The Taxi

Is there a historian at the wheel?
Photo by Zygia

This weekend, I was at London Paddington Station’s gleaming new taxi rank (completed just in time for the Olympics), where I was directed to an old green cab. Stuck to the glass partition inside the taxi was a laminated sheet showing the covers of at least 5 books, all by a certain Alf Townsend. These, it transpired, were written by the driver himself, and they were largely history books. There was London Taxis at War (2011), an account of the Second World War in the capital based on interviews with old cabbies, the autobiographical Blitz Boy: A Evacuee’s Story (2008), and Heathrow Cabbie (2010), a mixture of driver recollections/stories, set in the context of the airport site’s history, right back to the Iron Age.

As we tried to negotiate the traffic around Regent’s Park, Alf told us about his media work, interviews and TV programmes, many of which draw deeply on the oral history of the London cabbie community. It seemed that we had jumped into the car not only of a bona fide taxi-driver celebrity, but also of a historian. It was a reminder that history-writing is a vocation and a passion which of course flourishes outside traditional institutional or professional contexts. And a London taxi, it transpires, is a pretty good platform for publishing history – Alf Townsend said he had sold over 5000 autographed copies of his books in the black cab itself, to his passengers. There is a gutsy sales approach which academics, whose historical monographs typically enjoy a humble print-run of 200, might well mull over.

Republic on the Isis?

Palace for committees?
Photo by ell brown

Over the past couple of weeks, Somerville has been conducting interviews for a new Treasurer, to oversee the college's finances and physical fabric. As with interviews for academic jobs, the candidates’ timetables include plenty of time to have coffee and lunch with current members of Governing Body (i.e. the committee of Tutorial Fellows and top college officers which is the sovereign decision-making body of any Oxford college). Over Greek salad, quiche and chocolate tart we’ve had the chance to chat about our work, about the everyday life of the college, and the character of Somerville. In particular, I’ve found myself trying to explain how the college’s governance functions. I sometimes think the best analogy is an early modern European one – that Oxford colleges, and indeed the University itself, are best understood as a Renaissance republican city state, perhaps 15C Venice.

When I started teaching the Renaissance Special Subject some 5 years ago, I gained a slightly better understanding of how Oxford's hugely complex governance works, at college and university level. In Renaissance Venice and Florence, the republican liberty of citizens (academics) was of paramount importance - freedom from external domination/occupation (government) and freedom from internal tyranny (powerful administrators?). This liberty was embodied in the Grand Council, or Venetian assembly, a body perhaps akin to Congregation, Oxford's famous 'parliament of dons'. The Venetians tried to defend their liberty by creating a fabulously complex structure of overlapping committees - a system designed to be so baffling that few could grasp it (let alone dominate it), where some committees were genuinely powerful and other only appeared to be so. To prevent chaos or statis, there was a Doge - officially only a ceremonial figurehead with strictly limited authority, but in practice often the only person who understood the system, and who was able to provide leadership. In this kind of republic, power was everywhere and also nowhere. I don't know what last week's candidates, with their diverse career backgrounds, made of our explanations of Governing Body. Living in a republic, in a consensus- and committee-driven system, can certainly have its frustrations. But, like 15C Venetian patricians, I've come to agree (on most days!) that these are ultimately a price worth paying for liberty.

Going for Gold

Will she make it?
Photo from Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games

Earlier in the week, BBC 3 broadcast a programme called Girl Power: Going forGold, which over 9 months followed three athletes as they fought to get selected for Team GB’s Olympic Women’s Weightlifting squad. Weightlifting is not a world I’m particularly familiar with, but it was compelling watching Zoe from London, Helen from Devon and Hannah from Birmingham settling into life at the national training camp in Leeds. It was interestingly difficult to predict who would win those coveted Team GB places – whether natural talent, ability to perform under pressure, single-mindedness or simple number of hours spent in the gym would win out. But what I kept muttering to myself as I sat in front of the TV was: “why an earth are you doing this?” Why would you sacrifice everything else (e.g. your A-levels), move far from home, devote 3/5/10 years of your life and train 6-10 hours a day, when the odds of getting an Olympic team place are poor? Six contenders, two places.

But, of course, academia is exactly the same, and in some respects worse. You invest 4-5 years of your life doing a Masters and a Phd/D.Phil, possibly struggling to find the money to pay for this, working long hours, often abroad and far from home… and when the thesis is done, you hope to be selected for a postdoctoral position. The classic, coveted Oxbridge post-doc is the JRF (Junior Research Fellowship), and these can easily attract 300 applicants for each advertised post. For even a one-year temporary History lectureship, you’re typically looking at 1 winner out of 60+ applicants. Like trying to break into top-level international sport, academia is high risk and high reward. Up-and-coming weightlifters and historians alike do it because they are passionate about their work, and believe (rightly or wrongly) they are talented enough, or lucky enough, to get the chance to compete at London 2012, or to join the Senior Common Room of an Oxford college. Winner takes all – it’s a great system if you’re one of the winners, a pitiless one if you’re not.

