tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46542658228451387192024-03-08T20:35:19.283+00:00Clare Mulley's BlogBlogposts from author Clare Mulley. The subjects of Clare's books: Krystyna Skarbek, Christine Granville, and Eglantyne Jebb are discussed.Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.comBlogger60125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-77755591431966188702020-09-12T10:30:00.003+01:002020-09-12T10:30:57.809+01:00Favourite Things<p><b>Talking and walking</b></p><p>I love conversation. Talking and walking is a favourite pairing, especially if the talk is linear and the walk a loop. A tandem cycle-ride is also ideal for a good chat, except on the hills. Talking, eating and drinking work well in any combination – my favourite room in any house is usually the kitchen where all three can be undertaken together. Reading and writing sometimes feel like extensions of this – talking with people not currently with you, some of whom are inconveniently dead. It’s all a big conversation across time and place.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Book research</b></p><p>My books have provided great opportunities for research adventure. After lots of reading I pack a bag and, at some point, do what Antonia Fraser calls “optical research”, going on holiday to follow in my subject’s footsteps. There is nothing more exciting than setting off alone with a mission. I have been lucky to meet many veterans and other witnesses, open up old trunks, read diaries, try on necklaces. You never know what will provide an unexpected insight.</p><p>When I was researching The Spy Who Loved, about Polish-born British Second World War special agent Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, I was invited to stay in the Warsaw apartment of the son of one of her lovers. The following morning I opened the front door to find a Wehrmacht division in the street outside. I automatically reeled back, but a second tentative look outside confirmed that not only was the unit really there, but one particularly angry officer was now getting off his motorbike and heading straight for me. He had a kind of hand-held machine gun, and as he shouted at me he started jabbing its perforated barrel towards my neck. I was nearly in tears before someone explained that I had walked into the filming of a Second World War TV series, ruining an otherwise good take. My panic brought home to me the depth of Krystyna’s courage in a way that no archive could. As a British special agent with a Jewish-born mother, serving undercover in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Krystyna had been arrested more than once, yet always kept her cool and talked her way out of trouble. I guess my talking skills still need some work.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Potatoes</b></p><p>I love most food. It is partly the sociable aspect of sharing a meal, but largely the pleasure of eating. Roast potatoes come high on my list, but a good mash, warm potato salad, or an intensely flavoured packet of crisps always go down well too. Perhaps it is a comfort thing. My lovely sister is also a keen potato fan, and even has a portrait of a King Edward on her kitchen wall, so potatoes also remind me of her. Marie Antoinette once wore potato flowers in her hair, but that is just a happy extra.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Nuance</b></p><p>This I like in all its shades. Nuance is underappreciated, but it is what has drawn me to all my book subjects. Eglantyne Jebb, the subject of my first book, founded Save the Children yet avoided individual children as much as possible. The only two female test pilots in the Third Reich both put their considerable skills at the disposal of the Nazi regime; one was a fanatical Nazi but the other was part-Jewish and secretly in the domestic resistance. Special agent Krystyna Skarbek excelled in the predominately male field of wartime special operations and can only truly be in understood in the context of her country, although it often excluded her. My new book proposal hinges on an incredibly difficult decision that had the potential to change the course of the Second World War but required pitting the truth against victory. Accepting nuance is not only more honest than seeking absolutes, it is also far more interesting.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Old stuff </b></p><p>I am drawn to anything that carries the traces of time and tide, or otherwise hints at a human story. I like to weigh my grandfather’s cigarette case from the First World War in my hand, knowing he smoked away most of his pay in Gallipoli. I read the inky names inside old books, wondering what caused the smudges, and pause on the curve of worn stone steps, imagining centuries of passing feet. A friend recently knitted me a pair of gloves from a “glove recipe” written down by a great aunt when she was still a teenager. They are heavy and practical, not at all dainty-maiden-aunt type mittens, which pleases me immensely.</p><p>A few years ago my mum had wrapped up two small boxes for my birthday. One was so light I wondered whether she had forgotten to fill it; the other was small, square and pleasingly heavy. Inside the first was my grandmother’s hair, two bunches chopped off around 1910 when she graduated to womanhood. It was not in particularly good condition, and my husband expressed his relief that it was not, at least, a severed finger. The second box contained my grandmother’s medal for coming second in the 1912 civil service entry exams. A medal seems a much more sensible thing to keep than a tangle of old hair. Medals are earned rather than grown after all. But it is only when the two things are taken together that you get a real flavour of the woman.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>Dancing</b></p><p>Dancing cannot be combined easily with talking, walking, eating, travelling, nuance or looking at old stuff; nevertheless I love it. Especially a cèilidh or any other dance where someone tells me what to do.</p><p><br /></p><p><i>Please note: this article was first published in "Reaction" magazine on the 5th of September, 2020.</i></p><p><br /></p>Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-18644788039230653762019-09-13T14:25:00.003+01:002020-09-12T10:59:02.672+01:00Eglantyne Jebb bust unveiled100 years and one day since Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton launched Save the Children at a packed public meeting at the Royal Albert Hall, I was very moved to see a new bronze bust of Eglantyne unveiled at the same venue. You can see a short film of the event here. The sculpture was created by the award-winning artist Ian Wolter who donated his time and work for free, mainly because he is a long-standing supporter of the Fund, but also because he is my husband. The cost of the bronze was generously sponsored by Save the Children’s former Chairman, Peter Bennett-Jones, and broadcaster and ambassador for the Fund, Natasha Kaplinsky, kindly did the actual unveiling.<br />
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Eglantyne and Dorothy had arrived at the same hall a century earlier, when the trees across the road were rather shorter and there was less traffic pollution on the building’s beautiful façade. The sisters did, however, have to face some fairly hostile elements among the crowd that had gathered that day. Some had even brought rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at the ‘traitor sisters’ who wanted to ‘give succour to the enemy.’ Eglantyne silenced them all as she called out, ‘Surely it is impossible for us as normal human beings, to watch children starve to death, without making an effort to save them?’ Potatoes went back into bags, purses came out, and a spontaneous collection was taken up around the hall.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""gill_sans_infant" , "helvetica" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">The Royal Albert Hall hosting the launch of Save the Children on 19 May 1919</span></td></tr>
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Fortunately, a century later, Save the Children’s CEO Kevin Watkins, and Craig Hassall, CEO of the Royal Albert Hall, had left their rotten veg at home, as had the Fund’s trustees, many committed volunteers and supporters, and quite a few members of the Jebb and Buxton families who joined us.</div>
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As her biographer, I was delighted to open the event with the story of Eglantyne’s arrest in Trafalgar Square, the brilliant defence she mounted at her Mansion House court case, and her and Dorothy’s ambitious initiative to capitalise on the blaze of publicity that followed the trial by launching the Fund a few days later. Just before I stepped up to the mic, a lady who looked vaguely familiar introduced herself.</div>
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I first met Amanda Richards when I worked at Save the Children in the corporate fundraising team, over twenty years ago. Amanda was one of three guests to join me on the Fund’s first ever programme visit for major corporate supporters. In 1998, we travelled together for two weeks in India.</div>
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Our first stop was to see the mobile crèche set up by the Save the Children for the children of female construction workers on the building site of an international hotel. This was a pilot scheme and, seeing the many benefits to both child welfare and worker productivity, it was soon paid for by the construction company and extended to all their sites, before becoming standard industry practice.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""gill_sans_infant" , "helvetica" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">At Save the Children’s mobile crèches project in Delhi, 1989</span></td></tr>
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While we were joining in with some craft activity at the crèche, one of the children gave me a card she had made with a drawing of a flower. When Amanda left a week later, having seen a range of projects looking at child health, education through night schools, the supply of safe water, and a women’s collective making clothes, she took the card with her. Inside I had written a note for another Save the Children business supporter, a man who she would be meeting back in London. I don’t think I had seen Amanda again since then. She is now a Vice President of the Fund, among other activities acting as long-standing chair of the ‘Summer in the City’ ball that annually raises around £200,000.</div>
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A couple of weeks after the Royal Albert Hall event, Amanda and I arranged to meet again. Now she told me that her visit to India had stayed in her heart, and on her mind, ever since. She had expected to be moved and impressed, but she had not anticipated the impact of the work being either so wide or so deep. Staff explained how cycles of social exploitation and deprivation had been broken; companies had permanently changed their business models to align with children’s rights; and children had told her that they hoped to become teachers, doctors and even development workers!</div>
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Amanda had since read my biography of Eglantyne, The Woman Who Saved the Children, and I was delighted to sign some copies of the book that had been donated for guests at her centenary summer fundraising event. She was thrilled in turn that all the book’s royalties are donated to the Fund, so that every copy raises money as well as awareness.</div>
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When the book was republished this year, to mark the centenary, the arrest and trial chapters inspired scriptwriter and Save the Children supporter Charlotte Bogard McLeod to write a short play. This was then performed with Joely Richardson as Eglantyne, and Helena Bonham Carter as the judge, at Save the Children’s centenary gala in London’s Roundhouse. During rehearsals both actresses told me how inspired they were by Eglantyne, and how they hoped this play might go further… fingers crossed everyone please!</div>
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<br /> <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhLMVXCWFnj8MZxKmEX-EK46KAA7kiOWF6a9EWaWAo4g3cnU9UXFRHtmxTkxkkvm4XYhi92XJ5bT3gSLZDciVaUKh2gRIhXEKGlV9DSx9OnI5zTU82ZvFx820aH5GR3ZAoWoBDmwk6s0E/s1024/nine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhLMVXCWFnj8MZxKmEX-EK46KAA7kiOWF6a9EWaWAo4g3cnU9UXFRHtmxTkxkkvm4XYhi92XJ5bT3gSLZDciVaUKh2gRIhXEKGlV9DSx9OnI5zTU82ZvFx820aH5GR3ZAoWoBDmwk6s0E/s320/nine.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">The Roundhouse, London, May 2019</span></div><br />
Other Eglantyne events this year have included a series of talks in and around Ellesmere in Shropshire, a town which now has new street signs welcoming people to ‘The Birthplace of Eglantyne Jebb’, and an event at Cambridge University where I spoke with Dr Peta Dunstan whose biography of Eglantyne’s sister Dorothy, Campaigning for Life, has just been published. There has also been a new blue plaque to Eglantyne put up in Marlborough, where she once taught in the local school, and Anne Chamberlain has performed her excellent one-woman show, Eglantyne, all round Britain and in Switzerland, Lebanon and Tanzania!</div><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; text-align: center;"> Clare with the new Ellesmere town signs</span><br /><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtXCYkbTLSMDaWGuGCGYgrnGZa9O5uIG7kE_Fx-y9RnQluQX1fD5j2N3sk0G7q3bPGUAAUg995E9Bp1ty10gC20TsqfevK3_Ui-aZ2FL4JhU1jbgmQDg6JRENbNRE5v0As7oT5BBi-zZU/s909/eleven.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="909" data-original-width="768" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtXCYkbTLSMDaWGuGCGYgrnGZa9O5uIG7kE_Fx-y9RnQluQX1fD5j2N3sk0G7q3bPGUAAUg995E9Bp1ty10gC20TsqfevK3_Ui-aZ2FL4JhU1jbgmQDg6JRENbNRE5v0As7oT5BBi-zZU/s320/eleven.jpg" /></a></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""gill_sans_infant" , "helvetica" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">With Dr Peta Dunstan, biographer of Dorothy Buxton</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">Flier for Anne Chamberlain’s one-woman play Eglantyne</span></i></td></tr>
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Back home I have been interviewed about Eglantyne for national and regional press, for BBC TV World News, and on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme with Evan Davis. I’ve recorded podcasts for the Spectator and Dan Snow’s History Hit; and spoken at countless history and literary festivals and other events. ‘We have to devise means of making known the facts in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world,’ Eglantyne once said, not knowing what an impact her own life story might have.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""gill_sans_infant" , "helvetica" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">Clare discussing Eglantyne Jebb with Matthew Amroliwala, BBC World News</span></td></tr>
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<i>The Woman Who Saved the Children</i> has now been translated into Spanish and Korean, and recently I was pleased to talk about Eglantyne to members of the International Save the Children Alliance at their centenary conference in Lady Margaret Hall – Eglantyne’s own former Oxford college. This is where the bronze bust of her now lives, where it has already inspired plans for an annual Eglantyne Jebb lecture. Meanwhile a plaster edition of the bust, with a bronze patina, has been given a permanent home in Save the Children UK’s Farringdon head office, where everyone can see her.</div>
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<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>Finally, following my introduction to the Jebb family, this autumn the National Portrait Gallery will be including an original image of Eglantyne in the national collection. Perhaps it might be this one, below, showing her striding into action, apparently not noticing that her shoe-laces are undone and she is losing papers from her file. This is my favourite of all Eglantyne’s scratchy self-portraits, although I also very much love a set showing show her frightening a herd of sheep as she falls off her bicycle before getting back on again with true blue-stocking determination…</div>
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These updates were all very good, but what Amanda wanted to know was what happened to the lovely corporate supporter to whom she had brought my flower-card from India. Readers, I married him… Watch out people, it is amazing how much the story of one brilliant, courageous, passionate and compassionate woman, can change your life!</div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZHkTHYt64CPPRLAQMXl-Fq40YC_nlpS1WdHXM2TzQkEgJzXtqufDkyukZS5BUmrVEYsC4L8q02SlcXAgjFoNQ9ML5bY8ymRtO8lEaqjjfpz5Gyx-AU3ejS2ea4p6USqQFRQ_IIHjTkVg/s768/fifteen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="768" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZHkTHYt64CPPRLAQMXl-Fq40YC_nlpS1WdHXM2TzQkEgJzXtqufDkyukZS5BUmrVEYsC4L8q02SlcXAgjFoNQ9ML5bY8ymRtO8lEaqjjfpz5Gyx-AU3ejS2ea4p6USqQFRQ_IIHjTkVg/s320/fifteen.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span face=""gill_sans_infant" , "helvetica" , "helvetica neue" , sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #3a3a3a; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">Sculptor Ian Wolter with his bronze of Eglantyne Jebb, and author Clare Mulley</span></td></tr>
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Clare Mulley’s first book, <i>The Woman Who Saved the Children</i>, won the Daily Mail Biographers’ Club Prize. <i>The Spy Who Loved</i>, now optioned by Universal Studios, led to Clare being decorated with Poland’s national honour, the Bene Merito. Clare’s third book, <i>The Women Who Flew for Hitler</i>, tells the extraordinary story of two women at the heart of Nazi Germany, whose choices put them on opposite sides of history. </div>
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<a href="http://www.claremulley.com/">www.claremulley.com</a></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Text and photos copyright Clare Mulley, with the exception of Eglantyne Jebb’s self-portrait and the Royal Albert Hall in 1919, which belong to the Jebb family and Save the Children.</span></i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><br />Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-89780614961163621732019-04-23T17:56:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:30:52.018+00:00Lyra<style type="text/css">
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It is hard to imagine someone who was more engaged in the business of
life than my friend Lyra McKee. Recognised by Forbes magazine as ‘one
to watch’ in 2016, her career as both a journalist and an author
had since taken off, crowned by a two book deal with Faber last year.
At the same time, she had found love. Amazed at her own happiness,
she radiated joy – partly because she could not help it, but also
deliberately sharing her delight, because what is not to celebrate
when you eventually find the love of your life? It still seems
impossible that Lyra was shot dead on Thursday night, while reporting
on the riots in Derry, as she called that city. There was such a
force of energy with her; so much forward motion, and there were all
these unfinished sentences, books, conversations and relationships.
Everything was still in play.</div>
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Lyra first made public waves with her blog on her experiences of
growing up gay in Belfast, which was made into a short film. Her
Belfast roots were, for better and worse, a huge part of her
identity. Knowing from experience that love could be both complex and
critical, she made the city, its history, faiths and residents, the
focus on her intellectual curiosity and the subject of her writing.
‘The past is not dead, it is not even past’, she wrote, as she
drew connections between enduring poverty, prejudice, social
exclusion, corruption and cycles of violence. She sent me a draft of
her second book, which raised questions around the Bradford case -
the unresolved disappearance of some young men during ‘the
troubles.’ It was a powerful but very personal call to find out the
truth, and promote justice and social reconciliation. Essentially her
writing, like her life, was about asking difficult questions and
starting conversations.
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I only knew Lyra for 18 months. We first met in November 2017, when we were both invited to give a TEDx talk at Stormont. Whether ironically or intentionally, given that the meetings of the Northern Ireland Assembly had been suspended since that January, the theme of the TEDx event was ‘Bridges.’ Invited as a historian and biographer, I spoke about history books as bridges to the past, and biographies as footbridges, which you can cross but only as a tourist, bringing your baggage with you. Lyra spoke about building bridges in the present, making an eloquent call for mutual tolerance and respect. She wanted to reach out to those who rejected her very identity, as an openly gay woman, from a religious viewpoint. She meant this as a paradigm of all the conversations we need to undertake with people with whom we feel fundamentally in disagreement. Hers was the outstanding talk of the evening, the one that stayed with people afterwards.</div>
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As I was staying on in Belfast, Lyra and I spent much of the next few
days together. She was interested that I was giving a series of talks
for a community project supported by the Centre for Democracy and
Peace Building, which hoped to improve relations between the Belfast
Protestant, and largely-Catholic Polish, communities. We met up again
when I returned for a second tour of Orange Lodges in and around
Belfast, where I was sometimes told I was the first woman to be
invited to speak; a local young offender’s institute; and the
Intelligence Corps club. ‘Perhaps all places where I’ll be
invited to talk in a year or so,’ Lyra laughed. In the evenings, we
went out to various bars and Chinese restaurants, discussing love,
the troubles, writing, Harry Potter, our families, Brexit, and
generally setting the world to rights. We stayed in touch by email, I
sent comments on her manuscript, we met in Belfast on my next visit,
and tried and failed to meet in London.
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Then a mutual friend emailed me on Friday morning with the shocking
news that Lyra had been killed. The second city of Northern Ireland,
Derry or Londonderry, was heavily militarised in the 1970s and,
despite ceasefires, remains a site of great hardship and civil
unrest. Lyra had moved there from Belfast only recently, to live with
her partner, a nurse at the city’s hospital. On Thursday evening,
police had searched certain properties with the aim of confiscating
arms and averting violent protest during the anniversary of the 1916
Easter Uprising. Several cars were set alight later that evening.
Lyra had gone over to cover the rapidly escalating situation. Her
last tweet said simply, ‘Derry tonight. Absolute madness.’ Then
she was shot dead by a man in a balaclava, firing towards police
vehicles. The ‘New IRA’, officially an amalgam of armed groups
opposed to the peace process, and closely tied to drugs movement and
other criminal activity, has since admitted responsibility.</div>
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Still in shock, that day I watched as Lyra’s name rightly made
national headlines. Theresa May said something fairly non-descript.
