Beyond Brutalism: Architecture, Citizenship, and Space as a way into 20th-century British Architectural History

A great privilege of academic life is the opportunity to convene with scholars in one’s field and share new research. Most recently, this took the form of the conference ‘Architecture Citizenship Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s,’ that I convened with Dr Alistair Fair of the University of Edinburgh. Held here at Oxford Brookes on 15-16 June, it was funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with additional support from the Research Fund of the School of History, Philosophy and Culture.

Re-thinking how we do architectural history

In convening the event we had a number of aims.  Central was to bring together excellent scholars – from early career to emerita professor - who are producing excellent work in the field of twentieth century British architectural history – and to give them an opportunity to share their research and enjoy a conversation about it. 

More particularly, we wanted to bring together scholars who are working on that history in a particular way. All the work presented at the conference took as its starting point an understanding of architectural production in the widest sense, encompassing not only completed buildings and unbuilt projects but also texts and the media, clients, builders, and users. That is, we are all part of a turn in twentieth-century British architectural history away from primarily formalist accounts of style (we’re just a bit bored with Brutalism). This new architectural history – now beginning to consolidate itself - is rooted in the archive and asks how cultural production functioned as a vehicle through which to explore such ideas as modernity, identity and community. In essence, the material and spatial culture of architecture is conceived as a commentary on these ideas, whether by embracing or resisting them. 

The Pivotal Decades: Re-thinking Architecture and Nationhood 1918-1939 

The conference began with a focus on the 1920s and 1930s, which, speakers argued, was the period when architects and others self-consciously began to re-evaluate the purpose and nature of architectural culture as Britain entered full democracy. This would be done through the creation of prototypical new sites (such as the Pioneer Health Centre, discussed by Elizabeth Darling), through architectural journalism (Jessica Kelly on the Architectural Review) or through a re-invention of the architectural profession, especially in the wake of the inter-war Registration Acts (Neal Shasore on the RIBA). 

What emerged in these papers was the idea of the building, as the creators of the Pioneer Health Centre put it, as ‘an inter-facial membrane’: an active and dynamic set of spaces in and through which ‘publics’ could be or become modern.

Elizabeth Darling explored this idea through a consideration of the concept of the ‘Centre,’ and the examples of the Pioneer Health Centre, the Building Centre, the Housing Centre and the Community Centre. These addressed a number of publics – another key theme in this session. This might be a working-class public, as was the case at the Pioneer Health Centre, enabled to assume a fuller role in society through improved health care and access to birth control, or a more affluent, middle-class public who, through access to information about modern products for their homes at the Building Centre, could create domestic settings as modern as they were.

Speakers were careful to note the difficulty of the term ‘public,’ noting a tension between the intentions of middle-class/upper middle-class reformers, journalists, architects, and the audiences they addressed. Jessica Kelly’s paper showed how the Architectural Review  negotiated a relationship with a reading public from the late 1920s onwards, when it became a proselytiser for architectural modernism. From problematising a (middle-class) public (and equating femininity with poor taste in articles such as ‘The Architectural Consequences of Women’) and which thus needed to be instructed about the new architecture, she charted the emergence of an idea that the architectural press might collaborate with its readership in the advocacy of a specifically national form of modernism. 

Neal Shasore showed how the architectural profession similarly sought to engage with a middle-class public through a new headquarters building (opened 1934) notable for its openness (in contrast to other profession’s more monumental and private institutional interiors) and a newly-founded PR committee: its aim to create the idea of architecture as a public service and the architect as indispensable in the formation of the commonweal. 

This linking of the architect/architectural culture and the public realm; buildings as some form of setting for transformation; and more national or regional forms of modernism would find full expression in the reconstruction of Britain after the Second World War. Subsequent sessions explored their manifestation in the fields of education, urban planning, and the cultural sphere.

Educating the Nation after 1945

In this session speakers considered how the new Welfare State’s concern for citizens from cradle to grave, began with a massive school (and later university) building programme. Roy Kozlovsky showed how a concern for children’s emotional well-being (largely stemming from the experience of wartime evacuation) led to carefully designed, domestic scale, school environments, settings for a more informal education with the ultimate aim of creating the child as a (proto) ‘social democratic self.’ 

