University of Northampton

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

Putting Undergraduates on Trial (this time with feelings)

For several years now I’ve been putting undergraduates on trial. Before you get excited I only mean as an exercise in understanding the criminal trial in the past, I don’t lock them up or send them to Botany Bay!

Each year I set an assessment which involves groups of 2nd year History and Criminology students at the University of Northampton working together to recreate a trial from among the thousands available via the Old Bailey Online website. Students have to think about how the transcript they are provided with by the site should be adapted to work in a 15-20 minute presentation and are then asked to reflect on what they have learned (about the crime, the process and the wider justice system of the 1700s or 1800s). Finally each of them will submit a short written essay which explores the context of their chosen case in more detail.*

The presentation element has always taken place outside of the classroom. At Northampton this usually involved taking the UGs to the university’s Moot Room on Park campus where the police and law students practised in a room set up rather like a modern family court. Since we moved this summer to the new Waterside campus I’ve lost this resource and was wondering whether I might be able to utilise a more appropriate venue instead.

With the help of Jane Bunce and her team at Northampton we secured the use of the Sessions House, one of England’s most authentic surviving courtrooms. Sessions House has two courts, one for civil cases and the other for criminal ones. The courts are situated within the Northamptonshire County Council offices in town and comprise courts, eighteenth and nineteenth century prison buildings and extant cells below.

On Thursday last I took my current second years into town where we were given a tour of the premises by Alan Clarke, a local historian and expert on Sessions House and his architectural significance. He showed us where the last public hanging took place, explained the layout of the two courts (including the wagging tongue above the criminal court) and the students explored the graffiti in the dingy cells underground.

Then we recreated a trial from the Old Bailey archives.

The case I chose was that of Robert Campbell, Antis Horsford and Henry Stroud for the murder of Daniel Clarke in April 1771. The case was well known in the late eighteenth century and arise out of the ongoing disputes between the silk weavers of Spitalfields (in London’s East End) and their masters. As weavers took direct action to defend their livelihoods (which involved cutting silk out of looms and intimidating those who worked silk under the price the collective had set for it) the state imposed heavy penalties on offenders.

Weavers were arrested, put on trial, condemned and executed, mostly as a result of informers being pressured or bribed to give evidence. The community closed ranks and one commentator described Spitalfields and Bethnal Green as having been ‘rendered almost ungovernable’. Daniel Clarke had been ‘an evidence’ against William Eastman and William Horsford, two weavers that had been executed in early 1770 for their part in the troubles. Now, in April 1771 Clarke was to face the consequences of his actions.

The Gentleman’s Magazine reported what happened on a wintry day in the East End:

‘Yesterday, between four and five o’clock a mob assembled in a field bear Bethnal Green, consisting of upwards of two thousand, when they sat upon one Clark, a Pattern Drawer, who was the principal evidence against the two Cutters that were executed at BG some time since; they continued pelting him with their brickbats, & for three hours, which laid his skull entirely open. Never did any poor mortal suffer more than he did; he begged of them several times to shoot him; but they kept stoning him till he died in the greatest agonies’.

It took the authorities several weeks to take anybody into custody. Once again the magistrates met a wall of silence which was only broken when two men decided to take up the offer of a large reward and give the authorities some names.

As a result Antis Horsford (the widow of the executed William), Robert Campbell (a weaver down on his luck and trying to escape to America), and a gardener named Henry Stroud (who was married to the sister of the man hanged with Horsford, William Eastman) were put on trial in July 1771.

In our version the students took on the roles of prosecution and defence barristers, witnesses, judge and jury. It took us about two hours to read though the case. In reality the trial lasted ‘from nine in the morning till eight at night, after which the court adjourned to dine’ (as the Gentleman’s Magazine tells us). They found Antis Horsford and Bob Campbell not guilty and recommended Stroud to mercy as they felt the community was responsible for Clarke’s death, no one individual.

In reality Antis was acquitted but the men were convicted and ‘turned off’ in public close to the scene of the crime near Brick Lane a couple of days afterwards. The weaver’s dispute ground to a halt after that and the government acted to protect the industry from foreign competition. It was too little, to late, silk weaving in Spitalfields was in terminal decline; although it staggered on into the next century, weavers remained poor and got poorer.

The state had needed scapegoats for the wilful destruction of property and the communal murder of its agent of ‘justice’ (Clarke). I suspect all three were innocent to some degree, and Stroud even helped drag Clarke from the pond where the ‘mob’ were stoning him to death. I gave this story to my mother a few years ago, as fodder for her creative writing course. This year she has published her version of events (entitled ‘Rough Justice’) which pictures a happier future for Henry Stroud.

