Category: Activists Page 1 of 2

John Betjeman, more than just a National Treasure

On May 17, 2026

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture; steam trains; the English countryside and seaside; provincial towns and country churches; and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades, and Hillman Imps. Often sentimental and nostalgic, his accessible verses guaranteed him a place in the pantheon of National Treasures. Academics and scholars could be dismissive: he was rejected for the position of Poet Laureate in 1967 on the basis that his work was “lightweight,” * and that he was a mere “mere songster of tennis lawns and cathedral closes.” ** And as a teenager in the 1960s, eager to embrace sophistication, I was a little ashamed of liking his poetry as much as I did.

But Betjeman was not just, as he is sometimes presented, a compound of cuddly whimsy and quirky charm. He cultivated fogeyism and winsomeness, but his work can be wry, mocking and satirical. Pathos jostles with a sardonic wit in his poems. He can be very funny; he engages with misfortune and adversity. He can also be a terrible snob and rather unkind. But neither his poetry nor his campaigning can be dismissed as “lightweight.”

Listen to a few extracts from a small selection of his poems:

For exuberant joyful absurdity nothing can equal A Subaltern’s Love Song:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament – you against me!

Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,

The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy

With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,

I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn…

But remember too the wistful and understated poignancy of In a Bath Teashop with its restrained economy of detail bearing a wealth of humanity and tenderness:

“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another

Let us hold hands and look.”

She, such a very ordinary little woman;

He, such a thumping crook;

But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels

In the teashop’s inglenook.

The autobiographical blank verse poem Summoned by Bells captured the tragic brevity of childhood with a pithy:

Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells

And sights, before the dark of reason grows.

Betjeman allegedly regretted the publication of Slough, feeling that he had been unkind towards the town and its inhabitants, when it was uncontrolled industrialisation not the place itself which he abhorred:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens

Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath…

Moreover, two years after he published those verses real bombs fell on England giving an unintended ugly twist to the poem.

In Westminster Abbey, written in 1940, for all its jaunty rhythm, Betjeman tackles darker themes of religious hypocrisy and racism:

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.

Spare their women for Thy Sake,

And if that it is not too easy

We will pardon Thy Mistake…

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,

Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,

Honduras and Togoland;

Protect them Lord in all their fights,

And, even more, protect the whites.

Business Girls exhibits a tender empathy with the newly emancipated but poorly paid women of the mid twentieth century. And there is a hint that their independence came at too high a price, in part forced upon them by the carnage of the two World Wars:

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town…

Early nip of changeful autumn

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions

Business women lie and soak,

Seeing through the draughty skylight

Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there poor unbelov’d ones,

Lap your loneliness in heat.

All too soon the tiny breakfast,

Trolley-bus and windy street!

How to Get on in Society is a wonderful spoof on faux genteel manners and pretensions:

Phone for the fish-knives, Norman

As Cook is a little unnerved;

You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes

And I must have things daintily served.

Are the requisites all in the toilet?

The frills round the cutlet can wait

Till the girl has replenished the cruets

And switched on the logs in the grate…

(Pete Sarstedt’s 1969 hit Where do you go to my Lovely? which employed a similar technique, always reminded me of this poem. The song came out a mere fifteen years later but the list was very different, for lifestyle and societal ambitions had changed a great deal in that time.)

In 1973 Betjeman wrote and narrated Metroland, a television documentary focused on the suburbs of NW London. Between 1915 and 1933 the Metropolitan Railway had built houses adjacent to the line heading out of London through Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. They coined the slogan “Live in Metroland,” and produced a brochure promoting their Tudorbethan properties. The fulsome marketing language played on middle class aspirations, advertising spacious homes with gardens and garages in an idealised environment surrounded by trees and nature, but within easy commuting distance of the City.

Betjeman liked suburbia, and his commentary, delivered partly in verse and over an old black and white film shot from an MR train, sounds superficially like an unqualified homage to commuter towns, reflecting the MR’s own celebration of the comfortable suburban life of ladies who lunch, and their car washing, lawn mowing, golf playing husbands. But if there is affection in his portrait, it is tinged with regret, for Betjeman is conscious of the irony that in offering former city dwellers a quasi-rural retreat, the frenzy of construction destroyed the very countryside it promoted. When he looks out at the end of the MR line he reflects, “Grass triumphs. And I must say I am rather glad.”

Moreover, though Betjeman is broadly comfortable with semi-detached houses and golf courses, he cannot resist a snobbish aside worthy of Nancy Mitford when he describes Neasden as “The home of the gnome and the average citizen.” There was an acidity never far below the surface in Betjeman’s work; he had previously parodied the aspiring inhabitants of suburbia in Middlesex:

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens

Runs the red electric train,

With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s

Daintily alights Elaine…

National Treasure maybe, but Betjeman is neither lightweight nor cuddly. He is too self-consciously clever and sharp for that. Yet those very attributes make him a better poet than he is sometimes credited with being.

