Hiram Rhodes Revels

On 25 February 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, was sworn into the United States Senate, and became the first African-American to sit in the United States Congress. He represented the state for two years during the reconstruction period after the Civil War.

Born on 27 September 1827, in North Carolina to a black father and white mother, Revels was educated by a black woman (even though, at this time, the educating of black people was illegal in the state) until 1838, when he was sent to become an apprentice in his brother's barber shop. Unfortunately, his brother died when he was only 14 years old, but he left his assets to Revels, meaning he was able to purchase an education, first at Knox College, Illinois, which had been founded as an anti-slavery establishment, then later at a seminary in Ohio.

Revels was ordained as a minister in the Methodist church, and in the pre-Civil War years, he preached all over the United States, though this was not without its dangers. In Missouri, he was imprisoned for the "crime" of preaching the gospel to African-Americans, though he was fortunate not to be subjected to violence during his time in prison. In 1845, he settled in Maryland where he remained throughout the Civil War. He organized regiments of African-American soldiers for the Union, and even took part in some battles himself.

After the war was over, he moved himself and his wife and five daughters down to Mississippi, where he continued his ministerial work and founded several schools for black children. His work in education led him into politics in the state, where, though he was first reluctant to become involved, soon made him very popular with both black and white people.

When two vacancies appeared in Mississippi's senate seats (one of which was the result of Jefferson Davis, the ex-Confederate President leaving), the state governors wanted to fill one seat which had a tenure of 1870-75 with a white man, and the seat which was due to expire in 1871, with a black man. Revels seemed the natural choice, and he concurred. On 20 January 1870, the Mississippi state legislature voted 85 to 15 in favour of Hiram Rhodes Revels becoming the first black senator in the whole of the United States (if only for one year).

Though he traveled to Washington almost as soon as he had been elected by the Mississippians, Revels had to wait until Mississippi was readmitted to the Union on 23 February before he could join the Senate, and even then, his troubles were not over. Democratic senators tried to argue against him taking his seat, and some even suggested that, under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, he was not eligible to become a senator, despite the fact that neither he nor his parents had ever been slaves. Eventually, they were overruled, with the Senate voting 48 to 8 in favour of allowing Revels to take his seat.

Whilst in the Senate, Revels worked for racial equality, though he was mostly unsuccessful. His campaign to end segregation in schools failed, as did his attempt to nominate a young black man to the US Military Academy. He did however successfully overturn legislation which had previously barred black men from working at the Washington Navy Yard because of their colour. He was also praised for his oratorical abilities, which helped to persuade some of the Senators that black people were as capable as whites in taking roles of high office.

Revels resigned two months before his term was over, and took a job teaching Philosophy at a Mississippi college, where he later became President. He also continued his Ministerial work until his death, on 16 January 1901. Shockingly, there have only been five other African-Americans in the United States Congress since Revels.           

The Missouri Compromise and the dangers of history

On 17 February 1819, the United States Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, an event which led to Civil War and the death of thousands. 

The issue, you see, was the expansion of slavery - each state was allowed to rule whether slavery should be legal or illegal in their territory, and at that moment, the number of slave states and the number of free states was exactly equal. However, there was a lot of unpopulated territory in the country which was perfect for growing cotton, and the anti-slavery Northerners were very worried about Southern plantation owners upping sticks to one of these incredibly fertile areas, growing cotton, using slave power to harvest it and then deciding that they would like to make the area into a state of the United States, with senators and congressmen who voted in favour of slavery. This would obviously upset the balance of slave and free states, leaving the North at a disadvantage. 

They proposed that slavery be made illegal in all new states joining the Union, but this would clearly lead to a massive imbalance against the South, which they felt would be very unfair. So naturally a compromise had to be reached, and it was.

It was decided that Missouri would be brought into the Union as a slave state, but at the same time so would the state of Maine, as a free state, thus maintaining the balance. They then drew a big line across a map of the United States, and said that any state entering the Union below this line was permitted to allow slavery, and all those above, weren't. (They weren't just waving a marker pen about; the line in question was the 36°30' line of latitude so it did have some significance geographically.)

However, though the compromise worked in the early part of the nineteenth century, by the middle it was proving a great hindrance and eventually ended up causing Civil War.

