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WW2 legacies and Magna Carta: history behind the headlines
00:47:40
Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter discuss the present-day parallels of the Second World War, 80 years on – and look at medieval manuscripts hitting the headlines
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Matt Elton
Hello and welcome to our monthly series History behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month I'll be joined by our two regular panelists.
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Hannah Skoda
I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in Medie at St John's College in Oxford.
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Rana Mitter
I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.
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Matt Elton
Hannah and Rana It's Great to be with you here in Oxford today for this episode of History behind the Headlines. We'll be talking through a couple of topics, as usual, kicking off with the fact we're speaking at the very end of May, which marked the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and I believe there were a few things that you both wanted to explore in terms of parallels or in terms of connections to that. Rainer, do you want to kick us off?
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Rana Mitter
Absolutely, because as we're speaking, it's a couple of weeks since ve Day itself, 8th of May, 1945, and then, of course, 80 years on, 2025. And I was struck by the way, that 80 years on, actually memories of World War II and a victory in Europe are still much more bifurcated than I might have expected this far on. And I thought in some senses there would have been more consensus, but actually it's very clear that World War II still remains a very potent source of people imagining their identities. And second, those reflections, or perhaps in some cases, accusations that they make, aren't necessarily all lined up in the same place. So that was prompted particularly by seeing the gathering on 9 May, in fact, in Red Square in Moscow, where Vladimir Putin, currently still in the midst of a very brutal war, used the Second World War very much as an occasion to make the point that he was the inheritor of Stalin's resistance to Nazi Germany. Now, of course, any historian would point out there are a lot of flaws with this problem. The first is, of course, that Russia is the country here that's invaded its neighbour, not the other way around. Also less mentioned is the awkward reality that for the first two years of the European war of 1939-41, Stalin and Hitler essentially had a pact, the Non Aggression Pact, which actually was rather more than that. It was really an alliance in certain ways, involving mutual trade, an agreement to carve up much of Eastern Europe between them. So those sorts of awkward facts didn't tend to make it onto the podium. There were some other things, though, I thought that were extraordinary in terms of what they said about the world today. The most prominent leader to stand next to Vladimir Putin in Red Square was of course, not either of the wartime allies, no American president, no British Prime Minister, but instead Xi Jinping of China. And I think later in the summer, when we come back, Matt, to the 80th anniversary of VJ Day over Japan, we'll probably refer that as well. But at this point, I just wanted to say that there was also a sign that the new world was beginning to emerge. Too, because the president of Brazil, Lula, was also there. So for an event that was 80 years ago, it's still tremendously potent and often in some very uncomfortable ways, at least if you're looking from Western Europe or indeed from North America at this. This point. There's also one other element of that wartime legacy that I think is particularly tragically relevant today, and that is the fact that refugee flight has become such a huge part of what follows conflict, whether it's in the Middle east or whether it's in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, Myanmar, Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other places where you also have massive flows during and after conflict. But sticking to the legacy of 1945, I think looking at what's happening in Central Europe now is a reminder that this is not the first time that this has happened. And, in fact, even more than that, I'd say there's a direct line of continuity between some of the things that emerge in that period, 1945 to about 47, and then beyond. The first of those things is the fact of refugee flight itself. I've just been actually at a fascinating conference in Vienna a couple of days ago, headed up by Professor Kirsten von Lingen of Vienna University, which is about what she calls being in transit. But the basic story then is just to remind us quite how much the flow of people, involuntary, often desperate people from various sides, was part of the shift at that time. Many of those cases are people who would not necessarily have achieved a great deal of sympathy. Ethnic Germans in large parts of Central Europe, many of whom were moved as part of the Nazi expansionist policy to parts of Central and Eastern Europe. But whatever the reasons for them being there, the mass, sudden mobilization of large numbers of ethnic Germans became a very large part of the movement at that time. Beyond that, of course, you have large numbers of people who were moved neither to any desire or any fault of their own, significant Jewish populations, those that survived at that time, and also people from what the historian Tim Snyder has called the bloodlands. In other words, those areas of Central and Eastern Europe which involved huge numbers of people, often fight over very, very small patches of territory. It's worth noting that one particular city, which is now in Ukraine, in not quite living memory, but certain recently historical memory, started as Lemberg, became Lvov and is now Lviv. And that name change suggests quite how much moving of names and moving of people has been an underpinning. So that huge refugee flight of millions of millions of people around that part of Europe is still, I think, very much an element of the end of the war that has a