Author: historyatnorthampton

Deporting people is not the answer to the problem of crime, nor has it ever been.

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Clearly we need to have the full details of those individuals who have today been deported from the UK to Jamaica. However, the Home Office was forced to remove well over half of those they wished to deport after last minute appeals that they had not had their cases properly represented by lawyers. Which begs the questions of what have these people done and is it ever right to deport someone from the place they call ‘home’?

Earlier this week a Home office spokesperson said:

‘We make no apology for trying to protect the public from serious, violent and persistent foreign national offenders.’

Sajid Javid has argued that all of those being deported were ‘Jamaican nationals who have been convicted of criminal offences and served prison sentences of 12 months or more’.

Opponents of the deportation have suggested that at the very least these people have not all been given the opportunity to contest their deportation in the courts. Detention Action– a charity which works with those held in immigration detention centres – claimed that poor communication at the centres in which the detainees had been held meant they couldn’t access legal support.

The High Court upheld this injunction in at least 30 of the 50 cases of those scheduled to be flown out of Britain this morning.

Bella Sankey, Director of Detention Action, said:

‘Yesterday we gathered shocking and damning evidence that those scheduled on tomorrow’s deportation flight to Jamaica have been denied access to justice. Home Office efforts to issue new SIM cards have been flawed and patchy and people facing a life-changing removal from the UK are effectively being held incommunicado. These removals must be halted until access to lawyers has been restored’.

Speaking on BBC News this morning Sankey remarked that those being deported were being punished a second time for crimes they had already served prison sentences for. Mnay were brought to the UK as children or young adults, many had suffered abuse and grooming whilst here, and in many cases their crimes were minor and drug related. Even in the case of those committing the serious violent offences that Home Secretary Patel and Chancellor Javid were intent on highlighting, did so after living here for several decades.

Her point was that these people – whatever they have done – are, effectively if not legally, British citizens. Their offending is our problem, not Jamaica’s.

convicts_at_botany_bay_commons

We have a history of deporting people our own citizens in this country. From at least the 17^thcentury we shipped unwanted criminals to the colonies on America’s eastern seaboard – to Maryland and Virginia for example. Revolutionary war in 1776 brought the system of indentured forced migration to a close and it was far from effective Unknown anyway, as convicts found it fairly straightforward to escape and return to England.

It was much harder for them to escape from the next penal colony however. In 1787 the First Fleet sailed for New South Wales, landing in Botany Bay and establishing a penal settlement was to last until the 1860s. Australia was an unforgiving continent from which escape was almost impossible.

Whilst modern historians have reconsidered the convict experience in the last few decades, and argued that some of those sent ‘down under’ had a better set of life chances than those left behind in the slums of London, Birmingham and Manchester, it was still a double sentence.

Most of those transported (deported in effect) to Australia were guilty of fairly minor property crimes and yet they had been imprisoned in Britain, often in unsanitary and bleak conditions, before being packed onto a ship and transported thousands of miles to endure harsh conditions in a new colony. Set to work in chain gangs, on farms as bonded labourers and servants, whilst they might work their way out of bondage it was very difficult for any of them to return ‘home’.

Britain abandoned transportation in the 1860s, preferring instead to lock up most of our criminals in model prisons like Pentonville. Notions of reform and rehabilitations often ran a poor second to those of protecting the public and punishment but at least on release those convicted could return to the communities they knew and understood.

Britain is a nation of immigrants; first and second and third (and so on) migrants from all over the world. Those from the Caribbean (whether Windrush or not) come as part of what was our empire and dominions. To uproot those that have made their home here (however badly they have lived their lives since they arrived) seems to be piling further punishment on top of that imposed by a judge at trial.

To me it smacks of cruelty and an abrogation of responsibility for people whose crimes were committed here, not in Jamaica or anywhere else, and as a result of the environment they grew up in, not the one they were removed from as children or teenagers.

Unknown I rather suspect that Mr Javid and Ms Patel (left) are more interested in appearing ‘tough on crime’ than they are in dealing with the problem of ‘crime’.

There is nothing new in this: it is very easy to talk tough and impress the readers of the Daily Mail and the Conservative Party conference but it will do nothing to keep the people of Britain ‘safe’ in the long run.

Drew Gray, Historian of crime and punishment

Free Speech for Fascists

On 13 November, David Renton gave a History Research seminar based on his work on the history of fascism and National Front. In this blog he reflects further on issues of free speech raised in his presentation:

Renton

For years, I’ve written about the battle between left and right. My interest hasn’t been so much in the structured alternation between two projects for government which gets resolved in a election. I mean rather the conflict between the far right and far left: a story of street-fighters, cultural warriors and intelligence-gatherers.

Recently, I’ve been writing about the rise and fall of one group, the National Front, which in 1976 and 1977 was a mass party capable of winning 100,000 votes in local elections in London and similar support across Britain.

That research has taken me to the Searchlight archive at the University of Northampton. Searchlight was a monthly magazine, with a predominantly left-wing readership which reported on the activities of the Front and other groups on the right.