DUP leader Arlene Foster and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald came
to mark their respect in the city where Lyra had last lived and died,
and Foster was applauded for her words here, about everyone standing
together, and the importance of getting Stormont functioning and
democracy working again in Northern Ireland. An immense crowd
gathered to remember Lyra, at which her partner paid moving tribute,
calling for her death not to be in vain as ‘her life was a shining
light.’ Could Lyra’s legacy yet guide Northern Ireland to peace?
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Then things became surreal. Bill Clinton tweeted that he was
heartbroken by Lyra’s murder. Lyra would have been astounded, if
only she could have known. She had a soft spot for a bit of
celebrity. She had loved the fact that Ana Matronic had been on the
TEDx programme with us and was fabulously friendly in the bar
afterwards. Later she told me how J.K. Rowling, another of her
heroines, had once replied to one of her tweets. I imagined Lyra
laughing, wide-eyed, at her own sudden celebrity, before brushing it
off with some modest remark.</div>
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Then my facebook thread filled up with wonderful personal tributes to
Lyra, most with photos of her goofing about in the bars or streets of
her favourite city. She was so sociable, so much fun, so engaging,
that she had hundreds of friends in different places, and parts, of
her life. Not just the depth, but the reach of the woman was
phenomenal, even without the headlines.
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Inevitably, the story of Lyra’s death has now sunk down the news
columns. As strange and awful as it was seeing Lyra’s face in the
papers, seemingly so out of context, I also feel ridiculously angry
that her death is now no longer news, that the world has refused to
‘stop the clocks.’ But I also know that Lyra has made a
difference. Her life and death have changed things. The Real IRA has
been exposed as unprincipled and criminal in their violence, prepared
to shoot to kill into a crowd, and the support that was growing for
them has haemorrhaged away. The famous ‘Free Derry Corner’
landmark - a blank house wall painted ‘You are now entering Free
Derry’, now has graffiti below in letters just as high,
‘#NotInOurName R.I.P. Lyra.’ The overwhelming majority in
Northern Ireland seek a better future, one built by two communities
who wish to live in peace. Stormont’s politicians have been brought
together to talk about rebuilding the democratic process. No one can
now say that the Irish border issue is simple or insignificant, or
take for granted the priceless peace we have seen for the last few
decades.
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With Lyra’s death, not just Northern Ireland, but all of us, have
all lost an outstanding voice: warm, brave, honest. We must not now
lose the momentum with the conversation that Lyra started about
tolerance, respect, and sincere engagement with those with whom we
most disagree.
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Watch Lyra’s TEDx Stormont talk here:
<span style="color: blue;"><u><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ymU-5Y3rkY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ymU-5Y3rkY</a></u></span></div>
<br />Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-81851971163093486112019-03-11T11:49:00.000+00:002020-03-13T14:34:56.062+00:00Perhaps this International Women’s Day, we might consider judging women for their agency!<b>Article originally published on the <a href="https://www.andantetravels.co.uk/">Andante Travel Website</a> as an interview with Clare</b><br />
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The women of the Special Operations Executive, or SOE, were special agents, recruited, trained, armed and sent to serve behind enemy lines coordinating, training and arming resistance circuits in Nazi-occupied countries alongside their male colleagues. The SOE was established in July 1940, following Winston Churchill’s injunction to ‘set Europe ablaze’. Yet the first female agent of the war, the Polish-born Countess Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, had demanded to be taken on by the British secret services six months earlier, and was in post before the end of 1939! Her achievements in three different theatres of the war showed how valuable female agents could be. Later more women were recruited as they were considered less likely to be stopped and searched than able-bodied men travelling around enemy-occupied countries. Around 39 women were sent into occupied France alone, to act as clandestine couriers and wireless transmitters - work for which they were told they could expect to be arrested, interrogated and executed within six weeks. Many stepped up to undertake sabotage and armed combat, and several became circuit leaders, organising armies of several hundred men. Thirteen would not return.<br />
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<i>The women who were involved in this project, what would have given them the ‘edge’ to apply (or be recruited, if that was the case)?</i><br />
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Krystyna Skarbek was unusual in that she approached MI6 to be given a role. Women were usually recruited from other branches of the services when they were discovered to have valuable skills. All the female agents were great patriots with a strong sense of honour and duty. They were determined, ready to endure both stress and loneliness, and each was also incredibly brave. They shared certain skills too; the ability to think quickly and creatively under pressure, languages skills, physical fitness; and the ability to win support and generate loyalty. Yet there was no single ‘type’ of woman that made a good agent. They came from many different countries and faiths, some were young women, others mothers or grandmothers, one had an artificial leg. Beauty could be both a help and hindrance, as an attractive face might charm but was also more memorable. The popular idea that the female agents’ most important role was as a ‘honey-trap’, seducing the enemy into revealing their secrets, is mistaken. Although some did employ their charms to good effect, their most vital attribute was simply that they might be overlooked while getting on with a range of tasks from gathering intelligence to smuggling, and sabotage to transmitting radio communications.<br />
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<i>What can guests on Historical Trips’ Women of the SOE tour expect from the experience?</i><br />
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This is a very special and personal tour that follows in the footsteps of several of the female special agents, some of whom did not return, but all of whom made a significant contribution to the Allied war-effort. As well as visiting a couple of small museums, and several public and some quite hidden memorials, family members of several of the special agents have supported the tour, opening up their homes, giving talks, and sharing their knowledge. I feel strongly that the contribution made by the women should be remembered respectfully, and their service honoured.<br />
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<i>What do you think is important to consider, discuss or celebrate on International Women’s Day 2019?</i><br />
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I am often asked why I mainly write about women. While I would be delighted to write about the lives of interesting men, the fact is that there is still a rich seam of women’s stories waiting to be told, and plenty of information to be found that has been misfiled under ‘domestic’! Furthermore, all too often female special agents, in particular, are still presented primarily as beautiful and brave, rather than as effective. Perhaps this International Women’s Day, we might consider judging women for their agency!<br />
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<i>What interests you so much about women involved in war?</i><br />
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Conflict requires societies to give of their all, even if this means defying previous societal norms. As a result, wars have provided many women with new opportunities, be it working on farms or in factories, as drivers or pilots, or behind enemy lines as special agents. My three books look at the responses of four very different women to conflict. The remarkable Eglantyne Jebb, who distributed aid in the Balkan conflict that turned into the First World War, later defied the law to set up Save the Children, and developed the pioneering concept of children’s human rights - permanently changing the way the world regards and treats children. Krystyna Skarbek was not only the first female agent of the Second World War, but also the longest-serving agent male or female. Brought up to marry well, she yearned for freedom, and was extremely effective when she had the chance to fight for it. Most recently, I have written about the only two women to serve as test-pilots for the Third Reich, one a fanatical Nazi, the other secretly in the German resistance. Their perspectives, choices and actions meant that they would end their lives on opposite sides of history. Perhaps paradoxically, in overturning established special norms conflict can be an enabler, as well as a force of destruction.<br />
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<i>You must have experienced some really memorable moments over the years, thanks to your work as an author along with your various lectures and television/radio appearances, could you please share some with us?</i><br />
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I love my job. I am naturally nosy, and being a biographer gives me license to read private letters and diaries, and interview witnesses of the most extraordinary events from the past. My research has led me to sleep in my subjects' bedrooms, and eat from their dishes - how good is washing up, could there be any DNA left on a plate? I have flown a glider in France, eaten breakfast with an assassin’s son in Germany, and in Poland I was once nearly arrested by the Gestapo… honestly, you will have to ask me when you see me!<br />
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Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-38455591244056751342018-11-20T17:10:00.000+00:002020-03-13T14:35:25.145+00:00Meeting the Nazi test-pilot Hanna Reitsch<i>Published by the Alderney Literary Festival where Clare will be speaking in March 2019</i><br />
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One of the great joys of researching my two books about special agents and pilots in the Second World War has been interviewing veterans and witnesses to that conflict, and others who knew or met those who served in it. As the human coast erodes, as it were, it feels ever more important to capture these stories.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Occasionally after a book has been published, people get in touch with stories that I would love to have included in my books. With The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the dramatic and still little-known story of Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg, the only women to serve the Nazi regime as test pilots in the Second World War, but who ended their lives on opposites sides of history, I have been lucky enough to meet two people who knew Hanna. </span><br />
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Former diplomat, Treasury official and President of the European Investment Bank, Brian Unwin, met Hanna in the 1960s when he was serving the British High Commission in Accra, Ghana. He got in touch having been astounded by the very different picture he had gained of Hanna from reading my book. Over lunch at the Reform Club, Brian told me how he had been sent to deliver a diplomatic gift of books to the head of the Ghanaian gliding school outside Accra in ‘the dying days of Kwame Nkrumah’s totalitarian regime’. He remembered a few white buildings around the field, a crowd, the hot sun, and his giving a ‘stock speech’. Afterwards the ‘attractive silver-haired director of the school, in her 50s’ offered to take him up in a glider. Slightly nervous, Brian checked that she was qualified to do so. After her reassurances she took him up for a short flight. Only when he returned to the High Commission did he learn that she was Hanna Reitsch, ‘Hitler’s pilot’. </div>
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Brian said that he had been rather proud to include this story in his memoirs, and to think that he was probably the last Englishman alive to have been flown by Hanna Reitsch. Having read my book, however, and learned ‘how unreconstructed’ Hanna was, he has reviewed his perspective. </div>
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Last week, after I gave a talk at the Wimborne Literary Festival, John Batchelor, MBE, introduced himself. John is a military artist and technical illustrator who met Hanna at Edwards Air Force Base in California, around 1977. Hanna had got out of her Mercedes car, John told me, and soon had a crowd of people around her. Curious as to who she might be, John identified her by the two pieces of jewelry she was wearing. One was a senior gliding award with diamonds, the other a round brooch with a border of precious stones and a swastika at its centre. The woman could only be Hanna Reitsch and the second brooch her gift from Hitler, which she said she would wear for the rest of her life – even though it was now illegal to wear the swastika in Germany.</div>
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John introduced himself to Hanna, and found her ‘very helpful’ when he asked her about her war-time test flights. Fascinatingly, she told him that the one aircraft she would not fly under power was the Me163. This confirmed my belief that although she was happy to tell the BBC in an interview that flying the Me163 was ‘like riding on a cannon ball,’ her own flights with it had been when she was towed up to test the gliding landings. </div>
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Hanna did not discuss the Nazi regime or politics with John, but when he mentioned her jewellery she told him that she had also kept her Iron Cross but did not wear it ‘every day’. It seems to confirm that Hanna was, as the brilliant British Royal Naval pilot Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown had told me during my research, ‘a fanatical Nazi’ to the end. </div>
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John was amused, however, when he left Hanna or, as he put it, ‘got rid of her into her waiting Mercedes’. A group of young aviation people, editors and writers, who were waiting nearby, asked, ‘Who was that old woman you were trying to date’, only to be astounded to learn that it was Hanna Reitsch!</div>
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Twice during my research for The Women Who Flew for Hitler I was told that I was just ‘two handshakes away from Hitler’; once by Eric Brown, who had shaken Hanna’s hand, and once by Major General Berthold von Stauffenberg, whose father Claus von Stauffenberg had led the most famous assassination attempt on Hitler; the 20 July 1944 Valkyrie bomb plot. It was an honour, as well as a great pleasure, to interview all these men, and it is always wonderful to meet other people who are willing to generously share their memories to help me gain the most accurate picture I can of my subjects. Perhaps, if I get the chance to have a new edition of The Women Who Flew For Hitler, I can add some further nuance to their stories! </div>
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Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-83582563197886174152018-10-17T15:20:00.001+01:002018-10-19T13:07:58.828+01:00Ford Maddox Ford argued that if you open a book at page 99, "the quality of the whole will be revealed to you". Here Clare applies the Page 99 Test to The Women Who Flew for Hitler<i>Blogpost written for the Campaign for the American Reader.</i><br />
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<i><br /></i><i>Clare Mulley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Women Who Flew for Hitler and reported the following:</i><br />
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Melitta posed for British press photographers “where the huge ‘D’ for Deutsche was painted, rather than beside the swastika on the tail” of her light aircraft, page 99 of The Women Who Flew for Hitler opens. In a way, this gets right to the heart of things.<br />
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This is a book about the only two women to serve the Third Reich as test pilots during the Second World War. That they were both brilliant pilots is a given; the Nazis would not have let any women near an aircraft if they did not need their skills. As the only female Flight Captains in Nazi Germany, and recipients of the Iron Cross, Melitta von Stauffenberg and Hanna Reitsch were also great patriots and shared a strong sense of honor and duty. Their concepts of ‘patriotism’, however, were very different. Hannah was a fanatical Nazi. Melitta was secretly Jewish and loyal to an older, pre-Nazi Germany. In 1944 she would become closely involved in her brother-in-law Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Hitler.<br />
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Back in 1938, where page 99 finds us, Melitta had been sent to England to show the British what German female pilots were made of. As it happened, her visit coincided with Chamberlain’s trip to Munich. British journalists were on standby for major news, and rather frustrated to be reporting on “two pretty young German pilots in cotton skirts and light woolen cardigans”. So when Melitta was suddenly ordered to report to her Embassy without delay, it caused something of a media frenzy.<br />
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“Nervous excitement grew around the possibility of being the first to hear the news, and break the story, that the whole country was dreading…”<br />
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By the end of the page, however, we know that the intriguing urgent call to the Embassy has come from Melitta’s husband, unexpectedly on business in London and hoping to arrange a dinner date with his wife. “We trust that the dinner went off satisfactorily”, the British papers dryly concluded their reports.<br />
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This is a book full of high drama in the skies, and collaboration but also courage and defiance down below. There is also plenty of humor and humanity in the small details of life. Above all, this is the true story of two real women with soaring ambitions and a searing rivalry, making seemingly impossible choices under the perverting conditions of war and dictatorship. While Melitta chose to position herself by the ‘D’ for Deutschland, Hanna would always stand by the Nazi swastika. They would end their lives on opposite sides of history.Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-31914683642439315892018-10-06T14:55:00.001+01:002020-03-13T14:35:53.220+00:0010 books in 10 days, ‘no explanations’Clare Mulley, September 2018<br />
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I have just been nominated to post ‘10 books in 10 days, no explanation’ on Facebook. To choose only 10 books was hard enough, but ‘no explanation’ was almost worse… so here is the post-posts blog to explain things a little…<br />
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<b>1. BB, <i>Lord of the Forest</i></b><br />
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It is very difficult to single out one childhood book. I think I was very struck by Ian Serraillier, The Silver Sword and Jill Paton Walsh, The Dolphin Crossing, but as I have now written quite a bit about the Second World War, in which both these are set, I wonder if I have self-selected retrospectively. I also loved Gerald Durrell, Ursula Le Guin and C.S. Lewis. The Lord of the Forest is the book that really stuck with me though. I had no idea who BB was, but liked the anonymity (to me) of the author, and simply loved looking at history through the life of an oak tree. That is right – it is, in effect, the biography of a tree.<br />
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<b>2. Jane Austen, <i>Pride and Prejudice</i></b><br />
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Cliché choice, but I do love this book. Read it as a teenager, loved it then, loved it ever since. Now my two eldest daughters love it, often quote it, and the middle one is dressing up as Lizzie Bennet for her school library open day next week... so it is a love shared as well. My photo shows quite an ugly compendium of Jane Austen’s novels, but it was presented to me for winning my school art prize in 1984… I started reading addictively, and have never stopped.<br />
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<b>3. <i>The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary</i></b><br />
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When I went to university, my mum gave me a small pocket dictionary that had been hers before she married, but while lovely and quite useful it didn’t have enough words. My eye was always on this two-volume dictionary of my dad’s. (No internet then of course.) I now love both, and also many other dictionaries including Johnson’s and Flaubert’s, Brewers Dictionary of Phrases and Fables, and of course the ever evolving Oxford Dictionary of National Biography<br />
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<b>4. Mary Wollstonecraft, <i>A Vindication of the Rights of Women</i></b><br />
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Another university read. In 1792 this book pioneered the idea that women are ‘human creatures… rational creatures’, deserving the same fundamental rights and opportunities as men. It is hard to argue against her basic position, ‘I do not wish them [women] to have power over men, but over themselves’, but unfortunately many of her concerns are still relevant today.<br />
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<b>5. Vikram Seth, <i>A Suitable Boy</i></b><br />
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A wonderful novel, full of history, humour, politics and a love of words and language both evoking and transcending time and place. While in different countries, my mother, sister and I each read a copy when it came out, and our talk about the book formed a strata through our letters. We each agreed it was obvious who Lata should marry and only later discovered we had each favoured a different contender. I do love books to escape with. Lots of them. Here I also have to mention Adaf Soueif’s very romantic The Map of Love… but there are so many!<br />
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<b>6. Julian Barnes, <i>Flaubert’s Parrot</i></b><br />
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I have a love/hate relationship with Julian Barnes’ writing, but this is a brilliant book. It is not only about a subject that fascinates me - biography - it also inhabits, explores, debunks and celebrates the very idea of biography. At times I have become obsessed with the ethics of biography, biographical techniques and structures, the balance of factual granite to creative rainbow, the nature of truth, the lenses we peer through, biographies as mirrors as much as windows etc. Wonderful genre-bending ‘biographies’ that have played with these issues include Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, A.J.A. Symons’ Quest for Corvo, Richard Holmes’ Footsteps, Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, and many others including this book, here to represent them all, Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot.</div>
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<b>7. Sei Shõnagon, <i>The Pillow Book</i></b></div>
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One of the things I love about researching a biography is the sense I sometimes get of joining a conversation across history. Reading diaries and letters, or even less intimate material, can bring moments of profound empathy and a frequent sense of a meeting of minds (although also sometimes the sudden shock of finding inexplicable prejudice or worse.) Of course you can feel this sense of communication across time and place whenever you read a book, fiction or non-fiction, but it first really struck me when I read the daily thoughts and observations of the tenth century Japanese courtier, Sei Shõnagon. Perhaps most famously, because of its resonance, one day she noted ‘a man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random, as if he knew everything.’ At times I looked up almost surprised she wasn’t with me. </div>
