Least Haunted – Kelvedon Hatch Bunker

Nope. We don’t “got” ghosts.

Ever since I covered the interpretation of the Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker I’ve been meaning to go back and watch the predictably terrible ‘Most Haunted’ episode filmed there (Series 13 Episode 6 from 2009). If you’re as much of a masochist as me, you can find a copy on YouTube. Here goes!

The introduction as usual has presenter Yvette Fielding outlining the existing ghost stories about the site that they’re ostensibly there to investigate (and usually end up ‘finding’). She mentions “a great figure…seen moving from room to room witnesses indicate that it appears to be the figure of an unusually tall elderly lady…” Odd – neither the RAF nor Home Office were known to recruit elderly women. Fielding tells us of “dark figures” in the sick bay and “the figure of an RAF officer” both claimed to be “re-running” their “daily duties” and “…a scientist who is very unwelcoming to any guests that enter his domain is thought to haunt the site after his untimely death.” There’s no evidence that anyone died in the bunker at any point. When the site was an RAF ROTOR radar bunker staff didn’t live in the bunker, they were bussed there and back each working day. So for an RAF ghost to even make sense he’d have had to have died ‘on the job’. Of course I can’t prove that he didn’t, but we don’t even have a superficial real-world identification here. They haven’t bothered to research whether such a thing ever happened. The scientist and medical staff and/or patient ghosts are also implausible. No-one lived in the bunker during the 1960s UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation use of the site or during government headquarters phase of occupation either. In fact the place was entirely unoccupied (other than the surface guardoom) outside of occasional exercises, so this is even less likely. Presumably this scientist is supposed to have died during an exercise? Again there’s no evidence of that. The sick bay was never used for its intended purpose, unless of course someone got a ‘booboo’ on an exercise but that’s hardly likely to result in a haunting. Of course you can argue that these supposed deaths would be subject to the Official Secrets Act but by the same token this means there’s no way to verify that a corresponding death even happened, much less that people are really seeing/experiencing the resulting ghosts. None of these entities puts in an appearance during the show proper, surprisingly. Finally Fielding mentions “…a negative entity here some believe to be of a demonic source that engulfs unsuspecting people in a cloak of darkness, so frightening is this phantom and its actions some people refuse to enter this area.”

We move to “resident historian” Leslie Smith who blethers briefly about “spies and double-agents” being a “dreadful reality”. Not here they weren’t – these bunkers had nothing to do with the likes of the Secret Intelligence Service. Anyway, she doesn’t seem to be saying that they were – just that the people that worked here were likewise subject to the Official Secrets Act and the associated “weight of knowledge”. This goes nowhere – I assume the implication is that this has resulted in some sort of negative ‘psychic energy’ or something but a) she doesn’t explain this and b) she’s supposed to be the historian, not an accomplice for the psychic medium du jour. She goes on…

“…the deeper you go into the bunker right deep down there is a dark presence there, an evil presence that rises up and makes the area black so even if the lights are on people can’t see and stumble about, it’s said…”

This is presumably the same thing Yvette was on about earlier. Clearly this phenomenon didn’t manifest while they were filming (although they love to turn the lights off themselves of course) and it certainly didn’t when I visited. I’m sure lights have gone out or been turned out while people have visited on ghost hunting trips, but if this was happening regularly I think the bunker’s Tripadvisor reviews would be suffering. 

We are then treated to “world renown [sic] medium, lecturer, teacher and bestselling author” Patrick Mathews who gives us some truly vague drivel in the bunker’s sick bay, not about the obvious (but problematic) ghosts of patients or doctors etc but ramblings about the “owner of the land” who he imagines was fighting the purchase or the construction of the bunker. More on that in a moment.

Then comes the most pathetic moment of the whole episode. Fielding asks fake psychic medium Patrick Mathews “what sort of time period” and he pauses, at which point someone off-camera (who apparently can’t remember when the bunker was built either but doesn’t want the editor to have to jump-cut to the answer) whispers “when it was built”! You can hear it here at 03:03:35. To Mathews’ credit he’s remembered the rough answer and is trying to come up with a plausible answer (one from ‘spirit’ rather than the script or guidebook) – not to when the bunker was built – but to when this imaginary protester might have been protesting. He eventually arrives at “19…give or take 50? Okay maybe a little before that because there was talk about…” and trails off there. In reality the ROTOR system was conceived and locations chosen in 1950, not before. The bunker wasn’t built until 1952 so it’s highly unlikely that there was “talk” prior to 1951.

The supposed reason for his protest isn’t the loss of farmland or anything, it’s this pish;

“…this wasn’t worth the sacrifice to save others and disrespect those who have already passed [pointless interjection from Yvette here] because he’s saying, ‘cos I’m going with this and he’s saying about the, the, the, digging, the, the discovery and all of a sudden there were bodies discovered here okay, and it was almost like a hush-hush type thing or like a secret thing or not talked about he says because he’s going like this like “shh” it wasn’t said so when they were building or putting this all together there were burial grounds or something to that or…the burial of what?…either mass graves, a war site of some type of battle that the people were here they must have discovered bones…”

Of course no-one bothers to do any basic research to see if anything archaeological was found on-site and his nonsense is interrupted by a claim from the crew to have heard something spooky.

We then move downstairs to the Government Departments (not ‘Department’ as the CGI map says) and a different ‘spirit’ appears who is apparently “screaming” because his face melted and “burnt badly”. Mathews never reveals where he was going with this in terms of where these bodies might have come from, when or how they died – possibly he’s aware of Matthew Hopkins and witch-trials, although you wouldn’t expect him to have specified a male ghost. Anyway, he continues his storytelling with;

“…right now they’re showing me digging and digging so I’m taking when they built this building or whatever it, you know, the area while they were digging there must have been bodies found because I see digging, I see them holding up a bone right and the bones that they found, the people the spirits were not pleased with the way they were handled okay…”

At this point Ciaran calls Mathews out regarding the first spirit being unhappy that the government was taking his land because of these burials. He suggests that if burials were found the government would have just moved the construction somewhere else. I actually don’t believe that in a 1950s context – the site was carefully chosen and this was well before any requirement to stop work to carry out a full archaeological survey let alone change location. They’d have recovered the remains, they might even have called in an archaeologist but there would have been no requirement to relocate. Still, it makes Mathews think on his feet and come up with a new justification that the owner didn’t want to give up his land but was forced to. This is true on one level, that this was a compulsory purchase. But did the original owner resist? No evidence of that. The current owner is the grandson of the original and nowhere has he ever said that his father resisted, for reasons of ancient burials or otherwise – I’m sure he had his misgivings but it wouldn’t have been the ‘done thing’ to voice them. Again if we’re to believe this we have to assume conspiracy and cover-up, one that the owner of the site could easily corroborate, but they don’t even try (or they did and he refused). This man is also claiming to be in touch not with some distant occupant of the site but with the current owner’s dead grandfather, seems rather near the knuckle. It’s perhaps telling that he did not take any active part in the filming and just took the money. I don’t blame him. 

The rest of the episode is the usual faffing around in the dark claiming to have heard footsteps, voices or other noises to no result, despite what “sceptic” O’Keefe claims at the end about one incident possibly being “paranormal” because no-one heard a door shut. In other words this episode is practically identical to every other that I’ve subjected myself to, but worse in a way because it lacks even the usual superficial attempts to connect the claims being made with any oral or (god forbid) written history of the site in question. Unfortunately Most Haunted kept going on along the same lines on TV until 2019 in one form or another and has been (sort of) revived as a stage show. As this is getting…mixed reviews (amusingly, posted to the wrong page), this might be the final “dead cat bounce” for the franchise, which really should never have survived the infamous “Mary loves Dick” incident.

‘Call of the Werewolf’

Sigh.

Sorry to those of you still reading this page – it’s been ages I know. Over the Christmas period I’ve had some time to come back and revisit a documentary on the werewolf that I was involved with. This was the series ‘Mythical Beasts’, produced by Windfall Films for the Discovery Science channel in 2018 (still available in the UK via Sky or presumably NowTV). Normally if I appear in something it’s directly working with the presenter, but in this case there was no presenter, just a series of talking heads and a voiceover. I appeared briefly in the ‘Call of the Werewolf’ episode (episode 9) effectively at the behest of one of these experts, social anthropologist Garry Marvin. Garry was brought in to cover the inevitable Beast of Gevaudan segment. At the time I thought the episode was exclusively about La Bête, and wrote this article on that story and how silver bullets DO figure in the story but did not seem to stop the beast. I believe I did pass that information on to Garry or the producers but if so they did not include it. This is, in fact, the only piece of evidence tying the Beast to the traditional werewolf. It is likely (as author Jay Smith believes) that at least some peasants believed that the Beast was a werewolf i.e. a man in wolf form, but there is absolutely no period evidence of that beyond the attempt to kill it with silver. Even then, that attempt was shown to have failed, and no historical werewolf was able to wreak such havoc without being caught or killed. There is also no direct link between werewolves and silver at this time. It was a perceived remedy for basically any supernatural entity or charmed human. So even its usage doesn’t necessarily mean that the user thought they were fighting a werewolf. The vast majority of the evidence is in favour of a special supernatural animal of some kind (mostly thought to be a monstrous wolf or hyena, today all but certain to have been several wolves). So in the scheme of things the Beast is only adjacent to the story of the werewolf and, by rights, I shouldn’t even have appeared!

