Hello everybody Here I am at the Nottingham council house on my home turf with
Catharine Arnold who is a prominent writer and historian so it's lovely to
meet you today Catharine and obviously thank you and obviously Catharine is
also the Sheriff of Nottingham can we start by talking about your book
on the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 why did you choose that subjects um family
history really my own background because my father's parents both died in the
Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 and frustratingly he would not speak about
it it was obviously a formative time in his life and it had repercussions for us
as it did for millions of others over the years and so I'd always been
intrigued by it it had always been at the back of my mind as something to
write about and then I was kind of going through some ideas with my my agent and
we suddenly thought mmm three years time 100th anniversary of
Spanish flu yes that is something I'd really like to write about but strictly
speaking it was a virus but in those studies they didn't really know what a
virus was as opposed to a bacteria but it was global yes it took out we think
now round about a hundred million people which is then about a third of the
population of the earth so there wasn't a single place that went untouched from
the motor's parts of China and India to Australia New Zealand Greenland Russia
it was everywhere and was that a personal journey for you it was more
that I could understand what his his family his household I can understand
what he had gone through in lemming ttan where it happened and I could then see
Canada like the waves rippling out you know from one little boy losing his
parents in the West Midlands to a similar pattern echoing throughout the
country and then throughout the world so I was um reading for instance about an
American boy at school gradually losing his friends one by one
seeing the nearby graveyard filling up I could think oh yes that's what happened
back in lemming ttan so although it wasn't explicitly personal it was very
it it would have been impossible to write about it without it being personal
so I'd say it's probably the most personal of my books and it had a
considerable impact on me as a result if you don't mind me saying Catherine your
books tend to focus on the darker side of humanity so what is it about asylums
and vice and the criminal underworld that so fascinated inspire you to write
I think I've always been interested in the dark side of life I grew up in a
very spooky house and I think early on I learned that to stop being frightened
about something it was interesting to explore it and I also liked to to scare
and be scared I have to admit that there's no that's kind of like a free
sort of telling my friends a frightening story or writing a ghost story at school
or something it both frightens us and it reassures us because we're making it
into a story we're making some sense of what could otherwise be a meaningless
existential threat and if you could choose any era in history but is your
favorite that you're most inspired by what era would that be I suppose really
it would be the Victorian era I can remember my agent speaking to somebody
else and say well Katherine's the Victorian really and I thought I'm not
sure I like the sound of that but I think what he meant was I was interested
in kind of an almost steampunk Sensibility this mixture of fashionable
the new the scientific and the modern and this consciousness of a much older
world and an older world beyond that of myths and legends and also the
Victorians were great show men and show women they mean you think of somebody
like Dickens reading aloud to his audiences he'd love
to act out all the parts and to be an entertainer
not just writer and that speaks to me as well the kind of the performative aspect
of it I suppose one way to describe the kind of writing I do would be as a mash
up because while I'm attempting to pull together lots of facts and ideas and his
Oracle incidents and make them fresh and new for a new generation and for people
who haven't read them before I'm also drawing on a whole existing canon of
writing so for instance if I'm writing about death in the Victorian era then it
would be impossible not to mention Dickens and his descriptions of
graveyards or other writers and their descriptions of poor for funerals I'm
very conscious that I'm not necessarily doing something new or different but I'm
working within a medium of stuff that already exists so when I say mash up
perhaps unselfconscious but it's been like being a DJ you're just pulling
together lots of different elements and then putting them together in a slightly
new way which you hope people would enjoy and is there a particular
historical character that most excites you well quite recently I became
obsessed with the Ruth Ellis case as you know she was the last woman to be hanged
and I was writing a book about crime and capital punishment and I spent the
entire book writing about the history of capital punishment and how ghastly it is
and how cruel and barbaric when I came to her case I was very very intrigued by
it because from from a legal point of view it can be said that she put the
noose around her neck herself she walked right into it there plenty of senior
defense counsel bending over backwards to get her off there wouldn't have been
a great fuss among the general public if she'd been pardoned or at least of her
service hadn't been commuted to imprisonment there was immense public
sympathy for her and as it began to come out that quite clearly she'd been
brutally beaten on a regular basis by her boyfriend there's not a surely you
would have thought a jury in the world that would have convicted and yet she
appeared to want to die it was almost as if having killed and Blakely she felt
that she had to die herself it was tremendously engrossing because it was
an example of a kind of twisted romanticism and I was also fascinated by
the way Ruth was portrayed in the media the time by the petition by the fact
that the famous crime writer the American crime writer Raymond Chandler
who really invented the concept of the fan fatale with a smoking gun Raymond
Chandler pleaded her to be spared so yes I became completely obsessed of that
case and I think you do I think it's a bit like being a detective you think
hear all the facts of the case is this what really happened so you've written
about the greatest literary genius of the country in Shakespeare what is it