Of course, it didn't. The problem with history is that it's impossible to exactly pin down one cause for a great event - some could feasibly argue that the Missouri Compromise caused Civil War, others might say that it was working just fine until it was scrapped in the 1850s by Senator Douglass, who believed that each state should have the right to vote on whether a state was 'free' or not, and introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act to this effect (it was a nice idea, but led to all out war and violence in Kansas, with pro and anti slavery mobs rioting and sometimes killing each other).

Other causes of the Civil War might include, depending on your viewpoint: Abraham Lincoln's winning of the 1860 election on the Republican Party ticket; the huge chasm between Southern and Northern values; slavery itself; the fact that slavery was not outlawed in the whole country when the slave trade was; the Dred Scott court case and its ramifications or even, looking at the very short term, the fact that the Southern states seceded, formed the Confederate States of America and opened fire at Fort Sumter on Northern troops.

A good case could be made for all of those examples being the sole reason for war, but as usual in history, they acted together, and it was only a culmination of all the events which eventually caused war. It is possible, of course, to argue that a certain event was more significant that another event, but it is very, very rare that one person can categorically state that X and X alone was responsible for the American Civil War, or the Reformation, or the decision to give women the vote or whatever. 

This is why I love my subject. You can never be wrong (well, you could if you were to argue that Winston Churchill was the cause of the American Civil War, but very few people try to do this, oddly enough...), and you can argue (read: waffle) your way out of, or into any situation. But seriously, you do learn how to prioritize arguments; review the most important causes of any given event; and critically analyze primary and secondary sources as evidence for and against a particular line of thinking, all very important skills. Which is why the government's proposals for a shake up of the history curriculum are especially worrying; focusing as they do on just one form of history - the 'Britain and the Empire were excellent' one. Michael Gove should realize that just because he learnt it in should, doesn't make it true. If he was a proper student of history, he would know this already...      

Juxtaposition

I'd like to take a break from identifying cell organelles (yeah!...) to talk about the marvelously ironic country that is the United States of America. Flipping through the Wikipedia article on 31 January, you will discover that, on this day in 1865, the "United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing slavery", yet on this day in 1876, a mere eleven years later, the country "orders all Native Americans to move into reservations". Huh.

America is a very interesting country. It's only been officially independent since 1776, yet in that relatively short time, it has risen to become the world's greatest superpower. (You could argue for days, I am sure, as to whether this is a title it retains, but it is very true to say that it was the dominant world power for almost all of the twentieth century.) A melting pot of many, many different races and religions, and containing immigrants who often arrived incredibly poor, America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the potential to completely fail as a democracy, simply because of its diversity. From some countries, you had Catholics escaping persecution, other countries, Protestants and others still Jewish (and that's just counting the major European religions), yet these incredibly different groups of people managed to exist side by side once they were in America.

The sheer size of the country probably had something to do with this. There was enough room, if you so required, to pack up and move thousands of miles away from the people who were annoying you, and still be assured of land and space to call your own when you arrived there, unlike in the highly overcrowded European nations. Often, new states sprung up where people of the same religion congregated - Pennsylvania, for example, was founded (first as a colony, then later as a state) by William Penn, a very prominent Quaker leader, and the religion dominated the state's governance for decades; Utah was founded by Brigham Young, a leading Mormon and has retained that connection to the Mormon religion to this day.

Though there were instances of segregation such as these, there are other examples of many different nationalities and creeds living side by side. New York, for example, had a very diverse population simply because it was home to the largest immigration center in the country; California after 1848 had an equally diverse population because of the myriad prospectors arriving from all over the world hoping to try their luck in the gold rush.

This is not to say that the US was not without its problems. Slavery was not formally banned in the country until 1865, whereas most European countries had banned it much earlier in the century (Britain, for example had banned in 1833). Even after this point, treatment of black people, particularly in the Southern states, was often terrible - the so-called 'Jim Crow' laws continued right into the twentieth century, and the Civil Rights Movement was still (understandably) very active until over a century later, when ethnic minorities were finally granted equal rights.

