McKay and Etherton

A couple of weeks back I was introduced to a local group (from the Gower, near Swansea) who have produced a fabulous CD of folk songs in tribute to Swansea’s sailors and coppermen. It is called Pennbucky to Llangenny by Andrew McKay with Andy Baker, Tony Beddow, Joe Parsell, Dave Robinson and Ken Simpson. The 18 track album is a treasure of history explored in song. One of my favourites is Dead Reckoning (hear a sample), a song about old skills made redundant, particularly regarding the change from shipping by sail to steam. Others sing about the art of the ship’s carpenter (Made of Wood), about Swansea’s wealth deriving from brass and copper (Bronze and Brass) and intrepid journeys Welsh mariners made around Cape Horn (they were known as Cape Horners) on their way to Chile and Cuba to collect copper ore to bring back for smelting (Drinks at the Cuba, Pennbucky to Llangenny). The album also includes a nod to the traditional with a set of hornpipes from Mumbles and Greenholme / The Ivy House.

At the moment I am working on a project on the heritage of Welsh copper at Swansea University and in amongst the research, the liaison with other organisations and people, my heart fills with joy when I come across things like this. That history has inspired beautiful music or art or words from people means it is worth remembering and telling to others. I wonder that people won’t learn more from these songs than they will from a run of the mill history book …

Brazilian quartz point

The politics of mineral wealth and the redistribution of that wealth to the people whose country it belongs is a huge and thorny issue that has occupied historians, social scientists and economists for years. It did get me thinking, however. My own work on material culture has not been that focused on exactly where minerals and non-organic raw materials came from–so much was recycled–but it is certainly a subject that requires more historical interest across periods and something I intend to follow up in the future. I have a much better picture of organic raw materials such as wood, linen and silk.

All this just reminded me more of the minerals I miss looking at, handling and studying, shining under UV light, etc. So I thought I’d revisit a set of photos I took a few years back and use them to think about minerals in earnest again.

See my whole Minerals set on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/courgettelawn/sets/1794338/

Wiltshire County Council and Swindon Borough Council are currently in the middle of moving various heritage services from around the county (mainly Trowbridge) topurpose-built facilities in Chippenham which will open some time after October 2007 as Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre. These services include the record office (archives), archaeology, museums service conservation (moved from Salisbury) and local studies library.

It is claimed that the new facilities will increase access to heritage collections and services for members of the public. However, have the planners thought about transport issues? To try and reach Chippenham from most of Wiltshire is a trial. There are few adequate bus services and a woeful, mistimed rail service on the TransWilts line which means that you have to add almost an hour to your journey to travel, say, from Salisbury to Chippenham (change at Bath) on the train (previously it was direct to Trowbridge). This is the letter I wrote to Salisbury Journal in response to the story of the new History Centre:

Dear Postbag,

I was very excited to read about the developments to move Wiltshire’s
archives to a new purpose-built centre in Chippenham (Journal, 31 May,
p. 5).

However, do those involved with this project realise how difficult it
is going to be to reach the centre from the south of the county by
public transport? Since First Great Western slashed services on the
TransWilts line (Salisbury-Swindon via Melksham) last December, you
have to now leave the county (change at Bath) and re-enter it, adding
more than 45 minutes to a journey which should take about 55 minutes.
There is currently one direct train a day from Salisbury to Chippenham
timed at 19.05, arriving 20.00!

I have written to First Great Western and Wiltshire County Council
about the poor service on the line and its implications, especially in
view of the current Unitary Bid and increasing traffic problems when
crossing the county. Unsatisfactory replies were given by both. Many
people who use services such as record offices want to travel by
public transport and so it is very disappointing that Wiltshire have
not been more joined-up in their thinking about the location of its
services and the access issues therein.