This blog does a decent job of recapping the episode, although they have misunderstood the point about silver bullets – it’s not that they were unlikely to kill, it’s that they’re less likely to kill than a lead bullet, being lighter and thus less penetrative and less likely to smash bone. They also include the point that people often report something or someone apparently being unaffected by gunshots when in fact they’ve just missed. They over-egg how inaccurate period firearms were, unfortunately, and they use a clip of me to do it. To be clear, smoothbore muzzle-loading firearms are nowhere near as ineffective as people think, but in a high-stress situation like this, it would be far harder to hit and kill a large animal with one of those than with a modern rifled repeating arm, which was my intended point. The dangers of simplifying nuanced points for a general audience, unfortunately. The segment also goes astray slightly in implying that ordinary musket shot would not kill a man-eating wolf. The real point was that it might not immediately kill one, such that the hunters might, along with ongoing deaths, assume that they had hit but not killed it. 

As an amateur werewolf historian of sorts myself, the rest of the episode was… lacking, sadly. We have Brian Regal, an actual historian, commenting on the mythology of silver bullets, which was fine. I see he has a (by his own admission) “not to be taken too seriously” theory that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection led to a downturn in werewolf belief because he showed hybrid animal humans can’t exist. This definitely shouldn’t be taken seriously, I’m afraid. Belief in the werewolf was already significantly subdued by 1859, and humans are quite capable of sustaining belief in magical things regardless of their buy-in on scientific theories. More importantly Regal has, like so many, misunderstood what the true historical/folkloric werewolf really was. It wasn’t a hybrid of man and wolf like the Hollywood beast – it was a man (or demon) in the shape of a wolf. No belief in hybrid man-animals required. Thankfully this idea wasn’t included in the episode, but unfortunately it repeatedly missed the same point – not everything wolf-related is werewolf-related. 

I have skipped again. The actual narrative here begins with that of King Lycaeon, introduced by an actual Classicist. Now, some werewolf scholars suggest that Lycaeon is unrelated to the medieval/early modern northern European werewolf, and I see their point. But the basic trappings of a man (men, actually, since there’s a wider myth of the men of Lycaea turning into wolves periodically) effectively cursed to into a wolf are there. I personally think it’s a valid touchstone, even if direct continuity from this to the ‘golden age’ of werewolfery isn’t evidenced. However, things quickly go off the rails as they bring in archaeologist Miles Russell, who explains his (very valid but irrelevant) research into animal and animal-human hybrids that we’re told are “disturbingly similar” to the werewolf. Except they’re not. Even King Lycaeon, who is famously depicted as a man with a wolf’s head, was not originally described as such – he merely, like all later historical werewolves, turned into a full wolf. The documentary goes on to make this very point via “mythologist” Winnie M Li is not a folklorist or historian, rather an author of fiction, but she’s absolutely right. However, this completely undermines the programme-makers’ own initial proposal that werewolves were physical hybrids of man and wolf (only fictional werewolves are). Confusingly, Li also, elsewhere in the same programme (backed up by Pluskowski), suggests that the entirely separate medieval concept of the hirsute wildman “probably contributes to a nation of what the werewolf would have been”. 

We then go back in time to the famous Upper Palaeolithic ‘Sorceror’ artwork from the cave of Les Tres Freres in France. The link here is supposedly the hybrid creature’s “wolf’s tail”. Even if that WAS supposed to be a wolf’s tail, the rest of the beast isn’t a great match for any kind of wolf – it has antlers for goodness’ sake. Another archaeologist, Aleks Pluskowski, then introduces the idea of Viking wolf-warriors. This is more relevant but as Christa Agnes Tuczay explains in her chapter in ‘Werewolf Histories’ (ed. De Blecourt, p.76), there were actually three ways in which a warrior might be wolflike, only one of which is akin to the Germanic (in origin) werewolf i.e. men who physically become wolves. The programme doesn’t actually explain any of this, choosing to focus entirely upon the famous berserker who merely behaves like a savage wolf (wearing a pelt), complete with a rather misleading animated scene of warriors in wolfskins physically transforming into Hollywood wolf-men. Nor does it mention the third wolf-warrior aspect, which is psychic projection of a spectral wolf-form while the body lies in torpor. This isn’t physical werewolfery but it’s closer than the warrior who merely channels (imagines) the strength of an animal in combat. Onyeka Nubia briefly mentions the same trope in an African context, merely serving to underline how un-werewolf-like this idea really is. By this point we’ve spent a lot of screentime covering things that are mere backstory to the ‘true’ werewolf of northern European folklore. 

Pluskowski mentions the description of accused werewolf Peter Stumpp, whose eyes “in the night sparkled like fire” – the programme suggests that this was a way to tell a werewolf from an ordinary wolf. Indeed, the eyes of a werewolf are sometimes mentioned as somehow noteworthy, but this is usually because they are red or sometimes human-like. Stumpp’s eyes may allude to red werewolf eyes or to normal shining wolf eyes, it’s not entirely clear. In any case the programme’s anatomist Joy Reidenberg then redundantly explains how ordinary wolf eyes work, claiming that people would have mistaken the reflective shine for something demonic. Of course, all wolves have this feature, and it’s a huge reach to suggest that all wolves spotted at night under some sort of light were automatically thought werewolves, especially since domestic dog eyes do the same thing and people had been living with them for thousands of years.

Pluskowski shows us a church mural depicting a man-eating wolf in hell – as he points out, the only animal shown to exist there. The narrator explains that the Christian church changed the popular view of wolves from something powerful and positive to something evil. All of this is good stuff, and is at least relevant background to the actual werewolf as a concept. Unfortunately he then brings in the ‘roggenwolf’ or rye-wolf, a ghostly wolf believed to inhabit farmer’s fields. The documentary narration (not Pluskowski, notably) claims that someone bitten by the rye-wolf would themselves be “cursed to transform into a wolf” and then mentions darkening skin, ravenous hunger and violent convulsions. This leads them (and Aleks) into claiming that this was the result of ergot poisoning. They mention the same theory as applied to the Salem witch trials, a theory that has been thoroughly debunked. I’m skeptical of it here too, since as plausible as it sounds (assuming these symptoms really do appear there really is no need to invoke a medicalised explanation for folklore – people are very capable of coming up with what now seem like crazy ideas without any external stimulus beyond something like failing crops or ill health. They expand it to a general explanation of at least some accused werewolves, a claim for which we have no evidence. More importantly, the rye-wolf and the werewolf are NOT the same thing. Wikipedia makes the connection, pointing to Mannhardt (‘Roggenwolf und Roggenhund’, 1865, pp.31-32) who says that the rye-wolf was sometimes, in his time, referred to using the word ‘werwolf’, i.e. the two myths were conflated in contemporary folklore sources. However, Mannhardt himself emphasises that this is a confusion of two traditionally distinct ideas (well after the era of the werewolf trials), and points out that there is nothing in werewolf folklore to support the idea that rye-wolves were werewolves (a good example of Wikipedia editors not researching beyond the first source they find). 

Worse still, Reidenberg reappears, backed up by “mythological consultant” Richard Schwab, bringing in the old werewolf medicalisation chestnuts of Hypertrichosis (excess hair) and Porphyria (a disfiguring sensitivity to light). No folklorist or historian of werewolf belief takes these theories seriously as the werewolves of folklore were not hairy men who hid from daylight as the movies depict (other perhaps than those suffering from Lycanthropy, the mere belief that one is a wolf). Reidenberg also references the full moon, suggesting that this explains why werewolves were thought to appear at full moon. Now, contrary to common academic claim today, there is an association between humans changing into wolves and the moon. The only Roman instance of a werewolf, Petronius’s Satyricon (which is mentioned in the programme), a 9th century source in the French Bibliothèque Nationale and the early 13th century Otia Imperalia by Gervase of Tilbury all mention the moon albeit none specify the full moon. We can’t really speculate what phases the other writers thought were significant, but Petronius did mention that the moon was shining brightly (“like high noon”), which sure as heck sounds like the full moon to me. Still, even if we accept that there was a common belief that werewolves came out on the full moon, there’s no link here with these medical conditions. 

Overall, the documentary isn’t a total waste of time but, like most of its ilk, is far too keen to paint the werewolf as a universal trope rather than focus upon the beast for which the werewolf was named – the northern European person (usually a man) who becomes an actual wolf by means of pelt, belt, or ointment. There is precious little of this in the episode and so much rich history of ‘real’ werewolf belief that could have been included. Pluskowski in particular makes good contributions but is clearly pursuing his actual research interests of notions of human and animal in general, not the werewolf as a discrete historical or folkloric concept. Although most of the participants had actual credentials, few of them knew much about the werewolf of folklore, and not one actual folklorist was interviewed. Unfortunately this is par for the course with this kind of subject matter, which is invariably sensationalised since most viewers approach it solely from a popular culture background. There were far too many of them as well, resulting in precious little screentime for them or the ideas presented. It’s also unfortunate that the show was clearly made on a very low budget, featuring simple digital artwork and very crude and repetitive CGI. I’m not sure that I dare attempt the vampire episode… 

Werewolves of Kyiv?

The flag version of the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces cap badge (Wikimedia)

In 2019 Ukraine’s Special Operations Command officially adopted a new unit patch featuring the head of a wolf with two arrows in its mouth. This was no ordinary wolf, however – it was explicitly identified by the unit as a вовкулаку or werewolf and the patch explained as follows:

“According to legend, Cossacks with supernatural powers who could turn into wolves could catch arrows with their hands or beat them off”

I was of course curious as to what folklore – or modern understanding of it – had inspired this. There is a fair bit of Cossack folklore portraying them as invulnerable, akin to Viking wolfskins or berserkers but usually without the animal skins. For the most part these ‘Kharakternyks’ are Slavic versions of the folkloric “hardman” – a man charmed to protect him from any attack, notably bullets. Indeed, all the folklore I can find on this relates to bullets and cannonballs, not arrows. This is despite folklore as late as the 19th century making reference to arrows, but never in the context of warriors being impervious to them, as far as I could see. It would have been difficult to incorporate round bullets or cannon shot, so using arrows makes design sense, I think. They are still “shots” being stopped (and in one case also destroyed) by the werewolf.

