A Bit of Balance

It's been standard practice for some years now, in certain quarters of the British media, to strive for journalistic "balance".

So that, for example, if BBC Newsnight do a piece on climate change, they are obliged to wheel in some corporate shill who receives money from the fossil fuels lobby to pretend that there's no such thing as climate change.

Balance, geddit?

Well, the requirement for balance doesn't apply to all of the media.  Channel 4's Shakespeare's Tomb went out of its way to avoid any form of balance, which meant that the vast majority of the available evidence in the matter was ignored and only those with a certain point-of-view were featured.  Similarly, press coverage in advance of the documentary, and in response to it, was equally one-sided (see below).

Thank heavens, then, for Ben Russell, who wrote this piece for the Bromsgrove Advertiser and its sister papers, including the Redditch & Alcester Advertiser, this week.  Ben was genuinely interested in the background to the story and the way the documentary team mishandled it.  The result - a piece which allows another perspective to be heard.

So thank you, Ben.  I'll post a link to the article when I can find one.

Otherwise, as I say, the media really just parroted whatever came their way in a press release.  This is an interesting example.  It appeared on the BBC News Online website the day after the C4 documentary was broadcast.  I've been trying - with little success - to find out if the copy and quotations were all supplied to the BBC in a press release, which is how things tend to happen these days, and if so, who issued the press release.

I doubt it was Channel Four, who probably don't know much about the Stratford tour guide who is quoted in the piece.  The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, however, do know him.  Could it be the SBT, then, that got its press release out to the BBC ready to be published within hours of the broadcast?  The mention in the BBC article of the thwarted attempt to secure permission to study the skull properly sounds like an authentic SBT touch, given that it was the two top guys at the SBT who successfully shot down that application.

And why, we might ask, is nobody telling tales about this outside of school (so to speak)?  I've emailed the Church of England Team Leader responsible for Beoley church, who is quoted in the article, partly to find out if he really did say that the story of the skull at Beoley is "rubbish", but I've received no reply.

Where's the balance, then?  One side of the argument, if we can call it that, has direct access to the media.  That same side took control of the Channel 4 documentary and kept all other voices out of it.  They scotched the investigation, then co-opted the production.

It was quite a surprise, then, to find this piece on the curious Cult of Weird website.  I know nothing about the site, or who runs it, but they'd obviously done their homework - far more so than the mainstream media - because for once, my work gets a mention.

It's going to take a long, long time, and an awful lot of hard work, to combat the misinformation broadcast to the world by Channel 4 in Shakespeare's Tomb and uncritically taken up by the press, left, right and centre.  The very fact that there are still journalists and commentators who are prepared to look a little deeper, and to present the other side of the story, is verily a welcome relief.

Gunpowder Treason - a 400 Year Old Lie

96 people died at the Hillsborough Stadium on 15 April 1989.  Even as the full scale of the disaster was becoming apparent, the authorities - police, politicians, the press - were concocting a story about it.  It was all caused by drunken football fans, they said.  Those same fans had picked the pockets of the dead and urinated on the paramedics who were trying to help.

We now know that that story was a pack of lies, although it took more than two decades for the truth to come out.  But what had happened was a political elite, composed of extremists, had cooked up and spun a false yarn designed to demonise a perceived enemy.  That enemy was, (a) football fans, who were seen as hooligans, and (b) the people of Liverpool, who remained obstinately opposed to the socio-economic insanity of Thatcherism.  The disaster provided an excuse for the State to denigrate those who seemed unable to fight back while, at the same time, covering up its own incompetence.

So what has that got to do with the Gunpowder Plot?

Well, we now know the truth about Hillsborough, 25 years ago, and few commentators would have the gall to repeat the lies told by the police and the government back then.  We do not, however, know the truth about the "powder treason", 409 years ago, because historians insist on repeating the lies.

The Radio Times reports that BBC2 has "just given the green light to Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot".  "It's a total retelling," says the writer, "which uses the interrogation of Fawkes's number three, Thomas Winter, who gave away the whole story."

Okay, before we go any further ...

Fawkes was not the ringleader.  That was Robert Catesby.  Guy Fawkes was essentially a hired hand.  Arguably, Thomas Wintour was Catesby's number three.  But did he give away the whole story?

