Investigations of a Dog

As part of the research for my book (saying that still feels a bit weird, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it) I’m going through indemnity cases in class SP 24 in the UK National Archives (aka the PRO). The Indemnity Committee was set up by parliament in 1647 to protect soldiers and officials from prosecution for actions that they had carried out under the authority of parliament, such as requisitioning things for the army or arresting royalists. It also dealt with disputes over sequestered rents and debts, and helped to enforce parliament’s order that apprentices who joined the army should be allowed to count military service towards their term of apprenticeship. If someone was prosecuted in court for acts which were covered by the Indemnity Ordinance (and many were despite the Ordinance banning people from bringing cases of this kind) the defendant could send a petition to the Indemnity Committee asking for protection. In SP 24 there are 58 boxes of petitions and other papers relating to cases, such as depositions and lists of expenses. Unlike some classes these are quite well sorted: papers relating to each case are grouped together and sorted in roughly alphabetical order of the plaintiff’s name (although confusingly the plaintiff in an indemnity case is the defendant in the corresponding criminal prosecution). I’m particularly interested in cases relating to horse requisitioning. According to Ian Gentles, about 30% of the military cases involve horses, although from what I’ve seen so far military cases seem to be a minority as many cases are disputes between civilians over payment of rents and debts due to sequestered estates. It usually takes me less than an hour to skim through a box, look at the first petition in each case to see if it’s about horses, and photograph the relevant cases. Sometimes I get cases that look interesting for other reasons, but I try not to wander too far off topic too often. Since I’m photographing these papers for my research, and since the National Archives allow document images to be uploaded to Flickr, that’s just what I’m doing. I’m also putting transcripts or summaries of the documents, along with links to the images, on the Your Archives wiki. You can see what I’ve done so far, and follow my progress in future, via a Flickr collection and Your Archives category.

So far I’ve uploaded cases from the first 2 boxes. I have another 16 boxes ready to be uploaded, but I’m working on some Python scripts to automate the process. The trial run on the first two boxes proved that doing it all manually is quite labour intensive. First I copied the image files from my camera and sorted them into directories for each box. The directory structure is based on the archival reference, so there’s a directory called “SP 24” with sub-directories called “30”, “31” etc. Then I went into each of these directories and made sub-directories for each case, so it looks like this:

• SP 24
  • 30
    • 1 Abeary vs Windebanke
    • 1 Adams vs Haughton
    • 2 Alford vs King
    • etc
  • 31

And the path to a particular case would be:

SP 24/30/2 Alford vs King

Which looks quite similar to the archival reference.

The numbers at the start of the case name are the part number (each box usually contains three folders called part 1, part 2 and part 3 but I decided not to make directories for these). Up to here it has to be done manually as arranging cases into directories involves looking at the documents to see where a new case begins and to check the names. But from here a lot of it can be automated.

Each directory containing one case needs to have its own photoset on Flickr. I used Postr to upload one case at a time and then used Desktop Flickr Organizer to create a set and add photos to it (I got both of these applications from the Ubuntu repository – if you’re on Windows then… stop using Windows!). Then I used the Organizr on the Flickr website to drag each set into the “SP 24 Indemnity Cases” collection. Once the Flickr photos and sets were in place I went to the web page for each set, manually created a Zotero item for the case, and attached a link to the page. Finally I created a Your Archives page for each case and attached a link to it in Zotero. This includes a template that I made for indemnity cases which gives some basic information in a standardized form and includes a link to the relevant Flickr set. Doing all this manually for each case is quite tedious and takes a long time, so I’m working on some Python scripts to automate the process. What I want the scripts to do is:

1. Upload photos from multiple directories
2. Create a separate photoset for each directory, with a name based on the directory name and path
3. Get the ID of each set and write the IDs and names to a CSV file
4. (At this point I’ll manually edit the CSV file to add data that will be needed for Your Archives and Zotero and which can only be got by looking at the document images, eg full names of plaintiffs and defendants, date of the petition, summary of the case, categories/tags)
5. Use the data from the CSV file to construct a wiki page with the correct template and upload to Your Archives through the MediaWiki API
6. Export an XML file which can be imported into Zotero