legacy. The other element I want to just flag up was that it was also a time that marked not the beginning, but the expansion of a set of institutions which are still hugely relevant today. International institutions that deal with refugee flight with basically looking to feed starving people, finding ways essentially to deal with the horrific aftermath of war through international transnational efforts. So one of the best known, there were several, but one of the best known in that 1945-47, 48 period was UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which essentially provided hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it, but not all, from the United States, to essentially clothe, feed and try and reconstruct the destruction of Eastern Europe. Also actually China as well. But it's worth remembering that many of the organizations today that underpin the United nations, particularly its humanitarian efforts, also emerge from that post1945 aftermath. The war may have ended, but conflict in a wider sense and trauma and refugee struggle certainly did not end at that moment. But Hannah, you know, that's a very 20th century story that I've been telling there. There is of course, a longer history of refugee flight and humanitarian assistance. Does it go all the way back to the medieval era?
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Hannah Skoda
Yes, I think it's really important to remind ourselves that there's a hugely striking, important pre modern history of refugee flight and of migration. More. The word refugee in fact comes from the French refugier, and it seems to first have been used in the context of Huguenot refugees. So the Huguenots were a Protestant movement which emerged in 16th century France who were caught up in the French wars of religion. In the second half of the 16th century, huge numbers were killed in really horrific circumstances. Many even at that early stage, left France and the beginnings of a Huguenot diaspora started to emerge. The early 17th century France then saw a period of what looks like some kind of toleration. But then in 1685, a key moment called the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, at which point persecution of the Huguenots was ramped up once again and the Huguenot diaspora really kind of intensified as those who had survived until then made their way to other parts, not just of Europe, but of the globe as rapidly as they could, seeking, seeking safety. So the Huguenot diaspora stretches from South Africa to the modern US Very large proportion of now British people actually are of Huguenot descent in the 17th century. So by the end of the 17th century, about 5% of the population of London was Huguenot already centering in particular areas. So Spitalfields very notoriously was a kind of Huguenot dominated area. And very strikingly, they tend to be very, very skilled workers as well, who are bringing their crafts with them. So Huguenots were known as silk working, they were known for silversmithery, they were known as hat makers and wig makers, all kinds of very, very skilled work. So they were actually very sought after and I think in many ways very much welcomed. So that in some ways is a very tragic story of diaspora in the first place, but in many ways a reasonably positive story of welcome once they reached the areas which were deemed to present some sort of safety, them or their refuge, quite literally. If we go further back in time into the 14th century, there's also a very striking sense of quite intense migration between areas then, not necessarily even provoked by particular kinds of persecution, but provoked by a balance of push and pull and quite often economic factors. The 14th century immigration in that period was illuminated very revealingly recently in a big AHRC funded project called England's Immigrants, which found records from 1330 to 1550 of 64,000 named immigrants to England. People who'd been born outside England, who moved to England in this period. So the numbers are really, really striking in this period. They're mostly European, so people coming from modern day Netherlands, Italians, French, Germans, I must say it's largely, largely European and very often, again, skilled workers. A lot of it seems to be provoked by the instability of the second half of the 14th century. So obviously 1348 is Black Death and then sort of repeated waves of bubonic plague after that, which produce a range of kind of demographic instabilities, so that people are moving from one area to another. Famously and really weirdly, bubonic plague seems to have had a proportionately lower mortality rate in the Netherlands than in other areas of Europe, which is really odd because the Netherlands are so densely populated in this period. So we get a large number of Flemings in particular moving to London in the second half of the 14th century because mortality rates in London were very, very high. So there's a kind of gap opened up and kind of movement, kind of osmosis of a group of people from one area to another. And what's really striking there is that the Crown really encourages this. So Edward III even sets up a weaver's guild, especially for Flemish immigrants to London in this period. So there's a real sense that they are wanted, that they're kind of, they're pulled into London by the economic opportunities but also by kind of royal encouragement. That encouragement doesn't go right across the social spectrum. So again, famously during the peasants revolt in 1381, which is a movement of social protest against exploitation of the commons, various forms of violence characterise that revolt. And Flemish weavers in London are particularly targeted. And the rebels during the Peasants Revolt invent a shibboleth. So they run round London with all their weapons, forcing anybody they meet on the streets to say bread and cheese to them. And if somebody says bread and cheese with a Flemish accent, it sounds more like brodenkiese, then they are killed on the spot. So there's a really a sort of interesting tension there, I think, between sort of top down encouragement of this immigration, but a wider sense of unease. But it's not an unease that's constant. I think on the whole, there's a real sense that London's really a thriving city.
