I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History
Table of Contents
About the Author
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
MY TRAVELS in LIVING HISTORY
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
I Believe in Yesterday
Tim Moore's writing has appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday Times and the Observer, on whose behalf he was voted Travel Writer of the Year at the 2004 UK Press Awards. His books include French Revolutions, Do Not Pass Go, Spanish Steps and Nul Points. He lives in West London with his wife and three children.
By the same author
Frost on My Moustache
Continental Drifter
French Revolutions
Do Not Pass Go
Spanish Steps
Nul Points
I Believe in
Yesterday
Tim Moore
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Copyright © Tim Moore 2008
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To my old self
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Neil Burridge, Will Marshall-Hall, the fine men of the Legio VIII Augusta, Aurificina Treverica, Mick Baker and the warriors of Tÿrsli ð, Christian Folini and the Company of Saynt George, Mistress Joan, Bella, Ed Boreham, Butch Hauri, the Douglas Texas Battery, Louisiana's war widows and refugees, and the incomparable Gerry Barker.
Oh – and Birna, for sending me off into the filth and fury with a kiss and a clean tunic, and not making me sleep in the shed when I came home.
Prologue
'Seven of us born up there.'
Sponge in hand, I looked around from the car's soapy roof and saw a venerable gentleman in a flat cap and scarf, trim and upright, nodding slowly, his gaze fixed on my bedroom window. 'Sorry,' he said, blinking himself back to focus and giving me a gentle smile. 'I'm a sparrow.'
My fingers tightened round the sponge, releasing a thick gobbet of dirty froth down the front of my trousers; then relaxed, releasing another: here was a Sparrow, scion of the fabled W.D. Sparrow. The W.D. Sparrow who had appeared on a 1923-postmarked envelope we found behind a doorframe after moving in sixty-five years later, and on the occasional utility bill that arrived in the months that followed. The man whose poignant legacy of this epic tenure, in a house stripped of all other domestic accessories, was an old red telephone and a BT directory, open at a page of Hounslow borough's residential care homes, with one such shakily circled in pencil.
In quiet suburban cockney, the son of Sparrow began to reminisce on his upbringing at number 29. The night he and a couple of brothers sneaked back in by shinning a drainpipe (one had slipped and broken a leg); the Luftwaffe bomb that had landed just behind the garden wall, entombing the Anderson shelter the family had vacated moments earlier; the bus-stop chats with Dirk Bogarde, who had learned his craft at the end of our road, in a theatre that was now an office car park; and, yes, the seven new Sparrows hatched in the nest since soiled by three fledgling Moores.
I listened enthralled, oblivious to the sponge-chilled damp in my wrinkled fingers. If his tales came embued with a special resonance, it was because the home in which they were set was in every important detail the one we acquired. W.D. Sparrow was a careful owner, whose hardcore seven-decade redecoration habit revealed itself to our blowtorches like the layers of a house-shaped gobstopper. But that telephone and a gas stove aside, he was not a man who set much store in contemporary lifestyle comforts. It was quite a thing, in 1988, to walk into a home in an affluent area of West London and find its water supply restricted to a single cold tap in the kitchen, with fresh evidence of solid-fuel heating solutions smutting the hearths of every room. There was no bathroom, indeed no interior sanitation of any sort: the council's awe-struck building inspector had congratulated us on acquiring the very last residence in London W4 serviced solely by an outhouse.
'Would you like to, um, have a look around?'
Sparrow junior's nostalgia well had run dry, and it seemed an appropriate offer. For a moment those old eyes widened in anticipation; then he forced a wistful smile, declined politely, tightened his scarf and walked away. I watched him for a while, then turned back to the house. His reluctance wasn't hard to understand. The interior that in 1988 was almost exactly as he remembered it would now, fewer than twenty years later, be entirely unfamiliar. Almost everything behind his old front door, in fact even his old front door, had long since been rent asunder with crowbar and sledgehammer, and carried away in a skip. I couldn't say I still parked my behind on alfresco porcelain, or poured pans of stove-boiled water into a tin bath, or had a hundredweight of smokeless delivered every week. These were commonplace traditions that had defined the previous occupant's existence, and that of his predecessors, yet to have continued even one of them would have marked me out as an unwholesome eccentric. One short step away from encouraging pigeons to roost in the kitchen, or storing my excretions in labelled biscuit tins. How close I was to the life and times of W.D. Sparrow, yet how very, very far.
I returned to my distracted sponge-work, pondering how abruptly we had cast aside an age-old way of life, and the universal skills associated with it. In a single generation, life-changing luxuries had become necessities: with sporadic access to electricity and running hot water, my parents had endured well-to-do upbringings that would now be decreed almost inhumane. I pondered it all again one morning shortly afterwards, reading a newspaper report on a recidivist German youth offender sent by the exasperated authorities to 'fend for himself' in a remote Russian village. 'If he doesn't chop wood, his room is cold,' said his social worker, 'and if he doesn't fetch water, he can't wash. He must cope as we all did a few decades ago. It's the last resort to re-educate him.'
