Month: July 2023

The Stolen Crown by Carol McGrath

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I really enjoyed this.  My only criticism is that it was too short, as tends to be the case with all Carol McGrath’s books.  It’s a very sympathetic portrayal of Maud/Matilda, the daughter of Henry I, who should have been Queen Regnant of England but whose crown was “stolen” by her cousin Stephen, leading to the period of civil war known as The Anarchy, before it was eventually agreed that Stephen would remain king but be succeeded by Maud’s son.  Although Maud was cheated out of the crown, she’s usually depicted unfavourably, because she’s seen as being haughty and arrogant, but this book shows her much more warmly.   There’s also a parallel narrative about a fictional character called Alice.

The book begins with Maud as a young widow, following the death of the Emperor Henry, and being forced into marriage with Geoffrey of Anjou.  We see how that relationship developed, and also her relationship with Brien Fitz Count, who seems to have been the man she really loved but with whom she could never be more than friends.   Then we get into the civil war, with Maud being forced out of London by hostile crowds just as she was preparing to have herself crowned queen, and the siege of Oxford in which she just about managed to escape.   We don’t see that much of what’s going on in the country in general, but, to be fair, the book’s about Maud and Alice, and what’s happening in their lives.

As I said, my one major criticism is that it isn’t long enough – it stops short, and we don’t see anything of the last years of Maud’s life.  We don’t even see her son Henry become king.   But it was a very entertaining book, and pretty much historically accurate.   Carol McGrath’s books are always good.

No Man’s Land: Reschen Valley by Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger

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When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up, large numbers of Hungarians ended up outside Hungary, and quite a number of German-Austrians ended up outside Austria.  Most controversial was the decision to split historic Tyrol and award South Tyrol, then almost entirely German-speaking and even now almost two-thirds German speaking, to Italy, which had been on the winning side in the Great War – in line with an agreement made in 1915 to persuade Italy to enter the war on the Allied side.

This book, the first in a series, shows how the German-speaking Tyroleans struggled to come to terms with Italian rule, especially when the rise of Fascism in Italy brought about attempts to Italianise the region, changing names and appointing Italian officials.  We see things largely from the viewpoint of Katharina, a German-Austrian woman living in the Reschen Valley, but also from the viewpoint of Angelo, an Italian man with whom Katharina has a brief relationship and who fathers her first child.

The “South Tyrol Question” rumbled on for many years, with terrorist activity in the 1950s and 1960s carried out by a group seeking reunification with Austria.  The area was granted autonomy in 1972, but Italy and Austria didn’t officially end their dispute over it until 1992.  And it still looks and feels Austrian – I went through the area on a coach from Venice to Innsbruck, and I honestly thought I must have dozed off and missed the border, because it seemed so Austrian.

This is only a short book, but it’s interesting, covering an issue in European history and politics which isn’t that well-known.  I look forward to reading the rest of the series.

onsiderable level of self-governme

In 1992, Italy and Austria officially ended their dispute over the autonomy issue

The South Tyrolean Question (Südtirolfrage) became an international issue. As the implementation of the post-war agreement was deemed unsatisfactory by the Austrian government, it became a cause of significant friction with Italy and was taken up by the United Nations in 1960. A fresh round of negotiations took place in 1961 but proved unsuccessful, partly because of the campaign of terrorism.

The issue was resolved in 1971, when a new Austro-Italian treaty was signed and ratified. It stipulated that disputes in South Tyrol would be submitted for settlement to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, that the province would receive greater autonomy within Italy, and that Austria would not interfere in South Tyrol’s internal affairs. The new agreement proved broadly satisfactory to the parties involved, and the separatist tensions soon eased.

Hope of Israel by Patricia O’Sullivan

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This book, another Kindle special offer, is a fascinating novel about the debates over religious toleration which raged in England during Cromwell’s time, as new Protestant sects abounded, the practice of Judaism was officially allowed here for the first time since 1290, and attitudes towards Catholics remained generally negative.  Domingo/Dominick, the main character, is from a Portuguese Marrano family who flee the Inquisition and move to Amsterdam, and then to London, where he falls in love with Lucy, a wealthy Catholic girl living as an Anglican.  Most of it’s historically accurate, but it includes some stories which are definitely false.

