The [abused?] Daughter of Time

(… or fostered by wrong-headed romantics?)

On the plus side, Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel is an engaging detective story which appeals to the reader’s sense of fairness, seeking truth in place of unfounded allegation and exposing the way in which history can be and is written by the victors, especially after a change of regime. It also made scathing criticisms of the unthinking myth-mongering prevalent in what is now the heritage industry and in primary-school textbooks, too often endorsed without examination in more serious works.

Where it goes seriously haywire is not so much about Richard III as in the matter of “Tonypandy”.(pp.109-110 and onwards recurrently to the end of the book).  This resonant Welsh place-name – later sneered at as “silly”- is hijacked to characterise the sort of myths referred to above (p.127: ‘Pure Tonypandy. A dramatic story with not a word of truth in it.’) Tey’s supposed justification for doing so actually embodies many of  the faults she picks up in the sources for what we may call Shakespeare’s Richard*:

·         a  distorted account imputed  to the tradition she is attacking – “the shooting down by troops that Wales will never forget”. What is rightly remembered  is the calling in of troops indicating the government’s manifest readiness to shoot striking miners. (An internet search will show how the centenary of the events of 1910-11 in South Wales was commemorated).

·          reliance on hearsay (40 years after the event), use of selective or no evidence, tabloid-style slander unsubstantiated.

·         victors’ version of events uncritically accepted. Tonypandy was not an  isolated outbreak of lawlessness; the miners were forced back after a protracted struggle with numerous clashes. 

Of course Tey had no sympathy for striking miners or for the  lower orders generally. Similar instances of blatant bias, dogmatically asserted as undeniable truth, and the familiar buzzing of favourite bees in her bonnet (like the fixation on physiognomy with which her detective’s quest begins), occur throughout as in her other works.

Why bother about all this? Because historical accuracy matters, and those who denounce official versions should be more scrupulous, not less (or no better), in our own practices than purveyors of the established orthodoxy.

You don’t have to be a wrong-headed romantic to think there is a good case made out in the book for rejecting the once-traditional, Tudor-led assessment of Richard III, but it may help, especially if you buy the whole package of Tey’s portrayal of him. Being a mid-20^th century-style family man and general good guy would have been somewhat at variance with his military side as well as his position of power. But it would be seriously wrong-headed and worse than romantic to take her unsupported word for any of the other instances of what she so wrong-headedly calls Tonypandy, first and foremost that significant episode of British labour history and class struggle itself.

On p.221 Inspector Grant realises, no doubt speaking for his author as usual, that “History was something that he would never understand…”  Evidently – as long as the experience of the vast majority of humanity is discounted as of no interest.

Page  refs. as in: Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time. London, Arrow Books 2009. First published by William Heinemann, 1951.

Tangentially related SmothPubs pamphlet: What is Libertarian History? by Liz Willis (2011) 12pp.

Even more tangentially related article: E. Willis, ‘English detective fiction and the “People’s War”’. Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol.42, no.1, 2006: 13-21.

* The enduring fascination of Shakespeare’s Richard – as crime-fiction noir not history; as memorably portrayed by Paul Daneman in the BBC’s 1962 Age of Kings series, not pantomime villain –  is another discussion.

Remembering 1911 - see also Tonypandy riots article on wikipedia.

Reality Check: A Place in History,
by Colin Philpott (Ammonite Press 2012)

Medicine, War - and Murder: Health Professionals in English Detective Fiction of the Second World War.  Another sidelight on detective fiction, otherwise unpublished Word document here

New suggestion for further reading: 

Josephine Wilkinson, The Princes in the Tower: Did Richard III murder his nephews...? Stroud, Amberley, 2013.   

A sequence of essays presenting a scrupulous and thorough consideration of the evidence now available in relation to different aspects of and suspects in the case. Delivers several “not guilty” verdicts but arrives at no final conclusion, although sign-posting a direction in which one may be sought. And more, or More (as in Sir Thomas, on whom Tey expended so much scorn, and who first supplied many of the key details in the traditional tale): in effect endorses a crime-fiction categorisation of the Shakespearean script by demonstrating how More’s patently inaccurate narrative was shaped by dramatic moralising rather than historical imperatives. 

