As part of their work on the second year core module ‘Working with the Past’, three University of Portsmouth History students – Chanel Parker, Loraya Head, and Gemma Norris – collaborated with Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery to curate a three-month exhibition that both celebrated the crafts of our ancestors and highlighted the importance of preserving the craftspeoples’ skills for future generations. In this blog, written for Hampshire Archives Trust, Chanel Parker discusses the research methods the group used when curating the exhibition.
‘Working with the Past’ is coordinated by Mike Esbester.
As a team we always encourage our students to enhance their skills while studying for their History degree with us, and one way we do this is by offering them opportunities to work with some of our external partners. In this post, we demonstrate how this is undertaken in one second year core module, ‘Working with the Past, co-ordinated by Dr Mike Esbester.
As part of their studies during their History degree, our students have worked with a range of local and international institutions, including the Mary Rose Museum, Lloyd’s Register Foundation, the D-Day Story archive, Hong Kong Baptist University, and Pompey History Society, and have undertaken a wide variety of interesting projects over the years.
One of our second year core modules, ‘Working with the Past’, is set up to specifically foster this type of collaboration. In the module we demonstrate how the practice of academic history can be transferred and applied to a vast range of practical projects that involve thinking about, working with, or drawing-upon knowledge and understanding of the past (you’ll find blogs on some of these projects elsewhere on this site).
Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery
This year, one group of students have been working with Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery on their new #EndangeredCrafts exhibition. Having taken inspiration from the Heritage Crafts ‘Red List of Endangered Crafts’, the Museum will hold an exhibition that highlights the objects that are held in its collections that represent traditional crafts that are at risk of disappearing. This disappearance, the Museum notes on its website, “is due to the individuals holding the knowledge and skills being unable to make provision to pass them on to the next generation”.
Our students, Chanel, Gemma and Loraya, in collaboration with Museum staff and under the supervision of our Dr Maria Cannon, have held a Twitter takeover (on 11 May 2023), put together a research panel (coming soon!) and recorded a podcast, which is published on the Museum’s website. To hear the podcast, go to the Portsmouth Museum and Art Gallery website here.
On 14 December 2022 University of Portsmouth PhD researcher, Corey Watson, presented at the second joint Naval History/ History research seminar of the year. In the paper Corey, who is in the second year of his doctoral programme, discussed the crucial role that the small group of surveyors who worked for Lloyd’s Register in China played as middle-men in this global maritime system. If you missed the paper, the recording is available to watch here. You will need the following password MLFv8c.z to access the recording. An abstract for Corey’s paper is below. To read more about Corey’s PhD programme, generously funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, see Dr Melanie Bassett’s blog on the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website.
Shanghai shortly after opening the port to foreign trade. Wikimedia Commons.
Abstract
In 1869, a Lloyd’s Register ship and engineer Surveyor was for the first time posted to Shanghai, China. The surveyor, Joseph John Tucker, upon arriving in Shanghai marked the beginning of a rapid and global expansion of the Lloyd’s Register Society’s influence. By the end of the First World War the society had hundreds of surveyors in post across all five continents. These marine surveyors – veteran marine engineers whose expertise covered shipbuilding and maintenance, maritime safety, and maritime technology – played important roles in facilitating the ever-expanding networks of maritime knowledge, trade, and migration that increasingly connected the late 19th century world. This paper will draw on the concept of ‘new imperial history’ to investigate how these imperial maritime networks of knowledge functioned by analysing the lived experiences of these Lloyd’s Register surveyors. It also develops on a burgeoning literature which stresses the importance of these transnational networks and the ‘infrastructural globalization’ of the ‘world system’ that they underpinned. This paper will specifically engage with the themes of maritime knowledge networks, the movement of people, and the resultingly complex cultural identities that were produced. It will be shown first that by studying these maritime professionals, there can be found a number of interesting contradictions in the workings of maritime networks as the long reach of London struggled, with mixed success, to keep a degree of control over its agents far from home. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that these surveyors, who played crucial roles as middle-men in these global maritime systems, found themselves with complicated and frequently shifting cultural identities and levels of professional agency as a result of their engagement with these networks.
Many people instinctively blame King Charles I for the British Civil Wars. So recent UoP history graduate Connor Scott-Butcher’s decision to use his dissertation to challenge the idea, perpetuated by the regicides, that Charles was a “man of blood”, and the weight of historical argument ranged against him, always seemed to me a risky and provocative proposition. Below, Connor writes about how he went about his research. He gave a few sleepless nights to his supervisor, as well as himself, but the result was a balanced and well-structured argument, based around extensive use of contemporary primary sources. – Dr Fiona McCall.
