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Historical Places Site of the Week World History

Site of the Week: Atlas Obscura, a compendium of curiousities from around the globe

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History Travel Site of the Week

It’s a well-worn, but absolutely true, travelling cliche that the best way to get to know a place is to get lost in it. The aim of most travel sites on the internet is to enable you to plan your trips better, separating the wheat from the chaff and ensuring that not a second is wasted. Several Nazi Party rallies were less well planned than your average TripAdvisor aficionado’s holiday. Atlas Obscura is different. It’s a worldwide database of interesting but obscure places, which anyone can join and contribute to. Using it, you feel like an armchair explorer, unearthing those serendipitous finds that make getting lost so much fun, and discovering great places you might otherwise never have known about. ivermectin age

Example: I recently visited Salzburg for the second time. It’s a smallish city, I’ve read a few guide books, and I was accompanied by Julie, a seasoned visitor to Sazlburg, so I smugly thought I had a pretty good handle on most of what’s worth seeing there. Wrong. A few minutes on this site wiped the smile off my face, revealing the existence of things I must have literally come within metres of but remained utterly oblivious to. There’s the Dom Museum inside the stridently baroque Cathedral, which houses the restored Cabinet of Curiousities of the distinctly worldly Archbishop Wolf Dietrich ( who served from 1587 to 1612). There’s the magical water-powered mechanical theatre at Schloss Hellbrunn (which I had visited, but in winter when the theatre and the palace’s famous playing fountains are in hibernation). And, most intriguingly, there’s the skull in the University Mozarteum, said to have been lifted from the grave Mozart shared with 5 or 6 others, and claimed by some to be the bonce of the great composer himself. DNA tests have proved frustratingly inconclusive, but the skull bears the marks of a blow to the head sustained about a year before its owner shuffled off, which may explain the persistent headaches that plagued Mozart in the last year of his life. chicken lice ivermectin

The real joy of Atlas Obscura lies in the fact it’s not just a travel guide, but a compendium of places with stories to tell. Mercifully, the descriptions are free from irritating, overwrought, self-congratulating traveller’s tales, opting instead for good solid research and revealing explanation (as you might expect from a site co-founded by the author of the blinking marvellous Curious Expeditions blog). Typical of this is the page on the Broad Street Cholera Pump, revealing how an innocuous looking water pump on a London street marks the spot where 500 people died in a single outbreak of cholera in 1854, prompting Dr John Snow to discover the link between the disease and London’s foul drinking water.

Atlas Obscura is a highly diverting read now, and I for one hope it continues to grow with input from the community, because this idea has the potential to become very exciting indeed. ivermectin for mange dogs

The image used to illustrate this article is from Atlas Obscura’s page on the Globe Museum in Vienna. Now that sounds like a day out, how did I miss that? O why was I so blind? Curse my blinkers!

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18th Century Animals Theatre

Dogs vs Flying Cars: A surprisingly Georgian night at the theatre

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Flying Car Vs Dog

A couple of weekends ago I went to see the touring production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Bristol Hippodrome. I felt much the same about the show as I did when I saw it on the West End. Although it has some fun moments, it’s lumbered with some distinctly average new songs, and an extremely messy second act. Criminally, the stage production chooses to abandon some of the most enjoyable elements of the film, most notably the secret, murderous hatred between the Baron and Baroness Bomburst, disguised by sickeningly cutesy lovey-dovey language. ‘Chu-chi Face’, the ostensible love song sung by the pair as the Baron tries several ways to murder the Baroness, is a wonderfully ironic highlight of the film. On stage, this side of their relationship is jettisoned, and the Baron becomes merely an overgrown child, pathetically reciprocating the Baroness’s sugary sentiments.

All the same, the stage production remains enjoyable thanks in large parts to its sheer spectacle. The flying car is as bewitching and convincing a piece of stage magic as ever, and gets a huge reaction from audiences. They say nobody leaves the theatre humming the scenery, but in Chitty they’ve given it its own curtain call before they head out into the night.

Another highlight of the show, I must confess, is its cast of capering canines – at times, dozens of dogs fill the stage. I’ve always felt that dogs are under-appreciated thespians. Actors spend years in training, learning not to act, to be the part rather than merely acting it. Dogs get this right off the bat. A dog is a dog, always will be. In Chitty, the dogs seemed to be enjoying themselves far more than many of the chorus, too. And, most excitingly, when a dog’s on stage, you never know quite what’s going to happen. They may run off and on when they’re told, and perform any number of other tricks on cue, but they’re still dogs. They’re not worrying about getting shouted at by the stage manager or the producer complaining to Equity. Professional theatre can get incredibly stale and predictable, so much like a day at the office, that anything that sets that even slightly on edge is always a joy. At the climax of the Chitty, the dog and the flying car appear on stage together. Millions of pounds of development, a whole team dedicated to building the thing, packing it into lorries and keeping it going every night, and somehow, I still found myself staring at the chubby little dog.

