May 2015 Vol 65 Issue 5
The Struggle for the Holy City
CRUSADES
Plus
Germany’s Other Führer / Killers at the Kremlin /
FROM THE EDITOR
I AM NOT NORMALLY a joiner, though I make an exception for the Cromwell Association. That is not because I am an unquestioning admirer of the Lord
Protector, who remains an almost uniquely ambivalent figure: a fine general, though perhaps not as good as John Lambert, his political rival; an inspiring yet verbose speech-maker; a man of considerable personal tolerance but with an authoritarian streak made worse by an unquestioning belief in providence; and an unswerving commitment to government for the people – administered by his circle of the godly elect – rather than by the people. And then there is Ireland.
No, the attraction of the Cromwell Association is that, while being broadly sympathetic to the achievements of the Protector, it rarely delivers panegyrics; indeed, at one recent symposium, one of its more prominent members, a leading scholar of the 17th century, lamented the fact that most recent biographies of Cromwell had been too positive; it was time for someone to call him to account, to present a more critical view of his rule.
This makes the Cromwell Association a somewhat different kettle of fish from the Richard III Society, though in fairness the Cromwellians have rather richer fare to digest. Whatever one thinks of Cromwell, his achievements suffice to make him great, which is more than can ever be claimed for the last Plantagenet king. Compare and contrast, for example, the literature produced by the Cromwell Association with that of the Richard III Society. Cromwelliana, the association’s quarterly journal, is one of the more valuable forums for discussion of the crisis of the 17th century, which affected all corners of Britain and Ireland and, in the light of present politics in Scotland, has an especial resonance today. It is a sad fact, for example, that few people realise that what was once called the English Civil War and is now more accurately called the Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, was actually sparked by events in Scotland. Which makes it all the more shameful that broadcasters such as Channel Four, with a public service remit, could devote hours of their March schedule to embarrassing live broadcasts of the pseudo-medieval shenanigans surrounding the reburial of Richard III – kitsch fit for a king – yet fail to shed any historical light on the current political struggle in Scotland or, say, Britain’s relationship with Europe. Public history? Yes please, but not at any price.
Paul Lay
Publisher Andy PattersonEditor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editors Fern Riddell, Kate Wiles Publishing Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor
of the Open University
Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary,
University of London
Professor Geoffrey Parker
Ohio State University
Professor Paul Preston
London School of Economics
Professor M.C. Ricklefs
The Australian National University
Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway,
University of London
Dr David Starkey
Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley
University of Nottingham
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Total Average Net Circulation 18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness, Oliver,
a rising star in the party who, amid the chaos of the collectivisation and forced industrialisation, cut a figure around which discontented elements within the elite might rally. Nikolaev’s fatal shots in the corridors of the Smolnyi Institute were, many have subsequently argued, the opening shots in a carefully choreographed campaign of terror against doubters and dissenters in the Bolshevik elite and a brutal settling of accounts with social and political groups that were to have no place in the new Stalinist world order. Kirov’s assassination thus became the essential piece in a puzzle that exposed the Stalinist terror for what it was: the ruthless and delib-erate campaign of a single dictator to crush all resistance and bend an empire to his will. Nikolaev may have pulled the trigger, it was argued, but Stalin pulled the strings.
The second, more recent, interpretation is that Stalin did not
History
Matters
Boris Nemtsov
•
Jihadi Brides
•
Ivan Roots
•
Historians for Britain
HISTORY NEVER really repeats itself but it does provide a (frequently distorting) lens through which con-temporaries view the world unfolding around them. When, on February 27th, long-time Vladimir Putin critic Boris Nemtsov was gunned down by unknown assassins a few hundred metres from the walls of the Kremlin, many observers reached back into Russian history for analogies. Most have invoked what is probably the murkiest and most notorious of all the political assassinations in Russia over the preceding century, one that has continued to attract intense speculation and controversy. Indeed, only a few weeks before Nemtsov was shot dead, the Russian historical magazine Dilettante ran a series of articles devoted to the assassination on December 1st, 1934 of Politburo member and Leningrad Bolshevik Party boss, Sergei Kirov. Common to understandings of both the Kirov and Nemtsov killings is the persistent idea that assassinations are a form of political currency in Russia: a means of eliminating rivals, projecting power, shoring up alliances and of blackening the reputation of opponents.
A charismatic, committed Marxist, Kirov had been Stalin’s pointman in the destruction of the opposition’s power base in Leningrad. He was shot dead in the Leningrad party headquar-ters in the Smolnyi Institute by Leonid Nikolaev, a young, disillusioned party member. Nikolaev was arrested and
Killings and
the Kremlin
Daniel Beer
executed and, in the days and weeks that followed, the Kremlin unleashed a wave of terror against perceived opponents in Russian cities. Kirov’s murder fuelled a swirl of rumour and speculation about Stalin’s involve-ment, which has persisted to this day.
Competing narratives of Kirov’s assassination embrace different views of Stalinist political history. The first is of a ruthless leader eliminating a rival and then exploiting the killing to unleash repression against a host of perceived opponents. Stalin, it has long been argued, saw Kirov as a potential contender for the leadership,
Ruthless or weak? What
does Russia’s history of
political assassination reveal
about its rulers?
A charismatic, committed
Marxist, Kirov had been
Stalin’s pointman in the
destruction of the opposition’s
power base in Leningrad
Russian rivals: Sergei Kirov (centre), flanked by Anastas Mikoyan and Joseph Stalin, October 11th, 1932.
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
order a hit on Kirov. Nikolaev acted alone, fuelled by a cocktail of personal and political grievances. Fearful, react- ive and apprehensive, Stalin lashed out at what he believed to be genuine threats. In this reading of the assassin- ation the fear of enemies, backed by foreign powers, constituted a clear and present danger in the minds of a leadership faced with capitalist encirclement and insecure in its own power. Seized by fears for its own safety, the Kremlin responded to the
crime of a lone assassin with a wave of arrests of oppositionists. Stalin might have exploited the killing to move against his opponents, but Kirov’s death was an opportune pretext, not part of any master plan.
For all the manifest differences between the murder of Kirov and the killing of Nemtsov, contemporaries in Russia and abroad have reached back into the dark years of the Stalinist Terror to claim parallels between the murky killing of a political ‘rival’ and the political uses to which it was put. What explains the appeal of the analogy?