Their treatment of the Native Americans was equally despicable - the forcible moving to reservations of the peoples was just the beginning of the end, with many "savages" having been treated as second class citizens since Europeans had first started coming over to the country. 

Women and other ethnic minorities were also often treated poorly, though in some cases, this was not much different to the rest of the world. Irish and Chinese immigrants were often little better than slaves, as they worked in highly dangerous occupations such as mining or building railways for an incredibly small wage, and no rights to protest, but, sadly, this was pretty much the same as the rest of the world. Though some states allowed women to vote in the late nineteenth century, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (which allowed universal women's suffrage) was passed in 1919, very comparable to most European countries. 

Obviously, the country was not perfect at all, particularly in their treatment of ethnic minorities, but it is truly remarkable that it was able to become such a dominant world power in so little time. They have often been held up as a bastion of democracy, and though clearly there are examples which can be found that illustrate that this was most definitely not true, there are plenty more examples to show that it is. Not for nothing do we still hold true the idea of the "American dream" - that a penniless man could come to the country, escape the rigid class systems of Europe, and make himself a millionaire. Naturally, these situations were very rare, but they did occasionally happen. Social class was much more fluid in eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century  America than it was anywhere else.

It will be interesting to observe what direction the United States takes over the next few decades. Once a model of democracy, the right-wing Tea Partiers, such as Sarah Palin seem to be having more and more influence on life there - the recent shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the other innocent victims is directly attributable to the violent rhetoric that is more and more forthcoming from certain political leaders; and the new Republican congress wants to restrict abortion still further, even going as far as redefining rape (you can be 'forcibly raped' or 'not really raped it was just a bit of harmless fun and who says a woman should be conscious during sex anyway') as if women who have been attacked haven't been through enough. Ironically, we may see, in a few decades time, the Middle Eastern countries that the US has been determined to invade in order to bring democracy to, actually being more democratic and allowing women more rights than America itself.

But who knows? I am a historian, not a fortune teller, after all.     

25 Presidents in Rhyming Couplets

A Dreadful Poem Commemorating the Achievements of the First 25 Presidents of the United States

because today is Number 25's birthday. 

American presidents number forty four,

with George Washington the first to take the floor.

(Though he didn't live in the White House

because it hadn't been built yet).

John Adams is next, a bit of a bore,

his main achievement: an undeclared war.

(It was against France - the 'Quasi War'

and basically nothing happened in it.)

Next up was Tom Jefferson, who went down a storm,

always on tip-top intellectual form.

(He wrote the Declaration of Independence

and was a polymath - Greek for "bloody clever".)

James Madison, the Bill of Rights' author

comes in as President number four[ther..]

(Look, rhyming isn't my strong point, okay?

You try finding a rhyme for 'leader of the House of Representatives'...)

James Monroe wrote his own famous doctrine

instructing Europeans to "keep out, the swine!"

(Though as I wrote earlier, he didn't exactly have an army to back him up

so it was a miracle they did, really...)

John Adams' son, John Quincy, was five

well - they had to keep the family name alive!

(The Quincys were a political dynasty

which means they get cities in Massachusetts named after them, and stuff...)

Andrew Jackson's next - and what a meanie!

The things he did to the natives were quite unseemly.

(If you want to know more, check out this book

it's really good, but quite depressing, so ready your tissues...)

Martin Van Buren isn't really known for much,

though was the first President whose parents were Dutch.

(He also is thought to have popularized 'OK'

though when he used it, it was to describe where he came from - Old Kinderhook.)

President Harrison lasted but thirty two days,

dying of the flu, that terrible malaise.

(His death sparked a bit of a consitutional crisis because no one knew what to do

but obviously they sorted it out because the US is still running...)

Successor John Tyler was very unpopular when

he ignored his party's principles as President ten.

(They later excluded him from the party, and most of his cabinet resigned

but it was a bit late by then.)

Polk increased the land mass by twenty percent

but only secured one term as President.

(He won most of what is today California, Arizona and New Mexico

in the peace treaty at the end of the Mexican-American War.)

President twelve, Zach Taylor, was the last Whig

but ate poisoned cherries, thus ending his gig.

(Which was quite unlucky really,

he escaped death as a soldier in many wars, and then...that?!)

