All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  It turned out not to have anything to help me about the state of the Fitzwilliam in 1842, but it had lots of juicy stuff about the election of 1847– which turned out to have quite a lot in common with the election we are to have in October.

  As I vaguely recollected (but it was brought vividly to life by this carefully written account), the establishment candidate in 1847 was Prince Albert – but, against him, the awkward squad, largely based in St John’s, put up a rival in the shape of the Earl of Powis (a truly awful Tory, MP for Ludlow and dyed-in-the-wool opponent of the 1832 Reform Act).

  After a bit of a wobble the Prince did not actually withdraw and went through with a lively election, which offers a load of tips for the supporters of the rival candidates this time round … including organising committees, and specially chartered trains from London to bring the voters in. (One of the things that the Prince’s opponents worried about was that he would try to Germanise the University – another was that the backdoor connection between University and crown was a bit unseemly.)

  It appears to have been a spirited fight, with Albert winning comfortably but not by a huge majority. The anonymous bureaucrat of my document then lavishes his pen on the dinner held at the palace to celebrate the successful election (silver knives and forks for the first course, he insists, gold for the dessert). Apparently the Earl of Powis was invited but couldn’t come.

  Which all makes you wonder about how the victory of one of our four candidates – Lord Sainsbury, the Mill Road grocer, Brian Blessed and Michael Mansfield – might be celebrated in October. Not so extravagantly, I guess, but I’ll let you know.

  Comments

  They were right about the Prince Consort: he did interfere, at least on one occasion I know of. In 1860 he pushed for the appointment of Charles Kingsley as Regius Professor of History – largely on the basis of his historical novels, and against the wishes of the academic historians.

  MARION DIAMOND

  Don′t feel criminalised. These sound like sensible and usual precautions around rare materials. Years ago, when a graduate student at Cambridge, I wished to use a very rare Chaucer MS. I won′t say which college it belonged to. I was left alone with it and could have eaten a three-course meal on top of it or removed some choice pages. When I finished, I looked for someone to give it to. I wandered aimlessly around the college and finally the porter telephoned someone, of importance I supposed, and I turned it over. I still shudder when I think of this carelessness.

  ERIKA

  The Africa Museum in Brussels – and David Starkey

  14 August 2011

  Even if you haven’t read Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, it’s hard not to have picked up the point that Belgian rule in the Congo was terrible even by the usual standards of European colonialism in Africa. That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Royal Museum of Central Africa, just outside Brussels. (and it has an honoured place on of my list of favourite but little-known museums).

  I first visited this museum (in Tervuren, a quick tram ride from central Brussels) almost ten years ago, with the daughter when she was doing a school project on the Congo. Then it was in its pristine state: it was a museum of itself, ‘celebrating’ the Belgian ‘achievement’ against the African ‘savages’. Pride of place went to the statues in the front hall, large gilded personifications of kindly Belgium bringing peace, prosperity and civilisation to the grateful Congolese – but the early nineteenth-century display of colonial memorabilia told a similar story. Stanley emerged as almost as much of a hero as Leopold, and the Heart of Darkness was nowhere to be seen.

  A few years later we went again, and things were on the move – for the worse, I couldn’t help feeling. There were glimpses of post-colonial political correctness appearing in the galleries, which, understandable as they were, were so against the grain of the collection and its display (the whole thing had been put together under the auspices of Leopold himself, for heaven’s sake) that they risked looking faintly silly. They were in fact a bit like the new wave at the Natural History Museum in London, with its pious little notices about how we wouldn’t hunt and stuff wild animals these days. It seemed to me that it would have just been better to leave the whole thing as it was and let us see what the colonial vision was like straight, and allow us to make our own minds up.

  Anyway, I went back (with the husband and the son) this weekend and was prepared for the worst: I fully expected computer screens and interactive push buttons … ‘The Belgian intervention in the Congo was: (a) good or (b) bad)’, with a serious computerised ticking off to anyone stupid enough to press button (a).

  Actually, it turned out to be a nice surprise. For quite a lot of the early twentieth-century display had been rather carefully, and self-awarely, restored. True, this was mostly in the natural history parts of the museum (despite the difficulties South Kensington seems to have, it is actually rather easier to come to terms with the colonial treatment of elephants than the colonial treatment of human beings). But even in the historical sections, a good deal of the post-colonial points were being made by adding sharp twenty-first-century responses to the traditional displays. There was, for example, a great photographic exhibition contrasting pictures taken in the Congo under Belgian rule with pictures taken now. In fact, this was part of a project that tried to gather contemporary Congolese reactions to old colonial photos – something the daughter is currently wanting to do in South Sudan.

  All the same, the most dramatic impact in the museum is still the front hall, with those gilded statues of Belgian beneficence to the benighted natives (even if some of them are now awkwardly – or conveniently – hidden behind the coat lockers). What strikes me, looking at these, is not the fact that some of the Belgian administration (and for ‘Belgian’ you could read ‘British’) must have been well aware that paternalism was a convenient cover for exploitation. I am sure that was sometimes the case; but more often the Belgian bourgeoisie must have turned up to this Museum and genuinely felt that it was a testament to their country’s good works.