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Rana Mitter
Can I have a question on that, actually, Hannah, because you said something there that leads to my modern ear sounds quite, which is that these entrepreneurial Flemings coming and emigrating to London do so because the death rates from plague are so high that it leaves these spaces open. So all these folks in Flanders hearing about these terrible, horrific death rates, all these people dying in agony of bubonic plague in London and think, wow, opportunity there, I can go. And are they not a little bit worried about becoming victims of this strain?
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Hannah Skoda
I think two answers to that. Firstly, bubonic plague is emphatically there in the Netherlands too. So even if we can see the mortality rates look a little bit lower, they wouldn't know that, in a sense, that the danger is just everywhere. So I don't think there's a sense that one would go to somewhere that was more dangerous than somewhere else. And secondly, this is historians extrapolating. We don't have any Fleming saying, ah, all those people have died in London. We're going to go and fill that gap. It's historians looking at these differentials and thinking, what could possibly explain this kind of population, this population movement?
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Rana Mitter
There's no sudden uptick in linen masks being produced in Flemish factories or anything at that. So I used to accompany them on their way across the Channel.
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Hannah Skoda
It would be great if we could demonstrate that kind of stuff. As ever, the medieval records don't quite give us everything we'd. Everything we'd see. But it produces, I think, a really interestingly kind of multicultural population. So by the 15th century, in England as a whole, one in ten people are foreign born, born outside England and in London in The same period, it's one in six, which is high. It's striking and it really kind of pushes, I think, against some of the ways in which we might characterise a pre modern period. I've got a lovely example here that came across recently of a guy called Nicholas Joan, who seems to have been from Bologna, maybe Bologna in Italy, but there's another place with a similar name in northern France, so he may have been a little bit closer, but anyway, and he emigrates to London. And in 1443, Henry VI gave the brokerage of exchanges and securities of carracks, ships and galleys coming to England to this guy, Nicholas Joan from Bologna. And what I love about this example is that Nicholas Joan decided he needed to thank the king for what he was doing. So he presented Henry VI with three camels and an ostrich from Turkey, which is odd in all sorts of ways, not least because ostriches are not native to Turkey either. So what it gives you is a picture actually of an extremely interconnected kind of world where people are very emphatically on the move, objects are on the move, and people are being actively encouraged to be on the move as well.