First, the terminology.  The author uses “converso”, and we’re told that Domingo is brought up as a practising Catholic.  (There actually was a man with Domingo’s name, but nothing’s known about him, so the author’s invented his story.)  However, we’re also told that his sister is driven to her death because she knows Jewish prayers, so it sounds as if his parents and sister were continuing to practise Judaism.  So I think “marrano” works better.  Anyway.  Their original plan is to emigrate to Recife, the Dutch colony in Brazil, famously home to the first known synagogue in the Americas but which was later retaken by the Portuguese, but they end up in Amsterdam as Domingo’s father is too ill to travel on.  There, they become part of a Sephardic Jewish merchant community and meet a lot of people who really existed, included Spinoza.   Domingo’s work then takes him to London.

Although technically Judaism had been banned in England since 1290, in practice things eased up during Tudor times, and, especially from the 1630s, there was a Sephardic Jewish merchant community in London, with close ties to Amsterdam.   As debate over religious toleration grew during and after the Civil War, and with some Puritans convinced that the end of days was coming, England was the New Jerusalem and it was necessary for there to be Jews in England for the millennium to come about, and also with Cromwell eager to use Sephardi know-how in the conflicts with Spain and the United Provinces, from 1656 onwards it effectively became legal to practise Judaism in England again.   We see the real life people involved, and also fictional characters with different views on the issue.

There are also some oblique references to events affecting Jews in Poland … which threw me for a second, until I realised that they referred to the Khmelnytsky Massacres.   Of course, the term “Ukraine” wouldn’t have been used in England then, but it did take me a second to realise what they were talking about!   We see one character complaining that Sephardi Jews are only concerned about themselves, not about Ashkenazi Jews.  I wouldn’t have said that this was particularly an issue in London at the time, but, yes, it was in Amsterdam.   There was certainly a divide between the two Jewish communities in Britain in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it’s pretty much gone now – but, in Israel, it does seem to be quite a sub-plot to the current heated debate over judicial reforms.

Meanwhile, once Lucy’s Catholic mother has died, her family become practising Anglicans, and Lucy is married off to a man who dislikes both Catholics and Jews.  When the Restoration comes, Charles II is happy for both Catholics and Jews to worship openly – the book doesn’t mention the Test Acts at all, but, to be fair, they don’t affect any of the characters – but Lucy’s husband, a prominent Roundhead, is arrested.  He’s then just left in prison without seeming to be convicted of anything, which seems unlikely, but his absence enables Domingo and Lucy to conduct an affair.

Lucy’s husband is then released, and Dominic goes to visit relatives in Barbados … and this is where the book, historically accurate until this point, comes out with all that nonsense about Cromwell enslaving Irish women and forcing them to “breed” with African slaves.   No-one’s denying that Cromwell’s behaviour in Ireland was appalling, or that thousands of Irish people were transported to the West Indies as indentured servants, but the slavery story and the “breeding” story are lies.  They’re used by white supremacists in America to try to play down the racial elements of slavery, and it’s no coincidence that some of their main propagators are also Holocaust deniers.  It’s a very nasty form of fake history.  I’m giving the author the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she came across it somewhere – it apparently features quite a bit on certain websites which promote conspiracy theories –  and took it to be true.  But it isn’t true.

Other than that, most of it was pretty accurate.  Lucy’s husband then obligingly dies, and the book ends with Lucy and Domingo and their children planning a new life in Newport, Rhode Island – home to the second oldest Jewish community in what’s now the United States, and also a haven of sorts for Catholics and Nonconformists.  It’s still got the highest proportion of Catholics of any of the fifty states, which surprises me – I would have thought it’d’ve been New York or Massachusetts, but Massachusetts comes in joint second with New Jersey, and New York’s fifth, behind Connecticut.   New York has the highest proportion of Jewish inhabitants, followed by the District of Columbia, New Jersey and Massachusetts.  And I have got way off the point!

We see the Jewish community in London reject Domingo because of his relationship with Lucy, and the Catholic community only accept their marriage because he was baptised as a Catholic in Lisbon.  And, even in Rhode Island, Catholics and Jews didn’t initially have full legal rights.  However, we know that, over a century later, George Washington visited Newport’s synagogue, and told its leaders that the new American government wouldn’t sanction any sort of religious persecution.

All in all, this was a fascinating book about the issues faced by religious minorities in the 17th century, and the debates about religion in England at that time.  I just wish it hadn’t included the Irish slavery myth.

 

 

World On Fire (series 2) – BBC 1

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It’s good to see this back, after a four year gap.  It’s an ambitious attempt to show parts of the Second World War that other series don’t reach … although there are so many different storylines going on that we don’t really get the chance to get into any of them.

