Vale White Mouse - Bravest of the Brave

Nancy Wake has just died aged 98. Words are superfluous. The actions of this extraordinary woman are her legacy to history. For sixty years, Australia disgracefully refused to recognise her wartime achievements and only in 2004 was she finally accorded her birth nation's highest honour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Wake


"The White Mouse", Portrait by Robert Hannaford








The Lady and the Pirates

While researching an unrelated topic in an online historical newspaper, I happened upon mention of a book with the florid title of A Lady's Captivity among Chinese Pirates in the Chinese Seas and I was swiftly diverted.
Who was this "lady" and how did she come to be in the "Chinese Seas" in the first place?



Fanny Loviot



It turns out she was a Frenchwoman, Fanny Loviot, who travelled from France to San Francisco in the rip-roaring days of the California Gold Rush. She was rather reticent in describing what she was actually up to but given her destination, it is more than likely that the "commercial" interests she mentions were the prostitution business. She later decided to travel to Hong Kong and it was while returning from there that she became the victim of pirates and the subject of a major rescue effort by the British. 

The full text of A Lady's Captivity ... is freely available to read online in a number of formats and even if some of the facts as related therein are as shady as Fanny's background, the voyage on the Chilean-registered brig Caldera in the company of the dashing Captain Matthew Rooney [see note below] and the Chinese merchant Than Sing whose actions saved Fanny from a desperate fate, still makes for an exciting read even today. The book was also reprinted recently by the National Maritime Museum in the UK.

On her return to France, Fanny gained much publicity and naturally enough published the account of her adventures. It was later translated into English by the equally fascinating and adventurous novelist, traveller, and Egyptologist, Amelia B. Edwards.

However, I have been unable to discover what happened to Fanny in later life and she seems to have faded from the public eye.

Another French Wikipedia entry describes the French lottery scheme under which Fanny purportedly travelled to California. This turns out to be an amazing historical scam in itself and Curt Gentry's 1964 book The Madams of San Francisco devotes an entire chapter to the scheme. It had various aims, primarily to fill government coffers and ensure the return of Louis Napoleon to power but was also a way of getting rid of many hundreds of French poor and undesirables by packing them off to California. Even the public drawing of the tickets in the Champs Elysees in November 1851 with 40,000 people looking on seems to have been conducted with sleight of hand and none of the citizens taken in by the scam ever received a penny.



See Chapter 5 "The Lottery of the Golden Ingots"

Note:  Assuming this has to be the same Captain Matthew Rooney, he was already a major player in the "Chinese Seas" himself and is worthy of having a biography of his own. Dealing in everything from opium to camphor, he is mentioned in various histories about Formosa (Taiwan). 
Some details can be read here.

Correction!

This is a correction to an earlier post I wrote on female despatch riders.

Various experts (including Barbara Legrand a WW1 battflefield guide) have stated on the Facebook page for the Lost Diggers of World War I that this woman is most likely a French mademoiselle dressing up for fun by wearing a corporal's uniform and cap and she isn't a despatch rider herself.

It just goes to show how images and photographs can be misinterpeted, especially if one doesn't examine them closely enough or isn't an expert in the era!

This is not to say there were no female despatch riders at all during First World War, and women riders most certainly played a very important role in the Second.

The Wrens were among the first.
http://www.seayourhistory.org.uk/content/view/133/221/1/1/

See also:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/tees/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8531000/8531137.stm

"A lady of an excellent spirit and judgment ..."

Elizabeth Claypole, The Royal Collection

With my fascination for the by-ways of history, I'm used to digging for facts on little-known individuals, but am always surprised when I stumble across others who led prominent lives that one might have expected to be well-documented, only to discover it isn't the case.

Elizabeth Claypole is one such example. The short entry on the Westminster Abbey website where she is buried intrigued me and I tried to find out more about her but with little success.

It seems that no-one has attempted a biography - there isn't even an historical novel - about Elizabeth's interesting, if short, life. She has walk-on roles in a few books about her father Oliver Cromwell, but the only detailed articles I could find on her were written by men in the 19th Century and it is odd that she does not seem worthy of more recent scholarship.