One answer is to consider the role of political assassinations in Russian history: moments when concealed power struggles erupt into the open with gunshots in dark streets and apartment stairwells. They seem to be moments in which one warring party fleetingly reveals its hand. Another answer is that the rush to interpret political killings as flickering illumi-nations of vast conspiracies has a long pedigree in Russia. Long encouraged by the Soviet state to justify its rule, conspiracy theories have flourished since the fall of communism. Belief in sprawling conspiracies as the real drivers of social and political change has grown amid the Kremlin’s stage- managed democracy, the repeated
denial of rifts within the elite and a state media that relentlessly projects the image of Russia besieged by ‘dark forces’ (a phrase with real political currency under Stalin), both within and without. Another answer is that political assassinations have come at moments of great political uncertainty and accelerated change. The assassina-tion of Alexander II in 1881, of Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911, Kirov in 1934 and a rash of assassinations of politicians, journalists and business people during the chaotic years of post-Soviet collapse all took place against a backdrop of political struggle.
The controversies that surround the Kirov assassination and currently inform the speculation surrounding the Nemtsov killing capture an endur-ing tension. On the one hand the ruler is seen as ruthless and implacable, sacrificing allies and eliminating rivals in a series of brutal moves on the chess board of Kremlin politics. On the other the ruler is weak, apprehensive and reactive, struggling to stave off chaos and forever nervously looking over his shoulder at the manoeuvrings of rivals. These are the binaries within which much of our understanding of Russia remains trapped. Nemtsov’s assassination, like Kirov’s 80 years ago, confirms the lens through which we already view Russia.
Daniel Beer is senior lecturer in history at Royal
Holloway University of London.
Stalin might have
exploited the killing ...
but Kirov’s death
was an opportune
pretext, not part of
any master plan
THE FLIGHT to Syria of three London teenagers in a bid to become ‘jihadi brides’ has prompted a storm of media coverage in Britain. The reasons for their choice are complex and may never be properly understood but the lure of a bad boy with a gun (and a religiously sanctioned bad boy at that) to girls from devout families should not be underest- imated. They are said to now be living in ISIS-held Syria, which has, to put it mildly, very different attitudes to teenage girls than those evident in Britain, attitudes that have been characterised in the popular press as ‘medieval’ in a pejorative sense. With regard to the view of ISIS concerning girls and young women, however, the comparison is not entirely redundant, when one consid-ers certain aspects of women’s lives in medieval Europe. The modern concept of a teenager as we understand it in the West holds little or no sway over there.
The term ‘teenager’ itself is a post- industrial construct that emerged in the last century in western nations, most notably in the US. This idea that child-hood stretches into post-puberty, when one ‘becomes’ a teenager, is one that would not only be alien to the jihadists of Syria but, until fairly recently, would have been unknown in Europe itself.
Although debate still rages over the meaning and understanding of medieval concepts of childhood and adolescence, there certainly was not the same understanding and empathetic attitude towards adolescents and teenagers as exists today. To a large extent, children were seen as ‘proto adults’ and the rush was on to join the adult world. This rush was facilitated and encouraged by the
Jihadi brides
journey back to
a world without
teenagers
Arriving in Syria, three
London schoolgirls will find
themselves in a ‘medieval’
world where the teenager is
an unknown concept.
HISTORYMATTERS
age at which marriage was deemed appropriate by the Catholic Church in the medieval West: 12 for girls, 14 for boys. Well-known examples of young brides include Margaret Beaufort, who was married at 12 and became a mother at 13, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married at 15 to Louis VI of France.
By the age of 15, better-off girls cert- ainly might have been expected to have a reasonable expectation of marriage. Lower down the social scale, marriage generally took place slightly later due to economic concerns about the raising of a dowry and establishing a household. Certainly though, if a girl was not to be married off young, then from puberty onwards (around the ages of 12-14) she would be expected to work and help sustain the family unit. Young teenage girls might even emigrate into larger cities and towns and work as servants or apprentices in order to save for a dowry and marry. When viewed in a certain light, the three London schoolgirls’ eagerness to become brides as soon as possible – marry a fighting man, set up their own households and bear his child-ren (all tinged with a strong element of religious fanaticism) – is somewhat ‘medieval’ in terms of life goals.
They have journeyed to an Islamic state, however, in which these life goals are perfectly comprehensible and seen as
will experience modes of living that would have been familiar to women in medieval Europe. In the most general terms, for most of our recorded history, wives and mothers were young and their children were required to grow up quickly, much like they are in ISIS. During the Middle Ages in Europe, girls’ and women’s places were deemed to be in those spaces approved of by their men, in the home and around the farm or wherever the family worked. This is the world that the three girls are travelling to; a society in which medieval concepts of girlhood and womanhood reign and which in some ways are even more restrictive than those of medieval Europe. In ISIS there appears to be no room for women to work, for example, or to operate – as they did in the Middle Ages – as femmes soles under the
law with attendant rights. These East London schoolgirls are now living under a cultural system that imposes an idea of what ideal womanhood should be that echoes the words of European medieval thinkers on the subject, but which can be even more misogynistic and hardline on female rights than manifested in our medieval past and which clashes pro-foundly with what being a teenage girl can mean in a post-feminist West.
The schoolgirls have discarded an idea of teenagerhood which allows for growth, development, experimentation and amounts of freedom. By refusing this path to adulthood they have chosen another, which is sharper and more brutal. It recalls a time in our past when girls became women almost overnight and were valued for their homemaking skills and childbearing potential. For those three young girls their journey to Syria really is a journey back in time. As in medieval Europe, Islamic State views 15-year-olds as women, ready and able for marriage, motherhood and the rigours of life in the new Islamic State. One hopes that their path has not been too dangerous thus far; judging by what can be discerned from ISIS teachings on women, however, their path into the modern Middle Ages is likely to be both a frightening and disorientating one. Gillian Kenny is an Honorary Research Associate
at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Trinity College, Dublin.
Worlds apart: women window- shop in Aleppo, Syria, 2008.
particularly attractive. This (to western eyes) recidivist outlook is reflected in a recently released manifesto entitled
Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto on Women by the Al Khanssaa Brigade, which
is a detailed exposition of behaviours expected from women and girls in ISIS-held territory. In these lands, the extended childhood of modern western youth, with which the three girls are familiar, does not exist. Childhood
(for a girl) does not last long at all, as marriage is allowed from the age of nine onwards. Marriage and child-rearing are presented as the normative, indeed required, state for girls and women. Girls and women are entreated to lead ‘quiet’ lives, implying a restriction to gendered spaces which are familiar to historians of women in medieval Europe.
The journey to Syria for these girls is, in a way, a journey back in time. They
The journey to Syria for these
girls is, in a way, a journey back
in time. They will experience
modes of living that would
have been familiar to women in
medieval Europe
Stephen K. Roberts
Ivan Roots
(1921-2015)
The distinguished historian
of Britain in its turbulent
17th century will be
fondly remembered.
