Review: David Starkey’s ‘Magna Carta’, BBC2

Having most recently appeared on our screens in characteristically forthright style on Question Time in an entertaining head-to-head with Mehdi ‘Kuffar’ Hasan (not to mention the rest of the panel), David Starkey returned to BBC2 this evening in his professional guise as a popular historian, commemorating the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta. Indeed, this year also marks two other significant anniversaries: the 600^th of Agincourt, and the bicentennial of Waterloo, but it would seem churlish to focus upon victories over our nearest continental neighbour, rather than celebrating a significant step towards something that we have yet to satisfactorily achieve: democracy, which remains very much a flawed work in progress. 

Starkey was in his element, providing not only the story of how Magna Carta itself came to be formulated and amended, but how it shaped subsequent law, governance, rights and reputation not only in England, but in one of its daughter societies – the United States, leading Starkey to comment that “It matters as much now, as then.” Insofar as Magna Carta provided the English and the societies that they later fashioned – “the Anglo-Saxon world”, as Starkey termed it – with three key freedoms in the realms of life, liberty and property, it has provided inspiration to those who would wish to place a check upon an overbearing sovereign power ever since. This novel and revolutionary idea proved not to be to the tastes of those of a despotic bent in thirteenth-century Europe, just as it is not to the taste of those of an authoritarian cast of mind today. King John had given his seal to the document under duress and immediately appealed to Pope Innocent III for its annulment. Innocent duly obliged, with the Pope adjudging it to be unjust, illegal and harmful to the royal rights and to the English people.

The same tensions between the sovereign and the governed would be played out under Charles I, with Edward Coke’s ‘Petition of Right’ recapitulating many of the themes of Magna Carta in 1628. Nonetheless, as history demonstrated, Charles was not able to reconcile his concept of divine right with parliamentary checks upon the royal will, hence his bloody demise in 1649. Again, with the bloodless coup that was the Glorious Revolution of 1689, and the revolt of Englishmen who became known as the Founding Fathers of the United States a century later, Magna Carta loomed large in the minds of those who rebelled against overweening royal authority. It was this that led Starkey across the Atlantic, to examine the seminal impact of Magna Carta upon the development of US constitutionalism, noting that beneath Washington’s Capitol Building is a full copy of the Magna Carta, written in gold lettering. On the right-hand door of the US Supreme Court, one of the bronze panels depicts Magna Carta, and it is that Court which has cited Magna Carta some 400 times since the 1790s, including against Richard Nixon. 

Starkey ended his piece by bringing matters fully up to date, questioning what power and relevance Magna Carta still possesses in the fearful security-obsessed age ushered in by the 9/11 attacks, noting how the subsequent War on Terror had led to rights and liberties taking a back seat to security, with phenomena such as extraordinary rendition and detention without trial making an appearance: “Every passing month brings yet more infringements of personal liberties, in the name of the War on Terror.” Are we, he asked, “perhaps even, sleepwalking towards authoritarianism?” Is freedom being sacrificed to security? “In this day and age, is Magna Carta little more than a myth?”  

For Starkey, the greatest challenges today would appear to be to the concepts of Parliament, and even England itself. Both are being called into question.

Review: Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home

Wolf Hall is prowling about the television schedules and will finally leap upon us this evening on BBC1. Will it be any good? One thing is almost certain: it will be better than ‘The Tudors’ (the television series, rather than the Tudors themselves of course). Accompanying the launch of this much-touted drama, the BBC is showing a number of Tudor-themed programmes, one of which – Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home – was aired on BBC4 last night.  

So far as history goes, the Tudor period remains one of the most popular – in England, at any rate – but the focus is normally upon the history of the court, rich as it was in drama and intrigue, but the history of more humble folk is often overlooked. It was to this field of popular history that ‘Hidden Killers of the Tudor Home’ addressed itself, and whereas one prominent cause of domestic mortality at the time – fire – is sadly still with us, many of the others, thankfully, are not.  