You find in its archives all sorts of reports – sent in by regular informers, wavering former fascists, or individuals who came into contact with the British right and felt a need to tell someone else what they’d seen.

An example of the committed anti-fascist spy is the individual who attended a meeting of the Front at the Shakespeare pub in Birmingham in June 1975 and who recorded not merely the names of all the speakers, but the content of their speeches:

‘A short discussion was held on infiltration and meetings. Tom Finnegan gave a report on the proposed bulletins for various areas – displaying a map with several hundred coloured pins on it he outlined how things would be done – the communist cell system would be applied with several people in each branch covering a set number of members … John Finnegan then took up the question of trades unions and said that National Front members must gain trade union posts. Communist training classes were referred to and possible emulation commented on.’

Or, if you want an example of the opportunistic anti-fascist spy: here is a one-off letter sent to Searchlight a couple of years later, at a time when the National Front held weekly paper sales at Chapel Market in Islington and the group’s National Organiser Martin Webster was a frequent visitor:

‘Please find enclosed Martin Webster’s passport, diary and a couple of letters. I came into possession of these items as a result of stealing his bike from outside a pub in Islington. I don’t normally steal things but as a committed anti-Nazi I thought I would take it first to wind Webster up.’

The next project I’ll be working on is about silencing and speech. The National Front wanted to see Britain become a one-party state on which everyone who disagreed with the Front would be silenced.

Anti-fascists also had their own idea of silencing, ‘no platform,’ which held that the Front should be prevented from speaking because the Front was a fascist party, and had as its defining purpose the destruction of democracy. As Alan Sapper, General Secretary of the broadcast workers union ACTT put it. ‘Democracy is threatened. We don’t need to bother with philosophical arguments. We can discuss democracy until the concentration camps come in.’

I am only just beginning my research but the things which intrigue me include the resistance of the Front to posing as free speech martyrs. They were desperate to be seen as a virile force capable of beating any opponent, literally or metaphorically, into resistance. Therefore, they declined to play the role which the far right had played in earlier decades: of demanding free speech for themselves but not their opponents.

On the left, meanwhile, no platform was not a single political position but a range of arguments whose resolution was never properly resolved.

Should no platform be restricted to fascists or could it be applied universally to anyone who championed racial or sex discrimination?

Was no platform only appropriate for places controlled by social movements (eg student unions, trade unions, politicised black communities), or did it apply everywhere (eg to party political broadcasts watched by anyone)?

Linked to that question, was no platform something to be carried out ‘from below’ (eg by people themselves blocking the road to prevent a speaker making their way into a meeting) or ‘from above’ (eg by petitioning the local authority to have a particular speaker’s invitation rescinded?

The confused outcomes of these debates is, I’d argue, something which was apparent even after the Front had gone into decline, and its legacy remains with us today.

A Tale of Two Articles

Jim Beach reflects upon taking an intelligence history investigation from initial idea to publication.

Dil'Se restaurant Dundee

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Depending on how you voted. Our project was born in Dundee on the evening of Thursday 23 June 2016. The Dil’Se restaurant provided some great food, ideas were discussed, questions were half-formed, and possible lines of inquiry scribbled down.

The following morning, we awoke to the EU referendum result. Although we never consciously entered into a race with the Conservative party, having simultaneously started something that was initially ill-defined and then unexpectedly complicated, we do feel slightly smug in having crossed the finish line before them.

The initial impetus to research and write came from a sense of unfinished business. Nine months before our meal I had published the diary of a First World War soldier who had been engaged in frontline signals intelligence (SIGINT).

Editing the diary had caused me to do some research on IToc (aye-tok), the British army’s system for intercepting German trench telephones, and to also look for the service records of the SIGINT soldiers whose names popped up in the text.

And it turned out that I’m not very good at rummaging in personnel records. Enter stage left my old friend, Jock Bruce. He’s a genealogical ninja and, I think initially out of pity, demonstrated that I was giving up too easily when confronted by hundreds of hits on common names.

Jock’s main historical interest is early Twentieth Century SIGINT and so, while I moved on to other things, he pushed further into the personnel files. We also batted emails back and forth about another problem; some of the diary evidence just didn’t fit with previously-accepted interpretations.

Jock then had a breakthrough. From the diary we knew that men who were recruited into this type of work were transferred to the Royal Engineers (Signal Service). But there were over 200,000 Royal Engineers in the First World War. How could we identify the couple of hundred who were designated as ‘Interpreter Operators’?

Taking the two dozen names that we had from the diary, Jock tested a hypothesis. What if these men had been transferred to the engineers in batches? Administrative logic would suggest they would have been allocated new service numbers in sequential blocks.

Through a process we dubbed ‘numerology’, Jock started searching for engineers with service numbers close to those of men identified in the diary. This unlocked many fresh targets and we quickly realised that, using their service records, we could build up a useful collective profile of these men. Or, to give it its proper academic label, engage in some prosopography.

Art IWM PST 6976

‘The enemy listens too! Careful on the phone!’

© Imperial War Museum, Art.IWM PST 6976.

