Paper Doesn't Refuse Ink, as my Dad says

Warning: this post does not have an inverted pyramid structure. The middle matters. Lots.

There's an interesting and important article by Kitty Holland in today's Observer about the tragic story of Savita Hallapanavar's death, with the most important sentence in the piece being buried in the middle of it all:

"Whether the fact that Savita had been refused a termination was a factor in her death has yet to be established."

Why is this the most important sentence? Because that's the sentence that pulls the rug out from under the whole piece. Savita's death has been reported worldwide, with Kitty Holland being the reporter who broke the story, and in explaining the story in the Observer, Holland makes it clear that from her point of view this story was always about abortion.

Holland says that her contact in the West told her of a woman who'd died after repeatedly requesting a termination. She realised that this could be a story with enormous political and constitutional ramifications, as abortion is the most divisive issue in Ireland and, she believed, the death of a woman in these circumstances was probably inevitable given the lack of clarity in law. Holland tracked down and rang Savita's husband, Praveen, who told her the story...

It was published, and went global. There was a spontaneous protest outside the Oireachtas, with up to 2,000 people there, or so Holland says, though the Gardaí put the numbers at about 700, and RTE and Channel 4 had reported that the vigil was to be numbered in the hundreds. International attention increased, with Savita's parents being quoted as having accused Ireland of murdering their daughter.

"The pressure," she concludes, "for something to be done about the legal morass around abortion is greater than it has ever been – not only domestically but this time, it seems, from across the world. Praveen Halappanavar, a quiet-spoken, gentle young man who was so determined to tell me what happened to his young wife, may yet prove the loudest voice those seeking change here have ever had."

True. And yet as she admits in a single sentence buried in the middle of the column, this story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

'Never Again,' say the posters, 'Abortion rights now,' though a termination might not have saved Savita

Lessons in Journalism

The fact that it's buried in the middle is significant. Newspaper stories tend to be structured on the principle of an 'inverted pyramid', with the big stuff at the start and then stuff being decreasingly salient; a 'kicker' is frequently deployed at the end, to hammer home what the journalist sees as the key point.

People often read columns that way, after all. They look at the headline, read the first couple of paragraphs, skim down, and look at the last paragraph. I'm not sure if people read them that way because we realise they're written that way, or if they're written that way because we read them that way. I reckon it's a circular phenomenon, which is also handy for editors as it gives a general thumb on what to cut out for reasons of length.

Look at that piece again. The headline says that Savita Hallapanavar's death may stir Ireland to change over abortion. The first paragraph says that when Holland learned a woman had died after asking for a termination, she realised this could be a big story with massive political and constitutional ramifications. The second paragraph is all about abortion, and specifically says that the death of a woman in circumstances such as Savita's was probably inevitable given Ireland's laws. Then there are eleven paragraphs telling the story, before a final paragraph about abortion again.

And buried in the middle of the piece, in the eighth paragraph of fourteen, is the admission that the story may have nothing whatsoever to do with abortion.

How Little We Know...

Investigations have yet to take place into why Savita died. Not in the most straightforward sense, as we know she contracted E.Coli and septicaemia. Rather in the sense of when and how she contracted the infection that killed her, whether she was given the best healthcare possible, why exactly her request the pregnancy be ended was rejected, whether a termination would have saved her life or whether it might even have further endangered her.

We don't know any of this. Her medical charts are not in the public domain. These things are all about details and specifics, and those details and specifics have not been published. All we have to go on are the heartbroken words of a man who recently watched his wife die.

In the absence of the medical data, anybody -- even an obstetrician or gynaecologist, no matter how well qualified -- who insists that a termination would have saved Savita's life, or that it would definitely have endangered her further, is talking nonsense. Assertions in this matter are mere speculation, and conjecture, as a sensible pro-choice friend said to me yesterday, doesn't help.

We don't know if Savita died because she was denied the option of having a miscarrying pregnancy terminated. The head of Dublin's Rotunda Maternity Hospital says this case probably wasn't about abortion laws, and was almost certainly about how a clinical situation involving miscarriage-related infection was managed; whether different management of the situation might have saved Savita's life, he says, is something nobody can say. If we're honest we should admit that we know next to nothing about this. All we really have are questions.

A Couple of Questions

Not, of course, that you'd think that, to see the hysteria that the Irish media has kicked up, presenting the story as a straightforward tale of a woman who died because she was denied an abortion, with this decision being due to a lack of clarity in Irish law.

We just don't have the facts to say that. Just as an example of how little we know about this, and if you're familiar with the facts of the case as reported, ask yourself the following question: on what day did the hospital start Savita on antibiotics?

Tuesday? Well, that's certainly what Holland and Paul Cullen, the Irish Times' health correspondent, reported in Wednesday's Irish Times, in the most-read story in the newspaper's online history. Savita's husband Praveen is specifically identified as the source for this detail, with him placing it in the exact context of Savita shaking, shivering, vomiting, and collapsing; it was in response to this, he said, that "there were big alarms and a doctor took bloods and started her on antibiotics".

This is what prompted the Guardian's Health Correspondent, Denis Campbell, to end his piece on the coming investigations into what happened in Galway by saying:

"Savita appeared to be in trouble as early as Sunday. The apparent failure to recognise that risk then, and to start her on antibiotics until the Tuesday night, will be the most urgent question for those investigating."

Curious, isn't it, that the Guardian's health correspondent, looking at the facts of the case at least as initially presented, thought the most urgent question was not whether a preterm delivery would have saved Savita's life, but why the hospital didn't start Savita on antibiotics until two days after she would appear to have been in danger?

To his mind this seemed less like an abortion story than one about a failure to anticipate possible infection. But of course, he was entirely dependent on the facts as originally reported by the Irish Times, quoting an interview with Praveen that took place several days before the story was published on 14 November.

RTE, strangely enough, seems to suggest that this isn't what happened. The national broadcaster's website  states that it had obtained details of the timeline of events as viewed by Galway University Hospital, with the hospital saying that on Monday 22 October, "After 24 hours of admission, antibiotics are given."

So it would appear that on this, at least, Praveen and the hospital disagree. Except that Praveen was interviewed by Kitty Holland a second time, this second interview being posted on the Irish Times' website for people to listen to. You should definitely do so, at least if you're genuinely interested in what happened in this horrible situation. About four minutes into this interview, Praveen clearly and explicitly states that the hospital put Savita on antibiotics on Sunday. He said that on Sunday Savita was told that it looked like the baby wouldn't survive and that it would be all over in four or five hours; she was put on a drip, he says, and the hospital started her on antibiotics.

Which was it? Tuesday, as Praveen originally said? Sunday, as he now says? Or Monday, as the hospital apparently says?

If you're still inclined to make assertions about this, try this: when did Savita's baby die?

Well, the initial Irish Times report stated that at lunchtime on Wednesday -- more specifically around two o'clock according to the interview which we can listen to --  the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to theatre to have contents of her womb removed.

But RTE reports that, according to the hospital, she was transferred to theatre on Tuesday, with spontaneous miscarriage happening there. Or at least, so I read the terse statement "Patient transferred to theatre. Spontaneous miscarriage occurs." The hospital account seems to suggest that this happened late on Tuesday night, as it says Savita was taken from theatre to the Intensive Care Unit on Wednesday.

Or was she? Because that's not what Praveen says. He says, on the recording, that Savita was taken to the High Dependency Unit and Praveen went there with her. He says he went home at about ten at night to freshen up, and between half eleven and twelve he got a call from the hospital and rushed there as she had been transferred to the Intensive Care Unit.

Not Just Difference of Interpretation; Differences of Fact

We probably shouldn't be surprised that the hospital's version of events, even in this bald form, is substantially different from what the Irish Times has published. Remember James Reilly's admonition not to prejudge things, and his caution that he was privy to facts that he wasn't privileged to share? Look at the problems that even a cursory comparison of the two timelines present us with:

• The Irish Times quotes Praveen as saying that the hospital started Savita on antibiotics on Tuesday and features a recording of a later interview with him saying it did so on Sunday; RTE reports the hospital as saying that she was started on them on Monday.
• The Irish Times reports Praveen as saying that the baby died at lunchtime on Wednesday, but RTE says the hospital has it that spontaneous miscarriage occurred in theatre on Tuesday.
• Praveen says that Savita was taken from theatre to the High Dependency Unit on Wednesday as the hospital said she should spend a few hours there, that he followed her there, and that approaching midnight he got a call which caused him to hurry to hospital as Savita had been taken to the Intensive Care Unit; RTE says that the hospital says Savita was taken from theatre to the ICU on Wednesday, apparently without going to the HDU.
• I'm not even sure if the accounts of what happened on the original Sunday match up. In the recording Praveen describes himself being told by the doctor "It looks as though the baby's not going to survive," confirming that he was sure of this. The original Irish Times report described this by saying that Savita "was found to be miscarrying", which to an utter layman like me sounds absolutely certain. But according to RTE, the hospital say that Savita was taken to the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Unit with "a threatened miscarriage". Now, I'm obviously no expert, but this sounds like something like a situation where the baby* could perhaps be saved.