Catherine Burke picked up this theme of the school as an early training in democracy – so important to a nation reconstructing. She also demonstrated how a new understanding that all children were entitled to the best was manifested in how architects (now very much public servants) designed these new schools meticulously: from structure to fixtures and fittings. In such attractive settings children received an education in culture as well as the 3 Rs.

This nurturing was continued through to higher education buildings, the subject of Louise Campbell’s paper. Again, the state understood education not simply as a means to an end, but a good in and of itself; the university was a site to train a new generation of engineers, civil servants and so on, but more generally to enable generations to become cultivated citizens of both a modern Britain and a modern Europe.

Architecture Citizenship Space: Beyond the Academy

Discussion took a slightly different tack in our final session of day one, a roundtable to which we had invited the blogger Municipal Dreams (John Boughton); the Manchester Modernist Society’s Jack Hale, and Verity-Jane Keefe, who runs the Mobile Museum. 

Working beyond the confines of an academic context, each engages with the architecture of the period under discussion with a particular emphasis on its lived experience and its enjoyment and appreciation. How often the architecture of the Welfare State (and indeed pre-war social architecture) has come to be dismissed and understood as a generic misstep in social policy, was a theme that quickly emerged. Thus work to remind a wider public and politicians that, for example, council estates are not anonymous agglomerations of housing, but Places inhabited by communities, or that Manchester’s modernist office blocks and highways might be important markers of a local identity, is a central activity of all our discussants whether through community workshops, blog writing or walks and publications. Emphasis was also placed on the importance of grassroots responses to local architectures versus the parachuting in of outside bodies unfamiliar with the particularities of a place.

Where and how to live

Day two saw our final sessions. In the first, new ideas of urban form and dwelling, as well as new methods of designing them, formed the subject of discussion. Otto Saumarez Smith explored post-war urban planning, favouring the concept of ‘urbanity’ as a lens through which to understand design rather than stylistc tropes like Brutalism or the New Empiricism. Urbanity – a term deployed by architects and sociologists working together – argued for higher-density city redevelopment that drew on the traditions of Georgian town planning to create urban spatial forms that retained the social relations of working-class communities but in much better designed and spatially generous surroundings. 

Christine Hui Lan Manley considered a different form of urbanity - this time a more visual form - in her discussion of Frederick Gibberd’s work at Harlow and Hackney. Gibberd sought to blend local references be that to Georgian architecture in an urban context or vernacular in a more rural setting with the more usual tropes of modernism to again create decent well-designed homes and neighbourhoods. 

Ruth Lang’s paper offered a parallel commentary on the development of modern ways of working through her discussion of the London County Council Architects’ Department’s method of design organization. She showed how small teams comprising not just architects but other specialists (including sociologists) worked communally on projects: experts dedicated to serving a post-war public that warranted - without question - the best of environments. 

Culture and Democracy

Finally, and in keeping with the theme that the post-war world required a cultured citizenry, speakers explored the nationalisation of culture from the mid-1940s onwards. Alistair Fair argued that for both Left and Right, the theatre was understood as a site in which all people could enjoy access to culture (as opposed to the less highbrow, and American, forms of culture such as the cinema). Through the Arts Council, successive governments in the 1960s and early 1970s supported the building of new civic theatres which, in their combination of performance with social spaces for mingling and eating, created sites of cultivated leisure. As Fair pointed out, the plays put on might not, however, always be to locals’ taste: in response to a play rich in its language, excused by its director as ‘idiom’, a woman complained ‘what you call idiom, I call filth.’ 

Reflecting the tensions in that letter, and also raised in the first session’s papers, that the intentions behind such projects were not always met on the ground with appreciation, Rosamund West’s paper outlined the London County Council’s policy of including artwork (usually sculpture) in its housing estates. This might be understood as a further echo of the policy of surrounding children in their new schools with well-designed furniture.  While some work was very popular, locals did not always appreciate the modernity of the sculptures commissioned.  

Lesley Whitworth’s paper showed how a parallel organization to the Arts Council, the Council of Industrial Design (COID, founded 1944) similarly sought to foster an awareness of the importance of design and the designer in the formation of a modern Britain. This most certainly had an economic motive: the purchase of consumer goods would help the British economy and fill the homes of those re-housed in the estates designed by Gibberd et al. But, more particularly, as Whitworth noted, and reiterating the idea of the importance of the arts per se, the objects that the COID approved as examples of good design, were talismanic for those who promoted them, and those who bought them. They were signs of Britain’s and Britons’ modernity.

