Lucy Worsley https://lucyworsley.com Lucy Worsley Sat, 04 Apr 2020 14:58:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 An interview in Good Housekeeping to celebrate THE AUSTEN GIRLS https://lucyworsley.com/the-austen-girls/ https://lucyworsley.com/the-austen-girls/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2016 14:33:25 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3881 To celebrate the publication of THE AUSTEN GIRLS, my friends at Good Housekeeping magazine have kindly run an interview with me conducted by the imitable Ella Dove … thank you! 

She makes no apology for dressing up to make history more interesting, and here Lucy Worsley talks to Ella Dove about her passion for the past, female ambition, and being stood up by Johnny Depp.

Deep within the sprawling labyrinth of Hampton Court Palace lies a little wooden door.  At first glance, it appears unremarkable, but it is here, at the top of turret, that Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, can be found.  That is when she’s not penning books or ‘larking around on the television in a stupid costume’ – her words, not mine – presenting her iconic history programme, which she films for the BBC.

She greets me with a wide, open smile.  With yellow leather glove-clad hands, she types a code into an incongruously modern keypad on the ancient stone wall and a hidden door clicks open.  ‘I hope you’re okay with steps,’ says Lucy.  ‘There are 51 here.  We often have to give people 10 minutes to catch their breath when they reach the top.’  She turns and skips up said staircase with the ease of someone who has done so a thousand times before.

To my slight disappointment, Lucy is not dressed as a Georgian lady or a Victorian housemaid, nor is she sporting the full Anne Boleyn costume complete with warts and an extra finger that she wore on her recent BBC Four show Royal History’s Biggest Fibs With Lucy Worsley.  Instead, she’s a picture of 21st-century chic.  ‘We’ll have tea in the library,’ she says.  She shepherds me into a small cosy room.  Books and files line the walls, and there is a sense of organised chaos.  As she pours the tea, I feel like I’ve stepped into a Jane Austen novel.  And well I might, for we’re here in part to discuss Lucy’s latest book for children, The Austen Girls, which explores the novelist’s life from the perspective of her nieces.

So why Austen in particular?  ‘I’m on a stealth mission to make girls interested in history,’ she says.  ‘Jane Austen lived in a repressed hierarchical society, where the expectation was purely for her to get married.  But instead, she decided to become a writer.  I want to show girls that they, too, can overcome the barriers of life and do something important.  I’m know I’m not to say my books are just for girls, but they kind of are.  Boys have other advantages in life.’

As a child, Lucy always had her head in a book.  ‘My way into what I do now was reading historical novels,’ she says. But initially, her father, a geologist, convinced her to take science A levels.  After a term, her mother noticed she was unhappy.  ‘My father was furious when I switched to history,’ she recalls.  ‘He said if I did a history degree, I’d end up cleaning toilets for a living.  He’s so fed up of being reminded of that because it has become a sort of stick that I beat him with.’

Lucy read ancient and modern history at Oxford.  In 1995, she began her career as a curator at Milton Manor House, in nearby Abingdon, going on to work as an inspector of historic buildings for English Heritage while also completing her doctorate.  She became chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces in 2003, and was approached by the History Channel in 2009 to present her first TV show, Inside the Body of Henry VIII.  As well as her four-book young adult series, she has written a multitude of historical guidebooks and biographies.  In 2018, she was awarded an OBE for services to history and heritage.

Her passion for history shines with every sentence.  ‘I never tire of coming to work’, she enthuses.  ‘There are around 1,324 rooms here and, at lunchtime every day, I try to explore a different one.  There’s always something to discover.’  Slipping into guide-mode, she tells me the rooms in which we are sitting were originally built for baby Edward VI – Henry VIII’s much-wanted son – but were burnt in a fire in the 19th century.  ‘It’s a Victorian rebuilding of a Tudor room,’ she says precisely, a stickler for detail.

When I tell her I trust her explanation, she shakes her head like a cross teacher.  ‘Well, you shouldn’t, she reprimands with a twinkle in her eye.  ‘The attitude of historians, of questioning the world, is an important life skill.’  Once, she tells me, she showed actor Tom Hiddleston around Hampton Court Palace and she was dismayed by his lack of questions.  ‘The only thing he asked me was, ‘Are there any ghosts?’’  She gives an impish smile.  ‘I could tell her wasn’t really interested, so I just said, ‘Yes’!’

