Half-a-dozen kings and queens we never had

These days, the succession to the throne is a fairly straightforward business. It wasn’t always the case, however, and English history is littered with those who, had events taken a slightly different term, could have got to wear the crown but never did. They are the might-have-beens of our history, and here are six of the best-known…

William Adelin (1103-1120) – would have been an alternative King William III

The youngest son of William the Conqueror, King Henry I had acted quickly to grab the throne for himself when his brother, William Rufus, was murdered in the New Forest in 1100. Henry fathered many sons, but only one of them was by his wife, Matilda of Scotland. It was in this 12^th century Prince William that the hopes of England’s Norman dynasty lay. Referred to as ‘Adelin’ (a corruption of ‘Aetheling’, the Anglo-Saxon term for the heir to the King) and rex designatus (king-designate), William was proclaimed Duke of Normandy but held the title in name only, although after his mother’s death in 1118 William acted as regent during his father’s absences from England. However, he died – along with at least two of his illegitimate half-siblings and much of the Anglo-Norman nobility – in the White Ship sinking of 1120. A direct consequence of this tragedy was a succession crisis which plagued the rest of Henry’s reign, resulting in the Anarchy, a 19-year civil war in which William’s sister Matilda and their cousin Stephen – who was meant to have travelled on the White Ship but did not due to illness – fought for control of England.

Empress Matilda, Lady of the English (1102-1167) – would have been Queen Matilda I

The daughter of Henry I, Matilda (also known as Maud) had been married off to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V but was a widow by the time she was 23. After her brother’s death (see above), she was proclaimed as the heir to the throne but this was unpopular with the Anglo-Norman nobility (those that had not travelled on the White Ship); when her father died in 1135 her cousin was crowned as King Stephen. Backed by her (second) husband Geoffrey of Anjou and her illegitimate half-brother Robert of Gloucester, Matilda tried to take the throne for herself in that long period of civil war known to history as the Anarchy. The closest she got was in 1141 when her forces captured Stephen; she entered London but was not crowned because of bitter opposition from the local populace. She then had to free Stephen in exchange for Robert (who had also been captured), and by the following winter Stephen had her trapped in Oxford Castle; she escaped over the frozen River Isis. Subsequently, a stalemate ensued with Matilda’s forces in control of the south-west of England while Stephen controlled the south-east and the midlands, although much of the country was in the hands of local barons who were happy to take whatever advantage they could get. Eventually, Matilda’s son Henry took over the fighting and by 1153 had negotiated a peace deal with Stephen; when the latter died, the former succeeded to the throne as King Henry II.

Louis of France (1187-1226) – would have been King Louis (or perhaps Lewis) I

The son of King Philip II of France, Louis fought against King John (his uncle on his mother’s side) in the latter’s unsuccessful attempt to recapture Normandy in 1214. When John tried to renege on the Magna Carta, the English barons offered Louis the throne; in May 1216 he landed in Kent, entered London with little resistance and was proclaimed (but not crowned) as King. He soon had control of over half of England, but when John died in October most of the barons deserted Louis in favour of John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III. Louis was defeated by Henry’s regent, William Marshal, at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, and he was subsequently forced to make peace, a condition being that he had to agree that he had never been the legitimate King of England. In 1223, though, he did become King Louis VIII of France.

Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales (1330-1376) – would have been an alternative King Edward IV

Known to history as the Black Prince, the eldest son of Edward III was an exceptional military leader in an age when prowess on the battlefield went hand-in-hand with effective kingship. It was he who defeated the French as the battles of Crecy and Poitiers, key English victories in what would become known as the Hundred Years War. He was also the first Prince of Wales to have used an emblem consisting of three white ostrich feathers; this heraldic device, which he is believed to have inherited from his mother’s family, was used as his ‘shield for peace’ – the one he used for jousting. He died one year before his father; the throne passed to his son Richard who was just nine years old at the time and who would eventually be overthrown by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, who became King Henry IV. Somewhat ironically, the Black Prince and Henry are buried yards from each other in Canterbury Cathedral.