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Rana Mitter
What intrigues me about that medieval mobility, Hannah, and again, you know, you'll tell me as a medievalist, if I've got this wrong, is that although it's very extensive, it's not very institutional. In other words, governments and states are not regulating it at that point. And that strikes me as one of the things that really does change. I mean, of course, I suppose from the early modern period on, from the 16th, 17th century centuries, but really in the 19th and 20th century, because when we think about those international institutions that I mentioned that, you know, start to create the refugee regime and also the migration control regimes that we know in our own era, you can see their origins in a whole variety of things that begin to emerge in that period. One is, as the early modern period kicks in and European empires start to spread ideas of Christianity and universalism and humanism, put forward the idea that there is a humanitarian duty that comes not just the individual, but also to the wider state as a whole. And then in the 19th century, at a time when religion is still strong, but there is a more strongly secular sense of the nature of order, you begin to find those organizations emerging as part of a belief that there should be some kind of cross state organization that regulates difficult problems. Now, really, in the 18th and 19th century, at the beginning, that's mainly about preventing war. So you have, you know, particularly the Congress of Vienna 1815 and afterwards, after Waterloo, the idea that Napoleon should not emerge and try and reconquer the whole of Europe. And you get the best part of a century, I guess 99 years up to 1914, in which there are wars, but the overall order remains relatively stable. But what are the products of the horrors of World War I is the emergence of that first set of international organizations through the League of Nations and elsewhere. And it's often forgotten. I think that because the League of Nations, if people remember it at all, it's remembered as a dreadful failure because it didn't stop the rise of Hitler in Germany and Europe and it didn't stop the rise of Japan in Asia in terms of conquest and invasion. But actually, many of the things that historians now look at in terms of what the League of Nations did as an international organization was the amount of work they did on trying to enforce international humanitarian norms and also trying to deal with what was seen as transnational social evils. So things like forced labor, forced migration, the idea that actually refugee problems should be managed on a cross state basis. I mean, you have the emergence. I mean, you pointed out that the Huguenot flight gives rise to the term refugee. But in the late 19th, early 20th century, you have figures like Fritzjof Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer and humanitarian, who was instrumental in trying to regularise the idea of refugee identity documents of regimes that would help them to actually deal with the fact that they had been thrown off. And the issue of what were known as Nansen passports. In other words, identity documents of people who had to flee their own state became well known during that time. There's lots of elements to it, but really by Even the early 20th century, and certainly by the late 20th century, the idea of having these sorts of state driven, but also international institution driven frameworks, regimes that try and deal with these problems, became essentially part of the furniture. It's really only in our own era right now, in the early 2000s, that there's been probably the biggest pushback in a generation against the idea that actually maybe these regimes are not desirable in themselves? There's plenty of pushback against that politically in a lot of countries. But am I right to think that it really is quite a modern development in the sense of maybe the last 200 years or so, to have that kind of cooperation between international organizations, the state, philanthropic institutions and individuals? Or is there a proto version of that even before the modern period?
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Hannah Skoda
I think you're completely right. I don't think there really is a proto version of it. I mean, in a sense, in medieval Europe, it should be the Church and one should be able to talk about the papacy in these terms. But I don't think. I think it would be a real stretch to try and demonstrate that it is really doing that. On the other hand, I don't think one could talk about supranational bodies in this way, but I think one could think about interest in what we might broadly term human rights or humanitarian concerns. I was thinking about two particular contexts as you were talking. One is the context of late medieval slavery. We talk about migration, we haven't talked about trafficking so much. And the later Middle Ages, particularly around the Mediterranean, are characterised by human trafficking on a really terrifying scale. Late medieval slavery is a horrific phenomenon and it's one which many cities around the Mediterranean just enter into with gusto. And people are buying and selling slaves all over the place. Case. But occasionally we find moments where discomfort at the humanitarian implications of this are expressed very, very vividly. And I was looking at an extraordinary case the other day of a black slave from Barcelona, a