And is the palace haunted?  ‘I don’t believe in ghosts because they don’t exist,’ she responds in that schoolteacher tone.  ‘I’m much more afraid of serial killers!  Saying that, I’m fascinated by why people think they’ve seen ghosts.  The palace is steeped in so much history that you do feel the weight of that as you walk about, but I think that’s a friendly feeling, not a scary one.’

So what is it she loves most about history?  ‘Some people might be snobbish about me dressing up and say, ‘Oh no, that’s not proper historical enquiry,’ she wags her finger in imitation.  ‘I disagree.  The only criticism I take seriously is when people ask, ‘Would they make a man do this?  Is it a gender thing and, therefore, is it acceptable? I think the entertainment is like a gateway drug, the marijuana of history – you can then get addicted to more serious things later,’ says Lucy.  ‘Oh dear!’ she exclaims suddenly, shaking her head.  ‘This is very unfortunate.  I’m using drug analogies.  I’ll try to keep things clean from now on.’

‘Naughty’ though it may be, it is phrasing like this that encapsulates Lucy’s effortless and unique charm; knowledge underpinned by infectious humour.  ‘I’m an advocate of anything that brings history to the mainstream,’ she says. ‘Generally, the nitty-gritty of how people lived their daily lives is what people are interested in.  Plus, it appeals to my narcissistic love of dressing up.’

Lucy seldom mentions her husband, architect Mark Hines.  ‘He’s asked me not to talk about him and I have to respect that,’ she explains.  In fact, the only time she refers to Mark is when she tells me how she once ditched him for Johnny Depp.  ‘His agent requested an after-hours tour of Hampton Court because he was here filming, but I was meant to be meeting Mark at a party that night,’ she says.  ‘I waited until 8pm when I was told that Johnny was tired and had gone home.  The wretched man stood me up!’

Her decision not to have children has also been widely commented upon.  ‘I was naïve when I said that,’ she admits.  ‘I never thought it would offend anyone, but it did.  A lot of my friends are also childless by choice.  I think it’s because growing up in the 1970s, our mothers had been expected to have children.  So, as a reaction to that, they drummed into us the important of career.  These days, there’s more ambivalence, but I still think it’s a sacrifice in terms of time, earning power and status in society.  Something has to give, but it’s wrong that it has to give more for women than men.  I’ve had the privilege of being able to dedicate myself to my work in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d had kids.’

She feels a duty to proclaim herself as ambitious ‘because ambition is considered to be a dirty word for women.   In fact, I once had a letter of complaint that said, ‘I don’t like that Lucy Worsley, she’s clearly ambitious.’  Funnily enough, it was from a man.

Lucy is certainly driven.  When she’s not curating or filming, she’s writing her books in the evenings and on the train to work, running, cooking, or ‘taking in the air’ in London’s parks.  ‘I like to be in motion,’ she muses.

Does she feel optimistic about the future?  ‘I do.  I think you have to be,’ she says.  ‘History leaves you with a sense that nothing is inevitable.  The past is not a guide to the future and sometimes things go backwards, but history shows us that it doesn’t have to be the way it is.  Once you appreciate that everything changes all the time, ther eis hope that maybe the world will be better again, one day.’

The Austen Girls (Bloomsbury Children’s Books) by Lucy Worsley is out now.

 

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My interview in The Lady magazine https://lucyworsley.com/my-interview-in-the-lady-magazine/ https://lucyworsley.com/my-interview-in-the-lady-magazine/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2016 16:18:14 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3860 Good afternoon!  Here, in case you missed it, is a little interview for you, from  THE LADY magazine…

FullSizeRender-13 copy 3 LUCY WORSLEY

…is a historian, author, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, and presenter for the BBC. She has fronted programmes including The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain, A Very British Romance and co-presented Dancing Cheek to Cheek: An Intimate History of Of Dance. She lives in London with her husband.

What are you working on at the moment? An exhibition at Hampton Court Palace called The Empress And The Gardener. It’s a set of drawings of Hampton Court Palace that Catherine the Great of Russia commissioned. They’re on loan from The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

When were you at your happiest? When I’m caught up in a really interesting piece of work that’s difficult and challenging.

What is your greatest fear? Heights. I have tried to conquer it because my work as a curator of historic buildings means I often have to climb up scaffolding. Once I went green and had to be carried down over a builder’s shoulder.

What is your earliest memory? Staring at ‘Blue Rab’, my toy rabbit, and wishing really hard that she would come to life.

Dislike about yourself? I’m not the world’s biggest talker, so I have to remember to tell other people what I’m thinking. Especially when I reach a conclusion which seems obvious to me.

Who has been your greatest influence? My mum – she brought me up to work hard and be a good feminist.

What is your most treasured possession? My Blue Rabbit, and her set of little clothes that my mother made for me in the hospital while she was waiting for my little brother to be born.

What trait do you most deplore in others? Selfishness: when people monopolise time, attention, resources, instead of noticing what would make life better for those around them.

What do you most dislike about your appearance? I try to be body-confident rather than body-hating, so I’ll turn the question around if I may, and say that I’m particularly proud of my lovely little ears. They’re quite beautiful.

Favourite book? Jean Plaidy’s ‘The Young Elizabeth’. I have my own copy still, with its picture of Hampton Court Palace on the front. I still can’t quite believe that I have ended up working as a curator at Hampton Court Palace, and following in Plaidy’s footsteps by writing a children’s book of my own set in the Tudor period.

Favourite Film? Brief Encounter – I love the way that Celia Johnson was cast, supposedly, because she looked like an everyday suburban housewife. As if! She’s so elegant.

Favourite piece of music? Any Mozart piano sonata.

Favourite meal? Fish and rice. I really like sushi.

Who would you most like to come to dinner? Michael Buble. A lovely young man.

What is the nastiest thing anyone has ever said to you? I couldn’t repeat the weird and horrid things people have said to my in cyberspace. I reassure myself that they don’t really mean it, they think I’m a little sock puppet from their TV screen, and that’s who they’re addressing, not me.

Do you believe in aliens? Er, no.

What is your secret vice? Benedick’s Bittermints. For evidence: see bottom drawer of my desk.

Do you write thank you notes? Probably not often enough. But I do like choosing and buying presents for people. I’m very well known in the gift shop at Hampton Court.

Which phrase do you most overuse? ‘Did you know that Henry VIII had a special servant to wipe his bottom?’

What single thing would improve the quality of your life? A promise to cancel the wastefully expensive ‘Garden Bridge’ project in London. Not least because it’s going to ruin my neighbourhood on the South Bank.

Can you tell me one thing people might not know about you? I like running. I trot along quite slowly but I can go a long way. I’ve been told that it’s because I have unusually large nostrils, like a horse. I can take in the air exceptionally well.

What would you like your epitaph to say? ‘She made history fun.’

Eliza Rose, by Lucy Worsley, is published by Bloomsbury Childrens, priced £6.99.

 

 

 

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A tour of Eliza Rose’s Hampton Court https://lucyworsley.com/a-tour-of-eliza-roses-hampton-court/ https://lucyworsley.com/a-tour-of-eliza-roses-hampton-court/#comments Sat, 02 Apr 2016 11:32:08 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3828 A lovely spring day at Hampton Court yesterday so out I went with my camera to make a photo tour for you.  These are the real places and real things that inspired me when I was writing my story set at the palace, ELIZA ROSE.  (Short commercial break warning: you can get your copy here!)  People have been asking me what age group it’s suitable for: it’s for all readers over the age of eleven.

the Countesses chamberThe story’s about some Maids of Honour at the court of King Henry VIII.  The Maids of Honour are girls, sent to court to serve the Queen, to find husbands, and generally to look pretty and make the court a more glamorous place to be.  They have a supervisor in the royal household, and in my story she’s the (made-up) Countess of Malpas. I gave my Countess this particular chamber – the one with the bay window – over what’s now called Anne Boleyn’s gateway. It has windows that look in both directions across both main
courtyards so that the Countess – as she says in the story – can keep an eye on the comings and goings of her girls. She didn’t watch carefully enough, though, to notice though that Katherine Howard was getting right under the king’s skin! She was as surprised as anyone when the engagement was announced.

The Countesses stairsEach morning, the Maids of Honour like Katherine have to go ‘on duty’, which means standing around in the Great Watching Chamber until the king and queen should choose to make an appearance.  The Maids weren’t supposed to say very much, just look pretty and wear splendid jewels.  They all quickly realised that this was pretty boring, and would go on duty as late as possible!

This is the little doorway out of which they would pop when the palace bush telegraph gave them wind that the king was on the move – they could run down the Countess’s stairs, and out the little door, and then up the other stairs to get into position just in time.

 

 

 

CourtiersOh look!  Here’s a crowd of Tudor courtiers who just happened to rush by as we were standing there.  Look how excited the little boy is on the right hand side!  They were all performing their song which kicks off one of our plays we have on every day at Hampton Court, called Encounters with the Past.  You can learn more about them here.

 

 

 

The kings doorIn the Great Watching Chamber, then, the hours could go VERY slowly while everyone was waiting for the king.  Yes, this is the door to the King’s private lodgings, and everyone would stand there … watching … waiting for it to open and for the king to come out.  Yes, this could be very tedious!

 

 

 

 

 

 

ElephantMy favourite Maid of Honour, Eliza Rose (the book’s really about her) would try to amuse herself in these dull moments by looking closely at this tapestry of an elephant.  In fact, the elephant inspired a dance that the Maids of Honour performed at court: the Dance of the Nine Graces.  Eliza, who had clumpy feet, hated this dance at first when she was taught it, but gradually came to appreciate the artistry and beauty involved in dancing well.  It’s just one of the things that her life at court will teach her.

 

 

 

Great HallWhen the girls first arrive at Court, they accidentally wander into the Great Hall, where the male lower courtiers and servants were eating and drinking and making a noise.  Eliza and Katherine quickly realised that they weren’t supposed to eat in the main staff canteen, which is essentially what the Great Hall was.  Instead, they would have their meals in their own private rooms, or with the king and queen and the top courtiers if it was the night for a banquet of a feast.  Anyway, it was quite lucky that they ended up in the Great Hall that first night, because that’s where they met Ned Barsby.  Young Ned, with his messy hair, might not look like it at first, but he is in fact OUR HERO.  So your hearts should beat a little louder as he makes his entrance!

Haunted GalleryBeyond the Great Hall is a gallery which is today known as the Haunted Gallery – and who is the ghost? It’s Katherine Howard herself, and her ghostly self takes the form of the young queen running along the gallery to beg Henry VIII for her life after she was accused for adultery.  You’ll have to read the whole story to find out how all this came about.

 

 

 

 

Little Banqueting HouseOnce Eliza and Ned have finally realised that they like each other (it takes a bit of time!) they need to find a private place to meet up to talk about the problems of court life where no one can hear.  That’s more difficult than it sounds, because although there are hundreds of rooms in the palace, there are also hundreds of servants, all listening and ear-wigging and eavesdropping upon everything that takes place.

Because Ned has access to all the keys, he suggests that they have a rendezvous one winter’s evening in the Banqueting House in the garden, a room only used in summer.  Here it is – imagine Eliza going excited, frightened, worried and a little bit happy all at the same time, going quietly through that garden to go to see Ned…

 

 

 

 

 

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About my new novel Eliza Rose… https://lucyworsley.com/about-my-new-novel-eliza-rose/ https://lucyworsley.com/about-my-new-novel-eliza-rose/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2016 06:17:06 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3825 Telegraph (1)The Telegraph published this interview conducted by Francesca Wade, but I can’t find it online to point you to it! I hope I won’t get in trouble for reproducing it here. With my thanks to Francesca, a fellow Dorothy L. Sayers fan, for letting me have my say!

Tales of lecherous Tudors

Lucy Worsley tells Francesca Wade why her novel for children restores the reputation of a female courtier

Standing in a portrait-lined corridor in Hampton Court, Lucy Worsley is telling me about the wine fountain in the courtyard below, when a fleeting movement catches my eye. The silhouette of a woman, running in clear distress, passes across the wall. ‘That’s our ghost’, explains Worsley. The spooky shadow is a projection, but the story behind it is probably real: when King Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard (dubbed his ‘rose without a thorn;) heard that she was under arrest for adultery, she dashed through this room (now known as the Haunted Gallery) towards the chapel to plead with her husband for her life. She was seized by guards before she reached the end of the corridor and was sent away to await her gruesome fate. ‘We’re not sure how old she was,’ says Worsley, ‘but she was probably a teenager’.

We’re strolling around Hampton Court so Worsley – the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, and a television historian with a penchant for re-enactment (her next subject will be Henry’s wives) – can show me the settings for her latest project, a children’s book.

She started the book on her honeymoon in Barbados (halfway through filimg a series, she had been ordered by her director not to come back with a tan, and spent so much time indoors that a rumour spread her husband was married to Keira Knightley) and finished it in concentrated snatches on her daily commute to Hampton Court. Eliza Rose tells the story of Catherine Howard from the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, and is a tale of lechery, power-play and intrigue at the Tudor court.

Cousins Eliza and Catherine meet at a finishing school run by an elderly duchess, where the girls – all from noble families, and thus expected to make illustrious matches – are taught to exude coquettish vulnerability. The girls’ relationship is barbed from the start, and deepens in complexity when they are sent to join the retinue of ladies in waiting to the king’s new bride, Anne of Cleves. After Anne’s deposition, Eliza and Catherine become rivals for the king’s affections. Catherine’s triumphant victory lasted just over a year: she was executed in the Tower of London on February 13 1542, having spent the night before practicing laying her head on the block. It’s a mark of how little sympathy Catherine has garnered that in the television series The Tudors she was portrayed doing this naked.

‘She’s never been taken very seriously, and it gets my goat’, says Worsley, who got into a spat with fellow historian David Starkey when he complained that historians who focused on Henry’s wives had reduced the king’s life to a ‘soap opera’. ‘People say she’s stupid, historians describe her like she’s a silly little girl, and that annoyed me. I thought, hang on, what about her side of the story? There have been historians who have described her as a slut, which I think is uncalled for, and which implies that she had the choice, which I can’t believe that you would have done as a teenage girl at the Tudor court. You’d have had an awful lot of people telling you what to do, the court itself, but also your own family, because you wouldn’t have been at court unless you were of a high-status family’.

It doesn’t take Eliza long to realize that ‘we were just pawns in the game of winning power for our families’. For the girls, the route to power lies in the king’s affections. ‘I think that’s one of the biggest differences between then and now,’ Worsley says. ‘I was brought up to follow my own hopes and dreams and desires. But in those days, you did your duty to God, to the king, to your father. There was no way out.’ Eliza Rose is aimed at girls of 11 and over, and Worsley has not sugared the spectre of sexual coercion that haunts the girls at every stage: Henry’s wandering hands, the way the girls are sized up like cattle at court, the sinister music teacher whose flirting would now be considered grooming. His character is a composite of three historical figures, two of whom were put to death with Catherine Howard, the third was a teacher who gave evidence against her at the trial. Worsley hopes that the story will give 21st century girls a warning. ‘Don’t take anything for granted, and don’t think that the past is a romantic place either.’

‘Some people have been saying to me, ‘Why have you written a children’s book? You hate children don’t you?’ because I don’t have any’, Worsley says with a chuckle. ‘But actually girls are some of the people I care about most. I want the world to be a better place for girls, and this is my little contribution’.

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New series: Empire of the Tsars, Romanov Russia with Lucy Worsley https://lucyworsley.com/new-series-empire-of-the-tsars-romanov-russia-with-lucy-worsley/ https://lucyworsley.com/new-series-empire-of-the-tsars-romanov-russia-with-lucy-worsley/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2016 10:28:22 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3803 Tonight’s the night for our Russian adventures – if you follow me on Twitter you may have spotted that I spent a few weeks last summer following the Romanovs around their former domain.  I hope you enjoy it if you get the chance to watch.

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A Very British Romance https://lucyworsley.com/a-very-british-romance/ https://lucyworsley.com/a-very-british-romance/#comments Sun, 27 Sep 2015 06:10:52 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3795 We have a new series coming up for you on the history of romantic fiction – A Very British Romance is starting on Thursday October 8th, 9pm on BBC Four.

Corporate Photography Bristol_Evoke Pictures_BBC A Very British Romance-66What could be more natural than romance, finding the perfect partner and falling in love? In fact every ingredient in this scenario, so beloved of romantics everywhere, had to be invented. In this three-part series Lucy Worsley will delve into the history of romance to uncover the forces shaping our very British happily ever after. The series will reveal how even our most intimate thoughts and feelings have been affected by social, political and cultural ideas.

In this first episode, Lucy Worsley’s exploration of three centuries of love’s rituals begins in the Georgian age, when the rules of courtship were being rewritten. Traditionally marriage had been as much about business as love. Lucy examines how women in the 18th century started to have an unprecedented degree of romantic freedom, partly due to the cult of ‘sensibility’ – a fashionable vogue for more emotionally-heightened living.

Lucy will then explore the glamorisation of romantic love that followed the emergence of the romantic novel in the 18th century. Lucy will consider whether the work of Samuel Richardson, Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, as well as providing escapism, provoked readers to seek out in their own lives the feelings and emotions they found in the novels – so having a profound effect on the desires and aspirations of the entire age.

 

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Lucy Worsley’s Reins of Power https://lucyworsley.com/lucy-worsleys-reins-of-power/ https://lucyworsley.com/lucy-worsleys-reins-of-power/#comments Thu, 10 Sep 2015 08:23:19 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3782 Ok this is possibly the most bonkers programme you’ll see this year … I learned to perform the seventeenth century art of horse-dancing, as practiced by Duke of Newcastle in his Riding House at Bolsover Castle, one of England’s most curious buildings, and also the topic of my PhD thesis.  There are more pictures here, and you can see my Bridget-Jones style approach to riding lessons here!

 

 

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Tonight: I toast the Women’s Institute on BBC Two https://lucyworsley.com/tonight-i-toast-the-womens-institute-on-bbc-two/ https://lucyworsley.com/tonight-i-toast-the-womens-institute-on-bbc-two/#comments Mon, 20 Jul 2015 16:23:12 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3777 Radio Times WI coverThanks so much for watching if you’ve visited me after tonight’s programme!  Here’s a little more about it, from an article I wrote in this week’s Radio Times… 

‘I recently found myself making jam in a village hall, the quintessential Women’s Institute activity, with a group of Hampshire ladies who included the “Chutney Champion” of the New Forest.

Who knows who I might be mixing my preserves with were I to join the WI in Norfolk.

It’s been reported that the Duchess of Cambridge is planning to join the WI near her home of Anmer Hall, an action that’s been read as reflecting her “normal”, middle-class values.

But there’s something pretty extraordinary about the institution that has also counted Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, and the Queen among its members.

One hundred years old this September, the WI has managed to be both part of the establishment, and, at the same time, a deeply subversive organisation.

Which helps explain how I also came to spend a sunny Saturday with the Shoreditch Sisters, a WI branch whose 20-something members identify themselves as feminists. We joined a noisy protest against the treatment of asylum seekers at the Harmondsworth Removal Centre.

But both the cake-bakers and the troublemakers have something in common: a belief that women deserve a club that inspires, comforts and campaigns on their behalf. What intrigues me most is the WI’s long lineage as a radical campaigning body, which often gets overshadowed by its reputation for competitive chutney-making and other such domestic activities. Well-behaved women rarely make history, it’s often said, and the founders of the WI could be very badly behaved indeed.

Take the story of Edith Rigby. In 1913 the country seemed to be at peace, but beneath the surface, a civil war was raging, as the Suffragettes turned to increasingly desperate measures in their fight to win the vote.

On 7 July 1913, Edith – a Suffragette from Preston and a friend of the Pankhursts – might have been seen lugging a keg of paraffin up to the hilltop holiday home in Lancashire of Sir William Lever, soap magnate. She laid a trail of paraffin round the wooden structure, lit it, and ran away down the hill.

As she got into the getaway car, the driver remembered that she was grinning.

Edith turned herself in to the police the next day. Using the dock as a platform, she asked the world whether Sir William’s burnt-out house was more important as just one of his many “superfluous” homes, or as “a beacon lighted to King and country to see here are some intolerable grievances for women”.

Edith was sentenced to nine months in prison, went on hunger strike, was released and finally fled the country.

But in 1918, after the Suffragettes had finally won their fight for the vote, Edith was back living in a village close to the scene of her crime. And she’d become a founder member and President of a new group that would in its own way continue the fight that the suffragettes had started. It was the WI.

Originally founded in Canada to improve the agricultural and domestic skills of pioneer frontierswomen, the WI only took hold in Britain in the depths of the First World War.

The need to boost food production on the home front resulted in Canadian WI member Madge Watts addressing a meeting of potential members in a garden shed on the island of Anglesey in 1915.

It was a small beginning, but it’s stirring stuff to read her speech to those assembled. “You will grow and grow,” she said, “and with that growth will grow your power – use that power to its full.”

And if you look at the resolutions passed at the AGMs of the National Federation of Women’s Institutes over the past 100 years, you’ll find a potted history of what’s been on women’s minds: from improvements in rural housing to education about venereal disease.

Perhaps the WI’s finest hour came in the Second World War, when members led the charge on the home front, feeding and housing millions of evacuees.

But some of them felt that their voluntary, unpaid work was taken for granted. A surprising consequence of the WI shouldering of the considerable burden of the extra housework caused by evacuation was an AGM resolution, in 1943, calling for such work to be remunerated.

“Women are important,” the resolution ran, “not just important as housewives and mothers and girlfriends and ‘sewers-on-of-buttons’ but vital and essential if we are to win this war… let one good thing that comes out of this disastrous calamity be fair pay for women.”

It would take another 30-odd years for the Equal Pay Act to be passed, but in making the case for it, the WI were way ahead of the women’s movement of the 1970s.

In fact, many of the same issues raised by the Women’s Libbers were completely familiar from WI campaigns: the provision of nursery care, and contraception. But the difference lay in the “F” word. Many WI members would have been offended if you called them “feminists”. But the Libbers would have been offended if you didn’t.

The WI did achieve a radical change in its public image in the 2000s, when members got naked – by creating a saucy calendar to raise several million pounds for leukaemia research (their story told in the popular Calendar Girls) – and got angry.

Their slow-hand-clapping of Tony Blair, when he broke Institute rules by making an overtly party political speech at a national conference at Wembley in 2000, captured headlines everywhere.

Is there still a need, you might ask, for a movement that’s purely for women? Well, today’s 200,000-plus members – that’s on a par with Labour, Britain’s biggest political party, by the way – would tell you that there is.

In its centenary year, one of the resolutions it considered for its AGM was this. “As we mark 100 years of the WI, we deplore the unacceptable level of gender discrimination that still exists.” They called for the removal of “barriers preventing today’s women and future generations reaching their full potential”. Who can argue with that?

To the formidable ladies of the WI, I say this: I’m proud to have wielded the jam-spoon with you.’

Lucy Worsley’s 100 Years of the WI is on Monday 20th July on BBC2 at 9pm (not shown in Scotland)

 

 

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The last baby princess at Kensington Palace: the new Princess Charlotte’s predecessor… https://lucyworsley.com/the-last-baby-princess-at-kensington-palace-princess-charlottes-predecessor/ https://lucyworsley.com/the-last-baby-princess-at-kensington-palace-princess-charlottes-predecessor/#comments Sun, 17 May 2015 18:22:37 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3769 My article written for t’paper, reproduced here for you…

Victoria‘SO, there’s a new baby princess at Kensington Palace – born in time for breakfast on Saturday and back home in time for tea.

It’s very nearly two hundred years since the last time Kensington Palace was home to a baby princess.  The future Queen Victoriawas born there at 4 o’clock in the morning of 24th May 1819.

But the circumstances into which the new royal baby has been born couldn’t have been more different than those of 1819.  The new princess is Her Majesty the Queen’s seventeenth direct descendent, and now fourth in line to the throne. Rarely in history has the succession looked more secure.

Victoria, though, was entering a Royal Family in crisis.

In 1819, king George III, suffering from blindness and mental disturbance, had retreated into a private world.  The public face of the monarchy was provided by the king’s eldest son, the Prince Regent, the future George IV: better known to the television-watching-public as the idiotic Hugh Laurie character in Blackadder goes Forth.

The Prince Regent and his brothers, sometimes known as Victoria’s ‘Wicked Uncles’, had brought the monarchy into some disrepute.  Right from the start, some people hoped that this new baby girl would in due course save the throne from the revolutionary mob.  ‘The English,’ wrote Victoria’s German grandmother, ‘like queens’.

And the baby who would become the indomitable Queen Victoria gave early indications of her character.  After a labour of six hours, she was born fit and feisty, ‘as plump as a partridge’.  Even her infant ways were imperious: she was described as more of a ‘pocket Hercules, than a pocket Venus’.

Unlike the frenzy of interest surrounding the arrival of the Cambridge babies today, Victoria’s birth was a low-key affair.   Her German mother, Princess Victoire of Saxe-Coburg, and her father, the Duke of Kent, were not only penniless, but also fairly minor members of a multitudinous Royal Family.

Tradition claims that Victoria entered the world in the North Drawing Room of Kensington Palace. WHY THIS ROOM? WAS IT PART OF THEIR LIVING QUARTERS which was then part of the apartment occupied by the Kents.  The room today forms part of the intimate Victoria Revealed exhibition at Kensington Palace, which tells the story of the queen’s birth and life.

Although she was born in a palace drawing room, Victoria’s early life was not luxurious. Kensington Palace at the time was rather a run-down, ramshackle retirement home for superfluous members of the Royal Family.  Because of their huge debts, Victoria’s parents had been unable to make their apartment clean and comfortable.

Even so, their baby was well looked after.  Fraulein Siebold, a qualified female doctor from Germany, supervised the delivery.  The newborn Victoria was vaccinated against smallpox, which was advanced medical practice, and she was breast-fed, her own mother providing ‘maternal nutriment’ (in the somewhat prudish words of Victoria’s father).

This was unusual because royal women were expected to hand their babies over to wet-nurses, so that they could more quickly return to their husbands’ beds and get on with the business of providing further members of the royal line.  But the Kents failed to follow convention, and Victoria’s mother said she would have been ‘desperate’ to see another woman feeding her beloved baby.

Up until this point, Victoria’s parents had been living quietly abroad to avoid the Duke’s creditors.  They had only made a mad last-minute dash home to London so that their child would be born on English soil, therefore avoiding any future questions about her eligibility to become queen.

But questions of eligibility seemed far from relevant in 1819, as it was by no means obvious that Victoria would inherit the throne.

She was the result of a curious phenomenon called ‘The Baby Race’.  Its starting pistol was fired in 1817 with the sudden and horrible death, in childbirth, of the young and beautiful Princess Charlotte, the Prince Regent’s only child, and next in line behind him for the throne.  Charlotte’s death was so deeply significant because she had been the only legitimate grandchild of King George III.  His twelve living descendants had reproduced themselves with vigour: it’s estimated that George III had nearly forty grandchildren.

But all of them, bar Charlotte, were born outside wedlock.  Even Charlotte’s own parents had quarrelled and parted, so no further children were to be expected from the Prince Regent or his estranged wife.

At Charlotte’s death, then, the crisis in the Royal Family forced the Prince Regent’s younger brothers, including the Duke of Kent, to leave their various mistresses, and get married to proper German princesses, in order to try to produce a legitimate heir to the throne.

It was an unedifying spectacle.  As one contemporary satirist put it: ‘Hot and hard each royal pair, are at it hunting for the heir’.

Victoria was just one of four of these Royal babies to be born, as a result of the race, in the bumper year of 1819.  Gradually, though, those older than her had the misfortune to die young, and it eventually became apparent that Victoria would be the next queen.  She finally achieved this at the age of 18.

After a birth heralded with so little fanfare, scant attention was also paid to Victoria’s christening.  It took place in the Cupola Room, one of the grand, if dusty, state apartments at Kensington Palace, and there had been no agreement beforehand on what her names were to be.  The Prince Regent arrived at the ceremony only to reject the baby’s proposed names of Charlotte and Augusta.  These were English royal names, and he didn’t feel they were suitable names for such an insignificant-looking little girl.

So she was baptised Alexandrina Victoria, and actually spent her early years as ‘Drina’.

In later life, Queen Victoria claimed that she’d lacked love as a child, enduring a poor relationship with her mother.  Her rather self-pitying memoirs describe a childhood at gloomy Kensington Palace, with only bewigged, elderly clergymen for companions, and having to be quiet so as not to disturb her pernickety uncles.

But I believe that this was written with hindsight by a woman with a melodramatic view of her life.

In truth, the surviving letters between Victoria’s parents, and in due course, the early letters between Victoria and her mother, breathe affection.  Like the Cambridges, the Kents were a tight, loving and rather modern-sounding family unit, living as they did in a low-key manner, with nannies and nurses but without the hangers-on of an extensive court.

And the family was destined to become smaller and tighter still, for when Victoria was only nine months old, her father the Duke died.

The Duke’s last illness took place in Sidmouth, Devon.  He’d taken his young family away from Kensington Palace to live on the coast, because outside London his prestige was still just about great enough to raise credit from the local shopkeepers.

Now Victoria’s mother – a foreigner – was left alone to bring up her baby daughter, with neglectful in-laws and without much money.

It was a bad beginning.  But it was in this childhood adversity that the steely character of a future queen was forged.

And even before his death, the unhappy Duke had maintained enormous faith that his baby daughter’s lot in life would improve.

‘Look on her well,’ he used to say to his friends, ‘for she will be Queen of England.’

He was right.’

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A year at Hampton Court – in pictures https://lucyworsley.com/a-year-at-hampton-court-in-pictures/ https://lucyworsley.com/a-year-at-hampton-court-in-pictures/#comments Sun, 03 May 2015 16:10:53 +0000 https://lucyworsley.com/?post=3748 It’s been a year since I got rid of the photos cluttering up my phone, and so ‘a year in the life of Hampton Court’ seemed like a good topic for a picture post.  It’s inevitable, if you work at Hampton Court, that you just can’t stop taking pictures of the place, and then you’re not sure what to do with them all!

A foggy day in Base Court, in January…

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Snowdrops in Chapel Court, in February…

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A chilly day looking towards Fountain Court, in March…

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Early spring flowers in the Pond Gardens, in April…

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A very blue evening across the Thames, in May..

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The Rose Garden, in June…

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Summer evening under Anne Boleyn’s arch, let’s say it’s July…

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Dawn in Clock Court, late in August…

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Autumn sunshine on the Great Gatehouse, in September…

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This was a VERY windy day in the Privy Garden, in October…

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A brisk day by the Wine Fountain, in November…

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And a bit of December sunshine, in a photo of Lord Chamberlain’s Gate taken on Christmas Eve.

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