Tag: Trump

‘MeToo’ in the 1870s as some brave young women fight back

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The MeToo movement in the US and over here has helped expose the widespread exploitation of power by men for their own sexual gratification. Several prominent female actors have testified to being sexually assaulted or otherwise manipulated into performing sex acts by men who had the power and influence to further, or finish, their careers.

It took considerable courage for the survivors of these attacks to speak out and help bring their abusers to court. Victims are not always listened to, even today, and we did see instances where victims were effectively abused again, notably by the incumbent president of the United States, simply for daring to speak truth to power.

Given how difficult it remains for women to bring accusations against men for sexual abuse in the twenty-first century one wonders just how easy it was 150 or more years ago?

Victorian Britain was a much less female friendly society after all. It was a male dominated society where women did not only lack the right to vote, they lacked pretty much any rights at all. There were no female judges or magistrates, no policewomen, women were expected to look after children and the home, obey their husbands and fathers. They earned a lot less than men, were not allowed to study at university, and not encouraged to study at all. Queen Victoria was an exception in being a woman who held power (or sorts) and even she deferred to her husband in domestic matters.

So the young women that worked for Messrs. Fourdrinier and Hunt at their paperhanging works on Southwark Bridge Road deserve a mention this morning. In August 1875 James Fellows, a 34 year-old employee of the firm, was brought before Mr Benson at the Southwark Police court. He was accused of ‘disgraceful conduct towards several young girls’ working at the paperhangers.

Just what that ‘disgraceful conduct’ was soon became clear as a number of the women testified in court. Alice Page was just 16 and still lived at home with he parents. She worked making paper collars for Fourdrinier & Hunt’s in the same building as Fellows. She was working on her own on the previous Wednesday when Fellows came into the workshop and exposed himself. He did it again on Saturday and she informed her foreman.

I think we sometimes used to consider ‘flashers’ as a ‘bit of a laugh’; they featured in 70s comedy routines and perhaps weren’t taken that seriously. But Fellows was an active ‘sex pest’ using his position, as a male employee in a firm full of female workers, to gratify his own sexual urges at the expenses of his co-workers. His abuse did not end with ‘flashing’ either.

Alice Gillings told the magistrate that on the previous Saturday Fellows had entered the room where she worked and had thrown her down and sexually assaulted her. Caroline Smith had seen what happened to Gittings and rushed over to help. She scratched the man’s face in the process. Alice then managed to get away from Fellows, slapping his face and pushing him off, and told the foreman. Sadly, he did nothing about it.

Other girls had complained of Fellows’ conduct but were too ‘ashamed to tell it’ in court. Sexual predators and abuser like Fellows often rely on the silence of victims too scared or embarrassed to speak of what had happened to them. Just as in the MeToo movement it took a handful of brave survivors to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Unfortunately in this case they had left it a bit too late. Mr Benson was disgusted by Fellows’ behaviour but since it had been over a week since the alleged attack on Alice Gillings he could not proceed with that charge. He reprimanded the foreman, James Collier, telling him that he should have sacked Fellows straight away after the first offence was reported saying that ‘he should not have remained in the place an hour’.

The indecent exposure had only been seen by Alice Page and he could not simply take her word for it uncorroborated. He suggested that the firm terminate his employment and ordered Fellows to enter into recognizances against his future behaviour for 12 months. It was a limited victory for the women at the paperhangers and hopefully prevented others from being victims of Fellows in the near future. It is deeply depressing to know that similar and worse episodes of male sexual violence and exploitation are still occurring in our ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ society.

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, Sunday, August 15, 1875]

Hogwash and a bad smell in Kensington

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It may be a little out of fashion nowadays but you may be familiar with the expression ‘hogwash’, as in: ‘that is a load of hogwash’, (i.e a load of rubbish). Indeed quite recently John Brennan, the former director of the CIA stated that Russia denials of involvement in US elections and collusions with the Trump campaign team were ‘in a word, hogwash’.

Maria Dunning knew all about hogwash. In fact she dealt in it, collecting kitchen waste to sell as pigs swill (from where the term originated in the 1400s). Unfortunately for her (and the residents of Princes Gardens, Kensington) the kitchen waste she’d collected had an unpleasantly pungent smell. Since she had taken to storing it on the street, albeit temporarily, locals had complained and this had summoned the good men of the Westminster board of works to investigate.

It wasn’t the first time that Maria had been prosecuted for infringing local bye laws and it ended up with her being summoned before a magistrate at Westminster Police court. The sanitary inspector explained that traders like Maria went door-to-door to collect the kitchen waste which ‘they carried away in tubs’ and this caused problems:

‘the liquor overflowed, and ran out the carts into the street, and in Ennismore-gardens and Princes-gate the smell was often very offensive. The defendant had been cautioned more than once, but on the day in question allowed more than two quarts of this offensive liquor to run over into the road. It was sour and smelt very bad’.

