HISTORY: 11.11 A short story too short

 Meet William Thomas Marshall, my great uncle.

Actually, I’m not absolutely positive this is William. It might be one of his brothers, but it’s generally assumed it’s him. I can describe him. He was 5’4”, weighed 10 stone, with a fresh complexion, brown eyes and black hair, a scar on his right forehead and a butterfly tattoo on his left forearm.

He grew up in a family of ostlers and cab drivers in Walworth, South London. In 1911, he was 22 years old, living at home, working as a messenger, although he also served for four years in the Territorials.

A year later, the firm he worked for went out of business and he decided to emigrate to Australia, where the boy done good. He became a farmer. I’m not sure where, but I’m guessing it was in the vicinity of Geelong, about 50 miles south west of Melbourne.

Hurdcott

Being a farmer didn’t stop him enlisting with the Australian imperial forces and returning to England, on the Orsova, which arrived in Plymouth on 14th September 2016. He joined the Anzac forces at Hurdcott camp, where Australian troops certainly left their mark on the landscape, and spent a merry few months hopscotching between battalions and camps on Salisbury plain.

Maybe because of his experience in the Territorials, he was rapidly promoted to corporal and then Sergeant, and, ominously, attended a course at the grenade school in Lyndhurst, where he qualified as an instructor, He wasn’t just a goody two-shoes though. In April, 1917, he was demoted to Corporal again, for allowing a prisoner, Private Phillips, to escape. I think this is my favourite detail of his life.

Chateauwood

Finally, on the 25th August 1917, he was sent to Southampton to reinforce the 59th Battalion, preparing to cross over to France. On 6th September, he arrived at Le Havre and marched on to join the 59th Battalion. You can guess what’s coming. Just over a month later, on the 19th October, he was killed in action.

Considering how very complete his army records are, in every other respect, you’d think there’d be more about the when and where and how, but no, it’s simply ‘killed in action.’

He is commemorated on the Menin Gate, where names of those without graves are recorded. I thought this puzzling, because, below that last ‘killed in action’ mention on his army record is a line in scribbled pencil “buried 25th November, 28 NE J5 b 30 65.

I asked the Commonwealth Graves commission if this made sense and was told that 28 NE J5 b 30 65 is a trench reference, It shows that William was buried near the village of Molenaarelst in Belgium – i.e. bang in the middle of the Passchendaele mud/blood bath. Maybe he was shot, or blown up, or maybe he was one of those who simply drowned in mud. It took more than a month to bury him, so I doubt if there was much still identifiable apart from his disc. At the end of the war, 200 bodies were recovered from Molenaaretst and re-interred in military cemeteries, but many others, including William Marshall’s, were destroyed in later shelling. Hence the Menin Gate memorial.

Which would be the end of his story, except that the Australian records go on. There are two sad letters from a Miss Gay Fanning in Geelong, Australia, the first pleading for information about William, to which she receive a bald notification of his death, and a second asking for the address of his parents so that she could contact them. Some army blimp sent her an officious reply stating that it was not current practice to pass on details of next of kin, I don’t know if she ever managed to contact them or if they ever knew she existed.

I hope, too, that she didn’t have any urgent personal need to contact his family, because there’s another army record which might take some explaining for her. In 1916, while stationed on Salisbury Plain, William made an army will, simply leaving all his worldly goods to be divided equally between his mother, Mrs E Marshall, and a Miss Mabel Westlake of 121 Oswell Road, Ipswich. Who? How did an Australian soldier, in Wiltshire, come to be forming a brief but obviously serious attachment to a young lady from Ipswich? Maybe she was a volunteer nurse, serving in one of the army hospitals. I will never know. There are records of several Mabel Westlakes marrying in the 1920s, so I hope she moved on.

The last record in William Marshall’s file quotes a letter from his mother, asking the whereabouts of his watch and chain that should have been forwarded to her. It never arrived, which is a sad waste, as is this story. So this is for you, Great Uncle Bill, and for Gay and Mabel and everyone else who missed you.

