clearclassics: two good history books.

I’m taking a break from my usual preoccupations to write about two very different works of historical scholarship, both equally good, in this week’s blog.

Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things (London: Penguin 2016).

Many of us have a vaguely-formed idea that consumption (i.e. buying things) is somehow not good, secondly, that it is a ‘first-world’ phenomenon dating back to the Industrial Revolution (whenever, or whatever, you deem that to be) and thirdly, that it is a creation of the corrupt and ‘over-producing’ ‘Western world’ (i.e. Europe and North America). Trentmann shows us that all these ideas are wrong in one way or another, and he does so in dizzying, dazzling detail. Any chapter of this book could be picked up and read easily (he writes very well) and enjoyed in a stand-alone way, so it is difficult to summarise what he says in a short review. But I am going to try.

The consumption of things that might be seen as superfluous to survival did not begin with the Industrial Revolution (for the sake of argument, the changes from 1780-1840) and it was not a western phenomenon. Europe’s adoption of what he calls the ‘five drugs’ – tea, coffee, tobacco, cocoa and sugar – from the eighteenth century, was only catching up with some of the rest of the world, who had already been enjoying some of these luxuries for centuries – except perhaps for sugar, although that too had been developed in some forms outside Europe before it began to be refined. Benin in west Africa had a thriving trade in ornaments and other goods, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were bracelets from Portugal and linens from Holland in Nigeria by 1600,but the traffic was not all one-way, and Africans had their own goods to trade back. This was even more true of India and China, not to mention the countries we call the ‘Middle East’ – in fact, even writing those words seems ludicrous – of course it was true, think of spices for one thing. One of the mosaics in the 11th-century McCarthy chapel on the Rock of Cashel was decorated with lapis lazuli from Baghdad. Our Euro-American-centred view of global history places far too much emphasis on the ‘white’ countries not only as colonisers and exploiters, but as instigators of all commercial and cultural activity. In a way, Trentmann is building on earlier works by German historians Heinrich Winkler and Hans-Jurgen Osterhammel, and their insistence on ‘de-centring’ the world’s history from London and New York and Paris and Berlin, and even going back earlier, Rome and Greece. (More recent books by Peter Frankopan on the silk roads develoop this argument further). Europeans, Trentmann argues, did not enter the ‘scramble for Africa’ for raw materials and (even more importantly) markets – they were already trading with all the ports and towns of the continent for decades, even centuries. The scramble was for national glory, though of course the economic imperative was there too. And of course there was terrible exploitation – Trentmann is not entering an argument for imperialism, political and economic or any other kind. He is just demonstrating how imperialists and other political conquerors always fitted into existing grooves of ‘getting and spending.’

I find the book most interesting when it deals with consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the way it was responsible for consolidating minimum standards of domestic comfort. This is as true of China, Japan, India and Africa as it is of Euro-America and he gives many fascinating examples of changing housing standards and municipal facilities in all these places.Improvements in gas and water and lighting encouraged people to spend more time in their own homes and led to a decline in public house receipts and street brawling,cock-fighting, bear-baiting and so on. (Probably a decline in outdoor communal amusements too, he notes wryly). Most of all, though, Trentmann makes us realise how important ‘things’ are, not necessarily for display and showing-off, but as comforts, what Jan Struther, an English writer of the late 1930s, called ‘that tribe of humble familiars which jog along beside one….apparently trivial, but momentous by reason of their terrible intimacy.’ For a middle-class woman on the eve of the Second World War, these were her sponge, comb, tooth-brush, spectacle-case and fountain-pen. For a child it would be a teddy or a blanket, for the lonely servant-girl in these islands (and Europe, and probably elsewhere) in the not-too-distant past, it would be the things she kept in her ‘locked box’, always sacrosanct and never to be opened by her employers. (Such privacy was respected in common law in England anyway.) For the Traveller or Roma, it would be the brightly-coloured dishes or horse-brasses. Our house, growing up, was full of reverently-preserved fabric and wooden artefacts from India. Our aunt out there was not rich, and she probably picked them up at markets for half-nothing, but they took on a value out of all proportion to their actual ‘worth’ in our house. To pick a sobering and extreme example of the power of ‘things’, think of those mountains of personal possessions discovered in the Nazi death camps by the liberators and how they spoke more eloquently of the atrocity of mass murder than the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria.