man named Antoine Simon, who managed to escape from his owner in Barcelona and he made his way across the Pyrenees. We don't know how he found his way or how he knew where to go. There's a whole mystery there which is completely fascinating. But he made his way across the Pyrenees and he ended up in the city of Pamier in the south of France, in the kind of foothills of. Just beyond the foothills of the Pyrenees. And in Pamier he sought his freedom because it was known as a city of freedom. And he was employed there by a guy called Pierre Tocque, who decided to employ him with a kind of usual employment contract. And the former owner from Barcelona decided to. To pursue Antoine Simon, this escaped slave, and to sue him for theft of himself. The King of Aragon decided to support the former owner. King of Aragon is the nominal king in Barcelona because of how the boundaries were drawn at that stage. And the Count of Foix, who's the local count in which Pamier is the region in which Pamier is cited, he decided to support this owner as well, mainly because the Count of Foix hates the city of Pamier. The city of Pamier decided to support Antoine Simon, this escaped slave, and Pierre Tocque, the man who decided to employ him. And we have an amazing 32 page document surviving about this case where they go into enormous detail about why Antoine Simon should in fact be free and cannot possibly be accused of thieving himself, because he is A human being. And as a human being, he is one of God's creatures. And all human beings have certain rights to freedom and to their own existence. It's an extraordinary document. And what's even more extraordinary is that they win the case. But the ways in which that's framed suggest a sort of conception of what we, I think, would term human rights, which go beyond just thinking in sort of Catholic Church law terms and really articulate a sense that everybody deserves a particular kind of treatment. And what's striking here is that this guy, Antoine Simon, clearly knew if he could get to Pamier, that would be a place where this could be articulated. The other context I was thinking in is an early 15th century play. So this is a morality play which was produced for the Congress of Arras, which was a major diplomatic event in the sort of last 20 years of the Hundred Years War, 1435. And it's an attempt in this Congress to resolve the conflict between England and the Burgundian French and the Valois French. And it doesn't really resolve the conflict, but it makes things worse for the English. So sort of mission accomplished, I think, for some of them, anyway, they produce this play to perform at the negotiations. And because it's a morality play, you have a series of allegorical figures. So there is a character in the play called Le Pauvre Command the Poor Commons. And there's another character called Guerre War. There's another character called Annie, Friend and Power.
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Rana Mitter
Not a highly subtle play from the start.
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Hannah Skoda
No, it's not subtle at all. It's also really tedious. But anyway, the Paul Commons opens the play with a very, very lengthy speech about how war is destroying the community and people are starving and they're suffering and children are dying and how utterly morally abhorrent and unacceptable this is. And then War marches onto the stage and says, yes, but I love it. This is such a great thing to do. And I can make everyone hate each other. And then Amy feel like social media then pretty much. And he steps onto the stage and says, yes, and for me, friendship is about beating up anyone who disagrees with me. And then Parent, whose kind of relationships, familial relationships, steps onto the stage and says, the great thing about war is it can turn brother against sister. And they carry on like this with Le Pour for comment, the Poor Commons speaking up again and again about the truly dreadful suffering that this is producing. And at the end of the play, Poor Commons gets the last word. So again, I think it's a really interesting articulation in an early 15th century context of a sense that some kind of interest in basic human rights should be driving what people are deciding on a kind of high political, diplomatic level.
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Rana Mitter
And it's remained, of course, a constant ever since then in many ways, and of course a highly disputed one as well. And of course, even the issue that you're talking about there, Hannah, which is slavery in the medieval sense, has its own modern counterparts as well as that are still probably largely dealt with by transnational international organizations. But they've inherited a great deal of what would have been, I guess, the debates that date back, what, 700 years? Something like that. 700 years. That's quite the historical trajectory you chose.
- [26:53]
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- [27:24]
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- [27:57]
Rana Mitter
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Matt Elton
That's all really fascinating. And before we move on to the next thing we're going to talk about, I wanted to dwell a little bit more on the idea of medieval documents being in the news, because there's been a couple of headlines in recent weeks about other records that are of interest. Hannah, did you want to talk about some of those?
