Investigations of a Dog

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.

Knowing how to program can save you from tedious repetitive tasks, such as inserting templates into a wiki page. Recently I’ve been spending more time editing the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives. I created a category for women’s wills, and while I was adding pages to it, I found that a lot of them didn’t have the correct template. Wills that were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are held by the National Archives and can be downloaded from their DocumentsOnline service. Transcripts of these wills can be posted on Your Archives, and we have a template for them which automatically creates a link back to DocumentsOnline based on an ID code, and formats some key data (testator’s name, dates, catalogue reference) in a standard form. Most of the data which goes into the template can be found in the DocumentsOnline index. We used to copy and paste each value manually, which was not the best use of a human’s time. Faced with the prospect of doing this an awful lot, I decided to write a program to do it automatically. First I threw together a Python script, which was alright for me but no use for people who don’t have Python and BeautifulSoup (and I also wrote it in such a way that it relied on Linux with xclip installed). So then I decided to rewrite it in JavaScript, so that other people could use it in their browsers. You can find the finished version and documentation on the PCC Will Bookmarklet page. Below is a walk through of how I did it.

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Someone just found this blog by Googling for “What happened to Lady Brilliana Harley in the English Civil War”. Well, Lady Brilliana Harley is famous for taking charge of the defence of her home when it was besieged by the king’s soldiers. This was something she did. She wasn’t a passive object that things just happened to. This is only one example, but I suspect that it’s not unusual to ask what happened to a woman during a war and to ask what a man did during a war. Actually both women and men do things and and have things done to them in war and peace. This is basic empirical fact. But language and culture bias us to think of men as active and women as passive.

This is a selection of First World War photos from my collection, mostly bought from ebay. I’ve posted some horse photos over at The horse in history and culture. The ones here have more of a gender theme. Click on the thumbnails to see bigger versions.

Four male prisoners of war, two in drag. This was taken in the theatre at Cottbus PoW camp, where my great-grandad was held from 1917 to 1918. He performed in the theatre but there’s no evidence that he dressed as a woman. One of the paradoxes of the hyper-masculine environment of the 20th century British Army was that it often forced men into stereotypically feminine roles in order to stand in for the women who were excluded.

Royal Army Medical Corps group, taken in France, 1919. It clearly shows how uniforms reinforced gender roles. The men are wearing army service dress, just like combat soldiers, although their role is to provide medical care. The women are wearing long skirts and big head-dresses. Also notice that some of the men are very short. The man on the left of the middle row, standing between the corporal and the nurse with a dog at their feet, looks shorter than some of the women. If you look very closely you can see that some of the group are holding puppies.

A man and woman called Fred and Kitty, but I don’t know their surnames. Fred is a sergeant in the Army Service Corps, and Kitty is in civilian clothes. The poses reinforce the differences in dress, suggesting male dominance and female submission.

Territorial Royal Field Artillery corporal with a small boy. Probably taken in Cardiff or Pontypridd. Like the Sergeant in the previous photo, the corporal is wearing spurs. These were standard equipment for troops classed as mounted, which included field artillery and service corps because they relied on horses for transport. I love the little boy’s pose. Although man and boy are both male, they illustrate the hierarchy of masculinity: the corporal is more of a man because of his age, independence and military service.

A group of female munitions workers. The unprecedented expansion of both the British Army and the arms industry in the First World War, along with the assumption that women couldn’t or shouldn’t fight, led to more women working in munitions factories. This temporarily gave some women increased pay and freedom, but 90 years on women as a group still earn less than men as a group. Although the uniforms make some concessions to the practicalities of working in a factory, they also signify femininity.

The next edition of the Military History Carnival will be hosted by Brett Holman at Airminded on 15 February. Please send him suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21).