WILD RAMBLINGS: June Is Bustin' Out All Over

What a very romantic image Cecily Mary Baker had of the dog rose. The queen of wild flowers, floating elegantly in pink drapery.

Delightful. It was an image I shared through most of my childhood. I loved the wild rose bush that was the centrepiece of our back garden in Luton. It wasn't supposed to be there, an interloper from next door's untended hedge, but my mother's attempts to block it out with plantings of flax, marigolds and Virginia stock never had a chance of competing. I loved my dog rose then, so I was pleased to find it growing all along my lane in West Wales. Yes I still regard the flowers as very attractive, but I wouldn’t say my image of them is romantic any more. June, with its roses, is the month of insurgency, not of elegance, and we are the enemy.

Back in April and May, Mother Nature posed as a dainty nymph, clad in Laura Ashley prints, sprinkling the grass with bluebells, primroses and celandines, and conjuring buds of fresh green from the trees. In June, Mother Nature is a muscular goddess in combat gear, armed with an automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. We thought we were in charge? We thought we had it all tamed when the hedge-cutter came in October? Think again. The revolution starts now.

The grass with blades that can slice through fingers is suddenly five feet high. The nettles, full armed, are even higher. Goosegrass is raising scaling ladders on either side and hogweed is loading its flame-throwers (never strim hogweed in the sun, unless you want to be scarred for life). Meanwhile, those sweet little dog roses are joining forces with testosterone-fuelled brambles to throw barbed wire barricades across the lane. Honeysuckle and briony are preparing nooses to catch me from above. I feel seriously threatened.

Yes, the lane is still putting on a mocking front of prettiness. The honeysuckle is a jeering crowd gathering around the guillotine, and the foxgloves are standing tall and proud – except that they begin to look suspiciously like triffids. But it’s the outpouring of greenery that really gets me. It’s encroaching as I watch. When I make it to the top of lane, I wonder if I’ll be able to get home again without a machete.

How long have I got? I know, from bitter experience, with a garden far too large for me to manage, that a corner, left unsubdued for five minutes, will return to impenetrable wilderness the moment my back is turned. Put a rake or a trowel down and it won't reappear until November. Leave the house for a fortnight’s holiday and I’d never find it again.

It’s all a wonderful disturbing reminder of how quickly our mighty works would be consumed if we faltered in our campaign for world domination. What has happened during lockdown? Is the Shard swamped in convolvulus and ivy yet? Has a sycamore grove taken root in front of No.10's door? Blink, and it might. Mother Nature is advancing, all guns blazing, and she's coming for YOU!

WILD RAMBLINGS: Rural Hush

 Ah the joys of taking a midsummer stroll up along my lane at six in the morning. The air like silk, the sky pure blue, the dew sparkling and all the peace and quiet of the countryside, broken only by the trills and twitters of the birds in the hedgerows, a faint rustle of mice perhaps in the undergrowth.

And perhaps there should be a few other sounds - the swish of scythes through long grass, the clip clop of horses, and perhaps a little hymn-singing in the annual ritual of communal hay-making.

What I actually hear, of course, from before first to last light, is the non-stop clamour of silaging in the surrounding fields.

Farmers and contractors don’t do nine to five, certainly not in the summer. When they see a window of opportunity, they go for it. A tractor on the other side of the hedge thrashes and rumbles its way round the field, the noise gradually subsiding to a mosquito whine that lets you think, maybe the irritating insect has flown out of the window. But no, it’s coming back to clatter and grind. Never ever ending.

When they have finished, the embarrassed fields are left flaunting a golden Brazilian, while silage wagons, piled high with cut grass, pulled by monster tractors, turn out onto the road, invariably just ahead of a line of traffic gearing up, or rather down, to tackle the hill at the end of my lane.

The roar of the tractors is complimented by expletives streaming from drivers’ windows, cursing the fact that the hill is too steep, the road too winding and the tractors too big, for anyone to pass this side of Cardigan. Add a couple of caravans to the mix, threatening to grind to a complete halt and the air is bluer than the sky. The end of my lane is an excellent place to stand and study the infinite variations of human nature, from rage, through resignation, to despair.