My topic for my dissertation was a thorough examination of the role/responsibility of King Charles I in the events leading up to the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642. In particular, I looked at rebalancing the roles of multiple individuals, rather than the historical blame that has been placed on King Charles I.
Bust of King Charles I by Louis François Roubiliac (1759), Wallace Collection, S23, photograph by Luke Mckernan, Wikimedia Commons
The topic of the Civil War had stuck with me from A-Level. My fascination for the period, as well as the added passion of my teacher, Mr. Andrew Brown, was what inspired me to study history at university in the first place. The reign of Charles I, with personal rule and civil war was particularly interesting, partly due to the decadence of the period and partly because war is almost always fascinating. What stayed with me was the idea that at every hurdle, the King appeared to be undermined by his Parliament, pushed or even bullied into legislation or war. This simple idea, of Charles I being ‘bullied’ by his Parliament, never left me and with a little bit of careful refining, the question of balancing responsibility was what I ended up trying to answer.
To begin my research, I started by going through the relevant literature on the period from the 1630s and early 1640s, examining the politics and religion of the period. The English Civil War has been written about for centuries, so I began with the best historians from the 1970s onwards: John Morrill, Conrad Russell, Lawrence Stone, Clive Holmes, and many more. This provided a broad knowledge of the politics and religion of the 1630s and 1640s and although this was useful to a project of this complexity, with so much information, it was often hard to narrow down the question. Under the watchful eye of my supervisor and mentor, Dr Fiona Mccall, I was able to thin out the research to examine the balance in terms of the political and aggressive actions.
English Civil War Society parade to commemorate the execution of Charles I, 27 January 2019, Wikimedia Commons
While religion was definitely important to the period, I felt it best to take a secular examination of the subject. The significance of choosing political and aggressive actions, is that in the historiography, the pair rarely cross. I could have chosen to only write about one of them, but instead I choose to look at it from both intertwining sides in order to re-examine the distorted, one-sided view. This is where the history has lacked and where my examination differs from those who came before me.
When I began searching for my sources, I feared how Covid would impact my access to things. I began my research by looking through the National Archives and the State Papers Online. I was fortunate enough to find that in spite of Covid, things appeared relatively accessible and the institutions I contacted were very forthcoming. I was sent a whole collection of sources from the library at Yale University, sources from the Isle of Wight Archives, and even access to a few ledgers when the British Library reopened in early 2021. My search was quite extensive, with the National Archives Discovery search engine proving the best way of finding locations of primary sources. Some were taken from books, both physical and thankfully some out-of-copyright digital versions, while House of Commons journals were easily accessible online. For the printed pamphlets and depositions, I was able to use JISC Historical Texts Online system to track down digital copies of the original works. I even went to the extent of trying to find the Papers of the Earl of Holland, a key player, which after a back and forth with Bonhams auctioneers reached a dead end. Despite the Covid situation, I was rather surprised at how much is out there, which rather put me at ease.
With all the primary sources and secondary readings, it gave a clearer image of the issue of the dichotomy of ‘King Pym’ and King Charles as too narrow a view of the period, giving greater light to the actions of other players on both sides: William Strode, Arthur Haselrige, Sir John Hotham, Queen Henrietta Maria, Colonel George Goring, and Henry Jermyn, to name a few. The ideas of Parliament as principled and Charles as not, was somewhat switched, with pressure, fear and often imprisonment being used by Parliamentary ‘radicals’ to impose law, against the principle of liberty and parliamentary freedom, whilst Charles, though weak to stop his court or oppose his wife’s demands, demonstrated principle and compromise in areas such as Strafford’s execution and the Militia Bill, against the claims of past historians who placed responsibility for war solely or mostly on Charles’ shoulders.
The Earl of Strafford, going to his execution, engraving with etching by J. Rogers after the painting by Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), Wellcome Collection, 43468i
The whole process was the most amazing amount of fun and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It took many months of work (and a few sleepless nights) but I loved every second of it. Whether it was because of the passion for the subject, the fascinating journey of searching archives and libraries, scurrying through the corridors of the British Library for example, or the fact that I had an enthusiastic, ever-helpful mentor who made the whole thing a joy, I could not have wished for a better thesis to have written.