IVAN ROOTS, who has died aged 93, was a regular contributor to History Today over a number of decades, espec-
ially as a book reviewer. Few historians of the mid-17th century have done more to widen the appeal of their subject to a general audience. He was much in demand as a lecturer to Historical Asso-ciation branches and to history societies of all kinds. He was lecturing until ill-health overtook him in the last year of his life and rarely declined an invitation to speak to any groups of people with a genuine interest in history.
He was born in Maidstone, Kent and won an exhibition from Maidstone Grammar School to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a pupil of Chris-topher Hill and fellow-student with another stalwart contributor to History Today, Donald Pennington. After
grad-uating in 1941, Ivan was called up into the Royal Corps of Signals and spent the remainder of the war in India and Burma, attaining the rank of captain. After demobilisation he returned to Oxford, but soon found a lecturing post at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, now Cardiff University, where he stayed until 1967. He moved to become professor of history at the University of Exeter, eventually becoming head of the newly- merged department of history and archaeology. He retired in 1986.
His best-known work is The Great Rebellion, 1642-1660, which first
ap-peared in 1966 and is still in print today. He was proud of the book’s longevity, which owes much to its readability, clear organisation and humane and sympathetic judgments. It remains arguably the best single-volume, intro-ductory academic history of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, balanc-ing compactness with a broad scope. Among scholars he will be remembered,
too, for his first published academic work, The Committee at Stafford 1643-5,
an edition of the order book of the Staffordshire county committee, a collaborative project with Pennington. Later studies of the local administration of 1640-60 inevitably reference this pioneer text. He also wrote a number of influential articles on aspects of Crom-wellian governance and was responsible for fresh imprints of two major texts of the 1640s and 50s. In 1974 he reissued
The Diary of Thomas Burton, first
pub-lished in 1828 and an immensely valuable source; in the same year he was behind a new edition of A.S.P. Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty,
which contains the most accessible text of the Putney Debates of 1647.
Ivan Roots reviewed for a wide range of publications. As well as his
work for History Today and History, the
journal of the Historical Association, he was a regular contributor especially in the 1960s and 70s to the Observer,
the Daily Telegraph and the Listener.
Through this last publication, when Maurice Ashley was editor, he became involved in the Cromwell Association. Someone of his approachable, informal and always friendly manner, as well as impeccable academic credentials and enthusiasm for Oliver Cromwell, was invaluable in a membership society and by 1977 Ivan had become its president. His interest in Cromwell lay in what he saw as the complex character of the Lord Protector. Although Ivan’s politics were broadly of the left, he was not a republican himself, still less one who admired Cromwell for his brisk way with parliaments or his resort to armed force. It was the multi-faceted aspects of the period, the challenges and dramas facing the writers and thinkers as much as the politicians, that cap-tured his attention and which he was so successful at conveying to others, whether in print or in a lecture. As one of his students put it, he gave you the impression that he had just breakfasted with Oliver Cromwell.
His lecturing style was informal, conversational, homely. His critics, if he had any, might have wished for more by way of factual delivery, but like all suc-cessful teachers he knew the limitations of lecturing as a medium for imparting information. His forte was the memor- able image, the effective comparison and the telling quotation. Although he willingly travelled the country to deliver talks and lectures, in later years he became more at home in the history scene of south-west England, serving in one capacity or another on the gov-ernance of all the significant historical societies of Devon. His later publicat- ions, too, reflected his growing interest in the region where he lived for over 40 years and included The Monmouth Rising
(1986) and Cromwellian and Restoration Devon (2003). In history circles, he will
be remembered above all else for his enthusiasm and for his support and encouragement of others who shared his interest in the 17th century.
Breakfasting with Oliver Cromwell: Ivan Roots.
Stephen K. Roberts is editor of the 1640-60
section of the History of Parliament.
He will be remembered
above all else for
his enthusiasm and
for his support and
encouragement of
others
HISTORYMATTERS
Britain: apart
from or a part
of Europe?
WHY ‘Historians for Britain’? In many ways the organisation that I and several colleagues have been setting up over the last year could equally well have been entitled ‘Historians for Europe’, for we are not hostile to Europe and we believe that in an ideal world Britain would remain within a radically reformed European Union. We are a group of historians, both inside and outside the universities, who believe that a historical perspective on Britain’s relationship with Europe urgently needs to be supplied at a time when debate about that relationship has become not just lively but heated. As an offshoot of the pressure group Business for Britain, our view is that the British public does need to be con-sulted about Britain’s membership of the European Union. At the same time, a referendum held tomorrow would leave no chance for the renegotiation of Britain’s position in the EU and an opportunity for that is vital. More than that: renegotiation has to include a commitment by the EU itself to reform its ways and, at the very least, to leave those countries that do not seek to be part of a ‘United States of Europe’ free to rely upon their own sovereign institutions without interference.
That might sound like a political manifesto rather than a series of hist- orical arguments. Yet we hold political views that span the spectrum from the right to the left. We aim to show how the United Kingdom has developed in a distinctive way by comparison with its continental neighbours. This has resulted in the creation of a different legal system based on precedent, rather than Roman law or Napoleonic
The ‘Historians for Britain’
campaign believes that
Britain’s unique history
sets it apart from the rest
of Europe.
codes; the British Parliament embod-ies principles of political conduct that have their roots in the 13th century or earlier; ancient institutions, such as the monarchy and several universities, have survived (and evolved) with scarcely a break over many centuries. This degree of continuity is unparalleled in contin- ental Europe. To some extent you can find it in parts of Spain; but even there, where parliamentary assembles go back well into the Middle Ages, radical constitutional change and civil war have broken many continuities. You cannot find it in France after the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, while Germany and Italy are 19th-century creations, whose political systems were almost entirely reconstructed after 1945. Portugal apart, national boundaries have fluctuated, often wildly, over the centuries; and even Britain has contracted, with the
long history of British engagement with Europe; not just English engagement, but also Scottish (the ‘auld alliance’ with France, most notably). ‘Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated’, the famous newspa-per headline, does not represent the real nature of Britain’s involvement in Europe, whether one thinks of the wool trade with Flanders that was such a source of wealth in the Middle Ages, or the English conquests that reached as far as Gascony, the ‘longest alliance’ between England and Portugal or, indeed, in more recent times, the British presence in the Mediterranean that at various points brought not just Gibraltar but Minorca, Corsica, Malta, Corfu and Cyprus under the British flag. British and French guar-antees to Poland were honoured in 1939, with the result that we found ourselves in a war to the death with Germany.
One way to describe this relation-ship would be to say that the United Kingdom has always been a partner of Europe without being a full participant in it. After all, until the second half of the 20th century, Britain still ruled over vast tracts of the globe very far from Europe. Becoming European might be seen as a reaction to ceasing to be imperial, or at least to the loosening of ties with the growing Commonwealth. But that is to over-simplify a complex recent history: in 1973 the United Kingdom joined a Common Market and there are many who would have preferred the founders of what is now the European Union to have forgotten their dreams of ‘ever-greater union’ and to have concentrated on making that economic association work better.