Then alongside Betjeman the poet is Betjeman the campaigner, and again his work is far from that of a good natured, bumbling dabbler.

A founding member of the Friends of Friendless Churches, he edited and wrote part of the Collins Guide to English Parish Churches. Simon Jenkins in his own England’s Thousand Best Churches recalls Betjeman’s tireless campaigns to save redundant churches, and reminds us of our debt to

Three ghosts (who) inhabit all English churches. They linger in every arcade, peep from every gallery and flit across every monument. They are those of John Betjeman, Alec Clifton-Taylor and Nikolaus Pevsner.

Betjeman’s enthusiasm extended to secular architecture. A railway enthusiast and champion of Victorian architecture when it was unfashionable, he led the unsuccessful fight to save the Euston Arch, the doric entrance to the station which was demolished in 1961.But his influence and determination were instrumental in saving the most spectacular of all the Victorian railway stations – St. Pancras and its adjacent Midland Grand Hotel.

The work of George Gilbert Scott, 207 metres long and seventy metres wide, supported by 850 cast iron pillars and covered by an arched glass ceiling, the train shed at St. Pancras station is the acme of high Victorian secular architecture. When it opened in 1876 the hotel was the first to have electric lifts, “ascending chambers”, flushing lavatories, and revolving doors. In the 1890s the Ladies’ Drawing Room became the first Ladies’ Smoking Room in London. But when it closed in the 1930s it still had only five bathrooms for three hundred bedrooms. It became railway offices, then after bomb damage during the war it stood empty. In the 1960s both the station and the hotel were scheduled for demolition.

Their survival was ensured after Betjeman led the fight to prevent their destruction and they became grade 1 listed buildings in 1967.But the station was in decline as more of the north bound trains made Euston their terminus, and the hotel remained empty. In the 1990s English Heritage restored the exterior, and organised tours enabled us to see the magnificence which lay within beneath the layers of dust and dirt.

Salvation came in the form of Eurostar which since 2007 has operated out of St. Pancras. The station was renovated, and in 2011 the hotel reopened with 244 rooms – en suite – and sixty-eight apartments. The breathtaking grand stair once again curves up beneath the cerulean ceiling spangled with gold stars.

Betjeman died in 1984, too soon to see the magnificently restored station and hotel, but his statue stands, gazing up in delighted wonder at the glass ceiling of the train shed – and conveniently located for the champagne bar. Raise a glass to him when you travel this way; he saved something splendid for us all.

Statue of Betjeman gazing up at the glass ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

Ceiling of the train shed, Saint Pancras

And you can visit his grave in Saint Enodoc’s churchyard in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Both St. Enodoc and Trebetherick, where he had spent childhood holidays, feature in his poems.

The fine lettering and decoration on the black slate are the work of the stone mason Simon Verity. In his introduction to English Parish Churches Betjeman praised the elegance of the stone carver’s craft, ubiquitous in graveyards until the middle of the nineteenth century, with letters and decoration deep cut into local stone. Sadly he contrasted it with the modern “machine made letters inserted into white Italian marble.”

It’s a beautiful location, near the sea, the old church partially sunk into the sand dunes, but… church and churchyard are surrounded by a hideous golf course. To reach them you must cross the sterile links, pass golfers in their pastel leisure-ware, and risk being hit by their flying balls. But Betjeman would not have minded; he loved golf and particularly liked to play on a seaside course.

*Helen Gardner, Merton Professor of English, Oxford

**Lord Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council.

Betjeman was appointed Poet Laureate when the position fell vacant again in 1972.

Grigoris Lambrakis – Zei

By Gravedigger

On May 3, 2026

In Activists, Medics, Politicians

The Old Theatre lay at the heart of the LSE: forum for the larger undergraduate lectures, arena for visiting speakers, and stage for febrile student union meetings. But on Thursday evenings politics ceded ground to culture when Film Soc. screened its weekly offering. And it was there, with singular surprise, that I first encountered applause in response to a film. In the provinces of my childhood, we had always hastened to exit the cinema before the credits rolled to avoid the then ubiquitous playing of the National Anthem. Free from that constraint a more leisurely exit prevailed but I had never witnessed an audience remaining seated, engaged in prolonged clapping long after the screen went blank.

The plaudits came from a group seated together near the front of the theatre. “It’s the Greek students,” my companion apprised me. It was 1970 and the film was Costa-Gavras’ “Z,”released the previous year.

