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Posts tagged 'books'

Tue May

2013

Writer of the Month – John Guy

Posted by John Guy in Records and research

The idea for writing The Children of Henry VIII appealed to me mainly because I’d got fed up with people from tv companies or guides in stately homes trying to tell me that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn came to visit X or Y places as a family, with baby Elizabeth in one or other of their arms. In reality, Henry VIII always followed the protocol laid down in the Royal Book as this had been revised and updated by his grandmother Margaret Beaufort in 1493, which meant that all his four children were brought up in nurseries set apart from where their parents were living, often many miles apart.

The Children of Henry VIII, by John Guy

The family were together only on a handful of occasions in Henry’s entire reign, and none of his children spent much time alone with either him or their respective mothers. I wanted to include Henry Fitzroy, the king’s illegitimate son, who tends to be written out of history, since he was a crucial part of the story in the earlier years. But I particularly wanted to shed light on the difficult personal relationships between the squabbling siblings, who of course all had different mothers, since I thought this might improve our understanding of the period as a whole. Until I started to write this book, I hadn’t fully appreciated the degree of jealousy, mutual distrust and sibling rivalry between the children, or how far their childhood experiences shaped their characters and subsequent lives.

Mon Mar

2013

Writer of the Month: Antony Beevor

Posted by Antony Beevor in Behind the scenes, Records and research

Antony Beevor

For me, archival treasure does not mean the great historical scoop, although it is no doubt very satisfying if it happens. The true value lies in the accumulation of personal detail which illuminates a period. My first great lesson came in 1991 in the Archives Nationales in Paris. I was working at the time on a book which I wrote with my wife, Artemis Cooper, called Paris After the Liberation 1944-1949. After months of frustration, I had finally received permission from the Ministry of the Interior to examine the files of the French security service, the DST, for 1944 and 1945.

Among all the papers packed in the dust-impregnated ‘cartons’, a short paragraph caught my imagination. It was a police report on arrests in the summer of 1945. A German woman, a farmer’s wife, had been found in Paris among French deportees returned from camps in Germany. It transpired that she had had an illicit affair with a French prisoner of war assigned to their farm in Germany while her husband was on the Eastern Front. She had fallen so much in love with this enemy of her country that she had followed him to Paris, having somehow smuggled herself onto a train returning concentration camp victims. That was all the detail provided.

Fri Mar

2013

A view from the counter: Bookclub mania

Posted by Sally Hughes in Behind the scenes

The weather continues to tease and tantalise – brief hints at sunshine, warmth through glass, a few spring bulbs. Sadly this is too often quickly followed by a Siberian blast and a need to huddle by the heater, nose in book, in wilful denial of the heating bill which will blight all chance of a summer holiday. However, at least now it is lighter and there is a chance of getting out. Cycling home along the river path is still a distant dream. Are you mad ? In that darkening gloom? It may be Richmond, but if you are not assaulted by the mad, bad and dangerous to know then there is fear of running into a jogger or over a duck. However, one can at least go out without the need to wear 12 layers of passion-killer thermals and that fetching scarf knitted by Gran, one finger constantly twitching over the mobile in case of travel updates from TFL which will blight forever the chance of reaching Clapham.

A bookclub meets in warmer climes - a mobile library van, Accra (catalogue ref: CO 1069/43/73)

Thu Feb

2013

Writer of the month: Mali’s monuments

Posted by Gus Casely-Hayford in Records and research

Over the last year I have watched helplessly as dozens of Mali’s most ancient monuments have been damaged or destroyed as Ansar Dine supporting militia have pushed further and further south from their strongholds on the edge of the Sahara Desert. So it was with more than a little relief that I watched the recent liberation of Timbuktu by French and West African forces. But that relief turned quickly to shock as news reports showed the liberating forces uncovering what appeared to be the deliberate destruction of some of the irreplaceable archives ancient and libraries of Timbuktu.

Gus Casely-Hayford

As I watched the news reports, I was taken back to my last visit to the great city…

The alleyway had been worn into a series of deep smooth sculpted ruts making it almost impossible to negotiate for the uninitiated without absolute concentration.