Sometimes I wonder if I might not be a bit simple, so it was reassuring to read in The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, that the Georgians would be firmly on my side on this one. In this book, Andrew McConnell Stott paints a wonderful picture of the awe-inspiring excess of Georgian theatre in London, as rival playhouses vied to add ever more spectacle to their spectaculars, and draw crowds of hungry theatre-goers. In 1794, the Covent Garden theatre staged a production of the full-blooded romance Lodoiska. Its climax featured a siege on Lovinski Castle by a horde of Tartars. Military extras swarmed the stage, firing rifles and cannon, while real flames erupted eighteen feet high at the back of the stage (frequently threatening to engulf it entirely). The heroine of the piece is trapped in a high tower, surrounded by the flames, prompting the hero to dash across a bridge, scale the tower and rescue the maiden, seconds before carpenters backstage knocked out supports, sending both bridge and tower hurtling towards the stage. One night, one of the carpenters proved rather too keen, scuttling the bridge too early, while the hero was still on it. He fell to the stage, and somehow managed to catch the heroine as she fell with the collapsing tower. When he stepped out of the smoke, with her in his arms, the pair received such a rapturous response from the audience, thinking that this was all part of the show, that they were forced to repeat this new hair-raising climax every night.

Not wanting to be outdone, Sadler’s Wells ripped out its entire under-stage area one season, so that it could be filled with water and used to stage mock naval battles (with children employed to man the ships so as to disguise their miniature scale). Buoyed by Nelson-mania, the venture was a roaring success, and performances continued nightly in the increasingly unsanitary waters.

The Georgians, like me, also had a particular fondness for animal actors, albeit taken to a typically outrageous extreme. One notable hit in 1784 involved Moustache, a dog cast as the star of a play called The Deserter. The plot of this impossibly bizarre piece of theatre centred on Moustache leading his platoon of canine soldiers into battle against their enemies. Frederick Reynolds remembered seeing him,

“in his little uniform, military boots, with smart musket and helmet, cheering and inspring his fellow soldiers to follow him up the scaling ladders, and storm the fort”

That I would pay to see. As did the Georgians, in their droves. The following season was replete with a Noah’s Ark of entertaining animals, from a hare playing the drums to a singing duck, two dancing horses and, Samuel Johnson’s favourite, a pig who could read and tell the time.

Clearly, this was not the ultimate expression of what theatre can achieve, but it is telling that men like Johnson and Sheridan (who managed Covent Garden at this time) had such open attitudes to this type of theatre. Georgian theatre might have been chaotic, hopelessly extravagant, rampantly commercial, often shallow and sometimes desperate, but it was also exhilariting, bold, extremely popular and wildly entertaining. It’s a reminder of how deadening the limits of snobbery can be, and of the joys of a willingess to try anything once.

Further Reading

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20th Century Biography Site of the Week

Site of the Week: Oscar Kirk’s Diary

London's docks

Oscar Kirk was born and raised in Poplar, East London, close to the substantial complex known as the West and East India Docks. A few days before the end of the First World War, Oscar, then just 14, got a job at the docks, and started to write a diary of his everyday experiences.

His entries from the first half of 1919 survive, and the Museum of London Docklands has started publishing them daily on this web site. The diary is remarkable for its detailed record of seemingly ordinary events, from the purchase of a paintbrush to watching a diver plunge into a drydock to retrieve a spade. A typical entry from Friday 3rd January reads,

Pay day. 17/- . 2pm
I bought 3 comics and a maxim-gun. “Chuckles, Merry & Bright, and The Jester.
Had some fried potatoes for my supper.
Mother and Marjorie went to the Hippodrome to see “Smiles*”.
I bought some boot-polish.
Weather: Wind SW. Fresh at times. Raining. Late Mild.

It’s so minimal and mundane it’s almost poetic, but it’s quickly becoming quietly gripping. Already poignant themes are starting to suggest themselves, especially in the contrast between the regulated working life of Oscar (who by today’s standards is still a child) and the world of adventure he seems to dream of. He records the death of Captain Leefe Robinson, the first war pilot to shoot down a zeppelin, and the reading list he included with the diary includes such exotic titles as The Elixir of Life, To Arms!, and Under Sealed Orders. Somehow, you can’t help but wonder if a part of Oscar might feel he missed out on the derring-do of the war. It’s all speculation, of course, as I’m sure it will remain. I don’t see Oscar getting all One Tree Hill on us any time soon, but this, I think, will be the fun of it. Over the coming months I’m looking forward to trying to piece a larger picture together from these bare fragments.