“Z” began with an arresting content warning: in lieu of the habitual disclaimer, it informed the audience,

Toute resemblance avec des evenements reels, des personnes mortes ou vivantes n’est pas le fait du hazard,

And in case this lacked sufficient clarity it confirmed the intentional similarity to real events with determined capitalization,

Elle est VOLONTAIRE.

The film was based on the political novel of the same name by Vassilis Vassilikos published in 1967, an account of the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis and the subsequent investigation into his assassination.

Grigoris Lambrakis (1912-1963) was born in Kerasitsa, a village in the Peloponnese, and studied medicine in Athens. He was a champion athlete, holding the Greek record for long jump for twenty-three years, winning gold medals in the Balkan Games, and participating in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games.

During the Axis occupation of Greece, 1941-44, he worked in his brother’s clinic where they sheltered partisans and supplied them with false identities. During the famine of those years, he set up the Union of Greek Athletes who held competitions to raise money to fund food banks for the starving population.

Throughout the Civil War years which followed the withdrawal of the Axis powers Lambrakis treated the wounded on both sides of the conflict. For this he was accused of “anti-national activity” by the conservative, monarchist government and spent six months in the Goudi prison in 1948.

During the 1950s while specialising in gynaecology and endocrinology, Lambrakis operated a free weekly clinic for patients unable to afford medical care.

So far, a clever, talented, decent man living his life and doing what good he could along the way, principled and with a certain courage. Then in the 1960s came a significant shift in focus: Lambrakis became committed to radical social and political change.

Something had been rotten in the state of Greece since the mid-1930s: an unpleasant amalgam of domestic dictatorships and foreign oppression. In 1935 the monarchy had been restored by a rigged plebiscite. George II then facilitated the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas. Between 1941 and 1944 the Axis occupation, the collaborationist government under Rallis, and the British blockade reduced the country to starvation. More than 200,000 people died in the famine.

In 1944 it was understood that the Communist EAM/ELAS, whose members had been at the heart of national resistance against the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and Bulgaria, would be given a significant voice in the new government, and that the collaborationist Security Battalions would be put on trial. This did not happen. Instead, Churchill, who combined hysterical anti-Communism with a crazed desire for British hegemony, sent troops under General Scobie to escort the Greek government in exile home from Egypt.

Back in Athens, Scobie ordered the EAM/ELAS forces to disarm, while supplying the anti-Communists with ammunition. A mass protest in central Athens was met with police opening fire and in a savage assault killing twenty-eight people. The Battle for Athens, thirty-seven days of fighting, ensued with the British troops and right-wing nationalists ranged against the Communists. The defeat of the latter when the British flew in extra troops was followed by the White Terror of 1945-6 with arrests, torture, exile and murder of leftists. The Greek Civil War continued until 1949 with an estimated 150,000 dead.

Throughout the 1950s, repressive right-wing regimes were funded and supported by America, where a morbid fear of Communism ran even deeper than in Britain. These successive governments connived with the extravagantly funded monarchy to maintain a stranglehold on the constitution. Former partisans and dissidents were sent to re-education camps on remote islands; censorship was rife; the power of trade unions was limited and trade unionists imprisoned; the power of the army and police went unchecked.

Against this background Lambrakis stood for the Hellenic Parliament in 1961 as an Independent member for Piraeus under the umbrella of the United Democratic Left (EDA), the only legal left-wing organisation since the civil war. His platform was one of peace and democracy, his aim to eliminate all trace of fascism at home and to free Greece from the foreign presence supporting it.

In his pre-election address he told his audience,

Dear friends we are running for election with two pursuits: peace and democracy. We want peace so that no missile bases will be established on Greek soil and we can have friendly relations with our Balkan neighbours. We want real democracy… to put an end to arrests, forced exile…and to have the most beautiful achievement of the Greek people finally recognised: our heroic national resistance against Italian and German fascists and their local collaborators.

Lambrakis opposed Greek involvement with NATO and reliance on American economic aid, sought to close the US missile base near Thessaloniki, and fought the establishment of nuclear bases in Crete. He established the Committee for International Détente and Peace in Greece and attended international pacifist meetings and demonstrations.

In April 1963 he joined the march organised by CND from the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in Aldermaston to London. The Bertrand Russell Youth Committee for Nuclear Disarmament led by a law student, Michael Peristerakis, planned another march from Athens to Marathon later that month, differing from the marches in western Europe in that it was a demonstration for social change, democracy, and the right to freedom of expression as well as disarmament. In a perfect, though undoubtedly unintended, illustration of the need for these reforms the Karamanlis government and the police banned the march. Despite a display of intimidation thousands of marchers ignored the official ban; 2,000 were arrested and three hundred injured. Only Lambrakis, claiming his parliamentary immunity, was able to reach Marathon, walking alone holding the same banner he had carried at Aldermaston bearing the nuclear disarmament symbol and the word “Greece.” But when he tried to complete the return march, parliamentary immunity failed him and he too was arrested.