This patch followed an even more interesting cap badge approved upon their formation in 2016. This featured a wolf in profile, unusually wearing a broad belt or girdle. The issue version can be seen in this promotional video; the belt is positioned more vertically and the wolf’s mouth is more open. To get the obvious bit out of the way first, yes, this is a werewolf. The werewolf of folklore was always… just a wolf. It might be unusually large, be missing a leg or tail, or have human eyes or even a single human leg (!), depending where and when we’re talking about, but it was never the hybrid wolfman or monster of 20th/21st century fiction. So right away this symbolism is actually historically accurate. Likewise the fork (an early form of the Ukrainian trident, missing its central tine) and the motto “I’m coming at you” (perhaps better translated in this context as “I’m/We’re coming for you”) are indeed associated with Prince Sviatoslav I. This raises the main query with this symbolism, in that Ukrainian warriors turning into wolves (i.e. being werewolves) doesn’t seem to have been common, as Ukraine implies. Sviatoslav was compared to a wolf (some say leopard) in historical documents but was never claimed to have become one. Prince Vseslav of Polotsk, not mentioned, was also said to be able to take the form of a wolf. As to the idea that Cossack magicians or ‘Kharakternyk’ (Характерник) being werewolves by default as the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) claim, well, that may be a reach. I can’t find anything to support that in the historical sources. However, I did find one historical Cossack who was actually supposed to have this power –  Ivan Sirko (Іван Сірко). Oddly there’s no mention of his wolf form on his Wiki page, only (without cite) on the Kharakternyk page. At least one legend (found in English in ‘Cossack Motifs in Ukrainian Folk Legends’ by RI Shiyan, 2006) confirms that he was indeed thought to be able to turn into a wolf as the modern popular sources suggest. That’s good enough for me as an historical basis for the insignia, even if it may not extend to other Cossacks (if anyone does know of other evidence, let me know – it’s certainly plausible enough).

The belt is an important element in this design. B.A. Rybakov in ‘The Paganism of Ancient Rus’ (Язычество Древней Руси) writes of the волк-оборотень or волхв-волкодлак, the ‘wolf-werewolf’ (likely a similar etymological cock-up as that which led to the French loup-garou) or ‘warlock-werewolf’, a “man who adopted a wolf’s form by means of a magic belt”. He references the renowned Slavic folklorist Aleksandr Afanasiev’s ‘Poetic Views of the Slavic Nature’ (Vol. 3, 1865):

“According to Russian beliefs, vovkulaks are of two kinds: they are either sorcerers who take on animal form, or ordinary people, turned into wolves by sorcery spells.

Sorcerers usually roam like wolves at night (that is, in the darkness induced by black clouds), but during the day they again perceive human forms; they are in close intercourse with unclean spirits, and their very transformation into wolves is accomplished with the help of the devil.”

The magic or nauz belt (пояс-науз) is very interesting and is loosely explained in this article on the Ukraine SOF website. It seems to derive from Ukrainian/Kievan Rus folklore around the practice of tying knots and objects into amulets, bracelets and belts in order to achieve magical effects. In this context, that would be transformation into a wolf. In the rest of Europe, such belts were made of wolfskin (if they weren’t actual whole wolfskins). This is not specified in the Slavic version but given that some period artwork does depict belts and pouches made of furred pelt, it’s possible that this was supposed to be taken as read. The SOF author refers to it as a “battle-belt” and claims that the werewolf can only be recognised by the belt he still wears in wolf form. I’ve never seen a folkloric source that mentions a wolf wearing a belt – it’s implied that the belt turns into a wolfskin or disappears.

Even if the belt did remain on the wolf, it probably shouldn’t in theory be the tanned cowhide multiple-strapped cheres (черес) belt depicted on the insignia. According to Rybakov the ‘nauz’ (пояс-науз) as worn by magic-users in human form (he too does not mention wolves dressed in belts) was recognisably a magical belt due to being tied into complex knots. The Nauz was frowned upon and even banned, which wouldn’t make sense if one couldn’t tell one apart from an ordinary leather belt. Still, the belt on the badge does its job, which is to convey to a modern Ukrainian/Slavic audience that this is a Cossack in wolf-form – it’s what a modern Slavic audience would recognise as a ‘Cossack’ belt. Since this allows the badge to feature a folklore-accurate wolf rather than a Hollywood wolf-man, I’m all for it.

Afanasiev mentions the nauz only once, and without reference to the werewolf at all, so it’s quite unclear on what basis Rybakov links the two, but without going very deep into foreign language folklore I’ll have to take him at his word. He does include an image of a bracelet from Gorodishche that may depict a werewolf complete with his nauz, although even his own caption includes a cautious question mark. To me it could easily be a hunting hound wearing a harness. Still, whether or not he’s on the money regarding the period folklore here, he reflects 20th-21st century conception of it and is no doubt the touchstone for the modern Ukrainian understanding of werewolf folklore that underpins the SOF insignia. We know this for sure because an early (2015) variant shown here (top right) is clearly closely based upon the original 12th century bracelet artwork, with the implied belt around its middle replaced by the gold cheres belt of the final version (with only two straps). It’s actually a shame they didn’t go with this version as it’s even more rooted in tradition. This then evolved into two possible designs, with the chosen one being the left hand of these. I should note that the various Ukrainian SOF training units adopted an entirely different version of a (were)wolf’s head in profile without the arrows, as can be seen in this video, making three different in-service versions of werewolf artwork. 
Overall this is a very cool use of folklore to help create an identity and tradition for a brand new unit. It does imply that all kharakternyks were thought to be werewolves, but it is at least based on a real historical piece of folkloreI. It conflates the magical nauz with the ordinary cheres belt, but does so for sound design reasons. It flies in the face of the werewolf as a bad guy, which in Christian Europe he has nearly always been, but it reflects older tales (notably Scandinavian) in which warriors are identified with, and sometimes as, the werewolf as a battle-beast – not someone you’d invite to dinner, but someone you want protecting you even if you didn’t even know they were there. Which, of course, is exactly the image that special operations forces want, and need, to project. If I may make a rare dip into politics, I have to say that so far, the SSO have shown themselves more than worthy of this symbolism in their fight against Russian aggression. Of course folklore is in any case always evolving and being reinvented, as the wider history of werewolf beliefs and stories shows: I thoroughly recommend the 2015 book ‘Werewolf Histories’, edited by Willem de Blécourt and Daniel Ogden’s The Werewolf in the Ancient World (2020). Ogden also has a short summary here of the extent to which the werewolf can be seen as a ‘universal’ myth, even if all the details over the millennia.

Did the British call American riflemen the “most fatal widow and orphan makers in the world”?

I’ve just come across this cool piece of art on Facebook (I like the use of the memento mori as used on period headstones) with the following Revolutionary War quote above it; “…the shirt-tail men, with their cursed twisted guns, the most fatal widow and orphan makers in the world.” – London Paper -1775

It’s a real quote, and the date is correct, but it’s not from a London paper. It’s from the diary of an American general – General Arnold, who is expressing his envy of fellow commander Daniel Morgan’s famous corps of riflemen. So it’s not the British quaking in their boots – it’s the American ‘brass’ praising their own men. The full quote, from ‘Chronology of the American Revolution: Military and Political Actions Day by Day’, Bud Hannings (2014, p.54) is;

“Morgan with his coon-tailed caps and leather jerkins and long rifles from the mountains of Virginia, I wanted; cursed, twisted guns, the most fateful widow and orphan makers in the world … shirt-tail men, the British came to call them.”

Hannings doesn’t cite the quote and I can’t find it anywhere else, but it is referenced in ‘Collections, Topographical, Historical & Biographical…’ Vol.3, 1824, p.383, so is presumably accurate. Even if not, it’s definitively a self-congratulatory American quote, not a fearful British one. Not that Britons didn’t fear riflemen, and they certainly respected them – even creating their own equivalents. But something about the turn of phrase seemed unlikely from the perspective of an enemy. It’s also worth noting that their ultimate contribution was not war-winning. The Revolutionary War was won by the conventionally trained, equipped and deployed Continental Army, not by rifle-armed militia who were not numerous enough to make that kind of difference. At that period light infantry alone, especially not untrained militia, were not capable of winning wars. America won its freedom by building its conventional military strength and alliances, but that’s not as romantic as the plucky “shirt-tail men” – the only bit of the quote that might once have been spoken by a British officer. However, if it was, it was likely spoken with contempt, not admiration.

East Grinstead – Hub of Weird?

I’ve been aware of Scientology’s history at Saint Hill Manor near East Grinstead, Sussex, UK for many years. What I hadn’t realised is that several other occult/esoteric/religious organisations are also located in the area as this recent Facebook video and this Telegraph article relate. That is, the so-called Church of Scientology, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), the Rosicrucian Order and, apparently, various pagans. 

On the face of it, I have to admit that this seems pretty weird. It even prompted a 1994 Channel 4 documentary called “Why East Grinstead?”, although this did a very poor job of answering its own question. Some speculate that either magical ley lines or the Greenwich meridian are somehow relevant. It’s worth noting that they’re not all that close together – see this hasty map – none are not actually based in East Grinstead but are located in the countryside nearby. Also, by no means all of the sites in question are unique as far as their parent organisations go. By far the most famous thing in (near) East Grinstead is Scientology’s Saint Hill Manor HQ – but this hasn’t been their HQ since 1967 (established in 1955) and today is one of four “Advanced Orgs” (warning, link to Scientology’s website here). So it’s certainly noteworthy that this facility is there, and it’s the closest of the three at just a mile or so beyond the outskirts of the town. The Rosicrucians do have their current UK HQ in the area, although it’s about 10 miles away at Greenwood Gate, Blackhill, Crowborough. This was not established until 1976 (see The Rosicrucian Digest). Interestingly a Rosicrucian presence did appear in the area in 1955, the same year that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard opened Saint Hill Manor, in the form of the publishing company New Knowledge Books, which had just moved to East Grinstead from a London address. The owner was Rudolf Steiner, Rosicrucian and founder of anthroposophy and sometimes said to be “the German L. Ron Hubbard”. Hubbard for his part was a member of the Rosicrucian Order in the 1940s and borrowed some aspects from it. Given the apparent timeline all of this would seem to be coincidental – Hubbard had already bought the Manor the year prior.