I find that the process of thinking through a case like this by acting it out helps us understand what is going on. Some of the language is strange but speaking it aloud helps it became intelligible. The courtroom is a strange and symbolic place, not easily recreated in our heads or in a sterile classroom. If you stand in the dock or the witness box, or address a court from the judge’s seat you can feel the difference (as Tim Hitchcock so effectively explained last year in Liverpool at the launch of the Digital Panopticon).

This year (or rather next, in early 2019) my students will – for the very first time – perform their own Old Bailey reconstructions in an eighteenth-century courtroom. Sessions House will come alive again as the voices of the Old Bailey Proceedings are given oxygen by the breath of Northampton undergraduates. I will sit in the judges’ chair and ‘judge’ how effective they are.

Drew Gray, Subject Lead in History, University of Northampton

*my 2016 textbook has an online section which details this exercise and others that might be of use to students and tutors. You can find that here

Inside Wandsworth Gaol: A historian’s perspective on prison visiting

executionbox

As a academic historian who works on the history of crime (and most of that in London) when I was offered the chance to take a peek inside a working English prison I could hardly refuse. I run modules on crime and punishment at the University of Northampton and help students explore the changing nature of penal policy over 200 or more years from the late 1600s to the early 20th century.

So when the nice people at London Historians organised a behind-the-scenes visit to Wandsworth Prison Museum I was quick off the block and bagged one of the 10 places on offer. WPmain gates

Last Sunday I trekked across the capital to the imposing gates of Wandsworth Prison to meet up with the other lucky visitors and our guide, Stewart McLaughlin a serving Prison Officer and curator of the small prison museum.

We started in the museum which is about the size of a scout hut, and packed solid with neatly labelled exhibits. Stewart has gathered together an impressive collection of prison relics which he’s arranged chronologically so that it tells the story of Wandsworth from its early days (as the Surrey House of Correction) through the nationalisation of prisons (in 1878),to its use as a military prison during the First World War, and on to the present day.

We ‘met’ famous inmates like Oscar Wilde and the man that killed Dr Martin Luther King (James Earl Ray), and some of those that ended their days inside on the end of a rope. Wandsworth was a hanging gaol and this is where George Chapman (aka Severin Klosowski – a ‘Ripper’ suspect), John Haigh and the wartime traitor William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) were all executed. We saw Albert Pierrepoint’s execution rope and other memorabilia that reminded us that until 1961 murderers were still being ‘dropped’ at Wandsworth.

The exhibition is a fascinating glimpse into the prison’s long history and Stewart has pieced it together with considerable skill (and limited resources!) This is an example of one man’s efforts to preserve and display history and one wonders what will happen when he decides to hang up his keys for good.

It is one thing to be allowed to peer into the past via an exhibition of the artefacts of penal history, it is quite another to be invited to walk through the gates of a working prison. This is exactly what we all did next though, carefully moving under Stewart’s guidance from the reception area to the large open star that links the five man wings (A to F) together. This central boss used to allow officers (then warders) to see right down each wing and control the prisoners. Not quite a panopticon as Jeremy Bentham envisaged his ‘inspection house’ but effective all the same. We stood while Stewart explained the prison’s history and working structure and patiently answered a stream of questions.

As he did so the prison carried on all around us, with the sounds of cell doors clanging, keys (and more keys!) and male voices. All of this was permeated by the smells of a closed institution: Sunday (‘school’) dinner, laundry, stale air, but (surprisingly given all the media coverage of prisons) not a trace of drugs. This was a calm space as far I could see. Outside in the exercise yard men were chatting in the sunshine, no one paid this small group of visitors any attention, they just seemed to be getting on with life.

As we wandered through Stewart took us to the staff room in one wing. Quite an ordinary space with kettle, cups and tupperware lunch boxes. Well ‘ordinary’ except that this was one one of two condemned cells in Wandsworth and so suddenly we were left to imagine how some people may have struggled to relax while they waited to see if an appeal was successful or the executioner would lead them off to the gallows.

Outside, as we stared up at the razor wire that is intended to prevent modern prisoners emulating the Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs and scaling the high walls, our attention was brought to the concrete paths that cover the ground between the walls and the prison itself. Under here, we were told, lie the remains of those who were executed within the confines of the gaol. Since the abolition of hanging families have been able to exhume their loved ones and rebury them, but many don’t. As our guide pointed out most murderers kill people close to them and so the hanged are often the second deaths in a tragic set of events. Let sleeping dogs lie is often the most obvious reaction.

