Calling fellow historians

[Julio_Geordio]

@balbec

TNH

Can’t bate a good yarn.

[anon61878697]

Liam Mc , be in his late 40s / early 50s? beard ?

[TreatyStones]

That same text is going around a long time. Possibly taken from Paddy Cronins book. I reckon it’s a myth.

[anon61878697]

What part of it in particular gives you that impression?

[balbec]

The part about any cunt wanting to spend an extended period of time in Askeaton.

[Julio_Geordio]

@balbec

The part about any cunt wanting to spend an extended period of time in Askeaton.

To be fair he was doing it as a penance

[TreatyStones]

@ciarancareyshurlingarmy what do you reckon markings to the bottom of this map segment are?
I know the two markings in top right are where there is an existing house, do you think the lower ones are also likely to have been houses? Would sheds have been included on a map from back then (1834 - 1842)?

[ciarancareyshurlingarmy]

Yes, they are buildings of some sort. Farm sheds were included in those 6in maps. Looks like a rough field. Next step is to check if the house books for the townland are available online in the national archives

[TreatyStones]

I came across the outlines of the buildings when walking across the field lately so was looking them up to see if they were on any maps. Going by their location I’m guessing they were just sheds.

[backinatracksuit]

Did you happen to see the most recent John Creedon show in RTÉ (unrelated really)
Lads are finding all sorts of ancient historical buildings using drones, particularly during the recent very dry summer, I assume it due to differences in soil that have grown over them but it was really cool

[TreatyStones]

I didn’t see the show but I did read about the massive structures uncovered around Meath due to the dry spells and drones. Perfect outlines that were never noticed before.

[anon67715551]

On the subject of historical guff and indeed Co.Meath there was a spokesperson there on Nationwide waffling about an oul’ ruined bridge over the Boyne. She professed that it had been built by the Normans “in the 12th or 13th century”….Now I’m not one for nitpicking but that is a bit of a stab in the dark. Accepted historians here of standard of @Thomas_Brady or @TreatyStones would hardly be as vague as that.
The oul’ Master in the National school was able to pinpoint the battle of Clontarf as being Good Friday 1014 and he only a thick bastard. This Navan woman was only guessing I’d bet.

[TreatyStones]

Some spot.

[Tank]

The following letter was published in The Morning Post newspaper in England in 1916, during World War 1.

A MOTHER’S ANSWER TO “A COMMON SOLDIER”

To the Editor of The Morning Post

Sir, As a mother of an only child – a son now in training and waiting for the age limit to do his bit – may I be permitted to reply to Tommy Atkins, whose letter appeared in your issue of the 9th inst.? Perhaps he will kindly convey to his friends in the trenches, not what the Government thinks, not what the Pacifists think, but what the mothers of the British race think of our fighting men. It is a voice which demands to be heard, seeing that we play the most important part in the history of the world, for it is we who “mother the men” who have to uphold the honour and traditions not only of our Empire, but of the whole civilised world.

To the man who pathetically calls himself a “common soldier”, may I say that we women, who demand to be heard, will tolerate no such cry as “Peace! Peace!” where there is no peace. The corn that will wave over land watered by the blood of our brave lads shall testify to the future that their blood was not spilt in vain. We need no marble monuments to remind us. We only need that force of character behind all motives to see this monstrous world tragedy brought to a victorious ending. The blood of the dead and the dying, the blood of the “common soldier” from his “slight wounds” will not cry out to us in vain. They have all done their share, and we, as women, will do ours without murmuring and without complaint. Send the Pacifists to us and we shall very soon show them, and show the world, that in our homes at least there shall be no “sitting at home warm and cosy in the winter, cool and ‘comfy’ in the summer.” There is only one temperature for the women of the British race, and that is white heat. With those who disgrace their sacred trust of motherhood we have nothing in common. Our ears are not deaf to the cry that is ever ascending from the battlefield from men of flesh and blood whose indomitable courage is borne to us, so to speak, on every blast of the wind. We women pass on the human ammunition of ”only sons” to fill up the gaps, so that when the “common soldier” looks back before going “over the top” he may see women of the British race on his heels, reliable, dependent, uncomplaining.

The reinforcements of women are, therefore, behind the “common soldier.” We gentle-nurtured, timid sex did not want the war. It is no pleasure to us to have our homes made desolate and the apple of our eye taken away. We would sooner our lovable, promising, rollicking boy stayed at school. We would have much preferred to have gone on in a light-hearted way with our amusements and our hobbies. But the bugle call came, and we have hung up the tennis racquet, we’ve put his cap away, and we have glanced lovingly over his last report, which said “Excellent” – we’ve wrapped them all in a Union Jack and locked them up, to be taken out only after the war to be looked at. A “common soldier”, perhaps, did not count on the women, but they have their part to play, and we have risen to our responsibility. We are proud of our men, and they in turn have to be proud of us. If the men fall, Tommy Atkins, the women won’t.