These papers were all delivered in an atmosphere notable for its friendliness and collegiality, and each session ended in useful and constructive discussion. We finished with the observation that having considered the historical moment when culture was seen as transcendant, rather than tied to measurable outputs, and that the provision of spaces and things through and in which individuals might negotiate their place in democracy was the goal of architects, designers, their clients and their users, we were rather a long way from our present reality. The theme of architecture, citizenship, space, seemed therefore especially timely.  

Dr Elizabeth Darling, Reader in Architectural History 

Image one: Elizabeth Darling & Alistair Fair introduce the conference

Image two: Roundtable speakers

The Witchcraft Exhibition at Ravensburg: A Review

The municipal museum of Ravensburg (Baden-Württemberg, Germany) is currently hosting a major witchcraft exhibition. ‘Hexenwahn 1484. Frauen auf dem Scheiterhaufen’ (‘Witch Craze 1484. Women at the Stake’) is the somewhat curious title of the event that includes the exhibition itself, a series of public lectures, and the publication of a collection of essays about the witch hunts in Ravensburg and the surrounding Lake Constance area.

Ravensburg is clearly a good place for a witchcraft exhibition, since it has largely escaped the air raids of WW2 and large parts of the old town centre are still intact. A number of buildings mentioned in the Ravensburg witch trials therefore still exist. The former imperial free city of Ravensburg, one of the more affluent semi-republican city states that had flourished in South Germany in the late Middle Ages and experienced a slow but steady decline in the early modern period witnessed some of the earliest German witch trials. 

The municipal museum ‘Humpis Quartier’ is a unique place that would be well worth a visit all by itself. The museum is not really housed in a building. Rather, it houses itself in a number of late medieval buildings. The modern museum space integrates a courtyard and some old buildings into a complete new system that is artificial and yet seems to have grown organically out of medieval architectural roots. The symbiosis of ancient half-timber, rough masonry, concrete and glass is almost in itself ‘magical’. At times, the visitor may wonder where exactly in the architectural space and where in time he is.

The exhibition uses what is in Germany sometimes called the ‘taxi approach’ to the eternal problem of getting the general audience interested in a very specific academic question: You’ve got to pick them up where they stand. The visitors are greeted by three screens with videos that talk about modern concepts of the witch most visitors would be familiar with. The screens present witches in the popular imagination (long noses and red hair seem to be of the essence), literary witches (‘Faust’ and fairy tales), and the witches of the Southwest German street carnival (male mummers wearing grotesque wooden masks). In order to see these screens the visitors have to go through a comparatively dark and narrow corridor. This corridor leads into a big open space under a high class roof. 

The room itself is a symbol: Here, the exhibition ‘illuminates’ and ‘clarifies’ matters. A series of reproductions of pictures with explanatory texts present the five elements of the demonological definition of the witch: A witch is a person who has made a pact with the devil (1). She (the witch is usually female) has sex with demons (2). She meets regularly with other witches. This so called witches’ Sabbath is usually not imagined as a ‘Black Mass’ but rather as a peasants’ feast (3). In order to join these secret gatherings quickly and without being seen, witches fly magically through the air (4). Witches use magic to do harm (5). This essential part of the exhibition is much too ‘talky’: The explanatory texts matter, the (not very well chosen) reproductions of pictures do not. It seems as if the organizers of the exhibition simply wanted to get the basics out of the way. The visitors cannot help a feeling of anti-climax. The fantastic open exhibition space and the three screens that made the visitor think about various concepts of the witch seem to be wasted.

The next room presents a number of most interesting artefacts: talismans and bits of paper with magical writing and symbols. While these are clearly the most interesting pieces of the exhibition, they have hardly anything to do with witch trials: All of these items belong to the huge area of folk magic. They were supposed to ward off misfortune, illness and any kind of evil influence, at times including witchcraft. However, contrary to popular knowledge, folk magicians were usually not accused of witchcraft. Nevertheless, the room does provide a glimpse into actual magical practices from the early modern period that the visitors will appreciate.

