Author: Robert James

“Literature acknowledges no boundaries”: Book reading and social class in Britain, c.1930-c.1945

An article on book reading and social class by Dr Robert James, senior lecturer in history at Portsmouth, has recently been published in the Journal of Social History. See below for the abstract, and if you want to read the article, click here.

Abstract Sitting down to read a work of fiction was a well-established leisure activity within British society by the early-twentieth century but one that was mainly enjoyed by the country’s more leisured classes. After the First World War, however, changes to the publishing industry’s working practices, coupled with the growth of the “open access” system in public libraries in the 1920s and the spread of twopenny libraries in the 1930s, created a new type of reader, drawn principally from the country’s working-class communities. This article reveals that the spread of the working-class book-reading habit prompted a series of discussions among the country’s cultural elites, publishers, and public and commercial librarians regarding how that social group engaged with the written word. Many of these commentators were highly disparaging of the working classes’ reading and book-borrowing habits and, based on a prejudiced understanding of that social group’s cultural capital, sought to influence the types of reading material available to them, particularly with regard to what was accessible in the country’s public libraries. The article argues that while the outbreak of the Second World War may have tempered these discussions somewhat, class distinctions surrounding the reading habit continued to shape people’s participation in it, thus revealing that even during a period when class divisions were supposedly blurring, attitudes toward social class and leisure remained essentially unchanged.

September 7, 2017
Intersecting port cities: PTUC members collaborate with the Port Cities Research Centre, Kobe, Japan

In June, four members of the history team at Portsmouth participated in a series of field trips, presentations, and workshops with academics from Kobe University in Japan. In this blog, one of the founding members of the Port Towns and Urban Cultures research group, Dr Rob James, who is a senior lecturer in history, discusses the visit and what potential future opportunities the collaboration promises.

As part of our goal to extend links with other institutions worldwide, four members of the University’s Port Towns and Urban Cultures (PTUC) project, Dr Mel Bassett, Professor Brad Beaven, Dr Karl Bell and Dr Rob James, travelled to Kobe, Japan in late-June to meet scholars from the Port Cities Research Centre (PCRC) at Kobe University. The aim of the visit was to both collaborate on port city research and explore research interests between Portsmouth’s and Kobe’s academic communities. Both universities have strong research interests in history, literature, sociology, politics, education and languages, and during the visit we realized that there were great opportunities for working together.

The PTUC crew at the ‘Intersecting Port Cities’ workshop

On the first day of the visit members from PTUC and PCRC gave presentations on their various research areas at the Intersecting Port Cities. Kobe and Portsmouth. Their History and Potentialities workshop. This provided a chance for each of us to familiarize ourselves with both groups’ research interests and start to think about ways we could develop future collaborations. While both Kobe and Portsmouth are port cities, they are very different in terms of their history and social composition. Portsmouth is a city with deep naval roots, but Kobe’s port is more industrial, with strong commercial links to large manufacturers such as Kawasaki. Due to its broader industrial base, Kobe is a wealthier city, but we learned that pockets of deprivation still existed, particularly in areas with a strong immigrant community. Despite these economic and social differences between the ports, both operated (and still do) as contact zones in which people from differing cultures meet and mix. Both are waterfront cities at the intersection of maritime and urban space, offering the chance of cultural exchange that both reinforces and challenges local, national and international boundaries. The comparative histories of Kobe and Portsmouth discussed in these workshops thus helped us hone our methodologies and understanding of port cities in general.

Rob James presenting at the ‘Intersecting Port Cities’ workshop

Although these research workshops focused on a comparative analysis of port cities, it became clear from our discussions that there was the potential to work together on themes such as citizenship, ethnicity, ‘race’, education, translation and cultural transmission between East and West. All of these areas could involve academics from a range of disciplines at each university, and plans have been put into place to link researchers from both universities’ various faculties. For example, Rob James’ research into the cinema culture of ports links well with the work being conducted by postdoctoral researchers at Kobe University, so plans are afoot to work on collaborative projects in which the cinema cultures of Kobe and Portsmouth are compared and contrasted. After this thought-provoking workshop we were treated to dinner on the Luminous Kobe II pleasure cruiser, and while we sailed around the city’s harbour, eating an array of delicious food from sushi to Kobe beef, our PCRC partners continued to share fascinating stories about the development of the port of Kobe and its rich industrial, economic and social-cultural histories.

