SPEAKERS’ PROGRAMME 2024-25

 Meetings are usually held on the second Tuesday of each month at Ealing Green Church, W5 5QT, with the exception of the November meeting which takes place at Twyford School at 6.30 pm.

 Please note that any changes to the programme will be notified on our website: www.ealinghistory.org.uk, by email and on local Facebook sites

 2024

10 September   –    Professor Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, ‘The Memory of the Crusades in western Europe and the Near East from the C18th to the present day’

Professor Phillips has been Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway since 2005. He is the author of numerous books on the crusades, most recently The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (Bodley Head, 2019), described in The Times as ‘Superbly researched… enormously entertaining… one of the outstanding books of the year… Clear, concise and illuminating.’  He has talked to literary festivals around the world and has participated in radio, television, podcasts and other forms of public history.

 

 

By the Age of the Enlightenment crusading had been discredited in Europe as a superstitious and backward act. But from the early nineteenth century Romanticism (seen, for example, in the writings of Sir Walter Scott) emerged to bring the medieval era back into vogue. Alongside this, the increasing French, British and Italian presence in the Middle East and  North Africa prompted some to recall their crusading ancestry and to look back upon the campaigns of Richard the Lionheart and Saint Louis as an age of heroism, unity and achievement. In contrast, the Muslim Near East – which had never forgotten the crusades – made increasingly strong parallels with what they saw as a toxic past, taking inspiration from the Sultan Saladin and Baibars as men who drew their people together and expelled the invading crusaders. In the course of the twentieth century, and down to the present day, crusading has been a powerful shorthand for resistance to westerners for Islamists, such as Osama bin Laden, or for Arab Nationalists such as Nasser, Saddam Hussein and Asad. Today President Erdogan of Turkey frequently invokes Saladin and the Crusades in his internal and external political messages although, as this talk will show, the cultural resonance of the crusades runs much more deeply – in the West and the Near East – than the pronouncements of individual leaders.

8 October       Emerita Professor Catherine Hall, Department of History, University College London, Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery,

‘Capitalism and Slavery. Where are we now?’

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race, and empire.  Her research centres on rethinking the relation between Britain and Empire in the early/mid-nineteenth century. It reflects on the ways in which metropolitan ideas and practices have been shaped by the colonial experience. Some of her work has focused on the long relationship between England and Jamaica (Civilising Subjects. Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (2002). Her most recent book is Lucky Valley: Edward Long and the History of Racial Capitalism (CUP: 2024)

This talk will open with Eric Williams’s classic text Capitalism and Slavery (1944), discussing the main arguments and the critiques which were mounted against it. It will then go on to talk about the project which we developed, in part inspired by Williams, the ‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership’ – www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. We devised this research to demonstrate the extent of Britons’ involvement with the whole slavery business – its contribution to the building of the nation’s wealth and power and to the embedding of racial thinking in British culture and society. I will finally reflect on the significance of the C18 historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, drawing on my recent book, Lucky Valley. Edward Long and the history of racial capitalism.

 12 November        Emeritus Professor Chris Read, Warwick University, Violence and peaceful persuasion in Lenin’s approach to the Russian Revolution 1917-24′, speaking to the sixth-form evening at Twyford CoE High school, W3 9PP, 6.30 pm.

Chris Read is Emeritus Professor in Twentieth-Century European History at Warwick University. His research has focused on two main themes, the intellectual history of the Russian intelligentsia between 1900 and 1925 and the social history of the Russian revolution. He is author of numerous books, including Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (Routledge, 2005) and War and Revolution in Russia: 1914-22 (Palgrave 2013) and Stalin: From the Caucasus to the Kremlin (Routledge, 2017).

Lenin is often described by critics as a dictator. Was does that mean? Was his governance of Russia based mainly on repressive violence? Or was it, as his supporters maintain, through carefully nurtured support in the population of early Soviet Russia? These are the questions which will be at the heart of the discussion.