Then we have the Church of Jesus Christ etc etc – the Mormons. This is their London Temple, one of two “temples” in the UK – there’s also a special “visitor’s centre” church for a total of three Mormon establishments in the country. Interesting that one of these should be co-located with Scientology, but that in itself is hardly unusual – you’ll find Mormon churches and Scientology centres in numerous British cities. The only difference here is that both are higher-level sites within their respective organisations but that is again unsurprising. Ordinary church-level buildings are going to be located in urban areas, special ones with any kind of ‘retreat’ role are going to be in the countryside – but require good road and rail links so that members/delegates can easily get to and from them.

The Opus Dei site, Wickenden Manor (four miles from East Grinstead), was established in 1964 according to the book ‘Historia del Opus Dei’ (2021), but unlike the others this not a particularly significant site, being only one of three “retreats” that they maintain – they have 13 other sites around the country for actual “work”. Opus Dei is also the odd one out here – it’s not a cult or religion in itself, it’s merely an evangelical wing of the Catholic Church. For both reasons I think it’s a bit of a red herring here.

Finally there are the claims of druids, satanists etc meeting in the woods. This is a very common claim for woods all over the country, usually teenagers messing about, sometimes neo-pagans actually practicing their rituals, never actual biblical Satanism. The only evidence of any organised presence of any group associated with these beliefs is from the 1994 documentary, when members of the Pagan Federation are filmed at Stone Farm Rocks near East Grinstead. But neo-pagans are everywhere – there needn’t be (and as far as I can tell, wasn’t for these people) any particular reason to choose that area over any other nice wooded rocky bit of English countryside. If you’re making a documentary about unusual beliefs in any part of the UK you’ll find neo-pagans to interview, especially in the populous south-east of England, so close to London. So again, this seems like a red herring. The same goes for the dowsers that were featured – dowsers are everywhere. Nor are they necessarily esoteric in their beliefs – many are convinced they’re doing science (they’re not, dowsing doesn’t work). There’s really no evidence that anything unusual in the area has attracted these various groups. The suggestion that either the meridian or ley lines being somehow significant is laughable. Only the alleged pagans would find the ley lines significant and the route of the Greenwich meridian is wholly arbitrary and, ironically, science-based, nothing to do with esoterism, the occult, or anything else. I’m with the local museum manager and the Canon asked in the documentary – it’s just coincidence. At most, Hubbard’s choice might have influenced or emboldened some of the others. Perhaps they thought they would be less likely to get hassle if there was already a controversial alternative group nearby that, until the 1990s, didn’t attract too much negative attention (and once they did, being by far the wackiest, would take any flak from locals!).

Shining Girls (Apple TV, 2022)

Another time travel fiction review with SPOILERS for the TV show (and to some extent the book as well)

I very much enjoyed the Apple TV series Shining Girls, an adaptation of Lauren Beukes’ 2013 novel The Shining Girls. I thought it was well acted, well shot, mostly well written and had a satisfying ending, albeit a problematic one since the killer is left alive and Kirby might now be forever bound to the house like he was. However, I was confused and somewhat annoyed by the time-travel aspects; the way the house worked as a time machine mostly made sense, but the way that  Kirby’s present (and later that of Harper and Jin-Sook) was shown to change moment to moment really makes zero sense. It made me very curious to find out if it was part of the book, and I soon found out that it wasn’t. I decided to read the book as much preferred the idea of a straightforward time travel version of the same story. As much as I enjoyed the book, it made me all the more annoyed that the TV version had made such a dramatic and nonsensical change. It wasn’t the only questionable change either. The focus upon Kirby and her ever-shifting reality resulted in a great deal being changed or removed, including most of the titular ‘shining girls’ including, surprisingly for 2022, the black, trans, and pro-abortion characters. The ones that are retained are significantly changed and a whole new character – Leo Jenkins – is added for no clear reason. 

Time travel in the novel is straightforward; you simply can’t change the past. It’s a clever twist on a closed loop like The Terminator or Twelve Monkeys. So nothing changes. In the TV show it’s more like Terminator 2 or Back to the Future – you can change the past and save the girls. This is a change that the 12 Monkeys TV show also made to the movie’s story, and I could have lived with the same here. Most people don’t share my love of closed loops and it’s fun to see a seemingly foregone conclusion averted/subverted (which is why James Cameron contradicted his own first movie with his sequel – it made for an emotionally satisfying ending at the expense of pure logic. No, what got me annoyed in Shining Girls (2022) was not the malleable timeline but the introduction of a second, wholly nonsensical mechanism for changing it. This is both more confusing than it need be and a direct contradiction because in theory changes made by one mechanism should impact those made by the other. Dark and Avengers: Endgame (see my review here) both introduced branching realities, to varying degrees of success – I would have been OK with this show doing something similar since under that system of time travel cause and effect is pretty much intact. Shining Girls makes the same mistake as Endgame, but whereas that logic only broke in the final scenes and can be ‘fixed’ with some off-screen assumptions, Shining Girls is fundamentally broken as a time travel story since its second mechanism is nothing to do with ‘many worlds’ and is, well, random. Drinking vessels, desks, haircuts, clothes, characters and locations all change, for absolutely no reason. No multiverse shenanigans are ever mentioned or even implied. The characters speculate at one point that the changes are somehow echoes of events that might yet happen; a laundromat changes into a bar for which Kirby already has a matchbook, and Kirby goes from single to married to a coworker. 

Dan: When things change for you, do you recognize it? 

Kirby: Sometimes. Other times, they’re just random. 

Dan: Maybe they’re what’s to come.

But then it’s shown that she doesn’t marry her coworker at all in the ‘final’ timeline, at least as far as we see. Is she still destined to do so at some point? If so then there’s no chance that she stays in the house and becomes some sort of time-travelling vigilante or whatever. They’ve shown that it’s possible to change reality, seemingly permanently, so surely the timeline where she marries him is no longer viable? When should the laundromat have been a bar and what are the consequences of it changing at the ‘wrong’ time? Kirby has the matchbook – why? Jin-Sook’s career is destroyed in the present because she isn’t killed…also in the present. At the same time Kirby’s present also shifts because Dan is stabbed, again, in the present. Why? The answer to all of this and the other seemingly random changes is deeply unsatisfying and illogical. The cause of these changes is not meddling in the past but rather (sigh) strong emotions experienced by someone who is ‘entangled’ (a clear if nonsensical attempt to reference quantum mechanics) with another person who is somehow detached from time – namely Harper (with Kirby’s fellow victim Jin-Sook joining the entangled mess later on). In Luisa’s own words:

“I always thought of time just there’s one string of time, and so wherever Harper is he’s still connected to Kirby so his emotions, his violence against other women it ripples forward kind of like a butterfly effect and changes her world, changes her, you know, her hair, her apartment depending on on what he’s done, and so if he kills Jin-Sook in April 26 it doesn’t matter that Kirby is, you know, at the same time, it basically ripples backwards and still impacts her life.” 

This (and another attempt to explain it here) makes absolutely no sense. The conceit of ‘mutable’ timeline time travel and much of our fascination with it is that when you change something, you’re creating a cause that has an effect. It doesn’t matter which way around – you can have something exist out of time in the past that is caused in the future; logically speaking there’s no problem with that. But two unconnected events are, well, unconnected. There IS no cause, there can be no effect. How the hell does Harper killing a woman that has nothing to do with Kirby’s past change Kirby’s present? How does him attacking her in the present change the past of the building that they happen to be in? Or where her desk is? How is Harper ‘entangled’ with Kirby in the first place? He’s affected by the house’s time travel magic – is this somehow contagious? There is no satisfactory answer to any of these questions. What Harper is doing in the present cannot logically affect events in the past. He can take an object from the present back or otherwise change the past IN the past, but he can’t just throw a spacetime tantrum and change Kirby’s past from the present. What Luisa is describing is some sort of psychic warfare – which might have been an interesting premise for a TV series, but not this one. The changes are not even consistent in their frequency or magnitude. At one point near the end reality shifts again but Kirby’s hair, clothes and makeup don’t. This was apparently because they “ran out of hairstyles” and liked her cool punky confident look so they just kept it. 

Of course it’s possible to (as some fans have) invoke ‘many worlds’ and say that every change we see is actually the universe branching, but that’s not shown or told to us. Instead, everything is shown to happen in a single mutable timeline in which trips to the past absolutely do change the present/future. Further, only causal events that take place in the subjective present (like the fight with the changing building) could create a branch in reality and even then, this branch would occur then and there, not arbitrarily in the past (indeed, according to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, that’s exactly what IS happening all the time). If you’re going to make up rules that aren’t logical, OK, do that, but you need to spell them out, if not in the show then somewhere (famously, Donnie Darko did this on its website). 