"We restage the interrogation and get inside the plot, which was huge", continues the writer, Adam Kemp, breathlessly.  Restage the interrogation, hunh?  That'll be interesting.  I can only assume we will mention the fact that Thomas Wintour had been shot in the shoulder when he and his comrades were finally cornered by a local posse.  Whether he would have been capable of composing his ten-page confession in neat handwriting is open to doubt.  But the signature on the confession - a rather bold "Thomas Winter" - wasn't his own.  He spelled his name "Wintour".

Note that Adam Kemp referred to "Thomas Winter".  He's using the name used by the Jacobean government, not the individual whose name it actually was.  Which means that his "total retelling" will, in all probability, be exactly the same version of events as that which was cooked up at the time by government ministers.  It won't be a "total retelling" at all.  Just another re-tread.

He goes on: "They would have got everyone under one roof, the royal family and the entire governing elite and bishops.  There is truly nothing that can come close.  It really was big,"

Yes, it was.  It would have been enormous.  If it had happened.  And yet, truth be told, there never was even the slightest risk that the king and his lords would be blown to smithereens.  Not a chance in hell.

Let's start with the gunpowder.  It was sourced from the Tower of London, where the government (which had the monopoly on gunpowder) kept its supply under the supervision of Sir George Carew.  Carew, a government insider, had just become Baron Carew of Clopton.  He somehow managed to let Clopton House, his estate just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, to the gunpowder plotters.  Nobody seems to have thought that was odd.  But the government resolutely blocked an investigation into how the gunpowder had been removed from the Tower.

How much gunpowder was there?  Good question.  A credible source said one barrel.  Guy Fawkes confessed to secreting twenty barrels in the Parliament building.  Sir Robert Cecil, who knew more about the plot than anybody, wrote of there having been 34 barrels.  The figure eventually settled on was 36 barrels.

So nobody was quite sure how much gunpowder had been involved, and no explanation was ever given for its mysterious disappearance from the government's store.  A large quantity of gunpowder was returned to the Tower a couple of days after Fawkes's arrest and was registered as "decayed".  Its constituent elements had separated.  It would never have blown up anything, let alone the royal family and entire governing elite.  There wouldn't even have been a puff!

Reliable witnesses saw the real ringleaders - Robert Catesby and Thomas Percy - emerging from Sir Robert Cecil's house in the early hours of the morning, just days before the plot was discovered.  That's like the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings being spotted sneaking out of 10 Downing Street a few days before they detonated their rucksacks on crowded tubes and buses (except, of course, that the gunpowder plotters explosives were "decayed" and weren't going to blow up).  Thomas Percy himself was a government insider, in the king's service at the time.  His job was to make sure that the plot proceeded and to implicate his kinsman, the Earl of Northumberland, whom Sir Robert Cecil has sworn to destroy.

Catesby, on the other hand, spent much of the year leading up to the plot's discovery trying to trick Father Henry Garnet into condoning the plot.  The government repeatedly delayed the opening of Parliament so that Catesby would have more time to incriminate Garnet.  Catesby was aided in his attempts to entrap Garnet by William Parker, Lord Monteagle.  Monteagle was eventually credited with exposing the plot and rewarded handsomely - every mention of him in the plotters' confessions was redacted.  Both Catesby and Percy, who had engineered the plot, were killed, rather than taken alive, on the instructions of Sir Robert Cecil.

The simple fact is that the Gunpowder Plot never really was.  True, some of its members were ardent Catholics who joined what they believed would be a blow for freedom.  But the main players were government stooges (William Shakespeare - who was alarmingly close to the events - made this clear in his plays, Macbeth and Coriolanus).  In other words, the Gunpowder Plot was pretty much the same as every other plot of its time.  These supposed "plots" were "discovered" on a more-or-less annual basis, and they all followed the same pattern - a good example being the Babington Plot of 1586.  A Catholic patsy was lured into a fake conspiracy by government agents, who then "discovered" the plot which they themselves had manufactured.  There was massive publicity, and the Protestant extremists at the heart of the government got to enact the policies which they'd been hankering to put into place: the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots - a Catholic contender for the English throne - or the execution of Father Henry Garnet, Superior of the Jesuits in England.

The constant repetition of the government's lies about the Gunpowder Plot is an offense to history.  It amounts to a 400-year propaganda campaign, and it speaks volumes that British historians would rather regurgitate the falsehoods about Catholic militancy than investigate the truth about Protestant duplicity.

