Previous to that I had never actually read a novel by her, partly because I had been put off by the rather prissy, very English, format of a lot of British television adaptations.
Her novels are actually rather wittier than you would think from the tv adaptations, and actually tell you quite a lot about how society in post world war one England functioned, as well as being fun to read.
Since then I’ve read one or two of her novels, usually by downloading the public domain Project Gutenberg edition to my kindle, and currently I’m reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
I won’t recount the story, if you’ve read the book you know it, and if you havn’t I won’t spoil the story, and anyway, there’s a synopsis on wikipedia.
However, one thing puzzles me about the book – where one would normally write clue, she writes clew.
The Gutenberg Edition is based on the US Grosset and Dunlap 1926 edition (Grossett and Dunlap were an imprint of the much larger Dodd Mead and Company which among other things published mystery and crime novels in the 1920s and 30s). It’s possible that if you have a different edition you won’t have this seemingly aberrant spelling.
Clew is quite obviously an alternative spelling of clue, and indeed my old 1970s Collins English dictionary lists it as such.
What’s more interesting is that clew derives from the middle English word for a ball of thread or twine.
In the Theseus and Ariadne myth, Ariadne, who has the hots for Theseus, gives Theseus a ball of twine so that when he goes into the maze like lair of the minotaur to confront and slay the beast he can find his way back so he can then marry her. Theseus, being a bit of a shit, then abandons her to die on Naxos.
The story of Theseus and Ariadne was quite well known in medieval times where it was framed as a story of courtly love, sacrifice and betrayal, with the ball of twine as a key part of the story.
And so clew as well as a ball of twine, becomes the name for something that will lead you to the solution to a problem, in short, a clue…
When first published to novel was controversial and published anonymously.
In Victorian times, marrying the sister of your dead wife was illegal, and forbidden by the Church of England and the Anglican Church of Ireland, and similarly illegal in Scotland. To have sex with your wife’s sister was not only adulterous if she was still alive, but considered incest, even if your wife had died.
And resulting children would automatically be considered illegitimate.
And women did die, from diseases treatable today, and from complications in childbirth, meaning that widowers were more common than they are today.
Not that it didn’t happen. No less a person than Charles Austen, Jane Austen’s brother and a senior naval officer did so marrying his wife Frances’s sister Harriet a few years after Frances died.
Society seems to have operated on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis. Legal changes in the 1850’s gave the middle classes a route to semi respectability, when marriages between widowers and their dead spouse’s sister contracted overseas were grudgingly recognised.
By the 1860’s it was a hot topic, but successive attempts to legalise such marriages failed, only becoming legal in 1907.
He shall prick that annual blister, marriage with deceased wife’s sister
referring to the successive attempts to get a bill legalising such marriages through parliament
But why was it such a hot topic?
The number of cases was quite small, people were prepared to look the other way, and anyway you could get married overseas.
And the reason is that Victorian middle class concern, property and inheritance. The children born from such a marriage were illegitimate and could not inherit, and any children from a previous legal union would be able to challenge any inheritance. It could also be argued that the husband had no legal right to his deceased wife’s sister’s property, which would make a legal mess worthy of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, especially if there were children concerned.
But why marry one’s dead wife’s sister? Well, the ways of the heart are of course mysterious, but equally if one lived in a small country town, the middle class social circle would have been quite small, and of course you would already be acquainted with your spouse’s sister, in much the same way as one sees marriages between colleagues who work closely together.
And I don’t think we can get precious about this. Society isn’t that different today, with supermarket magazines with headlines like ‘I slept with my best friends ex...’ Social proximity has always been the basis of relationships.
However, despite the 1907 act legalising marriage to a deceased wife’s sister, it remained illegal for a woman to marry her deceased husband’s brother.
That is, until 1921, when, in a highly cynical move, marriage between a widow and her deceased husband’s brother became legal.
The move was highly cynical in the wake of the first world war, where a large number of young men had died, including disproportionately those from the middle and upper classes, as officers were supposed to lead from the front leading to higher death rate among junior officers.
Encouraging widows to marry their dead husband’s brother reduced the amount of money going to fund war widow’s pensions and hopefully would lead to an increase in the middle class birth rate…
It’s quite an interesting little story about how people opening up an old fireplace found a library book forgotten for 150 years in a box hidden in the fireplace.
