On Wednesday 8 November Dr Laura Almagor (University of Utrecht) presented a paper in our History Research seminar series entitled Reinvention at Bandung: Jewish Displaced Persons and the new global order, 1943-1962.
During the summer and autumn of 1945 millions of uprooted persons made their way back to homes across Europe. The remaining refugees crowded together in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria and Italy. Six years later, 175,000 individuals, mostly Jews, still languished in the camps. In 1955, the Bandung conference convened to discuss the lingering problem of these displaced persons. Laura’s research looks at what the conference debates reveal about how displaced persons and Jewish leaders understood the place of the Jews in the context of a new, decolonised, world order in which Europe was no longer seen as central.
If you missed the paper, a recording can be viewed here.
Baptism is as a rite of central importance within the Christian religion. Deriving from the Gospels, it was one of only two of the original seven Catholic sacraments retained by English Protestants. In late-sixteenth and seventeenth century England, with high birth rates, and everyone required to attend church by law, it was a very familiar ritual, commonly performed before the congregation on a Sunday. It also generated much controversy, over its precise theological meaning, as well as the way, time and place in which it should be conducted. During the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, many of the existing practices of the English Church was challenged and reformed, including baptism. Godparents were banned, as was making of the sign of the cross in baptism, a change which puritans had long sought after. Fonts, where baptisms had always been carried out, and which were often the oldest surviving parts of their churches, were ripped out, or their use discontinued. Some clergy and religious groups wanted to take things further, refusing to baptise illegitimate children or the infants of people who had not signed-up to an agreement binding members of the congregation, or even to baptise children at all, considering that only adult believers should be baptised. As you can imagine, in a world in which many believed that unbaptised infants would be consigned to a special circle of hell called limbo, this caused consternation. In her recent chapter entitled ‘“The Child’s Blood should lye at his door”: local divisions over baptismal rites during the English Civil War and the Interregnum’ published in a volume of Studies in Church History devoted to religious rites of passage, Dr Fiona McCall shows how this led to violent conflicts in churches between those who those who advocated reforms to the rite, and those who wanted to retain the existing rituals. Discord over a rite that was meant to draw members of parish communities together, served instead to emphasise the extent to which these communities had become fractured and divided.
UoP History’s Katy Gibbons has recently published a chapter in volume 1 of the Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism. This major multivolume work seeks to explore the complex and contested stories and experiences of Catholic communities in Britain and Ireland across 5 centuries, and to bring together aspects of their stories that are often approached separately.
Katy’s contribution explores the many challenges faced by Catholics in England, Wales and Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth, and how their responses were shaped by the specific local, national and international context. In particular, it considers the linguistic, political, ecclesiastical and legal frameworks in which Catholics negotiated their existence as subjects of a Protestant monarch, including the divisions this provoked amongst them.
Our own Dr Mike Esbester is co-lead of the Railway Work, Life & Death project at the National Railway Museum. This post from the project, written by co-lead Karen Baker, looks at the work of one of the project’s placement students, Connor Scott, who used the dataset to interrogate just how dangerous it was to work on the railways, with 23,000 accidents investigated by state inspectors between 1900 and 1939, including 504 deaths.
The data show that shunting accidents were particularly common, and the blog details how this has led to new displays at the museum to illustrate this for visitors. Another display shows a prosthetic leg made by the railway companies for use by a worker who lost his leg in a shunting accident. The fact that it was thought necessary to design a replacement leg, suggests there was a regular need: the dataset indicates 806 workers lost a body part(s) and 150 of these were shunters.
Artificial Leg. Source: The Wellcome Collection.
The project also worked collaboratively with colleagues at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick who were able to digitise their trades’ union accident records and share them with the NRM volunteers. These records show the human impact of accidents, the financial help received by wives and children from trades’ union funds, which provided an income when husbands/fathers were no longer able to work. This information will help contextualise and add human stories to objects in the collection, such as Laddie the Railway Collecting Dog, previously on display as an oddity, with no explanation of why he was important.
The University of Portsmouth is supporting a new PhD project looking at railway worker accidents and their wider impacts on those affected. The student will be drawing upon the RWLD dataset and the collections at the NRM and other institutions like the MRC.