So far, we have learned little about the actual Ravensburg witch hunt of 1484. The next sequence of rooms is dedicated to it and to one of its key players, the witch hunter Heinrich Kramer. Kramer, also known as Institoris, was the author of the notorious demonological manual ‘Malleus maleficarum’ (Hammer of the Witches). A local clergyman invited Kramer to Ravensburg so that he could lead an investigation against witches in his capacity as papal inquisitor. Kramer preached sermons against witchcraft and tried to talk the people of Ravensburg into denouncing their neighbours as witches. However, the crop of actual trials was rather scanty. Six women ended up in court, only two of them were found guilty and executed. 

The exhibition tends to overlook the basic fact of the Ravensburg witch hunt. Even though Kramer was an inquisitor, the court that tried the alleged witches was not an inquisitorial court. It was the municipal court of Ravensburg i.e. a secular, not an ecclesiastical court. Without the active support of the town authorities, Kramer would have failed utterly. The two women executed were persons of ill repute whom the people who mattered in Ravensburg saw as likely disciples of the devil. This exhibition fails to make the interrelation between Kramer, the local authorities and the inhabitants of Ravenburg sufficiently clear. Indeed, the selection of exhibits and the explanatory texts re-affirm the old misunderstanding that the inquisition was responsible for the witch trials. 

Visitors who have no prior knowledge are not likely to learn about the basic findings of witchcraft research, therefore. Almost all witch trials were conducted by secular authorities, not by the church. The driving force behind the witch trials were the so called common people, peasants and town people, not learned witch hunters. Instead of teaching this essential (and certainly somewhat disillusioning) lesson, the Ravensburg exhibition goes into details of individual trials and torture. The visitors are confronted with an executioner’s sword, and a torture device used for the ‘strappado’ the most common and most simple form of torture. Strangely enough, the organizers of the exhibition decided to include the so called ‘torture chair’ in the display, a rather ridiculous forgery from the 19^th century that has a lot to do with modern sadomasochistic fantasies about the so called ‘dark’ Middle Ages but nothing at all with early modern criminal trials. 

One display case presents an original text from a Ravensburg witch trial, interestingly one that documents an acquittal. Audio tapes play excerpts from trial records. A most helpful map identifies buildings and places connected with the witch hunts in Ravensburg: The visitors may continue their tour outside of the museum and go to the actual places that can still be found in today’s Ravensburg. These include the Green Tower where the alleged witches were imprisoned and a nice residential neighbourhood near the town centre, formerly a bit of woodland just outside the city walls where the witches’ Sabbath supposedly took place. This is clearly relevant and important. However, the exhibits do not stress the big inconvenient truth that the local authorities - not just the learned outsider Kramer - were responsible for the Ravensburg witch hunt.

Kramer used the experiences he had made in Ravensburg and other places in the German South when he wrote his manual for witch hunting, the ‘Malleus maleficarum’. The point of the book was to convince secular authorities that they should take a more pro-active stance toward the alleged threat of witchcraft. One early modern copy of the ‘Malleus maleficarum’ is on display. A series of panels without any original exhibits informs the visitors about Kramer’s further career and witch hunts that took place in some South German principalities. The last room of the exhibition confronts the visitors with the contemporary witch hunts that are taking place right now in large parts of Africa. Many experts agree that one of the main factors that hinder the further economic and political development of African societies is the fear of witches and actual witch hunts. There are a number of informative texts and photographs, but no original exhibits whatsoever.

The Ravensburg exhibition is highly informative. Visitors with little or no expert knowledge will learn something about the history of the witch hunts. However, some the explanatory texts are clearly misleading. There are too many of these texts and not enough original exhibits. It would be highly unfair to compare the Ravensburg exhibition to the big historical witchcraft exhibition in Karlsruhe in 1994, clearly the best one so far, or even to those in Berlin 2002 and Speyer 2010. The municipal museum of Ravensburg simply does not have a million-Euro budget to spend on an individual exhibition. Still, it would have paid to invest just a little more time and effort into the exhibition. The wonderful historical sights of the Lake Constance area are always worth a visit. So, if you go there this summer anyway, make sure to include the Ravensburg witchcraft exhibition in your itinerary.