Congratlulations should go to the Museum of London Docklands for a refreshing project that sets an example for how museums can use technology to bring their archives to a wider audience, without feeling gimmicky. You can also keep up with Oscar’s entries on twitter, though the tweets reduce his spare writing even further. The effect of reading it in twitter form is like buying a mobile phone for an elderly relative, who despite having hated the things all their lives suddenly, through a mixture of gratitude and loneliness, begins to use it obsessively, bombarding you by text with every detail of their day-to-day lives, necessarily abbreviated by their arthritic difficulties with working the keypad.

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18th Century Biography British History History Royal History

Frederick, The Hated Prince

Prince Frederick of Wales

Over Christmas I visited Hampton Court Palace, in the middle of their annual Christmas festivities. Jesters strolled the courtyards, and re-enactors scuttled around the cavernous kitchen, distilling rose water as if by magic and turning spits, perched next to roaring fires. In a corner of the kitchen, one man was making elaborate sweets and decorations from sugar, and was surrounded by gold-leafed sugar crowns and wooden marzipan moulds. As we stood to listen however, it soon emerged that he had deviated from the script, and was using his position as an unlikely springboard to spread his heartfelt but jolly anti-monarchist views to the young children gathered around. “I’m the biggest republican you’ll find!”, he confided to them. “You see, deep down kids, nothing’s changed – the Queen still basically owns everything. Your parents think they own their house, your garden, but no, the Queen still owns everything in the country. Start a revolution!”. His speech over, for one silent moment he searched the children’s eyes, hoping presumably to see the glimmer of fires lit in their hearts. “So all of this stuff is sweets?”, gasped one of the wide-eyed boys in the crowd.

Hampton Court is such a treat because it’s two palaces for the price of one: the redbrick Tudor palace, an earthy, human-feeling place designed for feasting and the sensual pleasures of a highly social court, and William III’s seventeenth-century baroque palace, a sort of Versailles-on-Thames. This latter part of the palace feels very different. Chilly, formal and withheld, it embodies a changed style and purpose for royalty, more familiar to today’s visitor. This part of the palace, however, has stories to reveal of royal families so dysfunctional they make our own look like the Waltons.

It was the well done audioguide for the palace which introduced me to the figure of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who despite his enigmatically sad life story barely registers as a blip on the historical radar, except as father to George III and great-grandfather to Victoria.

Young Prince FrederickBorn in 1707, Frederick was the eldest son of George II (the last British King to be born outside of Britain), and Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The relationship between Frederick and his parents seems never to have been happy, and in time would be animated by a bitter, festering hatred. This hatred can be traced, dissected and placed in context, but at three hundred years’ distance remains hard to fully understand emotionally.

It is fair to say that father-son relations between George II and his father George I were no picnic either. The most important reason for this seems to have been George I’s treatment of his wife, Princess Sophie Dorothea, George II’s mother. Though by no means the most natural or devoted of mothers, she certainly held a place far deeper in her children’s hearts than the cold, controlling George I. The marriage broke down when Sophie Dorothea turned to another man to meet the many needs left unfulfilled by George I. On learning of this affair, George I, despite his own frequent infidelities (some of which produced children), divorced Sophie Dorothea, and, rumour had it, had her lover murdered. Sophie Dorothea was banished to the castle of Ahlden, and forbidden from ever seeing her children again. Myths abound of a young George II making desperate attempts to breach the castle to see his mother, even trying to swim the moat that surrounded it, but to no avail.

This poisonous example cast ominous shadows over George II’s relationship with his oldest son Frederick. Their problems appear to have taken root in the divided responsibilities of the House of Hanover, whose rulers had, since George I was crowned in 1714, served as both Kings of Great Britain and Electors of Hanover. Having been born in Hanover, Frederick’s father, George II, was summoned to Britain by George I when Frederick was just seven. It was decided by George I that Frederick should not accompany his parents, but instead remain behind in Hanover, so as to maintain his bonds with his ancestral home (still, perhaps, where the heart George I truly lay) and to provide a figurehead for their Hanoverian subjects to look to. Here perhaps was the first bone of contention between Frederick and his father. Whilst George II struggled, like many before and after him, to find a useful, satisfying role as Prince of Wales (opposing his father whenever he could), Frederick was nurtured and encouraged by George I as the representative of the House of Hanover at home, taking a place at the centre of court ceremonial. Indeed, George I ignored Princess Caroline’s pleas to be reunited with her son, and insisted that he could not come to England.

Consequently, Frederick did not see his parents for 14 years, and led what seems to have been a lonely childhood. His education, free from paternal interference, began to take on a far more liberal and artistic bent than his parents would ever have approved of. By his early adolescence he had already developed the pronounced tastes for drinking, gambling, women and petty destructiveness that are to be expected from privileged, idle young men, unchecked by any authority figure.