Over the curry in Dundee we had decided to write a short article which synthesised the existing secondary sources with the evidence from the diary, plus a couple of thousand words on the personnel dimension derived from Jock’s genealogical work. It all sounded so simple.

But then it spiralled out of control. We found ourselves investigating multiple leads and producing many more questions than answers. But we persisted. Mostly from a combination of curiosity and obstinacy.

The next forehead-slap moment came when we both dug back into our old notes on First World War intelligence. We found numerous examples of both of us having both looked at documents without realising the potential significance of the trench SIGINT references.

While re-tracing our steps in well-known sources, we also began trawling new ones, such as local newspapers, using terminology found in the diary. We got lucky in finding, for example, one officer who decided to spill the beans about his secret SIGINT work to a community group in Berwick-upon-Tweed. We were also aided by the kindness of numerous First World War historians who responded very generously to our strange enquiries about obscure aspects of their past and present research.

Then came the hard part. Writing up.

It quickly became clear that we’d accumulated too much material for one article. We wrangled with various configurations, but eventually ended up writing two; one focused thematically on the personnel and the other, structured chronologically, on the SIGINT.

Neither of us had co-written academically before, and it’s fair to say that it was quite challenging. What we learnt was that, having known one another for many years, we found it relatively easy to engage in a critical-but-creative dialogue conducted mostly by email. That said, we both realised early on that writing this way takes much more time than flying solo.

Eventually, we submitted to the Journal of Intelligence History and found the peer reviewers to be firm yet fair. A little further digging thereby ensued and, happily, we were waved through at the second time of asking.

Would we do it differently if we had our time again? Probably not. Yes, we made mistakes and could have been much more efficient in pursuing leads. We also discovered just how strangely obsessive each of us could be in pursuing divergent aspects of the investigation. But, ultimately, by working together, we have researched and written something that neither of us could have done alone.

Please have a look at our work using the links below. And tell all your military and intelligence history friends to do the same. There should be something in there for everybody; perhaps the German intelligence advantage during the Battle of the Somme, security concerns about using immigrants for secret intelligence work, or eavesdropping on the conversations of enemy prisoners.

British Signals Intelligence in the Trenches, 1915-1918: Part 1, Listening Sets.

British Signals Intelligence in the Trenches, 1915-1918: Part 2, Interpreter Operators.

Finally, we are most grateful to the University of Northampton for funding open-access. And we also thank GCHQ for recently publicising the names of the Interpreter Operators.

URB@N History and Personal Tutoring

This week, I was very pleased to support Emma Tyler present her second URB@N project for the History department at the University of Northampton. For those who have not heard of it, URB@N stands for Undergraduate Research Bursaries at Northampton, and is a scheme the university has been running since 2008. Basically URB@N gives students the chance to carry out research into the ways undergraduate teaching works, to help lectures and other staff improve the teaching experience at the university. Students are expected to put in a significant amount of work for this research, but are rewarded for their time with a £500 bursary.

Emma Tyler presenting her URB@N project at the annual Teaching and Learning conference at the University of Northampton on 18 June 2019

I have been involved in four URB@N projects so far, and each one has led to some interesting discoveries. In the past these projects have helped me develop teaching materials for my modules on the history of fascism, and enhance the department’s online and social media presence. Our online spaces now include this blog site, which features content from staff and students, and also our Twitter account, @HistoriansUON, among other things.

For the most recent project, Emma looked into the department’s personal tutoring system. She was trying to find out both ways it worked well and ways it could be improved, to make sure the History team is being as supportive as it can be. She conducted a questionnaire survey of all the History students, and also ran a focus group of first years. Carrying out this type of research is fairly unusual for History students, as it involves finding out things about people who are very much alive, and involves getting ethical approval for all the data collection. It has also helped develop Emma’s experience in developing practical recommendations from original research, another key skill.

Emma’s research was able to show that the vast majority of our students are happy with our personal tutoring system, and they seem to view the History team as helpful and supportive. For example, her data shows that the department makes clear the role of the personal tutor very early on, and uses the system to offer students a wide range of academic and pastoral support. She was also able to highlight some areas for enhancing the way the History department delivers personal tutoring, such as rethinking our choice of meeting spaces for tutorial sessions, and adding in more scheduled personal tutor meetings throughout the year.

While Emma is now finalising a report that she will present to the History team over the summer, on 18 June she presented her research project at the university’s annual Teaching and Learning conference. Over lunch, along with other students from across the university who were granted URB@N bursaries, she talked about her research at a poster exhibition. She chatted with a wide range of lectures and others involved in delivering teaching, and was even able to get some further ideas to help refine her recommendations. Emma was a great advocate for the History department, and was able to explain in detail how the History team approached personal tutoring.

The URB@N scheme is a very important element of how the University of Northampton empowers the student voice, and is responsive to problems and issues that students face. It empowers students, and helps them engage in research that not only enhances their own skills, but also hopefully improves things for fellow students. I am look forward to being involved in more URB@N projects in the future, and hope that other History students can find it as beneficial as Emma has.