Historians for Britain aims to facilitate that debate. How one votes in a referen-dum should be influenced by what sort of new offer is on the table following renegotiation of Britain’s position within the EU. That offer has to reflect the distinctive character of the United Kingdom, rooted in its largely uninter-rupted history since the Middle Ages.
A challenging relationship: air raids against Germany are planned, 1944. David Abulafia
departure of most of Ireland. But – allowing for occasional coups d’état by Henry VII and William of Orange – Britain has not been torn apart by invasion since 1066. Nor has its public favoured the intense nationalism that has consumed many European coun-tries, even allowing for the independence campaign in Scotland. Fascism and anti- semitism never struck deep roots here, nor did Communism (except as a silly fad among student politicians). The British political temper has been milder than that in the larger European countries.
Alongside these differences there is a
David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean
History at the University of Cambridge and Chairman of Historians for Britain.
The Church Council of Constance assembled in 1414 under pressure from the Holy Roman Emperor to resolve the confusing and embarrassing situation in which the Church found itself with three popes all at once. There had been two rival popes since 1378 and three since 1409. The Council claimed direct authori-ty from Christ and consequently superior power over any pope and succeeded in resolving the papal situation by the time it finished its labours in 1418. Meanwhile, in 1415, the Council had considered, and condemned as heretical, the teachings of the Prague priest Jan Hus and he was burned at the stake in Constance. It also condemned an Englishman whose writings had influenced Hus.
Fortunately for the Englishman, he was dead. Thought to have been born in the mid-1320s, John Wycliffe or Wyclif (there are several other spellings) was a Yorkshireman, who studied at Oxford University, became a fellow of Merton College and went on to win a brilliant reputation as an expert on theology. Ordained priest in 1351, he was vicar of Fylingham, a Lincolnshire village, from the 1360s, but spent most of his time at Oxford. In 1374 he was made rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire.
By that time Wycliffe had developed startlingly unorthodox opinions, which were condemned by Pope Gregory VII in 1377. He had come to regard the scriptures as the only reliable guide to the truth about God and maintained that all Christians should rely on the Bible rather than the unreliable and fre-quently self-serving teachings of popes and clerics. He said that there was no scriptural justification for the papacy’s existence and attacked the riches and power that popes and the Church as a whole had acquired. He disapproved of clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, the
selling of indulgences and praying to saints. He thought the monasteries were corrupt and the immorality with which many clerics often behaved invalidated the sacraments they conducted. If clerics were accused of crime, they should be tried in the ordinary lay courts, not in their special ecclesiastical tribunals.
Wycliffe advanced his revolutionary opinions in numerous tracts. He thought that England should be ruled by its monarchs and the lay administration with no interference from the papacy and the Church. In his On Civil Dominion
of 1376 he said:
England belongs to no pope. The pope is but a man, subject to sin, but Christ is the Lord of Lords and this kingdom is to be held directly and solely of Christ alone.
His opinions gained him powerful supporters, including John of Gaunt,
who intervened to protect him from in-furiated archbishops and bishops. He lost some support in 1381 when he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, that in the Eucharist the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Parliament condemned his teachings the following year, but he was allowed to retire to his parsonage at Lutterworth.
The corollary of Wycliffe’s belief that all Christians should learn the faith for themselves was that Scripture needed to be translated into their own languages. His most important achievement was the first complete English translation of the Bible, issued from 1382. Whether he translated any of the Latin Vulgate himself is uncertain and disputed, but there is no doubt of its impact at all social levels. The remarkable number of copies which have survived show how widely esteemed it was.
At Christmas in 1384 Wycliffe was at Mass in the church at Lutterworth on December 28th when he had a stroke and collapsed. He had suffered a previous stroke a year or two before and the second one proved fatal. He never spoke another word and died on the 31st. His body was buried in Lutterworth churchward, where it remained until 1428 when, following the orders of the Council of Constance, it was dug up and burned. The ashes were scattered in the nearby River Swift.
Wycliffe’s followers were known scornfully as Lollards, thought to be derived from a Dutch word meaning ‘mumbler’, though it acquired the implic- ation of ‘lolling about’ and ‘idling’. There were groups of them at Oxford and elsewhere and some blamed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler and others, partly on their influence. Some Lollards were burned as heretics and a Lollard rising in 1414, led by Sir John Oldcastle, was suppressed. All the same their influence persisted and Lollard ideas blended with the rising tide of Prot-estantism in the 16th century. Indeed, Wycliffe has been hailed as the Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation.
Months
Past
MAY
By Richard Cavendish
MAY 4TH 1415John Wycliffe
condemned as
a heretic
Morning Star of the Reformation: John Wycliffe in a 16th-century portrait.The man who created the Tiger Moth, the Mosquito and the Comet taught himself to fly and started building his first airplane in 1908. He took off in it for the first and only time the following year after many hours vainly taxiing it around. Going downhill, the machine bumped about on the grass as he increased its speed till it suddenly rose into the air and shot straight upwards until the wings splintered and it fell to the ground in a shattered heap.
Geoffrey de Havilland was 27 and far too determined a character to be deterred. Born in 1882, the son of a clergyman, he had trained as an engineer and worked at first for various car manufacturers, designing buses before borrowing money from his affluent grandfather to set up on his own, designing and building aircraft. He made his first successful
flight in his second plane in 1910 in a field in Hampshire, where he flew three or four inches above the ground for about 20 yards. He managed to sell the machine to the War Office factory at Farnborough, which took him on as a designer. In 1912, in a plane he designed, he set a new British altitude record of 10,500 feet.
After service in the RAF in the First World War, Geoffrey set up the de Havilland Aircraft Company in 1920 and started producing a light airplane called the Moth, which helped to
and he was crowned in Rome in 1266. He invaded southern Italy, defeated and killed Manfred in battle and had the 16-year-old Conradin beheaded in Naples in 1268. In 1271 he conquered Albania and was also planning to make himself King of Jerusalem.
In 1282, however, the rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers broke out and French officials in Sicily were murdered. The rebels were in league with Peter of Aragon and Charles lost Sicily to him. A tournament in Bordeaux with a hundred knights on either side was organised to settle the dispute, but Charles and Peter somehow arrived there at different times and each went away claiming victory.
Charles retained Naples and southern Italy until his death in 1285. Alfonso V of Aragon reunited the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as it became called, under Spanish rule in 1442. In the Divine Comedy
Dante pictures Charles and Peter recon-ciled, singing harmoniously together at purgatory’s gates.
foster a growing civilian enthusiasm for flying. The Tiger Moth biplane, which the RAF used as a trainer, appeared in 1931 and the company did a profitable business in airliners. In 1933 it settled at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire and went on to make a crucial contribution to victory in the Second World War, most notably with the Mosquito fighter-bomber, proba-bly the most versatile warplane of its time. He was knighted in 1944.