Of course there are problems of over-consumption and planned obsolescence and all those features of modern life – Trentmann isn’t denying this – but he is making us think in a new way of the objects with which we surround ourselves and telling us – reassuring us? – that when we treasure ‘things’ we are just being normal, like all of humanity throughout all of history.

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Dermot Walsh, Beneath Cannock’s Clock: the last man hanged in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press 2009)

On a much narrower canvas, this is more or less a social history of an Irish city in the early 1950s woven around the story of Michael Manning, a 23-year-old newly-married man, who was hanged in 1954 for the brutal rape and murder of a 64-year-old nurse, Catherine Cooper.

Cooper was originally from west Clare, and back in Ireland (like so many others of her profession) after a successful career in England, spending her final working years as a ‘home sister’ in that renowned Limerick institution, Barrington’s Hospital. She was happily independent, loved the job that had made such independence possible and was very fond of ‘style’. On the last evening of her life, she walked to Castletroy, now a suburb of Limerick city on the Dublin Road, to visit a retired matron from the hospital. Maybe it was an enjoyable catch-up on all the gossip, maybe it was an errand of mercy. One hopes it was enjoyable.

Manning was a carman. Called carters in other towns, carmen in Limerick up to the late 1950s retained the sole authority to move goods from the docks to the railway station and other delivery points. It was an untouchable, hereditary trade, and Manning had inherited the business, horse and cart from his father. Carting has irregular hours, and on the day that Manning decided his fate, he spent most of his time drinking, although he went home for his dinner in the middle of the day to his wife Joan, who was expecting their first child. The amount he drank that day and the number of pubs he drank in, makes the reader realize how acceptable and normal drinking to excess was, at the time. Eventually he left his horse and cart out where he usually left it, in his brother’s house near Castletroy, and it was then, at about 9.30 in the evening, that he came upon Catherine Cooper, walking back into town from her friend’s house.

The story is vividly told by Walsh. Manning was very quickly apprehended, and arrested a few hours later in his bed, with his wife.The gardai identified him quickly because the Dublin Road was jumping with people on that November night. Castletroy was an upper-middle-class area, and a lot of the young women who worked as maids there, cycled into the city when their working day was over, to go to the pictures and meet friends. The days when maids waited downstairs all evening to be summoned by bells on the whims of their employers were over. With England beckoning and factory jobs to be had in the city, maids were like gold dust. All along the route into town were groups of young men, some of them friends or boyfriends walking the ‘girls’ into town or back ‘home’, or waiting to meet them, or just hanging out in the hopes of ‘getting off’ with one of them. Groups of young men and young women were still doing this in Italy when I lived there in 1984-85 – ‘la passegiata‘ they called it, and my mother remembered watching from her bedroom window as a little girl in Limerick city in the 1930s, the dolled-up girls from the lanes linking arms with their friends going ‘down town’ when all the shops were closed, to walk around and meet similar groups of lads. Anyway, Manning was identified by several such ‘walkers’. He was noticed because he wore a rather distinctive hat.

A few of the details are very telling. The couple out walking who came upon the dying Cooper and saw Manning running from the scene, summoned a priest before they thought of getting a doctor or ambulance or garda. Sure enough, the priest was first on the scene, then the doctor, summoned from St John’s hospital, pronounced the nurse dead. She probably would have died anyway, but the priority given to spiritual rather than temporal welfare was very much of its time.

The story of the trial is long, but not very complicated. Nobody wanted a man hanged, and even Sister Cooper’s family in Clare signed a petition for his reprieve. This was not out of any disrespect for their aunt and sister, but because there was a general feeling that Manning was either mentally ‘defective’ or mentally ill. Despite all petitions, he was hanged on April, 20 1954. It was Albert Pierrepont’s last visit to Ireland.

For me, the book’s chief value is its illumination of the economic and social life of an Irish city in the 1950s, including the carman ‘privilege’ enjoyed by the murder, the everyday life of a senior nurse nearing retirement, and the crucial role played by observant ‘young ones’ and their ‘youngf’llas’ as they would have been called in Limerick, in bringing Manning to justice.