about him that so inspires and is so relevant to today and has been through
the ages first thing that intrigued me about Shakespeare's that he was coming
of age as a dramatist and an actor at the point where British theatre suddenly
kicked off so from people doing a few plays employ stirs and on the back of
cards you suddenly had purpose-built theaters and suddenly a whole load of
unemployed graduates from Occident Cambridge hit London trying to get in 3d
scene nothing really changes and they have the the knowledge and the ability
to translate and write and put on plays and at the same time there's a huge
upswing in the urban working class who wanted entertainment so they would pile
into these theaters equally happy to watch somebody from Oxford strutting
around quoting from catalyst catalyst sorry or you know a good fight scene
from a history play it's almost it's perhaps a vulgar analogy but it's almost
as if you could compare the development of Elizabethan theatre with gaming in
this in our age over the last 10 or 15 years something that came from up see
out of nowhere and suddenly became a million dollar industry overnight the
other side of Shakespeare what really fascinates me him what fascinates me
about him as writer was his curiosity his humanity his ability to get insight
inside the mind of almost anybody from a jealous girl like Iago - Desdemona -
poor old leer sin alum model the heath with his fool to portray their
their feelings and their their plight in language that is understandable okay
some people there are some words that you need a modern translation for that's
fine but you get you get what he's all about there's never any doubt that his
heart is in there the other thing that got me about Shakespeare was um starting
to write about him was terrifying because it was a bit like this love you
thing you think Shakespeare or I can't do that it's just too much but anybody
can write about Shakespeare you have to overcome that but it's the sheer amount
of books and I'd studied Shakespeare at university but I started off by going to
the UL at Cambridge and looking at all books about Shakespeare thousands of
them and I thought how on earth am I going to do this and then I realized
that the reason I write like I do is it's my particular take on things and I
felt I've read it more and qualified to sort of comment but it's what
Shakespeare means to me and I thought about summer I spent reading all the
Shakespeare plays because I felt I needed to to get that kind of under my
belt released enough to know what he was really about and then I'm fascinated by
the fact that we know very little about him as a person we've got a few facts
but where he lived and when he died but trying to get a grip on Shakespeare it's
like looking through a pair of opera glasses there all the way around so you
can just about see this little figure and you think he's just coming into
focus and then he's he's elusive but I think that's how a real writer should be
that the work should stand not the person and conversely to that you've
also written about bedlam or Bethlem Hospital which is the infamous asylum
why did you choose to write about that bedlam or Bethlem Hospital seemed like a
natural second after I'd written about London and death in necropolis and it's
again it's something I'd always wanted to write about because the original
Bethlem Hospital was the first psychiatric hospital in Europe and it
was a very ramshackle sort of small affair to start off with run by the
church and then by the 17th century it had
moved to an enormous sort of Palace of madness where Liverpool Street Station
now stands and could take 600 people and I was interested by the concept of
mental illness as it had changed over the ages and how people's response to
the mad had changed so in the medieval period and I used mad as a sort of
blanket turn without wishing to offend anybody ideas mental illness and mental
debility were vague in those days so they're quite likely to lock up people
who we would now define as having learning difficulties they really
couldn't tell the difference postnatal depression yeah the treatment of mad
people varied from the cruel and the callous to a much more enlightened
regime under the Quakers where they talked about sort of moral care and they
believed that if people were mentally ill if you fed them properly and looked
after them perhaps gave them smoke it's to calm
them down when they probably get better and quite often they did and also had
the whole kind of scientific cannon to go out there because I got the emerging
enlightenment the interest in science and scientific writing so there's quite
a lot of material about different attitudes towards mental health as an
aspect of Medicine it's almost as if there were different avatars of mental
illness so 17th 18th 19th centuries you've got these huge mansions of
madness not just bet on hospitals itself but hospitals like that up and down in
the country throughout the world and then as people became more
enlightened towards their in their treatment of the mentally ill the
hospitals shrank Ann became more normal and more recognizably hospitals
obviously your Sheriff of Nottingham now and it seems quite unusual that somebody
who's such a prominent historian and writer should take this role what is it
about the Sheriff of Nottingham but attracted you to it and does it
influence your writing in any way well I'm not sure I think it's early days yet
as to how it will affect my writing I was asked to do the
because I've been a Labour councillor and not even for 11 years and I've
always tried to run my writing alongside my duties as a councillor then last year
I was asked if I'd like to take on this enormous responsibility and there are
various reasons why that they'll ask people it can be seniority it can be
because they're reliable it's because they're willing to give up the time
because it's very time-consuming job but I was fascinated to do it because I see
it as a way of giving something back it's it's my last year as a councillor
and it's interesting as he's trying to see myself in a long line of other
sheriffs stretching back to anglo-saxon times and back to about 40 and 46 when
the first proper Sheriff of Nottingham was inaugurated Catherine it's been
lovely meeting you today thank you so much for letting us come and talk to you
and all of that information has been fascinating so thank you so much well
thank you I've really enjoyed it and thank you for joining us we'll see you
next time
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