Keeping Up With Dr Jones
Created | Updated Jun 19, 2008
After a brief respite, and because I've had a sneezy, drippy, coughy and generally incapacitating touch of the sniffles, Keeping up With Dr Jones returns with a quite candid discussion with JulesK:
So Jules, let's start off with an easy probing question, you say you're a history buff. So what turned you into one? Was it getting old? Or was it something you always had a yin for?
Getting old?! How old do you think I am, you young
whippersnapper...?!
Hmm, well, in contrast to Skanky's school experience,
I'd probably put at least some of it down to the
lessons of a certain history teacher back when I was
around fourteen (no, I didn't fancy him. Really. Best
stop digging, Jules, eh?). I remember one day he stood
us all up and like that 'Guess Who?' board game,
proceeded to let us sit down if we had certain
physical features, brown hair, shorter than however
many feet tall etc. (I know the readers can already
tell where this is going but at that age with not much
world knowledge it's quite powerful). Those of us who
got to sit down were allowed to feel smug about it -
anyway he gets to around four or five people left
standing and gulp - they're the safe ones. The Final
Solution, lesson one.
Another time the same guy (no really, he was short, I
tend to like tall men) had us vote on whether Trotsky
or Stalin was the nicer guy by carefully omitting some
of the facts (but never lying) until most of us had
voted for Stalin - then he goes on to tell us what Joe
got up to after Trotsky's encounter with the ice-pick.
So that was one of my starting points: it got me
thinking, made the dustiness of the past seem much
closer to my reality, you know. May seem clunky to us
refined types but if it sticks in the memory even now
it was a job well done, in my opinion.
I find history often speaks for itself, but I agree, having someone tell it to you in such a way as to make you enthusiastic for it is something entirely wonderful. On to my next query, if you had to teach someone about your favourite historical period, what would you be teaching them, and how?
Now, you see, having a favourite historical period can
seem a little dodgy if by favourite you mean 'period I
am most interested in' - for that does tend to be the
20th Century and the social (or rather anti-social)
aspects of WWII in particular. I think I am dually
fascinated by the appalling lack of humanity in the
concentration camps and the nuggets of humanity you
learn about, which shone through that dark time.
I do think I am more drawn to this period because I
can relate to it better - it doesn't seem so long ago.
What I mean to say is that there are some pretty yucky
things all through world history but they have never
felt as close to my life experience. Another reason is
that being a girl I do have a tendency to get so
disgusted by sexist aspects of earlier times that my
frustration clouds any deeper delvings into matters.
How would I teach it? Well the methods I mentioned in
the first answer would be a start for some people,
given that they worked for me. Not necessarily by
going on a school trip to such places - I often wonder
whether this approach can work for places where so
much suffering took place. We don't want any
theme-park-like experience. I find first-hand
accounts are good, as are historical novels (I'm
thinking of a particularly wrenching chapter of
Charlotte Gray by Sebastian Faulks). In the UK many
children are introduced to it via Anne Frank's diary.
Sorry, getting rather serious, I'm afraid. Can't
really answer that question any other way.
I have to admit, Schindler's Ark by Tom Keneally opened my eyes to those aspects of humanity when I was a teenager, and perhaps that leads us onto the next question - if you could go back in time and change something, no matter how big or small, what would you change, if anything?
Ooh, now that's a good question. Wouldn't that mess up
the space-time continuum, dabbling in timey-wimey
stuff?
Thing is, where do you start? Hitler was never born
but Idi Amin and Pol Pott still were etc.
There's also the selfish option of changing something
deeply upsetting in one's own past, something that
could help a family member.
I would have to have a good old think about this one.
Telling that my ideas so far have been to rectify bad
situations. 'If it aint broke don't fix it', I
suppose.
I could always go right back to the beginning of
humankind and bang some heads together - the ones who
decided that one sex was superior to the other one. We
may have had a lot more female world leaders and a lot
less pain through war that way. Mightily simplistic
but it's one theory.
I'm still thinking...
Well, think away, in the meantime, while cultures rise and fall, we'll move on to the next question I like to pose to all our interviewees. Presuming you don't mess up the ball of string of time and space, let's suppose you can time travel. Now what period of history would you travel back to, remembering that this is a one way trip - you have to stay there!
I'm still embarrassed by the girlie bit at the end of
my previous answer...blame hormones.
Moving swiftly on. I'm going to go with Britain in the
late 1920s. The fashions, the art deco, the jazz and
the vote. I was going to say New York at that time,
which would be much more exciting, but the Great
Depression was just around the corner. So a genteel
corner of England with a leisurely life please. And
could I get the figure to go with the dresses. Thanks.
Would a six digit figure do? Ah the roaring twenties, I didn't realise you were a closet hedonist! I really like the art of the time myself, and there's some wonderful bits and pieces where I work I'd dearly love to take home, so my next question is on a similar theme. If you were able to get your hands on an artefact of some sort to put on the mantelpiece at home, what would it be, and why?