Still, even without getting into what happened on the original Sunday, it still seems clear that the two accounts are utterly impossible to reconcile. Either Praveen is wrong, or the hospital is wrong, or RTE's source isn't in fact the hospital and is making things up. I have no idea of telling which is which, and right now I think there are very few people who do. 

If RTE's source is indeed the hospital -- if this is indeed the timeline of events as viewed by the hospital -- then we have to think about what this would mean. Even with poor documentation, the hospital should have clear records of what day Savita was taken to theatre, and whether she was taken straight from theatre to the ICU or whether she first spent a few hours in the HDU, and there should be very clear records of when antibiotics were started.

If the hospital's paper trail matches the timeline as given by RTE, then this surely means that either the hospital's story is substantially correct and Praveen's is wrong, for whatever reason, or else that there has been a massive effort made in the hospital to cover up something very dodgy. If it's the latter, we'd be dealing with massive malpractice, and a huge cover-up.

And no, I'm not suggesting that for an instant. But that's what this would mean, if it were the case.

Right now we just don't know, which is why we have to wait for the hospital's own investigation and the HSE's investigation to be complete. Faced with a story as shocking as this, people have serious grounds for worry, and even for anger, but we don't know what we should be worried or angry about.

As Kitty Holland says, in the middle of today's column, it has not yet been established whether Savita's death could have been avoided had her reported request for a termination been granted.

Note to the Irish Fourth Estate: the Spectator sees more of the Game

Certainly, one thing I'm worried about is the quality of journalism in Ireland at the moment.

How has the Irish Times ran two conflicting versions -- one written, one aural -- of the same story, and not noticed that they contradict each other? Did Kitty Holland not spot, the second time she interviewed Praveen, that his story had changed in at least one small but vitally important respect?

How has nobody picked up on the fact that the sequence of events as described by the Irish Times, with Praveen as a source, and RTE, dependent on the hospital's viewpoint, are completely at odds with each other?

Why is the Irish Times coverage of this against the backdrop of how things are so much better in Britain, glossing over how many women die in Britain every year from pregnancy-related sepsis, and with Britain's law spectacularly** misrepresented?

Why hasn't the Irish Times reported on the apparent fact that pro-choice groups in Ireland were given wind of a 'denial of abortion' story several days before the Irish Times ran Kitty Holland's and associated pieces?  Just judging by what I noticed on Twitter on Tuesday night it seemed to me that last Wednesday's vigil, for instance, was as about as spontaneous and organic as such things can be, but it also seems clear that certain people who advocate abortion pretty much on demand -- clarification on 'X' looking like little more a a wedge for them -- were well positioned that day to shape the story of Savita's death as a 'denial of abortion' one, when it may have been nothing of the sort, and to whip up popular rage on this issue. At the very least, surely any responsible paper should be asking whether cynical opportunism is at work...

And why on earth is it that nobody's screaming about how the Irish Times is reporting that the Gardaí say 10-12,000 people took part in today's march through Dublin in remembrance of Savita, demanding that Irish abortion law needs to be changed so nobody else need ever die as she did -- even though, as noted, no link between the two has yet been established -- while RTE is saying that Garda figure is merely that more than 6,000 people marched?

Other parts of the march, to be fair, looked more dense than this.

Though I'd not rule out the larger figure, I find the smaller one a bit more plausible, given that this march took up six or at most seven times as much space on the ground as the 'March for Choice' one in early October that had just 850 people in. Thereabouts, anyway. You remember, the one where Garda estimates, as reported in the Irish Times, were dramatically and mysteriously raised from about 800 to more than 2000. 'Several thousand', as the Irish Times eventually put it. But still, surely the thing to wonder is why the Gardaí are supposedly giving out different figures for this.

This stuff is serious. We need to be honest here, and refrain from manipulating numbers because we don't like how they don't suit us, holding off until the facts are in before jumping on stories that suit our agendas.

It may well be that pro-lifers are going to find that they have blood on their hands over this, but we just don't know. As things stand, it's almost as though Irish journalists have en masse decided to abandon all pretence of objectivity, and have taken sides, like cheerleaders with typewriters, the very thing that former Irish Times sports writer Tom Humphries rightly said journalists should never be.

There are investigations going on. We need to wait.

______________________________________________________________________
* I've noticed no shortage of people out there sneering at pro-lifers describing Savita's daughter as a baby, rather than a foetus. You can see a good example of that quoted over on this midwife's blogpost on the matter. Here's the thing: it's clear that Praveen and Savita called their unborn child a baby. Listen to the long interview with Praveen on the the Irish Times website. He repeatedly refers to his daughter as a baby.

** The other day, for instance, there was a piece entitled 'What would have happened in Britain?', which cited two of Britain's leading abortion providers as sources and wrongly claimed that British doctors "are legally able to carry out abortions until the 24th week of a pregnancy for all reasons, not just medical". This is a commonly-held and utterly false trope in Ireland; abortion is fundamentally illegal in Britain even now, under the terms of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act or the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act.

Rather than legalising abortion, the 1967 Abortion Act conferred certain defences against illegality upon doctors who carry out terminations, provided the terminations cab be justified under at least one of five grounds. Two of these grounds, being injury greater than that caused by termination to the health of the woman or her existing children, are subject to a 24-week gestational limit. British doctors are most definitely not allowed to carry out pregnancies up to that point "for all reasons", which is why there was a huge ruckus earlier this year when it was discovered that British clinics were aborting babies because their parents didn't want to have baby girls.

And the Irish Times know this: it specifically reported on this issue back in February.

Medical Malpractice and Treating Tragedies as Political Footballs

The horrific news last night that a 31-year-old dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died from septicaemia a fortnight ago following a miscarriage in Galway University Hospital looks almost as perplexing as it is tragic. I'm glad that two investigations are currently taking place into what exactly happened, because the whole thing mystifies and appalls me.

Seemingly Savita presented at hospital seventeen weeks pregnant and in extreme pain, and was told she was miscarrying; the following day she asked for the pregnancy to be terminated, but was denied one on the basis that the child was still alive, with somebody saying 'this is a Catholic country'; she remained in pain for two-and-a-half further days until the foetal heartbeat stopped. 

The Irish Times goes on to say that the third day Savita was in hospital she asked if labour could be induced to end the pregnancy, but the consultant refused, again apparently saying it was the law and 'this is a Catholic country'. Savita remained in agony all that night and into a fourth day, but the hospital refused to end this. Eventually the foetal heartbeat stopped, and Savita was taken to ward.

Two days later she died.

Obviously this is horrible, sickening, and tragic. 

I hope those investigations get to the bottom of what happened. I'd hope too, that appropriate action be taken if anyone claimed that the hospital couldn't help Savita as it would be against the law for it to do so, especially on the spurious grounds that, as was supposedly said, 'this is a Catholic country'. And if the hospital's negligence veered into the realms of the criminal, then I really hope there are suitable consequences.

The thing is, assuming that the reporting is accurate, and given the Irish Times' recent record on life issues, it may not be, this doesn't make sense. As far as I can see, Galway University Hospital would have been fully within its legal rights to have induced a preterm delivery -- or foetal evacuation -- in an attempt to save both mother and child. Indeed, not merely would it have been within its rights to do so, doing so would have been normal medical practice. 

This is exactly the sort of thing that Dr Berry Kiely talked about back on what was an uncommonly good Vincent Browne show back in the Spring -- you induce a preterm delivery, thus saving the mother, and you do everything you can to try to save the child. You almost certainly fail, but you try. 

