In Conversation with Edward Madigan

The leader of Royal Holloway's MA in Public History sits with our Assistant Editor to discuss the role of the historian in public history, his own work, and some of his favourite forms of historical media.

Gassed by John Singer Sargent, 1919

Tom: What are you currently working on?

A: I'm working on what I think is a really exciting project that I dipped into about 15 years ago. In a nutshell, I'm writing a book on the English experience of the Irish War of Independence. To me, this is a fascinating moment in both British and Irish history - a period of history that marked was marked by a conflict that broke out in 1919 but really escalated through 1921. To summarise, the Irish Republican Army faced the British state forces, comprised of the Royal Irish Police (the armed police), auxiliary units of police and reinforcements from Britain who became known as the 'Black and Tans'.

So, in Ireland, this is a very well-known episode. It's something that the average person, even schoolchildren, know a lot about; the men and women who fought the Irish Revolution are revered in Ireland. It's been represented since the 1920s in a variety of media; songs, films, poetry and novels, and there's a rich historiography about it as well. In Britain, by contrast, there's really no focus on this at all, and yet, it's a conflict that has a very direct impact on the trajectory of British history, where Britain, a victor of the First World War, ends up losing a lot of its home territory due to a different conflict. Just to illustrate this, the Treaty of Versailles saw Germany lose 40% of its land, whereas under the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which concluded the Irish War of Independence, Britain lost about 22%, 4/5ths of the island of Britain. This is really a watershed moment in British history, and yet not much is known about it here. I'm writing a book on this, which I hope will have a popular audience. I've been working with the Imperial War Museum to appeal for sources, written by men and women who were impacted by the conflict. It's exploring British personnel who served in Ireland and their families at home through letters and memoirs, a personal form of history. The real hope of this is to have a kind of exhibition, that's something I'd really love to come out of this, a kind of historiographical dimension, as well as a public history element.

Tom: What was your first piece of public history you worked on?

The first real public history I did was a little less than 20 years ago, when I was doing my PhD. I worked as a historical walking tour guide in Dublin, and it was an amazing experience. It was something I did at the time because I needed the money; I had a studentship with a small stipend, but it wasn't much so I had to work. I'd worked as a barman for years, but I was sick of that, so ended up doing these tours. It was a company set up by a guy who at the time had been a doctoral student in Trinity College himself in the 1980s, a guy called Tommy Graham. At that stage I'd done no public speaking, apart from at Mass, and I'd been on the radio, but that's not really the same. I was really thrown in at the deep end. The tours left from the gate of Trinity College Dublin, right in the heart of the city, open to anyone. Most of the people I led were tourists, mainly American tourists, and some from the continent and Britain, I took them through the story of over 2000 years of history in 2 hours. It was a remarkable experience, it demystified public speaking for me, and it also gave e the experience to try to make the past interesting and engaging to the public, and that to me was really something that I discovered I had some ability to do, very early on, it was particularly interesting as a young person. At that stage I'd finished school, tried to be a musician, wasn't very good at that, tried to be a DJ, wasn't bad at that, did some boxing, played football - I wasn't bad at any of those things, but I certainly wasn't going to earn a living doing them, and this public tour was the first thing I'd done where I though this is something I could do for a living and I really enjoyed it as well. Just the art of storytelling, or storifying the past into a narrative that would be engaging and entertaining in public, literally on the streets talking about the landscape of the city, that to me, was just an amazing experience, my first of practicing public history.

Tom: What is your favourite historical film?

Now this is an interesting one, I am a great fan of cinema, genuinely. I love watching films, I've always been into cinema, specifically I like British cinema quite a lot, there are few nationalities who are better at playing their own ancestors than the English. I like French cinema, the history of American film, and recently I've seen some amazing productions from Korea and China, I'm just interested in film. I like historical films, particularly of my own vague period, even if it's a bit... historically dubious, I'm not one of these historians that gets irritated by inaccuracies in film. When I read your question, I couldn't really pick one, but as a historian of the First World War, I've been deeply impressed by two in particular.

The first one dates from 1985, directed by Elem Klimov, called Come and See. It's a soviet era, Russian film, set during the Nazi terror that was unleashed in Belorussia, what is now Poland, it shows the violence of the Einsatzgruppen, who attacked Jewish and civilian communities, although much of the violence is directed as regular gentile Russians. It is just a phenomenal piece of cinema, the title is actually a quote from the Bible, I think from the Book of Revelations: 'come and see, and I saw, and the figure that rode upon the pale horse was death', of course I'm paraphrasing there. There are times where the film, which focuses on the story of a young boy who joins the Partisans, the events seem like a horror film, and yet you know, even as a non-historian, that this is an accurate depiction, and that makes it all the more disturbing. This isn't exaggerated, this is very realistic. Although it depicts profound violence, terrible human suffering and scenes of human degradation, it's a very beautiful film. It's not an easy watch, but I would just encourage anyone to watch; anyone who's curious about cinema, the cinema of the Soviet Union and the USSR experience of the Second World War.