 10 December    AGM and Christmas Social

 2025

14 January         Dr Andrew Lownie, Senior Research Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Buckingham, ‘Issues in Writing Modern Political Biographies’

Dr Andrew Lownie is a Senior Research Fellow in Modern British History at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Professor at the Ulster Literary Biography Research Centre. A former bye-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, he is a trustee of the Campaign for Freedom of Information and President of the Biographers Club.

 Wikimedia Commons- James Gifford Mead Photography

His books include biographies of the writer John Buchan, spy Guy Burgess (winner of the St Ermin’s Hotel Intelligence Book of the Year) and the top ten Sunday Times bestsellers: The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves and Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Drawing on his own experiences over the last forty years, biographer Andrew Lownie looks at the challenges facing modern biographers, not least that of missing archives.

 11 February         Anne Fletcher, author,  ‘Widows of the Ice: The Women that Scott’s Antarctic Expedition Left Behind’

Anne Fletcher is an historian and writer. She has a successful career in heritage and has worked at some of the most exciting historic sites in the country including Hampton Court Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Bletchley Park and Tower Bridge. She is the great-great-great niece of Joseph Hobson Jagger, ‘the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’ and he is the subject of her book From the Mill to Monte Carlo published by Amberley Publishing 2018. Of her book, Widows of the Ice, Dr Janina Ramirez wrote ‘This is the most mesmerising book …This is social history at its best!’

As Captain Scott lay freezing and starving to death on his return journey from the South Pole, he wrote with a stub of pencil his final words: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’ Uppermost in his mind were the three women who would now be widows: Kathleen, his own bohemian artist wife; Oriana, the devout wife of the expedition’s chief scientist, Ted Wilson; and Lois, the Welsh working-class wife of Petty Officer Edgar Evans. When the news came that the men were dead, they became heroes, their story filling column inches in newspapers across the world. Their widows were thrust into the limelight, forced to grieve in public view, keeping a stiff upper lip while the world praised their husbands’ sacrifice. These three women had little in common except that their husbands had died together, but this shared experience was to shape the rest of their lives. Each experienced their loss differently, their treatment by the press and the public influenced by their class and contemporary notions of both manliness and womanly behaviour. Each had to rebuild their life, fiercely and loyally defending their husbands’ legacies and protecting their fatherless children in the face of financial hardship, public criticism and intense press scrutiny. Widows of the Ice is not the story of famous women but of forgotten wives, whose love and support helped to shape one of the most iconic moments in British history. They have drifted to the outer edges of the Antarctic narrative, and bringing them back gives a new perspective to a story we thought we already knew. It is a story of imperialistic dreams, misogyny and classism, but also of enormous courage, high ideals, duty – and, above all, love.

 11 March             Emeritus Professor James Manor, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, London, ‘The Debatable Resilience of Nehru’s Liberal Democracy in India ‘

James Manor is the Emeka Anyaoku Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has previously taught at Yale, Harvard and Leicester Universities, at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, and at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.

‘The Debatable Resilience of Nehru’s Liberal Democracy in India ‘

 

 research.london.ac.uk

 8 April         Julia Boyd, author, ‘Off the beaten track: researching and writing social histories of the Third Reich’

Image: inkwellmanagement.com

Julia Boyd worked at the V&A Museum before marrying a diplomat and living abroad for a number of years, mainly in Asia. After that she lived with her husband in Cambridge at Churchill College for 10 years. She is now based in London. She was formerly a governor of the English Speaking Union, a trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and she is currently writing a history Wigmore Hall. Her books on German social history have been very well received: Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People (Elliott & Thompson, 2017); A Village in the Third Reich: How Ordinary Lives Were Transformed By the Rise of Fascism (Elliott &  Thompson, 2022)

‘My talk will focus on how I first came to write about the Third Reich, how I do the research, the value of micro history and how, by trying to look at these cataclysmic events through the eyes of ordinary people, it is sometimes easier to understand the big questions’. 

13 May  Professor Rebecca Earle, University of Warwick, ‘What can you learn from a cookbook (other than how to cook)?’

Image: University of Warwick

Rebecca Earle is a historian of food. She has also written about the cultural history of Spanish America and early modern Europe. She is interested in how ordinary, every-day activities such as eating or dressing shape how we think about the world and how others view us. She has written a number of books on Latin-American history. Her book, The Body of the Conquistador, explored how food, and eating, shaped the experience of colonialism in Spanish America. It won the Conference on Latin American History’s Bolton-Johnson Prize. Her most recent book is Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato, Cambridge University Press 2020. 