I don’t think I’m just being a time travel obsessive here. It isn’t just the fun nerdy logic puzzle aspect that this affects, it’s the narrative as well (unless you miss the fact or choose to overlook it). Although it feels like the stakes and tension are being raised by the changes becoming more frequent and disruptive, they aren’t really – it’s unearned and artificial-feeling, like overly dramatic loud music playing over an otherwise ordinary scene (looking at you, modern Doctor Who). If anything can happen at any moment to three of the main characters, nothing really matters. It’s also needlessly confusing for the viewer, since it’s hard enough for people to follow cause-and-effect changes – hence the contrived photos and fax in Back to the Future – never mind completely random ones taking place in parallel yet not, apparently, conflicting with or modifying the logical changes. Two totally separate mechanisms for change happening at the same time. It’s a bizarre narrative choice, especially since it isn’t taken from the book, and detracts from the otherwise excellent acting, staging, dialogue etc. However, having read many reviews, not many seem to agree with me. They seem to fall into several camps on the time travel aspects. First, people like this SyFy reviewer who seem to think that this multiverse travel, which I’ve explained isn’t the case. Second, some people misunderstand what’s shown and think that the changes ARE due to Harper changing the past, like this Slate reviewer who, by the way, I otherwise agree with. Even Beukes seems to rue the changes to an extent, although she seems mostly happy with the adaptation, perhaps because she’s less attached to her own coherent time travel than I or simply because adaptations are inevitably a compromise between producers, showrunner, writers and studio. Then there are the people who just don’t care or even (looking at you, Redditors) protest that anyone trying to analyse the time travel is ‘missing the point’ and should stop fussing over it. Finally, and not too far removed from the last group, are people who accept that Harper, Kirby or Jin-Sook’s emotions are somehow enough to change the timeline, which as noted is what the showrunner and writers actually intended. As is often the case with fan explanations, none is very satisfactory.

It seems to me that the creators understood that unexpected timeline changes are interesting and fun from movies like Primer or The Butterfly Effect (or perhaps series like 12 Monkeys) and would fit their intent for the adaptation, but weren’t able (or didn’t care) put in the work to make the changes work in terms of cause and effect. Instead they came up with this handwavy version in which things might feel like they might ultimately make sense but logic is in fact out of the window. It’s very much the J.J. Abrams empty ‘mystery box’ approach – set up the intriguing mystery, then reveal that stuff just happens because the writers say so rather than because (say) Harper killing the coroner/medical examiner in the past prevents Kirby getting access to the body she needs to investigate and suddenly a key piece of evidence is lost to her (other than her memory of it) in the present. I chose this example because they do a similar reality shift with the medical examiner in the show (changing from a woman to a man and back again), but it happens (twice) for no reason other than to throw off the audience.

The idea here was that Kirby’s ever-shifting present would be a metaphor for her trauma and “born of a desire to keep the series subjective to Kirby’s experience”, but there’s no reason why subjectively unexplained shifts (i.e. we the viewer sees the cause, Kirby doesn’t) wouldn’t do just as well – better, in fact, since Harper would be actively changing her past to affect her present and future, rather than being clueless as to how or why he was having these effects. Happily, like the other stories I referenced, The Shining Girls novel follows a self-consistent narrative – Harper was always going to lose, he (and Kirby) just didn’t know it yet. No-one is saved by changing the past. Even the hard date limit on Harper’s time travel, hand-waved in the show, is originally due to the fact that the timeline is (as the author’s time-travel consultant Sam Wilson confirmed) self-consistent – he can’t go past 1993 because that’s when the house is, essentially, fated to burn. He is living a loop – he dies in the burning house and then, it’s strongly implied, becomes the house, reaching back to lure a series of owners, including himself, to try to makes things right. But it’s a closed loop – he is merely setting the story in motion from its end. He has no free will, something that people tend to dislike about predestination stories, but I find them satisfying. The creators of the show claimed that they didn’t want the house to be the driving force for Harper’s murders because it took away from his agency – they wanted him bad in the first place. Seemingly, Luisa and co have misunderstood the ending – the house is not just some supernatural entity driving Harper to kill, it’s his ghost. Harper himself is the supernatural cause of the time travel in this story. There was no need to change the story to make Harper solely responsible for his evil – he already was. Like all serial killers he thinks that he has some higher reason for killing but in reality it’s pointless and circular. This also destroys the origin of the time travel house – in the show it’s just…there, and remains unexplained. Kirby inherits it as a “totem of power” according to Luisa, which seems anathema to the original ending (to be fair to her she does acknowledge that this isn’t necessarily a good thing).

Author Lauren Beukes had fellow writer Sam Wilson ‘doctor’ the timeline for her to make it work, and he did a great job. Beukes also gives her vision for her novel:

“I wanted to use time travel as a way of exploring how much has changed (or, depressingly stayed the same) over the course of the 20th Century, especially for women, and subvert the serial killer genre by keeping the focus much more on the victims and examining what real violence is and what it does to us. The killer has a type, but it’s not a physical thing – he goes for women with fire in their guts, who kick back against the conventions of their time.”

This aspect, unlike the closed time loop, somewhat carries over to the TV series, albeit lacking the same variety in terms of the titular girls. However, she also stated that she;

“…wanted to play with loops and paradoxes and obsessions which meant the model I settled on was a fatalistic one. Think of it is as Greek tragedy time travel – the more you resist your destiny, the more you put in to play all the events that will bring it about, like Oedipus or MacBeth or King Herrod but also, in the way it loops back on itself, echoing the legends of Sisyphus and the punishment of Prometheus.”

This is thrown out along with the time travel logic and, for me, somewhat undermines its own narrative. As Beukes correctly tried to show, trauma cannot be magically undone and the dead certainly cannot be brought back. You can only try to address it and, hopefully, stop others from suffering in future. As I said, I did enjoy the show as a supernatural mystery series with time travel elements. The time periods were all nicely depicted and the excitement of travelling through time was there. But it didn’t scratch that timey-wimey itch for me, unfortunately. The recent adaptation of The Time Traveller’s Wife was much better in that regard. In conclusion, if you’re a time travel nut like me, check out the show if you like, but the main thing is to read or listen to the book. Not only is the time travel much better but the way the interior of the house works, its origins and connection to the killer, and even the title all make much more sense.

Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker

A wonderful photo of boffins at work in the (level 1) Ops Room at Kelvedon Hatch circa 1962
THE UNITED KINGDOM DURING THE COLD WAR, 1945-1991 (D 106284) United Kingdom Warning and Monitoring Organisation. Metropolitan Sector Operations Centre. Operations Room – Scientists at Work. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205220516

For those still following this page, my apologies for another lengthy drought. I’ve just been too busy unfortunately. However, I have been working on a few things, the first of which follows…

This spring I finally got around to visiting one of the best preserved Cold War nuclear bunkers in the UK – Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. First, given the implication of me commenting on anything historical here, let me say that I absolutely loved this place. We owe the owner and manager, Mr Parrish, a massive debt for rescuing it for the nation rather than being vandalised or destroyed entirely. That said, it is not without its issues from an historical standpoint. Parrish claimed in 1996 that “Everything is original — except the John Major figure…It is exactly as the Government left it”. The Facebook page today likewise proclaims “Everything is as it was left by the Government, when the bunker was decommissioned in the early 90’s.” This is not the case. 

Praise for the bunker is (rightly) almost universal, but at the same time it’s attracted very little scholarly attention. I did find criticism in David Lowe and Tony Joel’s ‘Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories’ (2014, p.59) where they remark that Kelvedon Hatch’s “…testimony to the Cold War is somewhat compromised by its private ownership. The organization and upkeep of displays is very tired and occasionally misplaced (a dummy of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for instance, sits next to communications equipment dating from the 1960s), and the bunker jostles with youth-focused outside activities…”. Digging out Imperial War Museum and Historic England photos from 1992 and 1997 respectively, it isn’t just the interpretation that could be described as “tired”, sadly. The general condition of the place has gone from absolutely pristine to, shall we say, looking its age. Flooring and painted surfaces are worn (but not peeling), plant machinery is looking rough (albeit not visibly corroded), and there are worrying cracks in a couple of walls. I feel terrible pointing this out because if you’re going to privately run an underground three-storey office block formerly maintained at great taxpayer’s expense, maintenance is an enormous and inevitable problem. I certainly have no issue with the adjacent outdoor activities – how else are they going to fund this place? Mr Parrish’s recorded audioguide tour, whilst engaging, informative, and funny, doesn’t give the full story, but then how could it? Even Lowe and Joel blame the private status of the site rather than the owner himself. However, the whole place is in a sort of three-way limbo between an attempt at reconstructing actual wartime occupation of the final RGHQ phase, attempts to evoke its earlier days, and a sort of ad hoc Cold War history museum. It’s great for most visitors, but for those of us wanting more, I decided to try to disentangle this confusion using the available information, plans, photos, and film footage of the site’s different eras. 

Contrary to just about all of the information out there, there were actually three operational phases as follows:

Phase 1 – ROTOR bunker

1951 – 1953: Construction 

1953 – 1957: RAF ROTOR (R4 type) Metropolitan Sector Operational Control (MSOC) 

1957 – 1962: United Kingdom Warning & Monitoring Organisation (UKWMO)/Royal Observer Corps (ROC) Metropolitan Sector HQ co-located with the ‘rump’ RAF SOC following closure of the ROTOR programme.