Too often, the truth of history is altered or re-written to suit changing times, and when King Charles II was restored to the English throne he was determined to blacken the reputations of everyone who had been responsible for the execution of his father, King Charles I, or had been supporters of Oliver Cromwell. Many individuals (including Cromwell himself) who had originally been buried at Westminster Abbey were exhumed, hung at Tyburn and the bodies eventually ended up in a communal pit in the churchyard of St Margaret's next door and only Elizabeth Claypole remained where she was. Perhaps she was simply overlooked or, more likely, she was still remembered as someone who tried to intercede with her father on behalf of royalist offenders and others; that she was the only person who had the power to move him. It was said that she even berated him on her deathbed for the blood he had caused to be shed.

John Claypole, National Portrait Gallery

Elizabeth married John Claypole at the age of 16 and had at least four children who either died young or left no issue of their own. Her husband seems to have been more dissipated cavalier than puritanical roundhead, with a fondness for the good life. He disinherited his second wife and child, had an affair with his laundress, and sold off the family estate at Northborough.


In the two most reproduced portraits of Elizabeth - one of which is this rather haughty one at Chequers  - and another in the National Portrait Gallery she is shown dressed in silken and expensive finery that would have been anathema to her Puritan father. As both portraits were completed after her death one can't help but wonder if there was deliberate embellishment and/or manipulation of her image for political purposes, as she seems quite different from the fresher faced and simpler miniatures in the Royal Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum.



Elizabeth Claypole, Victoria and Albert Museum



It was well-known that Oliver Cromwell was often at loggerheads with his strong-willed daughter and despaired of her fondness of what he perceived to be "worldly vanities and worldy company". But in spite of his frustrations with her, it seems that Elizabeth was always his favourite child and he was utterly devastated when she died at Hampton Court at the age of just 29. Perhaps her loss was too much to bear and he himself died just one month later.

‘a lady of an excellent spirit and judgment, and of a most noble disposition, eminent in all princely qualities conjoined with sincere resentments of true religion and piety’

(Mercurius Politicus, 5–12 Aug 1658).



Among the portraits in the National Portrait Gallery collection is this mid-19th Century engraving of Cromwell's family pleading with him to spare the life of King Charles I. Presumably the woman leaning on his arm is Elizabeth.

For more details on the life of Elizabeth Claypole, see English Historical Review R. W. Ramsay 1892 and Memorable Women of Puritan Times Vol 1 James Anderson 1862, also the Oxford Dictionary of Biography.













"An extraordinary girl; she never would sit still."

In a week when I'm baffled by the reasoning (if any) behind the idiocy of "planking" or what young women hope to achieve in demanding the right to dress and look like hookers on "slut walks", it was heartening to stumble across the remarkable story of a woman from an earlier generation who deliberately went into a hazardous and remote area of the world populated by headhunters - the traditional kind, not modern-day business ones! - but who was accepted by the people and developed a very close bond with them.
She was not formally trained in anthropology but she was awarded the Lawrence of Arabia Medal for her work among the Nagas. (See here for general information on Nagaland.)
Later, in true Empire spirit, Ursula Graham Bower (Betts) displayed grit, resourcefulness and courage in a little-known arena of the Second World War, leading her Naga people in guerilla warfare against the Japanese.
Annabel Venning gives a good summary of her life in this 2010 article in The Daily Mail. In 1945, Time Magazine wrote about her exploits with the lurid title of "Ursula and the Naked Nagas".
Yet again, this is another amazing woman who deserves to be much better known but still seems to be just another feminine footnote to history.
Maybe that could change, with a new book on Ursula scheduled to be published in 2012.

Ursula wrote several books herself and a couple of radio plays were written about her exploits. She took vast numbers of photographs, including those in this collection.

Others can be found along with diaries, manuscripts and other documents at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and at Cambridge University, including some unique colour film footage from the 1930s and 1940s.

For anyone wanting to gain more insight into what women of that British Empire era could be like, the two-part video interview done in 1985 by Alan Macfarlane is an excellent resource.

In the first part, Ursula describes her immediate feeling of connection with the Naga people, as if she had always known them. Her manner is very matter of fact as she describes living among them, their culture and habits and, not least, their great bravery during the War. And in the last few minutes on the second tape, she tells us in her wonderfully plummy voice, and with typical understatement, how she came to meet her husband, get engaged and married within three weeks!  It seems she made the right choice and F. N. Betts had a distinguished career of his own and wrote many publications relating to natural history. One of their daughters described going back to Nagaland many years later in this transcript of a BBC radio interview.

Her mother once said Ursula was "an extraordinary girl; she never would sit still," but it seems she did sit still long enough to have this oil painting done wearing the traditional wedding dress of the Zemi people. The portrait is from a private collection and can be found among the numerous artefacts listed on the university Index relating to Ursula.