I’m pleased – if that’s the right word – that it’s covering the Manchester Blitz.  Far too many Second World War programmes focus on London and ignore the devastation wreaked on other British cities.

Sean Bean’s character’s been killed off in the Manchester Blitz, and the American journalist and her son/nephew and his boyfriend seem to have disappeared.   However, we’ve now got an Indian army unit serving in North Africa.  And a young German girl who’s being pushed into a Lebensborn programme.  I think that storyline might work better if set in Norway, rather than with a German girl who seems quite enthusiastic about it.  However, as I said, it’s an ambitious attempt to show parts of the Second World War which are usually overlooked.

Meanwhile, Lois is still working as an ambulance driver in Manchester, and her posh ex has got his Polish wife and her brother living with his mother in Cheshire.  And her ex and his brother are both on active service.   We also see two German airman in action.

There’s a lot going on, but it’s all interesting angles on the war.  And how strange it is to think that the first series of this was shown in a different world, before Covid and before Russia invaded Ukraine.   People are just going about their normal business and then, wham, everything changes.

Becoming Elizabeth – Channel 4

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OK, OK, it’s yet another drama about the Tudors, but at least it’s not about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.  And, although it’s missing out some of the political detail, it’s fairly historically accurate – apart from rather unfairly depicting Edward VI as a stroppy brat.  The main focus is on Thomas Seymour’s flirtatious behaviour with the young Elizabeth, which would now be described as “grooming”, and Seymour’s guile comes across very well.

It starts with the death of Henry VIII, and we then see Catherine Parr almost immediately jumping into bed with Thomas Seymour.   That may well be accurate, and I don’t think anyone could blame Catherine if it was.  She’d been married off twice to much older men, and had been on the verge of marrying Seymour for love when Henry cast his eye on her.   She and Seymour soon married in secret – and you’d have said good luck to her, had she not picked such a rotter.   As the programme shows, Seymour engaged in flirtatious and, although we haven’t got to that part yet, really very inappropriate behaviour with Elizabeth, tickling her when she was in bed, and cutting up her clothes whilst she was wearing them.  It was a deeply unpleasant episode – and Catherine Parr should have put a stop to it, but she didn’t.

Elizabeth was only in her early teens at this point.  It’s a vulnerable age anyway, and she was particularly vulnerable because of her situation.   Many people didn’t recognise her legitimacy.  Others sought to use her as a pawn.  Edward was too young to protect her.  Unlike Mary, she didn’t have powerful maternal relatives.   And yet, despite being vulnerable and alone, she was clever enough to extricate herself from accusations of plotting with Seymour, when his downfall came – and she was still only 15 then.

We see Somerset (as he became), Seymour’s elder brother, effectively seizing control of the country, and continuing the “Rough Wooing” of Scotland.  The machinations come across quite well, although we aren’t told about Somerset and his cronies awarding themselves titles right, left and centre.  Depicting Edward as a spoilt little brat seems rather unfair, though.

I kept wondering where Lady Jane Grey was, but she turned up at the end of the first episode.  She’s depicted quite well, as is Kat Ashley.   Now we’re just missing the Dudleys, but no doubt they’ll turn up soon.  A promising start!

 

The Tennis Champion Who Escaped The Nazis by Felice Hardy

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  Thank you to Amazon for making this book available on a Kindle deal during Wimbledon.   I knew the story of the Hakoah Vienna football team, but I didn’t know that the club had also produced an Austrian national tennis champion and international player – the author’s grandmother, Liesl Herbst nee Westreich.  Liesl and her husband and daughter were able to escape to Britain, but her mother and one of her sisters died of disease at Terezin/Theresienstadt, her other sister, her brother-in-law and her niece were murdered in an Einsatzgruppen massacre in Slovakia, and seven other close family members were also Holocaust victims.  The book’s partly about Liesl and partly about what happened to the rest of the family, and also talks about how those who survived never spoke about their experiences and were never able to deal with the emotional damage they suffered.

