66 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2014
Letters
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No Comparison
Clare Makepeace covered a lot of ground in her article about the long fight by Far East prisoners of war to gain compensation for their brutal treatment at the hands of the Japanese (‘Com-pensating the Railway Men’, April 2014). But I was surprised that she made no mention of the fact that in November 2000 the British government announced that a single ex-gratia payment of £10,000 was to be made to each of the surviving members of British forces held prisoner by the Japanese during the Second World War. The payment was extended to include the widows of former POWs and also to sur-viving British civilians who were interned by the Japanese.
Of course by 2000 many of the Far East POWs who had survived the war were dead, including my father, who was an army chaplain and spent three and half years in Changi Prison and working on the infamous Burma/Siam railway. However my mother duly received a payment of £10,000.
Interestingly J.G. Ballard (author of the best-selling book Empire of the Sun, based on his experience of being interned in a camp near Shanghai) was very surprised to learn that he, too, was eligible for the
£10,000 payment. He queried the thinking behind the scheme on the grounds that most of the interned civilians never suffered anything like the horrors endured by the military POWs forced to work on the railway.
David Cordingly Brighton, Sussex
Hungarian Inaccuracy I read Nora Berend’s article (‘Magyar Myth Makers’) in the History Matters section of the March issue with great interest in Budapest, just four weeks before the April 6th general election
when, according to all opinion polls, the coalition forming the present ‘authoritarian govern-ment’ will probably be re-elected for another four years.
I fully agree with Berend: that the interpretation of historical events of the past hundred years matters so much in Hungary and that the election campaign is focusing on historical events and behaviour of past political leaders, rather than election programmes. I do not know whether it is welcome news for historians or not, but one positive outcome of this debate is that the erection of the infamous mon-ument to the German invasion on Liberty Square, opposite the Soviet Heroes’ monument and in front of the US Embassy, has been ‘postponed’. Apologists for Kadar and Horthy are competing for mandates in the 2014 general election. Isn’t it time to move on to the 21st century? As long as Hungary is unable to close the debate on the 20th century, it is condemned to lag behind the rest of Europe.
Nevertheless, there is a small inaccuracy in Berend’s article. The secret ballot was introduced and not abolished under Horthy; in 1925 in the cities and countrywide in 1938.
Free multi-party elections were abolished in 1949 and reintro-duced only in 1990.
Denes Bulkai via email Horthy Enigma
I read Nora Berend’s article about Hungary and the legacy of Admiral Horthy with interest. I was also intrigued to note that she lectures in a much earlier period in Hungarian history.
Horthy is a controversial figure, but I feel viewing him in the light of modern thought is rather harsh. Reading his memoirs he was clearly a man who valued courage and honour and who
presided over a country which had lost the vast majority of its land (he compared it to the US having to cede southern states to Mexico and northern states to Canada). To the east there was Stalin, to the north Hitler, to the south Mussolini and to the west the dubious democracies, which had let down fledgling democra-cies in Spain and Czechoslovakia.
To say he was between a rock and a hard place is a gross understate-ment. As a former servant of the Habsburg emperor he naturally looked to Germany as his ally. He was old fashioned and wanted to guide Hungary like an admiral of a ship. He is recorded as having the strength to challenge his ally Hitler and some historians also record that he despised the Hungarian equivalent of the Nazis and that he resisted some requests to hand over Hungar-ian Jews. He was not a fan of democracy but neither was he a dictator in the sense that Stalin and others were.
I will continue to follow with interest the many documents and articles written about this enigmatic man.
Andrew Hough Bembridge, Isle of Wight I Don’t Believe It The material condition of the masses is the only thing that matters.
‘This announcement, made in 1980 by Maurice Larkin, a profes-sor of history at Edinburgh Uni-versity, encapsulates the neglect since the 1960s of aristocratic culture in early modern Europe.’
Nicholas Henshall’s source for this remark, quoted in his article ‘The Age of the Elites’
(November 2013), must be John Hardman in the introduction to the book French Politics 1774-1789 (Longman, 1995). When my husband – Maurice Larkin – heard this, he explained that it wasn’t true:
I didn’t say it. Indeed I couldn’t have said it because I don’t believe it.
Enid Larkin via email
The Wrong Bromley Patricia Fara’s article ‘A Social Laboratory’ (February 2014) was a fascinating survey of the effects of the First World War on the world of science and women scientists in particular. There is, however, one small error in placing the gin distillery, taken over by Chaim Weizmann for the production of acetone, in the south London borough of Bromley. It was, in fact, at Three Mills in Bromley-by-Bow, now part of the east London Borough of Newham. Full details of the extraordinary history of Three Mills can be found in my book East Ham and West Ham Past (Historical Publications, 2004).
Dr Jim Lewis Grantham, Lincolnshire Change of Plan
I do not agree with Chris Tur-ney’s assertion that there was a conspiracy of silence regarding a shortage of supplies in the depots of Scott’s last expedition (‘Captain Scott’s Secret’, Feb-ruary). The official diary clearly states that on March 10th, 1912 Scott found the Mount Hooper depot to have a ‘shortage on our allowance all round’. The article also makes no reference to the loss of fuel through evaporation, which had occurred on earlier expeditions, or to the fact that by taking five men to the Pole Scott forced Teddy Evans’ party to take food for only three men when provisions had been prepared for four. It has been suggested that this change of plan made mis-takes more likely and inadvert-ently caused the shortage.
Patrick Adams Cambridge
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MAY 2014 HISTORY TODAY 69
Remembering Rwanda
In 1994 the tiny African country of Rwanda was torn apart by state-spon-sored ethnic violence in which nearly a million people were killed in just 100 days. Dean White reflects on the escalating tensions between the minority Tutsi and the
majority Hutu peoples that led ultimately to genocide. He traces the roots of the rift between the two tribes to the arrival of the first Euro-peans, a century earlier, in 1894.
Shelley in Ireland
In February 1812 the 19-year-old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, together with his teenage wife Harriet and sister-in-law Eliza, arrived in Dublin.
The trio had already immersed themselves in the study of Irish history and politics, leading Harriet to assert: ‘I am Irish, I claim kindred with them; I have done with the English, I have witnessed too much of John Bull and I am ashamed of him.’ Believing that the Irish peasantry ’have been too long brutalised by vice and ignorance’, it was Shelley’s inten-tion to galvanise the ordinary people of Dublin into rising up against their oppressors. Eleanor Fitzsimons recounts the activities of the young radical in Ireland, concluding that, while the visit was to have a lasting impact on Shelley, for his part the poet made little political impression on the Irish.
Night Riders of Black Patch Country
In 1900 a tobacco farmer from the south-western Kentucky area known as the Black Patch could expect to raise six to eight cents for a pound of cured leaf. Four years later the price had fallen to two or three cents, thanks to the monopolising tactics of one man, James Buchanan Duke. As local farmers increasingly faced destitution, cre-ating a knock-on effect on the banks and local businesses on whose custom they depended, a covert posse of vigilantes – self-styled the Night Riders – began to take matters into their own hands.
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