The second, which is anglophone and probably more accessible, is a 1998 movie, directed by Terrence Malick, to me, one of the greatest directors of all time. He directed two ground-breaking and critically acclaimed films in the 1970s, the first being Badlands, the second was Days of Heaven, a breath-taking film to watch. It's about the crop workers of the Mid-West of the 1930s, so also historical. It was after these that he just disappeared for 2 decades, and then he came out in 1998 with this extraordinary piece of work, and because he was so highly regarded, every actor wanted to be in it. The movie is called The Thin Red Line, based on a novel by James Jones, an American soldier during the Second World War. The film takes place during the Battle of Guadalcanal, part of the US campaign against Japan, and like Come and See, it's a breath-taking, beautiful piece of cinema. It came out the same year as Saving Private Ryan, which is very impressive, but for other reasons; the opening scenes, the battle scenes - but the basic message is that war can be ennobling, and certainly the soldiers were in some way noble, which I think is not necessarily false, but it is a dubious message, whereas the message in The Thin Red Line, is that war intensifies all emotion, it brings out the best, but it also brings out the worst in people. There's a scene in it where these men who've fought and made terrible sacrifices to take this ridge are given some rest, lots of alcohol, and they start drinking and begin to fight, and then the narrator says 'war doesn't ennoble men, it turns them into dogs', and to me that spoke a great truth about war. It's a very compelling piece of cinema, similar to what Hemingway said about novels, there's a sense in which fiction can be more insightful than non-fiction.

Tom: What is your favourite historical painting, is it here at Royal Holloway's gallery?

So Laura MacCulloch, who used to be the curator here at Royal Holloway wrote about Man Proposes, God Disposes, by Edwin Landseer, which is the painting in the gallery here that depicts the wreck of the Erebus, one of the ships of the Franklin Expedition that went into the North-West Passage. It features two polar bears picking through the wreckage of the ship which is just haunting. It really disturbed the Victorians; the account of over150 men over two ships, they believed they were almost a chosen people in terms of their ambition, and to have that end so tragically and evidently in failure was really humbling. The stories after of cannibalism was regarded as very uncivilised. The painting itself isn't exceptionally compelling to me, but the story behind it is that Royal Holloway students had the painting covered during exams (to prevent the supposedly haunted artwork from malevolently causing failure) is fascinating. The picture of the Union Flag draped over the painting as students in the 1980s sit their exams is just a great story, part of the lore of the place.

Generally, in terms of paintings that I've liked, I'm lucky enough to live in central London so I visit the Tate Modern occasionally, I love the works of Turner and Constable, almost cliché, as as historian of the Early 20th Century and I like the works of Sickert, Singer Sargent, Orpen - these famous war artists. I've been very moved by the art of Kathe Kollwitz, probably the most famous female artist of the war years.

Man Proposes, God Disposes by Edwin Landseer, 1864

Tom: What do you feel is the historian's role in public history?

It's interesting the way you've phrased this, what is the historian's role, in a way you've proposed this to be answered in quite a simple way; the historian's role in public history is to... produce public history. The public historian is the author of the history, whether that's a website or a TV documentary or an exhibition, and yet very often, the historian plays one of several roles in the production. This is especially true at a major heritage site, so for example in London with Hampton Court Palace or the Tower of London, or out in the country these enormous stately homes. Historians work at these places, writing for the website, the visitor information booklets, but in the overall chain of command, historians are not at the top. There are marketing people, public engagement people, tour guides, and the historian has to cooperate with everyone else in that team, and I feel that can be challenging. This is partly because the aim, particularly of a country house, is to celebrate, to tell a positive story about the architecture, the family, the great and wonderful things they did, although this is changing now. If you go to a stately home now, there will be a focus not only on the great family, but the servants, the butlers, the scullery maids. Even more than that, thanks to organisations like the Colonial Countryside Project there will be a genuine acknowledgement that the great wealth of these places came from exploitation of slave labour, in the British case, usually in tobacco or coffee, and sugar. Up to the early part, even the middle, of the 19th century, slavery created vast wealth, almost unimaginably so, and it's difficult to understand the story of Britain's extraordinary built heritage, not just the stately home, but also the smaller villages built by those large estates and the wealth that came from a very dark place. There are a small but growing number of houses where that is at least acknowledged or that visitors are directly told where it came from. The public historian's role in all of this is to mediate. Historians don't deal with truth, but narratives of the past, and this should be accurate, but ideally towards some form of truth, so there are philosophical and cultural elements. They're almost like museum curators, doing research and working with people who aren't just historians, marketing teams, managers, people who don't prioritise history, in some ways this is healthy as it's a process of compromise, but managing relationships isn't easy, of course the academic historian must do this too, but it doesn't impinge on their work as much as in the public sphere.

Interviewed by Tom Miller (23-24 Assistant Editor), 1st Year History

Issue 14, History in the Media, December 2023

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Edward Madigan's research and teaching combine cultural and military history and he is particularly interested in the British and Irish experience and memory of the First World War. He also directs the MA in Public History at Royal Holloway and the London Centre for Public History and Heritage.