I wanted to find out more about people and organisations who have declared UDI (unilateral declaration of independence) against something or someone. On my travels I came across the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM). It is extremely pleasing to read that unequivocal socialism still exists in the politicking of the United Kingdom. The SRSM don’t just want Scottish independence but want to ensure that any independence is not accompanied multi-national corporate domination short-term capitalist gain for the few (for example like that which we are witnessing now in the ever-growing gap between the rich and poorer). Their principles are very much based in Wallace-esque rhetioric but if you scratch through this and excuse the sometimes overly-polemical content, there is an organisation and a solidarity that is refreshingly reassuring.
Red Duster is the SRSM’s journal contains an article from 2002 that made good reading on this dismal winter morning. UK and US Out of Iraq! Scotland Out of Britain! by Donald Anderson makes an excellent case for all British to support Scottish socialist independence. He asks, “If Scots had the will to declare UDI how would Britain be able to declare war on anybody? Her nuclear weapons are here in Scotland.” The article then goes on to make bold statements without support (the one thing I find so frustrating about socialist movements from whom I expect a propensity for honesty) by claiming that the UK is the biggest violator of EU human rights but not saying how. Further, making unhistorical comparisons between the proportion of black soldiers in the US wars in Vietnam (30%) and the proportion of Scots in Her Majesty’s forces in Gulf War I (40%). Good effort, could do better.

I am more interested in the comment about the nuclear weapons, especially in the light of two current political developments: first, the so-called debate about renewing Trident – the UK’s nuclear weapons system: for deterrent purposes only of course… second, Tony Blair’s warning about a UK break-up being “disasterous” for Scotland in the face of increasing support in Scotland for full independence. I can’t help thinking there is a link here…

I am wondering also why SRSM’s list of organisations in solidarity includesamong others Emgann – Breton left republicans and Republican Sinn Fein but not Mebyon Kernow – the party for an independent Cornwall?

I have been involved for a while, to a lesser or greater degree, in family history research but this is usually facilitating it for others. I have not really explored my own to any great depth. My blood family’s history (the Bhotes, originally from near Poona in India) has been transmitted to me in legend and story rather than through documentary sources. The trail ends up in undergrowth just beyond the boundaries of living memory.

My oldest remembered ancestor was a teacher and we have a portrait of him (not older than the latter quarter of the 19th century). When I reflect on the fragility of memory I feel needled. I need to talk to my grandmothers and remember what they tell me or it will be ‘lost’ – or rather the memories will never be created. I am now married and my adoptive family are the Goskars. There are not many left in the world and there are only two, my husband and his sister, who keep the name in this country (me through marriage makes three). Thinking about both my blood and adoptive families, I have become interested in the place or trade origins of surnames.

Bhote

All Bhotes are Parsis*, that is from the small community of Zoroastrians** of Persian extraction who settled on the north-west coast of India in the centuries after the successive Arab conquests of Persia from approximately the 8th century. The story about the first Persian emigrés to India is contained in the epic poem, Qessa-e Sanjan. Largely, the Parsis remained familiarly within their own community. Their culture and religion, while adopting many local customs remained distinct. The Parsis were very precocious in adopting surnames foreign to their own traditions (or perhaps these names point to children born of those who were not Parsi, though this would have been frowned upon as the community has until recently remained quite close-knit). So I also have Coopers and Nicholsons in my immediate family. Bhote is not a Persian word as far as I know. The family lore has been that it is the Gujarati word for ‘simpleton’ or ‘stupid’. Clearly this is a family joke and cannot be true but is enigmatic of my family’s bizarre sense of humour.  In trying to find other origins for it, I ended up in Tibet, the source of the Bhote Koshi river, well known to white-water rafters and other water-going adrenalin addicts although these parts of the river are found in Nepal. It seems that the river is named after the people known as ‘Bhote‘ (or Bhutia) who comprise about half the population of nearby Bhutan which neighbours Tibet and Nepal but Bhote was also used as a generic term for anyone who followed Tibetan culture or displayed mongolid features.

As interesting as all this was, and continues to be, I don’t feel I am any nearer why part of my family came to have the name Bhote. As far as I am aware there have been no connections between the Parsis and the Bhote people of Bhutan or Tibet but this is just the start of my search. The Parsis were intrepid travellers especially as traders and they faciliated much of the cross Himalaya trade from China to India. Who knows what happened along the way in the foothills around Tibet and Bhutan.

