Ian Irvine
Georgian binge drinking
Thomas Turner, a prosperous shopkeeper in East Hoathly, Sussex, writes in his diary (22nd February 1757):
“About four P.M., I walked down to Whyly. We played at bragg the first part of the even. After ten we went to supper, on four boiled chicken, four boiled ducks, minced veal, sausages, cold roast goose, chicken pasty, and ham. Our company, Mr and Mrs Porter, Mr and Mrs Coates, Mrs Atkins, Mrs Hicks, Mr Piper and wife, Joseph Fuller and wife, Tho. Fuller and wife, Dame Durrant, myself and wife, and Mr French’s family. After supper our behaviour was far from that of serious, harmless mirth; it was downright obstreperous, mixed with a great deal of folly and stupidity. Our diversion was dancing or jumping about, without a violin or any musick, singing of foolish healths, and drinking all the time as fast as it could be well poured down; and the parson of the parish was one among the mixed multitude. About three o’clock, finding myself to have as much liquor as would do me good, I slipt away unobserved, leaving my wife to make my excuse. Though I was very far from sober, I came home, thank GOD, very safe and well, without even tumbling; and Mr French’s servant brought my wife home, at ten minutes past five (probably upon his back).”
Regency road rage
Lord Byron writes to Tom Moore from Venice in (10th July 1817):
“Last week I had a row on the road with a fellow in a carriage, who was impudent to my horse. He first shouted, in an unseemly way, to frighten my palfrey. I wheeled round, rode up to the window, and asked him what he meant. He grinned, and said some foolery, which produced him an immediate slap in the face, to his utter discomfiture. Much blasphemy ensued, and some menace, which I stopped by dismounting and opening the carriage door, and intimating an intention of mending the road with his immediate remains, if he did not hold his tongue… He held it.”
Victorian vandalism
Raymond Asquith writes to his father from Balliol College, Oxford (19th November 1899):
“There is a great row going on now in College: on Wednesday our Rugby team played King’s Cambridge, who came over for the match; after which they had a big dinner at 5pm and both teams were desperately drunk by half past six; they made hay of the quad, which irritated our dons, brawled in the streets, which drew down the Proctors on them, and they are also being prosecuted by the South Western Railway for wrecking a train and assaulting porters at the station; three have been sent down and the rest gated, but it is thought that favouritism was shown in the selection of victims, and the dons are more unpopular than they have ever been.”
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Jonathan Power
An examination of the Swedish soul must begin, I’m afraid, with sex. Not Volvo, not IKEA, not Alfa Laval nor H&M. Not Strindberg nor Dagerman nor even Astrid Lindgren and Pippi Longstocking. Not the welfare state, not income equality nor criminal justice. Not the Lutheran Church nor collective bargaining. Not the Vikings nor 200 years without war. It’s that three letter word—and the half-myth about Swedish promiscuity—that is our starting point.
The town I live in, Lund, across the bridge from Copenhagen, hosts not only Scandinavia’s oldest university and cathedral, it is full of high-tech companies including some of the ones mentioned above and many computer technology, biotech and pharmaceutical start-ups. It is where I have lived for the last eight years. It hosts thousand of students and the weekends are notoriously wild. But the students are bright and after I’ve given a lecture I like to take those who want to out for a drink.
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Andrew Adonis
Charles Darwin’s bicentenary has overshadowed that of William Gladstone, which also falls this year. Yet, especially in these turbulent times, the four-times Liberal prime minister stands out as one of the great evolutionary pioneers of modern progressive politics—less celebrated than Abraham Lincoln and FDR because he was not a wartime leader, yet equally as important.
From his budgets as chancellor in the early 1850s until his retirement from the premiership in 1894, Gladstone was Victorian Britain’s leading progressive politician. As the dominant change-maker in eight governments, he radically extended political rights and pioneered constant, iterative reform. His legacy was a world-class economy and a set of institutions dedicated to the service of a cohesive public interest, rising above the sectional claims of class.
This was in stark contrast to the Britain of his youth. Gladstone entered parliament in the early 1830s amid a deep economic crisis and semi-revolutionary struggle for parliamentary reform. The trouble was rooted in the social dislocation of the industrial revolution and two decades of war with France, exacerbated by a narrow, inflexible political elite. The Great Reform Act of 1832 quelled the immediate threat, giving a political opening to the middle class. Yet social conflict was still endemic, as reflected by the Chartist and the anti-Corn Law League protests in the 1830s and 1840s.