Opening Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 11am -6 pm (Thusday 11am -8pm)

Admission fee: 5 Euros

The special exhibition about witchcraft ‘Hexenwahn 1484. Frauen auf dem Scheiterhaufen’ is on display till October 3, 2017.

Images

1. Cradle with a pentagram (five-pointed star) that is supposed to ward off evil spirits who might threaten or steal the baby
2. Modern mummer from Ravensburg wearing a wooden witch mask. Strangely enough, no such mask was on display in the exhibition
3. Executioner’s sword

Review by Professor Johannes Dillinger, Historian of Witchcraft and Magic

Yale visit shows anxiety and concern about Britain’s role in the world

On Tuesday 11 and Wednesday 12 April, I spent two days at Yale University in Connecticut. As one of the world’ best universities, and a key centre of research and teaching in the United States, it was an excellent vantage point from which to take the temperature of American Higher Education – and especially, as a British historian myself, in terms of US views of both British history and contemporary British politics. Invited by Yale’s Centre for International Security Studies to speak to both faculty and students, it was a fascinating visit that helped me to both sharpen my research questions and to see how others perceive the UK’s modern history.

As the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union, and now enters yet another election campaign, clearly many Americans were very interested to hear and talk about the situation the UK finds itself in. What I found most obvious was a puzzlement that Britain should chose to leave the EU, but perhaps more deeply an uncertainty as to where Britain stands – diplomatically, politically, even culturally and ideologically.

On the first day of my  visit, I helped take an undergraduate class, comprised not just of History students but drawing participants from subjects as diverse as Political Science and Computing, entitled ‘War at Sea in the Age of Sail’. Together with Dr Evan Wilson, who once taught with me here at Oxford Brookes as an Associate Lecturer, we looked with the students at different visions of Britain’s foreign policy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a so-called ‘blue water’ policy, or a European engagement. Nothing could seem more apposite in terms of present-day choices, and the students wanted to ask about the parallels with British diplomacy right now: to talk about trade, national self-image, and foreign relations, especially over Gibraltar, a running crisis at the time.

I then gave a paper to the ISS Brady-Johnson Colloquium in Grand Strategy and International History, entitled ‘Is the Sea Still Swinging into View? Contemporary British History and the Maritime Turn’. In this I attempt to show how the uncertainties stalking modern British politics have been transmuted into the way in which we think about Britain’s seagoing past: how modern concerns over networked economies, regional and continental trade blocs, gender and identity politics, and concepts of moveable, mutable space have fed back into the ways in which we perceive Britons’ engagement with the wider world. The questions were sharp, wide-ranging, and hard to field, mainly focusing on the way in which the British imagination lost touch with the oceanic emphasis that would have seemed second nature to most Georgian or Victorian Britons: again, the parallels with today’s debates about British as a ‘global’ or ‘European’ power were not hard to see.

On the Wednesday, I gave a lecture on Britain’s Brexit vote, trying to draw out the wider cultural, geographical, political and demographic issues that helped to bring about Britain’s ‘Leave’ vote. Here I argued that this decision was not primarily economic, but cultural – a protest against rapid change in and of itself, and (in England at least) a revolt of small towns and ‘provinces’ against London and other big cities. The audience were particularly interested in the parallels with the election of President Trump in the 2016 US Presidential election, as well as the emergence of so-called ‘populist’ movements across the developed world.

Overall, what was so noticeable about the reactions in my teaching session, and at my two talks, was the lack of clarity about Britain’s modern role in the world: is it a free-trading, ocean-going, globalised power, or a more ‘normal’ mid-ranking regional nation-state? And how do Britons now see their national past in the light of those dilemmas and choices? As a country that – as part of an Atlantic archipelago – looks inevitably outwards, or as a country with deep ties and interests in the heart of its own continent? It is no wonder that US students and lecturers are unclear, because Britain is very divided and uncertain about those issues too.

Glen O’Hara is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Oxford Brookes University. He blogs regularly, in a personal capacity, at Public Policy and the Past, and writes about current public affairs for a number of publications, including The New Statesman’s rolling politics blog, The Staggers.

Why vote? A brief history on British voting culture

Will you be voting on 4 May?

The local elections are almost upon us, which in Oxfordshire at least—elections are not taking place everywhere in England—means that upwards of 60 seats on the county council are up for grabs on 4 May. Democracy, so central to “our way of life,” is once more about to be practised at the ballot box. Excited?