Returning to the civilian flying business after 1945, de Havilland’s produced a pioneer jet-engined air-liner, the Comet, in 1949. Sir Geoffrey stopped taking any active part in the business in 1954 and it was bought by Hawker Siddeley in 1960. His life was not all glory. Two of his three sons, taking to the air like fledgling eagles, were killed flying. In his autobiogra-phy, Sky Fever (1961), he said: ‘Words are utterly inadequate to describe the sense of loss and shock from such tragedies.’ He also felt guilty for the Comet crashes of 1954. Awarded the Order of Merit in 1962, he was 82 when a cerebral haemorrhage carried him off in a hospital in Watford.
MAY 23RD 1265
The Hohenstaufen dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors long dominated both northern and southern Italy and Sicily, hemming in the Papal States on both sides. The death of Emperor Conrad IV at 26 in 1254, leaving a two-year-old boy, Conradin, as his heir, seemed to offer the papacy an opportunity to end the situation, but Conradin’s bastard uncle, Manfred, took over southern Italy and Sicily as regent. Pope Alexander IV excommunicated him, but he had strong support in Sicily and was crowned king in Palermo in 1258. He went on to take a firm grip, extend his influence into northern Italy and marry his daughter to Peter III of Aragon. The next pope, Urban IV, failed to persuade the English to intervene and then turned to the French, offering the southern kingdom to Charles of Anjou.
Charles was the ambitious youngest brother of Louis IX (St Louis), whom he had accompanied on crusade. The new pope, Clement IV, proclaimed him king
MAY 21ST 1965
Death of Sir
Geoffrey de
Havilland
Charles of Anjou
proclaimed King
of Sicily
Southern man: a statue of Charles of Anjou in the Royal Palace, Naples. Determined to fly: Geoffrey de Havilland, c.1925.END OF THE REICH
T
HE HISTORICAL SPOTLIGHT on Hitler as the undisputed Führer of the Third Reich has cast a shadow on the beginning and end of the regime, when Hitler was not the head of state. Between January 1933 and August 1934 and again in the early weeks of May 1945, the German presidency was held by two senior military figures. The first was the ageing field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, whose death in August 1934 opened the way for Hitler to create the unprecedented office uniting president and chancellor under the single word ‘Führer’ or Leader; the second was the chief of the German navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was chosen by Hitler toRichard Overy explains why the West’s confused
approach to Germany after Hitler’s death
damaged its relationship with the Soviet Union.
Dealing with Dönitz
be his successor as president after the dictator’s suicide on April 30th, 1945.
For historians, the Dönitz regime, which lasted for three weeks in May, including two weeks following the German surrender, is little more than a bizarre footnote to the end of the Third Reich. Yet the existence of what British diplo-mats called the ‘so-called government’, based in the north German coastal town of Flensburg, marked an important step in the break-up of the wartime alliance of the western democracies and Stalin’s Soviet Union well before the Cold War had become a historical reality. The shadow boxing between the Allies over the status and fate of Dönitz’s regime reflected important differences in the way the two sides viewed the proper way to treat defeated Germany.
The arguments hinged at first on the question of how a German surrender should be accepted. The stated aim was the unconditional surrender of all German forces, but German armies in Italy, then in northern Germany and
Karl DÖnitz, Germany's second and last Führer, stands accused of war crimes, Nuremberg, November 2nd, 1945.
Scandinavia surrendered on May 2nd and May 4th, 1945 to local Allied commanders, American and British. Soviet suspicions were heightened when Dönitz decided to send the operations chief of the German Supreme Command (the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), Colonel General Alfred Jodl, to General Dwight Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, or SHAEF), based in the French city of Reims. He was sent as a representative of what spokes-men in Flensburg continued to call the ‘new governspokes-ment’. The Deputy Chief of Staff of the Red Army, Marshal Alexei Antonov, told British and American representatives in Moscow, on May 6th, that for the Soviet regime the Dönitz government ‘in actuality does not exist’ and would not be referred to as a government. Antonov made it clear that the Soviet side would only accept the unconditional surrender of the German military high command and reminded the western Allies that circles in Moscow now strongly suspect-ed that Britain and America were negotiating a separate truce in order to allow the Germans to carry on fighting the war in the East.
S
OVIET SUSPICIONS are easy to understand. Not only did Field Marshal Montgomery’s army group in northern Germany fail to occupy Flensburg and in-carcerate Dönitz and his associates, many of whom were on the Allies’ list of war criminals, but when Jodl arrived at Reims, a surrender document was signed early on the morning of May 7th without consulting Stalin. At the Soviet leader’s angry insistence, the West agreed to stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin on the following day in which Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of OKW, signed on behalf of German forces. The Soviet side regarded the Berlin ceremony as the formal and legitimate act of ‘unconditional surrender’. None of this appeased Soviet anxieties that the West would treat the Dönitz regime as the legally constituted government of Germany and might strike some kind of deal with the former enemy.In the Soviet Union the press ran a campaign, almost certainly approved by Stalin, more or less accusing the West of colluding with Fascism. The Soviet Red Fleet journal wrote that a ‘shameful and inglorious’ word had now entered the annals of war: ‘That word is Flensburg and it tarnishes the victory we have won!’ In the days imme-diately after the surrender no effort was made to wind up the Dönitz government and no decision was taken about its constitutional or legal status. Since Flensburg was in the British zone of occupation, the decision ultimately rested with Churchill and the British War Cabinet. The Flensburg regime announced that the British army had agreed to allow Field Marshal Ernst Busch to assume command of the
that Britain and America were
negotiating a separate truce in
order to allow the Germans to
carry on fighting in the East
Above: Admiral DÖnitz, commander of the German U-Boat fleet, is received by Hitler, June 23rd, 1942.
Right: DÖnitz, having succeeded Hitler as Führer, leaves the German headquarters at Flensburg, May 1945, just before his arrest.
END OF THE REICH
north German province of Schleswig-Holstein on May 12th to maintain order and the supply of essential goods for the population: an act that amounted more or less to recogni-tion of Dönitz’s authority. In Flensburg itself thousands of German soldiers were crowded, still in uniform, while SS men guarded the senior ministers. Busch only a week before had been urging Dönitz to fight for the defence of Hamburg rather than surrender the city.