In 2000, Professor John Bonnar, then chairman of Institute of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, which represents 90%-95% of Ireland's obstetricians and gynaecologists, explained the situation to the All Party Oireachtas Committee's Fifth Report on Abortion as follows:

'In current obstetrical practice rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention is required at a stage in pregnancy when there will be little or no prospect for the survival of the baby, due to extreme immaturity. In these exceptional situations failure to intervene may result in the death of both the mother and baby. We consider that there is a fundamental difference between abortion carried out with the intention of taking the life of the baby, for example for social reasons, and the unavoidable death of the baby resulting from essential treatment to protect the life of the mother.'

In other words, for the hospital to have induced labour of the foetus with the intention of saving Savita, would, surely, have been in accord both with Irish law and normal Irish medical practice. It seems that such situations have nothing to do with the X Case, for all the well-meant cries that the failure of the Oireachtas to legislate for that is to blame here.

Bonnar elaborated on such situations as follows:

'We have never regarded these interventions as abortion. It would never cross an obstetrician’s mind that intervening in a case of pre-eclampsia, cancer of the cervix or ectopic pregnancy is abortion. They are not abortion as far as the professional is concerned, these are medical treatments that are essential to protect the life of the mother. So when we interfere in the best interests of protecting a mother, and not allowing her to succumb, and we are faced with a foetus that dies, we don’t regard that as something that we have, as it were, achieved by an abortion.  

Abortion in the professional view to my mind is something entirely different. It is actually intervening, usually in a normal pregnancy, to get rid of the pregnancy, to get rid of the foetus. That is what we would consider the direct procurement of an abortion. In other words, it’s an unwanted baby and, therefore, you intervene to end its life. That has never been a part of the practice of Irish obstetrics and I hope it never will be.'

Despite having no shortage of friends who are medical practitioners of one sort or another, including embryologists, obstetricians, and midwives, I'm obviously not one myself so I'm not qualified to judge, but it seems to me that at least on the basis of the facts as reported, this was a straightforward and stomach-churning case of shocking -- possibly even criminal -- medical malpractice with a tragic outcome.

After all, section 21.4 of Ireland's Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners seems to be unambiguous about this sort of situation, saying exactly what Professor Bonnar said to the Oireachtas Committee:

'In current obstetrical practice, rare complications can arise where therapeutic intervention (including termination of a pregnancy) is required at a stage when, due to extreme immaturity of the baby, there may be little or no hope of the baby surviving. In these exceptional circumstances, it may be necessary to intervene to terminate the pregnancy to protect the life of the mother, while making every effort to preserve the life of the baby.'

This is indeed the standard by which this affair should be judged. The problem here wasn't with the law.

The problem wasn't with religion either, for all that people are leaping to blame Galway's religious ethos, or the stupid and bizarre claims that 'this is a Catholic country'. Leaving aside how Ireland is not legally defined as a Catholic country, Catholic teaching allows for the normal Irish medical practice in this case, just as Irish law does. 

The problem seems to have been solely with somebody -- for whatever reason -- failing to obey both the law and the medical profession's own code of conduct, and attributing their failure to Ireland being -- supposedly -- a Catholic country. If that's what's happened then people should be bloody furious about this.

But while anger's one thing, it makes no sense to talk of how this tragedy means we should change the law to make sure that this doesn't happen again. Law isn't magic: if doctors can disregard law and medical practice now, then they can do so in the future, regardless of what the law says.

At least based on the facts as reported, I don't see how new legislation would help here. There are clearly people who think Ireland's laws, which require that human life be respected and protected from conception to natural death, are barbaric and oppressive. I understand that, but regardless of what they think, it really seems that Ireland's laws weren't at fault here. I may turn out to be wrong, but as far as I can tell, this has nothing to do with the X Case.

There are investigations that need to run their course. There'll be a time for anger, and we should make sure it's the right kind of anger, and directed at the right target. In the meantime, I think it'd be best if Savita Halappanavar weren't treated as a political football.


Update: It's been pointed out to me that according to the reports, Savita was admitted to hospital with a miscarriage underway, her cervix being open from Sunday, but that antibiotics were only brought into play on Tuesday night, a full two days later; it's as though she spent two days there with an open wound. Again, I'm no doctor and would appreciate if someone could clarify this, but given that this was a case of death from infection,  it seems to me to have been utterly egregious medical negligence from the start, and nothing whatsoever to do with the law, medical guidelines, or religious principles. 

Christmas Trees, and Belgian Waffle

Few things exasperate me quite as much as the perennial ‘War on Christmas’ stories. They’re usually ill-founded, they leave otherwise sensible religious people sounding crazy, and their inevitable correction enables clueless sorts to start spouting anti-Christian nonsense of their own that almost invariably goes unchecked.

I'm not going to link to people about this one, because I'm annoyed with folk on both sides of this argument as I think they've all let themselves down, but today, for instance, we had the spectacle of people muttering darkly about Brussels having decided that instead of having its traditional Nativity Scene and Christmas Tree in the Grand Place, it would replace them with an ‘electronic winter tree’. 

Seemingly, the Brussels councilwoman Bianca Debaets believes that this decision was down to religious sensitivities, saying, ‘For a lot of people who are not Christians, the tree there is offensive to them.’ 

Philippe Close, president of Brussels Tourism is suitably dismissive of this attitude, saying, 

‘Let’s be clear. There’ll be a Christmas tree and a Nativity scene. Christmas traditions will be respected. The theme this year is Winter pleasures, at the huge Christmas market that has a worldwide reputation. We wanted to emphasise culture and modernity, so asked artists to reinvent the Christmas tree, which is actually a pagan symbol.’

So it seems the plan is to have the Nativity scene there as usual, although the tree is indeed to be replaced with a 25m installation with a vague tree shape, made from screens and with a viewing platform at the top. About 12,000 people have signed a petition asking that the traditional tree be restored, but I’m not clear on their reasoning; it may have been aesthetic or environmental as much as anything else, given that this ‘tree’ looks incredibly tacky and surely requires a ludicrous amount of power.

Mmmm. Tasteful, traditional, *and* environmentally-friendly. Go Brussels.

So, the main story here is a storm in a teacup. There’ll still be a crib, there’ll be something vaguely reminiscent of a tree, and this has nothing to do with placating the 25pc or so of Brussels’ population who are Muslims, which isn’t really surprising as Muslims tend to be grand with the whole Christmas thing. 

That said, I find myself wanting to kick furniture whenever I see people wittering about Christmas trees being pagan symbols. This, frankly, is historical ignorance and incompetence at its worst. It always amazes me to see people who shout and scream about evidence and scientific ignorance propagating such shameless rot.

It’s the same kind of claptrap as saying ‘People nowadays insult people by sticking up their fingers at them, and the archers at Agincourt did that, so that must be why people do it now.’ 

Leaving aside the fact that the evidence doesn't even suggest that the archers at Agincourt did any such thing, this is utter gibberish because it fails to demonstrate a connection. All it does is note two similar behaviours and proclaims a link between them. There might be correlation at work, but there’s no evidence of causation. 

People like to bang on about the pagan roots of Christmas, but doing so requires a) ignorance and b) a fair amount of unhistorical thinking. 

Yule live to regret this...

Sometimes they’ll say it’s based on Yule, for instance. The ancient Germanic and Norse festival of Yule, I mean, not the modern made-up form of Yule, which like all Neopaganism is really just a reaction to Christian practices and can’t be dated any further back than the nineteenth century.

The problem with this Yule is that it’s based on very flimsy evidence, which also happens to ridiculously Teutonocentric; it's a version of that Edwardian notion of everything worth talking about being German. Still, the big issue is its flimsiness.

Writing in the eight century, Bede says Yule was the name the Angles and Saxons gave December or sometimes December bleeding into January. Seemingly they had a big celebration on the same night as the Christians celebrated Christmas, calling it the mothers’ night, though Bede doesn’t know why. Even assuming that Bede was right about this festival, which he might not have been, given that Anglo-Saxon paganism was in its death throes when he was writing, this isn’t saying a lot.

Pretty much everything else we ‘know’ about Yule is from thirteenth-century Christian writers, who say that their Viking ancestors had celebrated a Yule feast, involving the mass slaughter of animals and the sprinkling of all present with animals' blood. Our sources say the Norse had shifted the date of Yule to coincide with Christian celebrations, but modern scholars seem to think that it could have fallen almost any time after the middle of November. 