During the following days we engaged in a variety of trips to areas of historical interest, such as Kobe’s theatre district and ‘foreign quarter’, the Kobe Centre for Overseas Migration and Cultural Interaction, and the Kobe Planet Film Archive. These visits allowed us to see how identities in Kobe have been shaped and negotiated, especially through the city’s economic migration and its industries’ working communities. The visits also gave us a fascinating insight into how the city has changed over time, particularly the ways in which the ebbs and flows of the economy have affected the city’s cultural development. Indeed, while walking around the city, it became clear to us that the mapping project we have established at Portsmouth (that tracks the development of its ‘sailortown’ culture) could also be rolled out in Kobe. Such a task would enable the diverse and multilayered heritage of Kobe to be captured and shared with anyone interested in understanding the port’s history. As well as being taken on these very informative trips covering the city’s history, we were also introduced to the various outreach activities with which PCRC’s members are involved, including the Kobe Foreigners Friendship Centre and Takatori Community Centre, where we were told about the ways in which minority communities have been given a ‘voice’ in the broader Kobe community. We also visited Kobe City Archive and were introduced to many archival sources, including newspapers and trade directories, that showed us what a wealth of material there is available for us to use to enable us to further explore the port’s history while working collaboratively with academics at Kobe University.

Kobe theatre district

In fact, many opportunities for collaboration were discussed across the four days of the workshops, and it was at the final workshop session where both research groups put forward areas where we had identified real prospects for working together in the future. There was very clear potential to develop interdisciplinary projects that will showcase the research of both of our centres on the international stage. We also recognized opportunities to submit large funding bids to research councils that would allow us to fuse PTUC’s European port town network with the Asian consortium of universities, and thus help us to further explore the relationship between urban and maritime societies. In addition, we made initial plans for an international conference to be held jointly by the two centres, with plans for publications arising from the papers presented. We are also aiming to start a collaborative research project on Japanese culture and the West.

Kobe port from aboard the pleasure cruiser ‘Kobe Luminous II’

Overall, our visit to Kobe helped us to establish strong links with Asia, and particularly Japan, allowing us to solidify the port towns’ methodology while also establishing collaborative ways that the University of Portsmouth’s PTUC group could work with its new partner. Indeed, in discussions with our Kobe University colleagues, we have also identified opportunities for exchanges for both academics and students between the two institutions. We’ll keep you posted with future developments!

PTUC would like to thank the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, an organization that aims to support closer links between the UK and Japan, for its generous financial contribution to this trip.

Brad Beaven, Karl Bell, and Rob James are founding members of PTUC. Their edited collection Port Towns and Urban Cultures: International Histories of the Waterfront, c. 1700-2000 is available to purchase from Palgrave MacMillan http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137483157

All images author’s own.

August 21, 2017
Re-using the past: history on film.

In this blog Dr Rob James, senior lecturer in history, reflects on the issue of ‘truth’ in historical feature films, revealing how filmmakers have frequently used past events to comment about contemporary situations. Rob specialises in researching people’s leisure pursuits, and teaches a number of units on film and the cinema, including his second year option unit ‘The Way to the Stars: Film and cinema-going in Britain, c. 1900-c. 2000’ and the final year Special Subject strand ‘Cinema-going in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945’.

As James Chapman has noted in his masterly book Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film, ‘a historical feature film will often have as much to say about the present in which it was made as about the past in which it was set’. [1] Watching Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk reminded me again of how ‘British’ history has been used in order to comment upon contemporary events. The film, which features an ensemble cast, including major stars of the big screen such as Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, and Mark Rylance, along with lesser known actors like Fionn Whitehead and former One Direction singer Harry Styles, re-enacts that now legendary event in British Second World War history when allied troops evacuated northern France in the face of the German force’s onslaught. As Peter Bradshaw pointedly remarked in his review for The Guardian, the film is a perfect metaphor for these Brexit times, focusing as it does on the plucky spirit of this small island against an immense and belligerent continental foe. [2]

Historians and critics have regularly reacted in horror at the way filmmakers or television producers have depicted the past. This commonly revolves around two issues, both relating to historical accuracy, or more to the point, the lack of it. Loud shouts of derision have been made about the appearance of a wristwatch on a charioteer’s arm (in Ben Hur [1959]), or the sound of collared doves cooing in nineteenth-century Britain (the birds weren’t introduced into the country until the 1950s). These are foolish mistakes, of course, but they don’t do any real damage. Film’s distortion of the past for ideological reasons is seen as more troubling, however. Why, the Daily Mail’s Chris Tookey howled in 2012, did director Phyllida Lloyd have to make Margaret Thatcher a feminist icon in The Iron Lady (2011)? [3] Earlier in the century, Hugo Davenport and Stuart Jeffries raised their own concerns about films’ rewriting of the past as way of scoring political points. [4] These are important matters, of course. If, as these critics argue, films and television are the only way the majority of people receive their history education, then distorting the past for political gain can have significant consequences.