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8. <b>Alexander Masters, Stuart: <i>A Life Backwards</i></b></div>
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There are many brilliant biographies on my shelves, but to me this one takes the cookie, or in this case ill-cooked filthy chicken curry. Apparently it was the book’s subject, Stuart Shorter, whose stroke of genius it was to tell his story grave-to-cradle, unpeeling him layer-by-layer, Shorter and shorter, from chaotic addict until he is the blank human potential of any newborn child. It is Alexander Master’s genius that staples Stuart to the page however. Completely brilliant.</div>
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9. <b>Arundhati Roy, <i>The God of Small Things</i></b></div>
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A book that completely absorbed me, then wrung me out and left me bereft. I immediately dived back in and am always reluctant to leave it.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4654265822845138719" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>10. <b>Leo Marks, <i>Between Silk</i> <i>and Cyanide</i> & Anonymous, <i>A Woman in Berlin</i></b></div>
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Cheating I know, but I needed both. Recently I have read a lot of excellent Second World War books. Robert Harris’ alternative Fatherland will always be up there, but I’m mostly drawn to memoirs and histories. These two were among those that have really stayed with me. Leo Marks became the head of coding for Britain’s Special Operations Executive during the war. Brilliantly witty, mainly moral, very human, he was, I imagine, a difficult man who tells a terrible, wonderful story. But I can’t help but book-end my selection here with another ‘anonymous’ book; the memoirs of a woman in Berlin during the terrible days at the close of the Second World War and subsequent Red Army occupation. Recently I have also loved François Frenkel’s memoir No Place to Lay One’s Head, which is also about a word-loving woman, this time a Polish Jew escaping the Nazi advance through France. I have picked A Woman in Berlin because, although now attributed to the journalist Marta Hillers, when I first read it I did not know who the author was – an unknown woman, so representing all.</div>
Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-43246425786108996642018-09-20T12:10:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:37:00.565+00:00"The Women Who Flew For Hitler".....a dreamcast of a movie adaptationClare Mulley, September 2018<br />
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‘Blog post written for The Campaign for the American Reader’.<br />
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What could be more filmic? Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg both learnt to fly over the same green slopes of north-east Germany in the 1930s. This was the glamorous age of flight, when Amelia Earhart had her own fashion line and En Avion was the perfume of choice. Female pilots anywhere were considered courageous, but nowhere were they considered more extraordinary than in Nazi Germany, which promoted the idea that women’s real place was in church, the kitchen and the nursery. Hanna and Melitta were exceptional, and with the war they became the only women to serve the regime as test pilots, the only two female Flight Captains in Nazi Germany, and both recipients of the Iron Cross.<br />
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You might have thought, then, that Hanna and Melitta would have supported one another, but in fact there was no love lost between them. With her bubbly personality, blond hair and blue-eyes, Hanna seemed the perfect example of Aryan maidenhood, and she was soon an ardent supporter of what she considered to be the dynamic new Nazi regime. Melitta, by contrast, was dark, serious and seemingly shy. Her father had been born Jewish and she was officially categorised as ‘Mischling’, or half-blood, by the regime, but her skills were so valuable to them that they gave her ‘Equal to Aryan’ status. In July 1944, Melitta would support the most famous attempt to assassinate Hitler.<br />
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There could hardly be more perfect roles for two actresses today; both at the heart of the Third Reich’s war effort, risking their lives daily in the macho world of Nazi aviation. How about Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence for the blond Hanna, who once starred in UFA films for the Nazi the regime. Rachel Weiss or perhaps Gal Gadot could excel as her nemesis, whose quiet determination and moral courage drive the story forward.<br />
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There are plenty of supporting roles for the men here too. Hitler is hard to cast, although Bruno Ganz was excellent in Downfall. (The terrifying map room scene when Hitler/Ganz screams at his generals is one of the most adapted clips on YouTube.) Tom Cruise has already played Claus von Stauffenberg, Melitta’s brother-in-law, in the film Valkyrie, but perhaps he could be persuaded to reprise the role among the supporting cast?Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-15588655702741460862018-08-02T13:08:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:37:58.587+00:00Humour and Humanity: A day with 100 RAF veterans at Project PropellerClare Mulley, July 2018<br />
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<i>Mary Ellis as a Second World War ATA pilot, & with me at Project Propeller 2017</i><br />
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‘When women pilots cease to become news, the battle of equality will have been won’, the British ATA pilot <b>Mary Ellis</b> wrote in her memoirs, published last year.i Mary died in late July, aged 101, the last female Spitfire pilot who flew in the Second World War. I was among those honouring her, talking to Sky News, as her name rightly made headlines once again. I had had the privilege to meet Mary at the Project Propeller annual air veterans’ reunion last year where she told me stories of having been shot at twice in one day by anti-aircraft guns mistaking her for an enemy bomber, and of once being ‘stalked’ through the air by a Luftwaffe pilot who cheekily waved to her before ‘suddenly he was gone’. It was ‘all part of the job’ she told me in her matter of fact way, before striding over to chat with her fellow former ATA pilot Joyce Lofthouse and some of the male veterans at the reunion.<br />
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Mary had joined the women’s section of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in 1941, the same year that C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine wrote that ‘the menace is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when really she has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly’. In those early days the ATA women earned 20% less than the men and were expected to fly in skirts, even in freezing conditions. By the end of the war 166 women had enrolled, working alongside 1,152 men on equal pay and in uniform trousers. Last year the RAF became the first branch of the British military to accept women for service in any role, including close combat. The battle for equality is still being fought, but it is worth both remembering that we have come a long way, and the pioneers like Mary and Joyce who helped make the diversity of today’s RAF possible.<br />
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Joyce passed away last year, and Spitfire pilots Tom Neil and Geoffrey Wellum both died just a few weeks before Mary this July. As we remember these extraordinary men and women, wish them ‘blue skies’ and imagine a wonderful reunion in the clouds, we must also pay attention to those veterans still with us, keeping the Second World War within living memory.<br />
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<i>Project Propeller 2018, Halfpenny Green</i></div>
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This year’s Project Propeller reunion was held at Halfpenny Green, Wolverhampton. Although most World War Two veterans are now in their early 90s, guest numbers have been rising as word of the annual event spreads. It now takes a team of volunteers to not only liaise with the host airfields and ATC cadets, make cakes and sandwiches and book the 1940s singers, but also coordinate a growing crew of volunteer light-aircraft pilots who fly the veterans over from their nearest airfield. This year I arrived in a little Cirrus SR20 piloted by <b>Mark Williams</b> and <b>Nick Snow</b>. Setting off from North Weald, we went first to Elstree to collect veteran Spitfire pilot <b>Geoff Hulett</b>. </div>
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<i>Geoff Hulett with me, and Cirrus pilots Mark Williams and Nick Snow</i></div>
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Geoff was waiting for us in Elstree airfield’s Wings Café, wearing his RAF tie, good aviation sunglasses, and only a slight air of impatience. At ninety-five, he was up on the wing and kindly offering me his hand before I had time to turn around. A quick evaluation of the relative merits of the Spitfire and Cirrus ensued… The Cirrus won on comfort. Geoff, a recipient of the Burma Cross, had been a ferry pilot, delivering Spitfires, Hurricanes and P-47 Thunderbolts in Egypt and the Far East. He remembered his machines getting so hot that when he stopped to refuel he could barely touch the metal harness to lock himself back in, and sometimes oil would slip out onto the floor adding hot fumes to the already heavy air in the cockpit. </div>
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Perhaps unsurprisingly however, the Spitfire cleaned up in other respects. ‘We didn’t have this problem’, Geoff told me cheerfully when the warm engine of our Cirrus had second thoughts about firing as we waited to take off from Elstree. ‘If there were two aircraft, we would park one in front of the other, so that the slip-stream of one would keep the other cool, then reverse the order. That would keep them going.’ Then, once we were up in the air and Nick showed off his GPS navigation systems, Geoff simply pointed out the window saying, ‘that’s the best way actually.’ In Burma he had had no radar to guide him, only maps and a compass. ‘Monsoon season was awkward’, he admitted, ‘though low-flying on clouds is always fun’. Two minutes later Geoff had taken the controls, and we were ‘cloud surfing’ over to Wolverhampton in the very safe hands of a Second World War Spitfire pilot.</div>
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<i>Spitfire pilot Geoff Hulett at the controls</i></div>
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Geoff disappeared as soon as we landed at Halfpenny Green. Many of the veterans I spoke with were keen to meet up with old friends, and I was also glad to see a number of familiar faces such as RAF Flying Officer <b>John Alan Ottewell</b> who advised me on my research for my last book, T<i>he Women Who Flew for Hitler</i>.</div>
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<i>With Flying Officer John Alan Ottewell</i></div>
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Like most of the veterans I spoke with this summer, John had flown with Bomber Command. Every one of these men had an incredible story to tell. </div>
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Only eleven at the start of the war, <b>Ron Applegate</b> joined the ATC in 1942. Although he flew with trainee pilots doing what he called ‘circuits and bumps’, one of his most vivid memories was when he was out blackberrying with his brother. ‘All of a sudden there was a tremendous roar. It was Lancasters, flying at rooftop level… coming at us!’ Only later did Ron learn that they were practising low-level flying and flights over water in preparation for dropping the ‘bouncing bomb’, designed to destroy German dams. </div>
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Radar specialist <b>Stan Forsyth</b> flew with heavy radar equipment, locating enemy radar stations to be bombed, and sometimes accompanying raids up above the bombers, trying to catch the frequency of enemy fighters to warn the crews below. In 1944 Stan was given a different target to locate: the German Navy's mighty 42,900 ton battleship, the Tirpitz. ‘Five aircraft went out, and I found it in the fjords’, Stan told me with understandable pride. ‘I didn’t see it, except on the radar, but I knew it was him. They sent the bombers in, and I got the DFC for finding it.’</div>
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Pilot and Warrant Officer <b>Peter Holloway</b> flew over 150 operations in Burma in what he called ‘Hurricanes and Hurribombers.’ Some ops only lasted ten minutes, he told me, as his airfield was right at the edge of the Japanese lines. ‘We were so close you just took off, lifted the wheels, dropped the bombs, and landed again.’</div>
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<b>John Whitworth</b> remembered being exhausted, flying a Mosquito back from a Hamburg bombing raid, when suddenly he felt his unflappable navigator, Canadian <b>Bill Tulloch</b>, nudging him hard with his elbow. ‘We were doing 400mph, and I was asleep!’ </div>
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Several of the crew flying on long distance raids had been shot down. Wireless Operator and Gunner <b>Fred Hooker</b>’s first operation was on 3 September 1944, a bombing raid over Venlo in Holland. Bad weather forced them to land away from their base and they only returned on 10 September. The following night they flew to the Ruhr ‘which was hell’. On 12 September their aircraft was shot down on an operation to Munster. </div>
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‘We were on a bombing run, when suddenly I was sitting in fresh air,’ Fred remembered. ‘No Perspex. No guns. In fact the guns were hanging from the tower turret.’ With no intercom, Fred moved down into the damaged aircraft. ‘The rear was full of flames, and in the portside was a bloody large hole.’ Seeing one of the crew bail out of the front hatch spurred him into action but the parachute he grabbed was already on fire. The last thing Fred saw before blacking out was the flight engineer who strode over, picked up a chute, put his arm round Fred, clipped on and pushed him out. </div>
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Fred’s pilot and the tail gunner both lost their lives in the burning bomber, but the rest of the crew landed in a field of sugar-beet near Munster. Immediately caught, they were searched and put on a truck into the city. Walking past burning houses in the streets they had been bombing just an hour earlier was sobering. Some civilians tried to attack them and Fred believes his life was saved a second time that night, but this time by their two German guards. </div>
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Like several of the veterans at the reunion, Fred had brought along some papers. Among them was his German prisoner-of-war ID card, with photo showing a ruggedly handsome but stoney-faced young man. When I asked what was in his mind when it was taken, he laughed, ‘Blue murder… I hadn’t had a wash for two weeks!’ He would spend most of the rest of the war as a POW, long months whose progress he recorded in pencil on brown paper ripped from a Red Cross parcel. </div>
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<i>Wireless operator and gunner Fred Hooker with his papers</i><br />
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Welshman <b>Harry Winter</b> was also shot down over Germany. Harry flew Wellingtons and Halifaxes with the 427 Royal Canadian Air Force, known as the ‘Lion Squadron’ and adopted by MGM because of their rampant lion insignia. In October 1943 Harry was in the second wave of the bombing run over Kassell, when German flares lit up the sky until it was like ‘going down a high street with the lights on’. Night-fighters proceeded to shoot down twenty-five bombers within five miles. </div>
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Having been caught with his parachute still attached after baling out, Harry was taken to Luft 7. Later he would join the forced march to Stalag IIIA, south of Berlin, a camp that was eventually liberated by the Russians. Even then Harry was detained for a POW swap. Allowed to walk under guard into East Berlin, he knocked on doors asking for food. ‘Two girls saw my uniform was different and, when they found out I was British, they asked me to stay and protect them’, he told me. The women feared being raped by Russian soldiers. Harry was more than happy to swap the hard floor at the camp for a settee in Berlin, and eventually managed to flag down a US army truck and get sent home. When he finally got back to Cardiff, Harry found that his girlfriend had married another chap. ‘It was ok, I had disappeared I guess,’ he told me wistfully, before his eyes lit up again. ‘I got a London girl.’</div>
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All the veterans I spoke with this summer were pleased to share their time and memories, and some have published their memoirs, listed below. <b>Ivan ‘Lucky’ Potter</b> even signed a copy of his for me. None glorified war in any way, although most spoke warmly about the comradeship they found, and lit up at recalling their better memories. </div>
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‘We were flying with a full bomb load, a Lancaster UMH2, and there was a thundercloud directly on track’, Rear Gunner <b>Peter Potter</b> told me, a large grin raising the curled ends of his glorious moustache. ‘It was too massive to go around, so we went up 24,000 feet to go over it.’ Soon they were caught in the turbulent centre of the dark cloud, then suddenly sucked out of it and falling 20,000 feet. The air was howling over the aircraft’s fuselage and the control panel shook so much it was hard to read the dials as they plummeted down, but somehow Peter’s pilot managed to pull the Lancaster out of their unintended dive. They had just enough power to limp back to base. ‘It tore the rivets out, its body was all twisted’, he added rather proudly. Later he got a letter from Lancaster design engineer <b>Roy Chadwick</b>, who had inspected the broken aircraft. ‘To have incurred this damage,’ Chadwick wrote, ‘you had to have been going at 520mph. Ps, You have probably flown the fastest bomber in the war’.</div>
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<i>At Project Propeller 2018 with Lancaster Rear Gunner Peter Potter. Photo c. Nigel Whitmore.</i></div>
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There was also much moving talk about losing friends and colleagues however, the less fortunate who are also always remembered at Project Propeller reunions. ‘The worst was when we bombed Nuremberg,’ Wireless Operator and Rear Gunner <b>Reginald Payne</b>, now 95, recalled. ‘I have still my log-book. I did the ops without any real problems… the ground-crew found damage to the aircraft that showed we had been hit by enemy flak, but we were not aware of it… But we lost 94 airmen. We lost men in our hut. We lost a lot of friends. At night you would sleep next to another man, and you always said goodnight. Then they were gone. You would see all the empty beds, and a few days later “sprog” [newer recruits] airmen would come in.’ </div>
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<i>Wireless Operator and Rear Gunner Reginald Payne</i></div>
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<b>Mary Ellis</b> had shared similar memories with me the year before. Once, delivering a Wellington bomber, she had had to stay over at a Bomber Command airfield & enjoyed a fine meal in the mess with ‘all these lovely air crew.’ ‘The place was full of laughter and they were all such decent chaps’, she told me. The next morning there were only two or three men at breakfast, ‘solemnly drinking tea’. The others had not returned from their missions that night.</div>
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Other veterans spoke about the civilian casualties of their bombing raids. ‘At age 18/19 you don’t think’, <b>Lawrence Rogers</b>, now 96, told me. ‘Dropping bombs. It was our duty but so many innocent people were killed. Women and children.’ </div>
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Most of the men were quick to tell me that their best moment was, in <b>Reginald Payne</b>’s words, ‘landing back at base after the last op.’ Reginald and his crew celebrated by going into Lincoln to have ‘a good old round of drinks, but not too much - you never knew whether, for certain, they wouldn’t want you again the next day.’ Between them, the veterans I met saw the end of the war on different dates in London, Lincoln, Berlin and Shanghai.</div>
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<i>Pilot Eric Carter</i></div>
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At 98 ‘and getting on a bit’, <b>Eric Carter</b>, who had wangled his way into the RAF having originally been called up for the army, only to serve a gruelling year in Russia followed by postings in Egypt and the Far East, was the least sentimental about his war. ‘The best moment? I don’t think there were many… It was bloody dangerous, and it was awful.’ Like many, he had a clear message for the next generation: ‘Learn as much as you can from this period. It was not a party, not something to happen again. Make sure it does NOT happen again. Watch these politicians.’</div>
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<i>Navigator Jim Wright greets the Lancaster bomber salute at Project Propeller 2018</i></div>
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A moment later our conversation was drowned out by the sound of rapidly approaching Rolls Royce Merlin engines. Eric automatically lifted his gaze, while <b>Jim Wright</b> in a chair beside us, a navigator who flew on 43 missions during the war, raised his hand in greeting. A Lancaster was flying low overhead in tribute to the service that these men and their colleagues, male and female, British, Poles, Czech and others, had given during the conflict. </div>
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For my daughters, the Second World War is part of the history curriculum. I felt the same at their age, but almost as much time has passed since I was at school, as between the war and my classes. My children are probably the last generation who may have the chance to talk with people who served in the conflict, men and women like Mary Ellis, Geoff Hulett, Fred Hooker and Eric Carter, whose lives were shaped not only by their service, but by the absence of those dear to them who lost their lives. Once female pilots made headlines by dint of their gender; these days the names of both male and female Second World War pilots are all too often in the papers as they leave us. <i>Project Propeller</i> provides a unique opportunity for many of those still with us to meet again, share their news, and retell their stories. Each passing year it feels ever more important to listen to their voices, remember the debt that we owe, and learn from their memories and insights, their humour and their humanity. </div>
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<i>Clare with Cirrus pilot Mark Williams, Flight Engineer Harold Kirby, and Pilot Geoff Hullet.</i></div>
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<i><b>Project Propeller depends on donations of both time and money to keep going. If you would like to contribute, or are a private light aircraft pilot who would be interested in offering to fly veterans to next year’s reunion, please get in touch through the website</b></i>: <a href="http://www.projectpropeller.org/PP/index.asp">http://www.projectpropeller.org/PP/index.asp</a></div>
Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-14972803571284552162018-06-21T16:42:00.002+01:002020-03-13T14:39:10.657+00:00A New Perspective on The Children of Calais<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "open sans" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"><b>‘The Children of Calais’ </b>is an unusual piece of public art in a country that tends to memorialize heroes, royals and victories. Britain has a lot of men on horses, columns and pedestals, and quite a few Queen Victorias gazing across towns and parks. But things are slowly changing. April this year saw the first statue to a woman in Parliament Square, Millicent Fawcett. ‘The Children of Calais’, unveiled by Alf Dubs in June, is something different again. The six life-sized, bronze figures, three girls, three boys, that compose the piece are designed to provoke debate about the inhumanity of our response to the children – those most vulnerable to neglect and abuse – caught up in the ongoing refugee crisis.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit;">Award-winning sculptor and conceptual artist Ian Wolter was inspired by Rodin’s famous ‘The Burghers of Calais’, an edition of which lives in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament. Rodin was commissioned by the City of Calais to commemorate the six burghers of their city who, in the fourteenth century, were prepared to sacrifice themselves to the English king, in order to save their citizens from starvation under siege. The six men are portrayed at the moment they walked out of Calais to their certain death, one carrying the key to the city in an act of silent surrender. Every figure subtly portrays desperation in a different way. Although they are standing close enough to touch one another, each is lost and alone in their misery. Yet as well as expressing sorrow and defeat, they also capture heroic self-sacrifice and human dignity.</span><br />
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<i>On the left, Auguste Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, and, on the right, Ian Wolter’s The Children of Calais.</i><br />
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‘My six figures are English children,’ Ian explains, ‘children I know, in contemporary clothes, but in poses echoing Rodin’s burghers, with the tallest child holding a life-jacket in place of the Calais city key. Refugee children are simply children at the end of the day, forced from their homes and at the mercy of strangers whose language they may not even speak. When children are portrayed in the way Rodin approached his sculpture, the loneliness and desperation is overlaid with their need for adult care and protection.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Refugees are not just a contemporary phenomenon. Starvation, war and disease have driven people from their homes for centuries. Labour peer Alf Dubs, who travelled up from London to unveil the sculpture in the North Essex market town of Saffron Walden, is a former child refugee himself.</span><br />
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Just six years old when he left Czechoslovakia, he carried not a key or life-jacket but a simple packed lunch for his journey across Europe on the eve of the Second World War. So terrified was he of wasting his precious meal, that he did not eat at all for two days, until he arrived at London’s Liverpool Street Station. Alf was one of 669 children rescued though Nicholas Winton’s Czech Kindertransport initiative. In 1939, Winton forged Home Office paperwork; in 2003 he was knighted for his ‘services to humanity’, and there is now a plaque to commemorate the rescue in the House of Commons.<br />
“I am emotionally involved’ with the issue of child refugees, Alf made clear at the ‘Children of Calais’ unveiling, but ‘not just because of my background. I believe that most people, if not all in the country, think that we can do more for child refugees… I have never said that Britain should take them all. We should simply take our share.’<br />
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It was Save the Children that first informed Alf that there were 95,000 unaccompanied child refugees in camps in Europe, who fell outside of EU law giving families the right to live together. This inspired his ‘Dubs Amendment’, a proposal that Britain should take some 3,000 of these children to live in safety in the UK, even though they had no family link here. Alf already knew the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, because, as Maidenhead locals, they had met at Nicolas Winton’s 100th birthday party. May, however, asked Dubs to withdraw his amendment, a suggestion he rejected.<br />
After returning to the Lords, the Dubs Amendment was finally passed, though later scrapped after only 350 unaccompanied children had been brought to safety in Britain. In 2017 Britain’s inappropriately named Immigration Minister, Robert Goodwill, announced that we had done our bit and ‘met the spirit of the amendment’. Now the issue is being debated again. ‘It is important to recognise that campaigning is not the perogative of any one political party’, Alf made clear, with a quick look at the Conservative MP of Saffron Walden, Kemi Badenoch, who attended the reception after the unveiling of the Children of Calais sculpture. Yvette Cooper, the chair of the Commons home affairs committee, described the government’s approach as ‘completely inadequate’ just days later, but Alf insists ‘we’re getting there – it just takes persistence.’<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">‘What communities choose to commemorate in their public spaces is an expression of what is important to them’ sculptor Ian Wolter said. ‘The people who came to the unveiling of my piece donated over £600 to Safe Passage, there has been huge press interest, and if also some criticism on social media it can only be good if art provokes debate.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The lives of the six Burghers of Calais, as represented by Rodin, were eventually spared in an act of mercy by the English king’s pregnant wife. ‘I liked that element of the fourteenth century story,’ Ian adds, ‘because in my work it suggests the possibility of a happy ending for child refugees. That in the end, humanity may hold sway.’</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">First published by the City of Sanctuary <a href="https://cityofsanctuary.org/2018/06/13/a-new-perspective-on-the-children-of-calais/">here</a></span></div>
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Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-72092119039188887242018-06-20T16:11:00.003+01:002020-03-13T14:41:05.281+00:00Historia Interviews: Michael Morpurgo<div>
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<span style="box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: 700;">Clare Mulley talks to HWA Honorary Patron, Michael Morpurgo, about the extraordinary family history that inspired his latest book.</span></div>
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On 17 August 1944, Michael Morpurgo’s uncle, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Cammaerts" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">Francis Cammaerts</a>, was scheduled to be executed. He and two colleagues had been arrested by the Nazi German occupying forces in southern France, who rightly suspected that they were special agents, sent in to arm and organise the French resistance. Having had ‘an ominously good meal’ of vegetable soup, that evening the three men were marched across the prison courtyard towards the football ground, the place used for executions by firing squad. As the sky darkened with a summer storm, they were surprised to suddenly be herded the other way and into a waiting Citroën. Once round the first bend, the car stopped to collect a solitary figure, standing silhouetted against the white wall of an isolated farm building. It was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krystyna_Skarbek" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">Krystyna Skarbek</a>, aka Christine Granville, the Polish-born female special agent who worked with Francis in the field. Unknown to him and the other men, a few days earlier Christine had begged the local resistance to rescue them. After their refusal, she had cycled the 20 kilometers over to the prison, planned, and pulled off the apparently impossible rescue on her own…</div>
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A few years ago, not long after my biography of Christine,<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spy-Who-Loved-Clare-Mulley/dp/1447201183" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;"> The Spy Who Loved</em></a>, had been published, I met Michael Morpurgo at the Harrogate History Festival where he was talking in his capacity as the Honorary Patron of the Historical Writers Association. I asked him whether he might ever write the story of Francis and Christine, their love affair, resistance work, and Christine’s dramatic rescue of the men. Michael told me that he had published almost 800 stories, but this one was too close to him. Last month I went to the launch of <em style="box-sizing: border-box;"><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mouth-Wolf-Michael-Morpurgo/dp/1405285265" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">In the Mouth of the Wolf</a></em>, Michael’s latest book, which finally tells the story of Francis, his brother Pieter, and Christine. We met again, a few days ago at Ognisko Polskie, London’s Polish Hearth Club, to talk about why Michael finally chose to share this tale.</div>
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‘This story has been at the back of my mind all my life,’ Michael told me, at least ‘since I was six years old.’ Michael was about seven when he first met Francis. Knowing only that his uncle was a great war-hero, and finding him ‘immensely tall’, Michael found him very daunting. ‘Francis was a one-off, very strange. He did not behave like other uncles. He commanded a room whenever he came in. Very handsome. Very impressive. Difficult to talk to’.</div>
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Despite this, Michael was deeply inspired by both of his uncles; Francis and his younger brother Pieter, who had joined the RAF and was killed in action early on in the war. When he left school Michael even joined the army, ‘because the story of these brothers was so strong in my head. I was not a very deep-thinking eighteen year old’, he laughs, and he left again pretty swiftly, ‘never having had to go to war, thank god.’ His change of mind about his vocation came during winter training exercises in 1962. Michael tells even this like a story waiting to be written. ‘It was freezing’, he begins, ‘there was snow on the ground and in the trenches, and the enemy’ – in fact some Argyll Highlanders – ‘would cheerfully have killed and eaten us Sandhurst cadets. They shouted at us all night, and in the morning I had an epiphany… I suddenly realised that what I wanted to do was talk to people, not shoot at them. So I left the army.’ Nonetheless, his time as a cadet gave him an understanding of the military that he would later find very useful in his writing.</div>
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Like Francis before him, Michael then became a teacher, and the two men found each other again, discussing education. Over time Francis spoke more about his own life. It was his knowledge of the courage of the French people who hid and supported members of the resistance during the war that enabled Michael to write his book about the French occupation, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Waiting for Anya</em>, with real integrity.</div>
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Francis now also spoke about working with Christine. She had been parachuted in to serve as the courier with his resistance circuit in the south east of France in the summer of 1944. The previous courier, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecily_Lefort" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">Cecily Lefort</a>, had been arrested some weeks before, and would eventually be killed in the gas chambers. Christine was the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the war, and had already operated behind enemy lines in two different theatres of the conflict; in Eastern Europe; and Egypt and the Middle East. She had a reputation both for courage and for getting results. Francis immediately knew that he could trust her, and simply told Michael that it was Christine ‘who made it work.’ What he did not talk about was their love affair. ‘They fell in love extraordinarily quickly’, Michael told me. But Francis was married, and all he would later say was that ‘it is possible to love two women at the same time’.</div>
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Michael says he feels indebted to his uncles for many things, not least for having given him the debate of his life, ‘do you or don’t you do what they did, serve and fight?’ Michael believes he would have made the same choices at Pieter, the uncle he never knew. Francis started the war as a conscientious objector, and it was these differences that gave Michael his way into the story. He only dared to write the book after Francis had died, involving his family all the way, sending them drafts. Luckily, he says, ‘they are broadminded’.</div>
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In the end, the story of Francis and Christine was one that Michael felt he had to write. ‘History is the most important subject in the world, and the most ignored,’ he told me. ‘There is very little curriculum interest in it. Children are not being taught the story of the story, the development of history. You can start wherever you like, that doesn’t matter at all.’ Michael has told tales from all over the world, and across time, but ultimately, he says, ‘this is the story that I am connected to the most. I grew up during the Second World War. I played in the ruins, and there really was an old soldier with one leg at the end of the street. It was a dark and gloomy London, full of sadness. It was like some monster had come… This war had not just knocked down houses, burnt bodies and taken off flesh, it had also affected my own family.’</div>
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Michael and I had chosen to meet in the <a href="http://ogniskopolskie.org.uk/" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">Polish Hearth Club</a> in London, because last year the club commissioned a bronze bust of Christine, which now lives there on public display. The portrait was sculpted by my husband, <a href="http://ianwolter.com/" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">Ian Wolter</a>, an award-winning artist, using every photograph of her that I could find, including crime scene pictures released to me under the Freedom of Information Act. At the foundry, we added a handful of Polish and British earth to the bronze, so Christine is literally cast with the soil of her native and adoptive countries. What was it like to finally come face-to-face with Christine, I asked Michael. ‘Very strange,’ he hesitated, ‘to see the face that meant so much to Francis, but who none of us were ever able to meet’.</div>
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This is not the place to let you know what made Francis change his mind and fight in the Second World War, or even how Christine saved him and his colleagues-in-arms in a French field in the late summer of 1944. There are books out there for that. As a piece for Historia, I will simply pass on Michael’s passionate belief that, whatever the subject, you ‘have to tell a story that matters to you. If you are not really passionate about the subject then don’t tell it. If it hurts, it hurts. If it’s about war, it will hurt. You look people in the eye when you tell a story… just write.’<br />
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Michael Morpurgo’s <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mouth-Wolf-Michael-Morpurgo/dp/1405285265" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">In the Mouth of the Wolf</em></a>, illustrated by the brilliant French artist Barroux, is published by Egmont. <a href="https://www.michaelmorpurgo.com/" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #222222; outline: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">www.michaelmorpurgo.com</a></div>
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Clare Mulley’s <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spy-Who-Loved-Clare-Mulley/dp/1447201183" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank"><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Spy Who Loved, the Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville</em></a>, is published by Macmillan and has been optioned by Universal Studios. <a href="http://www.claremulley.com/home/" rel="noopener" style="background-color: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; color: #e8554e; text-decoration-line: none; transition: all 0.1s ease-in-out;" target="_blank">www.claremulley.com</a></div>
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Images:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: decimal;">Clare Mulley with Michael Morpurgo at Ognisko Polskie, The Polish Hearth Club in London, 2018. Photo © Ania Mochlinska, Ognisko Polskie.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: decimal;">Francis Cammaerts & Krystyna Skarbek aka Christine Granville</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: decimal;">Clare Mulley with Michael Morpurgo at Ognisko Polskie, The Polish Hearth Club in London, 2018. Photo © Ania Mochlinska, Ognisko Polskie.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: decimal;">The stories of Francis; <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">In the Mouth of the Wolf</em>, & Christine; <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Spy Who Loved</em></li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: decimal;">Ian Wolter’s sculpture of Christine at Ognisko Polskie. © Ania Mochlinska, Ognisko Polskie.</li>
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Article originally published on the Historia Website <a href="http://www.historiamag.com/historia-interviews-michael-morpurgo/">here</a></div>
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Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-50793914231242455772018-05-08T13:28:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:42:16.027+00:00How to Knit Gloves<h2>
‘How to Knit Gloves’ (for the Edwardian James Bond), 1911</h2>
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‘Gloves are not very difficult to knit’, my grandmother wrote in 1911. A rather proud sixteen-year-old, who had probably just finished her first good pair, she prudently remarked that hers were ‘very useful as new finger-tips can be knitted when the first wear out.’<br />
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I am not a knitter, but I love the idea of knitting new finger tips for old, rather like Bond replacing his finger-prints to enable him to have a whisky while avoiding leaving identifying marks on a glass. Bond could, of course, have just worn gloves, but perhaps Q did not have the beautiful instructions that my grandmother had written out for knitting such a ‘useful’ pair.<br />
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There are long generations on my mother’s side of the family. I was 38 when I had my last daughter, and my mother and her mother were about the same age when they had theirs. So, generationally, it only takes us two hops to get back to 1911 when my grandmother, Mary McCombie, was sixteen, the same age as my eldest today. Mary was the first of four siblings, who filled their spare time with reading and radio, tennis and parties, and – Mary at least on one slow afternoon – knitting.<br />
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Hoping to gain some insight into my teenage grandma, I emailed her gloves recipe to my brilliant-knitting friend, Emma to see what she would make of it. Emma immediately plunged into the challenge of knitting Edwardian gloves…<br />
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‘These needles arrived today.’ Emma emailed back a week later, with the first of a series of photos. Mary had recommended using ‘4 steel needles’, which is a traditional way of knitting in the round. Today there are bendy needles that flex in the middle, like bendy-busses making life easier for going round corners. They make it ‘less like hedgehog wrestling’ Emma wrote, which seems a perfect way to describe knitting with traditional straights.<br />
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Mary had recommended 3 ply yarn for men’s gloves, 2 ply for ladies, but Emma soon saw that this would only produce a tiny and rather lacy, decorative glove, so she moved up a size, fortunately announcing, ‘I'm loving this!!!!!’<br />
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Unlike me, Emma understood Mary’s knitting language and was soon setting off on two rounds of purl (garter stitch), 8 rounds of plain (stocking stitch) and 2 rows purl. The first cuff appeared. #intertextualknittingphotography<br />
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‘Looking good,’ I wrote back, and love that tattoo!<br />
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Three more photos followed in rapid succession. ‘I can't help but smile at how your gran begins with "gloves are easy to knit”’, Emma wrote. Mary had chosen moss stitch - achieved by doing a knit one, purl one sequence, reversing on the next row. ‘This gives the lovely bumpy effect you can see in the second picture. It's used if you want a robust garment, but it’s a bit of a fancy stitch that someone may use to show off.’ So either Mary wanted robust gloves or she was quietly parading her knitting proficiency.<br />
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Emma was knitting with the TV on. Despite using coloured wool threads as markers, as instructed, she lost count, but pressed on following her mother-in-law’s excellent philosophy that ‘flaws add character’. ‘Amazing work,’ I told her. ‘You are having a conversation with my grandma that I could never have understood, and it tells you a bit about her, her confidence and perhaps showy-offness, that I love.’ I sent her a photo of Mary aged about 16. Unlikely she had any tattoos, and certainly no Netflix.<br />
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The gloves were starting to look a bit mittenish, but Emma was soon ready to knit fingers. Mary’s pattern suggested 7 stitches per finger with 4 stitches added each side to ensure no gaps, but got a little vague in parts so Emma worked it out as she went along, sticking with the moss stitch.<br />
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Suddenly the first was done! ‘Now to make sure the second matches!’ Emma wrote as proud as Mary had ever been…<br />
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The result was a mossy, grey, 1911 work of genius, which Emma generously presented to me one evening a week later! I love them.<br />
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The grandma I remembered was an old lady (that’s the downside of long generations), but she was kind, and loving, and delighted at cheating at cards. I hadn’t put it past her to cheat with her gloves instructions too, but it seems she was rightly proud of her endeavours.<br />
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No doubt when the First World War started, just three years after Mary wrote out her knitting instructions, she again put her skills to good use. It is unlikely that her future husband, Alfred Smith, ever wore her wartime creations. He was posted to Turkey and served at Gallipoli, before being transferred to Egypt, but the nights did get very cold so you never know. I like to think that when they met after the war, and he was back in chilly England, she might have picked up her four steel needles again for him.<br />
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With thanks to Emma Dobson and Mary McCombie.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnoxxMVnh5M98xytCSYjsylxM-nAXP3tzeT81k4wpLIjoa6Q_4ag6b4utjSm6Es-d09g3F758-qK82xb9KKOX9hE4-qhfvmCWMBPg088wWih_xa_NE2BF9rH6Zd7L0XEe9Pti8fnFSFU/s1600/Gloves9.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="702" data-original-width="489" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnoxxMVnh5M98xytCSYjsylxM-nAXP3tzeT81k4wpLIjoa6Q_4ag6b4utjSm6Es-d09g3F758-qK82xb9KKOX9hE4-qhfvmCWMBPg088wWih_xa_NE2BF9rH6Zd7L0XEe9Pti8fnFSFU/s320/Gloves9.png" title="Emma Dobson" width="220" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emma Dobson</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxge-agZIv3dB61F_ts9EVinkIgUAHIdLVQjRrrDp5_z0FiXR3zzspkkrwDIvrk35U2k2DRdobt6U-RKh4Xl6kbvAfITO6qvUWZiNza58m0W0Jj29VDPDeYMpr7mAOaZeao0ELrmj-Pnk/s1600/Gloves10.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxge-agZIv3dB61F_ts9EVinkIgUAHIdLVQjRrrDp5_z0FiXR3zzspkkrwDIvrk35U2k2DRdobt6U-RKh4Xl6kbvAfITO6qvUWZiNza58m0W0Jj29VDPDeYMpr7mAOaZeao0ELrmj-Pnk/s320/Gloves10.png" title="Mary McCombie" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary McCombie</td></tr>
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Mary McCombie’s ‘How to Knit Gloves’ full instructions<br />