The VP took over - Mr. Millard Fillmore

who opposed allowing slavery in territories gained in war.

(Which made him very unpopular in the South

where rumblings of the Civil War were already starting.)

Franklin Pierce, number fourteen, was loved at first,

then became considered one of the worst.

(Though most contemporary historians agree that he was just out of his depth

with the US descending further and further into war and chaos.)

James Buchanan did not have a wife

and his Presidency was marred by strife.

(Not that, you know, I'm suggesting those facts are related

I just couldn't find a rhyme for Buchanan...)

Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation 

which some say caused his assassination.

(Everyone talks about his being the most loved leader of the US

which is clearly a posthumous accolade because he was so loved at the time that someone shot him...)

 Andrew Johnson led the country through post-war reconstruction

but ultimately, this led to his own destruction.

(He'd been a military man during the war and wasn't really cut out for politics,

ending up the first President to be impeached.)

President Grant had been a military hero

but when he left office, his popularity was zero.

(This was mainly due to lots of scandals when he was leader

and severe economic depressions, which always tend to be a bit of a bummer.)

Nineteenth on the list is Rutherford Hayes,

a President known for his liberal ways.

(He spent one term encouraging and laying the groundwork for meritocratic government

then stepped down and spent his life promoting educational reform. Nice chap.)

James Garfield's Presidency was also cut short,

and his killer was dealt with by the Supreme Court. 

(He wasn't killed by the bullet of his assassin, but the infection that developed afterwards.

He was moved to the sea, in the hope it would aid his recovery, where locals laid a train track for him to get there in a matter of hours!)

The VP, Chester Arthur, took over, as was the norm

soon becoming "the Father of Civil Service reform".

(Which, you know, I'm sure was a very good thing,

but it isn't really very exciting, is it?)

Grover Cleveland became President Twenty-Two

the only one to serve non-consecutively, too.

(Bugger, this means I have to come up with more rhymes

which is a challenge, when he didn't really do much. What rhymes with 'boring'?)

The Twenty-Third President was Benjamin Harrison

who admitted six states into the Union.

(North & South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming

if you were interested.)

Now we're back to President Grover Cleveland

Whose second term wasn't really all that grand

(It was full of economic panics and depressions,

which ruined the Democratic Party and led to Republican landslides.)

The final President for us to see

was the last of the nineteenth century - William McKinley

(about whom I know two facts:

today was his birthday, and the high school in Glee is named after him.)

  

Aftermath

5 July, 1945. The war in Europe was over, and Britain had emerged the 'victors' of the Second World War, along with the other allied nations. For the first time in over a decade, the country prepared to go to the polls, to decide who would be the new Prime Minister. 

Leading the Conservative Party was Winston Churchill, the man who had led the country through the war and whose party had been in charge before the outbreak of the war. He was a hero - hailed as the man who had held together the uneasy alliance between Communist Russia and highly capitalist America, as well as providing a well needed morale boost for Britain with his now infamous speeches about fighting the Nazis on the beaches with blood, sweat, toil and tears, and so on.

Leading the Labour Party was a man called Clement Attlee. The uncharismatic leader was fighting the war hero at the height of his popularity. In the previous election before the war, the Labour Party had won a mere 154 seats. It was clear to everyone what was going to happen; throughout the campaign, newspapers, foreign ambassadors, members of the public - even members of the Labour Party itself - were positive that the Conservatives would win the election with the greatest of ease. Britain went to the polls on 5 July (although Churchill himself could not vote, due to having forgotten to register), then the country patiently waited three weeks for the result (they had to count the votes of hundreds of thousands of troops, many of whom were still fighting the war, some as far away as Japan, where World War Two was still ongoing).

Life carried on as normal. The News of the World printed a front page article stating that Churchill and the Conservatives had a working majority; and the leader himself flew out to take part in the Potsdam Conference (a meeting between the presidents of Russia and America, which divided up the map of Europe after the fall of the Nazi Regime, where large chunks of Eastern Europe were handed over to the Russians in return for Western Europe keeping Greece, the supposed center of western civilization). The results of the election were expected on 26 July, so on this day Mr. Churchill flew back to the UK, not even bothering to pack properly. Stalin and Eisenhower expected to see him return within a few days.