However, the purpose of ‘history’ as a subject of study is to analyse and debate the past; to interpret evidence rather than regurgitate key ‘facts’ (and whose ‘facts’ are they anyway? One person’s truth can be another person’s distortion). Rather than getting animated about the ways in which feature films and television histories distort the past, why don’t we learn from James Chapman’s observation and start to think about why events are portrayed in the way that they are? What can that tell us about the messages that are being presented to audiences? We need to acknowledge that films don’t offer a window on the past, but a refraction of it, thus allowing us to understand social mores during the times they were made. Indeed, if we look back across the twentieth century we can identify many instances in which contemporary problems were addressed, and resolutions to them offered, in historical feature films. Here are just a few examples…

The first big British historical film success at the box-office arrived in 1933 with Alexander Korda’s lavish production The Private Life of Henry VIII. The period was one of economic, industrial, and political strife (the reverberations of 1929’s Wall Street Crash were still strong) resulting in the devaluing of the British pound and, after the collapse of the ruling Labour government, the formation of the National Government in 1931. [5] Korda used the film to highlight the importance of social unity and, through careful editing, compared the lives of the country’s lower orders with the lives of those in the Royal Court to show that people lower down the social scale were far more satisfied with their situation. They may have worked hard, but they were free; they were not shackled by the chains that restricted the King’s lifestyle. Why did Korda do this? In a time of social turmoil he hoped to reassure contemporary working-class cinema audiences about their social positon while also discouraging them from wanting power. He was thus using the film to endorse the political and social situation in 1930s Britain. [6]

The international success of Henry VIII encouraged other British filmmakers to turn to the country’s past in order to comment on the contemporary situation, and later in the 1930s Herbert Wilcox made two hugely popular films covering the reign of Queen Victoria, who at that time had been Britain’s longest-serving monarch (Queen Elizabeth II surpassed that on 9 September 2015). The first film, 1937’s Victoria the Great, was made as a response to the Abdication Crisis of the previous year. The crisis had rocked British society, with many people fearing it would threaten the country’s stability. [7] Into the breach stepped Wilcox with his film aimed at bolstering confidence in the monarchy by celebrating Victoria’s long and (in Wilcox’s depiction) glorious reign. Wilcox’s second ‘Victoria’ film, Sixty Glorious Years, released in 1938, dealt less with domestic issues, focusing instead on overseas difficulties, namely the rise of fascism in Europe. The film was basically a call for national preparedness in the face of the growing menace emanating from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy (it was released just after the Munich Agreement of the same year). Britain’s historical past was thus being utilised to resolve contemporary problems. [8] Korda and Wilcox may have bended the ‘truth’, but their distortions of the past were made as a response to what they perceived to be the needs of society at that time. The films’ popularity suggests that they were tapping the right nerve!

Of course, the real test for filmmakers came during the Second World War when the British film industry was utilised to help instil confidence in the country’s victory in the conflict (2016’s Their Finest, starring Gemma Arterton as the fictional propaganda film scriptwriter Catrin Cole, does a sterling job at portraying the government’s efforts to encourage filmmakers to use the medium in the national cause). As a result, Britain’s past was once again deployed to respond to contemporary issues. Films such as Thorold Dickinson’s The Prime Minister (1941), Carol Reed’s The Young Mr Pitt (1942), and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) drew on the activities of various British leaders – Benjamin Disraeli, William Pitt the Younger, and Henry V respectively – in order to boost the morale of cinema audiences. Gainsborough Studios, meanwhile, deployed British history to respond to the changing social mores of the period, and their films featured an array of female characters who participated in a whole manner of thrilling, often highly immoral, acts. 1945’s The Wicked Lady, for example, starred Margaret Lockwood as a seventeenth-century aristocrat who swaps her domestic drudgery for a life of excitement as a highway robber. Her impassioned refrain “I’ve got brains, and looks, and personality. I want to use them, instead of rotting here in this dull hole” would have spoken volumes to the millions of wartime women who had swapped their domestic chores for the experience of working in factories and fields as part of the war effort.