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<br />Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-47624971543817783752018-05-08T12:51:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:43:39.035+00:00Pilots and Spies, Enablers and Resisters<h3>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Article written for the Chalke Valley History Festival</span></h3>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were the only two women to serve as test pilots for the Nazi regime. Truly remarkable women, both were made Honorary Flight Captains and both were awarded the Iron Cross… yet they ended their lives on opposite sides of history. I am delighted to be talking about their beliefs, decisions and actions as told in my new book, </span><em style="background-color: #f8f8f8; border: 0px rgb(225, 225, 225); box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic", centurygothic, "open sans", helveticaneue, "helvetica neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Women Who Flew for Hitler</em><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">, when I return to the Chalke Valley History Festival this June.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX6Lih8HGn5PZtumodZu4UhLs_U1jxfy7STtazvMMchD3InVE5EsAjQdgArUVKpN3pQmjPrZBTXeuM67wwFj8UU0GVTUvlLRg9Zdc_3r7p93I80qNEcdWryg-V3i3jQom0lTK80hyphenhyphenf4qk/s1600/Spy+Who+Loved+UK+Cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="465" data-original-width="304" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiX6Lih8HGn5PZtumodZu4UhLs_U1jxfy7STtazvMMchD3InVE5EsAjQdgArUVKpN3pQmjPrZBTXeuM67wwFj8UU0GVTUvlLRg9Zdc_3r7p93I80qNEcdWryg-V3i3jQom0lTK80hyphenhyphenf4qk/s320/Spy+Who+Loved+UK+Cover.png" width="209" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">I</span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"> was last at the festival in 2013, speaking about The Spy Who Loved, my biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent during the Second World War. You can hear a recording of that talk <a href="https://cvhf.org.uk/history-hub/the-spy-who-loved/">here</a>. These days the questions that I am most often asked are; why the focus on women in conflict; and why the shift in perspective from the story of an Allied heroine, to that of two women serving the Nazi regime…</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">For a historian, the seismic upheaval of war brings fascinating stories not only of honour, courage and duty, betrayal, sacrifice and horror, but also of shifting priorities and perspectives. For women in Britain, the Second World War brought an end to many hopes and dreams but also new opportunities, notably in the workplace. For some, the conflict also brought the chance to serve both at home, and behind enemy lines. It was of course preconceptions about gender that made female special agents so unexpected and inconspicuous in the field, and therefore so effective when they were trained, armed, and sent to work in Nazi-occupied Europe alongside their male counterparts.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The well-connected daughter of a Polish count and Jewish banking heiress, before the war Krystyna Skarbek got her thrills from smuggling cigarettes by skiing across her country’s mountainous borders. Arriving in London towards the close of 1939, she was desperate to put her skills and experience to good use in the fight against Nazism. Being British and male were then the fundamental requirements of the Secret Intelligence Services, but Krystyna offered a unique opportunity to see how the enemy was organizing in an occupied territory. Deployed before the year was out, she became Britain’s first – and longest serving – female special agent, and was ultimately awarded the OBE, George Medal and French Croix de Guerre for her service in three different theatres of the conflict.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Krystyna’s principle motivation was her deep sense of patriotism. The conflict had enabled her to live a life of freedom, action and significance, but it had also left six million of her compatriots dead, and her ravaged country under the control of a Soviet-backed Communist regime. For her, surviving the ‘terrible peace’ that followed the war was harder than responding to the call to action.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Pioneering German aviators Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg not only made their names in the male-dominated field of flight in the 1930s but, with the onset of the war, also became test-pilots for the Nazi regime. They, too, were motivated by both their sense of honour, duty and patriotism, and their love for personal freedom. Their understandings of what these words meant, however, were very different not only from Krystyna Skarbek’s conception, but also from each other’s.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">With her blond curls and blue-eyes, Hanna looked the perfect ‘Aryan’ woman, which suited both her inclinations and her ambitions. Firmly aligning herself with what she considered to be the dynamic Nazi regime, when war came she proudly put her life on the line to test prototypes including the vast Gigant troop-carrying glider, the Me163 rocket-powered Komet, and even a manned-version of the V1 flying bomb or doodlebug. As a brilliant aeronautical engineer, Melitta, helped develop the Stuka dive-bombers, even insisting on testing her own innovations. She knew that it was only by making herself uniquely valuable to the regime that she might protect herself and her family – her father had been born Jewish. On 20 July 1944 Melitta supported the most famous attempt on Hitler’s life. Conversely in the last days of the war, Hanna flew into Berlin under siege and begged Hitler to let her fly him to safety.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">The Nazi regime and its enormously powerful armed forces led to the suffering and death of millions of people, Jews of all nations, Poles of all religions, Russians, British, French, American, the list goes on. </span><em style="background-color: #f8f8f8; border: 0px rgb(225, 225, 225); box-sizing: border-box; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic", centurygothic, "open sans", helveticaneue, "helvetica neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Women Who Flew for Hitler</em><span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"> searches for the truth about two female pilots, asking why they were so successful and how they felt about serving the Nazi regime. I hope that what it reveals – the good and the bad – will contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which Hitler was able to harness the resources of his country for his terrible purposes. It is no less important that we seek to understand these questions, as that we remember the courage, achievements and sacrifices of the brave men and women whose service in so many fields helped to defeat that threat.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
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<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Clare is due to give a talk at the Chalke Valley History Festival this summer, if you are interested in tickets please go to <a href="https://programme.cvhf.org.uk/programme/events/18-the-women-who-flew-for-hitler-the-true-story-of-hitlers-valkyries/">this link</a>.</span></h4>
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<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #f8f8f8; color: #666666; font-family: "century gothic" , "centurygothic" , "open sans" , "helveticaneue" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">First published for the Chalke Valley History Festival <a href="http://for%20the%20chalke%20valley%20history%20festival/">here</a></span></div>
Phil Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14574951345791378401noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-84299112263120267492017-06-28T14:48:00.002+01:002020-03-13T15:13:35.584+00:00Pioneers of flight: Hitler's forgotten Valkyries<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">First published by Pan Macmillan on 28th June 2017</span></h4>
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Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented and record-breaking women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. In her new book, The Women Who Flew For Hitler, acclaimed biographer and author Clare Mulley tells the real story of Hanna and Melitta. Here, Clare explains why she was drawn to write about these two fascinating women. </span></div>
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Among the women who were awarded the Iron Cross during the Second World War, for me, two stand out. Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were both brilliant pilots whose skill and conviction placed them firmly at the heart of the Third Reich. Hanna with her dazzling smile, blonde curls and blue eyes, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s new regime, happily lending her image to a series of publicity articles and collectable cigarette cards. She also test-flew the most pioneering designs from the Nazi aircraft development programme. The darker, more serious and seemingly shy Melitta had a more conflicted relationship with the regime. Although one of their most senior aeronautical engineers and the lead Stuka dive-bomber test-pilot, she would never accept many of the policies and practices of National Socialism.<br />
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As young women, Hanna and Melitta had learnt to fly fragile wood and canvas gliders over the same green slopes. With engine-powered flight prohibited under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, gliding became the focus for German national pride after the First World War. Although girls were only expected to watch, the women who dared to take to the skies quickly became icons in this golden age of flight.<br />
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In 1936 both Hanna and Melitta would wow the crowds flying at events during the Olympic Games. Two years later Hanna became the first women to fly a helicopter, and the first person ever to fly one inside a building, blowing all the gentlemen’s hats off as she circuited the Deutschlandhalle. When war came she tested the design of wing blades developed to cut through British barrage balloon cables, practised deck landings, and eventually crash-landed in a prototype of the famous Me163 rocket plane, destroying much of her face. Hitler awarded her the Iron Cross for her courage and commitment to duty, making her the first woman to receive the Iron Cross during the war.<br />
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In contrast, Melitta Schiller had quietly built her career further away from the limelight. A brilliant aeronautical engineer as well as a test pilot, Melitta’s work was fundamental in developing the accuracy of Stuka dive-bombers. Sometimes she would pass out during tests, regaining consciousness just in time to pull out before impact. She knew she had to work at the limits of the possible; it was through becoming uniquely valuable that she hoped to help protect herself and her siblings – all of whom had been defined as Jewish ‘Mischling’ in 1937. By 1944 Melitta had been reclassified as ‘Equal to Aryan’, her family were safe, she too had received the Iron Cross, and she was heading up her own military flight institute; an unheard of position for a woman, let alone one with Jewish ancestry.<br />
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, although they knew each other well and often met before and during the war, Hanna and Melitta had a difficult relationship.<br />
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As the tide of the war turned against Nazi Germany, Hanna and Melitta both looked for radical ways to bring an earlier but very different end to the conflict. Their beliefs, decisions, determination, courage and dramatic actions would put them powerfully on opposite sides of history. Yet later, when Hanna was infamous, revered and abhorred in almost equal measure, Melitta simply faded from the record. Uncovering her story has shed extraordinary new light not just on both these women’s lives, but on life more generally inside Germany under the Nazi regime, the limited options open to some, and the courage it took to face realities and act on truths under the perverting conditions of dictatorship and war.Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-76812246277461548042017-05-19T08:55:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:45:00.133+00:00My Weapon is My Writing: Olga Tokarczuk at the London Book Fair.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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First published by English PEN, 12 May 2017</h3>
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‘I treat language like a tool, like a fork and knife when you have to eat reality’, the multi-award winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk told her audience at the English PEN literary salon at this year’s London Book Fair, causing quite a stir. Verbal cutlery or not, Polish is now the second most spoken language in England and Wales, and Poland was this year’s ‘market focus’ at the fair. Visitors were buzzing round the stands showcasing the country’s long and vibrant literary heritage through the work of novelists, poets, non-fiction and children’s authors, as well as Poland’s five Nobel prize winners for literature. Tokarczuk, Poland’s most famous female writer and more than once on the Nobel long-list herself, was one of several international authors attracting the crowds to PEN’s salon.<br />
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Perhaps it is ironic then that in recent years the Polish domestic budget to help promote challenging literary authors such as Tokarczuk has been considerably reduced or reallocated. This is partly why PEN America awarded a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to Jennifer Croft for Tokarczuk’s award-winning The Books of Jacob, to help bring it to an English-speaking readership. ‘Promoting free speech, giving someone a voice, is the most important job in the world’, English PEN’s Robert Sharp says, ‘especially when there is so much need for empathy and understanding in the world.’<br />
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I have a particular interest in Polish history and the Polish book market. My last book, The Spy Who Loved, was a biography of Polish-born Krystyna Skarbek, a.k.a. Christine Granville, the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent in the Second World War. One of my hopes for the book is that as well as telling the story of this remarkable war hero, it might draw attention to some of the key roles played both by women, and by Poles, during the war. I was delighted when The Spy Who Loved was translated into Polish and published under the title Kobieta Szpieg, or ‘Female Spy’. Unable to return to Poland under the Soviet-backed Communist regime after the war, Krystyna Skarbek spent the rest of her all-too short life in London, and is buried in Kensal Green. At first I felt she would have been delighted to be, in some sense at least, finally returning home. But of course she has never been forgotten in the country of her birth where she is already the subject of a number of studies and one fascinating work of fiction by the novelist Maria Nurowska, who met me in Poland during my research for the book to share her insights. Sadly none of Nurowska’s books have yet been translated into English and, even the prolific Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob will be only her third novel published in English.</div>
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Tokarczuk was a professional psychologist until, she says, she realised she was ‘much more neurotic than my clients’. She now claims she could not live without writing: ‘the truth is, I cannot do anything else’. In conversation with Rosie Goldsmith at the English PEN literary salon, she spoke powerfully about the responsibility that, she believes, comes with writing, and which she sometimes feels weighing on her back ‘like luggage’. ‘Proud to be a feminist writer’, one of her key concerns is to consider reality from diverse points of view. As a young girl she used to sit, out of sight, under tables, ‘looking at shoes, legs, and the entire theatre’ as she listened in to other people’s conversations. Growing up she felt the rich presence of Jewish culture everywhere, among other influences, and began to relish how deeply literature was connected to culture. Her own writing reflects the traditional multiculturalism of Poland that existed before the war and the homogeneity promoted by post-war Communism. But it also addresses more negative issues, such as Polish anti-Semitism. Her books are ‘the best advertisement you could think of for Poland’, fellow author Jacek Dehnel argues, ‘but they show the history of Poland from a non-national point of view, giving voice to various minorities’. When pushed to define her writing identity, Tokarczuk says she feels like ‘a Central European writer, writing in Polish’.</div>
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Today Polish identity is principally, but not exclusively, Roman Catholic, and with the country’s current, socially conservative, ‘Law and Justice’ party in office, there is once again less celebration of the nation’s traditional diversity, and less promotion of alternative voices. For some, ‘social life in Poland is focused on demos’ Tokarczuk laughs, but for her, ‘my weapon is writing’. ‘Poles don’t want to know the truth about our history’, Maria Nurowska adds. ‘The role of the writer is to overthrow, and this is what Olga [Tokarczuk] does.’ As tool, knife and fork, or weapon, Tokarczuk and her compatriots know how to deploy words to good effect. What is needed now is the support to help them reach greater audiences both domestically and across international borders.</div>
Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-63491721561477453812017-04-20T13:41:00.000+01:002020-03-13T15:26:58.262+00:00Translating Lives: What it’s like helping refugees to learn English<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">First published by <i>Refugee Action on their website</i>, 29th March 2017.</span></b></h4>
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<span style="color: #676767;">‘Open your files’, Hilary remembers brightly beginning her first English-language class for Syrian refugee families in Cambridge, talking through an interpreter. ‘The whole group smiled, sat forward, and turned open the back cover of their files, ready to go’. Learning a language from absolute scratch can, it seems, be much more than simply a question of grammar and vocab. It is about learning how to translate your entire life, and learning how to operate in a different country and through a culture and set of rules that may often appear to work back-to-front.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">Hilary’s colleagues joke that she has been teaching English to refugees coming to Britain ‘since the Huguenots’. That might be pushing it, but her decades of service testify to the fact that desperate people seeking refuge is far from a new phenomenon. Hilary’s first classes were for Ugandan-Asians arriving in Derby in the early 1970s. As a former French teacher who had just left work to have a baby, she volunteered to give some English-language classes, and has never looked back. Soon she was also teaching women coming from Punjab, and not long after she had moved to Cambridge, in 1979, she started classes for the first refugees to arrive from Vietnam, who came under the auspices of Save the Children.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">A decade later it was refugees from Bosnia supported by the Red Cross. Some of the men arrived weighing only 6 stone and were sent straight to hospital. Almost all were undernourished, abused and traumatized. On learning that Hilary received a small salary, one of the men ‘stared at me with his wonderful blue eyes’, she recalls, and told her ‘I would rather the government just gave me the money so I could buy a gun and go back to protect my family’. His wife and children were still living under shelling in Mostar, but would eventually be reunited in Cambridge.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">The Syrian families now settling in Cambridge are arriving under a government scheme to provide safe shelter for select families from refugee camps in Lebanon and Turkey, who are deemed to be particularly ‘vulnerable’. The first four families arrived in late 2015, and have since been joined by another five. It is a slow process, as arrivals depend on Cambridge City Council being able to provide suitable modest-rent accommodation within the city. New landlords are always desperately needed.</span><br />
<span style="color: #676767;">The government scheme includes funding for the adults to attend some English classes but none that are suitable for complete beginners exist in Cambridge. Instead the independent volunteer Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign organizes, among many other things, specific classes with Hilary and two other volunteer teachers. The teachers work for free, and premises are provided by both the Quakers and a Catholic Church which donates use of its hall as well as money for refreshments, warm clothes and toys for the children.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">Hilary always starts new classes by dividing her group down gender lines. She then asks the groups separately whether they are happy both to learn together, and to have a female teacher. So far the classes have always opted to be taught together with her – which is good because as yet there is only one male teacher, although several men volunteer as interpreters. Nevertheless Hilary is acutely aware of the significance of gender in her classes, and generally feels the men find the work particularly difficult. ‘The men are more conscious of making a fool of themselves, either in language classes or in public’, she says. Struggling to even write their name in front of their wives can be a further blow to self-esteem at a time when ‘everything has been taken away from them, not just their homes, jobs, friends and language, but also the status that came from earning a living and providing for their family – that’s all gone’. In some ways the Syrian women’s familiar roles continue, albeit in different circumstances. Few have worked outside the home, and in Britain they are busy ‘shopping, cooking and looking after the children – and this helps them to relate to ordinary life in a different country’ Hilary says. ‘Men are more cut off from their everyday experiences.’ Hilary therefore tries to maximize the value of her language classes by developing spin-off projects. The women are now swapping recipes and hope to publish an English-language Syrian recipe book. With the men, Hilary hopes to arrange for each to visit someone doing the job they used to do in Syria, such as tilers, tailors – two great jobs to help with pronunciation Hilary notes – builders or civil engineers. Not only will this give them a chance to see how transferable their skills may be, but it will also give them the opportunity to relate to a professional other than a teacher or social worker.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">There is still some work to be done before such a project can be realized however. Classes are arranged via an interpreter so Hilary can learn a little about her students as she introduces herself. She needs to ascertain their previous level of education as study skills are a great advantage, and it is also good to know about their interests so she can pick up on this to support their learning. At the same time, she will never ask about their families or past life, because this might open up trauma or cause friction or embarrassment. It is a difficult balancing act requiring considerable empathy and respect on the part of both teacher and students. Mobile phones are a mixed blessing in such circumstances. Everyone has pictures to share that they can talk about, but recently one woman showed some film she had just received of her old house destroyed, with the bodies of several dead soldiers in front of it.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">The first goal is to enable the class to be able to recognize, write, say and spell out loud their and their children’s names accurately. Then they move on to health vocabulary, using games and songs to help make it stick. Children of school age attend local schools supported by volunteers, but pre-school children come to the classes with their parents, where another volunteer will play with them in the same room. Hilary is always delighted when she is teaching and a toddler’s voice suddenly sings from under the table ‘head, shoulders, knees and toes’ or repeats ‘it’s two o’clock’, but she also recognizes that the children’s fast progress can be an added pressure on their parents.</span><br />