Well, it's going to have to be a piece by Rennie
Mackintosh and there are many I'd love to get my hands
on, but to answer your question I'm going to pick this mantelpiece.
Why? He's my all-time favourite designer. I once wrote
an Edited Entry about a house he designed. There are
lots of copies of his style nowadays but I'm having
the real thing.
And yes, there are many 'ists' in my closet...
You really are quite the flapper then, eh? Speaking of flapping, what piece of historical inaccuracy has really annoyed you lately?
Well, the thing with inaccuracies is that proof stuff,
and I have to admit some of the most recent stuff has
less actual proof, more common-sense and generally
accepted feelings about them. I direct you to the
missing WMDs and the tragic death of Dr Kelly.
Before that it was the sense that for a long time
no-one spoke out about the ethnic cleansing in the
Balkans despite what we all knew about the most famous
Holocaust of the last century. Then later on the UN
decided they were actually bothered about hunting down
some of the perpetrators, post their evil actions.
That's not strictly an inaccuracy, is it?
Thirdly I've always been fascinated by the talents of
the so-called magic bullet in the JFK shooting.
Am I a conspiracist? Eek. I thought I was fairly
balanced.
I do seem to hover around the 20th Century for my
History though, maybe I should branch out?
Branches? Ah yes, family trees. Would you volunteer for having yours researched, or have you indeed looked into yourself?
I had a good delve actually, back in (counts on fingers) 1992 when I had a free summer. I like to think I did mine before it became all the rage.
I joined the local archives and spent hours in the gloom, trawling through microfiches. Occasionally I would get to look at the real documents, for example a parish register showing the baptisms of various relatives, which would be brought up from the vaults on request for me to see.
I didn't just want to do the male line so I did the four lines (one for each grandparent) as far back as I could. They ended for various reasons - some I would have had to travel to a different archive somewhere else in the country (this is both before I had a car and they were all available online for a fee), some petered out as it was difficult to work out who was my relative - similar names, ages etc. I suppose I could take some of them up again, now I have the means.
I really enjoyed it. I also made it a bit more interesting by going to interview the oldest living generation of the family and rooting about in churchyards to look at headstones. Recently I got a good programme from the web and filled it all in (easier than trying to use word processing tools as I used to do), linked to my husband's side as well. There are over 350 names on there now!
Apart from a 'black sheep' who was apparently thrown out of the family home in Norwich and came up to Yorkshire to make his fortune (or not), there's no-one too thrilling on there. If you were wondering.
Well, I was politely digging to see if there was anybody we could rib you about ... Any other tips for potential self-historians as it where? I've often found genealogy can be a frustrating game, as can being a historian generally, many walls get thrown up that are hard to climb over. Speaking of historians, is there anybody out there who has been an inspiration for 'rooting about in churchyards' - and ooo-err mrs, more tea vicar?!
My tip would be to go and do it yourself (if possible) - it's far more satisfying squinting over 300 marriage documents to find 'your' John Smith than getting one of these new-fangled search companies to do it for you. Honest.
I don't know too much about vicar's tea parties but there was a fantastic quote which came out of interviewing the relatives. One lady in her eighties, looking over the family tree with me, commented that 'they weren't really related to us, you know'. When I queried this fact, having spent hours confirming that the person in question was indeed of our bloodline, she followed up with 'well, I suppose only so much as their cat ran up our alley'. A truly priceless line..
Oh, I think that's truly exceptional! There's nothing like a bit of hands-on history, so I think that leads me to my final question. If you could contribute one item from the past to take into the future and ensure that its own little piece of history is remembered, what would it be? You can choose something famous, something large, something small, there's no guidelines - only it can't be YOU.
I have to say, you're an exceptional question-poser.
As I'm contributing it, is it from my history or a
less recent past, ie before me? I'm going with a bit
of both.
Right, this is quite trivial after the things we've
discussed I'm afraid - there is just so much stuff out
there - but I was incredibly bolshy when those
new-fangled CDs came in so I am voting for my old
music system which had a record player, radio and two
tape decks. And storage for LPs. Which I had to leave
in a flat as my then boyfriend wouldn't carry it
downstairs into the moving van as it was 'out of
date'. My particular one had Garfield stickers on it,
with captions in German. Which should throw future
historians off my trail a little. Trivial maybe but a
Big part of my teenage years - a bit of social
history. How else could one record the top ten from
the radio or make mix-tapes? Or listen to the Radio
One Roadshow while revising for the biggest exams of
one's life (apparently)?
Sorry I can't think of anything more profound - it's
been a long chat. Not that I'm complaining, it's an
honour to be involved.
Ah, that'll have 'em fooled, all those vinyls and no stylus that fits the player... thanks for your time Jules!
In the next issue of the Post Mina tells us about her love of London, Prisons and Handcuffs....
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