Goskar

The Goskars I am now related to are from Cornwall. They have a coat of arms but we don’t as yet know why or when they acquired it. In unheraldic speak, its shield has a silver background flanked by a horizontal blood-red band across the top and another diagonal from the left of this band to the bottom right of the shield.  The horizontal band displays three five-pointed stars (silver) in a row.  There are three Cornish choughs in the areas demarkated by the diagnonal band, two in the bottom left, one in the top right section.  Some cursory searches have found Goskars in south Wales, Warwickshire, Norfolk and elsewhere and a few years ago one in South Africa. It is an unusual name and does not seem to be of Cornish (linguistically) origin itself. Many people think it sounds Scandinavian, Germanic or Slavic. There is an enormous outcrop of rock off the North Beach in Tenby called Goskar Rock (also spelt Goscar). When we visited the local museum in Tenby they seemed to trace the word to a ‘Saxon’ word for a ploughshare – the main cutting blade of a plough but we have found no reliable references for this to date. Perhaps more intruiguing is the existence of a small village called Goskar now in north-west Poland and called Gostchorze but previously in Germany (the region of Prussia). Someone has written a short history of Goskar in German and published it online. My German is too ropey to understand it well but I am hoping to ask a friend a favour and try and find out more about this village which was and possibly still is a small farming community. What could be the connection between all these places and people? Any?

These are just beginnings. My searches have demonstrated how unexpected some results can be – and also how mis-leading they may be. If anyone can help with any of the above, I would be very grateful.

*As in any community there are many disputes about who is and isn’t a Parsi and what is and isn’t their inheritance. As you can see from this article on the Parsis in Wikipedia, there is much variation in belief as to the culture and ethnicity (especially the latter) of the Parsis.

**Here the link is to Avesta.org which has probably been the best regarded site on Zoroastrianism (providing texts, lists of resources, glossaries, etc) on the web. However there are many others projecting different ideas about the religion(s) so go browse and make your own mind up.

This week’s Global Museum highlights a story about a new museum that has opened in Nagoya, Japan in memory of Shoichi Yokoi, a former soldier in the Japanese army who returned to Japan in 1972 having spent over 26 years in the jungles of Guam without realising World War II had ended.
The story, originally released by Japan Economic Newswire quotes Shoichi Yokoi’s widow said that the museum was opened in memory of her husband, then sargeant of the Imperial Japanese Navy, at the couple’s former house.

I want many people to realize the preciousness of peace

Sadly the story does not elaborate further about the sargeant’s life on Guam or why he should have returned, ‘ashamed to come home’ alive more than 31 years after he left Japan on a naval transport ship.

What I find interesting about this story isn’t so much that Shoichi Yokoi might not have realised that World War II had formally ended more than a quarter century before he left Guam, but that he created a life for himself there, solitary or otherwise. How did that change his view of the world and of his own sense of self and how in 1972 did he find out that WWII was over? This story on the ‘last Japanese WWII straggler on Guam‘ which describes more detail about his extraordinary survival in an underground cave, making clothing from the fibres of wild hibiscus for example. In 1972, Shoichi was reputed to have said,

‘We Japanese soldiers were told to prefer death to the disgrace of getting captured alive.’

‘The only thing that gave me the strength and will to survive was my faith in myself and that as a soldier of Japan, it was not a disgrace to continue on living’ he reflected later in 1986.

It is difficult to know what such a story can teach us except perhaps demonstrating the human capacity for survival and determination to live when all else that busies our minds and bodies is lost.

I’ve just added this image and a story to Cornwall Culture, a campaign to find out what Cornwall means to you, us, them. In the section ‘What does Cornwall mean to you‘ there is a virtual pin-board of images each with stories, keywords and comments made by various people who have joined the campaign. You can also agree or disagree with whether a particular keywords or add your own. Browsing around what some people had to say was compelling. The strength of feeling among many of the contributors about being Cornish and about Cornwall’s heritage and history was more vehement at times than I might have expected, with for example, the supression of the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549 likened to an ‘ethnocide’ or ‘Cornish Holocaust’ perpetrated by imperialist overlords (the English) and how tinners who didn’t pay their dues to the Duchy were ‘forced’ to eat molten tin.

As a historian I am both fascinated and disappointed at such comments. Fascinated because I am experiencing the Cornish history of tomorrow. Disappointed because it seems that the claim on historical ‘fact’ seems to be anybody’s to promulgate as they wish without recourse to the evidence. I don’t see as much disputation of Boyle’s Law among such people. But then the way history is understood is as much about what people want to believe and how it makes them feel as it is about the painstaking labour of evaluating and interpreting the sources.

As for me, I was walking from Padstow to Harlyn Bay with Tom last summer on the South West coastal path in search of burials of iron age ancestors. They did it differently in Cornwall, you know. (No, they really did.)

On Boundaries is a new blog created by my friends gesta and reivers, a medievalist and a mathematical scientist, approaching life, people and the universe from their divers perspectives. If they don’t mind me saying, this will blog will challenge all sorts of rubbish that is believed by lots of unthinking or otherwise ignorant people. They are compassionate intellectuals, highly defined by their own life experiences in learning, knowledge acquisition and wisdom sharing.