The Tudor period was an age during which a recognisable domestic environment came into being, one which featured homes for the middling sort of folk possessing rooms with clearly defined functions, such as kitchen, dining room and bedroom; living spaces brought into being by the adoption of a widespread innovation: the chimney. Chimneys were a boon, insofar as they banished the smoky environment typical of longhouses which possessed an open fire placed in the middle of the dwelling, with its smoke eventually making its way out of an aperture in the roof. However, chimneys had a dark side we were informed: “The chimney brought a host of hidden dangers.” Why was this so? Well, as the art of their construction was at that time a novelty, some methods – such as building them from timber and wattle and daub – were a little unorthodox, not to mention unsafe. However, even chimneys built of a seemingly safe material such as brick proved to be dangerous. Temperatures from fires fuelled by wood could rise to 1000°C, and by coal to 1200°C. Tudor bricks could not cope with this, often exploding as a consequence; moreover, the mortar would frequently fail, and if the draw within the chimney proved to be insufficient, pooling smoke could ignite (an experiment with a mock chimney amply demonstrated the potentially devastating impact of such an instantaneous ignition). Poorly constructed chimneys thus brought with them a rash of house fires, with more fatalities arising from collapsing chimney structures than from the fires themselves.  

If you escaped from fire, you might fall prey to bad teeth, drowning, infection or childbirth, all notable killers lurking in the domestic environment; thankfully, “crushed testicles” and escaped bears were not such widespread dangers, although they were recorded as causes of death. Syphilis was an unwelcome novel addition to the age’s catalogue of misery, making its first appearance in England in 1497. Treatments for the ‘French pox’ were, unsurprisingly, all ineffective, and often featured the use of mercury, with one means of administering it being in the form of ‘Baxter’s cream’, fashioned from a mixture of lard, bees wax, herbs and mercury. Viewers were treated to the sight of some recreated ‘Baxter’s cream’ in a lab, safely contained within a glass vial to prevent its noxious vapours from poisoning its handlers.  

Drowning accounted for a startling estimated 40% of accidental deaths during the Tudor period, whereas in 2010 the corresponding figure was only 2% (perhaps part of this difference can be explained by the fact that the population during the Tudor period lacked the internal combustion engine and electricity). Our presenter – Dr Suzannah Lipscomb – treated us to a demonstration of Tudor ‘drowning’, wading into a muddy river clad in period woollen costume, attesting to the shock and involuntary gasp occasioned by immersing oneself in water with a temperature of 12°C, and the difficulty of moving around in woollen clothing that absorbs one and a half times its own weight in water. Her conclusion: heavy woollen clothing plus slippery muddy banks plus chilly water equals Tudor death from drowning. Thankfully, the camera crew were kind enough not to let her slip to a watery demise.

Richard III: ‘The King in the Car Park’ Review

This evening's documentary on Channel 4 proved to be an entertaining affair, helping to bring to life one of Shakespeare’s greatest historical villains, whilst also allowing his current supporters to put in many a good word on his part (yes, I too was astonished to find that he has living advocates). Found last summer in Leicester’s Greyfriars Car Park, it was a remarkable stroke of luck that the remains of Richard III came to light in the very first trench excavated. Indeed, this chance discovery has already spawned a rather charming tale that will be sure to pass into the folklore associated with the monarch, for the driving force behind the project – Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society – stated that when she first visited the car park she experienced a strange sensation “right over the letter R” painted onto the tarmac. Astonishingly, it was below this spot that Richard’s bones lay.

The Richard III Society itself exists to reassess and reclaim Richard’s reputation, which its members believe to have been unjustly maligned by Shakespeare; a somewhat eccentric endeavour, that has managed to attract 3,500 supporters worldwide. Although Leicester University expressed an interest and eventually became involved in the dig, it lacked the necessary funding, so it fell to the Society to raise the necessary funds – some £10,000 – which it exceeded in only two weeks of fundraising. The plan was to put in two trenches and search for the friary, but the digging began in the space marked with the R, thereby bringing the bones of the king to light almost immediately. Langley remarked that a big dark cloud came over and unleashed a “tempest the minute we discovered human remains.”