T
HE STUMBLING BLOCK to simply dissolving the new regime and arresting its members was Churchill. Orme Sargent, Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, already concerned that the Soviet side might, in retaliation, put up their own puppet regime in Berlin, as they had done in Warsaw a few months before, wrote to Churchill on May 12th urging him to reach a decision about the future of the Flensburg government, whose chief, Sargent reminded Churchill, was wanted as a war criminal. Churchill’s reply showed him at his worst. He refused to sanction winding up the regime on the grounds that it could assist the British authorities in keeping order in their zone of occupation. ‘I deprecate the raising of these grave constitutional issues’, wrote Churchill, ‘at a time when the only question is to avoid chaos.’ He hoped that Dönitz and Busch would speed up the surrender of German troops rather than forcing British soldiers to ‘go running round into every German slum’ to persuade men to lay down their arms. If Dönitz is a ‘useful tool for us’, concluded Churchill, it would be neces-sary to write off his ‘war atrocities’.Churchill remained consistently hostile to the rapid termination of the postwar German regime. Eisenhower wanted the power to arrest its members at once and urged the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff to issue instructions for him to do so, but Churchill dragged his feet. The crisis worsened when, on the evening of May 14th, the BBC broadcast the results of an interview conducted by a journalist, Edward Ward, with the man who claimed to be German Foreign Secretary and deputy to Dönitz, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler’s Finance Minister for the entire period of the Third Reich. Von Krosigk tried to explain that, as head of state, Dönitz ought to be regard-ed as the German sovereign, while the men gatherregard-ed in his cabinet were the figures best qualified for the task of organising postwar Germany and saving the country from the Russians. Not surprisingly, the Foreign Office protested in the strongest terms that the broadcast was tantamount to giving recognition to the regime by describing it as the ‘German Government’ and presenting von Krosigk as ‘acting Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary’. An angry Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information (and founder of History Today), rebuked the BBC for ‘a lamentable perfor-mance’, but the damage was done, encouraging what one British official described as ‘the morbid Russian fear that we may yet do a deal with the Germans to fight Bolshevism’. SOVIET HOSTILITY to the West over Dönitz reached a crescendo in the week that followed, fuelled in addition by Stalin’s suspicion that Hitler had not actually been killed in Berlin and was being shielded by his Allies. ‘These men constitute a Fascist gang’, complained Red Star: ‘They took part in Nazi crimes.’ The government paper Izvestia announced that the unexpected friendliness of the West
Far left: DÖnitz in the Mercedes once reserved for Hitler, Glücksburg, May 1945. Left: newspaper coverage of the unconditional surrender of the Wermacht at the US headquarters in Reims, May 7th, 1945.
Dönitz confirmed
that he had delayed
surrender to allow
soldiers and civilians
to escape the
advancing Red Army
Above: at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin, from left, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Field Marshal Georgii Zhukov and General Carl A Spaatz toast the German surrender, May 7th, 1945.Right: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the ratified surrender terms in Berlin on May 8th, 1945.
to the Flensburg regime ‘has stunned the conscience of all sensible people’. Eisenhower’s representatives met with Dönitz on May 18th, while American intelligence officers working for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey interviewed members of the government, focusing their efforts in particular on Albert Speer, now Minister of Eco-nomics, whose views were wanted on the effect of bombing on German war production. In his interview Dönitz con-firmed that he had delayed surrender for as long as possible to allow soldiers and refugees to escape from the advancing Red Army, but he also handed over copies of Hitler’s ‘Last Will and Testament’, which included his appointment, as evidence of his legal claim to be the German head of state. These contacts were easily subject to misinterpretation in Moscow, though they finally convinced Eisenhower that nothing was to be gained by prolonging the existence of the German regime. The following day, May 18th, he wrote to the Foreign Office and the State Department in Washing-ton that the regime ‘was of very little value’ and should be terminated. In contrast to the Prime Minister, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, agreed wholeheartedly, but he asked Eisenhower to act on his own behalf, ignoring the Russians. Some Foreign Office officials still thought that, in the choice between principle and expediency, the latter made more sense given that German collaboration had speeded up the disarming of German forces and might act as a source of stability.
E
ISENHOWER EMERGES from the story as the most sensible of those involved. He insisted that, as the senior military commander in the West, he had to be instructed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, not by the politicians, and that, despite Eden, the Russians would have to be consulted. The Soviet deputy supreme command-er, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, asked Soviet representatives at Flensburg to meet the Americans on May 19th and here the two sides agreed that the Dönitz government would be arrested and its work terminated as soon as possible. Formal Soviet approval arrived on May 21st. It was minuted that Churchill ‘strongly objects to action proposed’, but the Combined Chiefs of Staff gave their approval and, on May 23rd, a unit of British soldiers arrested the members of the Flensburg cabinet. They were sent to the holding centres for major war criminals at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg (codenamed ASHCAN) and at Kransberg, near Frankfurt-am-Main (codenamed DUSTBIN). The outcome perhaps reflected the extent to which Churchill’s own authority was waning by the spring of 1945.This did not end the uncertainty on both sides. The Soviet government continued to worry that the British and Americans might be searching for some way of using Germany as a new ally against the Soviet threat, while Churchill and his cabinet feared that the arrest of the Dönitz government might make it difficult to maintain order, to enforce the disarming of German troops and to combat a suspected underground insurgency. Ironically, many British soldiers and officials in Germany deplored what Geoffrey Harrison, a Foreign Office representative in Germany, called the ‘barbarity and callousness’ of the Red Army in its treatment of the Germans; this reality, he continued, worked to ‘inflame dislike’ of the Russians, while at the same time it inspired ‘toleration and some pity for the Germans’. The Joint Planning Staff were asked to
Top: members of the German government are arrested by soldiers from the 21st British Army group, Flensburg, 23rd May, 1945.
Above: German officials under arrest following the seizure of the headquarters of the German High Command by British troops on the same day.
Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the
author of The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013).
FURTHER READING
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970).
John K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (Andre Deutsch, 1981).
Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 (Allen Lane, 2011).
Peter Padfield, Doenitz: The Last Fuehrer (Cassell, 2001). David Stafford, Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution,
Liberation (Little, Brown, 2007).
report on May 23rd, on the likely after-effect in Germany of the arrest of the Flensburg government. The group reported back two days later that the termination of the Flensburg anomaly was ‘unlikely to add to the difficulty of the Allies in enforcing their requirements’. The arrests opened the way to what the Soviet side wanted, the formal establish-ment of the Allied Control Commission for Germany and a formal Allied declaration of the defeat of Germany, which took place a few days later in Berlin.