Kiama, about 120km south of Sydney, first became a population centre in the 1830s gaining a Post Office in 1841.
Around the same time as it acquired a post office, it also acquired the various features of mid Victorian society, a school of arts, a literary society and by the 1860s a public library.
Like many public libraries at the time, subscribers paid a modest fee to help finance the operation of the library, pay staff, who were often volunteers, an honorarium, and of course, buy books.
What it shows is that the library was important to the community and how important the School of Arts/ Mechanics Institute movement was to developing intellectual life in communities outside the colonial capitals in the nineteenth century.
While sometimes it seems as all the nineteenth century holdings of the Athenaeum are nothing but sensation novels, and the early twentieth century holdings crime, mystery and romance novels, it’s not quite true, there are books of chicken husbandry and of course important works such as an early (1863) edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
In mid nineteenth century Australia, books were expensive, mostly imported from the United Kingdom.
Community resources, such as Mechanics Institute Libraries were important not only in providing entertainment in the form of sensation novels but also access to knowledge …
Earlier this year, we had a road trip in WA, and the furtherest east we got to was Bremer Bay, at the end of a frayed tarmac road running through scrub for 60km.
It was a place so remote it felt like the edge of nowhere – road signs pointing east pointed to Esperance and to Eucla, almost on the border with South Australia. Otherwise nothing but sea and scrub.
One day when we were there we had lunch in the Telegraph Cafe, which is an old stone building dating from 1896 that was a telegraph relay station on the East West Telegraph line which connected Western Australia to the eastern colonies, and by extension, to the outside world.
The building that is now the cafe isn’t the first telegraph station on the site. The first wooden building dated from the 1870s, and was replaced by today’s substantial stone building in 1896 after it burned down.
Remember that in the 1870s there was no east west railway line, and no road to speak of across the desert, and the only communication with eastern Australia was by ship.
Mail went at the speed of a steamship. Western Australia was isolated, surrounded by desert on one side and the ocean on the other, and very much a world of its own.
The East West Telegraph changed that. The colony was no longer isolated.
And ending that isolation was partly due to Mary Wellstead.
Mary Wellstead with her husband in the 1880s – Wikipedia
When the Bremer Bay telegraph station was commissioned in 1876 there were no staff to man it.
Mary’s father worked on the construction of the line, and when no men were available to man the new station Mary was trained in telegraphy and morse code by James Coates Fleming, then the Superintendent of telegraphs for the colony.
Fleming was confident enough of her abilities to appoint her as temporary Station Master – today we would say Station Manager – until the arrival of a male team of telegraphists the following year, making Mary Wellstead possibly the first female telegraphist in Australia, and almost certainly the first female telegraph station manager.
After her replacement by a male manager, Mary continued to work at the station until she married in 1881 – in these days, as it was until the 1960s, women were expected to leave professional and government jobs when they married.
However, should you find yourself in Bremer Bay, remember Mary Wellstead, a woman who broke the glass ceiling by simply doing her job and doing it well.
About a month ago I blogged about that phenomenon of the Victorian postal service, the ‘Too late’ postmark.
Well I couldn’t resist, and ended up buying an example for myself from a dealer in Vienna.
It’s a prepaid international postcard (hence the 1d stamp as opposed to the green ½d domestic stamp) to an address in Vienna.
It had obviously been posted too late to make the mail boat to Europe and as well as a postmark had been stamped ‘Too Late’ by the British post office. Unfortunately the date of posting is illegible, but the Austro Hungarian postal authorities had also stamped the postcard 8.7.92 (ie 08 July 1892) to show when it had arrived in the Vienna sorting office.
Flipping it over, I’d expected a fairly standard message along the lines of ‘arrived safely, food and weather both terrible’, bit it’s actually more interesting than that
it’s an order acknowledgement from Sampson Low, Marston and company, who, as I know from my work cataloguing the historic book collection at the Athenaeum, were a major nineteenth century publisher of fiction in Britain, and by extension the British Empire.
Ephemera like this show that not only were Sampson Low supplying distributors in the UK but that they were handling orders from across Europe …
To some he was a mystic and a seeker after truth, to some a charlatan, and perhaps he was something in between.