James Scott, Duke of Monmouth (1649-1685) – would have been James III of England and James VIII of Scotland

The oldest of Charles II’s illegitimate sons, Monmouth claimed that his father had actually been married to his mother, Lucy Walter – a claim that Charles always denied. This claim, though, made Monmouth a factor in various schemes to have Charles’s brother, the Duke of York, excluded from the line of succession for being a Catholic; as a result of this, Charles had Monmouth exiled. When his uncle became King James II in 1685, Monmouth – Protestant, popular and an experienced military commander – landed in Dorset in an attempt to capture the throne. His makeshift force was no match for the regular army, though, and he was defeated at the battle of Sedgemoor by John Churchill (the future Duke of Marlborough). Subsequently, Monmouth was captured in Hampshire and executed on Tower Hill; it is said that the executioner, Jack Ketch, botched the deed to the extent that the Duke was still alive after two or three chops with the axe, and the job eventually had to be finished with a knife. It is also said that, following this, someone realised that no-one had done an official portrait of the Duke, so his head was sewn back onto his body. Curiously, many years later a descendant of his claimed to have found documentary proof that Charles II and Lucy Walter had been married; apparently he presented this to Queen Victoria, who burned it.

Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630-1714) – would have been Queen Sophia I

In 1700, the only surviving son of Princess Anne, sister-in-law and heir of William III, died. With William a widower who was unlikely to remarry and Anne having recently miscarried for the twelfth time, an undoing of the Glorious Revolution loomed, prompting Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement which ensured that the crown could not pass to a Catholic. The closest Protestant relative, and therefore the presumptive heir, was Sophia, a grand-daughter of James I; she was the daughter of Elizabeth of Bohemia (the ‘Winter Queen’) and had married the Elector of Hanover. She was a 71 year-old widow at the time of the Act of Settlement but she did have five living children and three legitimate grandchildren, so the question of the survival of the royal line wasn’t an issue. Thus was it decreed that after the deaths of William and Anne, the crown would pass to Sophia and her descendants. Although much older than Anne (who became Queen in 1702), Sophia enjoyed considerably better health; she was keen to move to London but Anne – acting out of suspicion, jealousy or both – opposed this. In the event, Sophia died in Hanover in 1714 after collapsing while running to take shelter from the rain. Anne herself died a month later, and the crown passed to Sophia’s son George, the first of the Hanoverians.

Some royal trivia

Following on from my musings about The Crown, here are some interesting facts about the British royal family. If you’ve ever wondered about their surname, the Queen’s full title or how the line of succession works, wonder no further…

Is it the House of Windsor, or Mountbatten-Windsor?

The official name of the British royal family is Windsor and has been since 1917, when George V changed the name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor because of anti-German sentiment in Britain and the Empire during the First World War (this had become increasingly problematic after the Germans had developed a twin-engined bomber called the Gotha G.IV which was capable of crossing the Channel and therefore bombing London). ‘Windsor’ was chosen because of that name’s long association with the monarchy.

The Mountbatten complication arose in 1952 when Elizabeth II succeeded to the throne, leading to questions about whether her children would use their father’s surname. By birth, Prince Philip had been a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg (which provided the royal families of Denmark and Greece, hence his nickname ‘Phil the Greek’) but when he took British citizenship in 1947 he abandoned his foreign titles and took the surname Mountbatten, which was that of his mother's family (his mother was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenburg, who had relinquished his own German titles and changed his name to the more English-sounding Mountbatten in 1917). While the idea of changing the royal family’s name to the House of Mountbatten (or Mountbatten-Windsor) was obviously supported by Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, it was opposed by (among others) the Queen Mother and the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

In 1952 it was declared that the royal family would continue to be called the House of Windsor, but a 1960 declaration states that descendants of the Queen and Prince Philip can use the surname Mountbatten-Windsor if they want to. Surname usage among the Queen’s children and grandchildren varies. Princes Charles and Andrew were both referred to as ‘Lieutenant Windsor’ when they served in the Royal Navy, while Prince Edward has styled himself as ‘Edward Windsor’ for his TV work and his daughter, who does not have a royal title or a peerage, is called Lady Louise Windsor. Princess Anne and Prince Andrew both entered the name ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’ in official marriage register entries, while Prince William was referred to as ‘William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor’ by the French courts during a lawsuit against a magazine that had published topless photographs of his wife. Meanwhile, Princes William and Harry have both used the surname ‘Wales’ while Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie have both used the surname ‘York’, referring to their fathers’ titles.