T
HE DÖNITZ GOVERNMENT itself had been a hollow regime throughout. The surrenders were in the end made by senior military commanders, though technically under Dönitz’s authority. The ‘ministries’ set up at Flensburg controlled almost nothing except the immediate area of the town, though this did not stop the regime from giving regular radio broadcasts about German policy until they were terminated by the Allies. Dönitz used one of Hitler’s official black Mercedes cars to drive the half mile from his home to the temporary government headquarters (a converted schoolroom), whileHitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, sent one of his cameramen to record the new government at work. Speer later wrote that theirs was nothing but ‘sham activity’, which the victors did not ‘deign to notice’, but the British Foreign Office, while deploring the failure to define the political status of the regime, was interested in its compo-sition and function and received regular reports, includ-ing a full account of the personnel followinclud-ing the formal appointment of Dönitz’s cabinet on May 13th. The longer the regime was allowed to survive, the more it seemed that the western Allies might take it seriously, a judgment that suited Dönitz and his colleagues, who were themselves puzzled by the lack of action and the apparent endorsement of their authority, though also keen that some semblance of continuity for the German Reich should be kept going.
I
N THE END, the treatment of the Dönitz regime proveda dangerous anomaly for the West. Soviet distrust was embedded in their relations with their western allies through the failure to enforce unconditional surrender collectively, the tacit approval given to Hitler’s successor and the dithering response to the new government once hostilities were finally over. In the West’s defence, it might be said that there were fears that a German insurgency might result from a situation of chaos. ‘Do you want to have a handle with which to manipulate this conquered people’, wrote Churchill, ‘or just have to thrust your hands into an agitated ant-heap?’ Nor was there any precedent for the mass arrest of an enemy regime at the end of hostili-ties, though this had not stopped the western Allies from incarcerating Hermann Göring once he was caught in early May. The real fear governing British action was the reaction of the Soviet Union, to which Churchill seems to have been strangely impervious. A puppet, pro-Communist regime in Berlin would have created even greater difficulties for the West and, though an unlikely outcome at that point, the ambivalent attitude to Dönitz displayed by the West was a risky policy. As it was, Moscow insisted on action, but not before growing frustration and mistrust helped to foster a mutual hostility that soon widened out into the early stages of what was to become the Cold War. Dönitz was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in 1956, dying of a heart attack in 1980 in a small village in north-west Germany. He was, until 2012, the only head of state to have been convicted by an international tribunal.
Top: Minister of Economics Albert Speer, DÖnitz and General Alfred Jodl are questioned by war corre-spondents soon after their arrest in Flensburg on May 23rd, 1945. Above: DÖnitz with, from left, Hermann GÖring, Alfred Rosenberg and Baldur von Schirach during the Nuremberg trials, 1946.
SOMERVILLE COLLEGE
I
N SEPTEMBER 1914 Harold Macmillan, an undergrad-uate at Balliol College, took the widely held view that the war would be over by Christmas. ‘Our major anxiety was by hook or crook not to miss it.’ He didn’t. Like large numbers of Oxford undergraduates, he signed up in the early days of the war and, like thousands of others, he paid a heavy price for it. In his case he was wounded three times, severely at the Battle of the Somme. He spent the remain-der of the war in a military hospital and never returned to Oxford to finish his degree. ‘I just could not face it. To me it was a city of ghosts.’The war transformed Oxford and its university. Acad- emic life largely ended in the men’s colleges, with a consequent loss in fees and tuition. The local economy also suffered from the dramatic decline in the number of students – nearly 15,000 college men served in the forces and 2,716 of them died. ‘In the face of these challenges’, Malcolm Graham, a historian of the city observes, ‘a differ-ent wartime Oxford soon emerged as college, university, and other public buildings filled with billeted troops and wounded soldiers.’ As the casualties mounted, convalesc-ing servicemen could be seen in the Exam Schools, the Town Hall and a tented hospital in New College garden, among other places. The Radcliffe Infirmary joined the Third Southern General Hospital, which in 1918 had nearly 3,000 beds in the Base Hospital and outlying institutions. Between them, they treated some 105,000 patients during the war.
If the war was disastrous for the men of Oxford, it
An Oxford
Interlude
The Great War transformed women-only Somerville
College. It became a hospital for convalescing soldiers,
housed poets and writers and changed forever the
fortunes of female students, writes Frank Prochaska.
The west wing of Somerville College, requisitioned as a military hospital, April, 1915.
For the first time, female dons were
permitted to lecture in the university,
coach male undergraduates and plan
courses and lecture lists
presented an opening for the women left behind. It un- settled the women’s colleges but they seized the opportuni-ty to provide a degree of educational continuiopportuni-ty in Oxford. For the first time, female dons were permitted to lecture in the university, coach male undergraduates and plan courses and lecture lists. The chance of academic advancement for women was not to be missed by a progressive institution like Somerville College, which saw itself in the vanguard of female education. Founded in 1879 Somerville was, along with Lady Margaret Hall, the oldest Oxford college for women and the premier destination for intellectual girls.
W
ARTIME PRESSURES posed a seriousdilemma for individual women in Somer-ville. Several undergraduates made a hurried exit to volunteer for war service, which left those who remained uncertain about the path of duty. Several dons left to treat the wounded abroad; others took on war-related administrative work; others joined various charities. On top of all this, the War Office requisitioned Somerville as a military hospital in April 1915, which caused considerable dislocation for students and fellows alike. When the college opened its doors to wounded soldiers, Somerville relocated to Oriel for the duration of the war.
Vera Brittain, a first-year Somerville undergraduate reading English, remarked: ‘It is really splendid – much better as a Hospital than as a College.’
‘Oxford versus War’ and ‘Learning versus Life’, wrote Brittain of her college days in her memoir Testament of Youth, an elegy for the lost generation of the First World War. She had arrived in Somerville in the autumn of 1914, a tumultuous world far different from her tranquil childhood in Derbyshire. ‘I live in an atmosphere of exhilaration, half delightful, half disturbing, wholly exciting’, she wrote in her diary at the beginning of her first term. She had won an exhibition and, as she put it, ‘tried to forget the war’. She laboured over Greek verbs, joined the Oxford Society for Women’s Suffrage and made friends; she took an imme-diate liking to the future author and translator of Dante’s Comedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, a third-year undergraduate,
Students at Oriel College, including Dorothy Sayers and Vera Brittain (third row back, first and fifth from left) and Emily Penrose (second row back, tenth from left). June, 1915.
whose crime novel Gaudy Night was set at Somerville. The ‘emergency migration’ to Oriel was something of an adventure for both students and fellows. The Oxford Magazine noted that a former dean of Oriel ‘must be turning in his grave’ at the thought of females in the college. Brittain, who felt the war had made student life ‘more elevated & less petty’, was positive about moving to a men’s college and wrote of the ‘dusty old dons and proctors’ who criticised Oriel for taking them in. ‘One realises at such times the value of men who have sufficient imagi-nation and far-sightedness to be feminists. On the day we come into our own the dons and proctors won’t be shown much mercy!’ Such views reflected the fragility of female education at Oxford, where chaperones were still widely employed and the university denied degrees to women.