So, given that Yule could have happened at any point between mid-November and January, and may have been shifted to synchronise with Christmas, and was described by our sources in a manner that rather differed from typical Christmas celebrations in certain obvious ways, it’s hard to see how people can credibly argue that Christmas was based on Yule in any meaningful sense.

Of course, if you want to get back to your imagined roots, why not go the whole hog? I’m sure nobody would mind if you massacred your family pets and smeared their blood all over yourselves and the walls of your houses to celebrate the days getting longer. Go for it. Knock yourself out.

I get rather Saturnine about this nonsense...

The other standard modern trope on this is that our dating of Christmas was purely a sanctification of a preexisting pagan feast. This idea seems to have been thought up by the German Paul Ernst Jablonski in the early eighteenth century, when he noticed that in the Julian Calendar the Winter solstice took place on 25 December; assuming that this must have been a pagan Roman festival, he cited this as another instance of the Catholic Church embracing paganism. 

The Benedictine Dom Jean Hardouin, while disagreeing with Jablonski’s interpretation, accepted his basic assumption without analysing whether it was correct, and so a modern myth was born.

Now, it is true that the Romans celebrated a winter festival called the Saturnalia, and it is also true that in 274 AD the emperor Aurelian instituted the feast of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, the celebration of the winter solstice under the guise of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, the solstice falling on 25 December under the Julian calendar. 

It’s therefore understandable that people who can’t be bothered to look up sources might have assumed that the dating of Christmas to 25 December was simply a case of the Christianization of Roman festivals, especially in connection with the notion of Jesus as the Light of the World and the longstanding Christian tradition of having the Day of the Sun as the principal day of worship.

Thing is, though, this is little more than assumption, and there’s at least as much evidence against it as there is for it. 

For example, it seems that St Hippolytus of Rome, writing several decades before Aurelian’s institution of the pagan feast recorded the date of Christ’s birth as 25 December. In his Commentary on Daniel, Hippolytus said that Jesus’ birth took place ‘eight days before the kalends of January’.

(Granted, there's a possibility that this was a later interpolation, but it's hard to see an argument for this having been the case that doesn't depend on the circular argument that 'the date wasn't settled until after this, therefore any evidence for the date before this should be discounted'.)

That’s not to say that Jesus was born on 25 December, but to point out that the tradition of his being born then seems to have existed by 235 AD, when Hippolytus died, whereas the Romans didn't have Winter sun festivals until 274 AD. 

That date could have been roughly established by early Christians counting forward from the claims in Luke 1 that Jesus was conceived six months after John the Baptist, who was himself conceived when his father Zechariah was serving in the Temple at Jerusalem as a member of the priestly division of Abijah. Certainly, this was an argument used by St John Chrysostom, who died in 407 AD, using calculations based on how Rabbinical tradition had frozen the priestly schedule following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

Alternatively, it seems more likely that the date was largely derived from the Jewish tradition that prophets had an ‘integral age’, whereby they were thought to have died on the same date as that on which they were conceived or born. Since some early Christians dated the Crucifixion to 25 March – in connection with the Passover – it followed then that Jesus must have been born or conceived on 25 March. They ran with conception, as commemorated to this day with the feast of the Annunciation, and counted forward nine months to Christmas.

Again, I'm not saying that the early Christians got the date of Christmas right. I'm just saying that it seems they dated it based on Jewish tradition, not pagan ones. This shouldn't really surprise us, given just how Jewish the early Christians were.

So, for the third of my tree points here...

Are Christmas trees pagan symbols, or even more dramatically as I’ve seen them described elsewhere, pagan symbols of winter rebirth?

Well, they’re obviously not the latter. If we’re using evergreen trees, then they don’t die in the first place so by definition can’t be reborn. If we’re using deciduous ones, which I really hope we’re not, then they don’t get reborn in the winter, and indeed don’t show any signs of life till the Spring.

To be fair, this probably uses up a few auld watts too...

Were trees sacred to pagans? Well, yes, they often were. So were rocks, hills, rivers, fires, storms, doorways, you name it. Good luck trying to thinking of things that pagans could have thought of as sacred that pagans never thought of sacred. Frankly, it’d be hard to start any kind of modern tradition without some kind of pagan precedent. That doesn’t mean there’s a link.

Trees appear to have had an important role in the general mytho-religious matrix of the ancient and early medieval Germans, English, and Norse. The World Ash Yggdrasil, for instance, seems to have been utterly central to Norse myth,* and the story of Wessex’s own Saint Boniface shows just how important trees could be for the Germans in the period the less clued-in still call ‘The Dark Ages’. 

According to Willibard’s Life of Boniface, there was a sacred oak tree in Germany, in what is now northern Hesse. Boniface cut it down – the Life claims that he started to do so and a wind finished the job – and the locals were so amazed that they converted to Christianity. Boniface used the timber from this sacred oak to build a chapel, dedicated to Saint Peter, which became the nucleus of his second monastic foundation, which he established at Fritzlar. This was in the early eighth century.

Here’s the thing, though. The Christmas tree, as a phenomenon, seems to date back no earlier than the sixteenth century, and certainly no earlier than the fifteenth. 

Insofar as we can ascertain the origins of the Christmas tree, it seems to have been a development of the late Medieval Paradeisbaum. The Paradise tree featured in morality plays connected with the Garden of Eden, but whenever morality plays were put on in Winter it was necessary to decorate evergreen trees with apples and other props in order to make them look like a semi-credible fruit tree, suitable for the paradise that Adam and Eve lost. 

Tradition ascribes the creation of the Christmas tree to Martin Luther, but the story looks like a pious fiction. There is some evidence of trees being decorated after the fashion of Paradise trees in the guildhalls of late fifteenth-century Riga and Talinn, and it seems that during the sixteenth century Germans took to bringing evergreen trees into their homes, not merely decorating them with fruit but also adding pieces of gingerbread, wax ornaments, and strings of nuts. 

I've heard that they caught on as specifically Protestant counterpoints to Catholic cribs, but while that strikes me as very plausible, I've not seen any evidence on this one. I'd expect it to be out there, but I've no books on that topic, and the internet has a habit of coming up short on serious historical stuff. 

Granted, this phenomenon was a German custom, but there seems to have been an 800-year gap between Boniface hacking down the sacred oak and Germans starting to bring trees into their houses. If you really want to argue that Christmas trees were pagan customs, you need to produce evidence. 

Or, I suppose, you can just make things up.

_____________________________________________________________________________

* I say 'seems', of course, because pretty much everything we know about Norse myth is drawn from Christian accounts of the myths after they’d ceased to be part of a living religion; they are, in effect, Christian fairy tales based on long-lost legends. Oddly enough, Cracked more or less has it right.

Remembering Again

“Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.”

So, after the description of the funeral games in honour of Troy's greatest son, ends the Iliad, which began by reflecting on the carnage wrought by the wrath of the Greek forces' mightiest hero:

“Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus
and its devastation, which puts pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished
since that time when first there stood in division of conflict
Atreus' son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus.”

If the Iliad still speaks to us after almost three thousand years it does so not merely because it is beautiful, and not merely because life is -- among other things -- a battle in which how we conduct ourselves in the short time we have here matters profoundly; rather, it centres on our deep and abiding need to make sense of war.

The first step in doing so, as a rule, lies in commemorating our dead, which is probably why it felt so cathartic last year when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II stood in silence in Ireland’s Garden of Remembrance, recognising all those who died fighting against Britain in the cause of Irish freedom, be that in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, or the War of Independence. 

Here lie the dead of Marathon, as commemorated by the 192 horsemen of the Parthenon frieze.

As long as we've fought we have commemorated our dead, often giving our warrior dead special honours in death. Stephen Pinker argues that the high proportion of prehistoric skeletons showing evidence of violent trauma shows that we've become less violent over the millennia, but he glosses over how those who've died in battle are often specially honoured in death, such that their graves are more easily found than those of people who've died in more mundane ways. If anything, I suspect we've become far more violent over the centuries. 

It's not less violent to kill someone with guided drones than with a knife; it's just tidier. For us. 

As a war historian, and an Irishman who happens to be half-English and has lived in England for most of the last decade, I've long found Remembrance Sunday deeply problematic. Indeed, the first couple of weeks of November are always tricky for me. All Saints and All Souls are feasts of remembrance to which I unambiguously ally myself, but I dislike Guy Fawkes Night, and I'm always uncomfortable about Remembrance Sunday, though I think it important that Britain's war dead be properly honoured and that her veterans be properly supported; even now far too many of Britain's homeless are people who once served their country in arms.