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Kenneth Baker
History is on the retreat in our schools and our culture more generally. When, as education minster in Margaret Thatcher’s government, I established the national curriculum in the 1980s, history was taken by all pupils up to the age of 16. This was later reduced to 14. The only other country in Europe that allows this is Albania.
We need to interest all our young people in our past—not just those who attend independent or grammar schools, or academies. And as a result of the immigration of the last 50 years, we are now home to people from more than 100 countries, attracted by Britain’s way of life but with little knowledge of how it came to be. It is from this knowledge that affection, trust, tolerance, loyalty and cohesion must emerge.
A museum of British history cannot on its own roll back the anti-historical tide. But it can help in a small way, and fortunately it is back on the agenda. In the mid-1990s, with the support of former Labour ministers Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, I tried to establish such a museum in London. We were top of the list for a £50m grant from the Millennium Commission and were encouraged by ministers to locate it at Bart’s hospital in east London, as it was scheduled to close. An architect was appointed and a team of historians assembled. But when Tony Blair came to power in 1997, his lack of interest meant that our prospect of a grant disappeared. Gordon Brown is, however, interested both in history and in Britishness and is on record as welcoming the idea, so there is now reason for hope.
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Archie Brown
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Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
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Andy Beckett
In 2005, when Tony Blair was still prime minister and people still believed he was presiding over a British economic miracle, his party conference speech made a pointed historical detour. Jim Callaghan, his predecessor as Labour premier, had died a few months earlier. Blair paid him, and other Labour politicians who ran Britain in the 1970s, a distinctly double-edged tribute: “they were great people. But [they] were not ready… to see change was coming.”
Conservatives are less restrained about Britain’s 1970s governments. The IMF crisis, the winter of discontent, overwhelmed ministers, Britain at a dead end—such bogeymen have sustained right-wing speeches and editorials for decades. Even now, with many of the economic and political orthodoxies of the last 30 years in doubt, the conviction endures that the regimes of Callaghan, Heath and Wilson were uniquely incompetent, short-sighted and obsolete in their thinking.
But how justified is this? It would take a bloody-minded revisionist to argue that the decade was a golden age. Footage of Wilson’s return to Downing Street after the February 1974 election shows the mischievous ringmaster of postwar Labour politics looking worn out, slack-shouldered, and joyless. For my book on the 1970s I interviewed his chancellor, Dennis Healey. Faced with an oil crisis, inflation and out-of-control state spending, Healey cheerfully told me that for his first year in the job: “I knew bugger all about economics.”
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Richard Jenkyns
The last few years have seen a steady flow of popular books about the classical world. From the ancient Greece of the 8th century BC to the collapsing Roman empire a millennium and more later, it has been the subject not only of popular histories, but of novels; not only of academic explorations, but of more anecdotal engagements with the travels and writings of the ancients. The ancient world has always held a deep fascination for the west. But does this lively and apparently growing public interest answer to some peculiarly modern hunger?
Certainly, critics and historians have in many periods bent their subjects to match their own preoccupations. The 19th-century glorification of classical Greece, for example, more or less openly called the old world into existence to redress the balance of the new; a pure, calm, sculptural Hellas was worshipped as a vivifying contrast to the turbid, smoky, agitated present. More recently, such reinterpretation has come to be seen as a universal part of history writing. Academic investigations into the reputations of particular writers, artists or periods in later times have spawned a whole new sub-discipline—known as “reception studies.” Then there is the school of literary theory that claims that everything said about literature is subjective, which also contributes: for once we suppose that critics are “making it all up,” the natural next step is to suppose that this “making up” will be coloured by their predilections.
The truth usually lies in the middle: we are all of us, consciously and unconsciously, influenced by our own beliefs and values, but we are not helpless before our prejudices. And we may reasonably suppose that people in the past were similar—with biases of their own, but at their best trying for honest understanding. The Greeks, indeed, can teach us this.