  Which is to say that the interesting historical question (and one that the decor of the Brussels Museum raises emphatically) is not whether colonialism/empire was good or bad; but how we can start to understand how it seemed morally good to so many ordinary, decent Western people? Self-interest isn’t a good enough answer. But there is an unimaginable leap of historical empathy here.

  Those were the thoughts on the tram back to the hotel, where we caught up with the new David Starkey row, which was not entirely unconnected. If I have got the story right, Starkey was in trouble for saying (in one of those postriots post-mortems) that if you heard the Tottenham MP David Lammy on the radio you would think he was white. Starkey seems to have thought this somehow to Lammy’s (or the country’s) discredit, whereas I felt that it was probably something to celebrate that you couldn’t tell a black from a white voice on Radio 4 (or alternatively that, as always in Britain, it was class not race that was audible).

  Lammy was, to start with, pretty restrained in his reply, but eventually came out with words to the effect of ‘Starkey should stick to sounding off about the Tudors’. The objections to this were obvious. Starkey might be a rather undistinguished example of the genre – but the Brussels Museum makes the powerful case that we DO need historians thinking and speaking about exactly these issues of race and ideology.

  Comments

  Mary, I think your post invites this question: just how much nasty drivel does somebody have to speak before the focus of your response shifts from ‘nobody should tell a historian to shut up’ to ‘historians shouldn’t talk nonsense′ (nonsense with potential consequences)?

  RICHARD

  Richard, I never said ‘nobody should tell a historian to shut up′, I said that just because Starkey′s specialist subject is the Elizabethans is not a good reason to shut him up.

  Just for the sake of completeness, this is what D Lammy said: ‘Yes, I have now seen what he [sc. Starkey] s
aid. His views are irrelevant – he′s a Tudor historian talking about contemporary urban unrest′s

  I would like to see Starkey′s views well and truly quashed … but we have to quash them for the right reasons.

  As one of my Oxford mates said to me, the worst thing that Starkey has done is to have given us a sense of moral certitude in opposition to him.

  MARY BEARD

  As a historian, Beard should be consulting the evidence before she writes her blog.

  LIZX

  Liz, If ′Beard′ followed your rather rigid prescriptions, she might be writing good history, but it wouldn′t be a very entertaining blog.

  LL

  Starkey′s was a complex point, easily misinterpreted (as we have seen), and it certainly does not deserve to be ′quashed′, which is a surprising choice of word from someone who claims to be holding out for free speech. I dare say what makes him ′undistinguished′ in your eyes is his refusal to kowtow to the liberal orthodoxies of the quad and court. Or maybe it is just the gentle envy of one media don for another with a bigger telly contract.

  HAMPSTEAD OWL

  Why does the Manneken Pis?

  18 August 2011

  The icon of Brussels is (to judge from the souvenir shops at least) the bronze fountain/statue of the little boy pissing, the Manneken Pis. It is an image that, in Brussels, goes back to the seventeenth century; but the idea of a fountain spouting water as if it was peeing goes back at least to the Romans, and probably before. It’s not a hugely imaginative idea.

  Anyway, you can now buy battalions of this little guy, most made I guess in China. (A few blazon ‘Made in Belgium’, but most are not homegrown – has anyone ever gone to one of these Chinese factories where miniature images of the great monuments of the West are churned out?) And if you don’t fancy a key-ring, you can buy him in chocolate, or see him in a more than life-size pretend-chocolate model. Every tour group is brought to admire.

  My question was: why has this become the icon of Belgium? Most cities have a much more visible symbol (Big Ben, the Parthenon, the Eiffel Tower), but this little boy is barely a metre tall and in what would have been a back street, if it hadn’t been for him. He is supposed to go back to the early seventeenth century (stolen and broken up in the nineteenth, and remade from a mould of the pieces), and there are all kinds of urban legends about what he might stand for. The one I was told years ago was that he was a lost rich child, whose father vowed a statue of him doing whatever he was doing if and when he was found. But there are plenty of others. I rather like the idea that it reminds us of the brave kids of Brussels who ensured their city’s victory by pissing on the enemy from trees.

  What I hadn’t realised till we went last week was that he also had a wardrobe.

  Kept in the Musée de la Ville de Bruxelles are the many and varied costumes he has been presented with by local and visiting delegations. Where these are made, heaven knows … but I have never seen the little chap dressed up.

  Anyway, we couldn’t resist going to see his kit when we were there last weekend. And as we going out of the Museum we couldn’t help notice some packs of what looked like repro 1950s’ postcards. These confirmed the sense of wonder – because they foregrounded the sexuality of the image that most modern renderings would ostensibly disavow. OK, they were sexualised only at one remove, but sexualised nevertheless. The repeated joke (and it came in various forms) was the one about the middle-aged lady who sees the statue of the little boy and suddenly gets horny … to the distress of her middle-aged husband, who sees that he is in for an energetic night.