Plans: via Historic England

Variant plans via the RAF Barnton Quarry restoration project (you can right-click and open image in a new tab to view a larger version)

Film: Kelvedon Hatch features prominently in the 1962 film ‘The Hole in the Ground’ (note this copy misses out a short introduction set outside the bungalow). By this time the RAF have handed over operations to the UKWMO, but the fabric of the building has yet to change. In the opening scene we see UKWMO team members running into the above ground guardhouse, then proceeding down the long access tunnel and into the main bunker, the blast doors slamming shut behind them. Visible in the background is some sort of equipment stowage or coat rack (!) located where the Home Office Radio Room would later be established. We then see the Chief Sector Warning Officer and his team of scientists emerge from the doorway at top left on the above-linked plan and immediately turn right, walking under the now-defunct tote board (its red-painted support posts and frame are visible). At this point we get a great view of almost the whole Ops Room. At the opposite side of the room the bottom of the now disused RAF Sector Ops glazed-in ‘cabins’ are visible (these appear more clearly later on as well). They then walk behind desks manned by (as explained in the film) Post Office telephonists who have volunteered under UKWMO. The team then turns right again, disappearing behind a large black pinboard (with two large maps on this side of it) that effectively bisects the room into admin/comms and scientific analysis. We pick up with the scientific team later as they perusing maps and charts. We get a reverse shot later on that shows the tote support structure again, in front of the group, complete with a colour-coded ‘sector’ type clock (as used in RAF ops rooms in the Second World War). Toward the end of the film we see the bottom right corner of the room with red double doors (these were visible in the distance in the establishing shot of the room). Pleasingly, these original 1950s doors are still in situ today (along with a lot of others!), repainted light green and with an additional 1985 vintage inner door in front of them. 

The whole setup is remarkably ad hoc – simple black cloth-covered pin-boards, ordinary tables with switchboard-style phones, individual message trays and pigeonholes made of unpainted wood. 

Photos: There are two known images, one of which is shown in photocopied form on the tour – the middle two rows of cabins with the top row just in shot – and the two plotting tables on Level 1 below the cabins. I was also very pleased to discover (I believe for the first time) IWM photo D 106284 showing a civilian UKWMO scientist plotting nuclear bursts on a map using a radiac slide rule. If anyone recognises the communications kit to the right of his drawing board, comment below. This shot is a perfect match for the scenes in the film.

Description: Kelvedon Hatch differed from all other R4 bunkers in having a tunnel that emerged into Level 1 rather than Level 3. Note that the cage opposite the main blast doors, today filled with random weapons as though an armoury, actually housed the 1950s electrical transformer for the site (plans are labelled as such and photos of other ROTOR bunkers still show the plant in place). Much is made of the ‘disguised’ above-ground bungalow, but this was a real, functioning military-style guardroom like any other, with toilets, offices, and an armoury (there’s a plan here that also appears in McCamley’s book). The armoury later became a decontamination room (this room’s door, behind the outer blast door, is still so labelled). All ROTOR bunkers throughout their various phases of use had a perimeter chain-link fence patrolled by armed guards and the actual radar stations were effectively military barracks with massive rotating radar dishes. The above-ground structures may have been intended to be low-profile, and certainly were at Kelvedon Hatch more so than elsewhere (since KH never had radar arrays and had the advantage of some tree cover) but were certainly not disguised. 

As a command centre for a short-lived RAF radar network, the site was focused around a central Operations Room ‘well’ three floors deep, with plotting boards at the bottom, a tall ‘tote’ mission control board at the front, and glazed, angled control ‘cabins’ wrapped around the back. The central room on Level 1 housed the two large plotting tables and the support posts for the tote. The remainder of the floor comprised two large rooms – ‘Apparatus’ at left and the main plant room at right. The two plant rooms remained much the same throughout all three phases. 

Moving up to level 2 we again find the glazed ops ‘well’ in the middle, surrounded by a corridor with office spaces either side and beyond this a maze of partition walls defining the toilet blocks (the women’s toilet being larger than the men’s) and a number of offices/rooms of varying size. By far the largest is an open plan space at top left. The plans (nor any other source) don’t reveal what the purpose of any of these might have been, unfortunately. We have a bit more information on the top floor (level 3) which again has the ops well but without the corridor around it. Instead there is a ring of self-contained offices. At left we have two large unidentified rooms with a thin partition wall and on the other side of a more substantial wall running from the stairwell to the bottom wall, a row of squarish offices with a corridor running past them. At right we have some labels, denoting the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) rest room 

Phase 2 – Sub-Regional Headquarters/Sub-Regional Control

1963 – 1966: S-RC 4.2 (Region 4, Control 2)

1966 – 1985: Sub-Regional Headquarters (SRHQ 5.1)

NB UKWMO/ROC Sector HQ retained until 1971 only

Plans: displayed (until they eventually fall apart) in the access tunnel, via Alamy stock images. Undated but believed to be ca.1965. Sadly I didn’t take my own photo so a lot of the room numbers and labels are not legible on the image we have. 

Photos/Film: None, however see ‘The Hole in the Ground’ above – the room may have changed a lot ca.1965 but the operations carried out, the kit, and the personnel involved would have been much the same.

Description

The first phase intended for ‘continuity of government’ in the event of a Third World War. The most significant change for this phase was that the ROTOR Operations ‘well’ was floored over. Rooms were also reconfigured throughout in keeping with the bunker’s new role. The men’s lavatory was expanded and a corridor created along the back of the toilets with partitioned offices along it (those labelled with a purpose are ‘Tape Room’ and ‘PBX’, a type of telephone exchange). New rooms were built on the left side of the floor telephone exchange Offices on Level 2 were knocked through to create a large Conference Room. Others were more significant. Notably, sleeping accommodation was installed; one dedicated 20 bunk dormitory on Level 3 and another 20 or so bunk beds in other areas, including a full row of beds along the access tunnel (so accommodation for around 80 people). Next door to the dorm was an equivalently sized room labelled ‘DEPTS’; the first dedicated working space for representatives of different government departments. The former RAF and WRAF rest rooms were converted into a single large unisex ‘Canteen Rest Room’ with adjoining kitchen capable of providing hot meals. The centre of Level 1 (rooms 101 and 103) remained in use as ‘Sector’ (presumably an operations room), but around 1/3rd of the room (101) was walled off as a sleeping area with bunks along the back wall. Another four small rooms on Level 2 were also designated ‘Sector’, with other rooms allocated to ‘Military’ and ‘Fire’ (one large room), Scientists, and Civil Defence Operations. The BBC studio was installed in its current location (albeit a different configuration) next to the GPO (General Post Office) ‘frame room’. The plant rooms (the main room being 102) remained unchanged. All told, Level 1 was already close to its Phase 3 incarnation in terms of usage and layout, if not in detail, but 2 and 3 remained quite different.

Phase 3 – RGHQ

1985 – 1992: Regional Government Headquarters, Metropolitan Region (RGHQ 5.1)

Plans: Only Level 1 has been reproduced online. To see this final layout (albeit in Phase 4 ‘trim’) you can also check out various tours on YouTube (including this short official one), and the complete plans were published in Judy Cowan’s 1994 pamphlet ‘Kelvedon Hatch Secret Bunker’. Better yet, visit the bunker yourself if you can; this article is primarily intended for people like me who visited but didn’t get a full picture of the site.

Photos: A whole series of Imperial War Museum record shots taken on decommissioning in 1992. These show how very sparse the place was, contrary to modern claims that the site is as the government left it. All we see are tables, chairs and telephones. 

Description

Internal walls were again rebuilt, this time in handily identifiable blockwork construction. Basically, if you see breeze-blocks, you’re looking at a 1980s alteration. The entrance to the access tunnel was redesigned to incorporate a new generator room into the near end of the tunnel (the exhaust stacks for the diesel engines are still visible to the left of the bungalow and have changed in design since the 1962 film). The complete row of bunks was replaced by a few fold-down bed frames attached to the wall (presumably for a guardroom ‘watch’, since there was now space for everyone on Level 3). The area at the far end of the access tunnel was enlarged and fitted with sliding blast doors on tracks to create a ‘Home Office Radio Room’. New generator cabinets and a siren point were installed just inside the main blast doors (it’s not clear whether the transformer outside them remained in place). The UKWMO Sector HQ relocated to the newly expanded Group HQ building at Horsham, and ‘Sector’ became office/operational space for “Uniformed Services” (outfitted with tables, chairs, lockers and desk phones), but the Communications Centre or COMCEN (also on Level 1) remained part of the wider Emergency Communication Network (CEN) with access to UKWMO/ROC data. The entrance used by the team three years earlier in ‘The Hole in the Ground’ and the door opposite it were walled off to create a corridor bypassing the new smaller main room (visitors now enter the room in the middle through a door marked ‘no entry’) and a small admin room (now one of several small cinemas for visitors). The science team were moved from Level 2 down to Level 1 next to a much smaller BBC studio. On Level 2 the formerly closed-in offices across the middle third of the room were knocked through to create one large central open-plan office. Note that the various wooden painted signs around the walls in this room are not original, as shown by the 1992 photos of the space and, in the 1997 shots, their initial suspension from the walls on string loops. Later they were (regrettably) screwed into the walls. These seem too specific in terms of content and style to be made up, but if they came from another site I don’t know which one or what era. 

Closed offices remained around the perimeter of the floor but were also reconfigured. Where there had been only one office/bedroom for a government official, a new corridor (down which the modern tour proceeds) accommodated three such spaces; 203 for the Regional Commissioner, 204 for the Principal Officer, and 205 for the Prime Minister (although it’s far from clear that the PM would ever have used this room). The row of offices that visitors see when they emerge from said corridor are wholly new for this phase – their predecessors having been ripped out. The first office at left is the ‘Secretariat’ (206), with a small room within this (207) housing a typing pool (previously located on Level 3). The adjoining rooms (208 and 209) were a truncated version of the Conference Room and, in the corner (now an event room) the Information Room.

Up on Level 3 the existing dormitory space was doubled, taking up the former government department space (there now being much more space for them on Level 2). This was divided by sex, men in the right hand room (302 – now an off-limits meetings/event space) with a small room next door for ‘Drivers’ (likely now a store for the giftshop), and women in the two rooms next door (301 and 308). Another two (also adjoining) male dorm rooms (309 and 311) were established on the other side of the toilets and Sick Bay (310 – seen here before stripping out and dummying-up). This area is partly correct today but 309 is, with some artistic licence, dressed as an emergency operating theatre. In reality this room would be fitted out with bunks and lockers in anticipation of use. We know this because we have a photo taken from 309 looking into 311. As cramped as the recreated dorms in the bunker are today, they are nothing compared to the reality, and the beds and lockers there today are not the same as they originally were.