The answer is probably not—and that’s assuming you even know these elections are taking place. If past trends are anything to go by, turnout is likely to be between 25 and 35% in most divisions. The last time Oxfordshire county council elections were held in 2013 not one division recorded a turnout above 50%. A handful even dipped below 20%.

Oxfordshire is not alone. The fact is that the majority of those eligible to vote in local elections simply don’t bother. For sure, the situation is better when it comes to UK general elections. Even so, over the long-term, electoral participation has steadily declined. The best turnout was secured in the 1950 general election, when some 84% of those eligible to do so voted. And the figure didn’t dip below 70% until 2001, when only 59% voted. Since then things have improved, though we’re still nowhere near to hitting pre-2001 levels. In 2010, turnout was 65%. In 2015, it was 66%.

Why this should be the case is doubtless complex, and has been much debated, especially by political scientists. All can agree, however, that it is partly—and for some, mostly—a product of growing apathy, cynicism and indifference, or what some call “democratic disenchantment.”

It’s just these kind of anti-political sentiments and actions (or inactions) that form a crucial part of my new research project on public life in modern Britain, which besides looking at cynicism and apathy will also examine the political (or for some, anti-political) function of secrecy and economic self-interest. It’s a project, in short, about the corruption of public life, its decay and quiet subversion. And it’s a project that I look forward to developing in my upcoming period of sabbatical leave, which begins in September and is generously funded by the School of History, Philosophy and Culture.

To be sure, apathy, cynicism, indifference: these might seem like the dregs of our political culture, the lumpen stuff we should really put to one side—they’re like the anti-matter of our political universe. It’s no surprise that political historians have been more interested in people who care about politics and the aspirations and ideals that motivate politicians and those that vote for them. And yet, when it comes to understanding what democracy is, and how it is lived and experienced, apathy and cynicism surely deserve consideration alongside activism, engagement and idealism. The statistics quoted above certainly suggest as much.

In any case, they’re no less fascinating and no less historical than the wholesome stuff of active citizenship. Non-voting is a case in point. It will come as little surprise, perhaps, that the problem was first studied in the 1930s, shortly after mass suffrage had finally been fully secured in 1928. It was then that the non-voter was first upheld as a threat to democracy. Yet, as I want to argue, it was also at this point that non-voting began to pose a kind of conceptual challenge to British democracy and all those concerned with its health. The issue of compulsory voting, for instance, was first discussed in parliament in the 1930s, prompting the question of whether such a policy was good for democracy, by ensuring full participation, or bad for democracy, because it violated the right to abstain and do nothing.

Above all, there was the vexed question of why non-voting took place: was it simply that people weren’t interested in politics at all, or rather that they felt alienated from party politics in particular, though not politics per se? Consider the following, written by Tom Harrisson, from Mass Observation’s (unpublished) study of the “non-voter” in Bolton conducted in 1938, one of the first studies of its kind in Britain (the Americans conducted the first in the 1920s): “In this country the non-voter has received little attention either from politicians or political theorists, but it seems of prime importance at the present time for all democracies to discover why so many of their citizens neglect their electoral opportunities.”

He went on to explain that there were “two main schools of thought” on the matter. The first considered “the non-voter either too ignorant or apathetic to go to the polls once a year.” The second advanced “the directly contrary opinion that the non-voters are the elite of the electorate – the sensitive and high-principled who are disgusted with the modern political battlefield.”

Little has changed since and the causes of non-voting are still not clear today. For all the contemporary studies which point to apathy and ignorance, just as many point to the kind of “disgust” invoked by Harrison—and these are very different things indeed.

So, if elections are happening where you live, will you be voting on 4 May? If not, if you stay at home, you might at least ask yourself why.

Dr Tom Crook is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University

Meet Professor David Nash, Lecturer in the School of History, Philosophy and Culture

One of the abiding research questions I ask myself, despite frequent diversions, is how and why has religion survived into the twenty-first century. The twentieth-century endlessly noted its apparent decline and was even swaggering enough to predict its total disappearance. When this not only did not happen, but we actually saw an upsurge in interest in religion, this left many historians scratching their heads and searching for alternative explanations.

