The Rest is HistoryEpisode 555: 1066 Slaughter at Stamford Bridge This was in effect the last battle between the Vikings and the Saxons, with two doomed characters each representative of their cultures. Harald Hardrada was 56 years old, and although he hadn’t previously been interested in invading England, he was now because of the need for money, the desire to be the next Cnut and because he was psychologically restless and warlike. He landed with 300 longships and possibly 10,000 men north of Yorkshire, where there were many Danish connections. There he joined forces with Harold Godwinson’s own brother Tostig (boo, hiss) at the Humber. It was a hot day, and it is possible that the Norse left their armour off, because they were unaware that Godwinson had rushed from London with his army, picking up men as he went. Harald was killed at Stamford Bridge, but glowing with success, Harold Godwinson did allow his treacherous brother Tostig to return to Norway. Then blow me down, who should arrive by William of Normanby, ready for a fight!
History Extra PodcastOwain Glyndŵr:Life of the Week The blurb on the website says “Famed for his dramatic and determined revolt against English rule in the early 15th century, as well as his bold vision for an independent Wales, Owain Glyndŵr has gone down in history as a symbol of Welsh resistance and a national hero.” Well, I’d never heard of him. To be honest, I didn’t like this episode much- it assumed too much knowledge of Welsh/English history. I’m not sure if I have this right, and I don’t have enough interest to check. As Wales was a colonized region, the rich and well-connected Owain served in the English armies, then went home for about 10 years. During 1400 rebellion broke out in Wales, taking advantage of the intra-English rebellion. His lands were confiscated, then an outbreak of violence saw a Welsh victory in 1402. The first native Welsh Parliament in 100 years was held in 1404 and in 1406 Owain wrote a long treatise on the Welsh State. The Welsh had French support at first, but when the French support split, the war reverted to a Peasants Rebellion. Owain never accepted a pardon from the English for his role in the resistance, and we don’t know what happened to him.
Background Briefing (ABC)Agents of Influence Ep. 2 The Billionaire’s New Sport I’d never heard of Len Blavatnik, but apparently he’s the new head of Foxtel and the owner of Warner Music. Is he the person I have to blame for taking AFL off free-to-air on Saturday night? He is one of the oligarchs (although he does not like that term) who made his money through the carve up of Russian state enterprises after the fall of Communism, and somehow he seems to have escaped Western sanctions. He has since distanced himself from Russia, and is strongly pro-Israel and pro-Netanyahu. Yuck.
The Rest is History Episode 554: 1066 The Shadows of War After our little excursion with Harald Hardrader, we head back to 1066 again with three warlords: the Viking Harald, the French Duke of Normanby and the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson. Edward the Confessor died on 5 January 1066 and the Bishops met to choose the next king (which surprised me because I thought that the English crown was hereditary, but it wasn’t. Although family had a good head start). There were quite a few contenders to choose from: 1 Harald Hardrada who had a slight claim, and no one wanted the Vikings 2. Sven, who was King Knut (Canute)’s nephew. Another Viking. 3. William the Duke of Normanby who had been promised the throne of England 4. another descendant of Alfred the Great 5. Edward the Exile in Hungary who arrived back in England in 1057. 5. Thirteen-year old Edgar. 6. Harold Godwinson. The Bishops went for Harold Godwinson, well aware that this would prompt an invasion, and so they crowned him the very next day. Meanwhile Tostig, Harold’s brother was stewing away in exile and he invaded but was not successful. Thanks to feudalism, Harold could command 90% of English men, but he was facing Norman technology and confidence, sharpened by religious reform under hardline Catholic reformer Hildebrand (who was later to become Pope Gregory VII). When bad winds arrived, threatening to delay William of Normanby’s troops, Harold decided to stand down his army which was a big mistake because who should arrive but brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada!
Half Life BBCEpisode 7 The City Forgets Happy to distance himself from his great-grandfather’s half-truths, Joe turns to his great-grandfather Siegfried’s sister Elizabeth who redeemed the family somewhat by establishing a nursery and orphanage for Jewish children in Munich. Once the Nazis came to power, Elizabeth herself escaped to Tel Aviv, and there she read about the gradual deportation, in several tranches, of all the children in her orphanage. In the concentration camps they were gassed by the same chemicals that Joe’s great-grandfather had produced. Episode 8 A Fracture Joe returns to Germany, where eventually a memorial to the Dersim massacre is unveiled, something that would not be possible in Turkey, where all mention of the massacre is suppressed. Kurdish activists are trying to get the German government to take responsibility because the chemicals were manufactured there (which is a bit of a long stretch, I reckon, and they’re probably only pursuing it because the Turkish government won’t admit it). I’m getting a bit sick of Joe making it all about him. It’s about time this series finished.
