. Photo by Bernt Rostad.

After Bermuda, I ended up in Washington DC at the peak of a heat wave. One of the new museums, in that city of museums, to have opened up since I was last there is an extension of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, in a giant museum-hangar near Dulles Airport. This is where the aeronautical exhibits too big to fit in a regular city-centre museum are displayed – objects such as Concorde, for example, or the space shuttle Enterprise.

One of the most celebrated exhibits in the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Centre, however, is the Enola Gay. This huge silvery-shiny, gleaming machine is the aircraft which dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945, causing the deaths of between 118,000 and 140,000 people. As I hovered uncomfortably by the modest information board in front of the Enola Gay, three elderly Americans were clustered in front of it. The lady said: ‘You read about it, and that’s one thing, but to actually see it…’.

I initially thought this was quite a glib comment, but now I’m not so sure. It’s striking how journalists can report on major world events, and historians can make films and write books about them, but it’s only when presented with the physical evidence that they somehow become truly credible to a wider public. It’s as if we’re all semi-consciously suspending disbelief about the past events we read and write about, until they prove themselves to have had some material existence outside the text.

I don’t think professional researchers are immune from this kind of instinct. When I finished writing my doctorate, my husband bought me as a present two tiny coins minted in 15C Poland during the lifetime (and indeed the regency) of Cardinal Fryderyk Jagiellon, the churchman on whom I’d written my thesis. Once I had seen these little artefacts, I believed a little bit more in the existence of the late medieval world I had spent 3 years trying to reconstruct and recreate; and I hadn’t really been aware of not fully believing in it. Perhaps this is why historians are so resistant to the idea of being denied access to original sources in libraries, and directed to digitalised versions instead – the text shimmering on the screen, just like the text in printed reproduction, doesn’t feel as real as the cool leather and crisp, dry pages of a 15C early printed book. We seem to need the authentic, old material thing itself to fend away an involuntary suspension of disbelief about the past – even the well documented recent past of WWII. ‘You read about it but…’

Books on Bermuda

This dispatch comes not from Oxford, but from Paget parish in Bermuda - England's oldest self-governing colony, a speck of land in the mid-Atlantic, a chain of islands formed by the peaks of ancient submarine volcanos. When travelling, it's always a treat to go equipped with historical novels set in the place I'm visiting - I remember how memorable it was reading Tim Willock's flamboyant epic romance, "The Religion", about the 16C seige of Malta, in a hotel built into the ramparts of the very fort where much of the action is set.

I couldn't find all that much by way of appealing historical fiction set in, or even history about, Bermuda before I left the UK, but it's been salutary to see how even in this age of three-click access to a wealth of published and antique books, and exhaustive on-line catalogues, the local on-the-ground bookshop can still offer treasure-troves of publications which internet trawls fail to pick up. I walked into the National Trust of Bermuda giftshop, for example, in a little alley off the Hamilton waterfront, and was directed to a book section. It was apparently modest, 20 titles or so, but they included detailed guides to the historical architecture of every parish on this small island, memoirs of colonial life, and a gleaming volume, 'Butler's History of the Bermudas', a new edition  (2007, by C.F.E Hollis Hallett) of a 1623 account of early colonial life in Bermuda, written by one of the archipelago's first governors.

So, instead of reading Bermudian historical novels while I'm here, I'm instead enjoying this 17C historical source, which is making for lively and funny reading. This is perhaps one of the penalties of being a historian. My old tutor at Lincoln College once expressed the wish that his teenage son would not become a historian like his father 'because it's a burden'. I've often wondered what exactly he meant by that remark, but maybe it was precisely this - the inability to just let things be their present selves, the need to locate everywhere you see in time as well as space, a sense that a place isn't at all comprehensible until you can clearly picture the early 17C settlers catching cahoo birds, watching their wooden watch-towers blown down in hurricanes, and anxiously scanning the blue horizon for Spanish galleons.