Phase 4 – Visitor Attraction

1994: Sold back to the landowning family.

1995 – Present: Opened to the public.

Plans: represented by the fire evacuation map located in the bunker. Identical to Phase 3 but with two additions – a new metal staircase in the upper right corner of Level 2 allowing access from the open plan office straight up to the room outside the canteen on Level 3 (marked ‘Common Room’ on the Phase 3 plan). Although not included on the 1985 plan, it is clearly original to the RGHQ phase. The other change is the exit tunnel sadly bored through the wall of the Common Room to comply with fire regulations.

Photos: Another series from Historic England who documented the site as a new visitor attraction in 1997, by which time a lot of the present embellishments had been made but without the additional clutter and the ravages of time that we see today.

Description: As part of the decommissioning process, all of the original furniture and communications equipment (other than some of the telephone exchange) was removed. The original 1950s transformer room was also stripped out, but the rest of the plant remained. By 1997 the bunker was increasingly ‘dressed’ with surplus Cold War-era furniture, equipment, artefacts (most of the phones are marked up with the station crest of RAF St Athan) and some basic museum-style diorama displays ranging from individual dummies in wigs to an attempt at a ‘Threads’-style post-apocalypse household. A recent addition is a large-scale Spitfire model that has for some reason been suspended over the plotting table in the former Operations Room. 

Note that some of the room door labels (which slide into universal holders affixed to the doors – the actual room numbers are permanent) seem to have been moved over the years. The label for room 202, ‘Government Departments’ is currently fitted to the door for room 201, which per the plans should be ‘Common Services’ (and is loosely interpreted as such today with racks of stationery). Male and female dorm rooms 302 and 301 have had their labels swapped for some reason.

Conclusion

What you see at Kelvedon Hatch bunker today is therefore mostly a very…busy take on the final operational (RGHQ) phase. I will say again; this is an incredible place, it just needs some analysis to make full sense of. The current attraction conveys the general sense of what all three phases were about, it’s just not clear how these fit within chronology and the fabric of the building itself. If it were up to me (clearly it isn’t) I would thin out the accumulated clutter and remove all of the shop dummy diorama displays. Remember – none of the furniture or props there now are original to the site. I’d choose to depict Phase 3 throughout, and choose one room to clearly demarcate and curate as a museum to interpret the first two Phases, with an introductory display on Civil Defence.  

Bibliography

The bunker is mentioned in a number of published works and websites, nearly all of them are superficial in their treatment of the site or outright wrong. I recommend:

Clarke, Bob. 2005. ‘Four Minute Warning: Britain’s Cold War’. The History Press.

Cowan, Judy. 1994. ‘The Kelvedon Hatch Secret Bunker’. 

McCamley, Nick, 2002. ‘Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers: The Passive Defence of the Western World During the Cold War’. Pen & Sword.

‘Stinking Rich’?

I’ve just watched a fascinating lecture from funerary and art historian Dr. Julian Litten on burial vaults. I learned a lot and greatly enjoyed it, but was very surprised to hear him recite the old chestnut that the smell of decaying bodies under church floors led to the expression ‘stinking rich’. This is just not true, as phrases.org.uk relates:

The real origin of stinking rich, which is a 20th-century phrase, is much more prosaic. ‘Stinking’ is merely an intensifier, like the ‘drop-dead’ of drop-dead gorgeous, the ‘lead pipe’ of lead pipe cinch or, more pertinent in this case, the ‘stark-raving’ of stark-raving mad. It has been called upon as an intensifier in other expressions, for example, ‘stinking drunk’ and ‘we don’t need no stinking badges’

The phrase’s real derivation lies quite a distance from Victorian England in geography as well as in date. The earliest use of it that I can find in print is in the Montana newspaper The Independent, November 1925:

He had seen her beside the paddock. “American.” Mrs Murgatroyd had said. “From New England – stinking rich”.

However, I thought I’d check, and I did find an earlier cite, from ‘V.C.: A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea’, by David Christie Murray (1904, p. 92);

“I’m stinking rich – you know – disgraceful rich.”

Nothing earlier than that however. So I would add to the explanation at phrases.org.uk and say that it’s more of an expression of disgust; someone is so rich that it’s obscene and figuratively ‘stinks’. If we had any early 19th century or older cites, I’d grant that it could have been influenced in some way by intramural burial, but this was rare by the turn of the 20th century and lead coffins had been a legal requirement since 1849. Litten suggests that unscrupulous cabinetmakers might omit the lead coffin, leading to ‘effluvia’, but even then I can’t imagine that was common as it would be obvious when it had happened and whose interment was likely to have caused it, resulting in complaints and most likely reburial. 

Litten also repeated a version of the myth of Enon Chapel, which is a story I’ve been working on and will be forthcoming, but added a claim that I have yet to come across; that the decomposition gases from the crypt below were so thick that they made the gas lighting in the chapel above ‘burn brighter’. I don’t know where this comes from and it hardly seems plausible. Dr Waller Lewis, the UK’s first Chief Medical Officer, wrote on the subject in an 1851 article in The Lancet entitled ‘ON THE CHEMICAL AND GENERAL EFFECTS OF THE PRACTICE OF INTERMENT IN VAULTS AND CATACOMBS’. Lewis stated that: “I have never met with any person who has actually seen coffin-gas inflame” and reported that experiments had been carried out and “in every instance it extinguished the flame”. This makes sense, since it was not decomposition gases per se (and certainly not ‘miasma’ as was often claimed at the time) that made workers light-headed or pass out in vaults – it was the absence of oxygen and high concentration of CO2 that caused this. Hence reports of candles going out rather than inflaming more.

Unfortunately, even the best of us are not immune to a little BS history. It was nonetheless a privilege to hear Dr. Litten speak.

Werewolves = Serial Killers?

Beast of Gevaudan (1764). Not to Scale (Wikimedia Commons)

When I last wrote on the Beast of Gévaudan, I said that I couldn’t rule out the involvement of one or more human murderers whose actions could have been conflated with several wolves and possibly other wild animals killing French peasants between 1764 – 1767. I meant that literally; the Beast was a craze, and it’s perfectly possible that one or more victims was in fact the victim of a murder. We have no evidence for that, of course, and certainly not for the claim, sometimes made, that the whole thing was the work of a serial killer. This was recently repeated in this otherwise very good video from YouTube channel ‘Storied’ (part two of two; both parts feature the excellent Kaja Franck, who I was fortunate to meet at a conference some years ago). Meagan Navarro of the horror (fiction) website Bloody Disgusting states the following:

“The Beast of Gevaudan or the Werewolf of Dole, these were based on men that were serial killers and slaughtered, and folklore was a means of exploring and understanding those acts by transforming them into literal monsters.”

The ‘werewolf’ of Dole does indeed appear to be a deluded individual who thought he was able to transform into a wolf and was convicted as such. However, this is not the case for Gévaudan, which is a well-documented piece of history, not some post-hoc rationalisation for a series of murders as she implies. The various attacks that comprise the story were widely reported at the time and in some detail (albeit embellishments were added later). No-one at the time suspected an ordinary person of the actual killings, and the only sightings consistently refer to a large beast, sometimes detailing how the kills were made. The idea of a human being in control of the Beast somehow was mooted at the time, as was the werewolf of folklore, but never a straightforward murderer. Of course, the idea of the serial killer was unknown until the late 19th century, and it wasn’t long after this that a specious connection was made. In 1910 French gynaecologist Dr. Paul Puech published the essay (‘La Bête du Gévaudan’, followed in 1911 by another titled ‘Qu’était la bête du Gévaudan?’). Puech’s thin evidence amounted to;

1) The victims being of the same age and gender as those of Jack the Ripper and Joseph Vacher. In fact, women and children (including boys) were not only the more physically vulnerable to attack generally, but were the members of the shepherding families whose job it was to bring the sheep in at the end of the day. This is merely a coincidence.

2) Decapitation and needless mutilation. The latter is pretty subjective, especially if the animal itself might be rabid (plenty were) and therefore attacking beyond the needs of hunger alone. The relevance of decapitation depends upon whether a) this really happened and b) whether a wolf or wolves would be capable of it. Some victims were found to have been decapitated, something that these claimants assert is impossible for a wolf to achieve. I can’t really speak to how plausible this is, although tearing limbs from sizable prey animals is easily done and if more than one animal were involved I’ve little doubt that they could remove a head if they wished. So, did these decapitations actually take place? Jay Smith’s ‘Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast’ relays plenty of reports of heads being ripped off. However, details of these reports themselves mitigate against the idea of a human killer. Take Catherine Valy, whose skull was recovered some time after her death. Captain of dragoons Jean-Baptiste Duhamel noted that “judging by the teeth marks imprinted [on the skull], this animal must have terrifying jaws and a powerful bite, because this woman’s head was split in two in the way a man’s mouth might crack a nut.” Duhamel, like everyone else involved, believed that he faced a large and powerful creature (whether natural or supernatural), not a mere human. Despite the intense attention of the local and national French authorities, not to mention the population at large, no suggestion was ever made nor any evidence ever found of a human murderer and the panic ended in 1767 after several ordinary wolves were shot.