Dr Fiona McCall is a lecturer in early modern history, teaching units on the British Civil Wars, and Crime, Sin and Punishment in early modern Britain, amongst others. Her current research project investigates traditionalist resistance to puritan values in English parish churches during the 1640s and 1650s, and in this blog she discusses how Christmas was banned during this period.
Christmas was officially banned during the late 1640s and 1650s along with the rest of the church calendar. But the interdict was widely ignored. Trawling through various counties’ quarter sessions depositions for the period, I have found frequent references to Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and various saints days, the witnesses (even those testifying against suspected royalists) usually oblivious to the fact that these festivals are no longer supposed to be celebrated. At Bristol the Mayoral court was even postponed from December to January ‘because the feast of Christmas comes betweene’.[1] Some were clearly mindful that Christmas was a sensitive issue: a 1651 Cheshire case refers to the ‘tyme Commonly called Christmas’, while a 1655 Northern Circuit assize deposition refers to the twelfth day after Christmas ‘so commonly Called’ [2] The term ‘Christide’ was frequently preferred instead, but not by everyone: one Devonshire witness timed the events he reported to ‘the Feast of the birth of our Lord god last past’. [3]
Josiah King, The Examination and Tryall of Old Father Christmas (1658)
Churches were supposed to be closed on Christmas Day and shops open. That was the theory, anyway. At Norwich in 1647, the Mayor of Norwich apparently gave notice that Christmas Day was to be observed, the market kept the day before instead, and even invited the ejected Bishop of Norwich, Joseph Hall, to preach in the Cathedral. [4] The authorities in Canterbury attempted a harder line. On the 22 December 1647, the town crier there proclaimed that a market was to be kept on Christmas day. This ‘occasioned great discontent among the people’ causing them to ‘rise in a rebellious way’, throwing shopkeepers’ ware ‘up and down’ until they shut up shop, and knocking down the mayor when he attempted to quell the ‘tumult’ with a cudgel. [5] ‘That which we so much desired that day was but a Sermon’, protested Canterbury Prebendary Edward Aldey, ‘which any other day of the weeke was tollerable by the orders and practise of the two Houses and all their adherents, but that day (because it was Christ’s birth day). [6] Elsewhere in Kent, parishioners crowded round the puritan minister Richard Culmer’s reading desk in protest at the lack of a Christmas day service, and assaulted him in the churchyard. [7] Gloucestershire minister Mr Tray, unpopular on account of his opposition to the festival, became the target of malicious rumours. Stories were spread that he had sabotaged the Christmas pies of his parishioners, baking in the communal oven, by sending his own unconventional confection to be baked alongside them. Lines of verse were placed under Tray’s cushion in the pulpit:
In the second in our series on First World War sources, second-year UoP student Charlotte Lewis discusses what can be learned from a letter by famed WWI poet Wilfred Owen to his mother Susan.
Whilst Wilfred Owen’s poetry is well known for describing the horrors of the First World War, his letters to his mother, Susan Owen, give the reader an insight into Owen’s personal experiences and reactions hiding behind his poetry. In light of this, this blog will focus on a letter written by Owen in February 1917 to his mother.[1] Through the analysis of this letter, this blog will try to convey not only its significant use in describing the conditions of the First World War, but also how it provides us with an understanding of Owen and his emotions reflected in his poetry, in particular his renowned poem Dulce et Decorum Est.[2]
The value of the content of Owen’s letter can only truly be understood when the conditions of trench warfare at this time have been fully acknowledged. Ashworth recognises that very early on in the war, at the end of the first battle of Ypres, the primary mode of warfare at the western front was static trench warfare.[3] During this time, armies were largely deadlocked and “movement was more often measured in yards than miles”.[4] This is clearly demonstrated in the opening sentence of this letter as Owen describes how “so little happens that I can’t keep up my instalments of blood-and-thunder literature”.[5] This line also reveals Owen’s relationship with descriptive writing as he writes “blood-and-thunder literature”, a genre of literature in which his Poem Dulce et Decorum Est conforms to in its description of the daily horrors experienced at the Western Front.[6] Potter argues that his letters from this time are “as evocative, shocking and profoundly moving as any of the poetry that his experiences inspired”.[7] For example, both the poem Dulce et Decorum Est and this letter portray a graphic imagery of fatigued, limping soldiers.[8] Owen describes in his letter how they marched “miserably slowly” as “some of the men could not wear boots” due to frost-bitten feet.[9] According to Ashworth, a trench foot was swollen and always painful.[10] There are strong parallels between this letter and the experiences described in Dulce et Decorum Est, supporting Rivers’ argument that his letters can be used as sources for his poems. However, whilst this letter does show clear similarities to his poem Dulce et decorum Est, it also shows a possible motivation for the creation of the poem.