For Lambrakis the battle for the release of political prisoners was part of the same struggle as that for pacifism: peace and civil rights were inexorably linked. Over 1,000 political prisoners arrested at the end of the Civil War remained incarcerated. Antonis Ambatielos, a trades unionist and member of the Greek resistance had been arrested and sentenced to death in 1947, his sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. To draw attention to his case and that of other political prisoners, Lambrakis made a statement to the British press during a visit there by Queen Frederica. Pointing to the undemocratic and unconstitutional interventions of the reactionary queen in parliament and government, and her resistance to the desire of the Greek people for democracy, freedom, and the release of political prisoners, he issued a prescient warning,

I wish to warn the queen that with her attitude she is leading the throne to a sure demise.

The resulting publicity resulted in the cause of the Greek prisoners being taken up by British Labour MPs and an international conference calling for an amnesty of all Greek political prisoners was held in Paris.

In May 1963 Lambrakis attended an anti-war meeting in Thessaloniki despite having received death threats. In full view of a large police and military presence a pickup van drove towards him and a passenger in the back of the truck delivered blows to his head. Five days later he died of his injuries.

Over half a million people attended Lambrakis’ funeral despite attempts by the government to limit the turnout. The letter “Z,” an abbreviation for the Greek “Zei,” He Lives, appeared on buildings and hoardings in Greek cities.

The Investigating Prosecutor, Christos Sartzetakis, was pressured by the government to return a risible false narrative of a traffic accident. He refused, emphasising the culpability of high-ranking police officials, members of the paramilitary and of the repressive para-state apparatus who initiated the attack.

The assassination contributed to the fall of the Karamanlis government, and the electoral victory of Papandreou’s Centre Union in November brought some reforms with the release of political prisoners, wealth redistribution, economic liberalisation and education expansion.

In 1964 a new political organisation, the Lambrakis Democratic Youth, was formed with Lambrakis’ friend Theodorakis as its first president.

Yet change was limited, and after King Constantine engineered a split in the Centre Union Papandreou resigned heralding political instability, and a series of short-term weak governments. Nonetheless in the elections scheduled for May 1967 the Centre Union confidently expected to emerge as the largest party and to be able to rule in coalition with the United Democratic Left. But precisely four years after Lambrakis’ march to Marathon, on April 21^st, 1967, the military Junta seized power claiming instability (nothing new) and the threat of an anarcho-Communist takeover (from the Centre Union?) as justification… Both the monarchy and the CIA have always denied that they lent their support to the coup.

Leading politicians and political activists were arrested, the constitution suspended and martial law declared. Political opponents were imprisoned and tortured. Amnesty International estimated that over 10,000 people were arrested and imprisoned within the first few days of the regime, and six months on more than 2,000 had been subject to torture. Political parties were suppressed, military courts established, civil liberties collapsed, freedom of assembly outlawed, surveillance introduced, the press censored.

The Investigating Prosecutor who had identified the agents responsible for Lambrakis’ death found himself in prison, while all charges against the perpetrators were dropped. Against this background Vassilis Vassilikos published “Z.” It was promptly banned in Greece as was the subsequent film with soundtrack by Theodorakis who was exiled. Even possession of Lambrakis’ scientific papers became an offence.

At the end of the film before the credits there is a list of some of the things banned by the Junta, they include: long hair for men, miniskirts, Sophocles, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pinter, new maths, the peace symbol, Sociology, the letter “Z.” The absurdity amused us, but must have appeared less than humorous to the Greek students.

The Junta fell in 1974 under the impact of internal splits, student protests, and the ill-fated attempt to invade Cyprus. The country transitioned by free vote to a Presidential Parliamentary democracy, the Hellenic Republic, with an independent judiciary, press and trade unions.

Since 1982 the Athens Classic Marathon has been dedicated to Grigoris Lambrakis.

Grave of Lambrakis, the First Cemetery, Athens

The quotation on the grave is from Yiannis Ritsos, Poet, Communist, and Member of the Greek Resistance.

Ritsos’ poem Epitaphios was inspired by the photograph of a mother weeping over the body of her son who died when police opened fire on a peaceful demonstration of striking tobacco workers in Thessaloniki in 1936.The poem was publicly burned during the Metaxas dictatorship. Theodorakis set it to music. It was sung in the streets following Lambrakis’ funeral. Ritsos was sent to a prison camp by the Junta.
(Photograph from a Greek newspaper, Rizospastis, May 10 1936 unknown author).

The bronze on Lambrakis’ grave portrays a dove of peace, Lambrakis bearing his CND banner on his march to Marathon, and his profile. There is a famous photograph of him with the banner. It is copyright but you can see it on Wikipedia if you google Lambrakis.

