Retro Blast: Happy Graduation, Blue Coats and All

Congratulations to those graduating this week and next! What a milestone in your lives! To celebrate, I’m reposting something from 2010 and letting you know that Art and Artifice is currently on sale for 99 cents for a limited time. Find the links to purchase here. 

This time of year marks graduation for many—from high school, from trade school, from college.  Some will wear gowns in their school colors; others will wear somber black.  In the nineteenth century, students attending school at Christ’s Hospital wore blue.

The London Bluecoat School, as it was called, opened for both boys and girls in 1552.  It was designed to educate and house London’s poor children, but students came from all England and Wales, and a few came from Ireland and Scotland.  An average of 1,500 students were enrolled each year.  It must have been a frugal operation:  in 1815, it cost about 22 pounds per year per child to house, feed, clothe, and educate the students.

So let’s say you’re a child of a poor family, and your mother would like to see you have a chance to do something better in life by attending the Bluecoat School.  First, she had to petition a member of the board of governors (who were generally officials with the City of London) or some wealthy person with influence at the school (a benefactor) for help.  She had to gather birth and baptismal records, a sworn statement from your parish minister, and statements from witnesses that proved you were the right age and in a “destitute condition.”  The board member or benefactor brought the proof to the board, who reviewed and approved these presentation papers, at which point your family was notified.

On a set day, Mother brought you down to the school and turned you over to the registrar.  I imagine there must have been some teary-eyed farewells at that point.  Much as if you were entering prison, the registrar recorded your name in a book and gave you a new set of clothes that consisted of a long blue coat close to the body, a yellow underskirt, yellow stockings, and a flat, round worsted cap.  That’s what you wore the remainder of your time in the school, up to age sixteen.

At first, boys and girls were educated in the same school, but just before the beginning of the nineteenth century, the girls were moved out of London to Hertfordshire, and some of the youngest boys (under age 10) joined them shortly afterward.  It appears the girls were taught to go into service or trade, but the boys in London were educated in the classics, including learning Latin.  The buildings also housed the Royal Mathematical School to train mathematicians and teach naval officers navigation.  Sir Isaac Newton, John Flamsteed the first Astronomer Royal, and Edmund Halley (who first computed the orbit of Halley’s comet) helped build the study materials.

The Bluecoat School was much patronized by the aristocracy and nobility.  It operated under Royal Charter, and noted architects Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor (I so want to steal his name for a hero!), designed the buildings after many of the originals were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.  The wealthy even left money to the school in their wills.  Famous students in London include critic and writer James Leigh Hunt, essayist Charles Lamb, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  Bluecoat schools eventually sprung up in a number of other English cities as well.

So, if you are graduating or have graduated, congratulations!  Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to do it in a blue coat and yellow stockings?

Green and Pleasant Land, Part 1: London

London is an amazing city. Of course the history aspect is amazing...but it’s also a remarkably livable city, at least for me who gets antsy when there aren’t trees nearby. There’s little of the canyon-like effect you get in Manhattan...and the parks are truly lovely. And did I mention the history? ☺

So the five of us arrived at our hotel in Westminster in what is probably an ideal place for sightseeing: we were at the St. James Courtyard hotel, a five-minute walk from Buckingham Palace (and on the same street as the Bluecoat School, about which Regina blogged). The hotel itself dates to the Edwardian era, and is built around a courtyard with all sorts of delightful architectural bits. London abounds in delightful architectural bits, by the way—no walk is ever dull there.