In situ, the skeleton displayed a pronounced curvature of the spine, which came as a shock to Langley, for she and her fellow Society members had taken the line that Richard’s hunchback was a piece of malicious Tudor propaganda. Whoever this was, he had suffered from severe scoliosis and had met a violent end, for the skull bore wounds inflicted at the time of death or thereabouts.

As the remains were boxed up and removed from the site, Langley wished to drape them with a replica of Richard’s standard, but some of the others had misgivings in case the bones proved to belong to someone else. Nonetheless, draped they were and off they went for further scrutiny. The next task of course, was to determine the identity of the remains, but how? Not one of the monarchs who came after Richard was a direct relative, so it fell to Michael Ibsen, a seventeenth-generation descendant of the king’s sister, to provide a source of contemporary DNA, which proved to be a match with that of a skeleton. Moreover, radio carbon dating placed the skeleton in the appropriate timeframe of 1450-1540 given Richard’s death at Bosworth in 1485.

A CT scan of the skeleton was made at a nearby hospital to construct a 3-D image. The differing sizes of his clavicles – with the right being significantly larger than the left – was suggestive, combined with the pronounced scoliosis - of the possibility that one shoulder appeared higher than the other. There was no sign of a withered arm, but his arm bones were gracile, showing him to have been slight of build. Members of the Richard III Society who spoke to the presenter via webcam were quite indignant at the suggestion that Richard actually may have possessed a spinal deformity. Moreover, they appeared to be convinced that he had not had a hand in the murder of the princes in the Tower; a partisan bunch who would happily have quarrelled with members of the Henry VII Society, should such an entity exist (astonishingly, it seems that it does! Welcome to, The Henry Tudor Experience (although without wah-wah pedals and LSD)!). The evidence of the bones however, would seem to suggest that Shakespeare was correct in having Richard say "I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks". Could it be that the political villain of our age, Tony Blair, will excite such support 500 years hence from those who aver that "He was no warmonger! He was a decent and honest man who cared for his people!" We can only hope not, though some may well wish that in future he comes to rest beneath a car park and stays there.

The traumas displayed by the skull seemed to tally with contemporary accounts of his death in which he was finished off with a poleaxe, with the wounds inflicted after his helmet had been removed. A small entry wound on the top of the skull appeared to have been inflicted by a rondel dagger. There was also a massive slice to the base of the skull that probably finished him off. Another wound was inflicted after death on his pelvis, probably by a dagger. 

The forensic reconstruction of Richard’s face proved to be somewhat kinder than the few posthumous portraits that exist, and elicited an emotional response from Langley who looked upon the face and once again averred that this was not the face of a man capable of the evils attributed to him by his successful rivals. However, this would, so the evidence of the disappearance of the princes in the Tower suggest, be more in line with wishful supposition than likelihood, for the boys had stood between Richard and the throne which he had taken for himself.

Facial Reconstruction of Richard III

Whereas the Wars of the Roses are long over, it would seem that even after having been dead for over half a millennium Richard still has the power to generate conflict, but this time around it will not thankfully involve any loss of blood, but merely a civic spat as to where his mortal remains should rightly lie. The current intention is for his skeleton to be buried in Leicester Cathedral, but a rival Yorkist challenge is being made, appropriately from the city of York itself.

It is, some claim, a matter of record that Richard had planned for his resting place to be York, for he had made provision for the construction of a vast chantry attached to York Minster that would be able to accommodate 100 monks praying for the wellbeing of his soul. Leading the lobbyists for the interment of the remains in York Minster is Kersten England of the City of York Council. On this evening’s Look North she voiced her hope that an intervention by the Queen would lead to a change of plans, but how sympathetic would the monarch prove to be? What does she think of Richard?

Leicester Cathedral is certainly a very modest structure, which was a humble church until elevated to cathedral status in 1927, hardly the sort of building in which a mediaeval king of England would have been content to rest. York Minster on the other hand, is one of the great gothic cathedrals, and would thus provide a suitably grand setting, but wherever he is laid to rest, it is unlikely that the receptacle will take the form of a sepulchre akin to the type in which other monarchs of the period were interred. Given that Leicester Cathedral lacks the draw of York Minster, it would likely welcome any tourism and associated donations that come with it. For this reason if no other, there seems sure to be a tussle over Richard’s crumbling remains. One place however, is unlikely to attract tourists of any type: the car park beneath which his skeleton was found. Lancastrians, presumably, will look upon the affair with an air of amused indifference.