The Queen’s full title

“Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith”

This varies slightly in the “other Realms” of which she is head of state, and in Canada it is of course given in French as well. The Queen’s title is partly reiterated in the lettering on our coins – D.G.REG.F.D. stands for Dei Gratia Regina Fidei Defensatrix, which is Latin for ‘By the Grace of God, Queen and Defender of the Faith’.

‘Defender of the Faith’ dates back to the 16^th century. In 1521, Henry VIII was granted this title by the Pope in recognition of his opposition to the ideas of Martin Luther. He wasn’t the only one; his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was also a Defender of the Faith as were two Kings of Scotland, James IV and James V. The Pope revoked Henry’s title in 1530 following the break with Rome, however in 1544 Parliament voted to give Henry the title as a defender of the new Anglican faith. It’s in this sense that it has been passed onto his successors.

‘Head of the Commonwealth’ is more recent – it was created for George VI in 1950. Before this, the Commonwealth was a group of countries which all had the same monarch, but this changed when India wished to become a republic but remain a member. The solution was to give the monarch a new title. Today, most Commonwealth member-states are republics; there are 31 of them, along with 16 Commonwealth Realms – the ones which have the Queen as their head of state – and five more that have their own monarchies.

The line of succession 

Succession to the British throne is determined by legitimacy, religion and descent. The rules as they now stand date back to the Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701). Succession is limited to those who are born within wedlock, in communion with the Church of England (ie. not of the Roman Catholic faith) and descended from Sophia, Electress of Hanover (1630-1714; more on her in a later post). The rules are the same in each of the 16 Commonwealth Realms – they have to be, in order for them all to have the same monarch. In 2011 the Prime Ministers of the Realms decided on some changes to the rules of succession, and the changes – which in this country fall under the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 – became law last year; specifically, the rule which disqualified anyone who married a Roman Catholic was got rid of, as was the the male-preference primogeniture requirement (ie. boys before girls, regardless of who was born first) for anyone born after the rule-change.

At the time of writing, and limiting it to the descendants of HM Queen Elizabeth II, the line of succession is as follows:

             

1.       HRH Prince Charles (68), eldest son

2.       HRH Prince William (34), grandson

3.       HRH Prince George (3), great-grandson

4.       HRH Princess Charlotte (1), great-grand-daughter

5.       HRH Prince Harry (32), grandson

6.       HRH Prince Andrew (56), son

7.       HRH Princess Beatrice (28), grand-daughter

8.       HRH Princess Eugenie (26), grand-daughter

9.       HRH Prince Edward (52), son

10.   James, Viscount Severn (8), grandson

11.   Lady Louise Windsor (13), grand-daughter

12.   HRH Princess Anne (66), daughter

13.   Peter Phillips (39), grandson

14.   Savannah Phillips (6), great-grand-daughter

15.   Isla Phillips (4), great-grand-daughter    

16.   Zara Tindall (35), grand-daughter

17.   Mia Tindall (2), great-grand-daughter

The line continues through the descendants of the Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret, and then to the eligible descendants of their father’s siblings, followed by the eligible descendants of previous monarchs. No complete line of succession is maintained so the exact position of those who are far down the list is uncertain. An unofficial list compiled in 2011 contains the names of 5,753 living and eligible descendants of the Electress Sophia; in this, Prince Philip – the oldest living great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria – is 679^th in line to his wife’s throne.