Growing up in Kars, which after the 1877 war between Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman empire, was a city of Imperial Russia, he was exposed to a polyethnic society of Yazidis, Pontic Greeks, Armenians, Ottoman Turks, Kurds and of course, Russians.
Gurdjieff, who was a Pontic Greek by origin grew up speaking multiple languages, including Russian, Georgian and formal Ottoman period Turkish.
In the 1970s, he was perhaps best known for his not quite autobiography, Meetings with remarkable men, in which he details his wanderings through the newly conquered lands of Central Asia, which prior to the 1870s had been a mix of independent khanates and emirates, but were now Russian governates, over which the Great Game played out.
Whether Gurdjieff himself was simply a wandering mystic or if he was a minor player in the Great Game is unknown, but later he set himself up as mystic and teacher first in Moscow and then St Petersburg. Prior to his arrival in Moscow in 1912 he seems to have left little in the way of a paper trail – something that given the chaos of Russian history during the early part of the twentieth century is not that unusual – some records survived, some were burnt, and some were simply lost.
However despite its authoritarian nature, tsarist Russia had a great tolerance for wandering mystics, holy men, and practioners of esoteric arts, and Gurdjieff seems to have prospered attracting a small group of followers.
After the revolution, Gurdjieff abandoned Petrograd moved to Georgia which for a short time after the Revolution was an independent state,
In Georgia he again set up a spiritual community and produced plays and ballets in Tbilisi, before fleeing the Soviet takeover of Georgia in 1920, first to Turkey and then to Paris.
But this is the interesting bit – Gurdjieff’s stay in Tbilisi was not his first, the few records we have of his early life show he studied at the Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi at the same time as one Josef Dzugashvili, later Stalin.
There’s no evidence that they knew each other or were friends, but the seminary was a small community and, Stalin, who was more of an intellectual than he is often given credit for, might have been interested in talking with Gurdjieff and discussing ideas.
It’s strange to think that possibly, just possibly the mystic to be and the future dictator shared a glass of tea and a cigarette and talked of myths and legends…
I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say that I’ve always enjoyed ‘golden age’ novels both for their stories and their portraits of a now vanished world.
Somehow a discount easyJet flight to Bodrum just doesn’t have the romance of the Orient Express. Even a TGV to Nice, while clean, efficient and comfortable is hardly le train bleu.
Agatha Christie, despite being very much a woman of her time, clearly had an adventurous streak, going surfing, and travelling to Baghdad by train and bus at a time when Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq were still strange exotic places, and not simply a source of dismal news headlines.
After all, when she travelled there, it was not that long since Gertrude Bell and a certain TE Lawrence had been almost the only Europeans to travel through what had been a remote and inaccessible part of the Ottoman empire.
Later on, in the mid 1930s, she spent several seasons in the field with her husband Max Mallowan when he was excavating in Syrian Kurdistan.
And she wrote a memoir, Come, tell me how you live, describing her time in the field, with a little bit of poetic licence along the way.
Like much of her writing it is very much of its time and some of the attitudes and language used jars a little bit today, but it does convey how archaeology was done before it became the highly technical and scientific discipline it is today, as well as the joys of fieldwork, from bedbugs to beautiful mornings in remote areas.
Unlike some of her earlier books it’s not yet in the public domain. As it was only published in 1946 despite mostly being written in the 1930s, it will be a few years until it becomes available for download.
The book itself seems to have dropped out of sight, but not quite – such is the power of the Christie’s name, it’s still available in paperback, although Amazon wants the best part of forty bucks for a copy. Ebook editions are more reasonably priced, and as the book has been reprinted on an off over the years, second hand copies are easy enough to track down if you prefer a physical copy.
It’s not TimeTeam by any means, but if you are interested in how archaeology was conducted in the 1930s, it’s a valuable source…
Her second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist working in Iraq in 1930.
Mallowan was probably the last of the heroic age of archaeology, when men in shorts went out to strange and exotic locations, dug holes, and discovered things. Apprenticed to Leonard Woolley, Mallowan worked at Ur with Woolley, before going on to direct his own excavations in the north of Iraq and Syrian Kurdistan, the area through which the men of Xenophon’s Persian expedition marched.
Anyway, cutting to the chase, Agatha Christie met Max Mallowan at the excavations in Ur, not as you might think, at some genteel garden party back in England.
And that of course begs the question of how did Agatha Christie get to Iraq?