The Gunpowder Plot is more than just an iconic incident-that-didn't-happen.  It led to the English Civil War; John Pym and John Milton were obsessed with it.  Like so many others in those paranoid times, they had swallowed the lies spouted by the likes of Sir Robert Cecil (for his own personal gain).  So successful were the propagandists in broadcasting the cooked-up story of the Gunpowder Plot, it fuelled the anti-Catholic rhetoric of the fanatics for decades.  Arguably, it continues to fuel our irrational fears of some nefarious, fanatical "enemy within" which is "out to get us" because it "hates our freedom".  That sort of nonsense has been doing the rounds since the Gunpowder Plot, and it's precisely why the plot was invented.  Fear is a useful tool of government.

Historians repeat the Gunpowder Plot lie for a simple reason.  Englishness has always been difficult to define.  It's easier to explain what being "English" means in terms of what it is not - Catholic, Jewish, Irish, Scottish, French, etc. - than in terms of what it is.  That is why the English lay claim to a "tolerance" and a sense of "fair play" which they so seldom exhibit.  If they were honest with themselves, they'd have to say that the simplest way to be "English" is to hate, fear and abuse anyone who isn't.  But that problem created its own national myth, embroidered by generations of Whig historians anxious to justify every atrocity and outrage of our past as a necessary part of our Manifest Destiny.  The State had to persecute Catholics because the Catholics wanted to blow up the State (even though they never did; never actually came close).  To be English is to be Protestant.  The Catholics were, ipso facto, the enemy - like those football supporters who died at Hillsborough.  They were "not on our side", so they could be slandered.

It really is time to put the lie of the Gunpowder Plot to bed.  And I doubt very much indeed that the BBC's Gunpowder 5/11: the Greatest Terror Plot will even try to do that.  No.  Just going by the title alone, it seems most likely that it'll be yet another repetition of the old, old lie, designed to excuse the most vicious persecution of English citizens who happened to be Catholic. 

Such a slavish acceptance and repetition of past propaganda isn't history, though.  It's telling fairy tales for political purposes.

Better Late Than Never

A flashback to last August, when Who Killed William Shakespeare? came out and Ben Sidwell of BBC Midlands Today did this fine piece for us.

Many thanks to the BBC for sending us the clip ... if only we'd thought to ask them sooner!

Ah well!  A very happy New Year to one and all.  There's a new blogpost or two in the offing.

Culture Wars

I first became interested in the Gaelic language back in my teens.  The BBC had a programme on Sundays called Can Seo, which was effectively a short course in conversational Gaelic.  I sent off for the book and the long-playing records which accompanied the series.

Later, I signed up for the "Celtic Studies" course at Glasgow University, which included the study of Gaelic.  I didn't hang around at uni for very long, but I managed to pick up a bit more of a sense of the history and development of the language, along with a fair amount of Gaelic literature.

I love the sound of the Gaelic - for me, it brings to mind peat-smoke and the salt-sea tang.  It is a soft, musical language which survives most obviously in place-names and songs.  Many Scottish place-names have remained essentially unchanged for centuries.  They record the impressions of the people who named them, and the history of the immediate area.

Gaelic was brought over to the Scotland from Ireland in the early centuries of the Common Era, and many a Gaelic place-name preserves memories of that period when the English language did not yet exist.  A large-scale map of the Highlands and Islands can therefore serve as a sort of relief map of ancient history: a peek into times forgotten by all but the archaeologist and - perhaps - the native Gaelic speaker.

The Scotsman newspaper published a rather snide, borderline offensive article yesterday which really riled the Gaelic-speaking community, and with good reason.  It claimed that Gaelic was a dead language, kept on life support only through huge injections of public subsidy, to which it had no right.  Confusingly, the piece also discussed the supposed decline of the Scots dialect, which has nothing to do with Gaelic (Scots is, in fact, a parallel development of English, both having evolved out of the Northumbrian Old English which had taken root in southern Scotland by the 7th century AD).  By the end of the comment piece it was difficult to know what the commentator was really on about - was he bemoaning the apparent decline of everyday Scots at the expense of the longer established Gaelic tongue, or did he hold both in equal contempt?  Hard to tell.