Maria disagreed; she held that the smell was actually quite sweet and anyway she couldn’t be held responsible for what other hogwash sales people did, she only collected form one property, that belonging to Judge Blackburn. This was Baron Colin Blackburn, an eminent legal mind of his day but sadly one who was not available in court to defend Maria. In his absence the magistrate fined her 10s plus costs and warned her not to repeat the offence if she wanted to avoid a much stiffer penalty in the future.

[from The Morning Post, Friday, May 28, 1875]

‘Fake news’ or fools’ news?’: a drunken news vendor in the dock

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Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day, the one day in the year when ‘fake news’ is supposed to be disseminated by the news media. In the past we’ve had the amazing Swiss spaghetti harvest of 1957, the invention of instant water pills that could save lives in droughts, and of course the discovery of the dead body of the Loch Ness monster (in 1972). Now, sadly, false or fake news has become ubiquitous with the advent of social media, the click-bait culture of the internet, and the ridiculous Trumpery of certain politicians.  In fact given the political events in England over the last few weeks it is quite hard to think what the press could tell us that we wouldn’t believe, regardless of its veracity.

In 1889 Frederick Stubbs decided to go early with the whole April Fools thing. At midnight on Sunday 24 March 1889 he was found marching about at Piccadilly Circus  (not under the gaze of Eros of course, as it was not installed until 1894) shouting “Death of Mr. Gladstone” ‘with the utmost strength of his lungs’.

He was carrying the following morning’s Sunday Edition and the 19 year-old newsvendor was as drunk as a lord, and reeling about. Drunks were routinely rounded up by beat policemen and asked to go home  if they were capable or, taken to the nearest station house if they were not. Stubbs was not and so PC 16 C (reserve) took him by the arm and escorted him to ‘the nick’.

The next day Stubbs was brought up, possibly still the worse for his excesses and with a sore head, to face Mr Hannay’s inquisition. The magistrate noted that the eminent statesman was very much alive but Stubbs was adamant that he’d seen an article in the paper marking his death. That was Gladstone’s brother, Mr Hannay explained, not the ‘Grand Old Man’ himself.

220px-Gladstone_being_kicked_in_the_air_by_angry_men_Wellcome_V0050369Gladstone, who had split the  Liberal Party three years earlier (in 1886) over Irish Home Rule, would be in opposition until 1892 when he regained the keys to Downing Street for the fourth and final time at the age of 82. He died on 19 May 1898 at Hawarden in Wales, aged 88.

In March 1889 Mr Gladstone was ‘enjoying excellent health’ the paper had actually said.  So Stubbs had made a mistake and not deliberately tried to fool anyone, and the justice recognized this. However, he had also got drunk and caused a disturbance in a public place and for that he would pay a fine of 5 shillings (or about £20 today).

[from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper , Sunday, March 31, 1889]

Normal service will be resumed…maybe

This weekend my university is doing essential upgrading work and so my access to the database of newspapers I use to create this blog is disrupted. I may get in back later today, or tomorrow, or not until Monday, who knows?

In the meantime I thought I’d go ‘off piste’ (so to speak) and write a few thoughts on what has been going on in the world. We had a university open day on Friday and one of the obvious questions parents ask is ‘why should my son or daughter study history’, rather than a more traditional vocational subject (such as law, or business studies for example).

Well, I answer, history equips them for either of those careers and more. It gives them analytical skills, writing and oral presentation skills; it builds up their confidence and ability to argue and persuade others; History allows us the ability to look at different cultures and understand different backgrounds and belief systems. A historian can look beyond the simple answer and discover and understand nuance, he or she is is able to evaluate the merits of a range of different sources and can marshal them to support their arguments.

In fact I can’t think of a better subject for an 18 year-old to study for 3 or more years if we want informed, rational, creative and well rounded people running our businesses, institutions, schools, and country in the future.

Look at the world this week and at how events have completely foxed our political commentators, journalists and leaders. A long perspective (a historical perspective) on the war on terror would be useful rather than a knee jerk reaction. Historians can help explain why events in Nice when they are so inexplicably awful. Historians could give us a perspective on the struggle between secularism and religion, between democracy and military rule in Turkey. Likewise the war in Syria, the rise of Putin, the clash of civilizations, austerity and the banking crisis, and the breakup of European solidarity are all better understood from a historical perspective.

Too often politics is all about the moment and the next few months; history is about the past and taking ‘the long view’. I wonder what sort of Foreign Secretary Simon Schama would make? A better one that Boris Johnson I’ll wager. Timothy Garton-Ash’s perspective on Brexit was the best thing I read on the topic and he knows a thing or two about European tensions.

In 1914 the power vacuum caused by the decomposing Ottoman Empire (the ‘Sick man of Europe’) was one of the underlying causal factors in the slide towards the Great War. In the 1930s the rise of fascism was assisted by the collapse of world economies and the instability of democracies. The fall of the ‘great’ European overseas empires and each of the great powers’ attitudes towards the peoples they had attempted to integrate or exploit (or both) has very real consequences for  the French, Belgian, British and German states of today.

So we need more historians and we need to listen to more historians because around the corner lie more ‘lone wolves’, more truck suicide bombers, more Putins, more military coups, more Marine le Pens, more Farages, and Donald Trump.