Now that the remains of Richard III have been found, will anyone be moved to search for those of Alfred the Great, whose tomb was destroyed during the upheaval of the Reformation? Perhaps that would be an even more difficult task, for if they were to be found, whose DNA could be cross-referenced?

The Skeleton of Richard III

Winter 2012-2013 Weather Forecast: will Arctic Sea Ice Cover play a Role?

Arctic Sea Ice: a new record Minimum?

As anticipated, although a couple of weeks ahead of the projected date, we have this week been notified that satellite data show Arctic sea ice to be at its lowest extent since such measurements began to be taken in 1979. The melt season does not normally finish until the middle of September, so it is likely that this cover will shrink still further over the coming fortnight to three weeks, surpassing by far the previous record minimum observed in the summer season of 2007. Then, some were claiming that the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice free by the summer of 2013, but the failure of the summer melt to replicate the conditions of 2007 – until this summer that is – caused most scientists to revert to more cautious estimates of a complete annual melt at some point in the 2030s to 2040s. These observations and claims have created not only headlines, but also a degree or two of heated controversy, with these measurements being used in the political arena by a variety of advocacy groups and individuals with their own particular axes to grind, whether these be anti-Western anti-modernist Greens, or oil industry lobbyists and ‘sceptics’. This is unfortunate, for neither seeks to use the science in a dispassionate way, instead focusing upon cherry picking data that best fit their respective narratives.

It is against this backdrop that some are trumpeting these measurements as being consonant with the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, whereas others are rubbishing the data and claiming either that such conditions are not historically unusual, or that we simply lack reliable data for comparative purposes. Whilst true that satellite measurements are of only recent provenance, earlier records from submarines and surface ships are available, providing a good indication as to the extent and thickness of the Arctic sea ice back into the 1950s. These confirm not only that the ice has decreased markedly in extent since then, but also in thickness, with some estimates suggesting that the summer sea ice has lost two thirds of its volume over the period in question. The first of the graphics below shows the extent of ice at the time of writing, together with the line indicating the 30-year average for this time of year. Below that, is a map showing August sea ice recorded in 1938, which clearly indicates its much greater extent compared to today. Earlier than this, we have a rather indistinct idea of what constituted the normal limits of the ice, but a research project is currently underway, analysing thousands of observations recorded in the logs of nineteenth-century whaling vessels in order to gain a better understanding of the climatological norm during that period.

What is beyond dispute, is the fact that sea ice has a high albedo, whereas open ocean does not: snow-covered sea ice with small water gaps between the floes typically reflects approximately 85% of the solar radiation that strikes it, whereas open ocean reflects only circa 3%. The unusually high loss of Arctic sea ice this year will therefore have significant implications for the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Arctic Ocean.

Warming or a ‘New Little Ice Age’?

Piers Corbyn is at present the most well known advocate of the ‘New Little Ice Age’ (NLIA) hypothesis, with him repeatedly claiming that owing to a lull in solar radiative output akin to the Dalton or Maunder minimums, we, at least in the UK and north-western Europe, are about to experience decades of cold winters and cool summers. This, he claims, is associated with shifts in the jet stream occasioned by solar changes, the explanatory mechanism of which he has declined to submit to peer review, ostensibly for commercial reasons. If indeed it is the case that reduced solar output is associated with cooling in these areas of the globe – as seems to be suggested by historical records – then it seems odd that the ice of the northern hemisphere should today be at such a low extent. After all, the onset of the Little Ice Age was not associated with reduced ice extent, but a significant increase. The Greenland Norse for example lost contact with Europe as shipping lanes were cut by ice, presaging a gloomy extinction for the Scandinavian colony, whose marginal agriculture was unable to support the lives of its inhabitants who gradually fell victim to starvation and the arrival of the Inuit. Although some people mistakenly think that “Greenland” was named as such because it truly was “green” before the Little Ice Age, this is factually incorrect, the name having been bestowed upon the vast icy island by Eric the Red, in a bid to tempt colonists from Iceland and elsewhere in Scandinavia to venture westwards, and settle in his new colony. Iceland itself, although far more clement, found that its entire coastline was icebound during a number of winters as recently as the Eighteenth Century; in 1695, much of the coast was still surrounded by ice in July. If we are entering a new Little Ice Age as Corbyn claims, it seems distinctly odd that this passage into a new climatological regime should be accompanied by a widespread retreat of ice in the Arctic and the Alps.  