Josephine Butler and The Contagious Diseases Act

By Gravedigger

On February 17, 2026

In Activists

My admiration for the work of Josephine Butler (1829-1906) is tempered by an uncomfortable aversion to the religious beliefs which kindled and stoked her extraordinary achievements.

Butler grew up in a conventional, albeit liberal, middle-class family with strong religious principles, political connections, and social awareness. Her father was an active supporter of Catholic emancipation, the abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and reform of the Poor Law.

But, at the age of seventeen, the then Josephine Grey had a religious crisis; becoming disenchanted with the Anglican church she began speaking directly to god in prayer, an intimacy which became the basis of her life and vocation. And this is where, as an atheist, I begin to feel a little uneasy: for a Victorian lady conformity to the social norms of church attendance is unsurprising but developing a hotline to god is disturbing.

When in 1852 she married George Butler, an academic and Anglican clergyman, she wrote that they often

prayed together that a holy revolution might come about and that the Kingdom of God might be established on the earth.

Although offended by her husband’s fellow dons speaking of

a moral lapse in a woman…as an immensely worse thing than in a man

she chose not to voice her views on the subject but

to speak little with men, but much with god.

Yet after the death of her daughter Eva, and her own problems with depression, she

became possessed with an irresistible urge to go forth and find some keener pain than my own, to meet with people more unhappy than myself.

Since the Butlers had now moved to Liverpool this was not difficult, and her activities immediately surpassed the conventional charitable works expected of clergy wives: she began visiting the workhouse where she sat in the cellars, picking oakum with the women while discussing the bible and praying; she established a hostel for women who had been seduced and abandoned, and helped them to find work; she offered shelter in her own house to prostitutes in the terminal stages of venereal disease.

But it was in 1869 that Butler’s most innovative work began. The Contagious Disease Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 sought to reduce the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly in the army and navy, by maintaining a supply of uninfected prostitutes. To this end the police were authorised to detain any women who were suspected of prostitution – no evidence was needed. Any unattended woman from the age of twelve could be apprehended. Police powers were frequently misused against women whose only crime was poverty.

The women were then subjected to an invasive medical examination, which Butler described as “surgical rape.” If they were found to have venereal diseases they were sent to a lock hospital, one of the old leper hospitals, called after the locks or rags which covered the lepers’ lesions. Incarcerated in these institutions, more like prisons than hospitals, the women had no means to support their children and were unlikely to obtain employment on release. If women refused the examination, they were subjected to a three-month prison sentence or hard labour.

There was no enforced examination of their male clients who were exonerated from any responsibility. The Acts, as Butler made clear, were there to protect male health rather than to eliminate venereal diseases.

Butler established The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, the first politically focused campaign organised and led by women. She toured Britain, speaking at scores of meetings, arguing that the Acts were discriminatory on grounds of both sex and class for they

not only deprived poor women of their constitutional rights and forced them to submit to a degrading internal examination, but they officially sanctioned a double standard of sexual morality, which justified male sexual access to a class of “fallen” women and penalised women for engaging in the same vice with men.

No surprise that Butler met with opposition from pimps, brothel keepers, clergy, and politicians. At one meeting cow dung was thrown at her, at another the windows of her hotel were smashed, at a third threats were made to burn down the building. She was disowned by friends and acquaintances, for it was not acceptable for a respectable woman to speak publicly on sex and prostitution. There were personal attacks by journalists and MPs. The London Daily News thundered

Women like Mrs. Butler are so discontented in their own homes that they have to find an outlet somewhere… and take pleasure in a hobby too nasty to mention.

For James Elphinstone MP, Josephine Butler was

worse than a prostitute.

Another newspaper vilified her as

an indecent maenad, a shrieking sister, frenzied, unsexed, and utterly without shame.

And a Royal Commission set up in 1871 defended the one-sided nature of the legislation:

There is no comparison to be made between prostitutes and the men who consort with them. With the one side the offence is committed as a matter of gain; with the other it is an irregular indulgence of a natural impulse.

The statement could not have substantiated more palpably Josephine Butler’s accusation of double standards.

It was not until 1886 that the noxious Acts were formally repealed, largely because of her relentless campaign. As one MP told her,

We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or country, but this is very awkward for us, this revolt of women.

Meanwhile Butler had toured France, Italy and Switzerland meeting women conducting similar campaigns. There she had become aware of the “white slave trade,” of girls as young as twelve being kidnapped or bought, and trafficked from England to the Continent, where they were sold as prostitutes. Alongside Florence Soper Booth and William Stead she became involved in her second great campaign, to expose child prostitution and the associated trade.