It is fitting, then, that Dunkirk draws on this period in Britain’s history. Almost as soon as the Second World War ended filmmakers began looking to the conflict as a source of inspiration (Ealing’s The Captive Heart, set in a German POW camp, appeared as early as spring 1946). Many filmmakers wanted to portray Britain in its ‘finest hour’ in order to instil confidence in the present. Dunkirk, then, is just one in a long line of historical feature films whose use of Britain’s past can be seen to draw parallels with contemporary events. As Rafael Behr wryly noted in an Opinion piece for The Guardian, the Dunkirk spirit has become ‘an emblem of national character – a metaphor for plucky survival against insuperable odds, and a benchmark of resilience’. [9] While not using the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ in the way that the likes of Nigel Farage and other right-wing commentators would perhaps like, by drawing on this event in Britain’s Second World War history, and by presenting a reassuring image of British courage in the face of seemingly impossible odds, Dunkirk’s portrayal of the past is a perfect antidote to these troubled Brexit times. [10]

Notes

[1] James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London. I.B. Tauris, 2005), p. 1.

[2] Peter Bradshaw, “Dunkirk review – Christopher Nolan’s apocalyptic war epic is his best film so far”, The Guardian, 17 July 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/17/dunkirk-review-christopher-nolans-apocalyptic-war-epic-is-his-best-film-so-far

[3] Chris Tookey, “What a crying shame. Meryl Streep’s brilliance as Mrs T can’t save an ill-conceived film that distorts history”, Daily Mail, 6 January 2012 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2082431/The-Iron-Lady-film-review-Meryl-Streeps-Oscar-quality-brilliance-save-ill-conceived-movie.html

[4] Hugo Davenport, “Imagining the Past”, BBC History Magazine, 6.1 (January 2005), pp. 36-37; Stuart Jeffries, “Hollywood does history”, The Guardian, 13 July 2005.

[5] Juliet Gardiner, The Thirties: An Intimate History. (London. Harper Press, 2010), pp. 114-117.

[6] Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present (London. I.B. Tauris, 2009).

[7] Martin Pugh, We Danced all Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (), London: Vintage, 2009), pp. 383-385.

[8] Chapman, Past and Present, pp. 64-90.

[9] Rafael Behr, “Dunkirk has revealed the spirit that has driven Brexit: humiliation”, The Guardian, 26 July 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/26/dunkirk-brexit-retreat-europe-britain-eec.

[10] Zoe Williams, “Dunkirk offers a lesson – but it isn’t what Farage thinks”, The Guardian, 31 July 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/30/dunkirk-lesson-nigel-farage-brexiters-war-stories-british

All film poster images taken from https://en.wikipedia.org

August 4, 2017
‘Man Up!’: Revisiting the trenches and reviewing First World War masculinity.

“David McCracken’s dissertation was a well-written and outstandingly researched piece of work. It conducted a rigorous interrogation of current First World War historiography and deployed a broad range of evidence, from infantrymen’s diaries and letters to memoirs and oral testimony, to evaluate how soldiers coped with life in the trenches. David put forward a multi-layered gender analysis that revealed how complex British society’s perceptions of masculine behaviour were during the conflict. It was an excellent dissertation that shed light on a crucial aspect of modern history.” – Dr Rob James, L6 Year Tutor.

I set out to explore the impact that the First World War had upon the construction of masculinity. In doing so however, it became immediately apparent that in their very nature, ‘masculinity’ and the ‘First World War’ are multifaceted beasts that are tough to tackle in ten thousand words. Although this may offer little solace to those approaching the unit, a dissertation appears as a mountain from the bottom and a mole hill from the top. What is required is a realistic study mass in which research material does not saturate detail. However, this can be tough. If you were to pick a book out at random in a dark university library, it would probably be a book about masculinity in the First World War. The topic isn’t particularly niche. To that end, I sought to approach the subject from a revisionist standpoint, critically analysing the work of historians who have gone before, whilst providing considerations as to how the topic should be approached and demonstrate the results from doing so.

Aerial photograph of the trenches near loos 1917. IWM Q60546.