I've had no shortage of family members who've fought in Britain's wars, whether in the Chitral Expedition, the Boer War, the Great War, World War II, or even Northern Ireland, but it wasn't until 2006 that I first wore a poppy, pinned onto my coat by a then recent ex-girlfriend one windy day in Liverpool as she managed the trick of firmly murmuring "I feel you should wear this". 

The first challenge is how to honour the dead without glorifying the wars in which they fought. We have to be honest and admit that plenty of Britain's wars have been far from honourable. The aforementioned Boer War, for instance, was a shameless land grab, and is hardly unique among Britain's wars in meriting such a description. I think most of us feel uncomfortable about the many wars Britain fought to deny people their independence, wherever they might be. And then, of course, there's the little matter of the invasion of Iraq nine years ago, justified at the time by the transparent fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction which he was refusing to surrender. 

The German cemetery at Langemarck. Because thousands of German children marched to war in 1914 too.

We can't deny this. An honest patriot cannot celebrate his countrymen’s heroism unless he also recognises their sins. "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case," as G.K. Chesterton put it, "It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'"

Of course, I don’t think we can or should blame soldiers for having fought in bad wars. War is often the continuation of political intercourse with the intermixing of other means, and as Kevin O’Higgins put it when putting down the Irish army mutiny in 1924, “those who take the pay and wear the uniform of the state, be they soldiers or police, must be non-political servants of the state.”

This has a correlative, however; if we’re not to shame soldiers for having had the misfortune to serve in bad wars, neither should we laud them for having been lucky enough to serve in good ones. We need to be careful too when indulging in the rhetoric of the ‘greatest generations’, not least because even the noblest of wars almost invariably encompass a multitude of sins. 

I firmly believe that we should honour our dead, and mourn those lives so brutally lost, and support those who've come home physically maimed or mentally scarred; I also believe that in doing so we should not forget how many wars were driven by cynicism, greed, and pride, and how there has been no shortage of soldiers over the years who've shamed the uniforms they wore. 

Remembrance Sunday, like I said, is complicated.

The second big problem, of course, lies in the fact that as the soldiers of the Great War have died, and those of the Second World War have grown fewer and more frail by the year, that Remembrance Sunday’s purpose seems to have changed, such that it’s in danger of excusing and even glorifying the shoddier wars of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow.

Much of the popularity of Harry Patch, Britain’s last surviving veteran of the First World War, was down to his impatience with those who tended to romanticise wars, and his bitter recognition that war was nothing more than ‘organised murder’. 

For him, Remembrance Sunday was ‘just showbusiness’.

When the reality represented by the likes of Harry Patch no longer exists to remind us of  soldiers hurrying to safety past their screaming, moaning, dying comrades, it’s easy for people to exploit their legends. There’s a simple level at which Remembrance Sunday is about recruiting as much as anything else – I was shocked a couple of years back when the build-up to coverage included an interview with a young Salford teenager  who was saying that he felt it was his duty to serve and that he’d always wanted to be a soldier. 

Of course, it’s always been like this at some level. The 1915 McCrae poem about the poppies of Flanders fields ends with an exhortation to fight on, and to scorn negotiated peace as a betrayal of those who have fallen:

“Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”

People fought on for three more years, and millions more died in the most horrible and pointless of ways. It’s hardly surprising that Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, damns this final verse as a stupid and even vicious propaganda argument.

Would a negotiated peace in 1916, preventing the Somme, really have betrayed the dead of Gallipoli?

We honour the dead, but we use them too, enlisting them as recruiting officers, summoning our children to serve and die in emulation of them. There’s nothing new in this. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek historian Polybius described how Roman funerals were used in just this way:

“By this constant renewal of the good report of brave men, the name of those who have performed any noble deed is made immortal, and the renown of those who have served their country well becomes a matter of common knowledge and a heritage for posterity. But the most important consequence of the ceremony is that it inspires young men to endure the extremes of suffering for the common good in the hope of winning the glory that waits upon the brave.”

It’s not just Remembrance Sunday that stirs these confused feelings within me. Being a military historian invites all sorts of questions, not least because time and again I’ve had to explain to people that being interested in war doesn’t entail liking it, and I’ve wrestled with these issues while visiting military cemeteries in Ireland and Belgium, Turkey and Greece, and as I’ve walked battlefields as diverse as Marathon, Thermopylae, Trasimene, Cannae, Hastings, Ypres, and Gallipoli.

How do we honour the dead without glorifying the wars? How do we honour them without luring thousands more to early graves? How do we make sense of war at all?

I have no idea. The more I learn, the less I feel I know.

Confronting Abuse: Sailing Between Scylla and Charbydis

The seemingly unending sequence of increasingly grotesque revelations about Jimmy Savile that have followed in the wake of ITV’s 3 October broadcast of Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy has been sickening, but distressing though these stories have been, they give us an opportunity to face the reality of abuse that we would be foolish to surrender.  

Confronting abuse must be done honestly and calmly, however; it is too easy to set up lazy scapegoats or succumb to a witch-hunting mentality. 

Serious questions have, rightly, been asked of the BBC and other institutions with which Savile was linked. The question of whether Savile’s behaviour was deliberately ignored and even concealed is, as in the case of abusive clergy, perhaps the biggest question. “Monsters exist,” wrote the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” 

Savile

Some, with axes to grind against the BBC, have been eager to believe Savile’s behaviour was deliberately concealed, rather than being facilitated by a wish to believe the best of people and a refusal to face reality. Unfortunately, the media’s natural narrative dynamics contribute to this approach. “The trouble is that the media hates cock-ups as they dilute guilt,” observed Simon Jenkins in The Guardian last week, explaining “a mistake must be rendered a lie, a cover-up and a crisis, so that the cry can go up for heads to roll.”

Investigation

Investigation is clearly needed, but it would be a tragedy if sensationalist storytelling made the BBC an institutional scapegoat, bearer not just of its own sins, but those of a whole society. Child abuse is no more the primary preserve of the British establishment than it was that of the Irish Church, and while concentrating on the past failures of the BBC might make us feel better, it would really be just a form of denial, draining valuable attention and energy away from where they're most needed to acknowledge and tackle abuse across Britain today. 

Sue Berelowitz, Britain’s deputy Children’s Commissioner, reported to the Commons Home Affairs committee in June that sexual exploitation of children is rife throughout urban and rural Britain. Describing in graphic detail the pack-raping of young girls by adolescent males, she insisted that “people need to lay aside their denial”, so that victims can muster the courage to come forward, trusting that they will be believed.

The numbers seem to support Berelowitz’s statement: abuse rates cannot be compared precisely between different countries, as surveys ask different questions and use different definitions and methodologies, but it seems that Britain’s abuse figures are no better than Ireland’s. 

Twenty seven per cent of Irish adults had been victims of childhood sexual abuse, according to the 2002 SAVI stud, which suggests that abuse must have peaked before the 1990s. The NSPCC’s 2011 study, Childhood Abuse and Neglect in the UK Today, found that 24.1pc of British adults between the ages of 18 and 24 had experienced sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence; 65.9pc of the contact sexual abuse reported by those aged 17 and under having been perpetrated by under 18s.  

While we need, therefore, to recognise how widespread abuse is, we need to do so responsibly; there’s a narrow path between denial and hysteria, and the victims of child abuse and our need to tackle abuse as the social pollution that it is will not be well served by a moral panic. 

Dismissive 

People have generally been dismissive of claims by clergy that right through to the 1990s they simply didn’t understand the reality of child sexual abuse. It therefore seemed somewhat disingenuous of Savile’s Radio 1 colleague Paul Gambaccini to say, as he did last week, that it “was considered so far beyond the pale that people didn’t believe it happened”. 

He’s not been alone in saying this, but rather than sneering about double standards and hypocrisy among media types, maybe we should welcome this as a belated recognition that the sexual revolution unleashed a maelstrom of confusion in a more naive world.

In December 2010, Pope Benedict provoked fury from Sinéad O’Connor and others when he told the Roman Curia that, “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” but the evidence shows that Benedict was right.

Sexual liberation had been one of the great ambitions of the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s; a desire to banish sexual repression led to the establishment of several communes and kindergartens in Germany where sexual contact between adults and children was expected. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a prominent MEP, described himself in his 1975 book The Great Bazaar as engaging in sexual acts with very young children in one of these kindergartens.