History repeats itself. Governments / politicians / we never learn from history. We ignore history at our peril. Some of the things commonly said about the consequences of not engaging with history when decisions like going to war are made. Countless people pointed this out in relation to the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and continue to do so. However, the planning and justifications for this particular invasion have never been countenanced by history. How could they? Who, in the Bush and Blair regimes have ever engaged with history truthfully, recent or distant, to make it influence their decision making? The only use of historical legitimacy that I noted was in that feeble declaration of support penned by Tony Blair and some of his European counterparts to make a statement of solidarity for George Bush and the US government:

“We in Europe have a relationship with the United States which has stood the test of time.

Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and far-sightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism.

Thanks, too, to the continued co-operation between Europe and the United States we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent.”
(30 January 2003)

Presumably the last statement refers to the persistence of US-bases – sovereign American soil – on the European continent (not least the UK and its colonies). Because, we are told, history demonstrated that alliance with the Americans brings victory, Europe should continue to stand behind the US government in future conflicts as victory and glory, surely, will be guaranteed again. The ‘special relationship’, cemented by Winston Churchill and revived between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan (and also taken to new levels of affection between Tony Blair and George Bush II), will be one aspect of history that will be difficult for Britain and Europe to extricate itself from. However, obviously the French and Germans did not feel their historical allegiance should force an alliance. The same can be said of Britain’s ex-colonies such as New Zealand, in spite of the moral and practical support afforded to the US by its neighbour Australia.

Clearly the invasion and war has, as many predicted it would, gone disasterously wrong. Would hindsight really have stopped the manner in which Iraq was invaded and occupied? Would that the US, UK and its allies in Iraq have understood better the history and consequences of past conflicts, they might never have embarked on this madness. I argue not. For history to count, for the wisdom and experience it brings to give weight to political decisions, it has to be debated openly, honestly and publically.

Yesterday, I was forwarded a very interesting article by George Monbiot which also appears in today’s Guardian. Writing about the appauling treatment of Irish civilians during the Irish War of Independence or Anglo-Irish War (c.1919-1921), Monbiot draws parallels between the cold-blooded killings and torture (widely attested) afforded by the Black and Tans or Royal Irish Constabulary to innocents and to those who even deigned to walk about with hands in their pockets, and the similar treatment dished out to Iraqi civilians by US soldiers in Iraq. Monbiot quotes a US veteran from Iraq: “On Sunday another veteran told the Observer that cold-blooded killings by US forces “are widespread. This is the norm. These are not the exceptions.” ” Like the Black and Tans then, the US troops, for now, are unlikely to face much in the way of punishment. He ends his piece by cautioning: “Occupations brutalise both the occupiers and the occupied. It is our refusal to learn that lesson which allows new colonial adventures to take place. If we knew more about Ireland, the invasion of Iraq might never have happened.”

If only that were true. If only those who understood change and therefore understood history were in power, such an idea as invading Iraq might never have been brought to the table. We don’t know and not all historians were against the idea of regime change. In any case, historians are not in charge of the country, nor do they have a prominent place in providing government advice. Even as academics they are barely valued as crucial to the fabric of society. During this year’s Reuter Lecture, ‘Historians and public intellectuals: Theodor Mommsen and Fustel de Coulanges’ at the University of Southampton (5 June 2006), Prof. Patrick Geary stressed the crucial role historians have to play in continually pointing out and correcting the mis-use of history, especially by politicians. However they also have a role in making comment about the present without needing to draw on their own academic work. Neither Theodor Mommsen nor Fustel de Coulanges drew upon their subjects of expertise (classical and medieval history) in their debates about the ownership of Alsace-Lorraine during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71).

It is in our (historians’) capacity to understand people and change that makes us essential commentators and critics of the world in which we live in today. Merely knowing and highlighting past events will seldom change decisions made in the present day. Yes, we can point to historical examples to bolster our arguments but it is the arguments themselves that have to stand firm on their own, and persuade. We have to demonstrate that honest intellectual debate, engaged in by anyone who has anything sensible to say, is the only sturdy counter-balance to wayward governments. However, like this person who seems to comtemplate himself in the mirror in this red-figure ware Greek vase, any historian – or anybody else – wishing to partake in such debates, first needs understand him/herself before they can seek answers about the past or indeed the present.