To publicise their cause Stead famously purchased a thirteen-year-old girl, Eliza Armstrong, from her mother for £5 and took her to a safe house in Paris. He then published a series of articles describing what he had done and exposing the extent of child prostitution. Butler followed this with speeches in London calling for greater protection of the young and the raising of the age of consent. Ironically both Butler and Stead faced police questioning following this audacious testimony and Stead was charged with abduction and imprisoned for three months.

Nonetheless in 1885 the age of consent was raised to sixteen and the procurement of girls for prostitution by drugs, intimidation, fraud, or abduction made a criminal offence.

Butler had traditional views on the importance of chastity for both men and women although this was informed as much by the lack of birth control and the risks of childbirth, as by a moral stand. Moreover, in the aftermath of the reforms of 1885 and 1886 she spoke out against the purity societies like the White Cross Army who sought to increase the prosecutions of brothel keepers and ban indecent literature… including information on birth control. She derided

the fatuous belief that you can oblige human beings to be moral by force,

and sounded a warning:

beware of purity societies…stamping on vulnerable women.

Knowing that women with no income and nothing else to sell would sell themselves she joined the fight for the training, higher education, and access to a wider range of jobs for women. She was instrumental in setting up the Married Women’s Property Committee which successfully pressured Parliament to get rid of the legal doctrine of coverture whereby when a woman married her property passed to her husband.

It is impossible to overestimate the achievements of Josephine Butler. Her work to eliminate sexual double standards, child prostitution, and the white slave trade, complementing the battles for the vote, education, and employment opportunities, brought not just concrete economic, political, and legal change, but was a precursor of the second wave of feminism, attacking the invisible power structures rooted in attitudes and prejudices.

She displayed enormous courage in addressing such unpopular causes. It is invidious to make a comparison, but if the suffragists encountered opprobrium for being so unfeminine as to demand the vote, how much more was Josephine Butler denigrated for daring to discuss prostitution and contagious diseases in polite society.

So how can I have any reservations about this woman? It is the religion. The social historian Sarah Williams argues convincingly that religious faith and spirituality grounded Butler’s activism and that her radical sense of justice was informed by her inner life of prayer. Suffering drove her grief for others, prayer was the basis of her vocation, and a part of her action to transform society. Similarly Judith Walkowitz considers Butler’s biography of Catherine of Siena (1878) an “historical justification for her political activism.”

The mystic Catherine of Siena, allegedly worked among the sick and the poor, helped bring peace to the Republics of Italy and encouraged the return of the Papacy from Avignon. Catherine’s reported lifestyle however is frankly creepy: it involved rigorous fasting, at one time an attempt to survive on the Eucharist alone; giving away other people’s possessions; drinking pus to overcome her disgust at the sight of patients’ sores; and having visitations from Jesus inviting her to drink his blood, and more… let’s not go there. She is hardly a great advertisement for political action informed by religious belief.

And the difficulty with anyone who believes that they have a direct line to any omnipotent god lies in the danger of their beliefs being a matter of faith, convictions not open to question or reason. This may not be a problem when they are doing good, but Josephine Butler’s beliefs were not always sound. There was her arrogant assumption that Britain had a mission to make converts to Christianity across the globe, and her endorsement of British Imperialism:

looked at from god’s point of view England is the best, and the least guilty, of the nations.

This led her to a position of apologist for British action in the Second Boer War. She did not acknowledge an abhorrent battle over the Witwatersrand gold mines, to which neither Boers nor British had any legitimate claim. Instead, she bought into the jingoism which claimed that the Boers were not fit to govern, and that the British were protecting the native South Africans. Her claim that British military manoeuvres were the “work of the holy spirit,” is the more repellent in the light of the British concentration camps where 100,000 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were kept in appalling conditions, and where 26,000 died.

Yet though, like everyone, she may be a flawed personality, and I may be alienated by her dogmatism and piety, there can be no doubting her courage, determination, and singular successes in improving the lives of working class women and girls. So, when I was in her native Northumberland, I sought her grave in Saint Gregory’s churchyard in Kirknewton to pay her the huge respects she undoubtedly merits.

Grave of Josephine Butler, Kirknewton, Northumberland

For more on Josephine Butler see Sarah C. Williams When Courage Calls: Josephine Butler and the Radical Pursuit of Justice for Women (2024)

Gavrilo Princip – Still One of My Heroes

By Gravedigger

On February 20, 2025

In Activists, Reformers, Radicals and Revolutionaries

In the 60s and 70s all our secondary schools followed the same history curriculum. We began with Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain and made our way systematically through England’s vicissitudes from 55 BC up to 1914, skimming the extreme edges of classical antiquity and contemporary history. The former was held to be the remit of the classics department, and of the latter we did not speak. My history teacher justified this on the basis that objectivity was impossible without a certain distance; my youthful cynicism judged it more likely a reluctance to engage with criticism of the status quo.