Tommy Atkins to the front
He has gone to bear the brunt.
Shall “stay-at-homes” do naught but snivel and but sigh?
No, While your eyes are filling
We are up, and doing, willing
To face the music with you – or to die!

Women are created for the purpose of giving life, and men to take it. Now we are giving it in a double sense. It’s not likely we are going to fail Tommy. We shall not flinch one iota, but when the war is over he must not grudge us, when we hear the bugle call of “lights out”, a brief, very brief, space of time to withdraw into our own secret chambers and share with Rachel the Silent the lonely anguish of a bereft heart, and to look once more on the college cap, before we emerge stronger women to carry on the glorious work our men’s memories have handed down to us for now and all eternity, - Yours &c.,

A LITTLE MOTHER
August 14[1916]

The letter was so popular that it received a reply from the Queen herself and was reprinted as a pamphlet. The Queen’s response was as follows:-

The Queen was deeply touched at the ‘Little Mother’s’ beautiful letter, and Her Majesty fully realizes what her words must mean to our soldiers in the trenches and in hospitals.

The Morning Post received many replies, which included the following:

‘Florence Nightingale did great and grand things for the soldiers of her day, but no woman has done more than the “Little Mother”, whose now famous letter of The Morning Post has spread like wild-fire from trench to trench. I hope to God it will be handed down in history, for nothing like it has ever made such an impression on fighting men. I defy any man to feel weak-hearted after reading it… My God! she makes us die happy.’

One who has Fought and Bled.

‘I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the “Little Mother’s” beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.’

A Bereaved Mother .

The letter and its response are recounted in “Goodbye to All That” by Robert Graves, who recalls a marked disconnect between the rhetoric in England and the mood in the trenches.

I have my own thoughts on the letter. Anonymous letters into British papers were common at the time and it was impossible to know who really wrote them. The future Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin wrote a series of letters to newspapers around that time urging wealthy Britons to fund the war privately. There were even letters to British newspapers by politicians purporting to be from war bond holders who were now claiming to to burn their bonds in patriotic fervour. There is no way of knowing if the “Little Mother” was really a woman at all, nor is there any way of knowing who really wrote the effusive replies.

[TheBlackSpot]

I’d say the “little Mother” was a skilled propagandist and very possibly not a mother at all.

[Thomas_Brady]

I’d say the little mother was a bollix.

[TreatyStones]

@Tank

The letter was so popular that it received a reply from the Queen herself and was reprinted as a pamphlet.

How convenient

[myboyblue]

Was it a Cork woman?

[Malarkey]

@artfoley

@Sidney

This is an absolutely wonderful, withering, hilarious demolition. Norman Stone will be seething.

Norman Stone obituary | History books | The Guardian

One of the specialities of the historian Norman Stone, who has died aged 78, was character assassination. As a judge of the Fraenkel prize in contemporary history some years ago, he told the astonished members of the jury that they should not award the prize to a historian of Germany whose politics he disliked because she was an East German agent – an allegation that was enough to rule her out of contention even though it was absolutely baseless and undoubtedly defamatory.

Shortly after the death in 1982 of his patron and mentor in Cambridge, EH Carr, the author of a multivolume History of Soviet Russia and influential works on historiography and international relations, Stone published a lengthy assault on his reputation, which included lurid details of his three marriages. When a colleague criticised this “outrageous” diatribe to his face, telling him that Carr “always said you were amoral”, Stone responded: “And he always said you were a bore” (probably an invention, though one cannot know for sure).

At a time when malice and rudeness were highly prized by some rightwing Cambridge dons, Stone outdid them all in the abuse he hurled at anyone he disapproved of, including feminists (“rancid”), Oxford dons (“a dreadful collection of deadbeats, dead wood and has-beens”), students (“smelly and inattentive”), David Cameron and John Major (“transitional nobodies”), Edward Heath (“a flabby-faced coward”) and many more.

Stone was undoubtedly clever. He could write entertainingly and could summarise complex historical circumstances in a few pregnant sentences, gifts which brought him a flourishing career as a journalist and commentator. He was a talented linguist who read and spoke more than half a dozen languages, including Hungarian. Yet his career was also dogged by character flaws that prevented him from fulfilling his early promise as a historian.

Born in Glasgow, Norman was the son of Norman Sr, a fighter pilot who was killed in training just over a year later. Brought up by his mother, Mary (nee Pettigrew), a teacher, he was sent to Glasgow academy on a scholarship from his father’s squadron, flourished academically, and went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study modern languages, switching to history shortly after his arrival.

With a good degree in the subject, he embarked on a PhD on the Austro-Hungarian army before 1914, though never completed it, and gained a reputation for brilliance sufficient, along with his linguistic abilities, to obtain a research fellowship at Caius in 1965, and two years later an assistant lectureship in Russian history, moving to Jesus College in 1971 as director of studies in history.

In 1975 he published the book that made his reputation: The Eastern Front 1914-1917, which won him the Wolfson history prize and numerous laudatory reviews. This was a scintillating narrative based on a wide range of sources in several languages, including both Russian and German, admirably succinct and clearly argued. It did a great deal to redress the imbalance of the British historiography of the war, which had up to this point focused almost exclusively on the western front.

