The Writing on the Wall

The college was in high celebratory mood last weekend, as we marked the opening of Somerville’s gleaming new ROQ buildings, which will provide accommodation for 68 second-year undergraduates from October. Niall McLaughlin Architects told the Fellows right from their opening pitch for this project that their practice was to work closely with potential users to create the best possible, people-friendly buildings. It is now clear how true to their word they were – the ROQ buildings have textured interior walls which look like a modern art installation, glass towers to shine light into the corridors, kitchens in the trendiest brightest colours, and very tempting desks in window alcoves, with views onto the developing Radcliffe Observatory Quarter (as it takes shape under a forest of cranes…)

What most impressed me about the buildings, however, were not their aesthetic or eco-friendly credentials, but the way in which the two structures embody memory. Memory is a concept (or a social phenomenon) which historians have become increasingly interested in the past decade. At the University of Leiden, for example, Professor Judith Pollmann is leading a project on local memories of the 16C Dutch Revolt in the 17C, while Janet Watson’s 2007 monograph studied memories of the First World War in Britain. The corridors of the ROQ buildings are full of plaques. These don’t give just the name of the donor who sponsored an individual student room, kitchen, or entire floor, but carry messages from those donors to future student-inhabitants. Whole year groups (e.g. year of 1960) have sponsored rooms, to celebrate the formative 3 years they spent together at Somerville. Certain rooms have been dedicated in memory of late Somervillians, by their friends and contemporaries. A recent JCR President sponsored a kitchen - his plaque gives a favourite quote from Lucretius, and urges students to enjoy their time here. On another plaque, two major benefactors celebrate the fact that they met as Oxford undergraduates, and remember their subsequent marriage in a church close to the college. The ROQ buildings, in a very-past conscious way, transmit and store memory. They are an eloquent and moving reminder that an Oxford college is not just a collection of smart buildings, but a dynamic inter-generational community.

Landscape, Memory and the Mercury

Last night (don’t ask how) I ended up with a ticket to the sort of event Oxford dons don’t find themselves at all that often, the Barclaycard Mercury Music Awards. This is a big annual shin-dig for the UK music industry, where the best album of the year is announced in the massively crowded Great Room of the Grosvenor House hotel on Park Lane. It made even Christ Church hall at full capacity look rather small.

The 12 albums nominated for the award were very varied – from the Fife folk singers King Creosote and Jon Hopkins, to the hiphop singer Ghostpoet, to the jazz pianist Gwilym Simcock. I was very much struck by how many of them took as their themes the British landscape and, indeed, British history. My Somerville English colleague, Professor Fiona Stafford, has recently written a prize-winning study of the sense of place in English poetry, Local Attachments: the Province of Poetry. There was an acute sense of place in these music albums too – in Metronomy’s electro-pop hymn of praise to Devon (The English Riviera), King Creosote and Jon Hopkins quite meditations on coastal villages of Fife in Diamond Mine, in Elbow’s recollections of their Manchester childhoods in Build a Rocket Boys!

But these songs aren’t just about an English or Scottish physical landscape, but also about nostalgia and a British sense of past. Diamond Mine includes field recordings of Fife oral history as part of the album, and the most historically-conscious album of all, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, was in fact the winner. Harvey’s bold album is a meditation on English identity as expressed (this is my reading, at least!) through the experience of English military interventions abroad – it’s about WWI as much as it’s about present-day Afghanistan. Harvey recorded the album in a 19C Dorset church, but apparently spent months researching British military history, reading up on the Gallipoli campaign of 1915… So it was fantastic to see such careful readings of history married to cutting edge, and indeed prize-winning, forms of cultural expression.

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.