The Reason Why

Who was Cecil Woodham-Smith? The name is pure Wooster, redolent of aristocracy, tweed jackets and a craving for post-prandial gaspers. Woodham-Smith was certainly aristocratic, and may well have worn tweeds and smoked, but there the resemblance to a Wodehouse figure ends.

Cecil Blanche Fitzgerald, later Woodham-Smith, is quite possibly the twentieth century’s finest female historian. Yet she has been almost completely forgotten by academic historians, for two reasons. First, she was not an academic, holding neither chair nor tenure during her long and active life. Worse, she was wealthy and had a habit of arriving at the Public Records Office in London in a chauffeur-driven car. Second, academic historians have largely lost interest in the things she wrote about: nursing, the Crimean War, Queen Victoria. The Irish famine is clearly still of interest, but for some of its historians Woodham-Smith seems to serve mostly as target practice.

Yet what Woodham-Smith achieved was remarkable even by today’s standards. Publishing her first historical study at the age of fifty-four, she eventually produced four excellent full-length books, each of which is a model of really good historical research and writing. They are accurate, well-referenced, readable, exciting and informative, which is why today all of them are still in print, and have passed through multiple editions, impressions and translations.

Cecil Fitzgerald was born in Wales in 1896 to a long-established but somewhat decayed Anglo-Irish military family. Her ancestors were red-faced and red-jacketed: she was a descendant of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who had fought in the American War of Independence (on the losing side), explored uncharted Canada, married a beautiful but mysterious young woman in Paris, and finally died of wounds received while resisting arrest for treason during the Irish Rebellion in 1798. Cecil Fitzgerald’s father had helped put down the Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857, and her mother was related to General Sir Thomas Picton, whose very lively military career culminated in his death at Waterloo.

The young Fitzgerald was a handful, even at an early age. She was sent to the Royal School for Officers’ Daughters in Bath, but played truant one day to travel to London to visit the National Gallery, and was promptly expelled. Packed off to a French convent (where such illicit trips were less likely), she completed enough schooling to be accepted to St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Fitzgerald was temporarily sent down for attending a pro-Irish demonstration, but she managed to graduate in 1917 with a second-class degree in English. Women’s work being what it was, this intelligent, university-educated and fiery aristocrat then got a job as a typist and copywriter.

Fitzgerald married a successful barrister in 1928, had two children and wrote fictional pot-boilers for fun. It is hard to imagine her disappearing into contented domesticity for long; it is almost as if she was waiting for an opportunity. This presented itself at a dinner party one night in the early 1940s, where a publisher was so impressed with her knowledge of Florence Nightingale’s life and work that he suggested she write a book. Woodham-Smith did more than that: she spent the next eight years researching Nightingale’s life, reading letters, diaries, investigating public records and seeking out private caches that might reveal new information.

The result was the magnificent and profoundly disturbing Florence Nightingale (1950). Anyone in the market for psychological thrillers can’t go past this book. Woodham-Smith explores Nightingale’s upbringing and family dynamic in painful detail, exposing them as the driving forces behind her extraordinary nursing career. It is an incisive and unsparing analysis of the claustrophobia of mid-Victorian life for women, especially those outside the common mould. Nightingale came close to losing her sanity more than once: having a lively, intelligent mind with a marked talent for mathematics and statistics, she was told to arrange flowers and to forget about pursuing her nursing career.

Years of subterfuge, deception, endless letter-writing, bizarre fugue states and physical collapses followed, until finally Nightingale was able to train as a nurse, and then work as one and train others. The cost to her physical and mental health was immense. Nightingale became an invalid for the rest of her life, and broke her heart repeatedly against the brick wall of established government interests as she tried to reform England’s hospitals and military accommodation. Nor does Woodham-Smith spare the Nightingale mythmakers, chief among whom were her mother and sister—the two women who had done the most to try to stop Nightingale in the first place.

It was precisely because she operated as a free agent that Woodham-Smith was such a very good historian. She was utterly unconstrained by any conventions about writing “women’s history” or immersing herself in working-class social history like any other respectable English academic mid-century historian. Instead, Woodham-Smith wrote about what she was interested in: only a real and abiding love for her work could have driven those years of painstaking research and writing, and the splendid results are there for anyone to see.

Her four histories are, in order of writing, Florence Nightingale (1950), The Reason Why (1953) on the Charge of the Light Brigade, The Great Hunger (1962) on the Irish famine, and the first of what was a planned two-volume study, Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times (1972). Woodham-Smith was the Christopher Koch of history writers: a strictly limited output, but what she published was so very, very good that it made up for the long wait in between. 

I had never heard of Cecil Woodham-Smith when a childhood passion for Queen Victoria led me eventually to her Queen Victoria. This book opened my eyes: the miseries and poor physical health of Victoria’s childhood, the hated Kensington system, and her early relationship with Lord Melbourne. I loved it; it was an extraordinary story and a really good read, and this book travelled around with me for many years. Woodham-Smith sensitively explores Victoria’s profoundly stressful upbringing, her loathing of pregnancy and childbirth, lengthy battles with post-natal depression and her often-stormy relationship with the supernaturally patient Albert. Against this background, her deep depression and strange behaviour after Albert’s death appear less as the whim of an indulged sovereign and more as the natural response of an emotionally fragile woman to the loss of the one stable force in her life.

So last year when I found a second-hand copy of The Great Hunger, I thought I’d give it a try as well (the other option was to buy Thomas Keneally’s book on the same topic, so it was no contest). I am now proud to say that I have a far better understanding of that awful mess known as nineteenth-century Irish history, which has gone such a long way to explaining the equally awful mess of twentieth-century Irish history. Not once does Woodham-Smith play the Irish fiddle or denounce the English; she doesn’t have to, because the facts, presented in her characteristic terse and coherent prose, speak for themselves.