I’m happy to report that the statue of Queen Victoria at her memorial in front of the Palace still looks like a lifeguard (which I’d noticed on my first visit to London about thirty years ago)—for some reason Her Majesty’s nose is lighter than the rest of her, as if smeared with zinc oxide. And Canada Gate at the entrance to Green Park off Constitution Hill is as shiny as ever:

However, I was very sad to see that cows are no longer kept in Green Park as they were during the Regency, despite this reminder of their presence:

I found it a little surprising to see how small St. James’s Palace was, and how “right there” as well—the streets run right alongside it—considering it’s actually the official home of the sovereign (ambassadors are still accredited to the Court of St. James.) It was built by Henry VIII and added onto over the centuries, but still has that sixteenth century feel:

And then we were in St. James’s Street, Masculinity Central of Regency London, home of such places as Brooks’s and White’s Club (and yes, there’s the famous Bow Window at White’s)

What I found interesting (beside all the famous historical landmarks and stores) was the topography. St. James’s Street trends uphill, which I did not know—it’s one of those things that somehow doesn’t get mentioned very often, and which I’m glad I now know. But even more exciting to me was catching sight of King Street off St. James’s. The King Street, home of Almack’s Assembly Rooms? You bet—only, Almack’s is long gone, replaced by (sob!) an office building. But at least I can now say I was there as I scribble away at my Almack’s stories. That's me with Child #1. Yes, he's pretty tall.

What else? We dined at Wilton’s on Jermyn Street, established 1742, and had a wonderful dinner...and a delightful tea at Duke’s Hotel. We carried out a quick raid on Harrod’s and came away with tea and chocolates (alas, the presence of a husband and son necessitated the visit being brief). And we visited the Victoria and Albert Museum (glorious sensory overload—it’s the world’s largest museum of art and design) and Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s house at Hyde Park Corner, which was amazing.

No interior photographs permitted, alas, as my little history-geek heart was a-galloping at the eleven-foot tall statue of Napoleon at the base of the Principal Staircase on which it is rumored Wellington used to hang his hat as he went up the stairs (and the painting of Wellington in old age presenting a gift to his godson, Queen Victoria’s son Arthur)...at the astonishing Waterloo Shield, which really has to be seen to be appreciated (Google it!) Wellington came away from the wars with a ton of goodies from grateful European heads of state. And most of all at the Waterloo Gallery, the room where Wellington held his annual dinners to commemorate the battle and which held his collection of Spanish masters. Curiously, among the amazing art collection amassed here are multiple portraits of Napoleon and members of his family. After Waterloo, Wellington would be linked for the rest of his life to the former French emperor—without Napoleon, Wellington would not have been Wellington. That must have been a strange thing to have to live with for the rest of his life—so closely linked to someone he actually never met face-to-face—and he lived nearly forty more years after the battle.

And right around the corner from Apsley House in Hyde Park? Rotten Row, of course!

Next time: visiting Oxford and Windsor

#WhyIWriteHistoricals

Today, across social media, authors are sharing why they write historical romance. We’re inviting readers to do the same for why they read historical romance. If you search for the hashtag #WhyIWriteHistoricals or #WhyIReadHistoricals, you can find their stories. Here’s mine.

I write historical romances because I find history romantic. Long dresses, men with shining swords, times when a kiss on the hand and a look across a room meant everything. Candlelit dinners (candlelit anything!), carriage rides, dancing the night away--what’s not to love?

I write historical romances because I find history surprising. Someone tried to rescue Napoleon with a submarine. Horses in pioneer Seattle didn’t need horseshoes because there were no paved roads. A Regency-era corset was custom-made and didn’t make breathing difficult. I love learning things I never knew!

I write historical romances because I find history inspiring. Thousands of men gave their lives to defeat the tyranny of a man determined to conquer Europe and England. Women stood up for their rights to vote so that I can vote today. America’s ancestors crossed oceans and continents to make new lives for themselves. What am I willing to do for what I believe?

I write historical romances because I love them. I love the stories, and I love the history. What about you?

*Thanks to Eileen Richards and Jessica Jefferson for the graphics.

I'm Baaaaaack!

Well, the Doyles are back from England, laden with tea and books and some pretty cool fossils...and it was a blast! I'll be posting in (historical) detail about the sites we visited, but while I get my photos in order for that, here are a few images I thought you might like:

It being May, we were lucky enough to catch the bluebells in bloom in many locations, but this bluebell copse on Dartmoor in Devon was our favorite:

Along with primroses, which I'm more used to seeing in the garden center, not growing wild!

No, it's not really a snowflake...it's one of the chandeliers in the Assembly Room at Bath!

Is it some primordial monster from the depths of space? Nope, it's a glass sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum:

On the straight and narrow on Dartmoor:

Even the chimneys at Hampton Court are worth photographing:

 

And again, it being May, we saw lambs. A lot of very, very, very cute lambs!

Not to mention cows, source of the copious amounts of clotted cream we consumed.  Here is a new breed photographed in the New Forest, the demi-cow--ideal for smaller farms:

It's great to be home! :)

Boys of the Bothy

What lives in a dark hole in the garden, coming out to till the soil and tend the plants?  No, I’m not talking about gnomes or hobbits.  I’m talking about bothy boys.

Bothy boys appear to be a mid- to late-nineteenth century phenomena in England.  Those wealthy families with extensive gardens often required a herd of gardeners to tend things.  I hadn’t thought about the fact that some garden tasks, like protecting spring plants from a sudden frost or maintaining greenhouses before the widespread use of electricity, were twenty-four-hour efforts.  Particularly on a massive estate, sending your garden workers home to the nearest village between shifts simply wasn’t feasible.

While the head gardener might have his own quarters on the estate, the under gardeners, journeymen, and apprentices were sometimes housed in bothys. A bothy is a small house of sorts, with an emphasis on the sorts.  The term is used for waystations on Scottish trails.  But on the great estates, bothys served as home to as many as a dozen workers.  Some bothys were no more than a dirt cellar carved out of a hillside with piles of blankets for bedding.  Upscale bothys were made of stone or brick and boasted dormitory-style living with a sitting room. The picture at top isn’t actually a bothy--I couldn’t find a royalty-free picture, alas.

The “boys” who lived in the bothy were not always boys--workers ranged from their teens to their early thirties.  They worked hard all day and sometimes into the night, depending on the time of year and needs of the gardens. The best houses provided instructors one night a week to teach the fellows enough botany to care for the plants, enough Latin to recognize the proper names, and enough drawing to sketch plan, placements, and the occasional odd specimen.

Produce from the garden appears to have been part of their wages, and they used it barter for other things, like meat for the table and eggs and cream from the local farmer. The universal feeling seems to be that these fellows had better things to do than cook for themselves; the better estates had a woman come in to clean once a week and cook once a day. Romantic that I am, I was already planning story ideas about a plucky Irish cook and a strapping bothy boy. But then I read that the position of bothy cook was generally given to an elderly female servant who was considered past her prime.

I bet she still kept those bothy boys in line.

For more on bothys, check out this excellent treatise and the pictures here, here, and here.

Where's Marissa?

Just so you know, I’m not really here.

Okay, that’s rather a cryptic statement. But as you’re reading this, I am happily traipsing around England with my family. We’re doing a whirlwind tour of southern England, starting in London and progressing through Oxford, Bath, Dartmoor, then along the south coast from Lyme Regis to the Isle of Wight and Brighton, then back to London and home. Believe me, you’ll hear all about it here on NineteenTeen in the coming weeks--I can’t wait to get back to Bath...and go fossil hunting in Lyme Regis...and I’m dying to see the Royal Pavilion (that's it above)! As you might guess, there's just a bit of a Regency slant to the places we're visiting.

Something else I’ve been anticipating for a long time is also happening right now. One of my favorite books (definitely in my all-time top five), Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, has been made into a television mini-series by the BBC.