My research has been seeking to provide an answer to this conundrum by thinking about how religion has a specific ‘use’ for people in the circumstances of their modern life. This means the religious and the secular are not so much beliefs as tools that people pick up to make sense of situations, events and happenings. In my last book (Christian Ideals in British Culture: Stories of Belief in the twentieth century. Palgrave Publishing) I explored how Christianity in Britain used stories of pilgrimage, remembrance, sickness and death, the ‘just’ war and salvation to make sense of existence and people’s place in this. These stories were so strong that secular versions of them could also be found. This meant that previous ideas of religion being replaced by the secular was not borne out by this evidence. People at large in the twentieth century primarily wanted explanations and comfort instead of thinking deeply about the theology behind them as many historians presumed. For people in search of meaning ideas helped and this was irrespective of whether they were religious or not. If this could be true throughout the century then the idea of religion waning in favour of the secular forever was not only untrue – it was actually probably irrelevant!

To complete this idea the current book I’m working on (loosely entitled ‘Secular Stories in the twentieth century) is the other half of the circle of my argument, and I am delighted to be the recipient of a Brookes Research Excellence Award to enable me to write several chapters of this during the spring of 2018. Through this book I am now looking at secular stories and how both the secular and the religious have used these in similar ways to make sense of the world and civilisation. These stories include the individual turning their back on religion, the power of science as explanation, stories of material progress and welfare, the quest for freedom of expression, human sexual freedoms and morality and lastly the disestablishment of religion within the state. As in my first book both the religious and secular have grasped hold of and made use of these stories and such actions have left an imprint upon twentieth century cultural history. Again they do not follow any pattern related to the secular triumphing over the religious. Indeed a central point of this second book is that religion did not sit idly by let these narratives be identified as secular. In a more organic process they came to be used by the religious to find accommodation with a secular world.

The long term aim of this project is to get us away from increasingly fruitless discussions of when religion declined, discussions that often fragment into pieces when you look closely at some evidence. Instead recognising the strength of religious and secular stories can help us produce an alternative history of people interacting with religion rather than being seen as passive shoppers and consumers for pre-packaged belief systems.

A Very Short History of Dowsing

I just published the chapter, 'The Divining Rod. Origins, Explanations and Uses in the Thirteenth to Eighteenth Centuries', in: Kallestrup, Louise / Toivo, Raisa (eds.): Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2017, p. 127-144.

The divining rod is a special variety of the magic wand which is itself just one of the innumerable versions of the staff as a symbol of power. The first sources that say clearly that the divining rod was used to find hidden or lost objects date back to the early 15th century. The divining rod gained popularity or rather notoriety in the 16th century when it was used – against the explicit criticism of Georg Agricola (1494-1555), the father of scientific mining, - in the rising mining industry of Germany.

During the early modern period, the divining rod turned into an all-purpose tool for divination: Dowsers claimed that they could find forgotten boundary stones, suitable sites for building, game in the exploited hunting grounds of the nobility, unoccupied spots in the churchyard, or even mistakes in history books. If you searched for hidden springs or mineral veins you did not even have to leave your study anymore: It was sufficient to hold the divining rod over a map. It would point out the spot where you had to dig. In 1692, the master dowser Jacques Aymar even managed to find a murderer who had escaped the law enforcement officers of Lyon. Even though the magical charlatanry of dowsing never went unchallenged the divining rod survived into the 21st century.

Whereas the early theoreticians of the divining rod had claimed that there was some mysterious connection between the rod and the materials you searched for, from the 17th century onwards the person of the diviner became more important. It was said that only especially sensitive persons were able to dowse. The 20th century witnessed a relative ‘democratization’ of the use of the divining rod: It was now claimed that you did not need any special kind of talent in order to work successfully as a dowser. All it took was a little concentration and one of the many, relatively cheap training manuals. Dowsing for supposedly healthy food – never mind what your doctor might say - seems to be the latest trend.

The key to the success of the divining rod or its more modern equivalent, the pendulum, is its very simplicity. The divining rod is the dilettante’s dream: It is cheap and can be handled by practically everyone, it requires hardly any training and no expert knowledge. Thus, the divining rod is the very opposite of a scientific instrument.

Professor Johannes Dillinger, Professor in History, among whose many research interests are the history of Witchcraft, Magic, and Folk Religion.