Remembering Jonny

There hasn’t been a blog for a little while, because we’ve been dealing with a tragic situation in Somerville over the past week – the death of one of our first year history students, Jonathan (or Jonny) Roberts, three days before he was due to sit his Prelims exams.

The college held a commemoration service last Thursday in Somerville Chapel, which was attended by over 200 people. I was Jonny’s personal tutor, and you can read the address which I gave at the service, remembering Jonny, by clicking here. I shall miss Jonny very much, and I extend my very deepest sympathy to his family and friends, in Somerville and beyond.

Remembering Vilnius

Vilnius. Photo by Philip Capper

For many years now, in the summer/Trinity term, I’ve been attending and latterly co-convening the Central European History seminar. One of our speakers this term was an Oxford graduate student who is writing his doctoral thesis on the interwar Vilnius dispute – that is, the diplomatic standoff created when in 1920 Polish troops seized the city claiming it was historically Polish, to the horror of the Lithuanians who claimed it as the capital of an independent Lithuania.

It was particularly interesting to hear Donatas talk about his research, because my grandmother grew up in Vilnius in the 1920s. Whereas Donatas talks about documents in

the British Foreign Office archives relating to the dispute, Lord Curzon’s bemused reactions and the frustrations of Lithuanian diplomats, my grandmother talks about the city’s festivals, street markets, the Jewish and Karaite communities, the divination rituals traditional on All Souls night and, indeed, sleigh-rides in the snow. Her stories make interwar Vilnius feel like the setting for a magical realist novel – back in 2002 the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer did in fact write a prize-winning magical realist novel, Everything is Illuminated, based on his own grandmother’s recollections of her pre-war Ukrainian village.

I was struck by the distance between Donatas’ research in public archives on the diplomatic battles over interwar Vilnius, and the memories of a child growing up in that contested space, the private family oral archive, if you will. Those two narratives of 1920s’ Vilnius don’t contradict one another, but they are radically different in their textures and concerns. It’s this potentially difficult tension between a public/national history, and one’s own personal family histories, which is one of the reasons why I don’t work on 20C Poland/Lithuania, fascinating field though it is. I would find it hard to work in archives with my grandmother’s voice at my ear, hard to keep the sources at arm’s length, and hard, in fact, to stand back and (as a professional historian) study my own close relatives as historical actors.

Exams Past



They all wear a pink carnation...
Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography



            June means Finals season in Oxford, with the History finalists soon to sit the last of their exams. It’s an odd feeling as a tutor standing at your window, looking out over the quad, and seeing students all dressed up in black-and-white sub-fusc exam-uniform, complete with symbolic carnation, faces set in concentration, setting out to sit a Finals exam in a paper you taught them.

            When I arrived at Lincoln College as a Fresher in the 1990s, we had an initial meeting with the History tutors in the panelled Wesley room, where we sat literally at their feet on the carpet. We were told then, among other memorable things, that the horror of sitting Finals never quite leaves you. One of the tutors said cheerfully: ‘You’ll dream about it for the rest of your life.”

            Alumni I meet often assure me this is true, but I wonder if the post-finals condition is particularly bad among those who stay on at Oxford as tutors & Fellows, watching generations of students go through the same stimulating but slightly grim ritual every single summer. In fact, the Finals nightmares I have nowadays tend to involve my students’ performances rather than my own. I’ve had dreams where I was at a raucous dinner on High Table, and realised to my horror that as the dons sat, feasted, drank and caroused, the hall was full of students trying to sit a Finals paper. I’ve dreamt that I was invigilating as Somerville students sat the ‘Conquest and Colonisation of the Americas’ paper I teach, and leafing through the exam to see in shock that the questions were written not in English, but in the Amerindian languages of Nahuatl, Quechua and Mayan! So the responsibilities of teaching the Oxford degree weigh particularly heavily at the moment, and I too will be glad when it’s all over and the historians can put away their subfusc for another year, and I can stop dreaming about sitting at a tiny desk, with just a fountain pen, a paper booklet and a ticking clock.