It argued powerfully that administrative chaos and poor military and political leadership were more important in causing the Russian defeat than economic weakness. However, its approach was self-confessedly old-fashioned, with its concentration on grand strategy, political and military leaders, to the neglect of the experience and morale of the ordinary soldier, factors that feature strongly in more recent accounts.

During his researches in Vienna, he had met Nicole Aubrey, the daughter of the brutal and corrupt Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s finance minister: they married in 1966 and had two sons. By the time The Eastern Front was published, the marriage was breaking down, and they divorced in 1977.

The resulting financial strain led him to start writing quick potboilers, beginning with a short life of Hitler (1980), a superficial and poorly researched work justly savaged by reviewers, notably Tim Mason, whose exposure of its weaknesses upset Stone considerably despite his own record of rubbishing other historians’ achievements.

There followed Europe Transformed 1878-1919 (1983), a short volume in the Fontana History of Europe, one of the weakest in an uneven series. His second marriage, to Christine Booker (nee Verity), came in 1982. They had a son, and she died in 2016.

As a teacher Stone could be inspiring, often winning over his pupils with his charm, which on occasion could be quite considerable, but he became increasingly undisciplined, neglecting his duties, and spending increasing amounts of time playing poker and drinking himself into oblivion in Soho.

The Cambridge University history faculty became impatient with his behaviour, but solved the problem of how to deal with him by encouraging him to apply for the professorship of modern history at Oxford, to which he was appointed in 1985 thanks largely to political support from rightwing Oxford dons reinforced by a laudatory reference from Sir Geoffrey Elton, the regius professor at Cambridge.

Stone hated Oxford, which he thought (bizarrely) was full of Marxists and out of touch with the real world. He lambasted the university on a regular basis in his newspaper column while continuing to draw his salary (a sum he frequently dismissed as too miserly to keep him in the style to which he had become accustomed), and excoriating it for refusing an honorary degree to Margaret Thatcher because of the cuts she had imposed on universities (“Why should we feed the hand that bites us?” one don memorably asked).

On the occasions when he did appear in Oxford to do some teaching, Stone became notorious for groping his female students (one of whom is said to have responded with a slap across the face), and annoyed Worcester College by sub-letting his rooms to make a bit of extra money. In 1997 the university finally grasped the nettle and arranged for his departure, though under financial terms that forced it to delay filling his chair until 2006, the year when he would have reached the statutory age of retirement.

Long before this, he had espoused a variety of rightwing political causes, advocating Britain’s departure from the EU, defending the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and supporting Croatia in the Balkan wars. He did some speechwriting for Thatcher and advised her on foreign policy, though she did not listen to his assurances that the reunification of Germany in 1990 was not a danger to European peace. On one occasion he collapsed in front of her, drunk; but she was well known for her indulgence towards alcoholics so long as they supported her politically.

After Oxford, he found a berth in Turkey, where he occupied positions at Bilkent and other universities, resigning from one in Ankara because the authorities tried to stop him drinking.

He devoted some of his remaining energies to the denial of the genocide of Armenians by Turkey in the first world war, but they were fading rapidly, and his last books – short histories of the two world wars (2007 and 2013) and The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A Personal History of the Cold War (2010) – did no justice to his real abilities, mixing worn-out historical clichés with random statements of his own personal views.

His last post was at the Danube Institute, Budapest, and his last book, Hungary: A Short History (2018) praised the country’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán among other things for his tough line on immigration.

Knowing that he did little research, never bothered to check his facts and relied on his literary flair to mask his mistakes, the publishers got serious historians to go through the text: one of them sent in a 20-page list of errors, but it was impossible to spot them all and so it was left to reviewers to point out the many further inaccuracies.

There is nothing wrong with historians being provocative so long as their provocations stimulate one to think again about the subjects they deal with. Niall Ferguson on the right would be one good example of fruitful provocation, just as AJP Taylor was on the left. But Stone’s provocations were little more than the voicing of his own personal political prejudices, and so had little or no effect on the way we think about the past.

Journalists often described him as “one of Britain’s leading historians”, but in truth he was nothing of the kind, as any serious member of the profession will tell you. The former prime minister, Heath, was wrong about many things, but he was surely right when he said of Stone during his time in Oxford: “Many parents of Oxford students must be both horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man.”

Stone is survived by his sons.

• Norman Stone, historian, born 8 March 1941; died 19 June 2019

It smacks of a blade being sharpened nany years ago and only delivered post mortem

Norman Stone · Grim Eminence · LRB 10 January 1983

[glenshane]

I thought of @Rocko when I trad this…and of @carryharry

“As a reviewer, Carr was sometimes just and never fair. He resembled a remote, irascible potentate who would not hesitate to put a whole town to the sword if one of its inhabitants ate his peas with his knife. He was quite good at seeing what authors were trying to achieve, and what the difficulties were, but he never sympathised, and he would deliver freezing judgments from on high”