Sexuality

In the mid-1980s, the German Greens’ state organisation in North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, while a Green Party task force in Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper that “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalised”.

In Britain, on the other hand, the National Council for Civil Liberties – then headed by Britain’s eventual Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, argued in 1976 that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.” 

The activist group called the Paedophile Information Exchange ubsequently became affiliated to the NCCL, campaigning for the age of consent to be lowered and opposing bans on child pornography. In the early 1980s the International Gay Association passed motions calling for an international solidarity campaign on behalf of the Paedophile Information Exchange and for the abolition of the age of consent.

Note that Peter says it may be impossible to condone paedophilia

Many of these would-be-liberators acted with sincere – if astonishingly naive – intentions.

The civil rights campaigner Peter Tatchell seems to be their natural heir, writing in 1997 that several of his friends had enjoyed having sex with adults when between the ages of 9 and 13; while not condoning paedophilia, he argued that society should acknowledge that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”.*

He’s not alone in arguing that sexual contact between adults and children isn’t always intrinsically harmful; Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion that he found being molested “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”, and wonders whether it might be less damaging for children to be sexually abused than to be raised Catholic.

Attitudes to sexuality in the 1970s were chaotic, confused, and naive. Most of us have learned better, but although some of us have been slow to catch up, we need to remember that the past was indeed a different country, and they did things differently there. Blaming people for their historical naivety won’t help us fix today’s problems.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 1 November 2012.
___________________________________________________________________________
* In September 2010 Tatchell claimed that The Guardian edited his letter without his knowledge or consent, but I would be curious if he felt it was edited to a point where he felt that his views had been misrepresented, and if he can prove this. After all, it seems that he was willing to let thirteen years go by before he attempted to disown the letter as published. It's almost as though he was happy with it until people pointed out that he'd publicly said that for adults to have sex with children isn't always abusive, is sometimes wanted by the children, and can be utterly harmless and even enjoyable.

Soapy Operatics

The other evening, while digging through recent tweets, I noticed how a fortnight or so back I’d said, “Hmmm. Must make tea before calling home again. Rang during a proposal in Coronation Street, something which is never mentioned on Twitter.”

And that time I paused, because I honestly couldn’t think of a time I’d noticed anybody talking about Coronation Street on Twitter. Or Eastenders, for that matter. Now, granted, I could just have been filtering out tweets on those topics, but it got me thinking about how roughly a quarter of Britain’s population watch soap operas every week, and yet they seem to go unmentioned on Twitter.

It turns out that there are official Twitter accounts for the two main soaps, with Eastenders’ official account having almost 220,000 followers, and Coronation Street’s having almost 180,000. Not Stephen Fry country – indeed, not even in the range of the QI Elves – but still, it’s not too shabby.

But here’s the thing. It seems that of the almost 800 accounts I follow, just two follow the Eastenders account, and two follow the Coronation Street one. And one of those is the NSPCC.

Am I typical in this regard? Or is it simply the case that Twitterati are radically unrepresentative of the British population – and perhaps the Irish and American ones too -- in general? Food for thought there, methinks.

Now there's a condundrum for you...
So, anyway, this got me thinking about the soaps in general. I’m sorry to say that I’ve probably clocked up a few thousand hours of passive soap-watching over the decades. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately turned one on, but I’ve certainly been in the room innumerable times when others have been watching Eastenders, Neighbours, Glenroe, Home and Away, and most especially Coronation Street. I have a big family, after all. The telly’s hardly mine to hog.

And while the telly’s been on, there have been plenty of occasions when I’ve not averted my eyes, so I’ve picked up a good broad knowledge of soap operas over the years.

Occasionally I’ve pondered a question memorably put by one of my best friends in Dublin: “What do the regulars in the Rovers Return watch on telly at half-seven on Monday nights?”

The dogs that don't bark...
It’s a fair question. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from Coronation Street, as a milieu, is Coronation Street the programme. Indeed, absent too, as far as I can tell, are Eastenders, Neighbours, Emmerdale, the lot. It seems that Weatherfield is almost the only working class or lower middle-class place in England where nobody watches or talks about soap operas.

I saw ‘almost’, because Walford seems to exhibit the same peculiarity. So, I suspect, does Emmerdale.

Another thing that’s strikingly odd in the two shows I’ve seen are football references. I’ve been assured that football gets mentioned now and again in the shows, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever noticed it happening.

Weatherfield, it would seem, is a suburb of Greater Manchester where nobody talks about Manchester United or Manchester City, and where the pub is singularly devoid of crowds of burly men shouting obscenities at a big screen. And, just as eerily, although Eastenders occasionally features a mention of Walford Town FC, we never see people camping out in front of the Queen Vic’s telly to watch West Ham, that being, I think, the local team.

Spectator sport, it would seem, is unheard of on Coronation Street and Albert Square. I can’t remember whether it was ever mentioned on Brookside Close. Is it tenable that this was the only street in Merseyside where nobody talked of Everton and Liverpool?

Were Merseyside’s two great teams ever mentioned in Grange Hill, for that matter, when the school was inexplicably relocated there from London in 2003, thus rendering nonsensical the teasing Ziggy had received for his Scouse accent back in the 80s?

Sometimes historians have so little to go on...
All of which leads me to think that we’d be in quite the pickle if future historians were left to rely on soap operas and the usual incomplete archaeological remains to figure out what life was like in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain.

What would they conclude? That ordinary English people didn’t watch drama programmes on television – so that the shows that had somehow survived must have been elite entertainments. That they didn’t partake in spectator sports, and rarely engaged in any physical activities. That their social lives revolved around drinking establishments called pubs, which were perennially popular and oblivious to outside social factors. That religion played almost no part in their lives, save sometimes at weddings and funerals. That adultery, abuse, rape, and murder were the small change of their miserable lives.

That those lives were short, with Londoners rarely making it past their mid-forties, and Scousers being lucky to reach their mid-twenties, though lifespans in Manchester were seemingly rather longer than those in London.

And then, just to complicate matters...

And, of course, if they were particularly unlucky they might also have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, to really confuse them. If they had ‘Army of Ghosts’, for instance, they’d see the Doctor and Rose Tyler sitting in Jackie Tyler’s living room, flicking through the channels to see Eastenders’ own Peggy Mitchell confronting a spectral cyberman in the Queen Vic.

“Listen to me, Den Watts! I don’t care if you ‘ave come back from the grave. Get outta my pub! The only spirits I’m serving in this place are gin, whisky, and vodka. So you ‘eard me – get out!”
The Doctor turns off the programme, and turning to Jackie says,“When did it start?”
“Well, first of all, Peggy heard this noise in the cellar, so she goes down - ”
“No,” he says, “I mean worldwide.”

Might the historians of the future think this is metafiction? Well, you’d hope so, not least because of the improbable suggestion in it that ordinary people obsessively watched soap operas, which they would of course know to be false.*

Of course, if they had more than ‘Army of Ghosts’ to rely on, they’d realise that Doctor Who and Eastenders share a fictional continuity**, with the Doctor having visited Walford in 1993’s Dimensions in Time, where the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh incarnations of the Doctor, not to mention a medley of companions, battled the Rani, caught in timeloops that saw them visiting Albert Square as it was in 1973, 1993, and what appears to be an alternative 2013 where Kathy Beale, Pauline Fowler, Frank Butcher and Pat Evans are all mysteriously still alive.***

This might lead them to think that Eastenders is no more realistic than Doctor Who, or it might lead them to think that this is just a straightforward way of making Doctor Who seem more credible, on the Henry James principle that “a good ghost story ... must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”

Or it might lead them to think that Doctor Who accurately depicts modern British life too, with Eastenders being a reality TV show within the Doctor Who continuum, which might at least explain why Jackie watches it.

But that’s a whole other topic. Whatever way we look at it, it'd probably lead to some very strange documentaries.

________________________________________________________
* Especially if they had Twitter to go by.
** Subtly different from Red Dwarf, which though set in the same fictional continuum as Coronation Street is explicitly stated as taking place in a different dimension.
*** Don't even think of saying that as a 'Children in Need' special it doesn't count. Nobody says that about 'Time Crash'.

Remember, Remember

A couple of years ago I had rather a long discussion with an evangelical Anglican friend of mine, a mathematician of Calvinist inclinations, about Foxe's Book of Martyrs and perhaps the most famous passage in that dubious old tome, this being his account of the execution of bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley on 16 October 1555. I was trying to explain that Latimer's celebrated exhortation to Ridley was almost certainly a pious fiction.