Samuel Johnson and the 'ghost' of Cock Lane

If there’s one thing London has in abundance, it’s ghost stories – I was merely scratching the surface when I did an article on who London’s ghosts are last month. In fact, London is said to be one of the most haunted cities in the world. The historian Peter Ackroyd, in his book London: The Biography, has even described London as “a spectral city, so filled with imitations of its past that it haunts its own inhabitants”. Traditionally, Londoners have tended to be a credible lot when it comes to ghosts, and nowhere is this better displayed than in one of the most famous London ghost stories of them all, the tale of the Cock Lane ghost.

This story was the media sensation of its day (1762), and a few years ago a book – The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr Johnson’s London by Paul Chambers – was published about it. The sub-title gives a hint as to why the story so fascinated people at the time, and it’s well worth a read if you can get hold of a copy.

The titular Cock Lane – “narrow, steep and surrounded by towering buildings that place it in almost permanent shade” – was and remains a small street near Smithfield Market, and it was there that the story began in 1759 when a couple calling themselves William and Fanny Kent took up lodgings in the home of Richard Parsons – a clerk at the local church, appropriately enough given his name, but also an alcoholic and a debtor. The couple were not all they seemed. Not only were they not married, they were actually forbidden from marrying by law, he having previously been married to her sister, who had died (one of the reasons why they’d moved to London had been to get away from her family, who had disapproved of the marriage in the first place and were incensed by Kent’s subsequent relationship with Fanny).

William Kent could be a bit naïve – on more than one occasion, he lent money to people who had little chance of being able to repay him. One such person was his new landlord, Richard Parsons, in whom he was also foolish enough to confide the true status of his relationship with Fanny. When Fanny fell ill, Kent had her moved elsewhere, but she contracted smallpox and died in early 1760. Some time later, Kent took legal action against Parsons over the unpaid debt.

In early 1762, mysterious noises started to be heard in the Parsons house – knocking and scratching sounds, for the most part. Some of the neighbours were already under the impression that the place was haunted by the time a local clergyman, the Reverend Moore, paid a visit, and as he had Methodist inclinations it didn’t take much for him to be convinced that the ghost was real (Chambers does well to give some context here, pointing out that early followers of John Wesley were noted for their credulity as far as the supernatural was concerned, which made them an easy target for mockery from those who feared their popularity). Furthermore, communication with the ghost – one knock for yes, two for no – seemed to establish that the ghost was that of Fanny, who was claiming that Kent had poisoned her with arsenic.

From then on, the story spread like wildfire. Two rival newspapers locked in a circulation war, the Public Ledger and the Daily Gazetteer, began to give detailed accounts and crowds rushed to Cock Lane to witness the phenomenon for themselves. A neighbour, whose “reputation as a local troublemaker was on a par with that of Richard Parsons himself”, appointed herself as a mistress-of-ceremonies for the regular séances that were conducted in a darkened bedroom at Parsons’s house for curious and credulous visitors. Even the great and the good – among them the Duke of York (George III’s brother) and Horace Walpole (the writer and son of the first Prime Minister) – went to Cock Lane to see what all the fuss was about and listen to the noises made by ‘Scratching Fanny’, as the ghost was quickly nicknamed.

By now, things were becoming serious as William Kent had to all intents and purposes been publicly accused of murder (and accused in person, for he’d even gone to one of the séances himself, as had a former servant of his who knew him to be innocent). It was by this point well-known that the ghost only seemed to make itself known in the presence of Parsons’s daughter, Betty, and it was decided that the matter should be investigated by a committee of ‘learned men’ which included a lord, a couple of priests who were less credulous than the Rev. Moore (one of whom, indeed, was “famous for his work in detecting frauds”), a physician of whom “little is known”, a hospital matron to act as lady-in-waiting (a woman, of course, would be needed to search young Betty) and – who else? – Samuel Johnson. If something required a little more intellectual weight in London at the time, there were few better candidates than the man who had completed the Dictionary a few years previously. As far as ghosts were concerned, he was sceptical; “as a devoutly religious man, he could not rule them out entirely, but neither could he believe in the many spooky tales doing the rounds ... ‘I make a distinction,’ said Johnson, ‘between what a man may experience by the strength of his imagination and what imagination cannot possibly produce.’”