What happened, therefore, was completely unexpected. Labour won 393 seats; the Conservatives a mere 197. They had just under 50% of the vote - 49.7%, to be precise. Why? Who was Clement Attlee, and how had he - the rather unassuming, uncharismatic Deputy Prime Minister of the Second World War Coalition to Churchill's war hero - managed to win such a great victory?

Attlee was born on this day in 1883, in Putney (London), one of eight children. He studied at a private London school until the age of 18, when he won a place to the University of Oxford to study Modern History (hooray!). His first job, from 1906-09, was working as the manager of a charitable club for working class boys, which was run by his old school. Previous to this, he had been quite a conservative man, but what he saw there convinced him that only significant income redistribution by the state would suffice to lift these children out of poverty, and he therefore became a socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party.

He became involved in local politics, and supported a lot of the more left wing proposals by the Liberal government which came just before World War One - he famously rode a bicycle around the southern counties of England in the summer of 1911, explaining their new National Insurance Act. During World War One, he served in the military (he was heavily involved in the Gallipoli Campaign, which gave him much respect for Churchill as a military strategist), but quickly returned to politics after the conflict was over, becoming mayor for one of London's poorest boroughs. 

As mayor, he implemented many socialist policies, such as forcing the slum landlords to spend much more money on ensuring that their properties were habitable, and also wrote a book, The Social Worker, where he famously wrote that "Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim". In 1922 he was elected as an MP, and he became leader of the Labour Party in 1935, always remaining very much on the left of the party. 

This inherent leftiness was very appealing to the country in July 1945, though it was his endorsement of a report that had been written a few years previously by a rather old Civil Servant which probably really won the election for him. Sir William Beveridge was commissioned in 1941 to write a report on 'Social Insurance and Allied Service', a task so monumentally boring that he put it off for a whole year, then sat down and wrote something completely different to what the original memo had suggested. 

Beveridge proposed that, after the war, the British government set about making a national insurance scheme, old-age pensions, family allowances and a national health service available to everyone in the UK, stating that the nation needed to be freed of the five evils of 'Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness'. The health service, he declared, would be free to all at the point of delivery and available to a person "from the cradle to the grave".

Upon reading the report, Churchill and the other leading Conservatives agreed that the report was a rather nice idea in theory, but in practice would be so monumentally expensive to actually implement that they immediately dismissed it. However, someone in the Ministry of Information didn't get the 'yeah, we're ignoring this one' memo, and thought that it would make a rather nice morale boost for the country.

It did. After being published, it quickly became an immediate bestseller, translated into seven different languages (though I can't actually find a list of what these languages were - I can hardly imagine a typical working class man wanting to read the report in, say, Latin, or worse - German.) and a special pocket edition was produced for troops and resistance fighters. And in the run up to the election, in the summer of 1945, the Labour Party basically adopted it as their manifesto. 

They also promised a return to full employment for all the troops who had fought in the war. This was of particular concern to them, as when their fathers had returned from fighting in World War One, there had been very few jobs available, and unemployment amongst ex-soldiers was rife.  The depression of the thirties was seen as the Conservatives' fault, so Labour, led by Attlee promised that they would help the British to 'win the peace, as well as the war', something which was popularly believed not to have happened after the First World War. 

Of course, it wasn't Attlee who was directly responsible for bringing in the new National Health Service - that monumental task fell to Aneurin Bevan in 1948 - but his principle of Britain as a Welfare State remains to this day, though it is weaker during times of Conservative rule. Attlee also continued his progressiveness after his government had fallen from power - in 1955 he was elevated to the House of Lords, and three years later he established the Homosexual Law Reform Society with Bertrand Russell, a group which aimed to decriminalize being gay, and after nine years of campaigning, succeeded. Sadly, Attlee did not live long enough to see this victory, dying in October 1967, but his post-war reforms live on today, a legacy which earned him the title of Greatest 20th Century Prime Minister by a poll in 2004.  

Rosa Parks, hero

Today marks 55 years since Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man and was arrested for refusing to abide by the city's racial segregation laws. The law stated that black people must sit at the back of the bus and fill up the rows from the back to the front. If a white person got on the bus and wanted to sit in the seats at the front, the black person must go and stand at the back and give them their seat. I remember learning that, when I was six years old in primary school, and being amazed that such a law should  have existed at a time when my parents were children.