The hazards of compilations

I recently picked up a copy of a 1997 book entitled The Giant Book of Influential Women: The 100 Greatest Women of All Time by Deborah G. Felder.  (Not to be confused with a recent work of the same name edited by Kathleen Kuiper and published by Britannica - available to read here on Scribd.)
I am always curious as to how an author or editor decides who is to be included in such books and, to be honest, why they get published in the first place as they usually end up in huge wobbly piles in remainder bookshops. They must be fairly easy to write but are not always reliable works as they are often derivative or cobbled together from secondary or previously published sources and some of them are guilty of perpetuating myths or inaccuracies.
While I concur with some of Felder's choices in this particular work - those women who have left important marks on history that still resonate around the world such as Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, or Emmeline Pankhurst - others left me baffled. As a non-American, they are unfamiliar to me: civil rights activists, psychologists and short story writers.
The author did admit in her introduction that the project was bound to generate controversy. She gathered her names from a survey of women's studies professors in American colleges or universities, which seems very narrow as surely their reasoning was bound to get skewed in the direction of their academic (American) interests? One who declined to submit a list wrote: "Frankly, I think your project is misguided and will lead to more criticism than you can imagine." I'm guessing it did as I notice the book has gone into subsequent editions in which the title has wisely been changed to 100 American Women who Shaped American History.

1997 Australian Edition

2005 American (Bluewood) Edition

In 2010, the British newspaper The Independent published a similar list. Again, if one is unfamiliar with modern British entertainment, politics or sport, the majority of these names mean nothing. These women might have changed Britain recently, but not necessarily impacted on the world as a whole. You can read that list here.
Other selections can be highly subjective and even verge on the ridiculous, such as an Esquire magazine list of 2010 in which serious contenders like Joanne of Arc and Golda Meir have to compete against B-grade actresses, pop princesses and even the 1972 Dallas Cheerleaders! 
One could spend many hours trying to find a definitive list of women who changed the world, but it would be impossible as of course no two people are going to come to the same conclusions. Much better to narrow down your search to specific eras or endeavours:  top women athletes, scientists, reformers, etc. I notice there is even a book out there on the 100 greatest Welsh women!
Surprisingly, two books on wild/notorious women have been published already this year in Australia that appear to go over tired ground. In this day of quick look-ups on Google and Wikipedia for anyone who wants a pocket history of an individual, I don't understand the reasoning by publishers as both books are rather expensive and will end up in those wobbly remainders piles sooner than later.
Wild Women by Pamela Robson includes individuals who have been written about extensively already like Bonnie Parker (Bonnie & Clyde) and the female pirate Anne Bonny but at least she does seem to offer some hope by including intriguing lesser-known characters such as a Queen of Angola.
Notorious Australian Women by Kay Saunders tackles well-worn women like Tilly Devine and Mary Bryant who have been covered in numerous compilations on infamous Australians.
And being the author of a major work on Lola Montez myself, I must take umbrage with the ludicrous and historically ill-informed choice of cover on this second work!
Lola Montez could never be described as an "Australian woman" by any stretch of the imagination. She only visited Australia for a short period in the 1850s as a performer, albeit creating a great deal of notoriety when she did so.
Nobody in their right mind would dare to suggest that other famous entertainer, Frank Sinatra, was a notorious "Australian man" as a result of his visit to the country in 1974 during which he created a similar degree of mayhem! (Check out the Dennis Hopper movie about that event.)

The last one standing (or sitting) is a woman

A poignant day in history: the last man believed to have served in World War I has died in Perth, Western Australia. He was Claude Choules, and despite the French-sounding name was British.

Florence celebrates her 110th in February (pic British Forces News)

That leaves Florence Green, who served as a waitress in the fledgling Royal Air Force in 1918 as the last (wo)man standing, or perhaps more often sitting, given her great age.
However, this isn't to say that there aren't still a few longlived stray individuals out there who might also qualify to have served in some capacity in the Great War.
What about the many other nationalities who are often overlooked in these mostly Western statistics?
According to some sources in the British army alone, over 1.5 million "Indians and other 'coloured' troops" served in that war and yet there is very little known about most of them. Plus there are the non-combatant labourers such as the Chinese and Africans who did not fight, but also died in the course of doing their work. No doubt some of them might also have been waiters like Florence Green, but because of the class and racial attitudes of the day, they have long been lost to history.


Waitresses wanted