Betty was moved to another house and questioned by the committee; she denied that she was making it all up. However, the ghost had previously promised that she would prove that she was real by striking Fanny’s coffin. Therefore, in one of the stranger turns of events in London’s history, the committee ending up paying a midnight visit to the crypt of St John’s, Clerkenwell (where Fanny had been buried). “For a few minutes,” Chambers writes, “some of the most eminent and respected gentlemen in London society could be found standing in a dark, damp and smelly crypt at midnight waiting for a spectre to communicate with them by banging on a coffin lid.” When this didn’t happen, they concluded – in Johnson’s words – that “the child has some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no agency of any higher cause”. Even the Rev. Moore now believed that the ‘ghost’ was not real, and a couple of weeks later Betty, having been moved to another house, was found to have a piece of wood concealed about her person.

Parsons and several others (but not Betty, who was a minor) ended up on trial for conspiracy; they protested their innocence but were found guilty. Parsons was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and also had to stand in the pillory - although, in contrast to many other criminals, the crowd (many of whom had doubtless believed the ghost to have been real) treated him kindly. Some of those involved were widely mocked for their part in the saga; Hogarth went to town on the Methodists (his piece ‘Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism’, reproduced in Chambers’s book, contains several references to the Cock Lane story), while Samuel Johnson could be “such a pompous and forthright character that many took the opportunity to portray him as a believer in the ghost. The fact that he had stood in the crypt at midnight ... caused further mirth.” The comedy actor Samuel Foote (who from his brief appearance in this book strikes me as someone I would like to know more about) was keen to do a play about the Cock Lane ghost (‘Fanny Phantom’, he called it) and wanted to use it to lampoon Johnson (who’d slighted him in the past) but thought better of it after becoming convinced that Johnson, a much bigger man, would beat him up if he did. The sub-plot about the play, in which Foote took the mickey out of someone else, is hilarious – although the undeserved ridicule that Johnson received over the Cock Lane story remained a sore point for years. Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, was even drawn to comment that “many of my readers, I am convinced, are to this hour under an impression that Johnson was foolishly deceived. It will therefore surprise them a good deal when they are informed ... that Johnson was one of those by whom the imposture was detected.”

The ghost’s legacy was a long one; “ripples ... carried through into the Victorian era and beyond”. ‘Scratching Fanny’ became a bedtime story aimed at scaring children into behaving themselves. Dickens mentions it in several of his books, while the term ‘Cock Lane’ became a byword for a farce which highlighted public gullibility. Interestingly, the spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century produced many a medium who relied on the same basic technique that Betty Parsons had used, and like Betty many of them were eventually caught out. Chambers ends his study with a few pages on what happened to the main protagonists, or rather on what little is known of William Kent and the Parsons family after their fifteen minutes of fame; we even have what appears to be a partial confession from Betty herself towards the end of her life (although she was found out, she never admitted to it). Chambers concludes with his suspicion that the ghost noises were originally a team effort by Parsons and some of his friends; “it is often remarked that the séances took place in crowded rooms that were poorly lit ... the noises could be heard coming from different directions”, although once Betty was on her own she had to do the noises herself.

This book was a most engrossing read, one of those accounts of an historical event where the author is both entertaining and informative. I, of course, was drawn to it on account of my admiration for Samuel Johnson as well as my recent researching into London’s ghosts, but I believe that anyone with even the smallest interest in London’s rich and fascinating history would enjoy it.

The history of a modern travel route

Good news! My latest piece for the Times Literary Supplement – reviewing Gillian Tindall’s The Tunnel Through Time, a book which reveals the history of those parts of London that are on the new Crossrail route – is in the latest edition; it can be found on page 32.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/tunnel-vision-3/

The Lady Vanishes, or Hitchcock's take on Appeasement

An old black-and-white movie was on the telly the other day – a vintage Hitchcock film from the Thirties, made just before he moved to the States. The film in question is his thriller The Lady Vanishes, and it’s great to watch even now, some 78 years after it was released. Yes, parts of it are faintly ridiculous to modern eyes, but it’s a lot of fun that’s still, well, thrilling.

