Chris Williams:
Welcome to The Things We Forgot to Remember podcast. My name’s Chris Williams from the Open University, and I’m a consultant on the Radio 4 series. During the making of this series, we’re supporting, we’ve heard about how communities affect the way we look at history. To discuss this issue, I’ve got with me from the Open University, Jovan Byford, who’s a psychologist, Clive Emsley, Professor of History, and Dan Weinbren, who’s a social scientist.

I’d like to start our discussion on community and history with a clip from our programme on the memory of Jack the Ripper.

Barry Godfrey (clip):
I think that any casual reading of Victorian newspapers will give you a great range of very gruesome crimes very quickly. I’ve come across several examples of children killing children, for example. There’s a very gruesome murder in Shropshire, around the same time as Jack the Ripper is going in London, where the parents of one eight year old girl, they chop off her head. The mother goes out and wraps her head in brown paper, throws it in a local pond while the father stays behind to burn the rest of the body on the fireplace. Now that’s happening at the same time as Jack. It’s not reaching the national press. It gets three or four lines in the Shropshire newspapers where it happened. It doesn’t even make the Times. And I think if you look at the Victorian newspapers, you’d find many examples of things which are equally gruesome as Jack the Ripper.

Chris Williams:
That was historian Barry Godfrey making the point that murders are remembered locally when they’re forgotten nationally. They give areas and communities something that they have in common. Clive, can I start by asking you what are the ways that communities fix and transmit their views of the past?

Clive Emsley:
I think the whole issue that Barry Godfrey raised there is really an interesting one about the locality and the local community and the national community. He juxtaposes that particularly murder in Shropshire with Jack the Ripper. Now the Jack the Ripper murders happened in a very, very limited area, a very small area of East London. In a sense it’s a crime confined to a small community area. But it becomes national because it’s picked up by the London press which is essentially the national press.

And the very fact that Jack the Ripper is never apprehended, and there are still arguments today about who he was, and every Ripperologist has his own theory, people are able to, communities are able to impose on the Ripper story whatever fabric they want to impose. And we can see this with other historical figures and the way that the national community, perhaps the local community picks them up and runs with them.

Robin Hood, there’s a statue of him in Nottingham. You can sort of do the Robin Hood tour in Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood is now a series on BBC television. But the Robin Hood who’s the hero of the modern series on the television is a very modern Robin Hood. He’s just come back from a war in the Middle East. He doesn’t actually talk about coming back from a crusade but from a war.

Now it’s interesting also that he comes back carrying a Saracen bow, which I guess would be the equivalent of someone coming back and using an AK47 as opposed to a British Army issue rifle. That’s a total distortion of the way that people have understood Robin Hood in the past, who always used the fine English longbow, which creamed the French at Agincourt and Poitiers. I mean perhaps these are things that kids now have forgotten to remember. So I think the national community is being encouraged to think of past figures in very modern ways so that they can easily be interpreted in the modern world.

Chris Williams:
But is the community remaking Robin Hood something which has only just happened, Dan?

Dan Weinbren:
Well they’ve been remaking Robin Hood since at least I guess the 15th Century and probably earlier. In the 19th Century there was a large organisation for mutual aid called the Ancient Order of Foresters Friendly Society, which although it was established in its modern form in the 1830s, claimed to both go back to Sherwood as part of its traditions and also it reinvented Robin Hood as a sort of democratic idyll of under the greenwood there were these people sharing, taking, moving money around between the rich and the poor and so forth.

And those notions became part of how that community, the Forester Society, which was a very successful organisation, perhaps one of the largest by 1900, how that organisation established in a sense its own continuity, its own traditions, and people would dress up and go on parades as Robin Hood under banners of Maid Marian and Hood and the others right until the 1950s at least. And they went on annual processions and pilgrimages to the site of where he’s allegedly, I quickly add, buried.

So I think that’s part of what they’re doing is they’re not just transmitting the view of the past, they’re actually creating a sense of purpose and a sense of community by drawing upon that tradition. Just as you can also see this in the Orange Order, which also goes on parades, its parades are very orderly, a bit like the men marching away in 1915, and if you look on their banners, there’s pictures which commemorate the five thousand Ulstermen who were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

They’re taking a particular idea, a particular event from a significant year in Irish history and presenting themselves as loyal, as British, and as part of the cycle of history, not a linear event, which begins in the beginning and goes to the present but of one where these things are constantly reappearing in their history.

So the Ulstermen are constantly being seen as being loyal and united, even though of course at the time when this event in 1915 was occurring, shortly before then Ulstermen had been arming themselves to be disloyal to the throne, they’re presenting a cyclical version of themselves as always being very similar. So I guess what they’re doing is saying that in lots of ways they are unchanging.

Chris Williams:
So Jovan, do communities always successfully push a collective version of their history?

Jovan Byford:
I think it is tempting to think when we talk about collective memories to think that particular communities share a consensus about what the past is like. So it is tempting to think about, for instance, what is the difference between the way that the English and the French remember, for instance, the Napoleonic wars, assuming that the English, all English remember it in a particular way as opposed to all French. But, in fact, what makes collective memory such a fascinating topic is that we never have a consensus on the past, and that remembering the past is always an argument.