So far I’ve written a Flickr upload script which does the first three steps and more or less works. Rather than working directly with the Flickr API I’m using the Python Flickr API library, which makes things very easy. It provides a flickr class with methods to handle API calls and authentication. Before using it you have to go to the App Garden and request an API key, but that doesn’t take long to do. App pages can be kept private, which is what I’m doing in this case as I don’t really have the time or skills to make my scripts fit for public consumption. The next step is to add error handling as the script only works as long as nothing goes wrong. In the real world, there are lots of things that could go wrong. The library throws an exception if it gets an error response from the API. Until I add some exception handling this means that the script just stops on an error. The script will need to keep track of what has and hasn’t been done (photos uploaded, sets created, photos added to sets) so that I can run it again if anything was left undone, and so that it doesn’t try to do the same thing again if it’s already been done. One annoying thing about Flickr’s public API is that it provides no way to create a collection or add sets to a collection. I assumed I’d be able to automate that part of the process but it looks like I’ll still have to do it manually.

For step 5 I’ll be using the Pywikipediabot library. I’ve already done some simple tests on a local MediaWiki installation and it seems quite easy to create a page. Once I’ve finished the script and thoroughly tested it I can ask for a bot account on Your Archives. Step 6 will involve learning a bit more about Zotero RDF. The easiest way to find out how to generate the right code is to export some similar existing items and look at the results.

So just because I’m writing a monograph it doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned digital history. I’ll still be using lots of digital tricks in the background, but they won’t necessarily be obvious in the text of the book. New technology is certainly making my research quicker and cheaper than it used to be. The stuff that I’ve written about above isn’t exactly revolutionary: it saves labour but it doesn’t offer new insights that couldn’t have been found before. But later in the project I’m planning to do some text mining which I hope will show me things that I couldn’t otherwise have found. I’ll also be revisiting phonetic algorithms for place name identification. And if I can’t think of anything else to blog about, there are likely to be some interesting stories in the indemnity cases.

I’m writing a book! I’ve signed a contract with Ashgate Publishing for a monograph provisionally titled Horses, People and Parliament in the English Civil War: Negotiating Property and Constructing Allegiance. If everything goes to plan it should be out some time in 2012. Although I’ll be using some material from my PhD research this isn’t “the book of the thesis” as it’s going to have a completely different argument. I’m using the supply of horses to armies to show how military resources were contingent and had to be negotiated with civilians; how identities could be constructed using external signs or imposed on people who didn’t want them; and how these things feed into each other. Building on my empirical research into military administration and logistics, I want to show how the practicalities of fighting wars relate to politics, religion, gender and animal-human boundaries.

This probably won’t affect my blogging much – my posts won’t be any less frequent than they already are. Obviously I’m not going to post any of the text of the book on the web, but as I go I’ll be putting some research material on Flickr and Your Archives. I’m currently going through indemnity cases in SP 24 at the PRO (UK National Archives), and I need yet more material from SP 28 (a bottomless pit of civil war financial records).

• The latest Military History Carnival is up at Wig-Wags.
• The Institute of Historical Research is carrying out a survey to find out what people think about the possibility of podcasting/vidcasting research seminars. Go and tell them what you think. Their digital seminars project also has its own blog.
• Ross Mahoney linked to a UK National Archives project which involves post blogging the Second World War on Twitter using cabinet papers: @ukwarcabinet
• Meanwhile, the National Archives wiki Your Archives is starting a project to  create a glossary of historical terms. See the current list of wanted terms, sign up and add what you know.

This week was the anniversary of the 1964 riots when mods fought rockers in various seaside towns. Over at Your Archives you can read a summary of a file of Home Office papers relating to the riots. But what were mods and rockers? The file helpfully defines mods as “riders of motor scooters with somewhat fanciful sartorial styles”, and rockers as “riders of motor cycles who dress in leather jerkins and heavy boots”. It’s interesting that only 20% of the rioters were thought to have arrived on bikes and scooters, and that the majority went by train. And it wasn’t just Brighton: even Skegness had some trouble!  What isn’t surprising is the knee-jerk reaction of some politicians and police officers who seemed to think that civilisation was under threat and that drastic measures like  national service, judicial corporal punishment, and confiscating driving licences for non-motoring offences were necessary. What does seem surprising today is that the government dismissed these suggestions as impractical and insisted (correctly, as it turned out) that the situation was under control and could be dealt with by existing police powers. I imagine that if this had happened in the last 10 years, the Labour government would have responded over-enthusiastically to the demands that Something Must Be Done, with “tough” new measures that created new problems without solving the illusory problems that they were supposed to solve. It remains to be seen if things will be different now. As for the mods and rockers, they didn’t destroy civilisation. In the 1970s modernism turned into revivalism. I still think “mod revival” is an oxymoron, although Secret Affair are one of my guilty pleasures. The Home Office files even mention a mod falling off a cliff which was possibly the inspiration for the end of Quadrophenia.