This is the sixth successive wetter than average summer across the UK.  For the NLIA advocates, this pattern could be significant, for looking back in history, Brian Fagan details a similar succession of exceptionally wet summers that presaged the end of the Mediaeval Warm Period (WWP) in Northern Europe in his book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History (Basic Books, 2000, New York). Starting seven weeks after Easter 1315, "the deluge" continued through May, June, July and August, with almost constant rain; to compound matters, both August and September were cold. The harvest failed to ripen, and much of the wheat, rye and hay that the population and its livestock was dependent upon, was lost. Fagan notes that the spring rains of 1316 led to the serious disruption of the "sowing of oats, barley and spelt. The harvest failed again and the rains continued." (p. 38). The year 1316 witnessed widespread famine across Northern Europe, with the cereal crop being the worst of the Middle Ages. A bitterly cold winter followed in 1317-1318, only to be succeeded by another wet summer with the upshot being more famine and an eruption of "religious fervour." During that harsh winter there had not been enough fodder to sustain livestock, with the consequence that many animals perished. Not until 1322 did this pattern of terrible summers come to an end across the region, yielding instead:

to unpredictable, often wild weather, marked by warm and very dry summers in the late 1320s and 1330s and by a notable increase in storminess and wind strengths in the English Channel and North Sea. The moist, mild westerlies that had nourished Europe throughout the Medieval Warm Period turned rapidly on and off . . . . The Little Ice Age had begun. (p. 44).

Could we be about to witness such a switch, or are the parellels nothing more than coincidence against a very different climatic backdrop? Fagan's observations raise some interesting questions.

Reduced Sea Ice: Cold Winters for the UK?

Putting aside disputes over the genesis of recent low levels of Arctic sea ice, there have been some interesting suggestions that the retreat of ice in this part of the world, together with its associated warming, is having a significant impact upon climate, specifically, the position of the jet stream in the northern hemisphere. One theory contends that the reduced contrast in temperature between the northern polar region and the tropics arising from a warming Arctic results in a weaker and slower moving more southerly jet stream, which has a tendency to get stuck in a particular position for long periods of time; hence, our second wettest summer on record preceded by an exceptionally wet spring (discounting March of course). Elsewhere, such as in parts of the US and Russia, this pattern has led to exceptional heat and drought, rather than to rain and subdued temperatures.

What this “sticking” of the jet stream implies for the coming winter is unclear, but if such a pattern should continue, rather than experiencing the normal run of mild Westerlies, the British Isles could once again experience something akin to the exceptional incursion of bitterly cold polar maritime air witnessed in late November and much of December 2010. This marked the beginning of the second consecutive unusually cold winter for the UK, although last year provided us with a break from this pattern. What will we see in 2012-2013? Whether the unusual disposition of the jet stream happens to be linked to reduced sea ice, ongoing low solar radiative output or a combination of both factors, will be a moot point amongst climatologists for some time yet.

Last year, The Daily Express latched onto a winter forecast by James Madden, claiming that once again we would experience a bitterly cold winter, which of course, we did not. Piers Corbyn too made similar predictions relating to exceptional cold during the early part of the winter season that proved to be wildly inaccurate. Neither independent forecasters, to the best of my knowledge, have yet released their outlook for the winter of 2012-2013, but they will do soon enough, and it will be interesting to see how much credence papers such as the Express place upon their forecasts. Journalists, when it suits them, seem to have incredibly short memories, and have thus probably forgotten the major gaffes made by Madden and Corbyn in 2011. Is anyone capable of producing an accurate long-range forecast? At this stage in the development of meteorology, probably not. Is it worth a flutter on a white Christmas at the bookies? It probably is, from the perspective of William Hill, Betfred, etc. 