One young man whose remains were taken away to be cremated outside was John Amery, the son of Leo Amery the Conservative politician and (like Churchill) a noted opponent of appeasement. Unlike his father John Amery was attracted to the Nazi cause and became a fascist and follower of Hitler. He was hanged at Wandsworth in December 1945 for his treasonable activities during the war.

The final place we visited was the set of smaller wings that used to make up the women’s prison until the late 1800s. During the First World War this was utilised by the military as a detainment camp. Here the prison held squaddies that broke the rules or absconded as well as conscientious objectors and (following the Easter Rising in 1916) upwards of 200 Irish Republicans accused of ‘betraying’ their king and country.

And then – and I have to admit this was quite a relief – we were back to the reception house and, once we’d handed over our passes, the doors were opened and we exited into the afternoon sun. The walk across Wandsworth Common took me past couples of all ages, children playing, dogs running free, ice cream vendors and people sitting outside the nearby pub enjoying a pint with their friends. It was a sobering reminder of what everyone in that prison had given up – albeit not all voluntarily.

Wandsworth Prison museum is not open to the public but is open for academic visitors, researchers and local history groups. All you have to do is make an appointment and be curious (and brave) enough to cross the threshold.

Drew Gray (Subject lead, History, University of Northampton).

Farewell Park and Avenue (and hello Waterside!)

On Wednesday this week I will be moving into my open office space in the Learning Hub at the University of Northampton’s new Waterside Campus. I’m pretty excited about the change because I’ve been down to Waterside and it looks fantastic. In fact it has exceeded my hopes so far and I hope and believe that this is going to really place Northampton on the university map.

But it wouldn’t be right to make this change without looking back at the time I’ve enjoyed at Park (and Avenue) campus over the years. For me its been quite a journey as well; I arrived on Park campus in September 1996 as one of the first new freshers on Nene College’s new BA History degree.

I’d decided (at 33) to finally get around to taking the History degree I should have taken at 18 had ‘life’ not interfered with my A levels. I was certainly older than some of the tutors and many (but not all) of my peer group. We were a good year I think – not too many troublemakers and mostly hard workers. We had no e-books then, no access to journals online either, so everything we read we read in the library or were given by the lecturers (who must have spent half their lives photocopying!).

I haunted the library because it was easier to work there than at home in my shared house. Eventually they must have taken pity on me because they gave me a job. Now I was stacking shelves and soon issuing books at the counter (yes, there were no automatic issue machines then folks). I also got a job at Waterstone’s in town so I had my book supply completely covered!

I got involved in other things at university, did some volunteering at the local school, interviewed the VC (Professor Gaskill) for the SU magazine, but mostly I studied. That paid off because I graduated with a first class degree.

I’d been inspired by the tutors that taught me, one of whom (Cathy Smith) is still here, as Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities. Cathy, Peter King and Elizabeth Hurren encouraged me to stay on and do a PhD. I finished that in 2006 and became one of the first year of new doctorates awarded by the University of Northampton. Previously degrees had been awarded by the University of Leicester but now we had the power to confer our own.

So in my time I’ve seen Northampton go from being a HE college to a University College to a full blown university. And in 2006 Sally Sokoloff (the head of History) employed me on a part time basis to teach history. From student to tutor in 10 years!

I’ve seen the departure of some brilliant historians – Peter King, Matthew Seligmann and Matthew Hughes (now at Brunel), Elizabeth Tingle, Elizabeth Hurren (at Leicester), Tim Meldrum (who gave up history for business), Heather Shore (professor at Leeds Beckett), Matthew Feldman (fighting the good fight against the far right) and many others.

All of them have come and gone but the ethos in the history department remains the same as it was when I started as a student. Everyone is enthusiastic about their area of history, and they bring that into the classroom. Everyone cares about the students they teach. And (and this is unusual in academic departments) we all get on.

Waterside is exciting but it is also challenging. It is a very different environment to the place we know so well. We won’t have offices like we have been used to, we’ll have to work harder to connect with each other and our students. But I’m very confident we’ll manage that and continue to deliver an excellent set of modules at undergraduate and masters levels.

So, farewell Park and Avenue and thank you for helping me find what it is I really like doing. I wasn’t sure what that was at 33 but 22 years (OMG!) later I’m delighted not only to be teaching in the History department but also to be leading it. And if you are starting a History degree with us this September then just think, you could be wearing my shoes someday. Well, you never know eh?

Drew Gray

Hapsburgs & Haribo: University of Northampton History Society returns to Vienna.

Following on from the success of last year’s trip, fifteen third-year students travelled to Vienna in the first week of June. Organised by the History Society, the group were again guided by Jim Beach, one of the History lecturers, who took them around many locations connected to modules they had studied during their degree.