One good thing about silage season: the red kites really love it. It’s an All You Can Eat buffet for them.

Conspiracy Theories by a hospital trolley

 Having spent 11 hours waiting for an ambulance, 5 hours sitting in an ambulance, and 4 hours sitting by an A&E trolley while overwhelmed staff find time to decide what to do with the patient, my thoughts on the situation crystallised, although I wouldn’t say anything changed. The nurse who was finally able to talk to me said, with a groan, ‘The NHS is broken. It no longer works,’ and it’s hard to argue with her assessment.

Is this all an unfortunate but coincidental accumulation of problems, or is there motive behind it? The Conservative Party believes in private enterprise. It’s in the DNA of the party. It wants the liberation of individual aspiration leading to perpetual advances in wealth and welfare, with any interference by the evil State seen as a unnecessary drag hampering success. Give individuals their heads, driven by their own ambition and acquisitiveness and Paradise is in sight.

This is why the Conservatives privatised industries and services and hamstrung local authorities in the provision of care, housing, education etc. It’s only natural that they would want to privatise the provision of health care too, and have something more like the American model, obliging people to sort out whatever insurance they can afford, leaving insurance companies and health providers to make a hefty profit, with a minimal rump service for people who can’t afford anything. The idea of a service for all, funded by the State, is anathema to Conservative principles.

Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the NHS is beloved by everyone in the country, even those who complain about it. So much loved that it would be considered high treason and heresy to so much as hint of getting rid of it. So what are the political options for the Tories?

A) Go with it and pretend to love it just as much as everyone else (the official Conservative policy since 1948).

B) Say ‘You voted for us so don’t complain when we get rid of it.’ Probably a fatal move, resulting in the erection of guillotines in Trafalgar Square.

C) Continue to proclaim your undying love for the service whilst very quietly letting it deteriorate and collapse into crisis after crisis, until people are driven by desperation to turn to private health care and the NHS will be left, underfunded, to deal with those who can afford no better.

If Option C hasn’t been covertly applied for the last 20 years and longer, I am a banana.

It could still cause difficulties for the party, but the Conservatives have been handed a couple of Jokers that they play ruthlessly: Covid and the war in Ukraine. Everything can be blamed on those two disasters. Of course the other disaster of Brexit is never mentioned, since it was a Conservative bright idea, but Covid 19 can be blamed on China, and the war on Russia, giving the government an excuse for anything. The NHS is in crisis because of Covid. Never mind that it was in crisis before, with ambulances held up outside hospitals and waiting lists growing ever longer. We can now say it’s all down to the exceptional circumstances of Covid 19. Nurses and other medical staff were dropping like flies, dying (unless they’d already left because of Brexit) and we were encouraged to show how much we loved them by clapping (and being seen to clap) once a week, before telling them they are so worthless they are only worth a pay rise of 1/3 the rate of inflation and that if they dare to ask for more, the misery of inflation, helped along by Russia, will be down to them as enemies of the people.

I don’t care much for conspiracy theories in general, mostly because of my belief that the majority of people in power everywhere are so incompetent and short-sighted that they couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery, let alone a serious conspiracy. But I am beginning to wonder if both Covid 19 and the invasion of Ukraine weren’t masterminded, secretly, by the Tories. First a diversion from the cock-up of oven-ready Brexit, then a cover for the gradual destruction of the one thing that still has any chance of uniting the British. If I turned it into a sinister thriller in my next book, would it be too far-fetched?

HISTORY: Tales My Great Aunt Told Me - rape and high treason

 I had a great aunt. She was the sort of great aunt that you would conjure up if you wanted to invent a great aunt. Always straight-faced, apparently straight-laced, and thoroughly wicked. I remember the exquisite agony of accompanying her, when I was a child, along the Crwys Road in Cardiff, pausing at every greengrocer (in the days when all their fruit and veg were on display outside), picking up an apple or some other fruit to inspect its quality, taking a bite, sniffing with disapproval, shaking her head and putting it back. By the time we got back to her house, she had consumed her full five a day without parting with a penny.

