War Classics appears in this list of WWI recommended reading by Housmans, the radical booksellers.
http://www.housmans.com/blog/?p=2208
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
I spent today at Stirling Castle. On my own. Part proper work, part research, part sheer indulgence.
The proper work bit was to see the exhibition Wallace, Bruce and Scotland’s Contested Crown before it closes next week. It’s fun to go along and watch people interacting with the displays.
The staff were fantastic. The man who sold me my ticket told me about the special exhibition, about these documents which are ‘the oldest thing you’ll see today, older than any part of the castle’. The guide in the room was doing a brilliant job of making 700-year-old Latin texts sound interesting to a group of schoolchildren. The running totals on the ‘who would you vote for’ between Wallace and Bruce were up in the 600s, with a narrow lead for William Wallace. The exhibition was remarkably busy.
I was in Stirling Castle about twenty years ago on a Scottish History trip from St Andrews, and then again about ten years ago. But so much restoration work has been carried out on these magnificent Stewart buildings that it was well worth another visit. It’s fabulous to see the coloured reconstructions of the Stirling heads, and so much more. I love to think that many of these depict the men and women of James V’s court – it’s like having the pictures in Hello spread out across the ceiling!
I wandered down the hill to the Church of the Holy Rude, which I’m not sure I’ve ever visited before but I particularly wanted to see today – that was part of the ‘research’ bit.
The infant King James VI was crowned here in 1567 when his mother Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate.
Behind the church is a graveyard which was partly laid out by the Victorians, and has some rather unexpected statues of figures from Scottish reformation history dotted around, including this truly bizarre monument to two famous Covenanting martyrs who were drowned in the Solway.
There’s a small hill in the graveyard. Climb that hill and look around, and you really are in the heartland of Scotland’s history. The surrounding landscape has been fought over again and again – Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn, Sauchieburn ….. The castle of the Stewart kings looms high, not just a strategic fortress but also a self-confident expression of dynastic power and artistic ambition. The medieval church has its own story to tell through the centuries, and then there are those figures of the Scottish reformation, interpreted through Victorian eyes. Whistlestop tour through the centuries!
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
There’s an interesting article in The Hindu today. It groups War Classics with several books which approach the First World War from a different angle.
Witness to the truth – The Hindu.
World War I spawned literature of various hues. One hundred years later, we still grope for meanings and explanations. Here are a few books that give us some indication of the pointless nature of the Great War, told by individuals who either experienced it firsthand or wrote about it later.
War Classics: The Remarkable Memoir of Scottish Scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front by Flora Johnston talks about a woman from upper class Scottish society, a lecturer in Classics, who went to live and struggle with common soldiers as a teacher with the army’s education scheme in France. The memoirs tell of the role played by thousands of men and women behind the lines to support the war and opens up a whole new world that lay just a few miles from the front. Keith also travelled across the devastated war zones after the Armistice and spoke of “a dream world, where everything happened… on a background of infinite horror”. She met the soldiers who had survived, saw tanks, clothing and weaponry lying littered across the battlefields of Europe and the war graves consisting of rough wooden crosses stuck in yellow mud and water.
I don’t think Christina was setting out to portray the war as pointless, but I do think her descriptions of the devastation it caused have real power – in part because they are written from a different viewpoint to most other commentators. The article concludes, We need books like these to approach the truth.
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
War Classics appeared in the Arts section of The Herald on Saturday 19 April.
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
And now for something a wee bit different:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-26886191
I’ve been working on the interactive to accompany this exhibition over the last couple of months. The exhibition brings together two extremely rare documents, one associated with William Wallace and one associated with Robert Bruce. Medieval documents aren’t instantly accessible to most of us, yet these two rare survivors have the power to link us directly back to some of the most exciting events in Scotland’s history.
The exhibition will set the documents in their national and international context, and the interactive helps you to explore both the actual documents and the story behind them.
It’s been fun to go medieval again!
The exhibition opens in Stirling Castle on 3 May. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
Yesterday I found this wonderful article about Christina from when she was 14 years old. It must have been published c1903, probably in the Caithness Courier or John o Groat Journal, although the clipping doesn’t give a source. I love the picture, from the days when it was too expensive to take a photograph for a short piece on schoolgirl prizes.
It seems there’s always more to find!
War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the western front, edited by Flora Johnston, is published by The History Press
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
This article about War Classics and Christina is printed in today’s John o Groat Journal.
(Whole page pdf – John o Groat journal 2014)
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front is now available to purchase via The History Press, Amazon, Waterstones and other websites.
It tells the story of a young academic from Thurso who travelled to France towards the end of the First World War as a lecturer with the army’s education scheme. Christina was part of the generation which pioneered higher education for women, and which was most affected by the war. The two themes of education and war intertwine through the book.
Christina writes with warmth and affection of her encounters with the troops, while her account of travelling across devastated battlefields is both vivid and moving. The book also includes letters written by her brother, David Barrogill Keith, from the Front.
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
One month until publication.
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
2014. The year seems familiar already as this date has been discussed so often. And whatever happens in the independence referendum, we know that 2014 will be a year we’ll always remember in Scotland.
Strange then, that it’s also a year which will itself see a great deal of remembering, as events take place to mark one hundred years since another unforgettable year, 1914. There will be debate about the nature, tone and purpose of such events. For me, there’s an interesting synchronicity in the fact that 2014 will see the publication of my great-aunt Christina Keith’s memoir of her time in France towards the end of the First World War, lecturing to the troops.
I hadn’t particularly planned it that way, but I’m glad now that Christina’s story will join all those others, as it explores a very different aspect of life on the Western Front from that which initially comes to mind.
When the war broke out in the summer of 1914, Christina was 25 years old and about to take up her first position as a lecturer at Armstrong College in Newcastle. Life in the College, as elsewhere, would soon be thrown into turmoil by the sheer scale of this conflict. As part of my research into Christina’s story I read the diaries of her Professor in Newcastle. On August 5 1914, while on holiday, he wrote:
We wake to find ourselves a nation at war with Germany. Germany would not agree to guarantee the inviolability of Belgium to which she is pledged by treaty like Britain; and so late last night Britain announced that a state of war existed between her and Germany. Arnold and I fished for a time in heavy rain.
Christina’s classes took place here in the Lit & Phil Society building as Armstrong College was requisitioned as a military hospital.
Christina’s memoir is not primarily a story of blood and guts and glory – but then, not everyone fought on the front line, but everyone was affected by the war. Christina’s memoirs tell a fascinating story of an extraordinary few months in her life which, while being laced with the sorrow and weariness of four years of conflict, were unexpectedly liberating.
War Classics: the remarkable memoir of Scottish scholar Christina Keith on the Western Front will be published on 3 March 2014. For me it’s another reason that this should be a memorable year!
© All content copyright Flora Johnston. You may reblog or share with acknowledgement, but please do not use in any other context without permission.
Flora Johnston 