UoN History Society in front of the Schweizertor

As before, the tour ranged across the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, and the schnitzel calories consumed were more than burnt off by the walking. Although the weather was warmer than last year, numerous water and Haribo breaks ensured a respectable rate of advance through the historical content.

Although he had undertaken meticulous planning, their tour guide had failed to check Europe’s diplomatic calendar. The unexpected consequence being a cordon of heavily-armed police between the University of Northampton group and a historical monument. The trouble was caused by Vladimir Putin who had dropped in to see the Austrian chancellor. Although unable to catch a glimpse of him, this unexpected snippet of twenty-first century history was a welcome addition to those from earlier eras.

Once again the efficiency of Viennese public transport was a revelation to the Northampton students. In one instance the excitement of travelling on the upper level of a double-decker train caused some of them to miss their stop for the Military History Museum. Despite a slightly delayed arrival at their destination, coming face-to-face with Franz Ferdinand’s bullet-holed car and blood-stained tunic was still a powerful experience for them.

Finally, we are pleased to report that preparations are already in motion for the 2019 and 2020 iterations of this trip.

‘f****** untouchable’?: the downfall of the Kray Twins in May 1968

On the 8 May 1968 a series of dawn raids were carried out by ‘more than 100’ Metropolitan Police detectives, led by DS Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read. The target of these raids was organized criminal gang that surrounded two East End gangsters that have passed into London folklore and garnered more column inches, True Crime books and documentaries, than almost any other ‘villains’ in the modern age.

Daily-Mirror

Ronnie and Reggie Kray are the archetypal British gangsters, up there with American ‘anti-heroes’ like Al ‘Scarface’ Capone, Johnny Torrio, and ‘Lucky’ Luciano. Two blockbuster biopics have presented the ‘Twins’ as violent and troubled rogues whose criminality and ruthlessness is still tempered with some sense that were not ‘as bad’ as modern criminals are today. They only hurt ‘their own’, and they were nice to their mum (Violet Kray), so the story goes, and they didn’t deal in drugs.

Let’s start with some of the facts about Ronnie and Reggie before considering quite why it is we remain so fascinated with them 50 years after their arrest. Born in October 1933 the Twins grew up in the East End of London, going to school in Brick Lane. They were very much a product of the mixed demography of Whitechapel and Spitalfields, with English, Jewish, Irish and Romani Gypsy ancestors. The East End was somewhere you ‘survived’ more than lived in the 1930s. This was an area long associated with poverty, overcrowding, immigration, and crime.

The Twins became involved with violence and street gangs very early in their lives and even a spell of national service in 1952 did little to tame them. The bought a snooker hall in Mile End and by the end of the 1950s were well-established local gangsters with a reputation for violence. But the boys were not content to be one of several gangsters they wanted to be THE firm in London.

As the post war austerity gave way to the ‘swinging sixties’ Ronnie and Reggie became part of the London ‘scene’. Their West End nightclub attracted the stars of the day many of whom enjoyed the infamy of being pictured with the Krays. For the Twins themselves their celebrity status gave them some much needed ‘respectability’ within London society.

It is hardly surprising that Ronnie later wrote that at the time ‘me and my brother ruled London. We were f****** untouchable’.

Of course such high profile behaviour brought the Twins into the cross hairs of the police, especially when their rivalries with other London gangsters (like the Richardson brothers in the south) or their own internal and personal issues ended in murders. On 9 March 1966 Ronnie Kray shot dead a member of the Richardson gang as he sat at the bar in the Blind Beggar pub on Whitechapel High Street. George Cornell’s murder was a very public act, demonstrating Ronnie’s belief that he was ‘untouchable’. He wasn’t.

Then in October 1867 Reggie, egged on by his twin, murdered Jack ‘the hat’ Mcvitie, a member of the Kray’s criminal organization who had supposedly tried to swindle them. From this point on the Twins were wanted men and it was only a matter of time before the police managed to arrest and charge them.

In March 1969, after a trial at the Old Bailey, Justice Stevenson famously declared that ‘society has earned a rest from your activities’ and sent the pair to prison for life. The next time they saw the outside world was in 1982 when they attended their mother’s funeral. By that time Ronnie was in Broadmoor, having been certified ‘insane’ in 1979. Ronnie died in 1995. His twin was interned in Maidstone Prison until 1997 when he began a series of moves before his death in 2000.

Most people have heard of the Krays and have seen that iconic David Bailey photograph. They rose to prominence in the 1960s and their celebrity status has perhaps helped to mask the reality that these were two very brutal individuals. Both of the recent film biopics present the violence (and Ronnie’s mental illness) but temper it all with the prevailing notion that they were somehow ‘decent’ working class lads simply trying to survive in a harsh world. They loved their mum and they never forgot where they came from. This is a very similar narrative to the one that surrounds the rise of the Mafia firms in New York and Chicago after the First World War.