And the answer is breathtakingly simple – she got the train.
(Actually she didn’t – quite. She took the Taurus Express to Aleppo and then a connecting train to Damascus, and after touring the city for a few days , took a long distance express bus to Baghdad.)
Lets go back to the years before the First World War.
The Ottoman empire, while it had lost its territories in Europe and in Libya still sprawled over what is today Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine/Israel, and even uncertainly into a little bit of what is now Saudi Arabia.
And while it was relatively underdeveloped, the Ottoman empire had begun to build a railway network to connect its empire together.
Perhaps the best known is the Hejaz line, spectacularly destroyed by Lawrence of Arabia (himself a former archaeologist) during world war one, built to take pilgrims to the holy places of Islam.
The other great railway project was the Berlin to Baghdad railway.
Originally conceived in the years before the First World War, it was a plan to build a railway line to Baghdad from Istanbul and the connect it to the European railway network.
Imperial Germany saw it as a way of potentially moving troops to the Persian Gulf to threaten British interests in the region, Imperial Russia saw it as a threat to its interests in Iran and The Caucasus, and the British just didn’t like the idea.
Finance was a continual problem as the Ottoman Empire was broke and could not guarantee the vast loans to build it, meaning that it was incomplete by the beginning of World War One.
In fact the line was only completed through in 1940.
Post world war one, part of the line formed the border between Ataturk’s new Turkish Republic and the French protectorate in Syria, and there was a gap between the line in eastern Turkey and railway line from Baghdad to Mosul and Kirkuk in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan.
However, in 1930, the same company as ran the Orient Express in Europe began running the Taurus Express via Aleppo in Syria to both Beirut and Baghdad.
Passengers to Baghdad had to transfer to large buses at the Turkish border to transfer to the then end of the Iraqi railway line in Kirkuk before travelling on to Baghdad and Basra.
Equally, there was an express bus, run by a British company, from Damascus to Baghdad, and this is how Agatha Christie reached Baghdad in what must have been quite an adventurous journey, albeit with the aid Cook’s representatives and the Orient Express company’s staff.
By 1940, the line was complete, and it was possible to travel all the way by rail from Istanbul to Baghdad, and with a change of trains, on to Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf.
Over the years, there were changes to the route, for example Turkey built a new section of the line via Gaziantep to avoid the detour via Aleppo in Syria.
The Lebanese civil war in the nineteen seventies put an end to the service to Beirut, and political problems meant that by the late nineteen eighties the service to Baghdad was cut back to the border with Turkey at Nusabiyah, but amazingly, a through service to Damascus via Aleppo continued to run until the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011.
Now there are no trains to Baghdad, or Damascus, and of course the conflict with Islamic State in the east of Syria was fought over the route of the railway, and not surprisingly, the service has been suspended since 2014.
So what of the future of the line?
I suspect that it will be a long time before we see passenger services from Istanbul to Baghdad again. Even if the security situation improves it will almost certainly remain cheaper and safer to fly, and the heady days of luxury trains rattling across the Mesopotamian plain are long behind us.
However, railways have never really been about passenger travel over long distances.
In the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century there were various long haul trains such as the Orient Express, the St Petersburg express and the Trans Siberian, but the reality today is that air travel has eaten the transcontinental expresses’ lunch.
Let’s take an Australian example.
The train from Brisbane to Cairns, over largely unimproved tracks, takes just over a day to cover the 1600 or so kilometres north along the Queensland coast, despite using modent tilt train technology to ensure a faster journey.
The previous classic passenger service, The Sunlander, which we took in 2014, took closer to thirty hours.
You can fly in less than three hours, meaning that to travel the route of the Brisbane Cairns train is something that you only do for fun.
In truth, long distance railways have always really been about freight.
Ever since I once spent a very long time waiting at a railway crossing in Cherbourg waiting for a train full of Zanussi washing machines, fridges and Renault cars to pass I’ve been convinced of the economics of long distance rail freight.
A train, averaging say 60km/h, can cover a huge distance cheaply and economically, more economically than the equivalent in trucks.
When we were recently in Fremantle, our rental apartment looked over the rail line from Fremantle docks. Dual gauge, it eventually connected to the east west transcontinental railway line, and our sleep was regularly punctuated by clanking and hooting as immensely long train loads of containers set off towards the east coast, meaning they would probably be in Sydney in three or four days time.