This book is both companion and expansion of Barbara Minchinton’s The Women of Little Lon (my review here) which looked at the sex work industry in nineteenth century Melbourne. Madame Brussels is one of the brothel keepers that Minchin described in the earlier book as part of the ecology and economy of Melbourne’s brothel precinct, but here she deals with Madame Brussels as biography, rather than one name among others.
Madame Brussels is probably the best known of Melbourne’s ‘flash madams’, now immortalized with her own lane and roof-top bar. She was certainly well known in the late 19th century, too, through her political and policing contacts that largely shielded her from prosecution, court appearances and notoriety. Caroline Hodgson nee Lohmar was born in Germany, married in UK and arrived in Melbourne with her husband ‘Stud’ Hodgson in 1871, shortly after her marriage. She rode the exhilaration of the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ land boom, suffered the 1890s recession, and was increasingly hemmed in by the ever-tightening moral strictures of the early 20th century.
Soon after her arrival in Melbourne her husband left her to work as a policeman ‘up-country’, returning twenty years later in the depth of the 1890s depression in poor health. Left in a strange city as a deserted wife, she opened a boarding house in Lonsdale Street and gradually began accumulating property adjoining her original purchase, later purchasing property in South Melbourne, Middle Park and Beaconsfield Parade in St Kilda. She presided over her brothels, but there is no evidence that she worked as a sex worker herself. Her brothel attracted politicians and magistrates and there were rumours that Alfred Plumpton, then music critic for The Age and composer, was her lover. Although she appeared in court several times, she was always well represented and almost magically the magistrate’s bench filled up with worthy JPs who were not otherwise active in the courts (but may well have been active in her brothel). She remarried after her first husband’s death, but this marriage to fellow-German Jacob Pohl was no more successful than her first, as he soon left her to live in South Africa for several years. After a couple of years’ absence from the brothel scene, she started up again but times and politics had changed.
In the years preceding the turn of the century she became increasingly name-checked by moral reformers, particularly Henry Varley, and became a regular object of scandal in John Norton’s Truth newspaper (which had plenty of the former, and little of the latter, despite the name). In April 1907, after appearing in court charged under new laws with “owing and operating a disorderly house”, she closed her brothel in Lonsdale Street, and died soon after in 1908. Despite an extravagant funeral, she had little to show for the wealth which had passed through her hands.
As might be expected of a notorious entrepreneur, the sources for her life are skewed by real estate transaction documents and court appearances reported breathlessly by the newspapers. There is a genealogical record, although it is patchy: for example, it is not clear whether her ‘adopted’ daughter Irene was actually her own daughter. There are the annual ‘in memoriam’ notices that she placed in the newspapers after her first husband’s death, as was the practice in the early 20th century. But in terms of letters, diaries etc, there is nothing.
In an afterword Phillip Bentley, who is credited as co-author writes:
…we have remained resolute our desire for all conjecture to have a basis in fact and so have resisted the temptation to speculate on how she overcame her early education towards ‘moral earnestness, humility, self-sacrifice and obedience to authority’ in order to become Melbourne’s most famous brothel madam of the nineteenth century (p. 253)
I’m not absolutely convinced that the authors fulfilled this resolution. There are many times that they raise questions which they leave hanging in the absence of evidence, but the questions are raised nonetheless, couched in “may” and “could” statements. The chapter ‘A Curious Gentlemen’s Club’ I found particularly unconvincing, where the question of flagellation is raised, largely on the basis of her first husband’s uncle’s involvement in the ‘Cannibal Club’ and the presence in Melbourne of journalist George Augustus Sala, who was said to have coined the phrase ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ as well as being the anonymous author of flagellation pornography. As the final paragraph of the ten-page chapter says:
In all the records and writings and newspaper reports examined to date there is no suggestion that Caroline’s establishments offered anything other than ordinary common-or-garden variety male-female sex. There are no wild rumours, no snide passing remarks from journalists or parliamentarians under privilege, in fact no hints at all of anything alone the lines of the ‘fladge brothels’ in London. That does not mean it was not happening of course: it means that if it was, we simply can’t see it. (p. 82)
Likewise the chapter where they raise the question of whether her first husband Stud was homosexual raises the question but then admits “There is no way we can know for certain whether Stud was gay” (p.140). I’m not sure that raising questions, identifying parallels and possible networks is sufficiently rigorous, although surely a temptation when writing a life of such notoriety which provided relatively barren and biassed documentary evidence.
This book stands on its own two feet, but I think that I appreciated it more for having previously read The Women of Little Lon, a book which has firmer evidentiary foundations than this one. But I guess that’s part of the challenge of biography: finding the individual person while confronting the dearth of evidence. Even Phillip Bentley admits that perhaps they have not unpacked her personality as much as they would have liked (p. 253), but certainly the authors have succeeded in bringing out the person behind the name now adopted by popular culture with such glee.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 