Gloucestershire Branch Programme 2024-25

Contact details – Janet Graham at histassocglos@gmail.com or Robert Sutton on 01242 574889

Members and students free entry to all talks, visitors £4 entrance fee.

Venues for most talks are the University of Gloucestershire either in Cheltenham or Gloucester. Directions can be found on the university website – www.glos.ac.uk

Some talks will be held at alternative locations, details are provided for each talk.

Our website contains up to date information www.haglos.co.uk

 

Monday 23 September 2024, 7.30pm

Venue – The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham and by Zoom

AGM and a conversation on the relationship between academic history and historical fiction. Dr Mark Hutchinson, Dr Martin Randall and Dr Vicky Randall all from the University of Gloucestershire

Each year after our AGM we have a shorter talk given either by a branch member or colleagues from our local university. This year we are joined by three speakers from the university who will take part in a round table discussion on history and fiction, with a special focus on the traumatic past. Dr Martin Randall (Creative Writing) is a specialist in the Holocaust and 9/11; Dr Mark Hutchinson (early modern History) discusses the English Civil War; and Dr Vicky Randall (modern history) has an interest in WW1 and WW2. Authors discussed may include Hilary Mantel, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith.

 

Monday 14 October 2024, 7.30pm

Venue - the Park Campus, University of Gloucestershire and by Zoom.

Burma to Myanmar: From influential superpower to repressive regime, Dr. Alexandra Green, Henry Ginsburg Curator for Southeast Asia, British Museum

From influential superpower to repressive regime, Myanmar – also known as Burma – has seen dramatic fluctuations in fortune over the past 1,500 years. Experiencing decades of civil war and now ruled again by a military dictatorship, Myanmar is an isolated figure on the world stage today, and its story is relatively little known in the West. Picking up the thread around AD 450, this talk explores how Myanmar’s various peoples interacted with each other and the world around them, leading to new ideas and art forms. The extraordinary artistic output of its peoples, over more than a millennium and a half of cultural and political change, attests to its pivotal role at the crossroads of Asia.

 

Monday 11 November 2024, 7.30pm

Venue - Oxstalls Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Gloucester and by Zoom.

Who Killed Cock Robin?’: The Rise and Fall of the First Labour Government in Britain, 1924. Professor Keith Laybourn, Diamond Jubilee Professor Emeritus of the University of Huddersfield and Visiting Profess at York St. John University.

The first Labour Government was a minority Labour Government which gained power as a result of the unstable state of British politics in 1923 and 1924. It was a moderate government which was unable to implement many of the socialist policies it offered. It was a minority government, supported by the Liberal Party, and its fate was sealed when the issue of the Soviet Treaties and the bungled arrest and release   of J. R. Campbell, editor of the Communist Workers’ Weekly drove Asquith and Lloyd George to abandon it. The publication of the Zinoviev Letter, the Red Letter Scare, suggesting that the Communists were using the Labour Party/ Government to get power was, perhaps, a contributory factor in its fall. Nevertheless, its very existence proved to have a vital impact upon the future of British politics.

 

Monday 9 December 2024, 7.30pm

Venue - The Exmouth Arms, Bath Road, Cheltenham.

A very (early) modern Christmas: the emergence of Christmas traditions, Dr David Howell, heritage practitioner at the Pembroke Dock Heritage Centre

Whether it is feasting, gift giving, decorated trees or benevolent bearded men does not matter all that much. What does matter is that these are all features of the festive Christmas period with which we have become so familiar. These and many more of the seasonal traditions, however, are products of centuries worth of practice, faith and vivid imaginations. This talk will explore the origins and evolutions of that which provides us with a framework for our modern idea of Christmas today.

 

Monday 20 January 2025, 7.30pm

Venue – Zoom

Byzantium the Forgotten Empire, Professor Jonathan Harris, Professor of the History of Byzantium, Royal Holloway, University of London

An exploration of one of the great cultural and political forces of the Middles Ages that somehow never made it onto the school curriculum. The lecture looks at who the Byzantines were and why their state endured for so long in very adverse circumstances between the fourth and fifteenth centuries. Finally, it will consider why and how, in the end, it disappeared.