We have popular culture and the rise of the movie to thank for this. Some of the most watched films of the 1930s (Hollywood’s golden age) era featured gangsters at home and abroad, and the image of the suited criminal complete with ‘Tommy’ gun, homburg hat and the obligatory ‘dolly bird’ became synonymous with ‘cool’.

Perhaps because the early gangsters traded in ‘bootlegged’ alcohol (banned by the US government in one of the worst decisions it ever made) and then desperately tried to reinvent their operations as legitimate businesses, we don’t see them for what they really were: ruthless, murdering, criminal organizations. It was when they thumbed their noses at the authorities or their activities impacted ordinary citizens that the authorities felt they had no choice but to hunt them down.

The Krays (much more so than the Richardsons it seems) were OUR gangsters. They showed that we too could have some ‘proper’ criminals to rival the Mafiosi across the pond. In recent years the BBC have revived the memory of Birmingham’s Peaky Blindersand transformed their relatively mundane criminal careers, turning them into gangsters that were able to give the Mafia a run for their money. The ‘Blinders have become anti-heroes to be looked up to which is exactly how the Twins wanted to be seen: as respectable businessmen who only used violence when it was absolutely necessary.

Like all True Crime myths, the idea that the Krays were ‘respectable’, ‘decent’ or eschewed violence expect when it was ‘absolutely necessary’ is a fiction and it is the job of History and Criminology to keep reminding us of that.

Drew Gray, Subject Lead History, University of Northampton

Kelmarsh Hall and the Heritage of Country Houses

I recently made a visit, with my colleague, Dr Caroline Nielsen, to Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire. Kelmarsh was built in the 1730s to a Palladian design by Francis Smith with the architect James Gibbs for the Hanbury family. The Hall retains many of its original features and 1000 acres of the original estate, including working farms. It has been interpreted by the present guardians, the Kelmarsh Trust, in a sensitive, innovative and intelligent manner.

The aims of the Trust are to preserve the buildings and estates and to educate the public about country houses and the natural environment. This is a tricky balance, both preserving but also interesting young people in what these sites represent. Country houses need to survive, but retain the authenticity that underpins the unique experience that they can offer.

Guided tours of houses can be quite dull and boring for youngsters (and some adults!). Children generally want to move in different directions on their own timescale and explore spaces on their own terms. I’ve visited lots of country houses over the years and seen a lot of stressed parents. The Trust, and their education officer, Tiffany Brownell, have thought about this and done an excellent job.

Lots of attention has been paid to the ‘below stairs’ areas of the House: http://www.kelmarsh.com/BelowStairsLaundry.aspx. There are reconstructions of the laundry, the servants’ quarters (including a 3D projection of a servant explaining his daily routine), a wine cellar, a brewery, a bell system and the servants’ stairs. The gendering of these spaces is emphasized, such as the specifically female space of the laundry.

Country houses pay more attention to these working spaces nowadays, quite rightly. As my research with Jon Stobart has shown the aristocracy spent far more of their income on the day-to-day running of their houses than they did on the more glitzy objects on show upstairs: Consumption and the Country House. So there is an intellectual rationale for showing the areas of houses where the servants did their work. Tours of the downstairs areas of the house begin on 1 April 2018.

The main house upstairs is an elegant series of rooms, from the Hall to the Salon, the Chinese Room, the Dining Room, the Library and the Ballroom. There is much more sense of space and ease to these areas.

The Trust has chosen to focus on the story of Nancy Lancaster and her choices, in the twentieth century, of wall colour and decoration, drawing on her connections to the society decorators Colefax and Fowler. So the story we are presented with at Kelmarsh is layered and complex, but so too is the history of these houses. Choosing where to focus the attention of visitors is a result of a number of different priorities.

The most exciting things going on Kelmarsh are their education projects using the story of the house, and they are telling an uncensored and honest one. No happy chappy servants and benevolent aristocracy here, just the truth about the hard work servants did to keep the house running and, ultimately, help preserve it for us.

The journey from the dark areas downstairs, treated to only partial glimpses of the landscapes around the house, to the light sweeping views upstairs is a reminder of the different lives led by masters and servants.

A new learning centre has been installed in the old coach house, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Here school visits allow children to explore history with a hands-on and fun approach to learning. They ‘work’ in the laundry and explore the house and the natural environment.

Future plans include projects focused on Premium Plus A Level students in the local area. The aim is to educate these students about the heritage of their local area and add value to their learning more generally, to show them, for example, the opportunities that Universities can offer them.