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Hannah Skoda
Yes. I was quite excited to find headlines about medieval parchment documents on the front page of the newspaper. That's unusual and makes me very happy. So the first was the discovery that Edward II's coronation role from 1308 is to go on display alongside the coronation role of King Charles III. So Edward II's coronation roll was produced in 1308, about 2 foot long. And the purpose of a coronation roll is to give details of the coronation service, who was there, what the rituals looked like. It's produced on very, very high quality parchment, so it's really a kind of memorialising document so that everybody will remember this splendid occasion. It's a particularly interesting document because Edward in this role doesn't mention his wife at all, Queen Isabella, but he does mention Piers Gaveston, with whom he was suspected of having an affair. So it's rather revealing in terms of his interest and emphases. But most of all, it's got this really important sort of mnemonic purpose. Charles III's role, King Charles now is 21 meters long, so what's that about 65 foot? So quite substantially longer than Edward II's. Interestingly, it's the first coronation roll ever to be produced on paper. It's not on parchment, but it's also effectively a description of the coronation. And these are going to be displayed at the National Archives. Anyway, I think it's an interesting thing to put the two side by side in terms of Charles now, his attempt to sort of show what he's doing in that hugely long historical trajectory. The second document which made it onto the front pages of the paper is a copy of Magna Carta held at Harvard, which was believed to be a copy and is now revealed to be an original, which is mind bogglingly exciting. So this is really thanks to the work of David Carpenter, who's at KCL in the uk, and Nick Vincent at UEA in the uk. It's got a really, really interesting sort of trajectory, this document. I love the way very often with medieval documents we find that, that their own sort of stories, the hands through which they passed over the centuries, are as dramatic as anything, really, as dramatic as their origins. This copy of Magna Carta was bought by the law school library in 1946 for $27. Now that it's revealed to be an original, I don't even know how one would value it. It's presumably priceless, really. It's not a copy of Magna Carta from 1215, it's a copy from 1300. So Magna Carta, to give a little bit of background here, was a document drawn up as an agreement between the barons and King John in 1215, emerging out of a huge dispute between them and making the fundamental point that kings cannot stand above the law, that they are also subject to the law. So it is massively important symbol of this principle that rulers should not stand above the law. They are also subject to it anyway. So 1215, that's rather extraordinary. But it was annulled pretty promptly after it had been issued. It was then reissued by Henry iii and in a sense the most significant version of it actually dates from 1225. Then Edward I decided to reissue it again in 1297. And the Harvard copy is the 1300 copy. And it's actually that 1300 version that has made it most kind of forcefully into modern law. So the clauses that are relevant here state, and these make it into modern law. No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be deceased of his freehold or liberties or free customs, or be outlawed or exiled, or in any other ways destroyed. Nor will we not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land, we will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man, either justice or right anyway. So an extraordinary document embodying an absolutely key principle, passed down through various hands, inherited by a World War I flying ace who eventually sold it to a book dealers who sold it to Harvard.
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Rana Mitter
What is yet true? All I could say on the response to that brilliant explanation, Hannah, is a reminder of the great Tony Hancock, who one of his shows, I, back in the 60s, asked plaintively, what about Magna Carta? Did she die in vain? Still a great question, I think for this day and day and age. Maybe many of those rights which free men and free women too, I think these days are supposed to have, are worth keeping in mind in the present day as well, when they can sometimes seem a bit more vulnerable than perhaps we might have expected.
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Matt Elton
And finally, depending on when you're listening to this episode, you might be planning your summer getaway or holiday. Perhaps you're thinking of going by train. Trains are something that's been in the headlines recently and ran. I think there's some historical parallels you wanted to talk about here.
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Rana Mitter
Yes, absolutely, Matt. I mean the news event itself for those in the UK is perhaps a bit banal, although maybe not. Which was that? Southwest Railways was the first line within the UK under the current government to be re nationalised, having been privatised back in the mid-1990s under previous government. So essentially the railways have had about 30 years or so in their current privatised form and are now being re national in a sense. There's a kind of Hokey, cokey element of trains being privatized. They're nationalized and privatized and then nationalized because the emergence of Britain's railway system, the first in the world, of course, in the mid 19th century, was also surrounded by debates that have never really gone away as to railways have all sorts of things going for them. They can be fast, they can be very effective, but they're not always very profitable. And how do you actually organize them in a way that is economically viable? It is worth noting that many of these debates were happening well over 