(A warning: As I’m going to discuss key plot points of said movie, you may wish to avoid the rest of this blog-post if you haven’t seen it yet. Can’t believe that I’ve just done a spoiler alert for a blog-post about a film that was made in 1938, but there you go.)

The plot, based on a long-forgotten novel, is this: A group of British tourists are stranded in the mountainous (and fictional) central European country of Bandrika – an avalanche has meant that their train is delayed. Among them is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a pretty English girl who’s heading back home to get married; while waiting for the train in the local guest-house, she meets with two fellow-Britons – an older English lady called Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who she gets on well with, and a debonair musician called Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) who winds her up the wrong way. Also waiting for the train are a lawyer who doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because the woman he’s with isn’t his wife, and Charters and Caldicott, a pair of avid cricket fans who are desperate to get back to London because there’s a Test match going on and they want to see the final day’s play. As well as some misunderstandings with the guest-house staff due to their inability to talk the local language, they endeavour, with no success, to find out the latest score (these two are very much the comic Englishmen abroad). Outside, a lone violinist plays a local folk-tune and is quietly strangled.

Iris and Miss Froy adopt each other as travelling-companions for the journey home, although it’s clear to the viewer that someone’s out to get the latter – at the station, Iris receives a bump on the head from a falling pot-plant that was meant for Miss Froy. As a result, Iris passes out after tea, and she’s in for a nasty shock when she awakes as Miss Froy has vanished – and, what’s worse, everyone who’s encountered her denies having done so (cleverly, Hitchcock has them deny this for different reasons – the lawyer doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because he’s with his mistress, Charters and Caldicott think that if Iris’s talk of a missing woman is taken seriously the train will be stopped and then they’ll never get to the Test match, and the various foreigners have, well, somewhat more nefarious reasons for keeping their mouths shut). Was she hallucinating about Miss Froy? Dr Hartz, a brain surgeon who’s also on the train, thinks she might be. Only Gilbert believes her story, and they set out to look for the vanished lady.

In the goods carriage, they’re attacked by one of the foreign passengers who turns out to be a knife-wielding magician in a scene which may well have inspired part of the circus train sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They then figure out that the doc is a wrong ’un who has captured Miss Froy, disguising her as a bandage-covered patient in his care. Far from being the mild-mannered governess she claimed to be, Miss Froy is actually a British secret agent who’s taking a vital message (memorised, in the coded form of a folk-tune she’d heard the late violinist playing earlier) back to the Foreign Office. Dr Hartz is of course trying to stop her – although his co-conspirator, a nun who isn’t really a nun, turns out to be English and is, therefore, appalled when she realises that she’s in a conspiracy against a fellow-Englishwoman; this, clearly, was not what she signed up for. So she switches sides and helps Iris and Gilbert.

As the train reaches the frontier, the doc realises that the pesky Brits have rescued the British spy, and he arranges with the Bandrikan (?) military to have the train uncoupled and shunted to a siding so he can recapture the now-unbandaged Miss Froy. Unfortunately for him, but hilariously for the viewer, it’s tea-time and the part of the train he’s moved to the siding includes the restaurant car, which contains all of the train’s British passengers who are (of course) taking tea. They’re not best pleased about their journey home being interrupted.

As the movie nears its climax, the train is surrounded by soldiers intent of capturing Miss Froy; the plucky Brits – Charters, Caldicott and the nun-who-isn’t-really-a-nun as well as Iris and Gilbert – realise that the only solution is to fight their way out with the two pistols they happen to have between them. The only one who disagrees is the lawyer, who thinks he can negotiate with the baddies; it doesn’t end well for him. Even though the country they’re trying to get out of is fictional, the politics of the time – this was 1938, the year of the Munich crisis when war loomed inexorably on the horizon – are inescapable (coincidentally, the film was released just over a week after Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper after flying home from Germany). The message is quite clear: Even though they’re out-gunned and the situation looks hopeless, the best thing the British can do is show a stiff upper lip (naturally, this is a film where, if you get shot in the hand, you calmly borrow your friend’s pocket-square to use as a makeshift bandage), crack a few jokes about the government and fight on in the hope of eventually winning through. I never thought of Alfred Hitchcock as being a critic of Appeasement, but on this evidence, he quite clearly was.