Play the Man...

Most of you know the line, I expect. I first learned it when I read Ray Bradbury's brilliant Fahrenheit 451 eight or nine years back:

"They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again:

'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'"

What a line. What a cry to confidence. What panache. What rot.

The first edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs carries no trace of this line, which seems, in any case, a tad eloquent for a man about to be burned alive -- it certainly doesn't really tally with Latimer's behaviour and words as otherwise related by Foxe. The account of the executions in Foxe's first edition was clearly based on the detailed eyewitness accounts given him by Augustine Bernher and George Shipside, both of whom were close associates of Ridley and Latimer. 

Absent from the 1563 edition, but present in the 1578 one, the question is how did it come about? Granted, Foxe sought for further information when expanding his original text, but he'd clearly gone to great effort in his first edition to get his account of Latimer and Ridley's executions as accurate as possible, and it's difficult to see why Bernher and Shipside would have refrained from sharing this detail with him, were it authentic.

It seems that somebody must have provided Foxe with this surely fictional detail at some point between the publications of his first and second editions, with Foxe eagerly accepting it as true, given how his description of the executions already echoed how the Apostolic father St Polycarp of Smyrna met his fate; Eusebius' account of Polycarp's death records that a voice had cried out "Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man."

Written by the Winners...

Foxe is a tricky source for historians, as it's very clear that it was written as propaganda, and indeed is a classic case of history being written by the victors -- which isn't always the way, for what it's worth -- and recently-persecuted victors at that. It's ultimately no more trustworthy than, say, a history of British involvement in Ireland as published by the IRA would be. 

The first English edition was published under state auspices a handful of years into Elizabeth's reign as a way of promoting the independence of Elizabethan England by showing that the Catholic Church was a brutal and cruel Antichrist. Foxe had begun work some years earlier, initially relying on propagandist tracts, designed to encourage opposition to the regime of Mary I, as his earliest sources. 

Unfortunately, Foxe was systematically used as state propaganda for centuries afterwards. As Diarmaid McCullough says in Reformation:

"From his various refuges in the exile communities abroad Foxe began gathering material which placed England Protestant sufferings against the background of the international fight with Antichrist. As Acts and Monuments, its English version first published in 1563 in the safety of Elizabeth’s reign and quickly nicknamed ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, this massive and repeatedly expanded compilation became one of the cornerstones of English Protestant identity, a potent reminder of the militant character of the English Reformation."

After swelling to a monstrous size, the book was edited down by 1700 into an even more sensational treatise on the evils of Popery, luridly illustrated folios being preserved in England's churches in order to convince the English people of the evils of Catholicism.

Foxe reveals a huge amount of important stuff and is invaluable as a carefully-controlled source for sixteenth-century England. The thing is though, that he's far from impartial in his melodramatic accounts, he does his best to gloss over the fact that the persecutions were -- bizarrely and appallingly to our eyes -- anything but unpopular, he exaggerates the presence of weeping crowds crying in sympathy at the public executions, he plays down the extraordinary extent to which the persecuting authorities sought to persuade rather than convict most Protestants, he eagerly repeats obviously biased and unsubstantiated claims, and he conspicuously omits the martyrdoms of those he presumably felt deserved execution for their beliefs. 

He also egregiously passes over inconvenient facts like Ridley having supported Jane Grey and preached from the pulpit that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards who were not entitled to inherit the throne, or that Latimer's hands weren't entirely free from the ashes of burnt heretics.

For all that, Foxe reveals a lot incidentally and despite his his own intentions, his work inadvertently demonstrating that popular support for the martyrs was often limited, and that the authorities frequently went to extraordinary lengths to try to save prisoners from the flames. Leaving aside the cynical fact that a repentant heretic was far more valuable than a defiant dead one, from their point of view, the Catholic persecutors were desperate to avoid condemning Protestants to death, as they believed that if they executed unrepentant heretics, they were effectively condemning them to eternal fire. 

If Mary and Pole hadn't died so soon...

Seemingly Mary received a rapturous welcome when she became Queen -- over opposition from the likes of Ridley -- in July 1553. More than 800 wealthy Protestants -- including Foxe -- fled England, and the Duke of Northumberland recanted his opposition to the Catholic Church after his rebellion was swiftly quashed, spontanteously admitting at the scaffold that his own Protestantism had been an opportunistic sham, motivated by ambition and greed. As early as 1554 it was a standard lament among the Protestants who had fled that the English people and clergy at large had returned to Catholicism, even in the parts of the country where Protestantism had been strongest. 

It doesn't take much to see pointers to the extent to which Mary's reign had returned England to Catholicism. Ten of the 23 bishops she'd inherited from her brother returned to unity with the Catholic Church, and after her death all bar one of her bishops rejected the Elizabethan settlement. More than two thirds of Edward's clergy returned to unity with the Catholic Church under Mary, and while much of this was surely down to simple opportunism, it's telling that many of them retained that allegiance after Mary's death. Indeed, even at the lowest levels of the clergy this was the case. Eamon Duffy, in Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor says it was possible in 1561 to walk from the Surrey border to the Sussex coast, crossing sixteen parishes in every one of which the incumbent had either died of influenza or been deprived of office for refusing to conform to the Elizabethan settlement.

Fires of Faith...

Contrary to popular misconceptions, largely rooted in Foxe's myth-making, Mary's reign was a golden age of Catholic preaching, publishing, and polemical argument, but unfortunately the whole period is unforgiveably tainted by Mary's persecutions of Protestants: more than 280 Protestant men and women were executed in just under four years, from February 1555 to November 1558, the most intense religious persecution of its kind anywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, an era when religious persecution was the done thing. 

Most people back then -- Catholics and Protestants alike -- believed that though regrettable it was sometimes necessary to execute people for their religious views. They believed heresy was worse than sin, that it begat sins and by causing people to sin, led to their damnation. Our eternal souls were at stake, and desperate action had to be taken to stem the heretical tide. It was this attitude that drove Mary I in her campaign against Protestants, and drove Elizabeth I in hers against Catholics.

If I can quote Duffy's Fires of Faith on this one:

"Religious persecution remained a viable government option, frequently resorted to all over Europe, well into the seventeenth century. Nor were barbaric forms of execution going out of fashion, least of all in England. Elizabeth I burned no Catholics, but she strangled, disembowelled, and dismembered more than 200. I should not myself care to allocate marks for brutality between these different methods of slow killing."

And that's not to get into those who were imprisoned or exiled, or the thousands who were slain in the suppression of Catholic revolts such as the Northern rebellion and the first Desmond rebellion, both of which took place in 1569, and the second Desmond rebellion of 1579-1583. Most of those who were executed under Elizabeth were nominally executed for treason, not for heresy, but one cannot really distinguish between the two in the sixteenth century: from the viewpoint of whoever was doing the persecuting, and given the whole question of supremacy, treason and heresy were often synonymous.

The burnings constitute an indelible stain on Mary's reign, and rightly so, but it's about time people started to get their heads around the fact that 'Bloody Mary' was nowhere near as murderous than 'Good Queen Bess'.

The Pearl of York...

In summarising the horrible ways in which Elizabeth had Catholics executed, I'm not sure why Duffy leaves out crushing, that having been the standard Elizabethan punishment for those who refused to plead their case. 

In 1586, for instance, St Margaret Clitherow, a 29-year-old butcher's wife who had converted to Catholicism a dozen or so years earlier, was arrested in York for the crime of having harboured Catholic priests -- a crime, in Elizabethan England, but one that Catholics were driven to, as without priests we cannot have Mass, cannot celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, and share in that sacrament which is the source and summit of Christian life. A mother of three, Margaret refused to plead her case, as doing so would have meant that her children would have been made to testify, and would themselves probably have been tortured.

And so, rather than being tried for harbouring priests, she was executed for her silence. On the morning of Good Friday 1586 she was taken to the tollbooth at York's Ouse Bridge and was stripped naked. A handkerchief was tied across her face, and she was laid down with a sharp rock the size of a man's fist under her spine. A door was placed upon her, and rocks and stones were piled upon this, so that her spine broke and she was crushed to death. 

It took fifteen minutes for her to die.

Her broken carcass was left there for six hours.

Blood begets Blood...