 

Monday 17 February 2025, 7.30pm

Venue – Park Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham and by Zoom.

Dead Ends and Grey Zones: The UN and Cold War Conflict Management, Dr Volker Prott, Aston University.

Dr Volker Prott from Aston University will revisit a crucial chapter of twentieth-century international history: the role of the UN in Cold War conflict management. His talk will examine to what extent the UN lived up to its original ambitions, how it dealt with failures and ‘dead ends’ in a Cold War setting dominated by great power interest – and how UN officials still sought to use ‘grey zones’ to exert political influence and ensure the growth of their organisation and its multiple agencies. The talk will use the early Kashmir conflict, the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, and the East Pakistan crisis of 1971 as case studies to trace the shifting strategies of UN conflict management. It will conclude with some historical reflection points, asking how the UN might become a legitimate and effective political force in the resolution of the multiplying conflicts and crises of the present.

2025 marks the 80^th anniversary of the founding of the U.N.

 

Monday 17 March 2025, 7.30pm

Venue – Oxstalls Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Gloucester and by Zoom.

English Perceptions of Joan of Arc from the 15th to 21st Centuries, Professor Anne Curry, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton.

Joan of Arc was instrumental in undermining English rule in France in the early fifteenth century and it is hardly surprising that she was portrayed wholly negatively in English sources of the period. Yet views changed in later centuries and Joan became quite a heroine for English writers. Anne will trace this changing reputation through words and images of Joan from the middle ages to today.

 

Monday 14 April 2025, 7.30pm

Venue - Tewkesbury Methodist Church, High Street, Tewkesbury and by Zoom.

Henry VI and the origins of the Wars of the Roses, Dr James Ross, University of Winchester

Dr Ross's lecture will focus on Henry VI, king of England from 1422-61, and the ways in which his priorities as king diverged sharply from what was expected of medieval monarchs, and how his fitful engagement with government - in an age of personal kingship - was perhaps the worst of all worlds for the realm he ruled. The extent to which this led to the bloody outbreak of the Wars of the Roses will be evaluated.
 Dr James Ross is Reader in Medieval History at the University of Winchester. He works on English political society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, particularly on the nobility and on kingship. He has published a number of articles as well as biographies of John de Vere, Thirteenth Earl of Oxford, 1442-1513 (2011) and Henry VI: A Good, Simple and Innocent Man (2016) for the Penguin English Monarch Series. 

 

Monday 12 May 2025, 7.30pm

Venue – Park Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham and Zoom

Rural Crime, and Protest? Poaching and Incendiarism in Early 19th Century Gloucestershire, Mr Tom Wilkinson, teacher and PhD student.

Crimes such as poaching and incendiarism have been labelled by anthropologist James Scott as examples of ‘weapons of the weak’, covert actions that allow the powerless within a society to resist exploitation without having to resort to more overt deeds such as riot and rebellion. While these acts are conducted on a small scale, their cumulative impact can be considerable.

The stereotype of the lone poacher, forced into criminality through the desperation of poverty, taking food from the lands of an uncaring elite in order to support his family, has long been considered synonymous with the concept of protest through crime. Poachers have been represented as fighting in a ‘crusade against privilege and the class monopoly of the Game Laws’, and have come to represent a fundamental element in the creation of working-class consciousness in the nineteenth century. The reality, however, was far more nuanced. 

The same concepts have been applied to incendiarism, particularly the targeting of agricultural property. Arson has been described as the ‘prime weapon of rural war […] a hallmark of social protest’ during the nineteenth century. Historians have pointed to the hopelessness felt by the rural poor during this period, a time that saw their quality of life ‘degraded to a state of wretchedness’, their living standards often worse than the animals to which they tended. It has been argued that incendiarism, and crime in general, provided the rural poor with a level of agency they otherwise lacked. Their crimes, therefore, were justified.

Early nineteenth century Gloucestershire provides a fascinating case study regarding these issues. This talk will examine examples of poaching and incendiarism within the county. The extent to which both crimes should be considered a justifiable form of protest will also be discussed.