This is really superb stuff from Hitchcock – a train journey where nothing is quite what it seems (he was very good at those) leading onto an attempted kidnapping, tales of espionage and a shoot-out interspersed with some cricket banter. No wonder this was the best British film in 1938! There are some great stand-out performances although as with so many films the show is, of course, almost stolen by the comic relief. Charters and Caldicott proved so popular with audiences that they returned in various not-Hitchcock films made by the same studio like Night Train to Munich (more or less a remake of The Lady Vanishes – it even had Margaret Lockwood in it, playing a similar role). Even after the actors who played them were banned from playing characters called Charters and Caldicott (following a dispute with the studio over how big a role they should have in a movie that they ended up not starring in) they still turned up as similar, cricket-mad characters in a few films (the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, for example, as well as a film called It’s Not Cricket which I now need to find because, let’s face it, there aren’t that many films about cricket).

Hitchcock himself, by the way, makes his trademark appearance in the crowd at Victoria station towards the end; it was only later that he got into the habit of appearing early on in his films in order to avoid detracting attention from the plot, as audiences used to cheer when they saw him.

The modern history books: Spies, conspiracies and Britain in the early Sixties

We live in an age where there’s a lot of popular history about, and some of it manages to combine a high standard of writing with excellent historical research. Here are three of the best that I’ve enjoyed reading recently:

Popping up on TV as well as in print, Dominic Sandbrook is one of those historians who’s pretty good on revisionism – reinterpreting historical facts by looking at the evidence from a different perspective and coming up with something that challenges the accepted historical view of historical events; the old A.J.P. Taylor maxim of nothing being inevitable until it happens is very much Sandbrook’s guiding principle, it seems. In the first of his four books on recent British history, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles, he strikes a fine balance between the political, the economic and the cultural, looking below the surface of events. The travails of Harold Macmillan’s various Chancellors (Reggie Maudling strikes me as being one of the most amusing people ever to have held that particular post) are juxtaposed with sections on movies, books (Ian Fleming of course, but also Kingsley Amis and long-forgotten types like Colin Wilson), television (this was the time when ITV started and the BBC entered one of its most creative periods), moral panic in the newspapers over immigration and the sexual behaviour of teenagers (plus ca change…), the early Sixties satire boom and pop music; plenty of stuff in that last bit on Lonnie Donegan, Billy Fury and Acker Bilk (whose presence is explained by the notion that in early 1962 there were those who thought that trad jazz would be the defining sound of the Sixties) before we get to the Beatles (where Sandbrook’s revisionism is clearly shown, with there being nothing inevitable about Beatlemania, the last remark on which goes to Ted Heath of all people – as Trade Secretary at the time, he remarked that the demand for Beatles-style jackets in late 1963 single-handedly saved Britain’s corduroy industry). It’s a long book (738 pages, not including the footnotes) but it’s well worth persevering with. The set-piece chapter is the one on the Profumo scandal – which has quite the build-up by being referenced or alluded to in previous chapters before, following an account of the Vassall scandal, it breaks out in a surprisingly low-key fashion (the central point, a junior minister’s affair with a call-girl, lasted just a few weeks) before becoming something that “might have been scripted to encompass a wide range of sensitive issues of the early sixties: espionage and subversion, sexual wantonness, unchecked materialism, the supposed exoticism and criminality of immigrant communities and the nepotism and ineptitude of the Conservative government ... it touched on public and private anxieties that had already been festering for years.” Interesting times, indeed, and fascinatingly chronicled here.