In many ways, the article resonated with a history of its own.  Gaelic is, and was, predominantly a language of the Highlands and Islands.  The Scots tongue belonged predominantly to southern and central Scotland, to Edinburgh and the Lowlands.  So, if we assume that the writer of the snarky little piece was campaigning against the survival of Gaelic, and allowing himself a twinge of nostalgia when it comes to Scots, then he was really resuscitating an ancient prejudice - what the Gaels of the Highlands thought of as the Lowlander's "great hatred".

But I'm not so sure.  Let us not forget that next year - 2014 - sees an opportunity for the people of Scotland to vote for an independent Scotland.  Right now, it's looking pretty close.  And, if I'm honest, I think independence for Scotland would be a very, very good thing.  In the increasingly fevered atmosphere of the independence debate, though, culture becomes a battleground.  The not-so-veiled attack on Scottish culture and the linguistic heritage of the Highlands and Islands which comprised the bulk of the Scotsman's article should be seen in the light of the independence furore.  What it's basically saying is: "Your language is rubbish and it should be dead.  And with it, the memories of your people, your ancestors, your ancient history.  Your culture is pants.  Forget it.  We're all English now.  In fact, we're becoming American.  So anyone who wants to speak the language of Scotland is some sort of effete subsidy junkie draining the public purse in order to maintain a Gaelic-language TV channel."

(For the record, BBC Alba is lovely - some of the very best music on television.)

There are times when you sense that history never changes.  The tone of the Scotsman piece is depressingly familiar.  You hear things very much like it throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.  It's the boring jawing of the colonial mind, with all its implied superiority.  It's the thinking that gave rise to the Glencoe Massacre and the Highland Clearances.

It is, all in all, a pretty silly attempt to justify the Act of Union of 1707 (England didn't really want Scotland, and most of Scotland didn't want England, but for strategic reasons it was in England's short-term interest to forge a political union with their northern neighbours.  England paid just under £400,000 for the privilege, most of which took the form of compensation for the failure of a financial scheme which the English had done their utmost to ruin.  The common people of Scotland gained little or nothing from the deal - in fact, the Highlands were forcibly drained of people and stocked with sheep instead, those few Highlanders who remained then being employed by wealthy English people to be little more than forelock-tugging gamekeepers.)

The author of the Scotsman piece seems to advocate some kind of Year Zero.  The abandonment and complete forgetting of the past (which the Gaelic and Scots tongues retain - the outlooks, worldviews and memories of their people).  He seems to want to draw a line through the present.  Everything before hand goes into the rubbish bin of history.

As he put it himself, "Like most educated people, I find the Mither Tongue almost unintelligible."  Note the superciliousness of that statement.  His education hasn't stretched to a curiosity and interest in the living heritage of his own people.  The statement would make as much sense - and, arguably, somewhat more sense - if it read, "Like most uneducated people, I find the native language of my fellow countrymen perplexing - because I never bothered to learn it - and barbarian, because I have a false sense of cultural superiority."

The same intolerance, the same violent denial of a peoples' right to their own memories and capacity for self-expression, has been used in the past in numerous attempts to stamp out other languages (Welsh schoolchildren were once cruelly humiliated if they let a Welsh word slip from their lips, because the English didn't want them to be able to express themselves in their own terms and in the language of their fathers).  It's not the mercy killing of a dying language that we're looking at here - it's the deliberate denial of another person's way of thinking, their memories and the way they see the world around them.

It's an argument we've heard, over and over again, since Roman times.  What it demands is absolute conformity.  No linguistic or cultural memories.  No history, in fact.  Forget everything.

None of that quaint, homespun wisdom, the bleak memories of past atrocities, the songs of love and loss and longing and rebellion.  No roadsigns telling you what the true name of the place you're looking for is.  Blanket conformity, and the smothering dominance of an alien culture.  What you might call, the Clearances all over again.

Let us hope that the Scots find the courage and confidence to vote against this sort of imperialist gibberish next year.

Beoley or Not Beoley

To the lovely church at Beoley, yesterday morning, on a beautiful day, to film a piece for BBC local news.

And what a piece!  Video-journalist Ben Sidwell did us proud, and the editorial team at BBC Midlands Today introduced the piece with a neat little summary of Shakespeare facts.  Naturally, BBC balance had to insist on words like "alleged" a lot, but they gave us a fantastic hearing, and I can't complain.  Very chuffed with it.  (And a big shout out to Lucy from BBC Hereford and Worcester local radio, who also came along for an interview!)