Paul Jackson, Senior Lecturer in History

Exhibition Launch: James Parkes and the Age of Intolerance

Starting on Wednesday 13 March 2019, the University of Northampton will be hosting an exhibition about the life of Reverend Dr James Parkes (1896 – 1981). Parkes was one of the most remarkable figures within twentieth-century Christianity. Yet since his death in 1981, he has largely been forgotten by the church, by Jews, and by British society as a whole.

James PArkes blog

The exhibition on display at Southampton city’s Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Day event in January 2019

James Parkes was a tireless fighter against antisemitism in all forms. He was one of the first Christians to accept both the Christian roots of antisemitism and the integrity and validity of Judaism. Throughout his career, Parkes worked tirelessly to promote religious tolerance and mutual respect among those of all faiths and none.

In the 1930s, he helped to rescue Jewish refugees from Europe, including Alexander Teich – the grandfather of the actress Rachel Weisz. Parkes campaigned for the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust. He was a key figure in the creation of the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). The CCJ was galvanised in 1942 as evidence of the Nazi extermination programme received widespread exposure in Britain. This was the most murderous year yet faced by European Jewry and the year when Polish Jewry was essentially destroyed.

Parkes authored more than 400 texts during his lifetime and was a prolific letter writer. He donated his library and personal papers to the University of Southampton in 1964. These materials formed the foundation for what later became the Parkes Institute, the world’s oldest and most wide-ranging centre for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations across the ages. The exhibition draws on documents and photographs from the University’s Special Collections to examine the life of James Parkes and reflect on his legacy for us today.

Since his death, James Parkes has been increasingly forgotten. He has become a ‘nobody’, whilst others are celebrated for the work that he pioneered. He ought to be remembered. Remembering activists such as Parkes is partly about honouring their humanity. But it also helps to illustrate the failure of their contemporaries to act during an age in which intolerance was all too common.

The exhibition has been curated by Chad McDonald, who is an alumnus of the University of Northampton. He is now a researcher based at the universities of Bristol and Southampton, where he is examining British post-war responses to the Holocaust. He is a member of the editorial team for the highly respected academic journal Patterns of Prejudice. The exhibition has been generously funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

The exhibition will be opened with a keynote talk by the curator at 4pm on Wednesday 13 March. It will be on show in the Owl’s Nest on the Ground Floor of the Learning Hub on the Waterside Campus until 27 March. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Click here for more details on the launch event on the 13 March

Remembering a war after ‘The War’

Jim Beach of the University of Northampton reflects on a visit to the Czech Republic.

Jim blog

Speaking neither Czech nor Polish, it was with some trepidation that I accepted an invitation to speak at a workshop on the Seven Days’ War between the Czechs and Poles in 1919.

The initial invite came from Tomáš Rusek, a Czech historian I had met at the Voices of the Home Fronts event organised by the National Archives and Everyday Lives in War in 2016. Along with Ondřej Kolář, who had presented alongside Tomáš, a coincidence of historical interest emerged during that conference and the three of us have remained in contact since.

The workshop took place in Ostrava in the Czech Republic on Friday 25 January and was organised by Martin Lokaj of the city’s university in collaboration with the Association of Czechoslovak Legionnaires. My paper discussed the British military officers sent in early 1919 to the Duchy of Teschen; now the borderlands of Poland and the Czech Republic.

Like my fellow Britons a hundred years ago, I was unsure what to expect but found the experience fascinating. Particularly as my only personal point of comparison was First World War centenary events in Britain.

The visit was made all the more interesting because I travelled with Ian Dalziel, the great-nephew of one of the British officers sent to Teschen. Like me, Ian had never visited the Czech Republic and we were made to feel most welcome by our hosts.

Another aspect that impressed us was the format and content of the workshop. It took place in Centrum Pant, a coffee and bookshop which is used as a cultural venue in Ostrava. This made the occasion less formal than a standard academic conference and seems to have helped the interchange of perspectives.

The audience was a mix of scholars and the wider public, with representation from both sides of the modern border. It is also worth noting that the programme did not shy away from confronting difficult subject areas. For example, one talk addressed the highly controversial issue of war crimes committed during the fighting.

Although handicapped by our linguistic ignorance, Ian and I witnessed vigorous debates in the Q&A sessions. Catching up on the gist, which was kindly translated retrospectively for us during the breaks, I was struck by a similarity with British First World War-related events between 2014 and 2018.

As in Britain, there was an obvious collision between recent scholarship and ingrained perceptions of the conflict. And although there was no obvious emergence of consensus, it struck me that it was important for old and new views to be expressed, challenged, and argued in a public historical forum like this one.

In this regard, it must be understood that a broader significance hangs over the Seven Days’ War. It tainted the early relationship between a re-established Poland and the new state of Czechoslovakia. As the interwar period played forward this had consequences when the Second World War loomed in Central Europe.

On the Saturday Ian and I joined the Legionnaires association on their visit to the battlefields of the Seven Days’ War in Poland. With temperatures well below zero and an accompanying snow fall, we certainly got a feel for the meteorological challenges facing the two sides a hundred years ago.