Now, ordinarily, I would cringe—I don’t watch any TV apart from an occasional movie on DVD (hey, watching TV wastes valuable writing time!) But it actually looks like they managed to nail this 800-page glorious behemoth of a novel. It’s about an alternate Regency-era England in which magic exists, though fallen from use...until a pair of magicians arise and try to resurrect English Magic...and nearly destroy each other in the process. It’s full of a delightfully dry humor (like when Jonathan Strange temporarily moves Brussels across the Atlantic on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo to keep it safe from Napoleon), features marvelous world-building and the occasional 3-page footnote, and is just a giant confection of a book for lovers of historical fantasy. And it’s airing in Britain right now (coming to the US in July) so I’ll have a chance to catch the first two episodes while I’m here! In the meanwhile, check out the trailer:



See you soon!

Pioneer Legends: Ezra Meeker

Marissa and I originally started this blog because we kept finding cool things in our research for our stories that we had to share!  As I’m researching my Frontier Bachelors series set in early Seattle, Washington Territory, I’m coming across a number of interesting real-life characters that I know you’ll love.  This post starts an ongoing series on some of these men and women who made the Pacific Northwest what it is today.

The Oregon Trail is a legend unto itself.  Thousands of men, women, and children traversed the country to claim land on the West Coast.  Ezra Meeker and his wife Eliza were among them.  Ezra eventually settled in the Puyallup area south of Seattle, where his hop raising made him rich enough to build his wife a mansion that still stands today.  He later lost all his money and tried to recoup it by selling supplies in the Klondike Gold Rush.  But that’s not the most intriguing part of the story.

You see, when Ezra was up in years (70 to be exact, in 1900), he became concerned that people didn’t know or appreciate what the pioneers had accomplished in traveling the trail. Farmers were plowing over the land once crossed by wagon wheels, merchants were building businesses where campfires had kept away the night.  He became obsessed with preserving the trail, wanting to see granite monuments erected all along the route.  After careful planning, he decided to travel backwards along the trail, by ox-drawn covered wagon, to raise awareness and funds to purchase the markers.  He set out in 1906 with his trusty oxen Dave and Twist, an amiable collie named Jim, and, eventually, a driver and cook named William Mardon, to speak about the trail and convince towns to place his markers. 

The way wasn’t easy.  Some towns refused to support him, unwilling to help an “old man” die out on the Plains or in the mountains.  Twist did die along the way, and no other cow or ox would pull with Dave until Ezra lucked into a similarly sized ox named Dandy. When speaking fees failed to pay for his travels, he started selling postcards of pictures taken on the journey.  Some towns put in markers while he was there; others put them in after he’d left.

It took him nearly two years to make it across the country, traveling beyond the start of the trail into Pennsylvania and New York.  Though he was nearly arrested in New York City, he ended up getting his picture taken on Wall Street and driving across the Brooklyn Bridge. He then headed to Washington D.C. where his state congressional delegation had arranged a meeting with President Roosevelt, who was pleased to discuss Meeker’s vision.  At that point, Meeker had earned enough money after his expenses to send the wagon and team home by boat and train, with only a few miles of pulling across land.

But that wasn’t his last trip along the trail.  When Congress began discussing appropriating money for markers in 1910, Ezra spent another two years charting the path so the markers could be placed accurately.  He continued promoting the trail at every major event along the Pacific Coast for another decade.  When Dave and then Dandy passed away, he had them stuffed and donated them to the Washington State History Museum.  He traveled the trail again by automobile in 1916 and met with President Wilson and again in 1924 by airplane and met with President Coolidge. In 1925, he spent some months driving an ox team for a wild west show. He even published a romance novel about the Oregon Trail.  He was on his way once more along the trail, in an automobile designed for him by Henry Ford, when, in 1928, he died of pneumonia just short of his 98th birthday.

I grew up hearing stories of Ezra Meeker’s exploits.  Every year in elementary school, we would tour the Washington History Museum and gaze in awe at Dave and Dandy.  Although I understand the wagon is no longer strong enough for display, the valiant oxen remain standing, teaching new generations about the triumphs of the Oregon Trail. 

I think Ezra Meeker would be pleased.