  You couldn’t sell these now. Or could you? And in what form? We imagined that we were buying repros of historic souvenirs. But getting them out on the train back home, they looked more like the real thing. There was nothing printed on the back about what they were copying, and the edges were decidedly yellow. Were they actually still flogging old stock?

  And still no one had quite explained why this pissing toddler was the icon of the city. Is it really just, as the guidebooks would claim, an encapsulation of the ‘irreverent spirit’ of Brussels … a kind of Tintin avant la lettre?

  Comments

  One of the most often repeated stories about Manneken Pis is that he saved Brussels. As the story goes, a plot to destroy the city was forged, explosive or incendiary devices left in place and a primer set alight in order to let the terrorists flee. But the young man came along and extinguished the primer, thus saving the city. The other speaks of a very young duke taken on a battlefield where he came out of his bed at a time when the battle was going badly for his forces, the sight of him pissing toward his enemies giving heart to his men, who went on to win the fight.

  In any case, a version of the statue has been in the city since at least 1388. It has been part of the history of the city for so long that it became a symbol of resistance, especially after Brussels′s siege by Louis XIV′s armies, during which the statue was hidden and after which the inscription ′In petra exaltavit me, et nunc exaltavi caput meum super inimicos meos′ was engraved. As for the clothes, it seems it became a tradition just after the siege when the Spanish governor-general Maximilien-Emmanuel de Bavière gave its first set of clothes to the boy.

  Signed: A Classical-period historian and digital humanist living on top of the highest tower in the less than fashionable area just behind the Covent Garden in Brussels. (Yes, culture and science may bloom in the most unexpected areas.)

  PASCAL LEMAIRE

  Fed up with the REF … and what about the babies?

  1 September 2011

  In case you don’t know, the ‘REF’ (the ‘Research Excellence Framework’, which sounds like the higher education equivalent of a ‘record of achievement’) is the new version of the ‘RAE’ (the ‘Research Assessment Exercise’, which was at least honest enough to admit that it was judgemental … more like the old ‘school report’). It is the process by which the government evaluates the research ‘output’ of university departments (and indeed of the individual academics within those departments) and then distributes (or not) money accordingly.

  No surprise that I have little sympathy with this process. It’s not that I think university academics should not be in some form accountable to those who (in large part, but not wholly) pay for them. But this process is overall a block on good, imaginative research in the humanities (and maybe in the sciences too). It dominates the thinking of university administrators. Try appointing someone to a university job who – whatever good reason – doesn’t look as if they are going to have a ‘robust’ submission (that is new uni speak even among the dreaming spires) for the REF. And it sets a load of ingenious people off on the chase of clever ways to come out on top … so that the government can thrash us all, or rather some of us, again. Divide and rule, it used to be called.

  No department wants to be a three-star (or whatever it will be called this time), else some slasher VC will come in and slash them (or, if they are VERY LUCKY INDEED, will give them extra research leave, and two new super-star colleagues (no teaching duties) so they can do better next time … dream on).

  I realise, of course, that many of my own colleagues have done valiant jobs and spent weeks of their life in evaluating all this research activity in past assessment exercises, to ensure that the process is still a peer review, not some metric exercise – which would reward the popular and bad (and to be fair the popular and good) at the expense of the brilliant and unfashionable. (A bit like Cambridge University Library thinking you can judge the value of a periodical on the basis of how many times it has been borrowed.) Don’t think I’m ungrateful to them. But all the same, I don’t like the system.

  Today, though, it isn’t the higher principles, or ‘the system’, that are annoying me. It is what the REF has done to my summer.

  Now I haven’t been research-inactive over the last few years; indeed I have written a lot, had quite a bit of ‘impact’ (another bit of uni new speak) and I have given two big series
of lectures in the states (Sathers and Mellons) which took a hell of a lot of work to do, which other people would long to give and which I am dying to write up. What I wanted to do this summer was to get down to Roman Laughter (the Sather topic) and get it pretty well finished … but hang on.

  I have to submit four ‘outputs’ published between 2008 and the end of 2013. My Pompeii book is an obvious one, as is a big article about to come out on nineteenth-century travel to Pompeii. After that I have a variety of things, including a new article in an exhibition catalogue on the secret cabinet in the Naples Museum, a total rewrite of a piece on ‘Oriental Cults’ I did a few years ago (this is effectively a new paper, but will it count?), some stuff on Roman Britain in the late nineteenth century, plus a Darwin lecture on Risk … and a paper on Samuel Butler that didn’t actually appear till 2008, although the title page is dated 2007 etc. etc.

  What I ought to have done this summer was get down and conquer my Laughter book. That would have made the most intellectual sense, and it would have been best for the subject, and for me. But I sat down and thought, hell – if I get to it now, it still might not come out by the end of 2013, there might be all kinds of hold-ups, and the University of California Press doesn’t quite get the REF issue …

  What I need to be safe, I thought, is another sure-fire article. So I wrote an article on the history of the Fitzwilliam Classical Collection, which I have enjoyed (a lot actually), and which I had promised … but in the end I only really did it because of the damn REF, when I should have spent the summer on Laughter.

  So if anyone ever tells you that the REF doesn’t skew people’s research plans, I for one can tell you that it does.