Explaining why she took the action she did, Parks wrote (in her autobiography): "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
 
When Parks was arrested, she was ordered to appear in court on 5th December. To show their solidarity with her cause, the black citizens of Alabama boycotted the buses for the day, encouraged to do so by Jo Ann Robinson, who was head of the Women's Political Council. Despite their actions, Parks was found guilty of disregarding the "law" and was fined $10 with an additional $4 court costs - a lot of money at the time, especially for a poor seamstress. Undeterred however, she decided to challenge the ruling.

The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) decided to use her case to test the segregation laws in the state. Interestingly, they had tried to do something similar the previous year, when a black girl named Collette Colvin had been arrested for exactly the same crime. However, as she was fifteen years old and pregnant, she was deemed an unsuitable candidate for advancing their cause, whereas the older, employed, married Rosa Parks, who had excellent standing within her community was seen as someone who would make their case winnable. 

 

the bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat 

They therefore decided to extended the boycott of the buses until Parks had won her case. A young preacher named Martin Luther King addressed a crowd at Parks' local Baptist Church where this idea was put forward, and the boycott soon spread throughout the city of Montgomery, eventually lasting 381 days, ending in late December 1956. The NAACP demanded that all bus passengers be treated courteously by bus drivers; that seats be allocated on a first come, first served basis (ie black people should no longer be forced to give up their seats for white people) and that black men should be allowed to be employed as bus drivers, and until these rules were instated, the black community (all 40,000 of them) would not use the city's buses.

The white community did not make this easy for them. When black car owners organized car-sharing schemes so that those who did not own a car were able to get to work, they pressured the local insurance companies not to ensure cars which were being used in the scheme. When black taxi drivers allowed black men and women to ride with them for only 10 cents (the price of a bus ticket), the council passed a law saying that all taxi drivers must charge passengers a minimum of 45 cents, or face a fine. Four Baptist churches, and the homes of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy were firebombed.

There were some positive stories, though. Black communities all over the US raised money to pay for bicycles and new shoes for the people of Montgomery, and when King was sent to jail for two weeks for "hindering" a bus in June of 1956, the protest started to gain national attention. Pressure was put on the state of Alabama to remove the 'Jim Crow' segregation laws, which, eventually, the Supreme Court ruled that it must. On 20 December, 1956 it became law in the state of Alabama that black people should no longer have to give up their seats for whites - Rosa Parks had won, and helped to initiate the Civil Rights Movement, and draw national attention to Preacher Martin Luther King.

 

Sadly, she did not initially have the happy ending she deserved. She lost her job and faced so much harassment in Montgomery that in 1957 she moved to Detroit, where she worked for John Conyers, a Democratic Congressman until she retired in 1988. She died in October 2005, a hero.

(If you are interested in reading the original BBC newspaper report of Parks' arrest, it can be found here.)

Remember, Remember...

Hello. Today, I am a NERVOUS WRECK. And it is all the fault of one Guido Fawkes. I am not even kidding.

Y'see, though it embarrasses me to admit it, sudden loud noises terrify me. A firework just went off somewhere in the vicinity of my house and I inhaled so sharply MY BREATH ACTUALLY MADE A NOISE. And I can still hear my heartbeat reverberating through my body. I am a wreck. And a wuss. I have a dog who is a complete nutcase. He gets scared of being left on his own so much that he turns into a shaking slobbering mess (he's a rescue dog, which is where his issues stem from - not from me being cruel or anything...) and he whimpers and runs away from cats. And yet, even this furry ball of patheticness is blandly carrying on like THINGS AREN'T EXPLODING BASICALLY ABOVE OUR HEADS.

I do not like Bonfire Night. 