Class List

Ready for your results?
Photo by aprilskiver

Today, we’re expecting the results of the Oxford first-year History exams, Prelims, to be published; Finals results came out at the end of June. The publishing of the so-called class lists is a major Oxford ritual (and rite of passage), but one which has changed substantially in the past five years or so.

For generations, it was the case that results were printed out on a stark white sheet and one master copy pinned up in the Examination Schools, looking much like a legal notice in a UK polling station. To find out how you had done, you had to make a trip to the cavernous entrance hall of the Schools, and identify which of the scores of giant sheets on the walls related to History. This was all very well if you were still in Oxford when your results came out (which most students were not). I received my Prelims results over a pay phone on a cross-channel ferry, desperately trying to hear what the man in the Exam Schools was saying, over the din of engines, slot machines and the duty free shop. I learnt my Finals results standing in my future mother-in-law’s kitchen in Scotland, calling the JCR President of Magdalen on his mobile, the only person I knew still with a college room in Oxford, who had nipped across the road to look at the lists for me.

That ritual has now gone – for a while the class lists were published on-line in PDF form, so you could scan the grainy image on your screen to see how your students had fared. Now, as a tutor, I don’t see a class list at all. Instead, I log onto the university’s massive student database, OSS, and search for results by individual student’s surname – it may be less glamorous, traditional and heart-stopping than standing in front of an A3 sheet of paper in a Victorian lobby, but I can at least see for the first time what all students (including those I taught from other colleges) scored on individual papers, without having to ask their college tutors. I do nonetheless miss my annual pilgrimage to the Exam Schools, which added a sense of occasion and solemnity to the whole process. But the thrill, satisfaction, pride (and, sometimes, relief) you feel when students whom you taught get Firsts or Distinctions is still the same. 

Francis Xavier’s Giant Seaweed

Fit for a saint? Kelp off the Californian coast.
Photo by richard ling.

I’ve just returned from a two-week holiday in Portugal, spent mostly in Sagres, a small town on the extreme south-western tip of Europe, a windswept area of wild heathland and dramatic sea views. One of the most intriguing documents I saw on holiday was a menu left out on the kitchen worktop of our villa, listing the treatments available at the resort’s Finisterra spa. Spa menus often contain a lot of Asian treatments and references – I’m never sure how far these massages etc. genuinely originate in Thailand or India, and how much spas simply are adding an orientalising flavour to draw people in.

The Finisterra brochure rather took me aback, because its core ‘rituals’ (2 hour treatments, costing 160 Euros) are inspired not by ancient Siamese healing practices, but by fifteenth and early sixteenth century Portuguese history. There is a Henry the Navigator ritual, a ‘relaxing and calming treatment’ which involves a lavender body scrub, a seaweed wrap and a compress of chamomile. There are rituals inspired by Gil Eanes, the Portuguese mariner who first rounded the western bulge of Africa, Cape Bojador, and a Vasco da Gama ritual, which uses aromatic oils, heated jasper and semi-precious stones in reference to his discovery of a sea passage to India. When I saw this, I laughed (of course), but I wasn’t really quite sure what to make of the fact that the great modern scholarship on the Age of Discovery which I read with my General VII (15C European history) students has here been reduced to a very expensive set of massages.

On the one hand, it’s rather encouraging that a spa in the western Algarve, catering almost exclusively to British tourists, is keen to share its national and local history, and takes pride in it – Henry the Navigator’s fort in Sagres is a (heated) stone’s throw from Finisterra. In a way, as a late medievalist I find it flattering that 15C history is seen as relevant, exotic and marketable enough to use in this way. Then again, the rituals do seem to trivialise Iberia’s dramatic late medieval history just a little bit. It wasn’t all brave men in caravels – what about the attempted invasions of North Africa, or Portuguese explorers’ role in the West African slave trade? And some of the rituals might simply be in bad taste. The ‘Japan Francisco Xavier’ ritual, for example (a body wrap in a giant seaweed) is inspired by the priests who travelled across the sea to spread Catholicism  –  but a lot of Xavier’s fellow missionaries to Japan, and their local converts (such as the Martyrs of Nagasaki), came to horribly grisly ends. A giant seaweed wrap doesn’t quite seem an appropriate response to that. I’m unlikely ever again to be offered spa rituals based on topics I teach in tutorial, but I didn’t try them. If someone lends me 160 Euros, maybe next time…

Cashing in?