In those final history lessons in the fifth form, as we edged towards the First World War, I developed a wild enthusiasm for Gavrilo Princip. This can certainly not have been the intention of my history teacher, a firm supporter of law and order, who would without doubt have been an apologist for the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the upstart Serb from Bosnia.

But to me Princip was a romantic hero, striking a blow against Austria’s occupation of Bosnian territory in 1878 followed by its aggressive annexation in 1908. Young Bosnia was a revolutionary movement seeking to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia-Herzegovina and to establish an independent state. The political assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the representative and heir of an unelected ruler at home and a foreign oppressor in Bosnia, was entirely justified. Princip was a freedom fighter.

If there had been posters of Princip for sale in English provincial towns in 1968, one would undoubtedly have adorned my bedroom wall alongside Che Guevara.

Two years ago, I visited a museum with the cumbersome designation Museum of Sarajevo,1878-1918. The dates mark the period of Austro-Hungary’s occupation, and it was from outside this building that Princip fired the shots which killed the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Until the collapse of Yugoslavia it had been called the Young Bosnia Museum, and Princip and his fellow members of Young Bosnia had been glorified as revolutionary idealists. Outside the museum a footprint was set into the cement to mark the spot where Princip stood to take aim at the Archduke, and there visiting Yugoslav schoolchildren used to pose for photographs.

The Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918, located in a former delicatessen beside the Latin Bridge, formerly called the Princip Bridge.

Today a discreet sign set into the pavement marks the place where Princip stood. Formerly Yugoslavian children would pose for photographs standing in Princip’s footsteps

Today, the museum’s approach is more subdued. It records the history of resistance to Austro-Hungarian oppression, and the assassination. There are clothes, photographs, and weapons on display, and two uncomfortable looking waxworks of the archduke and his wife. But the tone is factual, and the historic significance of the museum’s location is not stressed.

For the recent history of the former Yugoslavia has cast a shadow which has led to the past being rewritten in some of the former constituent republics. Under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic ethnic cleansing of Croats took palace in those parts of Croatia controlled by Serbia. Milosevic’s ultra nationalism, his irredentist and revanchist attempt to seize Bosnia for the Serbs, combined with Radovan Karadzic’s genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, and the brutal siege of Sarajevo, have cast the Serbs in an ugly light.

And Princip has become a polarising figure: while still a hero in Serbia, he is now perceived in Croatia as a Serbian nationalist terrorist rather than a liberty loving revolutionary. He is even held responsible for the First World War rather than his actions being understood as a catalyst and excuse for further Austrian aggression.

There is no commonly held view in Bosnia. Two different versions of the truth are expounded alongside each other. School texts in predominantly Bosniak and Croat areas describe Princip as a Belgrade backed terrorist, while the children of Bosnian Serbs are taught that his cause was a just one, seeking liberation from colonised serfdom.

It is unwise to rewrite the past in the light of the present. It is true that in 1914 there was in Serbia a desire for a union of southern Slavs under Serbian hegemony, and that the Bosniaks and Croats had no desire for this greater Serbia. But Princip was no Milosevic or Karadzic, his loathing for Austrian oppression was legitimate. At his trial he argued,

I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free of Austria.

Asked why he had shot the archduke he replied,

People suffer because they are so poor and because they are treated as animals. I am the son of a peasant; I know how people live in the villages and that is why I wanted revenge.

Princip risked his life for a revolutionary ideology of social justice. Austrian rule was feudal and oppressive, political opposition brutally suppressed. Moreover, the Serbian government was not involved in the assassination, and the members of Young Bosnia were drawn from all three ethnic groups in Bosnia: the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Serbs, and the Croats.

The museum, located in predominantly Bosniak Sarajevo, displays understandable discretion. But I was happy to see that Princip’s grave in the Holy Archangels Cemetery in Sarajevo still receives care. At the time of the assassination, Princip was only nineteen, a year too young to be subjected to the death penalty, so he was given the maximum sentence of twenty years in an Austrian military prison. There, chained to a wall in solitary confinement, he died of TB in 1918. In 1920 he and his comrades were exhumed and reburied below the Vidovdan Heroes Chapel. Today there are flowers on the grave, and it bears a quotation from the Montenegrin poet, Petrovic-Njegos,

Blessed is he who lives forever; he did not die in vain.

Grave of Gavrilo Princip and his Young Bosnia comrades

Vidovdan Heroes Chapel, Holy Archangel Cemetery, Sarajevo

Gavrilo Princip, photograph in museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918

Jemima Nicholas, The Welsh Heroine, Scourge of the French Invaders

By Gravedigger

On February 2, 2025

In Activists, Happy Endings

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Britain has not been invaded since 1066, when, as alleged by Sellar and Yeatman, “The Norman Conquest was a Good Thing, as from this time onwards England stopped being conquered and thus was able to become top nation.”