The key events of the day’s tour were the laying of wreaths at graves of the fallen. In simple ceremonies very similar to their British equivalents, a guard was formed by personnel from today’s Czech military and younger legion members wearing reproduction uniforms of 1919.

These uniforms were in themselves an intriguing insight into the conflict. Czech forces of the time wore a variety of dress depending on which army they had served with in 1918. Czech legion units formerly with the French and Italian armies wore uniforms of those countries, while locally-recruited troops had Austro-Hungarian outfits. The addition of insignia in the then Czech national colours of red and white did not really help with battlefield recognition because Polish colours were the same!

Ian and I were also impressed by the Czechs concluding their day with a double wreath laying at the graves of Polish soldiers in Skoczów. Reflecting the human complexity of Teschen in 1919, these men had been laid to rest in adjacent Catholic and Protestant cemeteries. And in the early evening darkness the lighting of candles next to their memorial stones added poignancy to the ceremony.

Reflecting upon the two days, I am struck by the willingness of my Czech colleagues to engage with what might termed the ‘difficult history’ of the Seven Days’ War. It would have been all too easy to let the centenary pass by without historical engagement.

It was a privilege to witness events over the two days. I am therefore most grateful to have been able to participate as a representative of the Everyday Lives in War First World War engagement centre.

This blog first appeared on the Everyday Lives in War First World War Engagement Centre website

UK premature baby care 1947-1965. The Doctor Isaac ‘Harry’ Gosset Collection

This blog is based on the presentation given on 8November 2018, as part of the History at Northampton Research Seminars series at the University of Northampton. It explores the origins of perinatal (premature baby) care in the UK from 1947 to 1965, using recently available archival material for Northampton, made possible through the generosity of the family of Dr Isaac Henry Gosset (1907-1965).

Isaac Gosset (known as Harry) was the son of the noted statistician William Sealy Gosset who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Student’ who developed the ‘t-Test’. Isaac received his education at the Dragon School in Oxford and Rugby School, then on to Magdalen College at Oxford before gaining his medical degree at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.

He held various medical posts in London and around the Home Counties including a period in the RAF during the Second World War. By the time of his demobilisation he was working as Senior Medical Specialist at RAF Cosford, one of the largest RAF general hospitals, and had attained the rank of Wing Commander.

Dr Gosset was appointed the first consultant paediatrician for Northampton General Hospital in 1947. He had extensive clinical responsibilities for Northampton and the southern part of the county, together with part of north Oxfordshire, and following the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 also Kettering General Hospital and the northern part of Northamptonshire.

He was a pioneer in the development of exchange transfusions ‘undertaking exchange transfusions for sick neonates with hydrops only one year after the first published description of this technique by Diamond in 1947’. This was a decisive, life-saving intervention by the paediatrician in the delivery room, an area previously felt to be the sole realm of the of the obstetrician and midwife.

The first premature baby unit in the UK was opened at the Sorrento Maternity Hospital in Birmingham by Dr Mary Crosse in 1931, the second unit opened at the Southmead Hospital in Bristol by Dr Beryl Corner in 1946. During the 1950s several hospital teaching centres set up premature baby units. The General Hospital in Northampton was an early adopter of premature baby units as the first one here predated 1950. This unit was deemed to be too small so in 1950 Dr Gosset helped in planning and setting up the new premature baby unit at Northampton by the conversion of the old labour ward in the hospital’s maternity home.

In neonatal practice he designed the ‘Gosset icterometer’.

Andrew Willaims 2

Andrew williams 3

It was made of Perspex, and manufactured initially by Modern Fittings, a local Northampton firm, and subsequently by Ingram’s of the Santos Works at Birmingham, it allowed accurate estimation of serum bilirubin without a blood test. The icterometer was trialled in both Northampton and Birmingham and both studies were published in the Lancet in 1960.

These are amongst the very earliest neonatal care research papers in such a prestigious journal and reflect that at the time icterometers were an important advance. Dr Mary Crosse and her team at the Sorrento Maternity Hospital, also in Birmingham, were using Gosset’s Icterometer too, so successfully that they were wearing the paint off their device.

Professor Peter Dunn, Emeritus Professor of Perinatal Medicine and Child Health, at the University of Bristol, and Southmead Hospital, Bristol, said of the icterometer ‘…[he] used the icterometer all the time when he was paediatric registrar at the Birmingham Maternity Hospital 1959-1962 and onwards’. He said further that ‘Not only was the icterometer an effective clinical tool, equally importantly it saved valuable time when paediatric staffing was minimal. I rate this instrument as the most valuable I had at that time and still is useful today especially for those working outside hospital’.

Icterometers were used for many years afterwards, but having been superseded by transcutaneous electronic bilirubin meters and microsampling of blood samples enabling blood tests to be undertaken more quickly and requiring less volume, they are no longer supported by current NICE guidelines for use in the UK. However Icterometers are still in use today in many countries around the world with recently published (2017) studies validating their use in China and Nigeria.

In April 1965 the new premature baby unit which Dr Gosset helped to design was opened. In this he was a generation ahead of his time, which even in the 1970s saw such units as being restricted to teaching centres.