UPDATE: True to form, The Daily Express did indeed publish yet another story on 17 November this year claiming that we are about to experience the 'coldest winter in 100 years'. Really? Hmm. I may not be able to forecast the weather with any accuracy, but the content of the Daily Express is rather easier to predict. By the very end of November, the Daily Mail, The Independent and The Daily Telegraph had all jumped on this same bandwagon, with none of them providing any evidence in support of their 'coldest winter for 100 years' claim. Although the beginning of December proved to be cooler than average, it was far from exceptional, and the much vaunted 'Beast from the East' turned out to be little more than a mouse bringing a touch of frost here and there as well as the odd flurry of snow. It was feeble stuff which swiftly yielded to the depressingly familiar weather pattern that has bedevilled the UK since April 2012: wet westerlies.Piers Corbyn finally revealed his thoughts on the matter in, of all publications, The Daily Express, on 10 January 2013.     

Cossacks ride on Paris!

Cossack Commemoration

Two hundred years ago such an announcement would have been dreaded following the savaging of Napoleon’s Grande Armée by Russian arms and General Winter, but today, this news betokens not forthcoming acts of bloody vengeance, but something of a cultural exchange in commemoration of the bicentennial of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. Itar-Tass reports that a detachment of 23 riders, all descendants of Don Cossacks who had harried Napoleon’s troops during their hellish retreat, yesterday set out from Moscow dressed in replica uniforms from the 1812 campaign and mounted on steeds of the appropriate Don Cossack breed, renowned for their endurance and ability to travel long distances. These days the breed is rare, but it is hoped that this commemorative event will help to secure its future.

According to Itar-Tass, the cavalry tour is a purely “socio-cultural undertaking which possesses neither a political nor an economic goal.” The role of the state is said to have been confined to lending some organisational assistance, whereas the tour itself has been funded through private donations.

Along the Cossacks’ route, which will take the riders through western Russia, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Germany and France, there will be a series of conferences, roundtables, seminars and concerts, with the detachment even being accompanied by a “mobile museum”. The climax will come at Fontainebleau, where a celebration concert and charitable auction will be held, with the latter disposing of the horses themselves. For the horses’ sake, it is to be hoped that the French gastronomic predilection for a certain type of meat will not on this occasion be a determining factor in the auction.

It is doubtful that on this occasion the visiting Cossacks will have any linguistic impact, although it is said of their ancestors that they did lend a word to the French language with which you may be familiar: “bistro” from the Russian “bystro” – quickly. Legend has it that occupying Russian troops banged their Parisian tables with impatience yelling “Bystro, bystro!” in their anxiety to be fed, and from thence it is said to have entered the French language. Although the etymology is disputed, the story possesses a certain charm.

The defeat of Napoleon plays a central role in Russia's national narrative, his invasion being just one of many from the West which over the centuries included the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the Germans and the Austrians. This historical experience, and the devastation wreaked by many of these invasions, has etched itself deeply into the Russian national psyche, hence what to us seems like an alarmist response by the Russians to American plans to site anti-ballistic missile defences in Poland. As for the riders, the video below shows their departure from Moscow yesterday. They have a long ride ahead of them.

Cossack Revival

Before you fall into the error of thinking that these contemporary Cossacks are little more than a Russian equivalent of the Sealed Knot, think again. Since the late Soviet period, repressed Cossack identities have re-emerged in different parts of Russia and in neighbouring states such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan where their hosts possessed traditional territories. In the main, with the notable exception of Ukraine that possesses its own Cossack tradition which forms an integral part of its national identity and myth (it would argue with some credibility that its Cossacks were the originals), Cossacks see themselves as a distinct branch of the Russian people, or a “sub-ethnos” in the parlance of Russian ethnographers.