My first task was to get to grips with the historiography. By year three, it came as no surprise that reading consumes a large portion of the overall project effort. Even so, at times, the overwhelming scale of the task at hand perforated my productive headspace, leaving me with little more than an empty Word document and a desire for a year three early exit. What’s more, with the extent of past research on the topic, knowing when to stop reading, when enough is enough, is difficult. The judgement rested on my grasp of key historiographical inputs. Was any additional reading adding to them, merely rehashing or worse, leading me away from what I was attempting to tackle? Once satisfied, I found that whilst social and cultural historians seek the ‘lived experience’, there was a fundamental failing in understanding the role of rank and military structure on the daily lives of soldiers during the war. At best, a distinction between a soldier and officer was made but the intricacies of rank relations was missing alongside a fair regard for the impact of existing within a chain of command. [1] How can we explore masculinity if we ignore the social and professional structures which are likely to direct the way in which men act? Fortunately, these failings are more than compensated for by military historians who revel in the detail of conflict, address the obscurities of army life and provide an insight into men’s war experiences. [2] What is needed is a combination of these two disciplines. To understand the war’s impact on masculinity we must merge military history’s concern with structure, strategy and tactics with social and cultural history’s concern with the ‘lived’ experience. It is on these lines that my dissertation developed.

Having suggested a theoretical approach, I needed to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak, and demonstrate how fruitful a merger can be. To do so, I focused on one military role, in one environment, in one location; the British infantrymen in the trenches on the Western Front. I put great effort into explaining my reasoning for choosing the infantry within my work. This included discussing how infantrymen were not only numerically dominant but the infantry role was arguably the epitome of hegemonic masculinity, the ‘soldier hero’, the male ideal. [3] Then it was onto the greatest and in my view, core task of a dissertation, finding, analysing and presenting the primary sources.

First World War trench warfare. Image taken from en.wikipedia.org

To extract the men’s experiences, I sought personal sources such as diaries, letters and oral testimony which would provide a sense of the ‘lived experience’. These sources mainly originated from the Imperial War Museum. Reading and listening to the stories of these men never failed to move me. I focused on examining the infantry platoon, the military composition which most soldiers existed within. Brigadiers and Generals, who have received much unwarranted historical attention, were arguably a fleeting presence in the majority of men’s lives. Private soldiers, Corporals, a Platoon Sergeant and a Platoon Commander (a Junior Officer) made up the majority of men and ranks and interacted with one another on a daily basis. This group of men’s exchanges, interactions and actions within a framework of rank and structure created what I term as a ‘man-family’. This was a system in which men supported one another by virtue of their responsibility at a certain rank, whilst simultaneously competing to show the traits of endurance and adaptability that the conditions of warfare had placed upon them. For instance, an Officer’s role as a Platoon Commander was to ensure the comfort and cleanliness of his men. [4] This is not unlike a mother within a ‘normal’ family setting. This ‘man-family’ was replicated in the trenches across the Western Front and the system, in combination with the very nature of warfare in producing new tactics (trenches for instance) and enduring poor conditions, led to adaptability and endurance becoming key markers of masculinity after the war.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of producing a dissertation. Whilst at times a blank laptop screen is all I seemed to be able to achieve, it was rewarding to hand-in such a significant piece of work. The research skills amassed during my time at university were fully utilised and there is a huge sense of satisfaction in detangling your thoughts into a somewhat coherent argument.

Notes

[1] One example of this is Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11. In this book, Meyer appears to be apathetic towards the military hierarchy. There is little distinction of rank beyond that of an officer and soldier and ranks are often omitted from the personal narratives that have been utilised.

[2] For a particularly useful study, see David French, Military Identities: The Regimental Systems, the British Army and the British People c.1870-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[3] Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge 1994), 1.

[4] Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in The Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 165.

David McCracken is a BA History student at the University of Portsmouth. His dissertation won the Robbie Gray Memorial Prize for best history dissertation. David also won the Elizabeth Prize for highest overall performance in all units throughout the final year.

July 21, 2017
The Battle of Jutland: Its impact on the people of Portsmouth

Dr Rob James, senior lecturer in history, and John Bolt, research assistant and PhD student, have written the following blog on their experiences of creating an online map, with the help of a local community group, Portsdown U3A, to identify the impact of the Battle of Jutland on the people of Portsmouth and the local area. The online map is available to view on the Port Towns and Urban Cultures website http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/.