It is only in recent years that I have come to realise what has driven me to spend significant chunks of my adult life travelling, searching out archives and libraries across Africa, hunting down local historians and visiting small and remote museums. Whether I have been engaged in concrete research or not, I have always sought out manuscripts whether held in state archives or small family collections.

Over decades I have fed my fetish in the basements of multi-national corporations, in the stores of village churches and mosques, at battlefields, in goldmines and in the backrooms of small corner shops. And I have learned that history is important in Africa for all the reasons one might imagine – but perhaps more than anywhere else I have travelled, I have become aware of the past forming a vivid and palpable presence in people’s lives.

Mon Feb

2013

‘Forever out of memory and forgotten’

Posted by Linda Stewart in Records and research

Wasn’t the recent discovery and identification of the remains of King Richard III in a Leicester car park absolutely riveting? I am not a medievalist (as will doubtless become clear during this blog post), nonetheless, Richard III was my way into the historian’s craft. As a schoolgirl I read Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time ¹, where a detective, scenting propaganda in Shakespeare’s account of Richard, conducts an investigation into the murder of the Princes in the Tower from his hospital bed.

King Richard III by Unknown artist oil on panel, late 16th century (late 15th century) NPG 148 © National Portrait Gallery, London (CC BY NC ND)

This led me to read my first grown up history book, Paul Murray Kendall’s Richard III. ² At 14, I was equally fascinated and daunted by the footnotes: PRO E/179 117/77; PRO C 65/114; ibid; op. cit… What did it all mean? Historians were obviously rarified beings who had, I assumed, privileged access to the documents behind all this paraphernalia. It was all very remote from my experience: I felt I would love to be a historian, solving the mysteries of the past, but it wasn’t something that people like me did. Eventually, I not only learnt to cite PRO references and know my op. cit.s from my ibids, I ended up actually working at the Public Record Office (as The National Archives then was). I still like the idea of history as a detective story, with the extra dimension of time; an investigation into cause and effect, weighing the evidence in context – my colleague Sean Cunningham, who has written a book on Richard III ³is very good on this point.

Notes:

1. Josephine Tey, the Daughter of time (1951) (gratifyingly still in print and now available as an e-book) ^
2. Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III, (1955) ^
3. Sean Cunningham, Richard III Royal Enigma – Treasures from The National Archives, (2003) ^

Thu Feb

2013

Writer of the month: We fought them in the filing cabinets…

Posted by Ben Macintyre in Records and research

D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms, a heroic feat of military strategy and raw courage. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of skill: it was an astonishing feat of paperwork.

Double Cross

Operation Fortitude, which protected and enabled the invasion, and the Double Cross system, which specialized in turning German spies into double agents, deceived the Nazis into believing that the Allies would attack at Calais and Norway rather than Normandy. It was the most sophisticated and successful deception operation ever carried out, ensuring that Hitler kept an entire army awaiting a fake invasion, saving thousands of lives, and securing an Allied victory at the most critical juncture in the war.

The Double Cross system depended on a filing and archive system that was vast, complex and meticulous. It is not too much to say that without the extraordinary record-keeping system devised by the spy-runners, the great D-Day deception might have failed, and the history of the 20th century would have been very different.

The great British talent for keeping and maintaining records played a vital, but largely unacknowledged role in winning the Second World War. Most of the wartime files relating to the Double Cross deception, once top secret, have now been released to The National Archives. That material has formed the evidential basis for my last three books: Agent Zigzag, Operation Mincemeat and Double Cross. Each of these books tells a story extracted from the wartime files. Indeed, without this huge trove of documents, these books could not have been written.

Thu Nov

2012

A view from the counter – part 4

Posted by Sally Hughes in Behind the scenes

Christmas at the bookshop

In the run up to Christmas (yes it has started, we have our Christmas cards out and we are only moments away from fake snow on the windows) I thought I might suggest some new releases for those seeking inspiration for the present list. Remember, a book is always welcome… well, it is in my house.