60 years ago. Probably the most famous example of that is what became nicknamed the Beeching Axe, after Dr. Richard Beeching, who was a senior executive at ICI, the Imperial Chemical industries and the government then of Harold Macmillan, brought him in to a position as head of what became the British Railways Board, essentially to look at the British railway system and work out how to cut it down to an efficient size. So what he saw and wrote about at some length, not least actually many, many years later, because what he did not spoil the ending for people, was to cut a lot of Britain's railways. And people held it against him for a very long time. But he said he didn't want to romanticize the railways, none of this business about steam trains and the idea that this was a sort of backbone of backbone of industrial Britain, but rather look at them very rationally and say that when it came to freight, maybe actually there should be a reworking in some ways an increase in the amount of freight rail capacity in the uk. But when it came to passengers in lots of places, the sums didn't add up. There were trains which had three or four people travelling on them per day or perhaps even per week, and he wasn't going to have taxpayers subsidise this sort of very, very extensive railway network that had grown up often in, actually in the Victorian era, at a time when there was a lot of money around, people invest in the railways and they'd often rival lines that would be produced essentially to go to the same destinations and two companies would compete. And of course, after a certain point, particularly during the mid 20th century and the emergence of nationalisation in the 1940s and 50s, it clearly didn't make sense to have lots of lines that were going to the same places. So on 27 March 1963, Richard Beeching published his, what became his notorious report, you might say entitled the Reshape Shaping of British Railways. And this particular report caused huge controversy, not least with passengers who found that their local Stations were going to be abolished. He identified something like 2000 +.2363, I think, was one number that the National Archives gives foreclosure, along with some 5,000 miles of track, with the idea that buses would. Rail replacement buses literally would replace these trains and make for a more efficient way of carrying people in the areas which just didn't have enough passengers to run a train. And he said, quote from Beeching here, I won't do the voice, but he would create a system which will carry a greater total traffic than at present and which will flourish financially while doing so. Now, he was trained in physics, so he was very much, you know, a man of science and someone who wanted to do a kind of plus or minus on what should be, what should be done. And so. So he put forward a proposal for essentially cutting very, very large numbers of lines. And it was carried on by the successor government under Harold Wilson. Not everything that was slated for closure actually did end up closing some of the lines, including, for instance, the Scottish Highlands, which had lobbyists who were very keen to make sure that the line stayed there. And also the value of tourism up in that part of the world and the fact that it was economically under provided for compared to the Southeast. All of these things lead to some reprieves. But overall, significant proportions of Britain's existing railway network was cut and that led to ultimate romantics, perhaps the exact opposite of Dr. Beeching, the songwriters Flanders and Swan, Michael Flanders and Donald Swan, writing one of their finest, loveliest songs, slow Train. There's a couple of lines in it that I think really bring to mind the sort of the sleepy romance of those old railway lines. So there's a line, they say, at Chawton, Cumhardie or Chesilla street, we won't be meeting again on the slow train. Now, it has actually been said, I think, that Chawton cum Hardie as a railway station doesn't exist in quite the same way. But I think it's now actually part of the Metro Manchester tram system. So it's been rebuilt in a different sort of way. But he has other station names that they put in there. Dog Dyke, Tumby, Woodside, Trouble House Halt. It's lovely to think of those places. There's a great line about the scene on at least one of these stations. Typically, no churns, no porter, no cat on a seat. And again, you can visualize one of those little country stations with milk churns waiting to be delivered. Railway porter, perhaps no customers. And the station cat, you know, perhaps the only thing you need to add to that is homemade cakes. When I was living, actually I should add, in Leamington Spa about 20 years ago, slightly more than that, they still had homemade cakes or at least locally made cakes at the station buffet. I don't know if they still have them there as well today. Of course, one of the complaints that all people will make about Beeching's cuts, and there was sense, clearly, in terms of trying to rationalize some of the reproduction or redundancy, was that we realized, I think this is a controversial thing to say, that actually keeping the railway network strong is an important thing for infrastructure. Only about 10% of Britain's transport journeys these days take place by rail, but they are important and people talk in terms of economic growth about maybe reopening the long term shut railway between Oxford and Cambridge, Economically very potent area. Not actually shut under Beeching, but a bit later in 1968. So a reminder that the recent headlines about going back in the direction of nationalization are part of that long in and out kind of rail hokey cokey, you might say, of how the railway is supposed to be organized. And this continuing frustrating thing that's true in Britain, other countries too, that we all seem to think that we do need a railway and broadly we value it, but paying for it, that's the problem.