T
HE FORMIDABLE principal of Somerville, MissEmily Penrose, was in Switzerland when the war broke out and had to undergo an arduous journey home. She quickly adjusted to the changed en- vironment and made the best of it for the sake of
Somer-ville and women’s education more generally. She ‘gladly surrendered’ the college buildings and gardens to the military and saw an opportunity in the transition to an ancient men’s college; it was an indication of the progress that female students had made in the university. In her mind the move to Oriel was an historic event that required individual Somervillians to show character and intellectual mettle in the cause of women’s higher education. ‘We have’, she warned her exiled students, ‘to defend against the would be critics a long line of trenches; each student has her bit of the line to keep.’
The weekly magazine London Opinion took a less serious view:
A hundred wounded soldiers fill
(In days like these one might have feared it) The pleasant haunts of Somerville For Kitchener has commandeered it! But, driven from their loved abodes, The learned ladies find a corner Where once was sheltered Cecil Rhodes, Clough, Matthew Arnold, P.F. Warner! The quads adorned by Newman, Froude, Keble, and other grave professors, Are thronging with a multitude Of ardent feminine successors!
The Common Room, which saw contend Logician with acute logician
Is proving in the latter end The home of merest intuition! O Oriel, centuries ago
To flowing-vested monks devoted, To think that thou again canst show A horde of scholars petticoated! And when thy gallant sons return, Of whom the cruel wars bereave thee, Will not thy fair alumnae spurn Suggestions that it’s time to leave thee?
Roland Leighton, December, 1914.
Vera Brittain, c.1915.
the first few days very much like paradise.’ He read Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina, which took his mind off ‘the war to end war which appeared likely to go on indefinitely’. In the tranquil surroundings he felt that he would now be able to pour out some of the poetry bottled up in him.
Sassoon’s Somerville poems, which included ‘The Stretcher-Case’, ‘The Father’ and ‘The Hero’, expressed his growing cynicism about the war. ‘The One-Legged Man’, for example, illustrates his desire to upset the complacency on the home front. As he later admitted, it also revealed the suspect pleasure that he took from poetry inspired by the suffering of the wounded:
And he’d come home again to find it more Desirable than ever it was before.
How right it seemed that he should reach the span Of comfortable years allowed to man!
Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife, Safe with his wound, a citizen for life. He hobbled blithely through the garden gate, And thought: ‘Thank God they had to amputate!’
A
FTER A FEW DAYS in Somerville, Sassoon was fit enough to wander out of the college to visit the Oxford bookshops, admire the pictures in the Ashmolean and call on the society hostess Otto-line Morrell at Garsington Manor outside Oxford. Though he longed for congenial company, his only unhappiness was the belief that his friend Robert Graves had been killed at In fact, Somerville’s ‘petticoated’ feminists were cut offfrom the few remaining men at Oriel, for they were relegat-ed to St Mary’s Hall, which had been a separate institution and thus easy to isolate from the two other college quads. Indeed, Oriel installed fortifications between the quads to allay the provost’s worries about a ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ incident, a reference to Ovid’s ill-fated lovers.
Not all of Somerville’s 120-or-so students could be housed in St Mary’s Hall. A number of them lived in lodg-ings across the city, including Brittain, who was reduced to solitary tutorials on Pliny and Plato. The war and its effects on her love affair with Roland Leighton, who was stationed in France, soon cast a shadow over her studies. She took refuge in the poetry of Rupert Brooke, which stirred her anxieties and grief, and grumbled that ‘I am going down this year conspicuous for scarcely anything’. By the end of the academic year she had decided to become a nurse, which took her first to the Derbyshire Hospital back in Buxton and then on to London, Malta and France as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment. In the battle between ‘Oxford versus War’ and ‘Learning versus Life’, the latter had won on both fronts. ‘I, too, take leave of all I ever had’, she lamented. She would not return to her academic studies until the end of hostilities.
I
N 1916 the authorities decided to turn Somerville into a hospital for officers. For patients, there were decided advantages. With 262 beds, many of them in tents, the college was not only adjacent to the Radcliffe Infirmary on the Woodstock Road, but its rooms were off corridors rather than staircases, which made looking after patients easier. Moreover, the college founders had sought to create a domestic atmosphere in the common rooms suitable for young ladies, which was perhaps an aid to recovering officers. Several Somerville students volunteered to look after the wounded as hospital orderlies, wheeling out their charges in Bath chairs and organising outings in the country. Had Brittain stayed in Oxford and done this she would have come into contact with two of the great poets of the war, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who spent time convalescing in the college.In his book, Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon recalled being deposited in Somerville in August 1916 with a case of gastric fever just severe enough to get him sent back to England from his battalion in France. He was grateful to be relieved from playing any further part in the Battle of the Somme. The relaxed atmosphere of the college was a holiday after the trenches: ‘To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for
‘To be lying in a little white-walled room,
looking through the window on to a
College lawn, was for the first few days
very much like paradise’
Robert Graves (front) and Siegfried Sassoon, September, 1920.
the Battle of the Somme, as had been reported in The Times. He was thus joyous when a friend telegraphed with the news that Graves was alive. Sassoon wrote to Edward Dent, the eminent Cambridge musicologist:
Robert has come back! ... Everyone said he was killed ... Isn’t that wonderful and splendid? And I’ve been in England with spots on my lungs or some rot and I’ve been lying on the lawn in sun and the Oxford bells – oh paradise for the poet. Sassoon’s convalescence in Somerville was short-lived and he returned to the front a few months after his hospital discharge. He was wounded at the Battle of Arras in April 1917 and invalided home as a war hero. Declared unfit for further service, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh where he was diagnosed with shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then known, and famously made friends with Wilfred Owen. Meanwhile, Robert Graves, who was also being treated for shell shock, found himself recuperating in Somerville in the spring of 1917. Sassoon
wrote to Graves at the time: ‘How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies’ College at Oxford.’
Graves was undergoing something of an emotional change during his recuperation. In his autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929), he claimed that his first love for a woman took place in Somerville with Marjorie, a probationer nurse and professional pianist; but when he discovered that she was engaged to a man at the front he did not press his case. He found distraction in strolls down the Cornmarket in his dressing gown for coffee at the Cadena. Like Sassoon before him, he often visited the Morrells at Garsington, where Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell were frequent guests. ‘I enjoyed my stay at Somerville’, he later recalled, ‘the sun shone, and the disci-pline was easy.’ At the end of the war he returned to Oxford to take up his place at St John’s College.
THE END OF HOSTILITIES saw the arrival of large numbers of demobbed undergraduates in Oxford and pressure to The cavalry
advance at the Battle of Arras, April, 1917.