The 'Alien' Royal Myth

In 1917, at the height of the First World War, George V renamed the royal family from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor . The name ‘Windsor’ was suggested by his Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham, who discovered that Edward III was known as ‘Edward of Windsor’ before he became king. At the same time a number of royal German cousins were also naturalised, the Battenburg family was renamed as Mountbatten, the Teck family became the Cambridges. To mark the centenary of the founding of the House of Windsor, Channel 5 has commissioned ‘Inside Windsor Castle’ and Channel Four has screened ‘The Royal House of Windsor.’ Both featured familiar and well-worn myths the royals about the German antecedents of the House of Windsor; myths that are in need of a long overdue debunking.

The Royal Family is German.
One of these myths is that the royal family is German. Well it is in origin, but there was never a German monarch. The usual claim for the royals being German is that in 1714 George of Hanover became King, and he was a German. And in 1840 Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who was German. But in neither case were they German by the time they arrived in Britain. In 1705, the Princess Sophia Naturalisation Act laid down that Sophia, and all her descendants, were naturalised British subjects. It was her son who inherited the throne in 1714. Similarly in 1840 Prince Albert gave up his Coburg status and was, also by act of parliament, naturalised as a British subject.

In fact George I (r. 1714-1727) and George II (r. 1727-1760) were the last kings to have lived for any time in Germany. George III famously said: ‘born and educated in this country I glory in the name of Briton.’ So the idea that the royal family is German, or was for over a century and a half, is an illusion.

They Spoke with German Accents
Well George I and George II did and Prince Albert did. But the others did not. Why would they? George IV, William IV, Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V were all brought up and educated in Britain. But this is a stubborn myth. In reviewing ‘The Royal House of Windsor’ in February 2017 in The Daily Telegraph, the journalist Harry Mount wrote of Queen Mary that she was ‘of German stock … speaking with a marked German accent all her life.’[1] Queen Mary was certainly ‘of German stock’ –her father was Prince Frederick of Teck- but she had a British mother (Princess Mary of Cambridge) and was brought up in Britain. Moreover recordings of Queen Mary survive, such as her Empire Day speech in 1923, which demonstrate that she clearly did not speak with a German accent.[2] This is a myth that has been repeated so often that it is sometimes assumed to be true.

The ‘alien’ view of the royal family has a long lineage. Saxons complained about Norman invaders, Tudors were derided as Welsh upstarts and the Stuarts regarded as Scottish interlopers. But the real alien myth began in 1714 when George I succeeded Queen Anne, who died without heirs. Jacobites, who favoured the restoration of the Catholic Stuart family from France, emphasised George of Hanover’s foreignness as a way of undermining his legitimacy. One writer questioned whether, as a Lutheran, he could become king as he had not been baptised by an episcopal chaplain (in fact it was soon shown that he had been). But the commonest myth was that the House of Hanover were very distant cousins of Queen Anne and had only a tenuous claim to the throne. The myth grew up that there were dozens of people more closely related to Queen Anne but had been debarred from the throne because they were Catholic (because the Act of Settlement of 1701 debarred Catholics from succeeding). This is a myth that has survived to the present day. In 2014, on the three hundredth anniversary of the Hanoverian succession of 1714, there was some coverage of the event on BBC radio programmes. Two historians made the claim that in 1714, when Queen Anne died, there were fifty people more closely related to her who were debarred from the throne because they were Catholics, so the throne passed to George of Hanover because he was a Protestant. Could there really have been fifty people closer to Queen Anne who had been excluded by the Act of Settlement? It sounded unlikely to me. So I worked my way through the genealogical tables to try to find if this was true. There wasn’t fifty or even fifteen people, there were six. I made the evidence available on the History of Parliament website.[3]

There are all sorts of ways in which royals are different from us, but foreignness is not one of them, however it’s a myth that takes a long time to die.

By Professor William Gibson, Director of The Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History

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[1] Harry Mount, ‘From German dynasty to the UK’s first family’, Daily Telegraph features, 22 February 2017.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JyC6qw2D_s (accessed 25 February 2017)

[3] [1] https://thehistoryofparliament.wordpress.com/2014/07/29/how-closely-related-were-george-i-and-queen-anne/ (accessed 25 February 2017)

Image: The text of the Princess Sophia Naturalisation Act, 1705