I guess it does have the advantage of being one of the most well known historical events in the country - and correctly known, too! Most people know that a band of disenfranchised Catholics planned to blow up Protestant King James I and his Parliament (and then stick his daughter, the Princess Elizabeth on the throne, on the grounds that she was very close to her mother, Queen Anne, who was a Catholic, and therefore likely to have been sympathetic to their views. Even though they'd, y'know, just killed her dad...); Guy Fawkes was not the main plotter, he was just the foot soldier (literally, from the Spanish Army) hired to do the dirty work of blowing up the Houses of Parliament but they were all eventually caught out when one of the plotters sent an anonymous note to Lord Monteagle who warned the King's security and lead to the plot being foiled. They would have been monitoring the activity of the buildings surrounding the Houses of Parliament...and there really isn't a subtle way to ship in 36 barrels of gunpowder. The plot almost definitely wouldn't have gone through, regardless of the anonymous tip-off.

Most modern Historians believe that it is highly likely that James's private secretaries knew about the plot, but didn't wish to "point the finger" too early, in case they didn't manage to catch all the plotters. In the end, they killed everyone they knew was involved, either in conflict in the standoffs which happened around the country where the plotters were hiding out, or when they were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. Lovely.

The tradition of celebrating Bonfire Night did actually start in 1605, the year of the attempted murder, as the plot itself was foiled on the night of the 4th/5th November. The following day, there was great rejoicing in the streets of London, and bonfires were lit in celebration. Soon, this annual celebration became more violent, with people burning effigies of the Pope on the bonfire, a practise which has mostly died out, with the exception of the town of Lewes in Sussex, which burns and effigy of Guy Fawkes and the Pope every year, and celebrates the martyring of 17 local Protestants who were killed during Mary I's reign. 

But with the exception of this town, Bonfire Night is an excuse for most people these days to go out into the cold and eat toffee apples (yay!) and watch fireworks. And write their names with sparklers, which is something even I like to do.

Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and Parli'ment.
Three-score barrels of powder below
To prove old England's overthrow;
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Hulloa boys, Hulloa boys, let the bells ring.
Hulloa boys, hulloa boys, God save the King!

PS: Happy Diwali! 

Anyone for a Sandwich?

Have you ever eaten a sandwich? You probably have. I'm a fan of sandwiches myself...though I can't help wondering - who on earth was it who decided that the best thing to accompany some meat would be a slice or two of bread? I guess it works though (as do fish, cheese, salad etc) so s/he was clearly onto a winner.

The discovery of the glory of the sandwich is attributed to (it may not surprise you to learn) the Earl of Sandwich (number four), John Montagu, who was born on this day in 1718. In honour of this, Americans have named today National Sandwich Day, which I initially thought was a great idea, but then I realized that most people eat sandwiches several times a week, if not every day and it would be much more exciting to have a National Ice Cream Day because seriously, if there's ever a food you need more of in your life, it's ice cream.

But back to Mr. Sandwich. He did not, sadly, invent the sandwich, but was often ordered a slice meat enclosed by bread to be brought to him when he was working, bringing it to the attention of others, who soon began to order "the same as Sandwich!" and so a new meal was born. 

The Earl is also the same person after whom Hawaii is named (Hawaii was originally called the Sandwich Islands, when they were discovered in 1778 by Captain Cook); the South Sandwich Islands which are a British territory off the South American coast and Montagu Island in Alaska. 


Now, you would imagine that, as he has so many famous places and foodstuffs named after him, John Montagu, Fourth Earl of Sandwich was a pretty impressive guy, and indeed, here is a picture showing him being very impressive and majestic and...things:

 

Anyway, despite that impressive and majestic overcoat and waistcoat combination he has going on, Mr. Montagu doesn't appear to have been very impressive at all. Well, he might have been. But he probably wasn't. But then again, he could have been. It's another of those occasions where no one really knows what's going on, because the sources we have aren't exactly reliable and unbiased and we therefore draw horribly invalid conclusions from them.

Basically, after attending Eton then one of the Cambridge Colleges, an educational background exactly the fricking same completely different from today's leaders of our country, Montagu was invited to join the government in several fairly high up positions. He did two terms as First Lord of the Admiralty (and as this was at around the same time that Britain's navy was at it's peak, this was a pretty important position), then was Northern Secretary, then went back and did a third spell as First Lord of the Admiralty. He also did, in between this, several very brief spells as Postmaster General and Secretary of State. 