<span style="color: #676767;">The main challenges the adult students face however, are all practical ones. Personal and family health is one key issue, as many arrive unwell. They also have other appointments to keep. Few want to argue about the time they have to sign on at the job centre, and they may not have the language yet to explain a timing clash. But Hilary has yet to have a student drop out, and some travel with toddlers an hour each way on buses to attend.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">Over time fantastic results come from such dedication. Last month one mother proudly told Hilary she had made a doctor’s appointment for her son, and taken him alone without needing an interpreter. Another is building up his language by watching football on TV. Already a Manchester United fan in Syria, he has discovered that football really does transcend borders – played by talented people like the Swedish-Bosnian-Croatian Zlatan Ibrahimović, and enjoyed by Britons of all backgrounds.</span><br />
<span style="color: #676767;">Of course, it takes time. Last week one man told the class how his attempt to buy dates at Asda led to him being told it was the 3rd February, but his ability to puzzle it out already shows how much he has learned. Hilary tells me that what her students most want to learn, once they have the essentials, is how to make small talk. ‘They want to know what to say over the garden fence, or when somebody comes to their house’, she says. ‘How to say “come in, would you like a cup of tea?”’ and also how to know when to leave a social event – how to read the signals embedded in unspoken language. Part of the problems is that Cambridge people often don’t talk to them after saying hello – not necessarily from prejudice but rather from embarrassment in advance that they won’t be understood.</span><br />
<span style="color: #676767;">‘On the whole’, Hilary believes, whatever people’s political views, most ‘do think it is important for refugees coming here to learn English’. What is needed is firstly more properly funded classes, at times that work for the refugees and with some degree of childcare, but also more community engagement. Refugees, like anyone else, want to make friends, they want to invite their neighbours round or take their kids to football matches with their schoolmates; they just need opportunities to engage.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #676767;">‘I think I’ve been so lucky’, Hilary says, looking back over her career and later voluntary work. Not only does she feel she has learnt huge amounts about diverse cultures and universal human nature, but she’s had such heart-warming experiences along the way. ‘When my son went to school,’ she laughs, ‘they asked him what his mum did for a living. “Oh”, he replied, “she eats samosas and drinks tea”’. Today Hilary still gets invited round to her former students’ homes, sometimes to the weddings of the younger generation, and out to celebrate New Year at different festivals at least five times throughout the year. The lesson is that once people from different countries can communicate, they can bring so much to each other. ‘It has been such a privilege – being invited into people’s homes at such an important stage in their lives’ Hilary says with a smile. ‘They remember me and I never forget them – it’s wonderful.’</span></div>
Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-26112148698174728182016-11-26T12:47:00.001+00:002020-09-01T13:42:57.451+01:00Twickenham's Rose and Poppy Gates of Remembrance<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><span face="">Article first published in <i>History Today</i>, 12 April 2016.</span></b></h4>
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<span face="">‘I shall never play at Twickenham again’, twenty-five year old Lt Ronald Poulton-Palmer reportedly sighed as he lay dying at Ypres on 5 May 1915. Hit by a sniper’s bullet less than five weeks after he had been posted to the Western Front, Poulton-Palmer had served his country twice over, once in the trenches, and once as Captain of the English national rugby team. He was one of twenty-seven England international players killed during the First World War. Many more have died serving in later conflicts.<br /><br />On 29 April 2016, the Rugby Football Union unveiled their stunning new Rose and Poppy Gates at Twickenham stadium, the official Home of England Rugby. Showing the symbolic metamorphosis of the English rose, as worn on the shirts of the national squad, into the remembrance poppy, the gates commemorate the sacrifice of all rugby players who have served and died in conflicts around the world. The annual Army v Navy Rugby Match took place the following day, drawing a crowd of 82,000, including many serving soldiers, veterans and their families.</span><br />
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<span face="">The RFU’s proud association with the military is already recorded in an exhibition at the World Rugby Museum at Twickenham, which details the stories of those players who went on to serve their country in the forces. Here the 1914 England rugby union team are captured in a photograph, stripy socks pulled up, hair combed down, starched white shirts embroidered with the English rose. This unbeatable side was led by Poulton-Palmer, who scored four tries in the last test match before the war, a 39-13 victory over France. Famous for his glamorous style of play and ‘elusiveness’ on the pitch, Poulton-Palmer was hailed as one of the greatest players in the world. A third of his squad would fall alongside him during the coming conflict.</span><br />
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<span face="">Lt Francis Oakeley, a scrum-half who won four caps for England, was killed in 1914 when his submarine, the HMS D2, disappeared in the North Sea. He was not quite twenty-four. A few months later surgeon James ‘Bungy’ Watson, who played centre, was one of 500 killed when the Royal Naval warship, HMS Hawke, was torpedoed by a German submarine. Capt. Arthur James Dingle, nick-named ‘Mud’ after the pitches of Country Durham where he learnt to play centre and wing, was exempt from military service as a serving school-master but petitioned to enlist. He died defending a trench during the Battle of Scimitar Hill at Gallipoli in August 1915. His body was never recovered. Debutant forward Robert Pillman volunteered for special duties in the Queens Own in northern France, once carrying a fellow officer who had been gassed 300 yards across no-mans land to safety. In July 1916 he was fatally wounded returning from a night-raid in Armentieres. A survivor of action in Gallipoli, Lt Alfred Maynard, hooker, was killed on the first day of the Battle of Ancre, Britain’s last push in the Somme, in November 1916. At 22, he was the youngest England international player to die in the war. Finally from that 1914 squad, Lt-Cdr Arthur Leyland Harrison was the only England rugby international to have been awarded the VC. Despite suffering severe head wounds, on regaining consciousness Harrison lost his life while leading an attack to disable German machineguns at Zeebrugge harbour in April 1918.</span><br />
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<span face=""><br />These men and their many colleagues are remembered in various military and sporting memorials in the UK and overseas, as well as with local plaques, benches and parish windows. Arthur Dingle has the distinction of being remembered twice in poems, once by PG Wodehouse in his mischievous English sporting send-up The Great Day, and with more reverence in John Sills The Ballad of Suvla Bay. Twickenham’s new Rose and Poppy Gates will not cite any individuals by name, they are not intended as a military memorial in that sense, but rather as commemorative sculpture that will gradually come to hold several layers of meaning and association for the players and fans that pass through them.<br /><br />When artist and sculptor Harry Gray was originally approached for the commission, one idea was to create a large sculpture of an idealized young rugby player symbolically passing his ball to a First World War soldier. Gray specialises in permanent public artworks where the relationship of the work to the site is paramount. Past pieces include the Battle of Britain memorial on the south coast, which shows a young pilot, face turned to the skies, as he waits for the call to action. Seen from above, from a pilot’s perspective, the figure is sitting at the centre of a propeller hewn from the white chalk of the ground, calling to mind how the courage, skill and sacrifice of the pilots has left a permanent mark on our country. For Twickenham, Gray felt the overt memorial feel of the figurative rugby player and soldier might not sit well with a match-day crowd’s mood of exhilaration, or might be open to misinterpretation as a triumphant celebration of patriotic service on the fields of both sport and war. Instead he proposed the Rose and Poppy Gates as a less confrontational, more contemplative way to consider the Rugby Football Union’s wartime sacrifices.</span></div>
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<span face=""><br />Gray feels that the RFU was brave in supporting this more modern concept, but his initial designs left him dissatisfied. An early maquette looked too floral and sentimental to carry the full meaning of the loss that the gates commemorate. Having rejected the use of thorns or barbed wire in the design, Gray reconsidered the materials involved. The English roses are now produced from ‘gunmetal’ bronze, imported from Germany as Britain no longer produces it, a marker itself of how international relations have changed. Most of the poppies are fashioned from the bases of First World War German shell casements, once fired at British troops during the war, and still bearing their factory date-marks. The firing pin holes serve as the poppy centres. Each one weighs heavily in the hand. Others are simply the iconic poppy shape cut out from the metal pickets, a striking presence in their very absence. In this way German shells are turned into symbols of remembrance, their function subverted while their history is preserved. The very material of the stadium gates encapsulates messages of patriotism, conflict, loss and commemoration.<br /><br />The gates’ poppy theme inevitably draws comparisons with <a href="https://poppies.hrp.org.uk/buy-a-poppy/">Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red</a>, the installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing one British military casualty during the First World War, which flooded the Tower of London moat, marking the centenary of the outbreak of that conflict last year. For many, this was a powerful statement about the size of Britain’s sacrifice, for others, a mawkish display of nationalism. The wonderful <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/11220393/The-Ring-of-Remembrance-Notre-Dame-de-Lorette.html">Ring of Remembrance Notre Dame de Lorette</a>, an elliptical structure engraved with the names of the dead of all nationalities who fought in northern France, has proved equally controversial, but in this case for recognising the losses among belligerent nations alongside those of the Allies.</span></div>
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<span face="">Perhaps some controversy is unavoidable. Gray believes that as war is a political act, ‘any artwork which commemorates warfare is by definition political’. For him, such installations exist essentially to provide ‘a social marker in time that uses sculpture or architecture as a holding place for memory’, and he argues that the best commemorative sculpture ‘asks questions, rather than just offering triumphalist solutions or expressions’. A recent inspiration that does just this was Turner Prize winner, and Oscar-winning director, Steve McQueen’s For Queen and Country. Created in response to a visit to Iraq in 2003 as an official war artist for the Imperial War Museum, <i>For Queen and County</i> was McQueen’s proposal for a set of postage stamps featuring the faces of servicemen and women who had lost their lives, with portraits chosen by their families. ‘An official set of Royal Mail stamps struck me as an intimate but distinguished way of highlighting the sacrifice of individuals in the defence of our national ideals’, McQueen contended. Collectively they would form ‘an intimate expression of national loss that would involve the families of the dead and permeate the every day – every household and every office’. Although facsimiles of the sheets of stamps are kept in the Imperial War Museum, despite the support of the fallen soldiers’ families and the Art Fund, Royal Mail has so far declined to issue the stamps. It seems that the loss presented in this way, without sentiment or compromise, appeared just too real, too great.<br /><br />Some of the England rugby union players who survived the Great War, as it was once known, later went on to serve again, alongside a younger generation in the Second World War. Cyril Lowe, who was credited with nine victories while serving with the RAF, would subsequently play rugby again for England. Twickenham’s new Rose and Poppy Gates, though which both home and away teams will pass on match days, speak powerfully both of sporting and national history, and of individual loss. This is site-specific, war memorial art at its finest: beautiful, provocative, reflective, and a working part of the fabric of match life at Twickenham. Lt Ronald Poulton-Palmer and his team-mates would have been pleased; Twickenham has chosen to remember well.<br /></span><span face=""><br /></span>
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-28973796803167788542016-11-25T13:19:00.000+00:002020-03-13T14:47:45.914+00:00In praise of school libraries, and all who pass through themI have just been delighted to help open a new Learning Centre and library at Saffron Walden County High School, in my voluntary role as the school’s Patron of Reading. It has been brilliant meeting so many of the students over the last year when giving book talks or hosting events by author friends at the school, or helping out on World Book Day and at the annual reading awards. Once I took some sixth formers to our local literary festival to hear the inspiring John McCarthy, the British journalist held captive in Lebanon for over five years, talking - among other things - about the importance of empathy and imagination. I must do more events like that. Just last week however, all past and present British children’s laureates have written a passionate open letter to the Department of Education urging an end to the cost-cutting that has led to the loss of hundreds of school librarians, so opening a new, well supported library now felt like a particular privilege and cause for celebration. <br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Having been asked to prepare a few words for the opening event, I was delighted to hear author Frank Cottrell-Boyce talking about the importance of reading on a Radio 4 ‘Open Book’ podcast as I jogged around the park pondering what to say. ‘We’re living at a time when public life is being completely polluted by incredibly over-simplified narratives about who we are and what we can become’, Cottrell-Boyce said, arguing that ‘the more narratives you can have in your head’ the better. I could not agree more. When I was at school I read books to find out about the world beyond my reach, what people did, what they thought, and how they felt. Arguably film, TV and the internet are now the dominant story-telling mediums in our lives. I love all three but there is something essentially passive about the process of watching, when compared to that of reading. Film and television director Ken Loach, among others, has recently criticized the trend for TV nostalgia, and it is certainly true that, there being much more space on shelves than air-time on TV, books will always be able to offer a greater diversity of voices. And Britain’s current children’s laureate, Chris Riddell, has stressed the importance of simply ‘reading for pleasure’, while calling school libraries ‘a vital resource that must be nurtured’. <br /><br />So I said this at the school, and I talked about how reading can transport you into other countries, times and contexts (the new library does look rather like a spaceship), and even into other people’s minds. As the historical author Manda Scott has said, ‘reading is the best way we have of expanding our sense of self, beyond who we are just now, of seeing who we might be, and seeing who everyone else might be as well’. Reading not only comforts and entertains us, it teaches us about the world, and it teaches us empathy - which made me think of John McCarthy once again.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">In the pod with books in hand: School librarians Alex Smith and Ruth Parsons, and former headteacher John Hartley<br />Behind: me with current headteacher Caroline Derbyshire. Copyright: The Walden Local</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The morning after the new Hartley Learning Centre (named after the school’s last headteacher), opened its doors, I ran my usual route around the park. This time I listened to John McCarthy’s fellow-hostage, Brian Keenan, talk through his ‘Desert Island Discs’ in 1990, not long after his release. I thought I knew what luxury he might request after his eight records. I remember McCarthy saying that occasionally, if required to ask for some ‘luxury’ in his cell, Keenan would never request the possible, such as more food or cigarettes, but always a grand piano. It was a joke and degree of defiance that gave the men more strength than any token from their guards. But when Sue Lawley asked whether there was ‘anything, in those four and a half years, that you really craved?’ and I smiled, anticipating the piano, Keenan answered, ‘the one thing I did crave, and it was driving me to distraction, but they would not give me it, was a pencil. I just wanted to fill those walls that I’d looked at for so long, with something, and just a pencil can take you so far...’<br /><br />I feel very lucky to write and review books for a living, traveling across time, place and page daily at my desk. I am also delighted to be staying on as Patron of Reading at Saffron Walden County High School for another year. As well as providing a quiet place for reading, the new Learning Centre is going to host many more author talks and events, and a student Book Club at lunchtimes. Children at this school are lucky to have such a fantastic space – yet having a library run by a professional librarian should not be question of luck, but a basic resource for every school, required and supported by the Department of Education. So here’s a shout out for school libraries; librarians, teachers and students; children’s laureates and volunteer Patrons of Reading; multiple narratives and diverse voices; the importance of empathy… and the power of pencils.</span><br />
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<li>If you are a writer interested in becoming a Patron of Reading at a local school, get in touch with the scheme <a href="http://www.patronofreading.co.uk/">here</a>.</li>
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<li>To read Chris Riddell’s beautifully illustrated open letter to the Department of Education, click <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/14/children-laureates-demand-uk-government-school-library-closures">here</a>.</li>
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<li>I’ve just submitted my latest book manuscript, so if you have a suggestion for a new subject for a historical biography, get in touch with me <a href="http://www.claremulley.com/contact/">here</a>!</li>
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-59053071092301496652015-11-15T13:53:00.000+00:002020-03-13T15:12:45.486+00:00Secrets of a Spy's Jewellery<h2>
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Secrets of a Spy's Jewellery</span></h2>
As a biographer I hope to get under the skin of my subjects, to trace their emotions, hopes and attitudes, as well as their words and deeds. Often it is the smallest things that provide the most personal insights; a postscript on a letter, the view from a window, or the choice of jewellery worn.<br />
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My research into Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, Britain’s first female special agent of the Second World War, took me to Poland. One afternoon in Warsaw I met Maria, the niece of Krystyna’s one-legged, special agent lover, Andrzej Kowerski. As well as medals, photos and papers, Maria had brought along three pieces of jewellery. The first was a red coral necklace. I imagine it being a gift to Krystyna before the war. As a rather bored countess she would often ski, sometimes smuggling cigarettes for kicks, over the high Zakopane mountains where such coral is traditionally worn. It is easy to imagine her heart pounding beneath these beads. <br />
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Then came a beautiful gold and ivory cube that unfolded into a bracelet – a love-token bought for her by Andrzej when they were both posted to Cairo during the war. Having never seen the bracelet in photographs, I wonder whether she kept it, rather like her lover, close to her only when required. The last piece was a simple wooden bangle. ‘Try them all on’, Maria urged. Sadly my wrist was too large for the bangle. For all her great courage and strong will, Krystyna must have been physically very slight.<br />
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As the beads and bracelet warmed on my skin, I thought about two other pieces of Krystyna’s jewellery that have not survived. Once, when captured in Nazi-occupied Poland, she broke the thread of a cut-glass necklace, a gift from another lover, to save her life with the precious ‘diamonds’. But the only piece of jewellery she really cared about was her family signet ring, made of gold with a slice of steel embedded in it. This she wore throughout the war, and chose to display in her only known portrait. Appropriately for such an independent, freedom-loving woman, it was not gifts from men, but her own name and honour that she chose to wear proudly. That ring is now lost, but perhaps that is fitting too. I am not sure who else could rightly wear it.<br />
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<li><a href="http://www.claremulleyblog.co.uk/2015/10/do-bunny-down-when-shared-war-stories.html">Do Bunny Down: when shared war stories can help to heal</a></li>
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-15553793945136407822015-10-28T14:21:00.000+00:002020-03-13T15:14:32.852+00:00Do Bunny Down: when shared war stories can help to heal<h2>
<span style="color: white;">Do Bunny Down: when shared war stories can help to heal</span></h2>
When researching biographies I am privileged to meet and exchange letters with many people whose observations, perspectives and actions present new insights into the past, and sometimes into the present. My current work, on two remarkable female pilots from the Second World War, has led to interviews with veterans and other witnesses from several sides of that terrible conflict. As always, many tales have emerged that have no bearing on the story I am telling – but which I cannot bear to let go unrecorded. This is the story of some USAF servicemen who crashed into an enemy field, and the young German boy who was desperate to find them...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Do Bunny<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)</span></td></tr>
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On 25 March 1945, twenty unescorted US B24 bombers were releasing their lethal load over their target when they were attacked by a set of seven of Messerschmitt Me262 jet fighters whose approach had been deliberately concealed by the glare of the sun. These pioneering machines were far faster than any Allied planes, and they were about to show how devastating they could be to heavy bombers. Their first target blew up in mid-air. Only the navigator survived after he was blown free from the nose of his B24. Crew in the other planes saw his boots suddenly jerked from his feet as his chute opened above him. He was taken POW. The lead bomber in the formation was then attacked, and tragically spiralled down into a shoe factory in the town below – loss of life unknown. The three of its crew who managed to bail out were all also captured. A third, badly damaged, bomber made it to the Swedish coastline, only to swing round and ditch into the Baltic Sea to avoid crashing into local housing. Its surviving crew were interned in neutral Sweden. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The crew of the Do Bunny,<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">Charles 'Chuck' Blaney is standing, back right.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)</span></td></tr>