She was the source of all information on my mother’s side of the family, so naturally I assumed that everything she told us was bare-faced fabrication. Such as her mother, my great grandmother, having been married twice. Her first husband was supposedly a sea-captain who drowned. When I eventually started researching my family tree properly, I discovered my grandmother was illegitimate, born to a young woman living near Cardiff Docks, her occupation listed as laundress. Probably earning what she could at the docks too, so who knows, maybe my great grandfather really was a passing sea captain.

Great-grandmother, my nana and baby great-aunt

I was surprised, when I explained this to various aunts and uncles, that they were shocked, determined to deny the story. Of course their mother was not illegitimate. Disgraceful! I was of a generation that found it interesting, whereas they were of a generation that found it shameful.

It turned out that illegitimacy in the more distant past was less shameful. Even though my great aunt talked about it with a hushed voice and much pinching of lips and meaningful nods, she clearly enjoyed telling me that our family came from St David’s and her swarthy colouring was down to the invasion of Fishguard in February 1797. Apparently the legendary Jemima Nicholas, whose red flannel Welsh costume and tall hat deceived the French into thinking she was the vanguard of the British army, arrived too late on the scene to stop a French soldier ravishing one local maiden.

I soon discovered that my family had no connection with St David’s or Fishguard, though they were from Pembrokeshire. My great-great-great-grandmother Hannah Skeel lived there, very proud of her connection with her brother, the Reverend Thomas Skeel, an Independent minister and founder of Zion Chapel in Spittal. Hannah married a stonemason, miles from Fishguard and had a daughter born shortly after the invasion – 16 months after, so my great aunt’s tale was a complete fabrication.

Well, not 100% fabrication. 98% maybe, but my research revealed an equally fascinating and disturbing story. The dreaded ‘Last invasion of mainland Britain’ was modelled more on a Carry On film than on D-Day. A small French troop, including many conscripted criminals, led by Irish-American William Tate, was sent to Wales to divert attention from the main French invasion of Ireland – which didn’t happen because of bad weather.

Tate’s men landed at a rocky headland, Carreg Gwastad, west of Fishguard, expecting the local poverty-stricken Welsh to rush to their side. The Welsh, being a cussed lot, picked up pitchforks and blunderbusses and skirmished with the French, a few on both sides being killed. Tate did manage to seize a couple of farms, although most of his convicts promptly deserted and ran amok in the surrounding countryside. There was indeed rape, but they were mostly looking for food. Within a couple of days, Lt Colonel Colby of the local militia and Lord Cawdor with the Pembroke Yeomanry Cavalry, had rounded up the French and obliged Tate to surrender.

What is most interesting to me is the reaction of Colby, Cawdor and the establishment in the aftermath. Many of the French prisoners, especially the officers were well-treated, dined in style and sometimes allowed to escape. But the invasion was an excuse for a clamp-down on the dangerous revolutionaries in the local Welsh population – the Nonconformists – Baptists, Methodists and others.

“This part of the country is very much under the influence of the pernicious doctrines of Methodism. These people are like wolves dispersed over the country. They are deceitful in their manners and, under the mask of religion, with piety and meekness in their mouths, they are pests to the community.”

Zion's Hill Chapel, Spital. Several of my ancestors were buried there, including Hannah.

Colby was obsessed with Anabaptists holding nocturnal meetings in the hills. “I long to get in among them.”

Winning the hearts and minds of the locals was not on the agenda. Crushing them into submission was. Several non-conformists were rounded up, accused of aiding the French, and two, Thomas John, a preacher from Little Newcastle, and Samuel Griffiths, a farmer from Poyntz Castle, were accused of High Treason, (when the potential penalty was still hanging, drawing and quartering). They were held for many months in far less agreeable conditions than the French prisoners, awaiting a farcical trial, which finally collapsed and they were released, close to ruin. Griffith's letter of complaint at his treatment is, unsurprisingly, one long scream of bitter resentment. The prosecutions scandalised the local Welsh.

allegedly Sarah Davies, nee Skeel, wife of Thomas Davies
though I am not entirely convinced.