If you look at most reports of his times in these various offices, though, you'll find that most historians have come to the conclusion that he was a bit incompetent and rubbish and generally not very good at his job. For example, his third spell in the Admiralty office was during the American War of Independence, and his generally faffing and incompetence when dealing with naval matters is generally said to have contributed greatly to the British losing that war.

Except (there's always an except...), most of the evidence for his rubbishness comes from...his main political enemies at the time. Who may just have had an agenda for painting him as a fool and kicking him out of office. Maybe. That's not do say he didn't do some foolish things, but really, basing all your evidence as to his personality on what people who didn't like him had to say? Yeah, probably not going to lead you to the most balanced conclusions.

In the interests of fairness, I should probably point out that I'm slightly biased in favour of the guy, because he was so into music - he often put on performances of 'Ancient Music' (by his definition, any music that was more than two decades old) and was a massive fan of Handel. His second wife was a famous opera singer at the time, and managed to squeeze out nine of his children before being stabbed to death by a jealous suitor in the foyer of the Royal Opera House. (This seems to happen a lot in opera - Carmen anyone? Maybe people were more passionate back then... I can't really imagine stabbing someone because I loved them, it'd likely be far too messy, more than anything.)

And yet, I can't really feel too sorry for him, because no one really knows him as 'the rubbish Lord of the Admiralty' they know him as 'the guy who invented sandwiches'. Even though, technically, he was neither. History's odd, sometimes...

Ellen Wilkinson and the Jarrow March

Seventy four years ago today, on October 5th, 1936, 200 able-bodied men from the north-eastern town of Jarrow set off for London. Over the next few days, they marched 300 miles, accompanied by a second-hand bus which carried their cooking utensils and bedding. Whilst marching, they sang songs and played mouth organs to keep up morale, and carried an oak box with gold lettering, containing a petition, signed by 11,000 citizens of the town. Signatures were  also collected on a second petition from the numerous sympathetic people they passed on their way down to London. The march was hard, but medical care was provided by the Inter Hospital Socialist Society's students. 

Why were they marching? What did their protest hope to achieve?

About a year previously, the main employer in the town - Palmer's shipyard - had been closed down. In Jarrow, as with many towns in the north-east, employment rates were at 70%. The men of Jarrow were dependent on their wives' or daughters' wages (themselves hardly substantial), which was not something that was culturally acceptable at that time. The town itself was in dire shape. In the words of the local MP, Ellen Wilkinson, it was 

"... utterly stagnant. There was no work. No one had a job except a few railwaymen, officials, the workers in the co-operative stores, and a few workmen who went out of the town... the plain fact [is] that if people have to live and bear and bring up their children in bad houses on too little food, their resistance to disease is lowered and they die before they should." [source]

Wilkinson herself is a very interesting figure. Born in 1891, she won a scholarship to the University of Manchester, never married, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, often visited Spain (during the Civil War there) and Germany to protest against Fascist groups - especially the rise of Hitler - and as Minister for Education during the post-war Labour government, managed to get the school leaving age raised to 15, despite the huge demand for extra buildings and teachers this would require. All in all, she was an amazing woman, achieving more in her lifetime than most people could in several. I would very much like to be her.

 

Ellen Wilkinson MP, 1891-1947

She also went on the march with the men of Jarrow, and presented their petition to parliament for them. As the shipyard had been closed, due to the worldwide economic downturn (sound familiar?), the men demanded that a steelworks be built to bring employment back to their town. The government, despite being largely Conservative, were not unsympathetic to their plight - nor indeed the similar plight of other men in the working towns who had been laid off due to the Depression, but there was very little they could do. There was a general lack of response to the Jarrow situation (though a ship-breaking yard was established in 1938), although their policies of  increasing domestic consumption and implementing a cheap mortgage scheme which lead to a house building boom did help boost the economy slightly.

Ultimately, though, it took World War Two, and the need for armaments and the like to give industry the boost it needed, and therefore lift the economy out of depression. I do not pretend to understand economics at all, and will defer to almost anyone's knowledge on how to avoid recessions and depressions, but surely, surely there must be a way of finding enough jobs so that everyone is employed and can afford to put food on the table, without having said jobs involve making weapons to kill others? I hope that that is not just wishful socialist thinking...