- [40:22]
Hannah Skoda
I'm struck by how much of this is inflected with a rather lovely sense of nostalgia as well. I think we live in a society now where nostalgia is doing a lot of negative things right. We think of it as quite a problematic emotion. But nostalgia around the railways feels altogether warmer somehow. And it's very striking how nostalgic people can get around, around transport. I think the etymology of the word nostalgia is rather interesting. It's a word that's invented in 1688 and takes us full circle around to our discussion about migration. In fact, this was invented in 1688 by a Swiss physician called Johannes Hofer, who was trying to diagnose the maladies of Swiss mercenaries who were being sent all across Europe and getting terribly homesick. And apparently some of them were missing home so much that they were swooning, fainting away. One of them even died of this homesickness. And apparently it would be particularly provoked by the sound of cow bells that would remind them just how much they missed being away from home. So Johannes Hoffer was called in to diagnose this and came up with the word nostalgia, coined from the Greek nostos and algos, meaning pain, pain and sorrow. And Longing and home. So I think in some ways that embodies everything that we've been saying about migration, but it seems to me very prominent in how we think about the history of railways.
- [41:46]
Rana Mitter
I think it is. It's also a question, I think, Hannah, of how we think about what states and wider societies are supposed to provide and what essentially comes from the public sector. I mean, I'm right in thinking I have an impression of the medieval era as one of carriages, but there's really no sense of a public transport infrastructure before the 19th century. Or is there?
- [42:07]
Hannah Skoda
No, I don't think there is. And travel is slow and painful and extremely uncomfortable. Though perhaps not as slow as we think. It's quite striking when you actually look at how long it would have taken, I don't know, a ship to get from Bristol to Bordeaux, for example, it's like three or four days. So that's really pretty rapid. If you're travelling by water, I think you can do stuff a lot faster. But where there is an infrastructure, of course, is in the road system. There is a very strong sense that the well being of the community as a whole, the well being of the realm, depends on having roads which are safe to travel along. So if we look particularly at royal law around highwaymen, it's absolutely strict and stringent and terrifying. This is something they come down really, really hard on because they've got to ensure that Roman are safe to travel.
- [42:57]
Rana Mitter
Along and people are paying turnpike fees and so forth to basically keep the roads maintained. This is sort of the pothole control of its day.
- [43:03]
Hannah Skoda
Yes, exactly. And turnpike tolls and then tolls across bridges as well. And I came across a very interesting example of royal or parliamentary attempts to regulate what kinds of transport are going along roads as well. So we're now, in the 17th century in London, there was a growing anxiety that so many people were using coaches to travel through London rather than using boats on the Thames. And in 1601 there was a bill in the Commons to restrain the excessive and superfluous use of coaches. It's one that's rejected by the Lords. But it's very, very interesting that there is this sense that, you know, some kinds of transport are better than others and we're going to try and regulate some. And then there's a wonderful poet from the same period, a guy called John Taylor, who was born in 1580, who wrote the first coach was a strange monster. Some said it was a great crab shell brought out of China. And then he calls them these upstart four wheeled tortoises.
- [44:03]
Rana Mitter
Well, my parting shot on public transportation will have to be the, I think, reasonably well known, perhaps not well enough known fact that in the early 20th century, the city authorities of the city of Cincinnati in Ohio in the United States, decided to build a subway system under the city. And they did. It's not very long, but it's there. The problem was, by the time they'd finished it or got to the next stage, other modes of transport, including road, had basically taken over. And so to this day, there is a short, still, I suppose, potentially operative Metro system under the city of Cincinnati, which has never been opened and never been used. Very occasionally they have debates about whether or not they could open it up and use it. They never really come to anything very much. But if you look in the right places in Cincinnati, you can still see the entrance points, what would have been the subway station entrances for the subway that was never actually used.
- [44:58]
Matt Elton
Lots of history there to dwell on on the hopefully not incredibly lengthy journey back from Oxford. Hannah and Rana, thank you both for having us, and we will see you again later in here.
- [45:05]
Rana Mitter
Jin.