Acknowledged, but not entirely true, for though their achievements were usually puny by contrast with the Normans, and though they are not so well remembered, other assailants have landed from time to time, seeking to vanquish and subjugate the land.

Under Sweyn II the Danes took first York in 1069, and then Ely in 1070, before accepting a bribe to leave the country.

The future Louis VIII of France had himself proclaimed king, though never crowned, in London in 1216. He captured Winchester and controlled half of England before being defeated at Lincoln and accepting 10,000 marks to withdraw.

In 1588, when the apparently much greater threat of the Spanish Armada was defeated by a combination of English fireships and British weather, some unfortunate Spaniards landed by default, shipwrecked on the west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Later, at the Battle of Cornwall in 1595 a Spanish force of four hundred men sacked Mousehole, Penzance, Newlyn, and Paul.

When the Dutch sailed up the Medway to Chatham in 1667, they burned more than a dozen warships and captured the flagship of the English fleet, HMS Royal Charles. Samuel Pepys recorded his alarm:

and so home, where all our hearts do now ake; for the newes is true, that the Dutch have broke the chaine and burned our ships, and particularly The Royal Charles, other particulars I know not, but most sad to be sure. And, the truth is, I do fear so much that the whole kingdom is undone, … So having with much ado finished my business at the office, I home to consider with my father and wife of things, and then to supper and to bed with a heavy heart.

Twenty-one years later another Dutch invasion, led by William of Orange, landed in Devon, with a fleet of 463 ships and 40,000 men. This time they had been invited by the opponents of James II, and when the latter fled the country, he was deemed to have abdicated. William and Mary replaced him, a substitution legitimised by Parliament and hailed as The Glorious Revolution.

But while that may have been the last successful incursion into mainland Britain, it was not the final landing by a hostile force. On 24 February 1797 around 1,200 French soldiers landed at Carreg Wastad Point near Fishguard in South Wales. This battalion incorporated a penal unit consisting of convicts mobilised for military service. Called the Legion Noire, because they used captured British uniforms died black or blue, they landed appropriately under cover of darkness.

The defending forces were ill-prepared and outnumbered: a quickly assembled group of five hundred reservist militia, aided by the civilian population. Yet the Battle of Fishguard, little more a few skirmishes, was over in two days with the French troops making an unconditional surrender.

Once they had landed discipline had broken down amongst the French troops as they ransacked local farms, looted, and grew intoxicated. Was this why they were so easily defeated? No, it was all down to Jemima.

Jemima Nicholas was a cobbler in Fishguard who led a group of women, armed only with pitchforks, against the French. One story describes Jemima single-handedly rounding up twelve French soldiers and holding them captive overnight in a church at Strumble Head. Another has the Welsh women in their traditional red cloaks and steep crowned black hats marching up and down the cliffs until nightfall, and the inebriated soldiers mistaking them for British Redcoats and thinking themselves outnumbered. Instantly demoralised, they capitulated.

Whatever the finer details, the government concurred that Jemima had taken a brave stand against the French. She was awarded an annual pension of five pounds for helping to defeat the invasion.

Subsequently known as Jemima Fawr, Jemima the Great, Fishguard’s heroine was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary. There was no headstone at the time, but in 1897 a stone was erected by public subscription collected at a centenary banquet. It records rather quaintly that,

She died in the main street July 1832,

Aged 82 years.

At the date of the invasion she

Was 47 years old, and

Lived 35 years after the event.

Jemima’s grave, outside St. Mary’s, Fishguard

A sign above the Royal Oak pub in Fishguard records that the peace treaty was signed there, following the last invasion of Britain.

My friends were reluctant to linger in the graveyard, but were eager to celebrate the signing of the peace treaty where it took place – at the Royal Oak pub in Fishguard

In 1997, at the bicentenary, seventy-seven local people embroidered the Last Invasion Tapestry employing the same techniques as those used for the Bayeaux Tapestry.

A pastoral scene before the French soldiers arrive.

…and word spreads that they are coming closer.

But Jemima, equipped with only a pitchfork, is more than a match for the French soldiers…

…they will rue the day they invaded Fishguard.

Jemima and the other Welsh women in their red cloaks and black hats march up and down until nightfall…

… the inebriated French soldiers mistake them for Redcoats, lay down their arms…

…and prepare to march to prison.
The French are defeated. Hurrah for Jemima!

You can find the tapestry of the Last Invasion in the Fishguard library. And if you want to contrast it with the Bayeaux Tapestry of the Norman Invasion, there is no need to go to Bayeaux. Reading Museum has a perfect copy of the latter and no jostling crowds.

Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 and All That
The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 12^th June 1667