The Great Hunger has probably been Woodham-Smith’s most enduring legacy. In 2008, three historians all wrote retrospectives on this book for the New Hibernia Review. Christine Kinealy’s essay “The Historian is a Haunted Man” is especially good, as she did a considerable amount of research into Woodham-Smith’s life, and she also explores the academic debate about Woodham-Smith’s views on the Irish famine. On the publication of The Great Hunger, Irish academics closed ranks against Woodham-Smith, dismissing her as an amateur, and Elizabeth Malcolm’s essay in the New Hibernia Review, “On Fire”, confirms this prejudice: 

The Great Hunger is a far more scholarly work than is often admitted. But it is scholarly in a way that stands apart from the male-dominated Irish historical scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s, which was largely interested in high politics and macroeconomics … An English woman and amateur historian bringing a more engaged approach to the analysis of the Famine, informed by social history, was clearly resented by Irish male professional historians bent upon turning their discipline into a science. 

In 1963 a University College (Dublin) exam paper included the question, “The Great Hunger is a great novel. Discuss.”

Now I was a confirmed Woodham-Smith junkie, with an almost complete collection. That just left The Reason Why, her unmatched history of the Charge of the Light Brigade, so I grabbed it when I saw it. It left me breathless: I quite literally couldn’t put it down. Woodham-Smith’s merciless analysis of Cardigan’s and Lucan’s early careers, the extent of corruption in the British Army, and the idiocy at high levels that put certifiable lunatics in charge of weapons and men, was overwhelming. Woodham-Smith shows you the main players in all their appalling glory and then transports them to the Crimea, and from there you can watch the whole mess play out.

And yet she does this with a minimum of hyperbole: she simply presents the facts, and allows you to reel back in horror from them all by yourself. The first half of The Reason Why is actually hilariously funny in places; Cardigan’s behaviour was so bad it was pure Blackadder, and I had to put the book down at times and laugh. But then I remembered what the book was about: it’s all fun until someone loses an eye, and the British Army lost considerably more than an eye in the Crimea. 

I have chosen the title of one of Woodham-Smith’s books for this piece, because I think it sums up something I want to say about historians and history writing in general. I have previously lamented the decline of really good writing in Australian history: not just the theoretical codswallop, but also the lack of compelling, interesting narrative history writing. It is as if many Australian historians have forgotten “the reason why” they got into this business in the first place, and that’s a real shame.

When we historians produce poorly written publications, we are making a bad situation worse. Students have to read this stuff: it’s the modern equivalent of the white man’s burden, and part of their punishment for being young and enthusiastic. But it is a shame they have to read it, because they then absorb the idea that the “best” sort of history writing is either incomprehensible or boring, or both. So the problem simply perpetuates itself, to the detriment of the discipline as a whole.

This dearth may also help to explain the rise of the “historical novel”—works like Geraldine Brooks’s recent Caleb’s Crossing seem to be taking the place of solid history-writing, accessible to the masses. But perhaps I’m too pessimistic—perhaps Brooks is just the modern-day equivalent of Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind is a cracking good read, but I don’t think anyone mistakes it for the last word on the American Civil War.

Woodham-Smith—and my blissful ignorance of the facts of her life until now—also got me thinking about how some historians are more read about than actually read. I am sure we can all think of some examples close to home: Mark McKenna’s recent biography of Manning Clark is a case in point. On the one hand, I am all in favour of paying attention to “that man behind the curtain”: Paul Johnson’s magisterial Intellectuals (1988) showed me that, even when it turned out that Johnson himself didn’t practise what he preached (but I don’t think anyone was too surprised).

But in our biographising we can forget too easily about the work itself. In the case of Manning Clark this may be a good thing, and certainly his turgid, inaccurate and overwritten work can now be seen much more clearly in the light of his turgid, inaccurate and overwritten life. But do we really need to know a lot about a historian to enjoy their work, and benefit from their research and insights? I know next to nothing about Geoffrey Blainey, and I can read him till the cows come home, and even if extraordinary revelations emerge after his passing I think I’ll still enjoy reading his books. (I suppose it depends on how extraordinary the revelations are; I haven’t felt the same way about Westminster Cathedral since I found out about Eric Gill.)

What is certain is that Cecil Woodham-Smith is a splendid writer, and her work has easily survived her. When she died in 1977, the Times obituary described her as 

one of the most gifted biographers and narrative historians of her generation. She displayed an attention to detail, a flair for story-telling, and an historical and human intelligence that set her work apart … In life as in scholarship and literature Cecil Woodham-Smith was a perfectionist, content only with the highest standards … A good lecturer and most entertaining in conversation, she was sharply witty in speech, but sympathetic and generous in action, especially to her fellow-writers and to young people. 

These are talents any Australian historian would do well to cultivate and imitate: history is a fine discipline and one of which anyone should be proud. It deserves good writing and good scholarship, and in its current crisis it desperately needs both. Christine Kinealy notes: 

Woodham-Smith had long before made clear that she regarded herself as an historian, stating that, “You must, if you are an historian, put down evidence. The rest is not history.” She also admitted that she “deplored” people who asked her why she didn’t write a novel, which she countered by saying, “There’s room for a woman who doesn’t write a novel, don’t you think so?” 

I couldn’t agree more. 

Philippa Martyr is working on a history of Claremont Mental Hospital in Western Australia.