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Peter Bazalgette
We now know that the current financial crisis is debt-driven: the child of over-extended mortgagees in the midwest of America and over-borrowed banks who picked up these loans in attractive but fatal parcels. For those Prospect readers wise enough to be in cash while the stock markets self-destruct, the big challenge is spotting the bottom of the market before piling in again. It’s at times like these we should be able to turn to public service broadcasters for guidance. And this month Channel 4 and the BBC have not let us down.
Take episodes seven and eight of Little Dorrit (BBC1). Old William Dorrit has been languishing in Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Now, in a truly Dickensian twist of good fortune, he is revealed as a wealthy heir and emerges blinking into the light, before taking in a grand tour of Europe. Can there be any more reassuring sight than Tom Courtenay as Old Dorrit? Just like the disciples in Life of Brian we can say, truly, “He has given us a sign!” For this came during the week of the 21st November, when the FTSE100 fell below 3,900. The BBC drama department was clearly calling the bottom of the market with a deft use of metaphor. Yea, and shall the debtors throw off their shackles. I peered closely at the credits to see if the BBC’s chief soothsayer, Robert Peston, was the co-author of the script. But the only name given was Andrew Davies. Financial forecasting is something of a departure for him, normally specialising, as he does, in ripping bodices and lesbian embraces.
Even before this “Buy!” signal was issued by the BBC, however, it was being countermanded by Channel 4. There, since the 17th November, The Ascent of Money has been charting the folly of man’s relationship with cash across the centuries. The series could not be more timely. It is, rather bizarrely, sponsored by the Cayman Islands, which is another sign: in a savage advertising downturn you have to use considerable imagination. Before I go into the programme itself, however, let me get my carp out of the way. Someone needs to restrain its presenter, Niall Ferguson, when he writes the “teases” at the top of each programme. In the first edition, it was a clumsy cliché: “Call it what you like—money can make us or break us.” In programme two, he resorted to sheer, reckless alliteration: “We may think power resides with presidents and prime ministers in palaces and parliaments.” And in programme three we had this: “Stock markets can be shock markets.” Spare us the shockney rhyming slang, Niall.
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Jonty Olliff-Cooper
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When Britney Spears totters from a night club at 5am—hair askew, often drunk, often without knickers—we tend to assume her behaviour is terribly modern. Certainly Toby Young, who argues that we are “lulled by the celebritariat” (December), seems to think so. But celebrities are not new. Nor is our obsession with them, as Prince Charles recently demonstrated with his 60th birthday portrait, modelled on Victorian hero Frederick Burnaby (1842-85). Burnaby is almost totally forgotten, but in his day he was so famous that the Queen reportedly fainted at news of his death. The Times gave him a 5000-word obituary. Grown men broke down and wept in the street.
It is easy to see why. Burnaby’s exploits make Rambo look wet. Few people have survived frostbite, typhus, an exploding air balloon, and poisoning with arsenic; explored Uzbekistan (where it was so cold, his beard froze solid and snapped off), led the household cavalry, stood for parliament, could speak seven languages, crossed the channel by air, written a string of bestsellers, commanded the Turkish army, and founded Vanity Fair; all before his early death aged 42.
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Michael Kenny
Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy
by David Marquand (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)
In this major new account of 20th-century British history, David Marquand depicts Harold Wilson as a politician who preferred to see the trees to the wood. It’s a witty and useful metaphor to bear in mind when approaching the literary genre that has grown up around the political history of 20th-century Britain. Many of Marquand’s predecessors placed us right in the middle of a beguiling cacophony of personalities, rows, plots and crises. We know a lot about some of the trees of our past political life as a result—but less about the pattern and nature of the wood. Against this backdrop, Marquand’s offering is striking in its ambition. Within it, both trees and wood get a thorough and thoughtful airing.
No doubt some of Marquand’s insights stem from the proximity afforded by his political career—first at Westminster as Labour MP for Ashfield, then with Roy Jenkins at the European commission, and subsequently as a founding member of the SDP—as well as his status as one of the leading political intellectuals and commentators of his day. And yet he chooses to remove all traces of himself from his narrative. This combination of close-up judgement and self-absence is revealing. It suggests the ethos of the era when the author came of age: the more austere and formal world of 1950s high politics, when the ideals of public service, civic duty and high-minded liberalism were in the ascendant. Not for Marquand the self-indulgence of political history as gossip, or of political commentary that takes the form of loudly-stated opinion.
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