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Another plane, the <i>Do Bunny</i>, also took extensive damage. Having been caught in a storm of cannon shells, one engine burst into flames and had to be shut down. The attack had left no time to close the bomb-bay doors, and damage now made this impossible. Despite returning fire, the <i>Do Bunny</i> took several more hits, eventually leading to the loss of a second engine - with one of the propeller blades left dangling below. ‘Time seemed to stand still’, the radio operator and top gunner, S/Sgt Charles ‘Chuck’ Blaney, later wrote. ‘The flight engineer was knocked out of his top turret and he dropped to the flight deck. The plexiglass in the rear tunnel shattered in the tail gunner’s face. Fuel and hydraulic liquid from pierced pipelines were pouring and swirling out of the still open bomb bay, which we were never able to close. <i>Do Bunny</i> was in real trouble.’ </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charles 'Chuck' Blaney<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)</span></td></tr>
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Suddenly the attack ended. Perhaps the Messerschmitts were out of fuel or ammunition. Either way, forced out of formation, the <i>Do Bunny</i> began a slow descent while its crew threw out ‘everything that was not nailed down’ to lighten their load. When a third engine packed up it was clear that they were not going to make it the last 220 miles to friendly territory. Opting to stay together instead of bailing out, they prepared to make an emergency landing.</div>
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Down below, a class of schoolchildren in the German town of Soltau were watching the crippled plane bleeding smoke across the sky. One girl shouted out, and twelve-year-old Gerhard Bracke rushed to the window to look but, by the time he got there, the <i>Do Bunny</i> was already out of sight. Disappointed, Gerhard decided to search for the remains of the plane on his own, as soon as he got the chance. Lt Joachim Grauenhorst, the Wehrmacht officer in charge of the Soltau Riding Academy, had also witnessed the B24’s final descent. Surprised not to hear an explosion soon after it had passed directly over the Academy building, he quickly assembled some soldiers to find the downed plane.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gerhard Bracke in 1944<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)</span></td></tr>
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Inside the coasting <i>Do Bunny</i>, ‘all went well until a wing dipped into the ground as we lost speed,’ Blaney wrote, ‘and then all hell let loose’. The torn, burnt and battered B24, riddled with hundreds of bullet holes, broke apart on impact. Miraculously five of the nine crew managed to jump to safety. It was not long before they were joined some scared and angry locals, some carrying pitchforks, followed by Grauenhorst and his soldiers who kept the crowd back while they began working to free the last four of the crew still trapped inside the wreckage. Incredibly, despite injuries including a broken leg, none of them had been killed.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Do Bunny<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Do Bunny<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)</span></span><br />
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The prisoners were escorted to the town square. Here two SS officers started building up the growing crowd’s resentment against the Americans as an enemy bomber crew. It was probably only because Grauenhorst had command of several soldiers that, after some tense moments, he was able to take the men back to the Riding Academy under his command. Here they were locked in the stables, partly for their own safety. ‘He probably saved all our lives’ Blaney believes.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lt Joachim Grauenhorst<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney) </span></td></tr>
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A passionate member of the Hitler Youth, Gerhard was keen to learn everything about the downed B24 and the enemy soldiers being held at the Academy. After school that afternoon he went exploring until he found the crash site. There he stood in awed fascination, looking at the wreck with its crushed nose, splintered fuselage and open bomb-bay doors which were now cut into the ground. It was a seminal moment for the impressionable boy, and he stayed for a long time.<br />
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The next morning the <i>Do Bunny’s</i> crew were driven to an interrogation centre, and started the long journey to a prison camp. They were liberated by the Russians in late May 1945.<br />
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Gerhard was still a schoolboy when the Second World War ended. He grew up to become a respected biographer and historian of the war. During our conversations, he not only told me about the downing of the <i>Do Bunny</i>, but of a rather wonderful postscript to the story.<br />
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Many years after the war, Gerhard spent some time researching what had happened to the Americans who had so miraculously survived the Luftwaffe attack and their own crash landing. Having tracked down Chuck Blaney and the other surviving crew members, he arranged a 50th anniversary reunion. In 1995 he travelled to Ohio, USA, to join them. With him, Gerhard brought a biography of the Luftwaffe pilot who had shot them down. Fighter pilot Ace Lt Rudolf Rademacher had survived the war only to die in a glider crash in 1953. Gerhard had also found the archived ‘missing crew’ reports from the other B24 bombers in the formation, and old photographs of the destroyed <i>Do Bunny</i> from the Soltau local newspaper. But what touched Chuck Blaney most was the warm personal letter Gerhard brought from Joachim Grauenhorst of the Soltau Riding Academy, along with an invitation from the Mayor of Soltau to a reunion in their town the following year.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Soltau newspaper coverage, 1995<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)</span></td></tr>
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Former enemies, Gerhard and Chuck are in touch to this day. 'He is still a best friend forever', Chuck told me touchingly of Gerhard. Both men were pleased that there is continued interest in their story, and that it might now reach a new audience. Sometimes, when certain people find themselves acting for, or representing, one side of history or another, it appears that time, rather than ideologies or national boundaries, is the greatest barrier. How awful it is, among the many terrible tragedies of the war, that a German shoe factory was hit by a downed American bomber, and that so many airmen lost their lives altogether. But how uplifting that one young witness to history was compelled to restore the common bonds of humanity between people once torn apart.<br />
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-87389200107260723802015-10-07T14:29:00.000+01:002020-03-13T15:16:00.317+00:00Distinction or Discrimination: Honouring the female special agents of the Second World WarThe names of 75 courageous women from 13 nations are etched into a beautiful memorial at RAF Tempsford, home of the Special Duties Squadrons during the Second World War. These are the female special agents who volunteered for active service behind enemy lines as couriers and wireless operators, running escape lines and leading partisan armies. All were brave, and all deeply committed to the Allied cause, but they had little else in common. Although most were British or French, there were also women from the Soviet Union, Belgium, The Netherlands, Ireland, America, Switzerland, India, Australia and Chile, as well as two from Germany, sent in to support the domestic resistance, and two from Poland, including Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the subject of my last biography. Some were lucky, others not, many were beautiful which had its own pros and cons, some were plain, and one had a prosthetic leg. Most female agents were effective, at least for a short while, and Skarbek survived in active service for six years. The huge contribution of this diverse group of women came at a high price. 29 were arrested and 16 executed. One more chose suicide with her lethal ‘L’ pill.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of the names on the Tempsford Memorial</td></tr>
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Today there is increasing interest in these women. Over the last few years there have been many new biographies and anthologies about them and several memorials. Tempsford is important in that it is the only one that pays tribute to all the women by name. Its marble column stands on a granite plinth collectively honouring the two special duties squadrons that flew them into enemy occupied Europe, but there is no reference to the male agents. Perhaps now we need to ask why is it that we still distinguish heroines from heroes. After all, the Special Operations Executive, better known as SOE, was in many ways a great gender leveller. Selected women and men went through the same training, including in the use of guns and explosives, and silent killing, and were armed and sent to work alongside each other in the field.<br />
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It was, however, precisely because they were women, that these female agents were so valuable during the war. Unlike able-bodied men, civilian women travelling around France by train or bicycle attracted relatively little attention. This meant they were better-placed to serve as couriers between different resistance circuits or groups of Maquis hiding in the hills. Women transported messages, micro-film and radio codes, as well as heavy equipment such as weapons and wireless transmitters to arrange the delivery of agents and equipment, etc. Some of them, notably Pearl Witherington and Nancy Wake, went much further, commanding resistance armies of 2,000 men, and, among other achievements, Skarbek persuaded a German garrison on a strategic pass in the Alps to defect.<br />
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Skarbek, the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent, was employed in December 1939. Eighteen months would pass, during which time she served both across Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, before SOE was even officially established. The first female covert radio operator to be flown into France, Noor Inayat Khan, left England in June 1943. Even at this point, women in the British military were not officially allowed to carry guns or explosives. To circumvent this, SOE enrolled women into the FANYs, which officially operated outside of the Armed Forces but still theoretically offered some protection under the Geneva Convention in the event of capture, and provided pensions should the women become casualties.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs3vw7hnf3_4YAS6HhkW5B95U7BECAoX-3I-MuxQDeDGN6nx9l-oANG_dnawzTY5x4O2Wj5NroqpBKUGZMLRNcDvukRQzqkM71Gv2dr94xo-Nmdh6Dyy2niuICfGHZEegGxXhfjOU7qpE/s1600/christine1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs3vw7hnf3_4YAS6HhkW5B95U7BECAoX-3I-MuxQDeDGN6nx9l-oANG_dnawzTY5x4O2Wj5NroqpBKUGZMLRNcDvukRQzqkM71Gv2dr94xo-Nmdh6Dyy2niuICfGHZEegGxXhfjOU7qpE/s400/christine1.png" title="Krystyna Skarbek" width="282" /></a></td></tr>
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Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville,<br />
courtesy of Christine Isabelle Cole, Bill Stanley Moss papers</div>
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Churchill had approved the employment of women in SOE, but their role was not made public until some time after the war for fear of a backlash. Meanwhile the women who had survived found their achievements were underplayed and their skills undervalued. While Skarbek’s male colleagues were reassigned to roles overseas, after she turned down a series of secretarial jobs for which she was monumentally unsuited, Skarbek was dismissed as ‘not a very easy person to employ’. Meanwhile the official papers sent to her were accompanied by belittling notes such as ‘Hope you are being a good girl!’ Even the honours the women received were less than their male counterparts, as women did not qualify for British military awards. Many felt bitter about this, but none expressed it as succinctly as Pearl Witherington. After being awarded the MBE (Civil), she famously commented that ‘there was nothing civil’ about the work she had undertaken.</div>
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It was only in the 1950s that the women’s stories began to be told. Having signed the official secrets act, many of the women, like the men they served with, refused to talk. Others, such as Odette Hallowes, spoke out, or like both Hallowes and Violette Szabo who had been executed at Ravensbrück, had their stories retold in biographies and films. And so the myth-making began. All too often, female agents and other women in the resistance have been honoured more for their courage and great sacrifice, than for their actual achievements. It has been judged more important that they tried, than that they succeeded. When the women did achieve, they still seem to have been feminised in the retelling, their beauty and sacrifices emphasised and their rough edges smoothed over. In order to be celebrated they have been, in effect, often recast as victims, rather than simply as heroes.</div>
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Ironically perhaps, today we need to reconsider the female special agents not only because historically they were marginalised but because, all too often, when given attention they have been judged as women, rather than as individuals doing an extraordinary job. If you have been the business of special operations, it is clearly self-defeating to be elevated as a heroine if at the same time you are diminished as an independent agent.</div>
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<i>courtesy of Pawel Komorowski</i><br />
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-33889482931678585142015-09-30T14:38:00.000+01:002020-03-13T15:17:06.833+00:00Leonard Mulley: a very civil heroSorting through some family papers recently, my mother came across a handsome gentleman’s silver cigarette case. The initials ‘LM’, etched squarely onto the front, stand for Leonard Mulley. Len was my father’s favourite uncle, a working class lad brought up in a two-up, two-down cottage in east Finchley alongside his thirteen surviving brothers and sisters. Cheeky - in the way that only someone who knows they can get away with it - can be, he seems to have been forever putting frogs down his sister’s pinafores when they were young, and later coal dust in their powder compacts. Several of the brothers became local boxing champs, and nearly all were sailors with the Merchant Navy before and during the war. The presents they brought back included a macaw for their mother, who used to enjoy picking out her hairpins, and rope soaked in tobacco and molasses for their father to chew – apparently it smelt absolutely delicious. This elegant silver case is not the sort of object that I had imagined Len owning but it sits well in the hand, feels weighty, and would clearly have been pleasing to own. An inscription inside, dated November 1946, tells a rather lovely story…<br />
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The autumn of 1946 was pretty dismal in England. Eighteen months since the end of the war in Europe, the early mood of jubilation was long gone. The country was in recession, reconstruction had not yet started on any significant scale, demobbed former-servicemen were finding it hard to get work, and there was no prospect of the rationing for food and clothing ending anytime soon. Len had served in the navy during the war, delivering essential supplies to Russia on the arctic convoys, and tying up a substantial part of Germany’s Navy and Air Force. On one voyage to Murmansk, his convoy was waylaid by enemy aircraft and u-boats and several ships were sunk. Traumatised, Len was transferred to clearing up London bomb damage but found retrieving civilians' bodies so distressing that he rejoined the merchant marine.</div>
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Although he returned to civilian life with few formal qualifications after the war, Len’s strong work ethic and good manner with people secured him a job as a Steward at the rather theatrical Eyot House Club, which sits on its own island on the Thames at Weybridge, in Surrey. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eyot House Hotel, circa 1955<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">Copyright The Francis Frith Collection </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 10.8192px;">- </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="http://www.francisfrith.com/" style="color: #993322; text-decoration: none;">www.francisfrith.com</a></span></td></tr>
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Eyot House had been built by D’Oyly Carte, the Victorian music impresario, theatrical producer and hotelier who had already built the Savoy theatre and hotel in the Strand, among many other famous venues. In its heyday the place would have been full of celebrity guests such as WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and writers like JM Barrie, which might explain why D’Oyly Carte once reportedly kept a crocodile on the island. By 1946, when Len worked there, the club was reduced to trading on its former glory, but it still held a certain mystique. There was as yet no footbridge to the island, so guests arrived by boat, or had to pull themselves across on the chain ferry. Once installed however, the wrap-around, Colonial-style veranda provided a strong sense of occasion, along with commanding views down the river.<br />
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The sun had set just after four in the afternoon on 24th November 1946. Although the weather had been unseasonably mild, there had been heavy rain for some days and most club members were inside, drinking tea or something stronger, and listening to the London Symphony Orchestra concert at the Royal Albert Hall being broadcast by the BBC Home Service. The setting could hardly have been more Agatha Christie, when suddenly shouts were heard coming from the river.<br />
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The Thames below the club house was at full tide and, further swollen by the recent heavy rains, the water was high and moving rapidly. Perhaps Len’s years in the navy meant the water held less fear for him. It is possible that he had helped saved others when his convoy had been torpedoed. However perhaps he had never had the chance, and the water held worse memories for him than for many. What we know for certain is that it would have taken great courage to plunge into the dark, fast-moving river that Sunday evening, but Len did not hesitate. Some time later he managed to swim to the bank, fighting hard to keep his head up, one arm clamped around a half-drowned woman. Who she was, and whether she was in the water through accident or intent, has been swept away by time and tide, but she survived that night because of Len.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The inscription inside Len's cigarette case</td></tr>
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These dramatic events are recorded in three very brief accounts. A few lines were reported in the local paper that week. Shortly later Len was presented with his cigarette case by impressed members and staff of the Eyot Club House, ‘in recognition for his outstanding bravery in saving a life from drowning after dark, and with the river in full flood’. The following year the Royal Humane Society presented him with their ‘Honorary Testimonial on Vellum’, awarded when someone has risked their life to save another, and in this case specifically ‘for having gone to the rescue of a woman who was in imminent danger of drowning in the River Thames at Weybridge, and whose life he gallantly saved’.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Len's Royal Humane Society certificate</td></tr>
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Sadly nothing more is known, except that the envelope enclosing the Royal Humane Society certificate was addressed to Len not at Weybridge, but at the Norfolk Hotel at Arundel in Sussex, where he was employed as Head Waiter, within a stone’s throw of the River Arun and not far from the coast. It seems that although changing jobs he wanted to stay close to the water. The Eyot House Club closed not long later, having been raided by police who stormed the island by boat late one Saturday night, and arrested a number of people for drinking after hours.<br />
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Tragically, Len was later killed on his way to work when he was accidentally knocked off his bicycle by another vehicle. He may not have been highly decorated for his service during the war, no DSO or medals beyond those standard for active service, but Len's story reminds us that heroism is not confined to times of war. Len continued to live by the principles he had fought for during the war, risking his life for the security of others in the peace. He was a truly good man, and a hero.<br />
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-58700056745161986282015-08-29T14:42:00.000+01:002020-03-13T14:48:42.984+00:00What would my subjects make of their biographies?I have written biographies of two very different women. The <a href="http://www.claremulley.com/books/the-woman-who-saved-the-children/"><i>Woman Who Saved the Children</i></a> (Oneworld Publications, 2009) tells the story of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the charity <i>The Save the Children Fund</i> and pioneering champion of children’s human rights. A very independent-minded Edwardian lady, the flame-haired Eglantyne was quite a woman. She graduated from Oxford university to illicit romance in Cambridge. After disappointment in love and a dalliance with spiritualism she undertook espionage in Serbia, and endured public arrest in Trafalgar Square before launching Save the Children in London’s Royal Albert Hall after the end of the First World War. Throughout her life she rode horses and bicycles, saw ghosts and climbed mountains. A woman with a very vivid imagination, she wrote poems, romantic novels, and the first ever statement of children’s human rights. Her courage, passion and determination have forever changed the way in which the world treats children.<br />
Eglantyne was not a self-promoting woman, but she was very good at marketing and quite prepared to fly the flag for the Fund at every opportunity. I am relieved to think she would be quite happy to see her story told, and delighted to know that all the author’s royalties are donated to the wonderful charity that she founded.<br />
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My second book, <i><a href="http://www.claremulley.com/books/the-spy-who-loved/">The Spy Who Loved</a></i> (Macmillan, 2012), tells the secrets and lives of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, a Polish Countess who became the first woman to work for Britain as a special agent during the Second World War. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christine’s story has been rather more concealed than Eglantyne’s. My biography is called <i>The Spy Who Loved</i>, because Christine was a very passionate woman. She loved adrenaline and adventure. She loved men – she had two husbands and numerous lovers who all get a mention in the book. But above all, Christine loved freedom and independence – both for her country, Poland, and for herself personally. It was because of her very passionate nature that, after her early death, a group of six men who had once served with her formed ‘the panel to protect the reputation of Christine Granville’ in an attempt to prevent unauthorised books and articles about her from being published. Like Eglantyne, Christine was a woman ahead of her times and these men felt that the world was not yet ready for their very modern heroine. I believe that Christine would approve of many of the changes in society today, such as the greater opportunities for women, although not all, such as the prejudice still facing many Polish people in Britain. So I think she might be pleased that her story was being told within the context of her country’s war history, to remind people of why there is such a historic bond between our nations.<br />