History of a somewhat different nature is covered by David Aaronovitch in his Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped Modern History. If we really do live in a conspiracy-obsessed age – and reactions to recent events both here and in the United States have presented little evidence to the contrary – then perhaps a look at conspiracy theories of the past, the truth behind them and why so many are willing to believe them (the need for a certain type of narrative is a key part of this) is no bad thing. Thus, we have a chapter on the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a document which, despite being exposed as a forgery in 1921, did much to fuel anti-Semitism in the twentieth century and is still doing the rounds in the Middle East) and a somewhat lighter chapter on the pseudo-history concerning the Priory of Sion myth (amusingly entitled ‘Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Holy Shit’). Showing that conspiracy repeats itself, there are links made between the conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, and also (exploring a particularly British vein here) between the deaths of Hilda Murrell and David Kelly. Personally, I’d’ve liked to have seen what Aaronovitch might have to say about the various conspiracy theories surrounding Harold Wilson, but what makes this book so relevant for readers today is the American stuff. When Aaronovitch turns his attention Stateside, there are chapters on conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbour, various Clinton-related cover-ups, the 9/11 ‘truthers’ and the Obama ‘birthers’; those last two show how belief in conspiracy theories has risen with the advent of the Internet (“Cyberspace communities of semi-anonymous and occasionally invented individuals have grown up … the democratic quality of the Net has permitted the release of a mass of undifferentiated information, some of it authoritative, some speculative, some absurd”). As this book was published in 2010, there’s nothing about Donald Trump’s involvement in the ‘birther’ nonsense, although if Aaronovitch is going to do a second edition he’d probably need to include a whole chapter (maybe more), building on the post-Internet rise in the popularity of conspiracy theories, about the uses of conspiracy theories as political weapons in this year’s Presidential election. This book is intelligently written and hugely enjoyable, and a good one to have read before the next time someone brings up the subject of the ‘truth’ about, say, 9/11 or the pseudo-history behind The Da Vinci Code.

Conspiracy of a real rather than a theoretical sort abounds in A Spy Among Friends: Philby and the Great Betrayal, the tale of how Kim Philby betrayed, well, just about everyone. Ben Macintyre – an author of espionage-related stuff who I have read before (his Agent Zigzag is excellent) – is on good form here dealing with the story of perhaps the most notorious traitor in British history, aided by being able to access recently-declassified government files and previously unseen private papers. This isn’t a straight biography of Philby, though (there have been plenty of those); this one tells the story of British and American intelligence in the Second World War and the early part of the Cold War, focussing in particular on the friendship between Philby and two of his closest associates, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton of the OSS, and later the CIA. Elliott was a very good friend of Philby – or so he thought; they were of a similar background (public school, Cambridge, made their names in intelligence during the Second World War) and he shared everything he knew with him at a time when people who worked for the secret service were very tight-lipped outside of it, but frequently got drunk and let slip all sorts of interesting information when socialising with colleagues (something of which Philby took full advantage). After the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951, which ruined Philby’s intelligence career by virtue of his closeness to the former rather than any concrete evidence, Elliott was instrumental in maintaining Philby’s innocence – blackening the reputation of a particularly troublesome MP who used Parliamentary privilege to ask some questions that some would rather have remained unasked – while trying to bring him back into the fold (he eventually succeeded in having him appointed as an agent under journalistic cover in Beirut, from where Philby defected to the Soviet Union in 1963). Elliott was also involved in the Crabb fiasco of 1956, the story of which is told here (one wonders how he was able to keep his job after that one, which went against the explicit orders of the Prime Minister). He was deeply affected by Philby’s betrayal, as was Angleton, although the effect on the latter was perhaps more ruinous for the intelligence community; having trusted Philby implicitly, Angleton switched to not trusting anyone and, having convinced himself that there was a mole in the CIA, wasted much time and resources as well as resorting to illegal methods in the chasing of this phantom, to the extent – irony of ironies – that some came to believe that Angleton himself was a KGB mole, charged with causing as much damage to the running of the CIA as possible. It all, it seems, went back to Philby. As retold by Macintyre, this is a truly irresistible read for anyone who, like me, has a penchant for spy fiction.