Since the late 1980s Cossack revivalism has led to the creation of a variety of Cossack organisations, some have which have sought a contemporary role for themselves analogous to that of their late-tsarist predecessors as servitors of the state and guardians of its borderlands. Earlier this month Izvestia announced that Aleksandr Tkachev, Governor of the Kuban, wishes to use Cossacks to help tackle illegal immigration to the region emanating from the northern (predominantly Muslim) Caucasus that he believes could lead to regional destabilisation and interethnic conflict. He remarked that currently the region was about 80% ethnic Russian with ethnic minorities making up the remainder, but drew attention to the parallel of Kosovo which although once majority Serb (he made the gaffe of referring to Serbs as Croats) now possessed an overwhelming Albanian majority. He is determined to nip the demographic crisis in the bad to ensure that the Russians do not share the same fate, and he sees the Cossacks as playing a very active and central role in this. It would seem therefore, that the Cossacks should no longer be regarded as just another historical curiosity.

Cossacks leave Moscow for Paris

Russian Horsemen Ride to Paris on Anniversary of... by tvnportal

David Starkey versus Michael Wood: Popular History for Today

Television history, and history more generally, tells us as much about the time in which we live, as about the period and events under consideration. Nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than in the former, where the tyranny of the present is expressed in the retro-projection of current political themes and obsessions in accordance with the tastes and prejudices of commissioning editors. Whereas the printed word affords the opportunity for historians to give expression to a wide range of opinions and perspectives, the compass of views deemed to be acceptable on the small screen is somewhat more constrained. What viewers are presented with therefore, is a distorted impression of historical consensus: the dominance of presentism.

This week witnessed the concluding episodes of two television history series: David Starkey’s ‘The Churchills’, and Michael Wood’s ‘The Great British Story: a People’s History’. Stylistically and attitudinally, as would be expected from two popular historians of divergent preoccupations and characters, the series were quite distinct, both in terms of their style, and in their subject matter: Starkey focused upon key elite figures who helped to fashion the modern world, whereas Wood took a bottom-up slant in line with the Asa Briggs approach to popular history. Whilst Starkey did seek to emphasise connections between the past and the present, albeit in the form of two pasts intersecting in the life and writings of Winston Churchill, it was Wood who rounded off his series with a direct and heavily politicised summation of our history with specific reference to the present and its realities. Whereas Starkey sought to draw lessons from the past, Wood was happy for the past to yield to the present, and to selectively distort the former to propagate the official myth that we are “a nation of immigrants”.

Starkey and Wood are of the same post-war generation, the two men being born in 1945 and 1948 respectively, with Starkey’s specialism lying in the Tudor period and Wood’s in the Dark Ages. However, whereas Starkey excelled at Cambridge, obtained his doctorate and has enjoyed a career encompassing stints at his alma mater, the LSE and now as a visiting professor at the University of Kent, Wood failed to complete his doctoral research at Oxford, turning instead to journalism before going on to make a number of popular history programmes for television. Whereas both – as well as Simon Schama, born in 1945 – came of age in the 1960s, their reactions to the cultural revolution initiated in that decade – specifically to its insistence upon the transcendence of the nation-state and of national identities rooted in descent and continuity – have been quite different. Starkey clearly bemoans the negative effects that this attitude and attendant policies have brought in their train, whereas Wood perceives them as positive and something to be “celebrated”.

Wood’s Vision: Multiple Identities as the Norm

It was telling that in his introduction to the last instalment of his series, even Wood was compelled to acknowledge that in the decades immediately preceding World War I “Together at work and play, the British knew who they were.” Moreover, he conceded: “It was working class patriotism that made the volunteer armies in the first total war.” Thus, despite what was to follow, Wood had conceded that British identity during this period was not problematic, for we did not have to examine who we were, for we knew. Today, those of us who lost members of our families, those “working class” volunteers who fell in Flanders fields and on the Somme, still know who we are. For us, our identities are not “problematic”.

Wood charted our decline which set in with the profligate waste of human and material resources in the First World War, followed by the failure of our industries to keep pace with the innovations of emergent competitors in the interwar period, the Great Depression, the devastation of World War II, and thence onwards to the post-war evisceration of our industrial economy with the decimation of shipbuilding, textiles, mining and steel, leaving Britain as the “first post-industrial nation”. Accompanying these changes was a radical reshaping of the country’s – specifically of England’s (although this was not mentioned) – demography brought about by mass immigration from the Commonwealth. He mentioned the Commonwealth Conference of 1947 which shaped the British Nationality Act of 1948, a piece of legislation that redefined what it was to be a British citizen, being in his words “ecumenical, cosmopolitan and liberal . . . an astounding vision of the future.” 