After yet more digging for evidence of horse collisions I’ve found some new examples and more sources for some that I already knew about. Maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t need to do this because everyone would just accept that shock charges are a stupid idea (as I’ve argued in lots of blog posts before, although I’ve changed my mind about some of the details), but maybe a world in which everyone accepted things without evidence wouldn’t really be all that perfect. I’m increasingly aware that old arguments against shock (eg John Keegan in The Face of Battle) are just as prone to woolly thinking, special pleading and vague appeals to “common sense” as the arguments for it. Instead of appealing to the authority of one historian’s common sense to disprove another historian’s common sense I need to appeal to the authority of science and real-world examples. Speculation about what “would” happen looks pretty worthless next to video footage of what did happen. In any case I find this research interesting and fun (despite the fact that it focuses on horrible things happening to horses and people!).

First, a new one that I haven’t mentioned before. Thursday 16 June 1994 (ladies’ day) at Royal Ascot. In the fifth race (the Ribblesdale Stakes), Papago ridden by Mick Kinane was trailing the field at the furlong post when a drunk spectator (James Florey) ran across course. The horse ran into him, knocked him down and rolled over, unseating the jockey. Although horse and jockey ended up on the floor they weren’t injured. Florey was taken to hospital. Initial reports said that his condition was serious, and he was later said to have suffered cuts and bruises, but apparently the only long-term result of the incident was that he was warned off British racecourses for five years by the Jockey Club.

YouTube has BBC footage of the accident in slow motion looking down the course, which gives a good view of what happened. It looks like the horse saw the spectator coming in from his right and tried to duck out to the left but this just kept him going towards the spectator who hadn’t seen the horse and carried on running straight across the track. The horse hit him and tripped over head first. There are also a couple of reports in The Independent from 17 June and 9 September.

A weird thing about this one is that I must have known about it at the time but I’d completely forgotten about it. I was really into racing at that time, watched it on TV whenever I could, and bought the Racing Post quite frequently. I even went to Ascot the day after the accident – I was there when Lochsong won the King’s Stand Stakes. And this was just after I’d started work on my undergraduate dissertation, which was all about cavalry, so it’s not like I wasn’t primed to look out for collisions. It just shows that memories are unreliable.

Churchill Downs, Kentucky, 26 April 2009. During an exercise period at the Kentucky Derby meeting, Doctor Rap unseated his rider and galloped into Raspberry Kiss, who was standing on the track. Raspberry Kiss was knocked over and was later put down because of a broken pelvis (or possibly died of shock just before she was due to be put down – reports are contradictory); Doctor Rap fell on top of her and suffered a bone bruise which will probably stop him from racing again. I tried to find out about this accident last year but things got confusing because many news reports got the names of one or both horses wrong! Thanks to the Thoroughbred Database, which gives pedigrees for thoroughbred horses, I’ve confirmed the correct names of the horses:

• Raspberry Kiss (USA) foaled 2007, by Champali (USA), out of Lucky Sheikh (USA)
• Doctor Rap (USA) foaled 2006, by Smarty Jones (USA), out of Carly’s Crown (USA)

Some sources gave the names as Dr Rap and Raspberry Miss, but there are no records of any thoroughbred racehorses with these names.

NBC Chicago has a video of the accident which gives a good view of what happened. Doctor Rap approached Raspberry Kiss from behind and hit her left side. She fell and rolled over, throwing her jockey off. Doctor Rap came down on top of her and neither horse could get up. They are still lying on the ground at the end of the video, over 30 seconds after the impact. The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY) and New York Daily News give reports of the accident which seem to have the facts straight.

Prescott Downs, Arizona, 26 August 2000. I’ve written about this one before but now I have some reports from the Prescott Daily Courier from 30 November 2000 and16 July 2003 giving reliable details. This is the one where Pacific Wind unseated his rider, galloped the wrong way around the track, and collided head on with Lot O Love, ridden by Stacey Burton. Both horses were knocked over and killed, and Burton was in coma for 23 days and suffered permanent brain damage. That’s what happens when you maximize the shock of impact.