What had become of the Western world, that managing w
ithout sockets and taps was now the ultimate sanction against young rule-breakers? Were the everyday challenges faced by our forefathers from the dawn of civilisation until 'a few decades ago' already so remote and alien?
The TV schedules certainly suggested a nation mourning the loss of workaday, Sparrow-pattern life skills, and nurturing a perverse fascination with its own pampered uselessness: almost every month saw a new series in which hapless volunteers relived history by failing to fasten a stiff collar or pluck a chicken or bail out a trench. Watching as an aimless throng failed to recreate the erection of Stonehenge, a reworking of Jarvis Cocker's withering dismissal of rave culture ran through my head: is this the way they say the past is meant to feel, or just 20,000 people standing in a field?
Happily, encountering history face to face was a generally more rewarding balance of education and entertainment: at sites of historical significance one would routinely encounter elaborately costumed participants proficiently going about their period business. As my children failed to churn butter in the kitchens at Hampton Court one spring afternoon, their tutors – an engaging pair of leather-aproned Tudor cooks – brought me up to speed with Britain's thriving 'living history' scene.
Until a decade or so back, re-enactment had ticked along as a regional hobby for weekend warriors – the Cavalier and Roundhead Midlanders of the Sealed Knot, the hardy Roman legions clustered around Hadrian's Wall. It's no accident that the first official definition ('any presentation or other event held for the purpose of re-enacting an event from the past or of illustrating conduct from a particular time or period in the past') appeared in a clause that exempted historical reenactment from the Violent Crime Reduction Bill, 2006.
Yet the cooks seemed refreshingly unimpressed with the pain-based end of the spectrum, and talked instead of a pastime that had developed into an erudite national sub-culture. Some of their associates were bona fide social historians, test-bedding theories on how people worked and played – it was all rather more academic these days. And significantly more diverse: 'I've heard you can go right back to the Stone Age if you want to.'
This was an extraordinary revelation. At a stroke, surviving in The 1940s House, even The W.D. Sparrow House, seemed feebly unambitious. Could I handle a spell in The Prehistoric Hovel? Were there really people who pressed the rewind button that long, who willingly embraced a grunting, filthy existence ruled by fear and hunger?
Intrigued, and just a little terrified, I spent the balance of that weekend delving into the history of re-enactment. It was a surprisingly long one, even if you didn't count the Roman battle victories refought in the Coliseum, which you probably ought to in honour of the many combatants slain therein on the altar of realism. Reliving famous triumphs for the purposes of propaganda or simple gloating proved enduringly popular – in 1895, the Gloucestershire Engineer Volunteers boldly recreated the defence of Rorke's Drift at Cheltenham's Winter Gardens (let us not dwell upon the seventy-five 'Zulu' participants).
The world had to wait until 1638, and an indoor confrontation played out between 'Moors' and 'Christians' in the Merchant Taylors' Hall, for the first recreation of something that hadn't just happened, and another 200 years for a re-enactment that wasn't a big fight. Though which was a succession of smaller fights.
The 1830s was, for Britain, a decade of disorientating change. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; the Reform Act; the Poor Law – the old order was being swept away, and with it the old way of life. The rustic, semi-feudal, slow-paced existence that had been the centuries-old template for British society was being melted down, and no one quite knew what would replace it. One reaction, much as it would be 150 years later when the next technological revolution transformed daily life, was to seek nostalgic succour in the comforting past. Hail Archibald William Montgomerie, 13th Earl of Eglinton, and curse the 1982 A-level history syllabus, which in failing to mention him failed to leaven the dreary bilge regurgitated above.
Memorably encapsulated as 'one of the most glorious and infamous follies of the nineteenth century', the Grand Jousting Tournament of August 1839 was conceived as a spectacular celebration of medieval chivalry and pageant. When the young Earl called together 150 prospective participants from across Europe in a Bond Street armour-dealer's showroom, he pitched his dream as an antidote to the smutted drudgery of the new Industrial Age, and the insidious democracy following in its wake: one chronicler described it as 'symbolic of romantic defiance in the face of modern practicality'. The costumes, the catering, the tents, the jousts themselves – no expense would be spared in ensuring an authentic experience.
Learning that they were to fund this expense, and that here was a sport where defeat might leave a 10-foot pole lodged in your face, a large number promptly shuffled out. The room emptied further when Eglinton announced that his tournament was to be held at the family seat, a remote estate not especially near Ayr. In the end, just forty patrician diehards remained to be fitted up by the dealer – quite literally, it transpired, as a twentieth-century examination proved the 'original Medieval armour' he sold them to be entirely fake.