Wood claimed that without the half a million immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa “a war battered economy would have ground to a halt” owing to a “chronic labour shortage.” This influx was stimulated by slogans such as “Your mother country needs you”, and Wood fell back upon making spurious historical comparisons between post-war immigration and earlier and far smaller migratory waves including those of Huguenots, Flemings and Jews. The name of Enoch Powell was invoked to provide the presenter with an opportunity to underscore his multiculturalist credentials by denouncing the deceased statesman as having made “inflammatory” and “inconsidered” remarks about immigration. He did not stop to consider whether or not they had been correct. Starkey would have done.

Whilst Wood celebrated the rise of immigrant “communities” and the re-emergence of distinctive Scottish, Welsh and Cornish identities, about the English he remained silent, preferring instead to refer to regional identities. Wood, the Englishman, does not appear to be at ease with Englishness, thus conforming to the stereotype of the national self-loathing exhibited by a certain type of English intellectual. For Wood, the transformation of Moss Side into Somali, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other ethnic enclaves was a reason to beam and to make reference to the culinary enrichment that such a presence brought in its train. However, he somehow managed to omit any reference to misogyny, honour crimes, forced marriages and paedophile grooming from his considerations. Wood sees only what he wishes to see, and whereas he grew up in Moss Side, he no longer lives there. If it is so wonderful, why not?

Wood appears to be ignorant of much recent historical and genetic research, and thus feels free to make reference to the Welsh as “the original British”, thus somehow implying that the English are interlopers – just another set of tribal immigrants amongst the many who now inhabit England. For Wood, it is mass immigration that makes our times “so dynamic and so interesting” leading to what he terms “another radical reshaping of our identities” in which “our destinies are inextricably bound together”. Thereafter, he dreamily wafted off into the credits, preceded by a collection of people from around the country declaring what they saw themselves to be.

Starkey’s Vision: a rudderless Nation

The focus of Starkey’s series was quite different to Wood’s, dealing as it did with two specific historical figures and their associated roles in history. It was however, also about the role of the writing of history in the shaping of history; the belief that Winston Churchill’s historiographical endeavours enabled him to better comprehend the situation in which he found himself, and to act in a manner that would extricate the nation from peril.

John Churchill would have made a fascinating subject for a series of his own, but presumably Starkey correctly adjudged that this would have rather less viewer appeal than the name of his illustrious and rather better known distant descendant. The device of coupling the lives of the two Churchills was therefore an interesting one, providing as it did a means of acquainting viewers with the War of the Spanish Succession and the 1^st Duke of Marlborough, subjects that they may otherwise have ignored.

Starkey’s history was therefore the stuff of high politics and geopolitics, an elite history from the top-down, that whilst suggesting links between different historical figures and periods, also understood each individual and period in their own terms. Although it was a series that valued the past for its own sake, in the concluding section of the final episode Starkey addressed his thoughts to the present, noting the central defining role of Churchill in national and international politics from the 1940s to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989:

He had given a shape to how we see the world. In 1989 it finished. And we haven’t got anything else. There has been no other Churchill. We really don’t know what we’re doing. We grope. And we’ll continue to grope until, if, another one arises.

In these words, the sense that he was damning our current crop of politicians was palpable. Starkey, unlike conformist popular historians such as Wood and Schama, is willing to make pronouncements on political issues of the day that are critical of official dogma, as exemplified in his remarks on the racial and cultural composition of the 2011 rioters and the role of culture from the sub-continent in the Rochdale paedophile grooming case. Starkey, unlike Wood, does not celebrate the demise of our nation or subscribe to its recasting as a multicultural “nation of immigrants”, and that his voice is still allowed to be heard on Channel 4 does credit to the broadcaster. Can anyone imagine the BBC commissioning a series from Starkey?   

Michael Wood: celebrating our national decline

David Starkey: searching for a new Churchill

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