It’s quite a messy book, because it jumps about a lot.  Whilst most of it’s about the events of the past, told as a novel, some of it’s about the author’s efforts to find out what had happened to her family.  It also jumps about a lot between different family members.   But it’s very interesting, if difficult to read.   Liesl was born into a wealthy family in what’s now part of Czechia, and her husband David was born into a poor family in what’s now part of Slovakia, obviously at that time both part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  David moved to Vienna, and became a wealthy businessman and the president of Hakoah Vienna.  He and Liesl met by chance in Paris, and married, and had one child, Dorli.   Liesl only took up tennis in her 20s, but soon became one of the top players in Austria, competing in many international tournaments – although, for some reason, at that time Austria didn’t send female competitors to the Grand Slam events.  As conditions for Jews became worse and worse, Liesl and Dorli managed to obtain visas for Britain, but David had to remain behind and escaped, aided by people smugglers, via Poland, eventually managing to join his wife and daughter in London.  But other family members weren’t as lucky, and we hear about their tragic fates in some detail.

We see Liesl playing at Wimbledon in 1939, and again after the war, even though by then she’d had one lung removed due to TB.  She and Dorli played in the ladies’ doubles together, the only mother-and-daughter team ever to do so.  Liesl lived into her 80s and David into his 90s, Dorli sadly dying in her early 50s, and the author talks about how they said very little about what had happened to them, and always clung together and found it difficult to form relationships with other people.

There are a lot of family Holocaust memoirs coming out at the moment, as the dwindling number of survivors tell their stories, and family members tell the stories of what happened to their relatives.   As the author says, at one time it was rarely spoken about.  Holocaust survivors now go into schools to tell children about what happened to them, which certainly never happened in my schooldays.   This one’s a little bit different, because of the tennis angle – we see how Liesl went from being a celebrity to being a refugee. It’s not the best-written book I’ve ever read, but it gets the emotions across very well, and I’d recommend it.

When Patty Went To College by Jean Webster

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I wasn’t expecting this to be as good as Daddy-Long-Legs … which was a good job, because it wasn’t, although it was probably an improvement on Dear Enemy. It was OK, but not very much happened.  An entire chapter was devoted to Patty and her room-mate decorating their room.  And another entire chapter was devoted to a telegram about a dead dog.

It was set in a girls’ college in the late 19th/early 20th century, presumably somewhere near New York as there was a reference to sending dolls to a settlement on the East Side.  And it was all right, but, as I said, not much happened, and there was no coherent theme or ongoing storyline, other than the playing of practical jokes which weren’t really very funny.  Every chapter was about something different.

The Kindle edition was free, and it was OK for free, but there are much better books in this genre.

 

Joanna Lumley’s Spice Trail Adventure – ITV

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The first episode of this new series, visiting what was once known as the Dutch East Indies and is now Indonesia, was very interesting, although often distressing.  Joanna Lumley does sometimes sound like a character in a boarding school book, with all her “Gollies” and “Goshes”, but she’s an engaging presenter, and she gets to go to some very interesting places.  And, as she said, the nutmeg changed the course of world history, and thoroughly deserved to have an hour’s TV devoted to it.

We started off in the Banda Islands, and heard about the arrival of the Dutch East India Company in the early 17th century – and about the Banda Massacre, in 1621, when they killed around 2,800 of the islanders, enslaved 1,700 others, and expelled all those who remained.   All to gain control of the nutmeg trees, nutmeg at the time being believed to have major medicinal powers.   Horrific.  And, if you’d asked me about massacres in the East Indies in the 1620s, my brain would immediately have said “Amboyna”, referring to the incident in 1623 in which the Dutch East India Company executed 21 people, 10 of them Englishmen, which soured Anglo-Dutch relations for years.   That’s just something that’s in my consciousness in a way that the Banda Massacre isn’t.  Maybe it’s something we all need to learn more about.

We then moved on to the tiny island of Rhun, one of the outlying Banda Islands, where English East India Company island ships arrived in 1616.   Desperate to do anything to protect themselves against the Dutch, the islanders of Rhun swore allegiance to King James, so Rhun was actually the first English/British colony.   As Joanna said, interestingly, in the 1667 Manhattan Transfer it was swapped with the Dutch for Manhattan.  At the time, it looked as if the Dutch had got the better of the deal.   History had a different story to tell!   What she didn’t mention was that, long before 1667, the Dutch had invaded the island, killed and enslaved all the men, exiled all the women and children, and destroyed most of the nutmeg trees to keep them out of English hands.   It really was a cut throat business, and the islanders suffered so terribly.

After Rhun, it was on to Jakarta, where things got a bit jollier and we heard about spice cigarettes, which are hand made locally, and we saw Joanna having a ride round in a rickshaw, talking about how the founder of Coca Cola once sold nutmeg to the US government, and joining in with some local dancing.

Next week, it’s on to India and Madagascar.   This was a fascinating hour’s TV, but it certainly wasn’t comfortable watching.