Image taken from http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nrg1/TheBattleOfJutlandMay311916RoyalChristmasCard.jpg

The Battle of Jutland took place on 31 May 1916. It was the largest sea-battle of the First World War, and was one in which many men from both the British and German navies perished. To mark its 100-year anniversary, a group of researchers from Portsdown U3A decided to conduct a research project to honour the local people who had died in the battle. Their aim was to identify the names of the 662 men from Portsmouth and the local area who had perished and create a Roll of Honour. Portsdown U3A’s Jutland research group planned to display the Roll of Honour at a series of pop-up exhibitions across the city of Portsmouth. The exhibition would also include a number of detailed information panels summarising the battle, as well as featuring short biographies of some of the men from the area who had lost their lives.

In May 2015 two members of the group, Carole Chapman and Steve Doe, arranged a meeting with Rob to discuss how they could take the project further. They had planned on submitting a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant application in order to finance their exhibition, but were seeking ideas for what else they could do to develop the project. Rob had been working on a mapping project with the Port Towns and Urban Cultures (PTUC) team in which the heritage of Portsmouth’s ‘Sailortown’ districts was being plotted on to contemporary maps as a resource for academics and visitors to the city (see the ‘Sailortown’ app), and suggested that the U3A could create a map that would detail the loss of men from Portsmouth and the local area. It was decided that a paper copy of the map would be created to take around the various pop-up exhibitions, as well as an online map that would be hosted on the PTUC website, where visitors to the site would be able to click on the various ‘pins’ in order to find out more about the men who had lost their lives. The plans had been made; now all that was needed was success in the planned HLF application…

It was with delight and great relief that the U3A heard that their grant application to the HLF was successful. Their vision could now become reality. The grant allowed co-investigator Rob to employ John as a research assistant in order to create the required maps. After taking receipt of the huge database the U3A had collated, John began work on verifying all of the information he had to hand, checking it alongside a database that PTUC’s Dr Mel Bassett had been working on as part of an AHRC-funded project that captured the national casualties of the battle (to access the database go to http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/source-information/jutland-casualty-database/). Once the data had been verified John, along with the team of Online Course Developers (OCDs) at the University, began working on the paper map. This process consisted of plotting each participant of the battle who had a link to Portsmouth on to a 1910 map of the Portsmouth area by using information on next of kin and their places of birth.

After the paper map was completed, John and the OCDs started work on the online map. An historic map of Portsmouth was overlaid on to a current Google map of the city so that all of the service personnel’s locations could be plotted on the map. This did create a number of difficulties, not least because many street names had changed or vanished due to the passing of time, from both war and urban renewal, which a computer programme is not able to immediately recognise. After many hours working through the database, John was able to accurately locate the vast majority of men using multiple resources, including contemporary Ordnance Survey maps and local history sites (a few couldn’t be located exactly due to incomplete records). The map was now ready to launch!

It is with great excitement, then, that this blog announces the launch of the online map that reveals the details of the sailors who lost their lives during this momentous First World War battle between two of the world’s biggest navies of that time. We hope you find it a fascinating tool for understanding the extent to which the Battle of Jutland impacted Portsmouth and the local area. The map also demonstrates that there are further opportunities for plotting the effect of other events and battles on contemporary maps. Ideas for future projects are therefore welcome!

Click the following link to access the map: http://porttowns.port.ac.uk/jutland-map/index.html

Rob James is Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Social History at the University. He is one of the founding members of the Port Towns and Urban Cultures research group.

John Bolt is a PhD student at the University. His doctoral thesis evaluates the cultural and social history of the Royal Marines.

June 27, 2017
The enemy of my enemy is my friend: An examination of the relationship between the Miskito and the British.

“Abigail based her study on engagement with, and critical examination of, a wide range of sources, from secondary ones to printed Calendars of government records and original Treasury Papers which revealed expenses for gifts to the Miskito to ensure a positive relationship. Extant artefact and pictorial evidence, though scant, was also employed. There was adept use of cartography and consideration of the three Miskito rulers brought to England – ‘The Prince’ brought to England at some point in the 1630s by Robert Rich, 2^nd Earl of Warwick, ‘Oldman’ here in 1655 and George, in England c. 1774 –November 1776, before becoming King of the Miskito. Written in a clear, confident and crisp manner, this study sheds remarkable light on an Indian tribe who remained autonomous and independent in a relationship with Britain on the margins of the European imperial world during a period of both crucial significance and not insubstantial change.” – Dr James Thomas, Abigail’s dissertation supervisor.

Image taken from Phillip Dennis and Michael Olien, “Kingship among the Miskito,” American Ethnologist, Vol 11, (1984) p.719.