You can learn the history of just about anything from a cookbook.  Cookbooks help us understand the Second World War. They are rich sources for studying the lives of women in the past. They form part of the history of the scientific revolution and the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Cookbooks reveal the impact of colonialism, the pervasive nature of racism, and the emergence of nationalism. They are a great way to chart the rise of consumerism and the emergence of new cultural trends. This lecture explores the value of cookbooks as historical sources, and also encourages participants to investigate the family histories embedded in the cookery books and notebooks containing their grandmother’s recipes that clutter their own bookshelves. Cookery books, in short, are a remarkable and powerful window into the past.

 10 June            Dr Ismini Pells, Department for Continuing Education, Oxford University, ‘Maimed Soldiers, War Widows and the Human Cost of the English Civil Wars: stories from the Civil War Petitions project’

Ismini Pells is an historian of early modern military and medical history. Her research particularly focuses on the British Civil Wars of 1639-51. She is the project manager of Civil War Petitions, a project based at the University of Oxford and, prior to that, at University of Leicester. This project has investigated war pensions awarded to maimed soldiers and war widows from the Civil Wars. Prior to this, Ismini also researched the careers of medical personnel in Civil War armies for a project at the University of Exeter examining early modern medical practitioners. She obtained her PhD from University of Cambridge, where her thesis explored the career of Philip Skippon, commander of the infantry in the New Model Army. This was subsequently published as a monograph with Routledge under the title of Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: the ‘Christian Centurion’.Ismini Pells’ main research interests lie in the military and medical history of the early modern period. In particular, her research has focused on the British and Irish Civil Wars of the Seventeenth Century. She published the first biography of  Philip Skippon, a senior officer in the New Model Army:Philip Skippon and the British Civil Wars: the ‘Christian Centurion’ (Routledge, 2020).

The seventeenth-century Civil Wars left a deep impression on the national population. As many as one in four adult males in England alone were mobilised for the various armies and recent estimates suggest that across the British Isles, a greater percentage of the population died as a result of the Civil Wars than during the First World War. Few localities were not first-hand witnesses to the fighting, whilst references to the Wars were still afforded a prominent place in popular folk traditions well into the nineteenth century. Yet the ordinary soldiers and civilians whose lives were irreparably changed by this conflict have largely remained obscure. The Civil War Petitions project is unearthing thousands of documents detailing the impact of the Civil Wars on the lives of these ‘ordinary’ people. During the conflict, parliament, and later the restored monarchy, offered war pensions and other financial gratuities to wounded soldiers, and the widows and orphans of those who had died in their service – the first such widespread instance of this in British history. In order to claim a pension or gratuity, veterans and bereaved family members had – often with the help of an anamnesis – to submit a petition detailing their war service. In these petitions, it is possible to hear the voices of the ordinary men and women who lived and fought during the Civil Wars. This talk will reveal how these people looked back on their experiences during the Civil Wars and how they coped with its aftermath. It will examine what induced men to enlist in an army and what we might learn from their accounts of the military engagements they fought in. It will also highlight the medical care made available to injured soldiers and the ingenious ways that the wounded and bereaved negotiated with the authorities for financial relief. Finally, it will consider how those who managed welfare systems responded to the enormous strains of supporting thousands of soldiers and civilians, as well as the relationship between the provision of relief, political considerations and the contested memories of conflict.

Members (£15 annual fee) and Visitors (£5 per talk) Students free.

 Secretary: Dr Philip Woods   tel. 0208 579 2174  Email: philipgwoods@outlook.com

For up-to-date details: www.ealinghistory.org.uk

Members (£15 annual fee) and Visitors (£5 per talk) Students free.

 Secretary: Philip Woods   tel. 0208 579 2174  Email: philipgwoods@outlook.com

For up-to-date details: www.ealinghistory.org.uk