I was at the British Library earlier this week, and found sheets of official paper neatly laid out on each desk in the Humanities I Reading room. This sight makes me slightly nervous, as it can indicate an announcement of imminent industrial action, or a broken book-retrieving machine in the stacks, but in this case the papers turned out to be a questionnaire, an exercise by the private research consultancy Oxford Economics. As the Chief Executive of the BL explains in her covering letter, the aim of this research is to ‘quantify the impact of the Library on the UK economy’, with a view to lobbying the government more effectively.

Some of the questions were simple enough, to capture economic activity associated with coming to the BL – how much do you spend on public transport to get here, how much do you spend on food in our cafe? But the two questions which gave me most food for thought were ones which conjured up an alternative world, in which access to a research library becomes (just?) a commodity, which can be purchased for the right price. What would be the maximum amount you would be willing to pay per month as a donation or subscription…? – how much would you fork out for the right to sit in these beautiful spaces and read Władysław Pociecha’s account of the 1519-21 Polish-Prussian war? Rather sheepishly, I wrote in pencil £25, because that’s slightly more than the sum you might pay for membership of a big scholarly association, like the Renaissance Society of America. Then, a question which made my eyes widen at my desk: Imagine the BL… allowed existing Readers to sell their Pass. What is the minimum amount you would be willing to accept? What is that piece of green plastic worth to you?

What's it worth to you?

In this hypothetical scenario, you can imagine BL cards traded furiously on e-bay, or exchanged for cash on seedy street corners behind King’s Cross station. I conjured up some fantastical sums in my head (£5K, £10K?), before putting my pen down because, cheesy though it sounds, to an academic a BL pass is probably priceless. Even scholars live in a material world, and function within a wider economy, whether they like it or not, so there’s no point in putting one’s head totally in the sand. The BL has to make a loud case for public funding, and it is of course regrettable that education and research (the pursuit of better understanding of the world) increasingly have to be justified in purely economic terms. But even in this climate, the hypothetical act of putting a price on an individual's lifetime access to ‘the world’s knowledge’ (to quote the BL’s slogan), to the national research collection, still has a rather dystopian chill to it. So I’m still carrying the questionnaire around in my bag, unsure whether to hand it over to Oxford Economics or not.

Peering into a black box?

A new experiment

This spring, a very exciting little email pinged into my inbox, informing me that my current project on the early Reformation in the kingdom of Poland (a rather under-studied and contentious field!) had been awarded a British Academy MidCareer Fellowship for the academic year 2011-12. This grant in effect pays for Somerville and the History Faculty to hire a replacement lecturer to cover my teaching, pastoral and administrative duties for a year, so that I can have a clear run at finishing the book.

While I’m on research leave here in Oxford (and occasionally Poland) for the next 16 months or so, this blog will continue in its usual way. As part of the British Academy award, however, I’ll be writing in parallel an on-line log (or diary) about progress on the book, called History Monograph. The aim of the History Monograph site is certainly not to bombard people with the minutiae of the early Polish Reformation as I unearth them. Rather, the purpose of the book log is to (take a risk!) and make visible the traditionally invisible process of how academics in the Humanities go about producing a 100,000 research monograph single-handedly. So for anyone writing, or who has ever written, a big chunk of non-fiction prose, this website aims to provide a space to share thoughts, experiences and tactics – not just about the hard-core intellectual problem of how best to structure an argument, or ways of maintaining some clarity of vision, but also about the everyday human challenges of spending months on a major writing exercise, with a looming deadline. I hope the website will come to function as a collective virtual workshop (or even self-help group!) on academic writing, and a further window into the world of a research historian.

The idea for the History Monograph log came in part following a conversation I had in Somerville SCR with Dr. Frank Prochaska – historian of 19C England, and husband of our Principal – about how he tackles the writing of a chapter, or a paragraph. As tutors, we continually give our students pointers on how to write a better introduction, essay or presentation. After speaking with Frank, however, it struck me that I had never had such a conversation with fellow academic. It is as if our personal approaches to academic/history writing are a private, closely-guarded and mysterious dark art – you lock an academic in a study for a year, and a book emerges, abracadabra! Book/article/thesis writing is surely an area where not only can our students learn from us, but where all writers can learn from each other. I have no idea how my personal approach to book-writing compares with that of colleagues, graduates or other professionals, but I look forward to finding out in the coming months...