One of Margaret's neighbours was a sixteen-year-old youth named Guy Fawkes who'd been baptised into the Church of England, but had become Catholic as a boy. His mother moved from York to Scotton, roughly thirty miles away, a year or so later.

Nineteen years after Margaret's martyrdom, Guy Fawkes was tortured to reveal his part in a murdeous conspiracy to blow up Parliament and kill King James I, who was hated by Britain's persecuted Catholics over his failure to remove from the Church's throat the State boot Elizabeth had planted there so firmly. Fawkes was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. 

And tonight people will light bonfires and set off fireworks to celebrate this.

Things, as you'd expect, got even worse for Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot. Shortly afterwards, parliament passed the Popish Recusants Act 1605, pressing the boot down further by -- for example -- barring Catholics from acting as legal guardians or practicing law or medicine, and mandating the receipt of Anglican communion. In 1613 there was even an unsuccessful attempt in Parliament to introduce a law to compel Catholics to wear a red hat, or coloured stockings, just so they'd be immediately identifiable. Legislated oppression against Catholics continued in all manner of ways until Robert Peel and Ireland's own Duke of Wellington gave way to popular pressure led by the Liberator himself, Daniel O'Connell, and pushed through the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. 

Even now, Catholics are technically third-class citizens in Britain, the only people specifically barred in law from even marrying someone who's in the line of succession to the throne. I'm okay with this, though; sure, it's unfair, but it doesn't make that much difference to Catholics' lives in reality. I doubt there are many Catholic schoolgirls who've been heartbroken by the prospect of having to choose between, say, Prince Harry and the Mass.

The bottom line for me is that I don't think we should be pulling threads out of the British Constitution to make a cosmetic change so that Catholics can feel better when in practice we have exactly the same rights as everybody else in Britain.

Things are okay now. The State doesn't approve of us, but it tolerates us. That's good enough, though there are signs that the tide is turning, and I just worry, at times, that that tolerance may ebb, as other groups, historically less oppressed than Britain's Catholics, demand not merely tolerance, but approval. 

But then, people who point this out tend to be misrepresented and barracked as bigots. Strange times. 

Motorway Musings: Two Cultures and Traditional Halls

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour," wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1905 book Heretics. In a chapter entitled 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', cited approvingly by Stephen Fry's eponymous character in 1992's Peter's Friends, Chesterton points out how city life can have the paradoxical effect of narrowing our minds:

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us… 

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.  

The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.”

I was thinking about this on the bus the other day, pondering differences between Ireland's and England's educational systems, and scientism, and the roads that lie before us. 

A Lesson Learnt Before a Sun-burning Day on a Crowded Black Beach

Many years ago, chatting to two smart and wonderful English girls in a Roman underground station I was struck by how, though they were clearly rather better versed in matters scientific than me, they seemed to lack the most basic knowledge of their own country's history or literature. 

Since moving to England, I’ve noticed this phenomenon time and again, as intelligent people with scientific or technical training all too often seemed to subsist on caricatures of history, geography, literature, and philosophy, while equally smart people educated in the humanities look embarrassed when their absolute ignorance of matters scientific is brought to light; some just shrug, and say they're not good with numbers.

That’s not to say that this phenomenon is alien to Ireland, but I’ve long found it to be far more pronounced in England. If Philip Larkin was right in saying that educated people should know three things – what words mean, where places are and when things happened – it rather looked as though there was something amiss with English education.

It doesn't really take a genius to see what's going wrong. English education tends towards early specialisation, such that first year history students – for example – in English universities generally tend to be slightly better than their Irish counterparts. I've known people to study three humanities A-Levels, and others to do four scientific ones. There's much to be said for this, of course, but specialisation has a price, and that price is all too often a rounded education.

In contrast, Irish students tend to study a range of subjects. People who start science degrees with Leaving Cert maths, physics, chemistry, and biology in the bag will also usually have studied English, Irish, and French or German. Those who start arts degrees with English, history, geography, and a couple of languages in their pocket will also have done maths and quite probably a science subject. And, of course, they'll all have done a whole medley of subjects right up to their Junior Cert.

Sometimes this knowledge can be pretty shallow, of course, but still, there's some sort of balance there, an attempt to educate children in a general way.

The more focused English system seems to lend itself far more than the Irish one to people seeing themselves as 'science people' or 'arts people'. It's as though the arts ones have persuaded themselves that they simply can't do science or handle numbers, and faced with this cowering ignorance, the science ones have become convinced that their type of knowledge is the only type that’s reliable.

People do make up lost ground as they get older, but too many years in the English education system have convinced me that though there are loads of well-rounded English people, intellectually speaking, they're seriously outnumbered by those at the extremes.

I remember being surprised and impressed back in the day to meet undergraduates who'd managed a mixture of science subjects and humanities in their A-Levels. They seemed a gloomily rare breed.

(I'd like to see the figures on this, of course, as my impressions might well be deeply unrepresentative, but still,  that's how it seems to me. And, well, I was on a bus while pondering this, so please forgive my broad-brush approach here. I don't know how many spreadsheets I could have summoned on my phone through a ropey connection.)

Two Cultures

The current fashion for popular science books, and the elevation of reasonably articulate scientists to the status of public gurus are clear symptoms of this; it’s as though the arts people feel inadequate, but lacking the skills and experience to educate themselves about science, they settle for trusting those they see as better informed than themselves. And of course, without suitable training and extensive reading, they're hardly equipped to establish just how credible certain scientists are. They all seem impressive, talking about things largely alien to the innocent arts people...

It's hardly surprising then there are no shortage of science people who'll look down on their arts counterparts, given how much ground has been surrendered.

And contemporary information fetishes – without an appreciation of the skills needed to interpret that information – don't help in the slightest. Insofar as there are celebrity historians to rival the science gurus, people can think of them as mere fact-bearers, not really getting that history's as much about approaching, sifting, handling, and contextualising facts as it is about simply finding them out. The facts don't speak for themselves, after all. History and science aren't just about knowing things: they're about thinking historically and about thinking scientifically.

Things haven’t really improved since C.P. Snow banged on about the Two Cultures in 1959. Establishment Britain’s still ruled by those from humanities backgrounds – not one senior government minister has a third-level science qualification – but in terms of popular culture it’s as though things have swung from one unhealthy extreme to another. 

In 1967, G.R. Elton was able to say with a straight face that “Modern civilization […] rests upon the two intellectual pillars of natural science and analytical history,” but a lazy scientism is in the ascendant now; in a world where Oxford dons can describe philosophy as “a complete waste of time” we run the risk of kicking away the philosophical and theological foundations of both pillars, and smashing the historical one into rubble.

Threads Plucked from the Tapestry of our Common Culture

All of which leaves me depressed at the way that high university fees seem to be increasingly driving English students to try to study close to home rather than – as was often the way – as far from home as they could possibly get. 

The system of university halls of residence – especially traditional ones, modelled on Oxbridge colleges – has long struck me as one of the very best features of English education, its real value being in how it forced all sort of students to live side by side, and to learn from each other. It’s an arrangement that mitigates to some degree the English tendency towards a fragmented intellectual culture.

Hall life isn’t always smooth, but there’s something to be said for a system where people of different backgrounds, different worldviews, different interests are simply forced to get on with each other. It’s normal in halls to see people who might identify themselves as Christians, socialists, Muslims, liberals, Thatcherites, Scots, environmentalists, Jews, scientists, vegetarians, lesbians, Buddhists, northerners, communists, Hindus, atheists, nationalists, Arsenal fans, and all manner of other ways sitting down to dinner with each other, and talking into the night about what they have in common and where they differ.

  

That’s not to say that birds of a feather don’t tend to flock together, but in the confines of halls, people just have to get on. Students rarely have the option of sealing themselves off into like-minded cliques, and so firm friendships form between historians, microbiologists, linguists, psychologists, medical physicists, economists, oncologists, political scientists, embryologists, anthropologists. engineers, lawyers, physical chemists, theologians, botanists, philosophers, mathematicians… and do so across cultural, religious, and political divides.

I was lucky enough to live in halls for years, and think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of place that enables and promotes such interdisciplinary mingling; it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more often, and it disheartens me that the more students stay at home, the fewer students will gain from the deep and diverse friendships that can be forged in traditional halls. The bridge that joins Britain's two cultures seems increasingly frail, and each brick that falls away weakens it further, impoverishing us all.

Or so I thought while slowly making my way up the M6 on Tuesday.