The collier, from George Walker, The Costume of Yorkshire (1813)
Anthony Annakin-Smith is a local historian with a diverse range of interests focused on maritime and industrial history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Anthony was awarded the PhD by Publication from the University of Portsmouth in 2022 for his work on The Neston Collieries, 1759-1855: an Industrial Revolution in Rural Cheshire. The collieries date from the eighteenth century, when the main colliery was owned by local magnates the Stanley family, and were more successful than its better-known contemporaries in nearby south-west Lancashire and North Wales. It was the first large industrial site in west Cheshire and introduced the area’s earliest steam engine. Anthony’s supervisors for his doctorate were UoP history lecturers Dr Mike Esbester and Dr Karl Bell. His Commentary in association with his published work were awarded the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s Dissertation Prize for 2023. To read more about Anthony’s research click here.
The process of undertaking a PhD by publication can be pretty daunting. Where to start? What will the examiners be looking for? Do I just re-hash the work I’ve already done?
As a PhD by Publication is a relatively unusual approach to a doctorate there is little guidance ‘out there’. Of course, your supervisors will give you plenty of support but I found it still took me quite a while – too long! – to get into the right mindset. In the end my work paid off – I got the doctorate (passing the viva without corrections) and, to boot, later received the Association for Industrial Archaeology’s Dissertation Prize. It seems, then, that I ultimately ‘got’ what the PhD by Publication is all about. As such, here’s a list of tips covering things I learnt along the way which may be of use to others.
Start with your goal in mind. I focused on the wording in UoP’s ‘What is a PhD by Publication?’ which suggests you should be able to demonstrate your work’s ‘coherence, significance and contribution to knowledge’.
Read other PhD by Publication Commentaries to give you ideas about structure, concepts, language etc. but …
… don’t use others’ work as a straitjacket. This is your work so use a structure and approach that best suit your work and your goals.
Step back from your published work. You are not meant simply to repeat your findings but instead to scrutinise them from new perspectives. I found myself discussing concepts in the Commentary that never featured (and didn’t need to) in the published work.
Have regular meetings with your supervisors (online in my case). This is obvious but needs stating. Agree a schedule and/or meeting frequency with them. Not only is the discussion at the meetings beneficial but the planned dates gives a point of focus for prior drafting and submission as well as for preparing questions you may have.
Have confidence in your work and opinions Listen to what your supervisors say and consider their verbal and written comments carefully. However, ultimately it’s your Commentary based on your publication(s) so don’t fret too much about dealing with every point they make – it’s OK to disagree or ignore points if you feel it’s justified.
Maximise use of the UoP Library. While there are plenty of online resources in the library, as a remote student who never even visited Portsmouth, I also made much use of the facility for physical books to be posted. This was quick, easy and very helpful.
Use resources elsewhere. UoP Library did not have access to everything I needed so I also used resources from another academic library to which I had routine access as well as making day-visits to other institutions.
Make use of reviews. Your publication(s) has/have probably been reviewed publicly in journals or elsewhere. Use insights from those reviews and leverage them to give independent authority to what you have to say.
Have a mock viva. This was very useful for highlighting potential lines of questioning as well as the style of the real thing.
Prepare for your viva well. I spent ages preparing answers to a myriad of potential questions, prompted both by the mock viva and by my own thoughts. In retrospect I probably over-prepared but the approach gave me confidence for the examination.
The viva is not as scary as you might expect (the need to ‘defend’ my work always worried me; it suggested I would be facing a bank of aggressive questioners looking to trip me up!). It was nothing like that and I was really surprised to find that I actually enjoyed it. I very definitely had not anticipated that!
Map circa 1872, showing Victoria Docks and the Thames Ironworks
One of our MA Naval History students, Paul O’Donnell, has recently had a blog published by the Churchill College Cambridge, whose archive he used for his dissertation research. His research there, using the papers of first Lord of the Admiralty Reginald McKenna, sheds new light on Arnold Hills, the eccentric chairman of Thames Iron Works, who were the last shipbuilders working on the Thames. It was ironical that this firm, one of the few firms capable of building Dreadnoughts, should have closed down in 1912, at the heart of the Dreadnought arms race. But as Paul explains, the company had an afterlife, as its works football team evolved into West Ham FC.