A case of trench foot which required plastic surgery, Wellcome Institute photo no. L0025834
A theme presented in Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est is his dissatisfaction with the portrayal of the western front through propaganda. In private through his letters, and public through his poem, Owen highlights his contempt for the image of war portrayed by the home front. Bebbington recalls that of the two British Museum drafts of Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, “one has the ‘dedication’ to ‘Jessie Pope, etc’”.[11] Pope frequently wrote jingoistic poetry as propaganda for newspapers and often portrayed an image of the war which was the polar opposite to that described by Owen in his poetry.[12] In his letter, Owen comments on the propaganda shown by the Daily Mirror, and how it “still depicts the radiant smiles of Tommies”.[13] This could be an indirect comment on the work of Jessie Pope and so this letter could act as a source for understanding the initial dedication of the poem to her, as well as the running theme of anger towards softened portrayals of war experiences which discredited and undermined the heroic nature of the soldiers. The perusal of this letter allows us to understand some of the multitude of emotions behind Owen as a poet through his description of soldiers’ daily experiences, whilst representing the realities of Trench warfare.[14]
The 2nd Manchesters capturing a German battery at Francilly Selency, April 1917 by Richard Woodville
However, when using this letter as a source, there are a number of considerations to take into account when assessing its use in understanding Owen’s experience of the war and associated emotions hiding behind his poetry.[15] Kerr acknowledges that Owen had an incredibly strong relationship with his mother, as he suggests that Susan Owen was the family’s still point and an “inner sanctuary”; one aspect of his devotion to her could be his willingness to “protect her from distress”.[16] Subsequently, we must consider whether Owen has refrained from describing the true nature of his experience at the time of the letter in order to protect his mother, and so this letter is less likely to emphasise the whole picture; reading the vivid details in the poem Dulce et Decorum Est it is possible to recognise that this letter might not contain the whole truth.[17] However, by using this letter as a source for understanding Owen’s poem, as well as understanding experiences of the First World War in general, it can be very useful in as much as it avoids popular memory.[18] Roper highlights that frequently other WWI sources such as memoirs and autobiographies can be influenced by public narratives created by popular fiction and television of what it means to be a soldier hero, whereas a letter is arguably free from this bias as it captures the moment in order to “communicate the self to the recipient”.[19] Thus, it would be beneficial to analyse Owen’s other letters alongside this letter in order to grasp a better perception.
Through analysis of Owen’s letter to his mother in 1917 we are able to develop a clearer understanding of Owen and his experiences of the war, providing a source for interpreting the emotions and messages conveyed through his poetry, in particular Dulce et Decorum est.[20] This letter offers a unique portrayal of the realities of warfare as well as an insight into Owen’s relationship with the war as a result of his experiences.[21] Whilst we are unable to gain a full understanding of Owen’s experiences through this single letter, it does offer a significant basis for a first understanding of Owen, and so we would benefit greatly from a comparative analysis of other letters written by Owen.
[1] Wilfred Owen, “‘Sunday February 18 1917’, Harold Owen and John Bell”, Wilfred Owen: Collected letters, (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 435-436.
[2] Bryan Rivers, “Wilfred Owen’s Letter No. 486 as a Source for “Dulce et Decorum Est”, in ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 21, (2014): 29.
[3] Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914-1918: The Live and Let Live System (London: Pan Books, 2000), 2.
[11] W.G. Bebbington, “Jessie Pope and Wilfred Owen” in Ariel: a review of international English literature, Vol. 3, (1972): 82.
[12] Anderson Araujo, “Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of pro patria mori in World War I poetry” in Media, War & Conflict, Vol. 7, (2014): 337
[14] Michele Kaltemback, “Wilfred Owen’s personality as revealed by his letters”, in Caliban, Vol. 10, (1973): 43; Owen, “’Sunday February 18 1917’”, 435-436.
[18] Michael Roper, “Re-remembering the Soldier Hero: the psychic and social construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War” in History Workshop Journal, vol. 50 (2000): 183
[19] Roper, “Re-remembering the Soldier Hero, 183; Penny Summerfield, Histories of the Self: Personal narratives and Historical practice, (Florida: Routledge, 2018), 22.