And the reason for that is that our representations of the past, the ones that are promoted by our community, never exist in isolation. We always have access to the counter memories, to different memories promoted by other communities. And we always have to remember the past. In remembering the past, we always have to orient to the alternative memories, and what we have to do is we have to embed our memories of the past within that context.

And also as our perception of the past changes, we can pick and choose from a range of alternative memories and create again and again novel ways of interpreting the past, and that is what makes collective memory so dynamic.

Chris Williams:
Right, so it’s a dynamic process of remaking. Clive, will a community always remodel the past just to suit its own interests?

Clive Emsley:
I don’t think it does it consciously, but communities can be very aware of their present and of what people are encouraging them to do. There’s a famous poster from the period of the Blitz which was issued by the British Government and carried the words to the effect, “Your courage, your determination, your sacrifice will bring us victory.” Now the person who devised that slogan did not realise how people particularly in the East End who had just been blitzed saw that actually as a bit of an insult, you know, our courage, our determination, our sacrifice is going to bring whose victory? Very rapidly this got back to the authorities, and that poster was taken down.

Now it’s interesting that we have a collective memory of the Blitz of everyone pulling together, and yet the story of that poster shows actually the fragility of that consensus, if indeed there was really a consensus at the time of the Blitz. We’ve forgotten to remember perhaps the social tensions that still existed within British society even in the darkest period of the Second World War.

Chris Williams:
Thanks. I know that something like a poster can be withdrawn, but surely things like monuments are there forever. I know, Dan, you’ve done work on memorials for the First World War. Don’t these just show one frozen image of what a community thinks about the war?

Dan Weinbren:
Well, one of the things about the war memorials in the UK is because bodies weren’t allowed to be brought back from overseas, each town, often each company or street would create its own. And some of these are very different. There are ones which have got images in metal of fighting men. There’s very occasionally women engaged in nursing activities. There are also ones which have generic figures of mothers weeping. And I think what’s happened is that how those are treated has changed over time, even if the statue itself or the memorial hasn’t, so that at one point you had to, in the 1920s it would be reasonable to tip your hat as you went past one. By the 1980s, there’s one in the North of England where it has a little plaque next to it telling you not to leave your empty beer cans there please, which suggests that attitudes towards that memorial have changed.

I think also they present a particular version of the past which has to be acceptable for the local people so that, or the employer if it’s a company one, so that some of the memorials in the areas which were contested between France and Germany are rather generic though of a weeping woman rather than a man in uniform because of course men in different uniforms were killed in that conflict.

And in this country, although the number of memorials suggests that people gave their lives, there is one which tells us that their lives were taken, suggesting the views of those who put it up. That may not reflect the views of everybody in that town, but it reflects the people who, the views of those who paid for the memorial. And that’s true about all the other ones. Often you’ll see there is a collection for a memorial, individuals have put a lot of money, and they have a say in the creation of what’s probably the largest group of popular art in the 20th Century.

Chris Williams:
Right, Clive.

Clive Emsley:
Well I was going to say it’s very interesting actually as well if you contrast the different images of war memorials and First World War cemeteries. We have a sort of national image of what they look like, and you can go to German ones which are totally different. The British Imperial ones being white marble and the German ones being of black stone and, interestingly, with triple iron crosses which look like calvaries, and there are lots of really interesting echoes that are going on there with reference to the national community.

And, of course, to pick up on Jovan’s point about the Napoleonic Wars, I have a very good French colleague, who we share a research interest, and he once said to me that having to get the Eurostar from Waterloo, he said, “Why do you call a railway station after a defeat?”

Chris Williams:
Thanks. So all of these artefacts, these commemorations are messages if you like to the public, but still is the public listening? Jovan, can you from your own research give any indication of whether or not these attempts to freeze memory will succeed, or are they doomed to failure? Jovan?

Jovan Byford:
Well I think it depends very much on the context. Clive mentioned earlier that memory of the Blitz, for instance. That is a good example because there is of course the contrast between the way that we remember the Blitz and East London community as sort of a real community spirit in the face of adversity, and that might be contrasted with the facts of the way they really were and various tensions that existed at the time. But the reason why we only remember the good things about the Blitz, the community spirit, is because we tend to remember the Blitz in the context when that is the relevant thing to remember.

So, for instance, we will of course remember the Blitz at various anniversaries, but the time when the Blitz memory’s invoked is, for instance, like in the aftermath of the London bombings when that becomes a relevant memory through which we don’t just interpret what is happening to us but how we should behave. So it becomes essentially a resource for telling people what is needed and creating a community spirit that actually is beneficial to the community itself.

Chris Williams:
So the thing that’s driving this collective memory and this community memory is our need for community rather than historical reality which is what we’re taking down off the shelf?

Jovan Byford:
Yes. We essentially create the community through remembering.

Chris Williams:
And that’s a good way of ending our discussion for today. My thanks very much to Jovan Byford, Dan Weinbren and Clive Emsley. To find out more about the Radio 4 series of The Things We Forgot to Remember and history in general, visit our website at Open2.net. I’m Chris Williams, the Producer was Mercia Goodway, and this is a BBC Worldwide production for the Open University.