To treat Thomas More’s History of King Richard III as a work of history, then, is to do it a disservice and to overlook More’s point entirely. (p.127)

[... It] has no place or purpose as source material for historical enquiry. (p.128) 

Given that More’s History of King Richard III should be viewed as drama rather than as history, it is perhaps only fitting that the darkest and most memorable portrayal of Richard III should be found in the work of the greatest dramatist of the all, William Shakespeare, whose play Richard III clearly owes much to Thomas More. (Note 54, p.176). 

Paul Daneman as Richard
in BBC's An Age of Kings, 1962

(It may be worth noting here that in editions of the collected works, Shakespeare’s play is called “The Tragedy” , not “The History” of King Richard III).  

Richard was a Good Lad –

... as Calum-Safety saw him in 1956, anyway:

Extract from Smothpubs booklet As ‘Safety’ Saw It: Around Stornoway in the 1950s, 2009, p.32 (See previous posts for more about this publication.)

Tyrant Exposed

It took the English several centuries to discover that Henry the Eighth was an unscrupulous, insanely bad-tempered, and bloody tyrant. Everybody knew he was a bad husband – but his excesses in other directions were glossed over by his historians who were more concerned with fawning upon his immediate descendants than with historical truth. Thus was created a fictitious character known to schoolboys as “Bluff King Hal”. The bluff was all on the part of the chroniclers, and strangely enough they got away with it until comparatively recently.

           Not only could they whitewash to the advantage of the monarchy, they could smear with equal facility for the same reason. Richard the Third, it has been discovered, was not as black as he was painted. His was a discredited dynasty and all the self-seeking scribblers set about maligning him to keep in with the Tudors. Even Shakespeare took a hand in it – and thus we had created for us another fictitious character known to schoolboys as Richard Crookback.

         Now we are beginning to find out that Richard, although he suffered from a physical deformity, suffered from none mentally. He had a fine intellect and set out to be a good and benevolent monarch – and he might have succeeded, with a less unscrupulous court and in less troubled and intrigue-ridden times, in establishing himself as one of the ablest and best of English kings.

           Now the point of all this is that up to the present day it seems to have taken centuries to get some historical characters into their proper perspective – at least in the countries in which those characters lived. The onlooker sees most of the game – and of course each country writes its own history differently. For example it is obvious that British history is taught in some European countries quite differently from the way it is taught in British schools. And vice versa. And European contemporaries of Richard III and Henry VIII would have recognised them for what they were.

            In the same way it had been widely recognised in this country for some considerable time before his death that Stalin had established a dictatorship in Russia. Now the Russians themselves have discovered this fact. They are advertising to the world at large that their hero of not so long ago was a tyrant. But their main concern seems to be the establishing of this historical truth in their own country and to the satisfaction of their own people. What really surprises the rest of the world is that they should have discovered the truth so soon. It is not usual for the history of dictatorship to be written with the correct slant, so quickly, by the country where the dictatorship was established.

            Perhaps this is another trend of modern times. The attainment of historical perspective may be speeding up in the same way as everything else seems to be doing nowadays. What it took English “history” a few centuries to discover about “Bluff King Hal” Russian “history” has discovered about Joe Stalin in as many years.

            The Russians may have their own reasons for doing it, but that it is being done at all, and done so soon, is a step in the right direction.

            Who knows? Perhaps in future historical skeletons will be taken out immediately for public gibbeting, instead of being white-washed or left to moulder in cupboards. Certainly it is unreasonable to expect that “nil nisi bonum” [nothing but good {to be spoken of the dead]] should apply to tyrants!

'As I See It' Stornoway Gazette, 3 & 6/04/1956

Like many readers, Calum Smith, author of the above, was greatly impressed by the arguments in “The Daughter of Time” by Josephine Tey (a.k.a. Elizabeth Mackintosh,  a.k.a. Gordon Daviot), in which the search  for the truth about Richard III and “who done it” (the Princes in the Tower) is presented as a detective story. [‘Spoiler’ alert:] Henry VII emerges as the villain of the piece.

Edmund Kean not looking too villainous as Richard III

To follow: More on “The Daughter of Time” and its idiosyncratic author, and why even people who normally have little time for royalty in any form care about this half-millennium old question.