The narrative of early modern European imperialism is one that sees historians neglecting the influences of indigenous peoples and the autonomy they held. This topic gripped my interest, and throughout each academic year I found myself choosing units that complimented and furthered my interest. During my second year I read an article discussing the Miskito Indians, a group of indigenous Native Americans in Honduras and Nicaragua, operating along the Miskito Coast.

The article itself focused on how the British manipulated the Miskito in order to further their own colonial and imperial ventures in the area. When it came to choosing a topic for my dissertation, I immediately knew I wanted to delve deeper into the story of the Miskito in the hope of uncovering the reality of their relationship with the British, as many historians painted them as subordinates to British rule, only focusing on Anglo primary sources and not considering the Miskito perspective.

My dissertation analysed the relationship between the Miskito and the British by looking at different elements of their relationship. First, it was important to look at how the relationship was formed, and whether or not this was controlled and orchestrated by the British, or was one of negotiations and cooperation. Through looking at the initial encounters of British buccaneers, and the people of Providence Island, it was clear that despite the historical narrative of overarching British control and of European superiority, and a quest to enlighten ‘savages’, the Miskito had full control over whether or not they wished to work with the British. The Miskito assisted British buccaneers, helping them navigate the rocking coasts and wild inland, while also benefitting from the relationship by receiving goods for their services such as guns, which led them to become the dominant tribe along the Miskito Coast. Miskito autonomy was also clear in British attempts from Providence Island to evangelise the Miskito. British missionaries claimed the Miskito desired for a Christian schoolmaster to properly educate their children. However, in reality, when looking at requests from Miskito King Edward I in full, it is clear that this request was a political one, as he also requested supplies, arms, and governor status, demonstrating Miskito manipulation of British values. The pinnacle of Miskito autonomy can also be clearly seen when looking at the War of Jenkin’s Ear, a war between Britain and Spain over mercantile and colonial control in the area. The Miskito worked with the British, not out of duty, but out of their own deep hatred for the Spanish after cruelty experienced during early Spanish attempts at colonisation. The Miskito were in control, and fully cognisant of their ability to manipulate their relationship with the British for their own gain.

However, working on a dissertation that focuses on the perspective of people ignored by the historical narrative did indeed come with many difficulties. Finding primary sources from the Miskito point of view proved impossible, forcing a reliance on sources from a British perspectives and an ability to read between the lines to look at Miskito motivations and actions. Furthermore, many sources were written in Spanish, and often untranslated, requiring attempts at translation in order provide a view from the Spanish. Finding sources relevant to the study also proved difficult, as the topic itself is one that has been neglected by historians and history itself. Despite investigation in the National Archives, Lambeth Palace and Portsmouth History Centre, many source leads led to dead ends. For example, in attempts to discover the name anonymous author ‘M.W’, and attempts to discover the background of Superintendent Robert Hodgson, no sources could be uncovered. However, this does reveal the need to investigate topics such as the Miskito, as it reveals a lack of historiography around the histories and perspective of minority ethnic groups.

Material sources also proved a dead end in looking at the Miskito. The only remaining material artefact from the Miskito during this period is a hand axe held by The British Museum, highlighting how many traded items have either not been catalogued, or haven’t survived the harshness of time.

Despite the difficulty in finding original source work from the Miskito themselves, or even material history, I am incredibly happy and fulfilled by researching the Miskito as my dissertation topic, so much so that I wish to pursue the topic further in the future. As a result of my topic, I was given the opportunity by Dr James Thomas to deliver a talk to the Historical Association, which gave me a chance to share the story of the Miskito, which is something I’d love to look into more. Writing a dissertation gives you the opportunity to delve into a topic that you are passionate about, all while revealing a piece of history that is under researched. By doing this dissertation, I hope to have shed a light on the need for historians to question the approved Anglo-historical narrative, and look into the stories and experiences of those people who played a large, but hidden role.

Abigail Jeffrey is a BA History student at the University of Portsmouth. Her dissertation won the Stephens Prize for best dissertation on imperial and maritime history of early modern Europe. The prize is named after Thomas Stephens (1549-1619), Wiltshireman and Jesuit. He was the first Englishman to sail round the Cape of Good Hope and take up permanent residence in India in 1579, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

Image of Miskito hatchet taken from the British Museum collection httpwww.britishmuseum.orgresearchcollection_onlinecollection_object_details.aspxobjectId=669732&partId=1.

June 21, 2017