During the 14 years of separation, the family of George II and Caroline expanded, with 7 more children born after Frederick. Absent during its formative years, Frederick seems always to have remained a stranger to this family, and his younger brother William, lauded for his bravery and manly, military pursuits, emerged as the clear favourite of Frederick’s parents and his sisters.

By the time Frederick arrived in England in 1727, following his grandfather’s death and his father’s accession, deep seams of resentment and division had clearly already been sown. Despite Frederick’s frustration at his parents’ delay in summoning him to join them, initially both sides seemed keen to maintain at least a semblance of amicable relations, and several observers commented that Frederick was especially polite and respectful towards his parents. This was not to last.

During this time the position of Prince of Wales had become a magnet for anyone with a grievance against the king, and a centre of opposition. At first, Frederick’s activities were confined more to cultural than political affairs. This did not make them necessarily any the less offensive to George II, a man with notoriously little time for books and a natural aversion to artistic endeavour. Frederick founded the Opera of Nobility in London, to directly rival the Second Royal Academy of Music, presided over by Handel and supported by the King and Queen. Frederick also patronised many of the most important artists of contemporary English Rococo. Frederick even wrote a play himself, under the pseudonym of Captain Bodkin, which was by all accounts so dire that it threatened to cause a riot when it was staged at Drury Lane (though riots were all part of the fun of eighteenth-century theatre-going). One member of the audience was moved to stand and declaim that ‘the highest power on earth could not force the free-born subjects of England to approve of nonsense’. The play ran for just two performances, though this was at least one more than the beleagured theatre manager had expected. One of Frederick’s more lasting legacies was commissioning James Thomson, a playwright and poet who wrote the words to Rule Britannia (later set to music by Thomas Arne), which has become an unofficial national anthem of Britain.

All of this served only to enrage his parents, who deplored his degenerate, extravagant lifestyle (including his habit of running up large debts) and refused to grant him the funds to which Frederick felt he was entitled. It is said that George II examined ways to remove Frederick from the succession, and even considered dispatching him to the colonies.

As the relationship deteriorates, it becomes harder and harder to discern who was responsible for each new offensive, or their reasons, but there was certainly much vitriol on both sides. Frederick offered sponsorship to a clutch of opposition politicians, and the King and Queen all but exiled him from court and any useful role. A low point seems to have come in 1737, by which time Frederick was openly ignored by his father, and not on speaking terms with his mother. Frederick’s wife, Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, was pregnant with their first child. His parents, who questioned Frederick’s ability to father a healthy child, were suspicious and insisted that he and his wife remain at Hampton Court Palace for the birth, so that they could witness it (and perhaps prevent any other baby being substituted if Frederick’s child died). However, when Augusta went into labour during the night, Frederick had her spirited out of the palace, and they escaped to the privacy of St James’s Palace. There have been dark rumours since that Frederick and his wife feared the King and Queen might seek to murder their child, which, however implausible, are at least reflective of the truly rotten state of the relationship.

The King and Queen were furious, the Queen sending Frederick a message informing him that ‘Your Royal Highness deserves to be hanged’. When the Queen became seriously ill shortly afterwards, George II would not allow Frederick to see her. When death followed, he did not attend her funeral.

There would be no lasting reconciliation between Frederick and his father, and each continued to try in every way they could to limit each other’s power right up until Frederick’s death in 1751 (some said from being struck by a cricket ball, but more reliable sources attribute it to pneumonia). Frederick was said to take to family life well, abandoning the womanising ways of his youth and living a seemingly contented family life at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire. George II only seemed to soften once Frederick was dead, doting on his widow, and demonstrating such an excess of grief that some took it to be affected. Perhaps it was. But perhaps only now was George free from the profound sense of duty, propriety and responsibility which seemed to bind the hearts of the Hanoverians. Perhaps only now was he able to stop holding Frederick to impossibly high standards, and mourn a son he had never been allowed to know.

What is most saddening about the story of Frederick and his family is all the missed opportunities, the lost chances to break the patterns of coldness, mistrust and hatred already established by George II and his father. George II and Frederick failed to see how George I had played them against each other, and sacrificed their chances for family happiness. As it was, they went on playing George I’s game for him, long after his death might have ended it. This was a game that would continued to be played by Kings and Princes in the years to come, in particular in the case of George III and George IV.

So perhaps more is revealed by the sad story of Frederick than his invisible place in history suggests, and it’s time to question the verdict of one contemporary who, struggling to think of anything to say as an epitaph to Frederick, could only come up with

‘Here lies Fred,
Who was alive and is dead’.

Further Reading: