Professor Tony Webster, Northumbria University Public Lecture Series

'The People’s Colossus? The British Co-operative Wholesale Societies and the World, 1863-1970' When: 6.30pm – 7.30pm, Tuesday, 17 January 2017 Where: Presentation Hall, Design Building, City Campus East, Northumbria University, Newcastle Refreshments will be available from 6.00pm Free admission. Register here. Synopsis
In his lecture Professor Webster will explore how the British Co-operative movement and specifically the Wholesale Societies, developed international supply chains and markets between 1863 and 1970. He will show how they created one of most sophisticated supply chain systems seen to date; one which managed trade with Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. He will suggest that in many ways they were pioneers in international supply chain development, outlining how these supply chains were developed and managed, and how as a result, the Wholesale societies came to exercise some leverage over British foreign and imperial policy. The lecture will highlight the emerging picture of formidable and highly sophisticated commercial operators, very much at variance with the modern impression of the ‘co-op’ as a rather old fashioned and inefficient organisation, unable to hold its own in the marketplace.
About the Speaker
Professor Webster studied at the University of Birmingham and was awarded the Ashley Prize for best PhD thesis in the Faculty of Commerce and Social Science. He originally trained as a Further Education teacher and a tax inspector, before joining Edge Hill University in 1993. He was Head of History at Edge Hill University, Head of Humanities at UCLAN and Head of History at Liverpool John Moores University before joining Northumbria as a Professor in History. He is a former Governor of the Co-operative College in Manchester, and Chairs the Heritage Advisory Committee of the National Co-operative Archive. He is currently working closely with the WEA and Building Futures East on a project promoting social enterprise education in Walker, Newcastle.

Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing and a Talk by Joe Hardwick

The play Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing is running until December 3 at the Live Theatre in Quayside. Here is the summary of it from the Live Theatre website:

Tynemouth, 1844. Harriet Martineau, leading radical thinker, feminist and anti-slavery campaigner of her day, seeks refuge from the claustrophobic demands of London society, with her needlepoint and a telescope in an attic room on Front Street. But instead of escape, she finds an unequal world in need of her attention. This is a world of racial intolerance and gender imbalance, of eccentric scientific practices such as mesmerism and phrenology. A world where a negligent husband may die from a pig falling on his head in the street.

Following on from the critically acclaimed 2010 production of A Northern Odyssey ( The Guardian), Harriet Martineau Dreams of Dancing is the second in Olivier Award-winning writer, Shelagh Stephenson’s trilogy of witty and engaging plays at Live Theatre exploring the contemporary relevance of Tyneside’s political and cultural heritage. The play features music by acclaimed folk band, The Unthanks, re-arranged from songs on their Mount the Air album, and dance inspired by Northumberland traditions, choreographed by Lee Proud (Billy Elliot – the musical) both part of the creative team in A Northern Odyssey.

On Tuesday Northumbria University Senior Lecturer in History Joe Hardwick gave a talk after the performance. Listen to that below.
 

Grant Success for Shane Smith and Joe Hardwick

Congratulations are due to Shane Smith (second-year PhD student) and Joe Hardwick who have each received grants of £1,000 from the Canada-UK Foundation for research trips to Ontario in 2016.

Shane’s project on the migration of military veterans to Canada explores the culture of petitioning among settlers in the early nineteenth century. He will be making use of petitions that veterans sent to the colonial authorities for land (held at Libraries and Archives Canada, Ottawa), sources that will tell us a good deal about public interaction with state bodies. Joe’s project looks at the culture of special days of worship in the Canadian colonies from the eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth. Executive government records at LAC will help him determine how these days were called, and the archive’s extensive newspaper collections will shed light on public reception.

The Canada-UK Foundation is a very useful source of funding and anyone interested in undertaking research in Canada should check out their website.

James McConnell Wins Bid to the AHRC-funded WWI Living Legacies Centre

Congratulations to James McConnell for his successful bid to the AHRC-funded WWI Living Legacies Centre. James describes the project below.

WWI poster, courtesy of the
Library of Congress. London:
Johnson, Riddle & Co., Ltd., 1915.

In mobilising ‘citizen historians’, this project will work with community partners such as the Northumbria First World War Commemoration project (NWW1), a path-breaking, multiple Heritage Lottery Fund-supported group, which has pioneered the use of grassroots-led research methods, combining these with cutting-edge IT, to produce community-led research on the men from the former borough of Tynemouth who fell during the conflict. ‘Citizen history’ is a relatively new concept in which professional historians work alongside volunteers from a range of backgrounds, often online, to collect and analyse data in relation to particular topics. For a well-known example of ‘citizen history’, click here.

In the case of this project, we’ll be looking to recruit volunteers to research the lives and wartime service of ‘Geordies’ in the armies of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada during World War One. By ‘crowdsourcing’ research in this collaborative way, the project will collect information that will help us to understand why ‘Geordies’ emigrated and how these journey relate to their wartime movements and even post-war locations of settlement.

The project will consider not only the complexities of individual ‘migration histories’ but also the way that individuals and communities saw their identities (as ‘Geordies’ and Britons, but also Australians, Canadians, or New Zealanders); how they understood ‘Geordie’ migration more generally, and how people came to see the empire in new ways through this migration. By using the term ‘Geordie’, we’re aware that the name is often used to describe the people of Newcastle, but it has been used by scholars to describe the people of the wider north east region  as well. In seeking to find volunteers across the world who will help the project research the lives of these soldiers, we’re using the term because it’s internationally recognisable.

Election Fever, Then and Now

Peter O'Connor

The results of the 2015 UK general election are now officially in the books. With the surprise victory of the Conservatives political pundits and scholars can now begin to study the reasons for the result and its likely consequences. For some in Britain however attention will now shift across the Atlantic to the 2016 US presidential election. Although the British political process is becoming increasingly ‘Americanized’ fundamental differences still remain which make observing US politics a fascinating and somewhat alien experience.

In a short interview in May 2015 the Channel Four journalist Jon Snow and the US satirist Jon Stewart discussed the relationship between the two political systems in the run-up to the UK election. A key difference which Stewart noted relates to the concept of continuous campaigning. This is a phenomenon which, according to the historian Lewis L. Gould, has characterized US politics since Richard Nixon’s arrival in the White House. Interestingly however British observers had actually recognized something akin to continuous campaigning (albeit in a simplified form) as early as the 1820s. A brief examination of the writing of one particular Briton from the period helps to shed light on the history of British attitudes to presidential campaigning and our long standing interest in American politics.

Although subsequently overshadowed by her son Frances Trollope (1779-1863) was one of the most perceptive and entertaining British commentators on the United States during the early nineteenth century. A novelist of some repute Trollope seems to have found America a fascinating subject—at least during the earlier years of her career. She spent a considerable amount of time in the US during the late 1820s and her experiences in the nation formed the basis for her books The Refugee in America (1832), The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836) and The Barnabys in America, or the Adventures of the Widow Wedded (1843) all of which lampooned different aspects of American life.

Professor Tom Lawson to Lecture on "Britain and Genocide: History, Memory and Morality"

Public Lecture by Professor Tom Lawson
Professor of History, Northumbria University
When:  6.30pm, Wednesday, 20 May, 2015
Where: Lecture Theatre 002, Business and Law Building, City Campus East, Northumbria University, Newcastle
Refreshments will be available from 6pm
Free admission
Register here

Synopsis

In twenty-first century Britain, genocide is the ultimate atrocity. In foreign policy the allegation of genocide has been important in recent debates around military action overseas; and in memory culture genocide is represented as a fundamental transgression. Within that culture, it is the spectre of the Holocaust that dominates.

In Britain, mourning and memorialization is often combined with a celebration of ‘our’ role as saviour and liberator. This lecture will explore the view that such a discourse obscures the complex role of genocide in British history and will seek to place racial extermination at the centre of the story of Britain, and particularly its Empire. In doing so the lecture will also call for a more reflective memory culture in the British present as a means of coming to terms with a violent past and for a morally active historiography as the means of achieving it.

About the Speaker

Tom Lawson is Professor of History and Associate Dean (Academic) in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences. He joined Northumbria in October 2013 from the University of Winchester where he’d been Professor of Holocaust Studies and Head of Research in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Tom is the author and editor of several books including: The Church of England and the Holocaust (2006); Debates on the Holocaust (2010); and with James Jordan The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (2008), with Thomas Kuhne The Holocaust and Local History (2010) and with Stephen Parker, God and War (2012). His most recent book was published in 2014 as The Last Man: a British genocide in Tasmania. He is also the co-editor of Holocaust Studies: a journal of culture and history and was previously a mid-career fellow of the British Academy. Tom is currently writing a history of genocide in the British Empire entitled Empire of Extermination: Genocide in the British World.

Commemorating the Centenary of the Women's Peace Congress of 1915

The following is a cross-post from the Histories of Activism Group.

On Monday, 20 April, the Histories of Activism group is organising an event at the Newcastle Lit & Phil to commemorate the centenary of the Women's Peace Congress of 1915 - a major international meeting held at The Hague. Over 1,200 women came together to coordinate their efforts to bring an end to the Great War. Following on from their meeting in the Netherlands, participants travelled to European capitals to lobby the representatives of the warring nations.  The event also resulted in the creation of the International Committee of Women for a Permanent Peace, which was later transformed into the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) - a major pacifist organisation that still exists today.

A century on, our 'Women as Peacemakers' evening will allow us to reflect on the history, legacy and ongoing relevance of the women's peace movement. The event is open to the public and will start at 6:00 pm.

Delegates to the April 1915 conference.

• Daniel Laqua (Senior Lecturer in European History at Northumbria University) will introduce the event by commenting on the history of peace movement up to 1914 as well as outlining the main features of the congress at The Hague.
• Sarah Hellawell (PhD candidate in British History at Northumbria University) will present findings from her doctoral research. She will focus on the British women who attended the congress as well as the subsequent creation of a British WILPF section. She will show how the British women's movement emerged from a section of the pre-war suffrage movement, and will also consider the tension between national loyalty to the British war effort and women's transnational efforts for peace.
• Ingrid Sharp (Senior Lecturer in German at Leeds University) will discuss the aims and achievements of the women at The Hague, explaining why it is important to remember them. In doing so, she will draw attention to the legacy and significance of this year's centenary, shedding light on the relationship between peace, women's rights and human rights.
• Jon Coburn (PhD candidate in US History at Northumbria University) will draw on his doctoral research on women's activism for peace in 1960s/1970s America. He will point out that women's groups have had a long and positive role to play in the American peace movement. He will highlight the connections between different waves of activism and demonstrate the enduring relevance of women's peace history for contemporary peace groups.

 Participation in the event is free. There is no need to pre-register, but if you would like to let us know that you are coming, you can do so via our Facebook page.

Public Lecture by Richard Van Emden

“Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War,” 28 April @ 6.15, CCE 1, Northumbria University

A British soldier walked over to the German front line to deliver newspapers; British women married to Germans became 'enemy aliens' in their own country; a high-ranking British POW discussed his own troops’ heroism with the Kaiser on the battlefield. Just three amazing stories of contact between the opposing sides in the Great War that eminent historian Richard van Emden has unearthed – incidents that show brutality, great humanity, and above all the bizarre nature of a conflict between two nations with long-standing ties of kinship and friendship. In his lecture, Richard Van Emden reveals how contact was maintained on many levels throughout the War, and its stories, sometimes funny, often moving, give us a new perspective on the lives of ordinary men and women caught up in extraordinary events.

From Richard Van Emden’s website:

Richard van Emden has been interested in the Great War since his teens. He interviewed 270 veterans of the conflict and has so far written twelve books on the subject. His latest, The Quick and the Dead: Fallen Soldiers and Their Families, is due out now. His previous books include Britain's Last Tommies, Boy Soldiers of the Great War, All Quiet on the Home Front, Prisoners of the Kaiser and the top five best-selling The Trench. He has visited the Somme and Ypres every year since 1985 and has an expert knowledge of the First World War battlefields. Richard also researches, produces and directs television programmes about both World Wars, including the award-winning Roses of No Man’s Land and Veterans. His most recent television programme Shooting the War, was broadcast on BBC4 (2010), and he has also appeared as an expert on programmes such as The Boy Soldiers of the Great War (Channel 4), and most recently The Real War Horse on the History Channel.

The Newcastle YMCA First World War Memorial at Northumbria University

James McConnel

The Newcastle YMCA war memorial.

In late 2014, the Estates Office at Northumbria University contacted me about an interesting discovery they had made in a storage area in the University’s Wynne Jones building. Following my research into the war-related features of Trinity Building (formerly Trinity Presbyterian church), they knew I was interested in information about any war memorials on campus. It turned out that staff from Estates had discovered in Wynne Jones a hitherto unknown First World War memorial. The memorial was accompanied by a brass plaque commemorating the opening of the Newcastle YMCA building on Blackett Street in 1900. This building was knocked down in the 1970s to make way for the Eldon Square shopping centre. Various architectural features of the Victorian building were salvaged when it was demolished. These included stone carvings and door surrounds, which were mounted onto one of the exterior walls on Prudhoe Chare in 1976 (the alley by the side of Marks and Spenercs). But it appears that the YMCA’s war memorial was also rescued from the old building, which was then transferred to the Association’s new premises on Ellison Place. The University acquired this building twenty years later in the 1990s and – seemingly without realising it – also inherited the YMCA’s war memorial.

The memorial is made of wood and includes the names of about 100 men who ‘Gave Their All’ in the First World War. Three Northumbria history students are now researching the names of the men as part of a work placement module all students undertake in their second year. With the help of a
Masters student who is undertaking a project on war memorials in Newcastle schools, they have been introduced to the use of digitised local newspapers, the 1911 census, CWGC records, and military archives, in order to research the lives of those named on the memorial. We have also made contact with the modern-day YMCA in Newcastle and it is interested in collaborating with Northumbria on this project, with some of the young people from the Association helping with elements of the research . Ultimately, the hope is that the biographical information collected will contribute to a permanent online resource about Newcastle YMCA’s role in the First World War.

Loyalism and Loyalists in the British Empire

A One-Day Workshop hosted by the British and Irish Worlds Research Group, Northumbria University

Call for Papers

“The Alternative of Williams-burg,” 1775.
A print showing the coercion of Virginia loyalists.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Northumbria University’s British and Irish Worlds Research Group is inviting papers from postgraduates and established academics for a one-day workshop that will explore the meaning, character and diversity of loyalism in the British Empire. Inspired by a recent growth in the literature on loyalism in old- and new-world contexts, Loyalism and Loyalty in the British Empire is intended to deepen our understanding of a topic which connects with numerous themes in British, imperial and British World studies, but one which has so far lacked a comparative perspective that considers how loyalism and loyalists differed across time and space.

Until recently, loyalism was considered as a static and conservative creed, one associated with enclaves of Protestant white male elites in particular corners of the British Empire. Loyalism also tended to be overlooked by a scholarly profession that was more interested in understanding the liberal and reformist strands in empire, and the development of national identities.

But recent work—Maya Josanoff’s study of loyalism in the American Revolutionary period is a particularly good example—has encouraged historians to view loyalism as a much more complicated and dynamic phenomenon. Loyalists came in many shapes and sizes; different languages of loyalty were spoken by settler and indigenous communities for strategic and ideological reasons; and British, Afrikaner, French Canadian and African populations all had different ideas on how and why empire could be maintained. We also know that loyalists were not always unblinking adherents of monarchy and British institutions. Feelings of betrayal prompted some to adopt reformist or revolutionary stances, and in some cases loyalists threatened separation and secession. Other considerations which we might pursue include:

* How did different communities of loyalists—both within colonies and over a larger imperial canvass—interact and communicate with one another?

* What was the ethnic, class and gendered make-up of loyalist communities, and did loyalists always identify themselves as ‘loyalists’?

* What were imperial loyalists loyal to, and did this change over time?

* Was there an ideology of loyalism, or were the differences between imperial loyalists more important than what connected them?

* How were loyalist diasporas formed, how did they sustain themselves, and what role did churches, associations and commemorations play in imperial loyalism?

* Was loyalism a strategic or pragmatic position for non-white and non-Christian communities, or are there ways for us to test loyalist sincerity?

* How did loyalism interact with regional, colonial and national identities across the British World?

Abstracts of 200-300 words that relate to these and related themes are sought. Please send the abstract to either Dr Joe Hardwick (joseph.hardwick@northumbria.ac.uk) or Colin Reid (colin.w.reid@northumbria.ac.uk) by 6 February 2015. The workshop will take place on 24 April 2015. The keynote speaker is Dr Allan Blackstock (University of Ulster).

A Great War Memorial at Northumbria University

James McConnel

Although Northumbria did not exist as an institution during the Great War, the University has a number of interesting connections with the period 1914–1918. The official history of Northumbria (by Joan Allen) records that one of the University’s predecessor institutions, Rutherford Technical College (established in 1880), was indirectly affected by the conflict: the College’s enrolments fell away in 1914, while the institution’s curriculum suffered as a result of various staff members joining (or in some cases re-joining) the colours. New students, however, subsequently enrolled at the college for the purposes of training in Newcastle’s munitions’ factories, while another aspect of the College’s curriculum which underwent change due to wartime circumstances was the training of women to replace the depleted male workforce. Towards the end of the war Rutherford College was also involved in the training of disabled soldiers in preparation for peacetime.

Northumbria University's Trinity Building on the left

But perhaps one of the most tangible links which Northumbria has to the Great War is the stained glass window dedicated to a soldier of the Great War housed in the Trinity Building on Northumberland Road. Formerly part of Trinity Presbyterian Church, the surviving stained glass windows include one, situated on the north aisle of what was the nave, which features the dedication: ‘In loving memory of Liet. J.A.G. Brewis, 4th D[urham] L[ight] I[nfantry], attached RFC, killed whilst flying, April 29 1917. Age 22 years.’

John Arthur Gardner Brewis was born in Sheffield in 1896. His father was, according to the 1901 census, a ‘Foreign Produce Importer’, and the family had moved to Gosforth in Newcastle by 1901. The only son of five children, at the time of the war’s outbreak Brewis had just completed his first year as a medical student at Newcastle Medical College (then part of the University of Durham). Having previously served as a cadet in the Officers’ Training Corps, he ‘was given a commission in the DLI immediately on the outbreak of war’. Following nine months of training, he was sent to Flanders in May 1915 as a second lieutenant with the 2nd Battalion DLI. After sixteen months at the front (during which time he was promoted to lieutenant), he joined the Royal Flying Corps, and acted as an observing officer for six months with 40 Squadron. Wounded twice, on returning from his second period of convalescence he qualified as a flying officer in February 1917.

John Arthur Gardner Brewis memorial
Trinity Building, Northumbria University

His career as a pilot was, however, to be short-lived (lasting just two weeks). His short flying career included being one of several British pilots who, on 24 April 1917, attacked an enemy aircraft, forcing it to land, with the resulting capture of two prisoners. Five days later Brewis was shot down by enemy ground fire while flying a morning patrol. RFC headquarters initially believed that he was unhurt and had probably been taken prisoner, but five months later in September 1917 he was reported as having been killed in action.

In the immediate aftermath of the news, Brewis’ parents received many expressions of sympathy, which later found tangible form in a number of memorials. In addition to the stained glass window in Trinity building on Northumbria’s campus, his name features on the Flying Service Memorial at Arras, on a plaque in Newcastle’s medical school, on a memorial in St Nicholas’ Church, Gosforth, on a plaque in Gosforth Memorial Welfare Centre, and on a plaque in Alnmouth golf club to its members who fell in the conflict.

James McConnel is a Reader in History at Northumbria University.  He studied at the universities of Sheffield and Durham. He joined Northumbria University in November 2008. He specialises in Irish and British History.  He is the author of The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Third Home Rule Crisis (Four Courts Press: Dublin, 2013).