The first, A Book for Cooks, is a blatantly self-indulgent hint to any of my nearest and dearest looking to buy for me. Not history, you may think initially, however bear with me: history is about people and ‘we are what we eat’. (In my case this is clearly several fat capons and an awful lot of butter, I sometimes wonder if my attraction to the past is nothing more than a hankering after a more woman-friendly age when the pins-ups were by Reubens rather Hello magazine…) So first up is an unusual but lovely look at the historical development of food, eating, design and the cookbook. A Book for Cooks is Leslie Geddes-Brown’s list of the 101 best cookbooks of all time. In cookbook terms, all time dates from the early 16th century when recipes began to be written down and published. Prior to that it was an oral tradition where crucial ingredients and cooking times were passed on by a clip round the ear to the nearest scullery boy.

Thu Oct

2012

The Ministry of Records

Posted by Linda Stewart in Records and research, Technology and innovation

At last, a hero who was a data specialist: Christopher Tietjens in the recent BBC adaptation of Parade’s End, four partially autobiographical novels by Ford Madox Ford, beginning just before the First World War.

BBC omnibus editon of the four Parade's End novels

Tietjens is a civil servant in the newly created Department of Imperial Statistics: ‘a first class government office’ no less. In truth, there’s not much data crunching in Parade’s End, although more so in the books than in the television adaptation: one doesn’t feel that mugging up on standard deviation was a vital part of Benedict Cumberbatch’s preparation. But is there anything in The National Archives that could shed some light on what Tietjens and his department were doing?

I supposed the Department of Imperial Statistics to be a fictional version of what is now the Office for National Statistics. In 1912, the ONS predecessor was neither newly created, nor was it anything other than home based, indeed at this time it was under the parochial charge of the Local Government Board. We even have real some data from that era: the historic mortality files from 1901 – 1995 in RG 69, part of our National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) collection. But Tietjens wasn’t tabulating native mortality; his masters were after the population of British Columbia and British North America. At the time of the high water mark of the British Empire, and all the administration and trade that went with it – if there wasn’t a Department of Imperial Statistics, you’d surely need to invent one… Continue reading »

Mon Sep

2012

A view from the counter – part 3

Posted by Sally Hughes in Behind the scenes

I have just been to hear Anne Sebba talk about her book That Woman on the life of Wallis Simpson. This is one of a series of authors’ talks which we plan to make a more regular feature at The National Archives. Books should, and do, stand by themselves and sometimes seeing the author in the flesh can be a disappointment. Am I alone in thinking that Nigel Slater, possibly the greatest food writer today, worthy heir to Elizabeth David, should never, never be let near a television camera? However, this was a treat.

That Woman by Anne Sebba

Slightly spookily Anne’s dress almost exactly mirrored the one Wallis is wearing on the cover of the book but once over this I was captured by her words. Wallis Simpson’s story is extraordinary and Anne elaborated on her view of Wallis’ life: a tragic love story if not the one you’d expect. She read from letters Wallis wrote to her second husband Ernest at the time of the divorce which showed a woman trapped by her own schemes, horribly alone and in love with a man she can no longer have.

In putting the abdication crisis in its historical context Anne showed how horrified the royal family had been by Edward’s actions. The country had just come out of the First World War a time when the country had responded to a call to duty and paid with their lives, now ‘the family’ who have possibly the most engrained sense of duty ever, were looking to one of their own asking what they saw as a small thing and he wouldn’t do it. As you know there is nothing like the opprobrium heaped on someone by their own family if they think they are letting the side down. The mistresses, the weekend parties, the gin, the madness they could deal with all that –almost de rigeur for a king you might say- but one must step up to the plate and do your duty, not throw your toys out the pram if you can’t have ‘the woman you love’. In Anne’s final slide of Wallis’s coffin being carried out followed by members of the Royal Family, the look on the face of the Queen Mother said it all.

Tue Jul

2012

A view from the counter

Posted by Sally Hughes in Behind the scenes

I work in the bookshop at The National Archives. You didn’t know we had a bookshop? Shame on you. It really is an undiscovered gem, well worth a visit in its own right. But of course I would say that. I love it. Tucked in the corner just off reception and opposite the coffee bar, the bookshop is a little treasure trove.

The National Archives' bookshop

Authors