Others, who were questioned as suspicious dissenters, were reluctantly allowed to go free after questioning. One was Thomas Davies, who gave a statement on oath before magistrates. He claimed he had “heard of the French landing about midnight, but he turned over and went to sleep again. The next morning early, two of his neighbours came along and took him to task for lying in bed with the French landed, so he got up and, after breakfast he went off to Hayscastle Smithy to shoe the mare. Then he set off for Pencaer with his brother-in-law Thomas Skeel. They got as far as Trefelgarn farm, just beyond St.Nicholas, when they met John Evans whose farm, Trefayog, had been taken possession of by the French, so all three of them set off for Trefayog to see what damage had been done. When they got there the French must have left, as they had some bread and cheese in peace and fed their horses. They thought better of seeking the enemy at closer quarters that day, and returned to their homes.”

Exciting? Well, it is to me because Davies’ brother-in-law was my Hannah’s brother Thomas Skeel. So although there was no French rape in my bloodline, I am descended from people nearly charged with High Treason because of their religion. Can you imagine a situation in which people could face hostility, abuse and persecution just because their religion was regarded with suspicion in a time of crisis! Couldn't possibly happen now.

The Rev. Thomas Skeel

I suspect that Thomas Skeel, Thomas Davies, Thomas John and Samuel Griffiths all regarded themselves, in reality, as patriotic British subjects, loyal to their king, but I really wish that they had, instead, confronted Colby, Cawdor and the rest, and smacked them in the gob, as they deserved.

WILD RAMBLINGS: What's In A Name?

 I have quite a lot of flowers in my lane. For example:

to name but a few, The thing is, with names like that to choose from, why would anyone want to call a plant Digitalis Purpurea, or Caltha Palustris, or Geum Urbanum, or Filipendula Ulmaria?

If you are a botanist, don't answer that, as it was intended as a rhetorical question.

I spent a lot of a time as a child looking at wild flowers and pressing a lot of them.. We had to make our own entertainment in those days. I can identify quite a few. Can you tell the difference between Hop Trefoil and Black Meddick? They look almost identical but one has a tiny spike in the cleft of the heart-shaped leaves. I know this because I spent several hours on my knees, helping a friend with her botanical homework, identifying every species in six square yards of pasture. The trouble is, 50 years on, I can't remember which has the spike and which doesn't. But I still like looking for them.

HISTORY: Horseshoe Nails and Other Consequences

Here is a story to entertain. I wrote it as Covid 19 spread across the world, reminding me of previous pandemics. This story is not fiction exactly, it’s history, and history is always subjective, open to challenge and re-evaluation, but this is my version and it makes a good tale. Allegedly.

There is an old rhyme:
    For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost.
    For the want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
    For the want of a horse, the rider was lost.
    For the want of a rider, the battle was lost.
    For the want of the battle, the kingdom was lost
    And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

No one know what kingdoms will be lost when one little nail messes things up.

Once upon a time, back in the Middle Ages, Venice was the great trading power in the Mediterranean, so aggressive against its rivals that it even persuaded crusaders to divert from their intended goal, Jerusalem, and sack Constantinople instead. That is one horseshoe nail with far-reaching consequences, but I digress. Back to trade… Other Italian city states wanted a share of the action too. Genoa moved in on the Black Sea and established a large fortified trading base at Kaffa (now Feodosiya) on the Crimean coast.

One day some Genoese merchants, out for a stroll, got in a bit of a barny with a bunch of the Mongol locals, in the course of which a local was stabbed to death. This is my horseshoe nail. The end result of that street brawl was economic upheaval, the collapse of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, the Reformation, the break-up of Western Christendom and, ultimately, Hitler.

How?