Why Beoley?  Well, because there's a spare skull down there in the crypt beneath the Sheldon family chapel at Beoley church.  And in the 1880s, the local vicar published a very detailed and descriptive story explaining that this extra skull is William Shakespeare's.

Understandably, perhaps, the Old Guard sought to puncture the story.  I don't know what was said at the interview in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, but the bit that made it into yesterday's news item was essentially this:

The vicar of Beoley in the 1880s - one Rev Charles Jones Langston - only made up his story about Shakespeare's skull because he wanted to raise money to refurbish his church.  It's a good story, but it isn't true: it was just a fundraising exercise.

We'll briefly pass over any questions of the integrity and honesty of 19th century clergymen (even though the excuse given by the Shakespeare cogniscenti does seem to cast grave aspersions on Rev Langston's honesty) and take a quick look at the facts.

Langston's story, How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen and Found, was published in 1884.  The following year, he oversaw the restoration of his church at Beoley.  And then he effectively retired, moving to Bath and referring to himself as "formerly Vicar of Beoley".  So he certainly did have a hand in the refurbishment of Beoley Church, although he didn't hang around afterwards to enjoy the fruits of his labours.

Now - Langston's story was privately published and sold for one shilling a copy.  I've not been able to determine how many copies he managed to shift, or what the initial overheads might have been, but I doubt he made enough profit to pay for the costs of a major church restoration.  He might have raised a bit, but there are currently no indications that he had hit on a real moneyspinner.

More importantly, though, Langston published the first half of his story (entitled How Shakespeare's Skull was Stolen) in October 1879, when he was nowhere near Beoley.  He was based in Kent at the time.

In other words, FIVE YEARS before he published the second half of his story, describing the discovery of the "VERITABLE SKULL OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE" in the crypt at Beoley, he published the whole set up - the supposed theft of Shakespeare's skull from its Stratford grave and the failure of the conspirators to return it.

It's stretching credulity just a little to argue that Rev C.J. Langston only published his story to raise money for Beoley church when he published the first half of that story five years earlier, at a time when he was the rector of another parish in a totally different part of the country!

We might also note that at no point in his finished story does Rev Langston mention Beoley by name.  His story - detailed as it is - merely drops heavy hints.  And he avoided identifying himself as the author, describing himself simply as "A Warwickshire Man".

He had gone to an awful lot of trouble - both before and after he moved to Beoley - to weave an intricate and intriguing tale about the theft and discovery of Shakespeare's skull, but then neglected to name the church or the parish in which it was found or the fact that he was now the vicar of that church and desperately needed money to refurbish the place.  None of that was immediately apparent from his published pamphlet.

Is that the best way to raise money for your church?  And would the sale of some privately-printed pamphlets at one shilling each make much of a dent in the refurbishment bill?  Especially if you forgot to mention the name or location of the church or that you were the vicar?

The fact is, nothing points to the Stratford mob having considered Langston's remarkable story at all.  Ever.  They've never looked.  They told themselves, "Oh, he was just trying to raise some money for Beoley church", and left it at that.

Even though the likelihood that he raised much money is pretty small;

Even though he'd already published the first part of his story five years earlier, when he lived in another part of the country;

Even though he never mentioned Beoley in his story;

Even though it would have been - ooh, what's the word? - a little bit morally reprehensible to go around inventing stories about missing skulls turning up in your church just to raise a few quid.  Not really what we would expect of a pillar of the Victorian establishment.

No: the claim that Langston only told his story about Shakespeare's skull because he wanted to raise a bit of money is very lazy thinking.  It's yer typical "we're not prepared to consider or investigate this, so here's a pat and not very well-thought-out reason to believe that we're right and everyone else is wrong" fob off.  To which the only real response is: "Must try harder."

Meanwhile, plugging Who Killed William Shakespeare? on bestofstratforduponavon website, the local view of Shakespeare manages to poke through the blanket of obfuscation and denial imposed on it by outsiders (who consider themselves Shakespeareans).  I quote:

Born in Stratford upon Avon and considered to be one of the world's greatest writers there has long been hints of controversy and conspiracy surrounding the Bard's death.  Stirling's book sets out to answer some of these questions and perhaps offer a few different explanations!

That's from no press release that I know of.  The remarks are essentially those of the local community - the people of Stratford - who have always known that the standard accounts of Shakespeare's death don't stack up.