Sadly in March 1965, Dr Gosset died of a coronary thrombosis aged only 57 on his way home from his usual Thursday afternoon clinic at Kettering General Hospital. The Premature Baby Unit was immediately renamed the ‘Gosset Premature Baby Unit’ a name which it still proudly bears to this day.

‘The Gosset Collection’ is unique in the UK in having extensive archival material covering premature baby care in the pre-ventilation era. Using ‘The Gosset Collection’ the full premature baby care pathway of the 1950s and 60s can be reconstructed, the history of the development of the icterometer can be explored and both can be placed in the context of a rapidly evolving area of paediatric medical care.

Fred O’Dell and Andrew N Williams, Northampton General Hospital, United Kingdom.

https://www.northamptongeneral.nhs.uk/About/OurHistory/Dr-Gosset/The-Dr-Isaac-Harry-Gosset-Collection.aspx

The photographs are taken from the Dr Isaac ‘Harry’ Gosset Collection and were originally provided by Dr Gosset’s family.

Needy knights and rich old ladies: Sir John Sandys and social mobility in late Medieval England

In 1980, Terry Jones, actor, presenter, writer and Monty Python member, published what has become something of a literary event. Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary is a book that had medieval historians foaming at the mouth for many a year afterwards. It generated much debate and forever altered the landscape of the knightly class and ‘chivalry’ in academic circles.

Jones proposed that Chaucer’s knight, far from being the chivalric gentleman, was in fact a ruthless careerist in pursuit of titles, land and wealth via the conventional trade of war. Ransom, kidnapping, extortion, profit and abduction was the new stock in trade, rather than saving the honour of the defenceless or fighting evil. Chaucer’s General Prologue and Canterbury Tales (c.1380s) are packed with similitudes and, like the best fiction, tell more of real life than non-fiction can.

One of the chief tasks of the medieval knight in literature was to rescue or at the very least, preserve the honour of the damsel, but in reality it was the often the knight himself who placed the damsel in distress.

One such real person I encountered during my research is Chaucer’s Knight to the life, an exact contemporary with the Canterbury Tales. In November 1375, orders were sent to William Upton to keep safely all the goods of John Sandys, a ‘fugitive’ from Cheshire, which were in his keeping; the king’s sergeant-at-arms were then commissioned to arrest all goods of John Sandys in William Upton’s keeping and bring them to London to the king for disposal.

John Sandys was charged with the abduction of the recently widowed Joan Bridges from Romsey Abbey (Hampshire), where she had been staying. It was found that he had on his person possessions worth over £120 (£100,000 today), which belonged to the lady’s previous husband. One of the Black Prince’s esquires was sent to Chester to bring the lady back to London for examination by the King’s Council. It was then discovered, however, that Sandys had already married her.

On 8th April 1376, Sandys secured a royal pardon for all homicides, rapes and felonies of which he stood indicted. He subsequently acknowledged that he owed the King a fine of £1,000 (around £900,000 today) but this sum was never paid, for it was assigned to the Black Prince, who before his death expressed a wish for it to be pardoned in full. (Sandys was fortunate; the Black Prince died in June 1376.)

It was his service with the Black Prince that was Sandys’ salvation. Sandys is first recorded in the service of the Black Prince, who was earl of Chester (Sandys’ place of origin), as well as Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England. On 27 January 1367, before Prince Edward sailed from Gascony to Spain, he granted him a substantial annuity of £50 (£50,000 today) for life from the issues of the earldom. Sandys probably fought in the battle of Najera, thereafter remaining for some time in the prince’s company in Spain and France.

“A knight there was, a worthy man…he loved chivalry, truth and honour….”

Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (Luttrell Psalter f202v) c.1350

The later fourteenth century abounded with ‘proto-professionals’ – free-booters and mercenary leaders such as Sir John Hawkwood in Italy, Sir Robert Knolles in France or Nicholas Sabraham whose campaigning life took him from Brittany to the Black Sea. Included in these groups were opportunists and criminals, deserters, mutineers. It was a diverse, volatile world in a shifting culture and it was from this world that John Sandys emerges, his military career typical of many who served during this time.

However much Sandys military careerism may prove to be part of a developing trend in late 14^thcentury warrior society, his abduction of a wealthy widow is the key to his stake in local society, politics and dynastic security. Without land, he was nothing, and the widow he apparently snatched from Romsey Abbey gave him that anchor.

Joan Bridges was the widow of both Peter Bridges and of Giles Norman and brought to Sandys four Hampshire manors with the marriage. Joan, however, was worth much more. She was the cousin and eventual heir of Sir William Fifhide, on whose death she stood to inherit three manors in Sussex and five in Hampshire, something Sandys would have been aware of in 1375.

John Sandys’ marriage to Joan and his previous military career positioned him well for a busy political career in Hampshire; he was commissioner of array between 1377 and 1392 (with involvement in putting down the rebellions of the summer of 1381); coroner from 1378, sheriff 1382-3 and 1394-5, JP 1384-95 (and JP in neighbouring Wiltshire 1391-4), MP eight times between 1381 and 1393 and deputy constable of Southampton castle in 1386.

During a military campaign in Aquitaine in 1380 Sandys was knighted, and his rise in society sealed. Sandys was now a made man; he dined with Bishop Wykeham’s household. (We have the only surviving household account roll, for six months in 1393 and he is specifically mentioned as a guest on Monday 16 June. He was in good company. On 25 July, King Richard II and his wife, Queen Anne of Bohemia lunched with the bishop and 234 others.) One imagines the fugitive-soldier of fortune turned landowner, MP and sheriff silently toasting his good fortune with the son of a stonemason turned Bishop over the wine and capons supplied to the kitchen that day. Sandys obtained a preacher’s licence from the Bishop for his own chaplain in 1385.

He may not have been born with a silver spoon, but he quickly learnt how to use one. Whatever his background as soldier of fortune from Cheshire, alleged rapist and murderer, by the 1380s, we would surmise that Sandys was very the epitome of Hampshire county society, an upstanding pillar of the community – one might even say, poacher turned gamekeeper.

Would any, or all this political activity have been possible without the widow Joan and her inheritance?

Joan was a prize worth having. Her life was lived out in the unequal patriarchal society, as heiress, wife and widow. If Sandys was Chaucer’s Knight, with all the ambiguities of the ‘chivalric’ career, then Joan was Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (like her, thrice married). Joan was the person with property, not John; Joan had the gentility that Sandys needed to enter into Hampshire society, once Sandys had washed himself of the blood and sweat from his numerous campaigns.

It was the heirs of their union (and her property) who would maintain the social status in the county community. Joan retained her rights over her freehold property from before the Sandys marriage, the land that had come to her during the marriage (from the Fifhide estate) and she would recover them if she became a widow, which indeed she did. Medieval land was ‘held’, not owned; what was at stake was the ‘right’ to their land and it was this that defined their possession. Sandys was seised in of Joan’s lands in right of her. Whilst married to John, she could not dispose of the land herself without his agreement; he couldn’t sell her land without her consent, or else the conveyance could be void at a later date.

As a widow, Joan was vulnerable because she was a woman of property in her own right and heiress. As an independent widow, Joan would have to take her own legal action in court (and women did) rather than her relatives take the action on her behalf.

The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Literature includes stories of knights dressed as friars assaulting women. See Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale – “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte”, a phrase which has a modern echo in a notorious comment by Donald Trump!

There is no record of Joan taking any such action. Perhaps it was a consensual match. Sandys was clearly a powerful man with a reputation, who would protect her. Perhaps not. When Sandys died, Joan married a fourth time, to the well-known lawyer, Sir Thomas Skelton, who had no connections with Hampshire and made no intention of making any. Does this mean Joan suffered silently with Sandys or just that once again she needed protection as a widow of means whose property was at risk?

Sandys not only wanted Joan’s property, which would be his during her lifetime, but his heirs by her would have the rights over her first two husbands’ property and inherit the Fifhide manors, which they did. Clearly Joan was either childless when Sandys carried her off, or with infant children who died because it was Sir John’s son by her – Walter – who inherited the properties and during the 15^thcentury the family prospered (it was always harder for ‘new’ men to get established – older families often had a male heir, however distant, to take on the estate).

In 1501, at the dawn of the Tudor age, Sir Walter Sandys was 26 when he inherited eleven Hampshire manors, the bulk of them Joan Bridges’ inheritances. His younger brother Sir William went on to become Lord Sandys, 1^stBaron of the Vyne in 1523, who built a new house at Sherborne which was visited by Henry VIII in 1510 and 1531.

The Sandys dynasty was firmly established, begun by an advantageous (forced) marriage by a career soldier with powerful backing and continued by good fortunes of fertility and survival (the average survival rate of the male line was 21% amongst peerage and gentry).

But what made Sandys unusual in Hampshire at least, was that he was one of very few, if perhaps the only, man to have married into the local gentry from a background without social parity in the period c1300-c1500, whose family became a leading local family. Widows and heiresses were key to the transmission of landed estates throughout later medieval England, but most marriages were conducted between families of equal status and from the local, or regional area. Sandys was neither.

Sandys was an exception to the rule. He not only broke out of the murky world of career soldiering but managed to build a local dynasty thanks to his marriage to Joan. In a man’s world of derring-do, high politics, and foreign adventures, the most important feature of later medieval landowning – and therefore local power – was the women – often nameless, mostly unknown – but they were crucial to the family fortunes. Real power lay with them.

Dr Toby Purser, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education and Humanities

Elizabeth Greenhalgh. Military Historian.

Jim Beach of UoN History reflects on the passing of a remarkable historian.

This is not an obituary. Nor is it a eulogy. It’s probably ‘an appreciation’. But Elizabeth, who died this month, would perhaps have pulled a face at that description. So let’s call it a paean; a song of praise that the Ancient Greeks offered up for their dead heroes.

Having come to the subject late in life, Elizabeth quickly established herself as a world-class military historian of the First World War. Within a decade she had published three landmark works with Cambridge University Press; Victory through Coalition (2005), Foch in Command (2011), and The French Army in the First World War (2014). In addition to this impressive output, Elizabeth also engaged in lively debate, through a series of articles, about Anglo-French relations during the conflict.

Greenhalgh books

My first encounter with Elizabeth was a dozen years ago at a conference on the Battle of the Somme. We ended up sitting next to one another during dinner and, having asked me some polite but tough questions about my recently-completed thesis, she immediately suggested avenues I could pursue as well as offering me snippets from her own work.

After that I saw her mainly during research trips to Europe from her home in Australia. Elizabeth’s historical generosity continued, and I will be forever grateful for various titbits taken from dark archival corners on both sides of the Channel. And as her books came off the presses, like the rest of the historical community, I was consistently impressed by the depth of her research and their lively writing. Her work is also now embedded into my undergraduate teaching.

Visiting Canberra a few years back, Elizabeth and her husband Michael provided me with a lovely home-cooked dinner, some great wine, and a lift back to my hotel. But perhaps most delightful of all was the fact that she had, without me asking, raided her institution’s library shelves for every ageing text related to my research. Best short-term loan system I’ve ever encountered!

Elizabeth’s tenacity and thoroughness in pursuing historical targets was both remarkable and inspirational. Like a great detective in crime fiction, for her there seemed to be no such thing as a cold case. As secretary of the Army Records Society, I was lucky enough to have a ringside seat for one of these pursuits.

Having proposed a book of documents and diary entries written by the French liaison officer to British GHQ, over many years various obstacles blocked Elizabeth’s path. A lesser historian might have retired with honour from what seemed an impossible task. Instead she doggedly chased down strange French copyright regulations, obscure bibliographic references, and elusive retired academics. The resulting volume, Liaison: General Pierre des Vallières at British General Headquarters, January 1916 to May 1917, is one of the society’s best.

For any military historian starting out, I think Elizabeth’s scholarly life tells you this: Don’t let age or gender hold you back from joining the fray, follow your passion and seek out fresh evidence, then challenge any consensus you might collide into. Back yourself. However, always take the time to find out properly what others are researching so you can lend a helping hand when paths intersect.

I will miss her. Military history will too. But from what I knew of her, Elizabeth would not want a fuss. Instead she’d probably want us to just get on with some decent archival research and then get it written up.

Wolverhampton First World War Conference Report

One symptom of a good conference is that you find yourself struggling to decide which parallel session to attend. It’s a good problem to have and it plagued me throughout the recent conference entitled 1918-2018: The End of the War & The Reshaping of a Century.

At one point I had to decide between the demilitarisation of the Belgian capital in 1918 or a British Army vegetable show in the same year. Was it to be Brussels or Brussels Sprouts?

Hosted by the University of Wolverhampton, the conference included six keynote lectures, sixty shorter papers, an after-dinner address, a round-table discussion, and the launch of digital exhibition. The latter, entitled ‘Aftermath’, was focused on the social, economic, health and political issues affecting veterans.

The conference sponsors included the Royal Historical Society, the Western Front Association (WFA), the First World War Network, and the five AHRC-funded engagement centres.

Unsurprisingly given this support base, attendees came from a broad spectrum; WFA members, a variety of students, plus academics at all career stages and from around the world. Probably because of this mixture, the event was noticeably informal in tone and the Q&A sessions were some of the best I’ve witnessed.

On the second day I was joined by Nick Mansfield, also from Everyday Lives in War. He made copious notes on Panel 11 and, as you can see, I captured them for posterity.

Nicks-notes-1024x699

And Panel 11 itself was a good example of the diversity of the conference content. Tammy Proctor unpacked the uneasy transition from war to peace in Belgium; Peter Stanley offered the hitherto untold story of the Territorials who served in India; while Ian Isherwood showed how the publishing industry shaped the stories told in the immediate aftermath of war.

Of the keynotes, Laura Ugolini’s exploration of masculinity was especially interesting. I also found Alison Fell’s examination of women veterans very thought-provoking and it has certainly prompted me to reconsider the canon of interwar intelligence memoirs.

The conference was bookended by lectures from two world-renowned scholars of the conflict. John Horne began by challenging the American/Western European notion that the war ended on 11 November 1918. Then, at the end of proceedings, Jay Winter suggested that there were, in fact, two overlapping wars; the well-known one that ran from 1914 to 1918 plus another, far more brutal, conflict that began in 1917 and ended in 1923.

This should perhaps give us pause for thought. In Britain we have just come to the end of a conflict commemoration process that has, generally, been disconnected from the rough and tumble of contemporary politics. Across East/Central Europe and the wider world, the centenaries between 2019 and 2023 will almost certainly be more contested. And yet, in many instances, the British were deeply involved in those events. How might we mark them?

Dr Jim Beach, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History

This blog first appeared on the Everyday Lives in War First World War Engagement Centre website: https://everydaylivesinwar.herts.ac.uk/2018/09/wolverhampton-first-world-war-conference-report/