Finally, I came across a YouTube video of an accident in Turkey. I haven’t been able to find any background information about this, and it’s not likely that I will because there isn’t much to go on. It seems to be some kind of display related to the history of the Ottomans. The grey horse gallops into the black horse which is standing still. The grey is knocked over and doesn’t get up. I’d guess it probably had to be put down. The video shows horse and rider lying on the ground for nearly two minutes after the collision, and at the end they don’t look like they’re going to get up and walk away. The black horse did walk away and doesn’t seem to be too badly hurt. Because the accident is a long way from the camera, and the quality of the video isn’t too good, it’s hard to see exactly what happened. It looks like the black horse probably regained its balance, but it’s very clear that its rider was knocked off very suddenly. I don’t think anyone could have sat on through that.

So, more proof that crashing horses into each other, or into people, is a bad idea. Don’t do it kids…

As I’ve been too busy with “proper” writing to come up with any blog posts, here are some links instead:

• Andrew Hickey and Mat Bowles explain why you should vote Lib Dem in the general election and how it can make a difference. The short answer is: electoral reform. No other problems can get fixed until our awful electoral system gets fixed. The Lib Dems are the only party with the means, motive and opportunity to do it.
• If you’re not from the UK and don’t understand why we’re getting so excited about the election, Debi Linton explains it all.
• Brett Holman at Airminded looks at the influence of the Boer War on air power history, which is more relevant than you might think.
• Nick Poyntz at Mercurius Politicus has had an article published in Midland History about a “crowd action” in Cirencester at the start of the English Civil War, and has posted an open access version for anyone to read. (Personally I prefer to call these things riots because it sounds cooler. Can you imagine Joe Strummer singing about a “white crowd action”? Would Sleater Kinney have been as good if they were crowd action grrrls?)
• The Common Swings is an indescribably odd and brilliant comic/fanzine written and drawn by Chris Browning. You should find something in it to amuse you if you like Viv Stanshall, Absolutely, vintage crime novels, H. P. Lovecraft or old railway posters advertising trips to dull seaside towns. You can order a print on demand version from Lulu or a hand made version direct from the author.

The 23rd Military History Carnival is now up at Edge of the American West.

There’s a meme going round which involves picking a theme tune for your blog. I decided to do it because I’ve got so much other writing to finish before I can do a proper post with words in it. So I choose “Our Daughters Will Never Be Free” by The Indelicates. It’s the second song in the video below (starts about 3:50). Being a live version the words aren’t always easy to make out, but take it from me, this is a scathing attack on postfeminist complacency.

8th March is International Women’s Day, and March is National Women’s History Month in the US (it would be nice if there were more of them in a year, otherwise we have 11 men’s history months and 364 men’s days by default, but you can’t have everything, especially if you’re a woman…). The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is Writing Women Back Into History. I’ll probably write some posts about women’s and gender history later in the month. But right now seems like a good time to announce a new website/blog:

They Really Do Exist “aims to be a directory of women who are active in traditionally male arenas”, “for all those people who are sick of hearing ‘But there ARE no women in that sector!’ when they ask why the media or other publicity downplays the role played by women in any given area”. The site was the idea of Jennie Rigg, a female political blogger who is, in her own very apt words, “FUCKING SICK” of being told that there are no female political bloggers. What I find most striking about this situation is that many male political bloggers (even liberal ones) try to delegitimize feminism by claiming that it isn’t really politics. In contrast, anti-feminist academics are more likely to delegitimize feminist history by asserting that it is political and therefore doesn’t meet their standards of (false) neutrality. This double standard gives patriarchy the best of both worlds and makes things even more difficult for feminists. Maybe part of the problem of patriarchal equilibrium is that feminists are intellectually honest and abhor hypocrisy, whereas patriarchy thrives on it. Anyway, if you know of a woman who should be included in the list, leave a comment at the submit page.

Inspired by Jennie’s example, I’ve expanded the scope of the War and Gender Zotero group to include works on any aspect of military history written by women. There are now two sub-collections in the group library: one called “About Gender” which includes any works about the intersections of gender and sexuality with war written by anyone (which is what the group was originally limited to), and one called “By Women” which includes anything relating to wars and armed forces written by women. The new collection is still in its early stages. So far it only contains works by women that were already in the group library. There are lots more items in my personal library which need to be added. I’ve almost certainly made some embarrassingly wrong assumptions about people’s gender based only on their forenames, despite being trained by the Cambridge Population Group not to do that.

And finally, here’s a photo of a nurse and some “munitions girls” from the First World War:

The February edition of the Military History Carnival is now up at Airminded. If you’d like to host a future edition, please contact the Battlefield Biker.