As the event approached, Eglinton began to suspect he had underestimated its Zeitgeist-tapping retro appeal. Beyond all the chivalric romance, the tournament winningly blended glamour with bloodlust: the flower of British aristocracy taking on Hello!-style Euro-royals, with excitingly lethal possibilities. Emperor-in-waiting Prince Louis Napoleon v the Marquess of Waterford, Count Lubeski of Poland v Viscount Glenlyon . . . The press build-up was feverish, and the Earl failed to dampen what soon became a national enthusiasm by promising free entrance to anyone who arrived in medieval dress. Having planned on a crowd of 1,500, he belatedly stuck up enough grandstands to seat three times as many.
Eglinton's excitement on learning that every inn and hotel in south-west Scotland was filled with codpieced, Rapunzel-hatted revellers from across the land soon evolved into a creeping sense of dread. Homeowners rented out rooms at exorbitant rates, and when there were none left, gentryfolk in fancy dress had to bed down in hedgerows. On the morning of the tournament, traffic on the thirty-mile highway from Ayr to Glasgow was muzzle-to-wheel; abandoned carriages blocked every road around Eglinton Castle. The most conservative final estimate of the colourful but careworn crowd that trudged through his gates was 100,000.
Eglinton was still wondering where to put them all, and what to feed them, when a crack of thunder split the lowland heavens. The epic cloudburst that followed leaked blood-red rain on those huddled under the scarlet grandstand canopies, and made a wet blur of the half-mile opening parade. Midway through the ill-tempered, malnourished hiatus that followed, the Earl sent a court jester out to appease the crowd: few could see him, fewer still could hear him, and those who did responded to his material with physical displeasure.
Three hours behind schedule, a squeaky fanfare heralded the inaugural joust: on cue, the rain became sleet. Unable to see the end of their own lances, the combatants tentatively converged across the quagmire, missing each other by some distance at low speed. The crowd had by now dispersed, yet soon returned: the rivers that ringed the estate were in full flood, stranding Eglinton with 100,000 unfed, blood-faced guests in tights. His ultimate reward for organising the world's first proper historical re-enactment was a bill for £40,000, lingering national ridicule and a very poor haul of Christmas cards.
Over-ambition, bad planning and worse weather, public humiliation, ruinous equipment of dubious provenance . . . in highlighting all these, Eglinton's Grand Jousting Tournament presciently introduced what I would discover to be many of living history's defining traits. If there is a more uncomfortable and expensive way of making a gigantic tit of yourself, only Richard Branson knows it.
Chapter One
If I was to start at the very beginning, then on the BC scale how low could one go? The online answer corroborated those Hampton Court cooks, and provided compelling evidence that re-enactment was a very broad church, with a far-flung cong
regation. A man in New South Wales was gamely trying to set up a neolithic group – 'Hi. Any takers for 4500–3300 BC?' – and some Californians had organised a re-enactment of the ancient agrarian rite known as Beltaine ('we recommend that children not be brought to this ritual'). Certainly, I hadn't expected to find an active Ancient Greek re-enactment scene in Watford. Yet a contest for the Apple of Hesperides held in a grammar-school hall wasn't quite what I had in mind – my intention was to experience, as intensively as feasible, the actual day-to-day life of our distant forefathers.
I scrabbled around in time and geography, and at length returned to my roots. The British populace at the embryonic stage of its historical development appeared depressingly resistant to progress – while great civilisations rose and fell in Egypt and Greece, we remained stubbornly mired in the rural, tribal Bronze Age for roughly 1,400 years. After the techniques for smelting iron were finally imported in the fifth century BC – some 800 years after their perfection in the Near East – our forebears happily played with their new metal for the next half a millennium, until the Romans pitched up. In those parts of our islands the invaders didn't reach, the Iron Age endured for a further 500 years. Over 2,000 years, and all we'd done was fit different tips to the spears stacked up outside our thatched-roof roundhouses.
Still, 2,000 years is a hefty chunk of recent history, and what with a reawakened national passion for Boudicca and the Celts, I imagined Bronze/Iron Age re-enactment to be a popular choice amongst living historians. It quickly became plain that this was not so, and for reasons that should have been obvious (though, as my forebears had found in the field of metallurgical innovation, only when a foreigner explained them). 'The problem with prehistoric re-enactment,' posted a Dutch living historian on one of the many relevant forums, 'is that because they didn't write anything, we don't have any information on how they interacted. From archaeology we know how they dressed, and how their tools and houses looked. But re-enactment is only a guess – all we can do is show how they might have cooked and worked and performed their ceremonies.'