Kelmarsh Hall and the Department of History at the University of Northampton are planning a collaborative project with four schools for the academic year 2018-19. After an introductory visit to the schools, the students will visit Kelmarsh Hall for a day of learning activities, using the excellent facilities the Hall has there.

The project then moves to the University’s Waterside Campus: http://hellowaterside.northampton.ac.uk/. The students will get a flavour of Higher Education with a workshop on the history and heritage of country houses. They will take a heritage tour of the city centre, beginning at the ‘engine shed’ site on campus, and finishing with a lunch on campus.

There are also plans for history students from the University to take up work placements at Kelmarsh as part of the History Department’s ‘Research Skills’ module and for a programme of student volunteers helping at the Hall during vacations.

These are important initiatives not only for the younger generation but also for the survival of the country house as heritage. After all none of the stock-in-trade consumers of country house visiting, the ones often annoyed by the presence of children, are getting any younger. Cream teas are not really a sustainable economic model. Kelmarsh Trust is showing what the future model should look like.

To find out more about Kelmarsh Hall and the activities on offer there email the Education Officer, Tiffany Brownell at learning@kelmarsh.org.uk or visit the website: http://www.kelmarsh.com/

Watch this blog space for updates on the ongoing projects…

Dr Mark Rothey: Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century History

‘O monstrous traitor! I arrest thee!’: From Guy Fawkes to the Brexit ‘betrayers’ a short history of treason in England

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The execution of the Gunpowder Plotters, by Claes (Nicolaes) Jansz Vissche (1606)

Today is the 412th anniversary of the execution of Guy Fawkes and his fellow Gunpowder plotters. As every school boy knows Fawkes was arrested on the 5 November 1605 as he prepared to blow up the Westminster Hall and send King James I and his ministers to an early grave. Instead it was Fawkes, along with Thomas Wintour, Ambrose Rookwood, and Robert Keyes who were to die in a gruesome public execution on the 31 January the following year. The other conspirators (Everard Digby, Robert Wintour, John Grant, and Thomas Bates) had been despatched a day earlier, while Robert Catesby (the ringleader) and Thomas Percy escaped punishment altogether.*

The gunpowder plotters were traitors; they had conspired to kill the reigning anointed monarch and replace him with a Catholic more to their liking. It is hard to see the Gunpowder Plot then, as anything other than a traitorous attempt to overthrow the legitimate ruler and his government and install a foreign power.

In this blog I’d like to reflect on the nature of treason in history, on how the form of punishment of traitors changed over the centuries, and make an observation on how the word ‘traitor’ has been very publicly misused in recent months.

But let’s start with the execution of Fawkes and the penalty for treason in the 1600s.

The Gunpowder Plotters were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered in a very public display of the power of the state and king. Traitors such as Fawkes were ‘drawn’ to the place of execution on a plank or cart which was pulled backwards by a horse, as a symbolic shaming of the individual. This practice continued throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as those sentenced to a more ‘normal’ death by hanging would be paraded through the streets on a ‘rattling cart’ for the crowd to see. Execution was intentionally public – ‘justice’ was to be seen to be done because that both consolidated the power of the state and deterred others from committing similar crimes.

Once the condemned had reached the place of execution they were dragged up on to the scaffold which was a raised platform that allowed the watching crowd an excellent view of the event. The ‘victim’ was then hanged, but not as offenders were hanged in the last years before the death penalty was suspended. There was no carefully calculated drop through a trap door to snap your neck; instead prisoners were slowly strangled.

The state executioner would have to time it just right. He wanted to ensure maximum pain and fear of death without actually killing his charge. When he judged that the traitor was nearly dead he would be cut down and stretched out on the platform. Taking a large knife the executioner would then start to mutilate the body, while the culprit was still alive.

The genitals would be cut off – another deeply symbolic gesture – followed by the putting out of the eyes and the cutting open of the abdomen to remove the bowels. Finally he would rip out the heart and, if the condemned were not dead by then, that would finally end their suffering.

The final humiliation – in an age where burial and the afterlife were so important – was to cut the body into quarters (literal quartering) for it to be distributed to the four points of the compass for display as a warning to others. The head would often be attached to some obvious public place, like London Bridge.

Guy Fawkes actually managed to escape this awful fate because as he mounted the scaffold he thrust his head through the noose and threw himself off, breaking his own neck and effectively committing suicide. His co-conspirators were not so fortunate.

Plenty of others suffered a similar fate in the 1600s. You didn’t actually have to commit such an obvious act of treason either; merely minting your own money (‘coining’) could earn you a similar punishment until the early 1700s. Women were spared the humiliation of being publicly dismembered , and were burned at the stake instead.

By the 1800s we had effectively abandoned hanging, drawing and quartering. Indeed the early 1800s saw a gradual move away from capital punishment and the infliction of pain and an increased use of transportation (effective banishment) and imprisonment. So what did we do with those that committed treason?

On the 22nd February 1803 Colonel Edward Despard was hanged (with six others) on the roof of Horsemonger Gaol in front of 20,000 people for attempting to assassinate George III. Despaired wanted to overthrow the king and government but the authorities had got wind of the plot and waited for their chance to arrest him. A huge crowd turned out to see him hang.

In 1820 Arthur Thistlewood was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for his part in organising the so-called Cato Street Conspiracy. Thistlewood (along with James Ings, James Brunt, William Davidson and Richard Tidd) had plotted to overthrow the government of the day – so this was clearly treason – but again their intentions had been discovered and the group infiltrated by government spies.

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In 1813 the punishment for treason had been altered to remove the particular unpleasant element of public disembowelling but Thistlewood and his gang still faced an awful end. The government relented however, and their fate was commuted to hanging and post mortem decapitation. They were executed outside Newgate Gaol with their severed heads being shown to the large number of onlookers gathered outside.

This was the last public execution of a traitor in London but we have had some traitors since.

In August 1916 Roger Casement was hanged for negotiating with Germany to aid Irish revolutionaries during the First World War. Casement’s is a tale of a dramatic fall from grace, only five years earlier he had been knighted by King George V for his humanitarian aid work in Africa. It was in Africa that he came to question the validity of the imperial project however, and perhaps this propelled him towards the cause of Irish nationalism. Arrested just before the Easter Rising Casement was held in the Tower of London (where all traitors end up) while attempts to get a reprieve for him went on. They failed, in part because of revelations that he was not only a traitor but a homosexual as well, and on the 3rd August he was duly executed.

William Joyce (better known as Lord ‘Haw Haw’) was the penultimate person to executed for treason when he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on 3 January 1946. The very last person to be hanged for treason was Theodore Schurch, an Anglo-Swiss soldier in the British army who was executed the day after Joyce for working for German and Italian intelligence. No one has been executed in England for anything other than murder since Schurch.

Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was interred from 1940-1943 amid fears that he might undermine the war effort against Nazi Germany but he was wasn’t sintered to death for his crimes. Yet Moseley had flirted with Hitler and argued Britain should make peace with the Germans, and in some minds this made him a traitor, but the government chose not to take this to the test of law. Moseley survived the war and had a late flurry in the 1950s before disappearing into obscurity.

Like Edward Windsor (the would-be Edward VIII) there is a valid argument for seeing Mosely as a traitor because he negotiated with an enemy power against the interests of the ruling monarch, the government of the day, and the people.

Which brings me to the misuse of the word ‘treason’ or ‘betrayal’ today.

The High Court judges and politicians that acted to ensure that proper procedures were followed during the recent Brexit debates, were not guilty of treason under the law and it would be helpful if the tabloid press were able to set that record straight. They acted to uphold British law and our democracy and not undermine it yet they were labelled as ‘enemies of the people’ by the Daily Mail. This was taken up by some pro-leave protesters who declared that those opposing Brexit in the courts were ‘traitors to democracy’. Cwa8B4MXgAANcNj

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Given that, historically, some elements of the British newspaper media themselves flirted with treason in the 1930s (by supporting, or at least championing, fascists like Hitler and Mussolini) it is perhaps at least ironic that they seek to condemn a modern defence of parliamentary democracy as treasonous.

CsoYfH1WYAAZgW7 The popular press (and some hard line pro-brexit politicians and commentators) are therefore complicit in whipping up public condemnation and abuse (especially on social media) of those that dare to present an alternative to Britain leaving the European Union. A narrow majority for change is being used as if it was landslide revolution with a few discordant voices. To label active ‘remainers’ as ‘traitors’ is not only a misuse of legal terminology it is in itself an undermining of our hard one democratic rights as a people. Given that we are supposed to be getting ‘our country back’ after march 2019 this is at the very least, paradoxical.

But then Guy Fawkes himself has mutated as a historical figure. From being a religiously motivated mercenary terrorist he has become a symbol of libertarianism. The man that dodged ‘a fate worse than death’ four centuries ago has been reinvented as a sort of anti-hero for those that see the Westminster ‘bubble’ as an undemocratic and corrupt institution in need of a modern revolution that puts ‘the people’ first for once.

Drew Gray, University of Northampton

*although their graves were later opened and their bodies exhumed and exhibited as traitors.

What about the victims, why are they so rarely included in the history of crime?

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I have been researching and teaching the history of crime and punishment for well over a decade now and the field now covers considerable ground. There are excellent studies of the criminal justice systems of the past, from the medieval to the modern age, ranging across a wide geographical area from Britain and its empire, to Continental Europe, Africa and the Americas. There are articles and books on the evolution and development of policing, the rise of the prison, and on different types of criminal activity. Researchers have studied homicide, highwaymen, fraud and forgery, shoplifting and pocket picking; they have looked at juvenile criminals, at female felons, and at (most recently) at the huge numbers of men and women transported to Australia.

Some of the earlier work in the history of crime – and I’m going back to the 1970s and 19780s now – set the scene for much of what has followed. Researchers like Douglas Hay and others that studied under Edward Thompson at Warwick, produced wonderful polemic work that critiqued the hanoverian justice system. They exposed the class bias at the heart of the English criminal justice system that selected its targets from the young working class men who robbed and stole from those better off than themselves.

Peter Linebaugh’s study of eighteenth-century London (The London Hanged) and Thompson’s own Whig’s and Hunters are, with Hay’s seminal edited collection (Albion’s Fatal Tree), examples of left-wing revisionist histories of a Georgian justice system that seemed to have very little to do with ‘justice’ itself. As another firebrand of this sort of history, VAC Gatrell, declared that the history of crime is a dirty subject because it is about power, not about crime itself.

Gatrell’s own magnum opus, The Hanging Tree, remains one of my favourite books both for its depth of research and the power of his prose. These pioneers in the history of crime redefined the way we studied this history, borrowing as they did from the wider field of social history, to place the criminal centre stage and, and this is important, raise him up as a victim of the justice system.

The Digital Panopticon, which launched late last year, traces the steps of those uprooted from their communities and dumped on the unforgiving continent of Australia in the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries. Michel Foucault and later Michael Ignatieff’s work on the Victorian prison system also paints a bleak and desperate picture of men and women ground down and destroyed by a heartless penal system.

In short then the history of crime and punishment has mostly (since the 1970s at least) been a history of how the state has brutalised those caught up in the criminal justice machine. What is largely missing from the story is that of the victims of crime.

Now, I understand why this was the case in the early years. Historians (particularly those of the left) were keen to show that working-class people had agency, that they were not simply condemned to the ‘condescension of history’ (as EP Thompson put it). Along with work that highlighted the fight for customary rights, the vote, resistance to oppression and creeping capitalism these historian created ‘social bandits’ and heroic highwaymen. More clearly, and less controversially, they attacked the state and its mechanism of social control.

But is it now time to think about the victims of crime? After all, since the late twentieth century the right of the victims of crime have increasingly been placed on the agendas of legislators and criminal justice commentators. Modern criminology does acknowledge that victims need to be both seen and heard; restorative justice has gained ground and recent debates about the release of John Worboys have re-energised calls for victims to be better informed or consulted when offenders are let out of prison.

I think we need to start to try and place the victims at the centre of our studies of crime and punishment, or at least to better understand their role and their experience. We have had excellent work that looks at the role victims have played as prosecutors, which acknowledges their ability to help secure pardons (or conditional pardons) for property offenders sentenced to hang under England’s ‘bloody code’. But what about some work on the shopkeepers in London that appear in the Old Bailey? Or the men and women robbed and beaten by highwaymen, or those fleeced in city taverns by ‘cunning’ prostitutes? Could we try to present a history from their perspective?

It is not easy of course. We have ended up knowing a lot more about the criminals than we have the victims. Even when it comes to the most famous unsolved murder case in history – the Whitechapel (or Jack the Ripper) murders of 1888 – there is precious little on the five (or more) women who were killed, at least by comparison to the endless commentary on who the assassin might have been. At least Haille Rubenhold is working on this as I write, so that may be addressed fairly soon.

So this is a call if you like, to prospective PhD students, and others working in the field. I’m not asking us to stop exposing the cruel penal systems of the past (or those of the present for that matter), nor am I saying that everyone executed, transported, flogged or imprisoned deserved their fate, but perhaps we now need to redress the balance a little and begin to research those that suffered in a different way from the prevalence of crime and paucity of protection from it that a deterrent based system in the past offered them.

Drew Gray

Drew writes a daily blog on the Victorian Police Courts and teaches the History of Crime at the University of Northampton.

indicative bibliography

Foucault, Michel (1975). Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison.

Gatrell, V.A.C, (1994) The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People

Hay, D (1975), Albion’s Fatal Tree

Ignatieff, Michael (1978) A just measure of pain: the penitentiary in the industrial revolution, 1750-1850.

Thompson, E.P (1975) Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act