The brawl and the death led to a riot against the Genoese, who locked themselves in their sea-side enclave. The angry locals besieging them were joined by the Mongol army, but the siege began to falter as sickness started to spread among the soldiers, as it tends to do in siege situations. Rather than simply give up, the Mongols took a last swipe at their enemy by catapulting their dead into the Genoese stronghold. The Genoese merchants tried to deal with the corpses but in the end decided to give up and head for home, escaping by sea.

Their first major port of call was Messina in Sicily – by which time some on the ship were dead and others were dying. The inhabitants of the port realised that they’d brought an unwelcome visitor and forced them out to sea again, but too late. At each port where the ship tried to put in on its return to Genoa, it brought the Black Death with it. Everywhere that ships and trade went, the Pestilence went too, all around the Mediterranean, all across Europe, to Spain, to Scotland, to Moscow, mutating at it went, from bubonic plague (pretty deadly) to pneumonic and septicemic plague (totally deadly). In the course of 3 years, till 1350, about a third of the population of Europe was wiped out, especially the old, sick, weakened and malnourished.

After such catastrophes, populations often spring back – the strongest have survived. A new generation was born. Then the plague returned in 1361 and hit especially hard at the young. This time there was no instant recovery. The population in England (and conquered Wales) took another 500 years to return to its 13th century levels.

The result of it all, in England at least, was the collapse of feudalism, which had been built on the backs of vast armies of peasant labourers tied to the land. Now they were in short supply, and despite attempts to round them up and bring them back when they ran off to the big cities, they became uppity. They revolted. Attempts were made to put them down, but there was no stopping the flow. Land owners had to start paying for labour and renting out land. Meanwhile, in the cities, merchants were on the rise, relying on money and trade instead of forced peasant labour.

It had been happening for a long time, of course. Earlier Medieval monarchs, in desperate need of money as well as feudal levies, had relied on the only source of capital, the Jews, since Christians weren’t supposed to soil themselves with usury, charging interest on loans (the basis of most modern economies). Edward I, finding himself in more debt than he liked, had solved his problem by defaulting on his debts and throwing the Jews out of England. But that left him needing another source of finance. Italian banks, which had learned not to be squeamish about charging interest, stepped in and, when kings, once more, defaulted on their debts, the banks went bankrupt. Kings started borrowing off their noble subjects instead – and they too went bankrupt.

But then there were the merchants of London. By the early 15th century, after the plague, a Lord Mayor of London, who had bankrolled Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, munificently tore up the debts the king owed him, to show he was so rich he didn’t need repaying. His name was Sir Richard Whittington. (The cat was added to his legend a few centuries later.)

It took the great landowners a few more centuries to realise that they were no longer the real power in the kingdom, but the city was already on top.

In matters of faith, the Black Death knocked the wind out of easy early Medieval piety. The Church failed to save people. They were abandoned, forced to confess to other lay men or even, God help us, if all else failed, to women. Priests died as fast as anyone, faster if they were properly dutiful in attending the dying. God hadn’t saved them. Many abbeys that should have supplied replacements or offered help, locked their doors to keep contagion out, and their street cred plummeted.

Anti-clericalism rose. The Church was left wallowing in corruption. Early “heresies” of men like Wycliffe were fought with flames, but no fire could stop the eventual emergence of Protestantism under Luther, Calvin and the rest. Europe was riven with religious division – which still staggers on in Northern Ireland and certain football grounds.

Some gave up on religion entirely, opening the way for the rationality of the modern era. Others became fanatical in their beliefs instead, convinced of God’s punishment and determined to find scapegoats. Edward I had deprived England of one easy target, but on the continent murderous anti-semitism swept country after country, because it went without saying that the plague must have been caused by Jews poisoning Christian wells. Anti-semitism had been simmering for centuries, ever since St John put the blame for the crucifixion on the Jews, but now it came to the boil, and the Jews remained the main focus for amorphous fear, rage and insecurity until Hitler arrived to milk it with such industrial efficiency.

So, don't get involved in a street brawl, because you never know where it might lead.

What will be the long-term effects of Covid 19? As Zhou Enlai said of the effects of the French Revolution, it's too early to say.