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 subject? Mm 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. Strictly speaking it was a
virus but in those days 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 remotest
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 could understand what he had
gone through in Leamington where it
happened, and I could then see
kind of 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 reading for instance about an
American boy at school gradually losing
his friends one by one and seeing the
nearby graveyard filling.
I could think - oh yes that's what
happened back in Leamington, so
although it wasn't explicitly personal
it was very.. 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.
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 fascinate and 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 learnt 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 there's kind of
like a a frisson 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 what is your favourite 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 saying "well
Catharine's a Victorian really" and I
thought I'm not sure I like the sound of
that, but I think what he meant was that
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..I 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 a writer and that speaks to me as
well kind of the performative aspect of
it, that's 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
historical 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 pauper 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 it sounds self-conscious. but it's a bit
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 enjoy. And
is there a particular historical
character that most excites you?
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 were plenty of senior defence
counsels 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 if 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 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 at the time, by
the fact that the famous crime writer, in
the American crime writer Raymond
Chandler
(who really invented the concept of the
femme fatale with a smoking gun) Raymond
Chandler pleaded for her to be spared, so yes
I became completely obsessed with that
case, and I think you do, I think it's a
bit like being a detective, you think
here all the facts of the case, is this
what really happened? So you've written
about the greatest literary genius 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 in
cloisters and on the back of carts, you
suddenly had purpose-built theatres and
suddenly a whole load of unemployed
graduates from Oxford and Cambridge hit
London, trying to get into the media
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 theatres equally happy to
watch somebody from Oxford strutting
around quoting from Catullus
sorry or you know a good fight scene
from a history play. 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 absolutely 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
guy like Iago - Desdemona - poor old
Lear senile and mad on the heath with his
fool, and 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 "lovey" thing, you
think Shakespeare - oh I can't do that,
it's just too much, but anybody can write
about Shakespeare but 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
the books about Shakespeare, thousands of
them, and I thought how am I going to do
this?
And then I realised that the reason I
write like I do is it's my particular
take on things, and I felt I've read them
all and qualified to sort of comment
but it's what Shakespeare means to me,
and I thought about the summer I spent
reading all the Shakespeare plays,
because I felt I needed to to get that
kind of under my belt really, 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 about where he lived and when
he died, but trying to get a grip on
Shakespeare, is like looking through a
pair of opera glasses the wrong
way around, so you can just about see
this little figure and you think he's
just coming into focus an 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 six
hundred 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 term without wishing to offend
anybody) ideas on 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, treatment
of mad people varied from 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 some opiates to calm
them down, then they'd probably get better
and quite often they did, and also I had
the whole kind of scientific canon to
go at there, because I got the emerging
enlightenment, 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 Bethlem Hospital 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 hospital shrank and
became more normal and more recognizably
hospitals. Obviously you're 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 that attracted you
to it and does it influence your writing
in any way?
I think it's early days yet as to how it
will affect my writing, I was asked to do
this because I've been a Labour
councillor in Nottingham 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
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 counselor and it's interesting
as a historian to see myself in a long
line of other sheriff's, stretching back
to anglo-saxon times and back to about
1446 when the first proper Sheriff
of Nottingham was inaugurated. Catharine
it's been lovely meeting you today, thank
you so much for letting us come and talk
to you, the 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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