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Taking Isabel’s question a little further, however, I can not now help wondering what these two women would have thought about the content of my books, not just the fact of the books’ existence.<br />
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Biographers have a tricky job. I aim for accuracy, and yet I know there are many kinds of truth – the dry truth of fact, but also emotional and moral truths, and often these may be contradictory. A person may tell a story, even their own story, and yet the truth told is often not one corroborated by the ‘facts’ found in archives, buildings or photograph albums. Likewise, I have found that there is character which may be unfulfilled, as well as character acted upon. Are things less true to a person, less telling of their nature, if they remained in the realm of aspiration or desire? And to whom does the biographer owe their allegiance, should a story become controversial or someone reveal their less pleasant nature – to their subject, or their descendants, or to the reader and the record? And can any biography be other than anachronistic, however hard the author tries not to benefit from hindsight?<br />
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Perhaps I have been fortunate to have written, thus far, about rather remarkable women, both of whom I have found deeply inspiring. And yet both Eglantyne and Christine are women who lived and loved, fought and feigned in a different age, when social mores and personal morals were quite different than those of today. And both these women defied the expectations of their age on several levels.<br />
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Biographies, I feel, should be regarded not just as windows onto the past, but as mirrors of our own concerns and interests. Perhaps that is why there are so many biographies of figures like Cleopatra, Elizabeth I, and Joan of Arc. The people we are interested in are anchored in one point in time, but new books are always being written about them from different perspectives, addressing the questions perhaps more pertinent to the writer and reader than to the subject. Of course Eglantyne and Christine might not have wished to have their love-lives exposed, (actually I think Christine would have laughed, but I doubt Eglantyne would have been happy) but had they been born today, I think both might have campaigned for equality, freedom and the enactment of human rights and decency – and, since hopefully these are what my biographies support through the telling of their lives, I think I might just get away with it!<br />
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-59657615289793719862015-08-28T14:44:00.000+01:002020-03-13T15:18:15.411+00:00Hiroshima: City of Peace<h2>
<span style="color: white;">Hiroshima: City of Peace</span></h2>
Seventy years ago this month, on Monday 6 August 1945, the nuclear bomb known as ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, immediately killing an estimated 80,000 people. Three days later a second bomb, the equally appallingly nick-named ‘Fat Man’, was dropped on Nagasaki, killing between 60-70,000 people. On 15 August Japan surrendered, marking the end of the Second World War.<br />
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It has been argued that President Truman’s decision to drop the A-bombs on these two Japanese cities saved more lives than were lost by ending the war so much earlier than any alternative course of action. As usual the truth is more complex. Truman’s primary objectives were certainly American lives and the earliest possible end to the war, but other pertinent considerations included impressing the Soviets as the Cold War approached, the lasting need to respond to Pearl Harbour, and the pressure to justify the development costs of the atomic project. In this war, sides of very different motivations and experiences all committed atrocities and suffered from traumatising war crimes. I don't seek to suggest equivalence. Nevertheless, it is still difficult understand the detonation of two separate Atomic bombs on the same country within a few days.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cherry blossom in Hiroshima, April 2015</td></tr>
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I visited Japan for the first time this Easter. It was cherry blossom season and the flowers were spectacular, frothing white and pink against bright blue skies. I was traveling around by bullet train and bicycle, visiting shrines and temples, stroking deer, feeding carp, and watching robots hop and skip in Tokyo. I also spent a day in Hiroshima, a vibrant city rebuilt after its almost total destruction in 1945. Modern Hiroshima has its fair share of cherry trees, but the official flower of the city is the Oleander, as this was the first plant to bloom again after 1945.<br />
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I was shown around the city by a local guide called Keiko. We started at the Peace Park that had opened in 1955. Here Keiko pointed out the new ground level, resulting from the vast amount of imported earth brought in to cover contaminated land. We visited the Genbaku Dome, the skeletal remains of the most central building left standing by the bomb which has been preserved as a memorial, as well as the eternal flame, and the peace pagoda erected in 1966.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hiroshima Peace Pond in front of the Peace Flame<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">and Cenotaph in the Memorial Park</span></td></tr>
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Keiko had married into a family from Hiroshima. Her husband’s mother was a young woman living less than two kilometers from the epicentre of the detonation in 1945. Of their large family only she, and a few others who were also away from home that August morning, survived. Keiko's husband was not born until a few years later but Keiko told me that, although rarely talking about it, he still carries the weight of these devastating events on his shoulders. 'As do all the city’s post-war generations', she added.<br />
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While other cities like Tokyo and Osaka had been severely bombed during the war, Hiroshima, where several Japanese armies were based, had not been targeted. Anticipating an eventual attack, that August the city authorities had mobilised school-children aged between eleven and fourteen to demolish certain houses to create fire-breaks, with the aim of limiting potential damage from firestorms. Many were helping with this work on the morning that the A-bomb fell, putting them close to the centre of the impact. Amongst other relics, such as melted road girders and roof tiles, the absolutely heart-wrenching Hiroshima Peace Museum displays possessions from some of these children including unopened lunch-boxes, scorched school books and several school blouses that had been beautifully hand-stitched by girls in classes just weeks earlier. In case these seem romantic, there are also some appalling human relics, kept by traumatised relatives who had nothing else. Thousands of other people left no evidence of their lives, abilities or personalities at all.<br />
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The museum also holds a display of many of the origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was just two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the A-bomb further out in the suburbs of Hiroshima. Having developed leukaemia some years later, Sasaki began folding paper cranes in the hope that when she had made a thousand she might be granted a wish, as in Japanese legend. Too weak to continue, Sasaki died in 1955.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki in Hiroshima Peace Museum</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sadako Sasaki statue, holding a crane aloft</td></tr>
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Such devastatingly personal effects and relics are deeply telling, but nothing can convey the enormity of the loss. Six thousand Hiroshima school-children were killed when the atomic bomb was dropped. Many more died later from their injuries. By the end of the year the death toll is estimated to have been between 90,000-166,000, possibly more than half of the city’s entire population. Cancer and other resulting conditions claimed many more lives, such as that of twelve year old Sasaki. Around 70% of Hiroshima’s buildings were also destroyed. Nagasaki suffered a similar level of destruction.<br />
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Hiroshima was proclaimed a City of Peace by the Japanese parliament in 1949. It has since hosted a series of conferences on peace, developed a dedicated Peace Institute within its university, and established the international ‘Mayors for Peace’ organization, calling for the abolition and elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2020. This may be an unrealistic goal but it serves as a guide to steer disarmament. When one thinks of mothers, their skin hanging off, running towards the suburbs of Hiroshima clutching their dead children to their chests, it seems impossible to conceive of ever using such a weapon again.<br />
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The American decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki resonates in other ways today as well. From a historian's perspective, earlier this year the USA took the decision to digitise the records generated by their Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, to make them readily available to researchers internationally. The ABCC was the US body established in 1947 to carry out a medical assessment of the effect of radiation on survivors from the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documents show that many of the US commission’s doctors were deeply affected by what they witnessed, although, as The Japan Times noted while I was visiting Hiroshima, many of the A-bomb survivors later criticised the commission for treating them like research guinea-pigs. Pity, without empathy or respect, is of little value. Preserved images in this collection include many taken to show the ‘atomic bomb radiation effects on the human body’, with some of the survivors photographed holding nameplates. Clearly issues around confidentiality and sensitivity must be paramount, and the full history behind the commission, as well as its findings, needs to be addressed.<br />
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Keiko nevertheless believes that the stories that stem from Hiroshima need to reach the widest possible audience. She told me that she feels deeply moved when showing visitors around her city and she hopes that, in this way, she can play a small part in helping to spread Hiroshima’s messages both of peace, and of the ‘evil of Atomic weapons’, around the world. I thought of Keiko as Hiroshima and Nagasaki fell silent for the seventieth anniversary this August, each city remembering the moment when tens of thousands of their citizens were killed. After doves were released and Buddhist bells tolled, vows were taken to redouble civic efforts to halt nuclear proliferation in a world where incidents, accidents, and the threat of nuclear terrorism is ever growing. Since then, countries including Japan and the USA, Britain, India, Australia, China and Russia have negotiated a controversial new deal to limit Iran's nuclear programme, while providing relief from previous sanctions and permitting the country to continue its atomic programme 'for peaceful purposes'.<br />
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As I left Hiroshima, Keiko gave me a white origami orizuru, or paper crane, which she had folded as we walked around the peace park. There are many important war anniversaries this year, but among them we must remember the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the message of peace with which Hiroshima has heroically chosen to reply to the world. Pity alone is not enough.Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4654265822845138719.post-83934579142790041822015-07-28T14:52:00.000+01:002020-03-13T15:19:04.398+00:00Imagining Eglantyne<div style="text-align: center;">
‘We have to devise a means of making known the facts</div>
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in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world.’ </div>
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<i>Eglantyne Jebb</i> </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poster for Anne Chamberlain's production, <i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">Eglantyne</i></td></tr>
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Earlier this month I was fascinated to see a new one-woman play called simply, <a href="http://www.eglantynetheshow.com/" target="_blank">Eglantyne</a>, written, produced and acted by the New Zealand artist Anne Chamberlain. Eglantyne Jebb, around whose life the play is built, was the remarkable founder of the independent children’s development agency Save the Children, and author of the pioneering statement that has since evolved into the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most universally accepted human rights instrument in history. She was also the subject of my first biography: <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woman-Who-Saved-Children-Biography/dp/185168722X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1436439017&sr=8-2&keywords=mulley" target="_blank">The Woman Who Saved the Children</a>, and it is wonderful to see that her life is still inspiring people, both to write, and to support the vital work of Save the Children today. Proceeds from both my book and Anne’s play are donated to the charity.<br />
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Among Eglantyne’s many skills was an extraordinary ability to communicate the facts in such a way as to inspire others. She had a very vivid imagination and clearly loved words, writing numerous poems and romantic-social novels, as well as her pioneering statement of children’s rights. She also wrote and gave speeches, published leaflets and press articles, and made pioneering use of photographs and film footage to win support for her cause, often from initially hostile audiences.<br />
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Anne’s play opens with Eglantyne’s very public arrest in Trafalgar Square in the spring of 1919, for distributing leaflets calling for an end to the economic blockade that was contributing to the starvation of thousands in Germany and Austria. These leaflets had not been cleared under the Defence of the Realm Act – it had never struck Eglantyne that they might need to be. The crown prosecutor did not mince his words, but Eglantyne chose to represent herself and focused on the moral case. By the end of the session she had been found guilty, but the court reporters had plenty to pad out their stories with, and the crown prosecutor insisted on paying her fine.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8oz4133bQ5615E-CgWY_4pUmhKA0ioco2Fki65iGKlzqaevc_uCcSDcBHV6pjhvd8Nx-h0aF-Kbg1LElcwnYu59_iYszldNbZzKqLUxvVPX7omicYI6AcPIKC221ftuojxbhSg6Ziytk/s1600/eg4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8oz4133bQ5615E-CgWY_4pUmhKA0ioco2Fki65iGKlzqaevc_uCcSDcBHV6pjhvd8Nx-h0aF-Kbg1LElcwnYu59_iYszldNbZzKqLUxvVPX7omicYI6AcPIKC221ftuojxbhSg6Ziytk/s400/eg4.png" title="Eglantyne Jebb" width="340" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eglantyne Jebb, c.1921</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XvcVfe47Of9IRtGsmVZ1zvvBuF53QXKUYOUtAQ3QLCcOxdZlD0dOxhYSJzT5ichaGHV3VC6_qOAfPQzWUpK2IDq4ovQaaImKgBPHQPh7Bg3ED3k9IapNrvOEqxYNMgI-lumGPz8S35E/s1600/eg5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XvcVfe47Of9IRtGsmVZ1zvvBuF53QXKUYOUtAQ3QLCcOxdZlD0dOxhYSJzT5ichaGHV3VC6_qOAfPQzWUpK2IDq4ovQaaImKgBPHQPh7Bg3ED3k9IapNrvOEqxYNMgI-lumGPz8S35E/s400/eg5.jpg" title="Anne Chamberlain" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne Chamberlain, as Jebb 2015</td></tr>
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<i>Save the Children</i> was swept into existence on the wave of publicity that followed this trial, culminating with an exciting public meeting at the Royal Albert Hall. After listening to Eglantyne and her sister’s speeches, the crowds, who had arrived armed with rotten fruit to throw at the traitor women who wanted to give succour to the enemy, were instead inspired to put their hands in their pockets and fund a herd of Swiss dairy cows to provide milk for the children of Vienna.<br />
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Eglantyne gained the support of factory girls and aristocrats, the Pope and the Mining Unions, the British aristocracy and the Bolshevik government. She even won the backing of the wife of the Prime Minister whose policies she had campaigned against. ‘When she spoke’, her friend and colleague Dr Hector Munro later wrote, ‘everything seemed to lose importance and one agreed to do whatever she wished.’<br />
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Little surprise then, that Eglantyne’s words are still inspiring people today. In her play, Anne manages to integrate many wonderful examples of Eglantyne’s own phrases, from speeches and letters, into her script:<br />
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- ‘Humanity owes to the child the best it has to give.’<br />
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- ‘Every generation… offers mankind anew the possibility of rebuilding his ruin of a world.’<br />
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- ‘The world is not ungenerous, but unimaginative, and very busy.’<br />
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As I often still give talks about Eglantyne, and use many of the same quotes, it was strange to hear these words in someone else's mouth, with different intonations. But it was also really lightening - and heartening. At the end of the evening I felt as though, in a way, I had been kindly exorcised of Eglantyne. She will always be an inspiration, but my relationship with her feels less intense – it feels shared.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4XpmBTqBSuYytnE2Tmg1KPcNWq4Ffpu70fA7ARhejhAueICC5gsVbFahwKutkYM0xbmiZqdPTPnEnUOTZByK_A02HcgbYrEAvoxN93FxpSm10bX1NZLGNgQGas1jYS0swrFiQ2P8210k/s1600/eg6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4XpmBTqBSuYytnE2Tmg1KPcNWq4Ffpu70fA7ARhejhAueICC5gsVbFahwKutkYM0xbmiZqdPTPnEnUOTZByK_A02HcgbYrEAvoxN93FxpSm10bX1NZLGNgQGas1jYS0swrFiQ2P8210k/s400/eg6.png" title="Eglantyne Jebb" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eglantyne Jebb, c.1925</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGA6ssU_SpkMwlq5ndJjjU2y7i0tv-7K8WI77TXLTVSBY9awaTHKQAmIDgzq-Y9TZyQjOQD5OOyyZKi7_L5sMz3Drb8JyVamOGq4dfwX2YZq9K_clgQAPWuqjZRzLJ9qhDKkzZK25cQM/s1600/eg7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijGA6ssU_SpkMwlq5ndJjjU2y7i0tv-7K8WI77TXLTVSBY9awaTHKQAmIDgzq-Y9TZyQjOQD5OOyyZKi7_L5sMz3Drb8JyVamOGq4dfwX2YZq9K_clgQAPWuqjZRzLJ9qhDKkzZK25cQM/s400/eg7.jpg" title="Anne Chamberlain" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne Chamberlain as Jebb, 2015</td></tr>
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Before I saw Anne’s play, I had wondered whether I would see a very different Eglantyne on stage, to the one I had come to picture to myself, someone I might not recognise even. This happened once before when I went to a production of Tony Harrison’s play in verse, called <i>Fram</i>. Fram, which means ‘Forward’ in Norwegian, was the name of the arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s ship. As the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, Nansen became an associate of Eglantyne’s, helping to bring desperately needed relief to Russia during the famine of 1921. She greatly admired his spirit and energy, calling him a ‘solid viking’. Harrison’s play explored the relationship between art and aid, at times in quite provocative and painful ways. Eglantyne’s lines are the best in it, I think, and she was excellently played by Carolyn Pickles when I saw the production at the <i>Royal National Theatre</i>. But although Carolyn made me laugh by signing my programme ‘Eglantyne’, I did not feel a strong connection with the figure she had portrayed on stage. Perhaps, I thought for a while, I had imagined her wrongly... </div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihdq3CaXoWfUrE3dHGmrBaQovGyBUp_AmHIu4I1IN4n2h6GPnLQHdzJ1ZU_fgVV88z92m10qKWR0U_iJro7-dbE0BbcUd1Eo33Siwd_Gqx0Rjk4SsXkqhulLQtXXCfL3z6wDjVTQokJGM/s1600/eg8.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihdq3CaXoWfUrE3dHGmrBaQovGyBUp_AmHIu4I1IN4n2h6GPnLQHdzJ1ZU_fgVV88z92m10qKWR0U_iJro7-dbE0BbcUd1Eo33Siwd_Gqx0Rjk4SsXkqhulLQtXXCfL3z6wDjVTQokJGM/s400/eg8.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;">Save the Children</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.8192px;"> feeds starving Russian children, 1921 </span></td></tr>
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As we slowly approach <i>Save the Children’s</i> centenary in 2019, the charity has asked whether it might be possible to re-imagine Eglantyne, to bring her story to a new and younger audience – with a picture book about her life, adventures and achievements. I think this would be wonderful, and look forward to seeing yet another interpretation of this wonderful woman on the page… If anyone has suggestions for brilliant and inspiring children’s illustrators I would be delighted to hear them!<br />
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Sadly there is no one alive today who knew Eglantyne. There are photographs and sketches, but no one who heard her voice, and no recording of her. However, much of her writing survives, her actions speak volumes, and her energy, spirit, determination and often rather dark sense of humour, are palpable throughout. When I watched Anne Chamberlain’s play earlier this month, I was delighted to discover that I felt very familiar with the Eglantyne that she brought to life, which makes me hope that perhaps we both found something of the truth in this remarkable woman.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhig8mA2-sheQbl6MxHDV1eRv7g9QjFkqhXjhTBuIhhTX-vGG1i3_X63y_kFMQXOq_Lw-oqOTd1oxxeYbRUAHnGU0G7912kLp3tXkTqRY8l7GmoenMaDXEksRk4_c9tmmGvU24iNRHPGqw/s1600/eg9.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="306" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhig8mA2-sheQbl6MxHDV1eRv7g9QjFkqhXjhTBuIhhTX-vGG1i3_X63y_kFMQXOq_Lw-oqOTd1oxxeYbRUAHnGU0G7912kLp3tXkTqRY8l7GmoenMaDXEksRk4_c9tmmGvU24iNRHPGqw/s400/eg9.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anne and me, holding each other's writing about Eglantyne Jebb</td></tr>
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I think that Eglantyne herself would have been fascinated by each reincarnation, and on the whole pleased, given that each helps to promote the cause – the welfare and rights of the world’s children – that she cared so passionately about. ‘A friend of mine once said to me that our minds, contemplating the truth, were like so many cameras turned towards the same building’, she once wrote. ‘No two cameras can be in the exactly the same position… so that no two precisely similar photographs can be taken; hence also, though some may be better than others, no single photograph, always supposing that it had not been faked, will be without its value.’<br />
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Sadly Anne’s play has now finished its British run, but it may be back next year and if so I will pass on the tour dates. I hope that between <i>Eglantyne</i> the play, my biography, and any new portrait, many more people, of all ages, may yet come to picture Eglantyne Jebb in their own way, and be inspired.<br />
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<b>Similar Posts</b><br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.claremulleyblog.co.uk/2014/05/eglantyne-jebb-woman-who-saved-children.html">Eglantyne Jebb, The Woman Who Saved the Children</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.claremulleyblog.co.uk/2015/03/women-making-waves.html">Women Making Waves</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.claremulleyblog.co.uk/2015/02/all-about-ida.html">All about Ida</a></li>
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Clare Mulleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11592100764046914574noreply@blogger.com1