And so it would be for the Istanbul Baghdad railway. Reconstructed it would provide a link to Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf to allow the transport of freight overland from Iraq and the Gulf states to Europe.
Saudi Arabia is already building a substantial railway network, and initiatives such as the Gulf Railway have the potential to allow the development of freight network bypassing the strait of Hormuz and connecting ports in Oman on the Arabian sea to Europe.
Yes, there will inevitably be problems, for example there are as yet no plans to connect the Iraqi railway network to the Gulf Railway, although the logic is inescapable.
All it takes is political will.
And this is not a fantasy. Once, the borders were more or less open. In the seventies, travelling around Europe one would occasionally see cars with Iraqi plates that had driven from Iraq to Europe on holiday driving trips – in fact at one time I had an Iraqi refugee GP, and she too remembered holiday trips from Baghdad to Istanbul and Greece all overland.
As is well known, I have a bit of a fascination for postal ephemera from the nineteenth century, and I was highly intrigued by this post from the Derbyshire record office …
Definitely in the ‘rather interesting’ category, and something I had not come across.
A little more digging shows that “too late” stamps were quite commonly used throughout the British Empire by the various postal administrations, including mail overseas.
Obvious when you think about it, if your mail is sent weekly by steamship missing the post could mean a substantial delay, and not just a day or two.
Uniquely, Victoria implemented a “too late” fee of sixpence (6d – a bit more than five bucks today), where, if you paid the extra fee the sorting office crammed your letter in a mail bag that was sent to the ship or train as late as possible before departure, again important in the days when mail was sent by steamship either between the Australian colonies or overseas …
I’ve been reading Shirley Barrett’s Rush Oh!, a story about whaling in Eden in the far south east of New South Wales, and an area which I more or less know.
When we lived in Canberra, the coast from Pebbly Beach south to Green Cape was our playground for bush walking, swimming in summer and so on.
Now this isn’t review of Shirley Barrett’s book, but one thing that struck me was that in the course of the book there’s a dance at the School of Arts. The School of Arts wasn’t an art school but local society that provided a public hall, a library, reading room and so on.
Unfortunately, the School of Arts in Eden is long gone and the building demolished, but interestingly there are other Schools of Arts in the area – for instance Bega had one, Cobargo had one, Narooma had one and so on.
A search of Trove shows that these were valuable community resources in the early twentieth century in what was then quite an isolated area – the railway never made it south of Bomaderry despite proposals connect Bega and Eden either with what is now the South coast line, or alternatively with the now closed Bombala railway with the Eden and Bega Schools of Arts hosting community meetings about the railway.
And it wasn’t just railways, or the lack of them, as well as dances these institutions provided circulating libraries, reading rooms, and served as a meeting place during such important events as the 1919 flu pandemic.
Like the Athenaeum in Stanley, they grew out of the Mechanics Institute movement, but why was it called the School of Arts, especially in a town like Eden, where the principal industries at the time were whaling and logging, or Bega, which was solidly agricultural, is a bit of a puzzle.
And I think the reason might simply be down to class predjudice – in the goldfields of North East Victoria the term Athenaeum was often used – Stanley has one, Chiltern has one (now a museum), Yackandandah had one, and so on.
Without any proof what so ever, it’s my guess that where the founding members were more genteel, they tended to call these bodies Athenaeums, seeing them more as a literary and philosophical society than a traditional mechanics’ institute a view supported by Caroline Freyne’s article for the Dictionary of Sydney on the School of Arts movement.
It’s interesting that in New South Wales, and Queensland, the term ‘School of Arts’ seems to have been preferred – we even have an example just across the border in Victoria in the Wagunyah School of Arts.
Why School of Arts in New South Wales, and Athenaeum in Victoria I have no idea – however a search for the string “school of arts” produces many more hits for NSW than Victoria, suggesting that the difference in nomenclature is valid. Likewise a similar basic test suggests that the use of the term Athenaeum is largely confined to north east Victoria.
The other term which seems to have been used occasionally was “Literary Institute” as the case of the Gundaroo Literary Institute, which functioned as a public reading room and library for the village. Simple string searches suggest that the use of the term was equally common in both New South Wales and Victoria…
stuff 'n other stuff 