3) Similar deaths in 1765 in the Soissonnais, which he for some reason puts down to a copycat killer rather than, you know, more wolves. This reminds me of the mindset of many true crime writers; come up with your thesis and then go cherry-picking and misrepresenting the data to fit.At the very least then, this claim is speculative, and should not be bandied about as fact (in fact, the YouTube channel should really have queried the claim). So, if not a serial killer, then what? French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie argues that the Beast was a local legend blown out of proportion to a national level by the rise of print media. Jean-Marc Moriceau reports 181 wolf killings through the 1760s, which puts into context the circa 100 killings over three years in one region of France. That is, statistically remarkable, but within the capability of the country’s wolf population to achieve, especially given the viral and environmental pressures from rabies and the Little Ice Age respectively that Moriceau cites. If we combine these two takes, we get close to the truth, I think. ‘The’ Beast most likely actually consisted of some unusually violent attacks carried out by more than one wolf or packs of wolves that were confabulated and exaggerated as the work of one supernatural beast, before ultimately being pinned by the authorities on several wolves, three shot by François Antoine in 1765 and another supposedly ‘extraordinary’ (yet actually ordinary sized) Jean Chastel in 1767.

Milk in First, or Last Part 2: a Tempest in a Teapot

Poster created by the amazing Geof Banyard (islandofdoctorgeof.co.uk) for a
2016 mock ‘Tea Referendum’

This is Part 2 of a very long article – see here for part 1.

Clearly the majority of modern-day advocates (including all those YouTube commenters that I mentioned last time) aren’t aspiring members of the upper-middle or upper classes or avid followers of etiquette, so why does this schism among tea-drinkers still persist? No doubt the influence of snobs like Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh et al persists, but for most it seems to boil down (ha) to personal preference. This has not calmed the debate any however. Both sides, now mostly comprised of middle class folk such as myself, now argue with equal certainty that their way is the only right way. Is Milk In First (MIF)/Milk In Last (MIL) really now a ‘senseless meme’ (as Professor Markman Ellis believes; see Part 1) – akin to the ‘big-endians’ and ‘little-endians’ of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’? Is there some objective truth to the two positions that underpins all this passion and why the debate has surpassed class differences? Is there a way to reconcile or at least explain it so that we can stop this senseless quibbling? Well, no. We’re British. Quibbling and looking down on each other are two of our chief national pastimes. However, another of those pastimes is stubbornness, so let’s try anyway…

Today’s MILers protest that their method is necessary in order to be able to judge the strength of the tea by its colour. Yet clearly opinions on this differ and, as I showed in the video, sufficiently strong blends – and any amount of experience in making tea – render this moot. If you do ‘under milk’, you can add more to taste (although as I also noted, you might argue that this makes MIL the more expedient method). As we’ve seen with George Orwell vs the Tea & Coffee Trade, the colour/strength argument is highly subjective. Can science help us in terms of which way around is objectively better? Perhaps, although there are no rigorous scientific studies. In the early 2000s the Royal Society of Chemistry and Loughborough University both came out in favour of MIF. The RSC press release gives the actual science:

“Pour milk into the cup FIRST, followed by the tea, aiming to achieve a colour that is rich and attractive…Add fresh chilled milk, not UHT milk which contains denatured proteins and tastes bad. Milk should be added before the tea, because denaturation (degradation) of milk proteins is liable to occur if milk encounters temperatures above 75°C. If milk is poured into hot tea, individual drops separate from the bulk of the milk and come into contact with the high temperatures of the tea for enough time for significant denaturation to occur. This is much less likely to happen if hot water is added to the milk.“

It also transpires that an actual international standard (ISO 3103:1980, preceded by several British Standards going back to 1975) was agreed for tea-making way back in 1980, and this too dictated that tea should be added to milk “…in order to avoid scalding the milk”. This would obviously only happen if the tea is particularly hot, and indeed the standard includes a ‘milk last’ protocol in which the tea is kept below 80 degrees celsius. Perhaps those favouring MIL simply like their tea cooler and so don’t run into the scalding problem? This might explain why I do prefer the taste of the same tea, with the same milk, made MIF from a pot, rather than MIL with a teabag in a cup… I like my tea super hot. So, the two methods can indeed taste different; a fact proven by a famous statistical experiment (famous among statisticians; a commenter had to point this out for me) resulted in a lady being able to tell whether a cup of tea had been made MIF or MIL eight times out of eight.

“Already, quite soon after he had come to Rothamstead, his presence had transformed one commonplace tea time to an historic event. It happened one afternoon when he drew a cup of tea from the urn and offered it to the lady beside him, Dr. B. Muriel Bristol, an algologist. She declined it, stating that she preferred a cup into which the milk had been poured first. “Nonsense,” returned Fisher, smiling, “Surely it makes no difference.” But she maintained, with emphasis, that of course it did. From just behind, a voice suggested, “Let’s test her.” It was William Roach who was not long afterward to marry Miss Bristol. Immediately, they embarked on the preliminaries of the experiment, Roach assisting with the cups and exulting that Miss Bristol divined correctly more than enough of those cups into which tea had been poured first to prove her case.“

-Fisher-Box, 1978, p. 134.

This of course doesn’t help with which is objectively better, but does suggest that one side may be ‘right’. However, as well as temperature, the strength of the brew may also make a difference here, one that might explain why this debate rumbles on with no clear victor. A commenter on a Guardian article explains the chemistry of a cup of tea;

“IN THE teacup, two chemical reactions take place which alter the protein of the milk: denaturing and tanning. The first, the change that takes place in milk when it is heated, depends only on temperature. ‘Milk-first’ gradually brings the contents of the cup up from fridge-cool. ‘Milk-last’ rapidly heats the first drop of milk almost to the temperature of the teapot, denaturing it to a greater degree and so developing more ‘boiled milk’ flavour. The second reaction is analogous to the tanning of leather. Just as the protein of untanned hide is combined with tannin to form chemically tough collagen/tannin complexes, so in the teacup, the milk’s protein turns into tannin/casein complexes. But there is a difference: in leather every reactive point on the protein molecule is taken up by a tannin molecule, but this need not be so in tea. Unless the brew is strong enough to tan all the casein completely, ‘milk-first’ will react differently from ‘milk-last’ in the way it distributes the tannin through the casein. In ‘milk-first’, all the casein tans uniformly; in ‘milk-last’ the first molecules of casein entering the cup tan more thoroughly than the last ones. If the proportions of tannin to casein are near to chemical equality, ‘which-first’ may determine whether some of the casein escapes tanning entirely. There is no reason why this difference should not alter the taste.“

-Dan Lowy, Sutton, Surrey (The Guardian, Notes & Queries, 2011).

Both the scalding and the denaturation/tanning explanations are referenced in the popular science book ‘Riddles in Your Teacup’ (p. 90), the authors having consulted physicists (who favour a temperature explanation) and chemists (who of course take a chemistry-based view) on this question. I also found this interesting explanation, from an 1870 edition of the Boston Journal of Chemistry, of tannins in tea and how milk reacts with them to change the taste of the tea. This supports the idea, as does the tea-tasting lady’s ability to tell the difference, that MIF and MIL can result in a different taste. Needless to say, people have different palates and preferences and it’s likely that some prefer their tannins left unchecked (black tea), fully suppressed (milk in first), or partly mitigated (milk in last). However, if your tea is strong enough, the difference in taste will be small or even non-existent, as the tannins will shine through regardless and you’ll just get the additional flavour of the milk (perhaps tasting slightly boiled?). My preferred blend (Betty’s Tea Room blend) absolutely does retain this astringent taste regardless of which method I use or even how hot the water is (even if I do prefer it hot and MIF!).

So, the available scientific advice does favour MIF, for what it’s worth, which interestingly bears out those early reports of upper class tea aficionados and later ‘below stairs’ types who both preferred it this way. However, the difference isn’t huge and depends what temperature the tea is when you hit it with the milk, how strong the brew is, and what blend you use. It’s a bit like unevenly steamed milk in a latte or cappuccino; it’s fine, but it’s nicer when it has that smooth, foamed texture and hasn’t been scalded by the wand. The bottom line, which is what I was trying to say in my YouTube response, is that it’s basically just fashion/habit and doesn’t much matter either way (despite the amount I’ve said and written about it!) – to which I can now add the taste preference and chemical change aspects. If you pour your tea at a lower temperature, the milk won’t get so denatured/scalded, and even this small difference won’t occur. Even if you pour it hot, you might not mind or notice the difference in taste. As for the historical explanation of cracking cups, it’s probably bollocks, albeit rooted in the fact of substandard British teaware. As readers of this blog will know by now, these neat origin stories generally do turn out to be made up after the fact, and the real history is more nuanced. This story is no different.

To recap; when tea was introduced in the 17th century most people drank it black. By the early 19th century milk became widely used as an option that you added to the poured tea, like sugar. Later that century, some found that they preferred putting the milk in first and were thought particular for doing so (marking the start of the Great Tea Schism). Aside from being a minority individual preference, most upper class hostesses continued to serve MIL (as Hartley recommended) because when hosting numbers of fussy guests, serving the tea first and offering milk, sugar and lemon to add to their own taste was simply more practical and efficient. Guests cannot object to their tea if they are responsible for putting it together, and this way, everyone gets served at the same time. Rather than outline this practical justification, the 1920s snobs chose to frame the debate in terms of class, setting in stone MIL as the only ‘proper’ way. This, probably combined with a residual idea that black tea was the default and milk was something that you added, and also doubtless definitely as a result of the increasing dominance of tea-making using a teabag and mug/cup (where MIL really is the only acceptable method) left a lot of non-upper class people with the idea that MIL was objectively correct. Finally, as the class system broke down, milk first or last became the (mostly) good-natured debate that it is today.

All of this baggage (especially, in my view, the outdated class snobbery aspect) should be irrelevant to how we take our tea today, and should have been even back then. As far back as 1927, J.B. Priestley used his Saturday Review column to mock the snobs who criticised “…those who pour the milk in first…”. The Duke of Bedford’s ‘Book of Snobs’ (1965, p. 42) lamented the ongoing snobbery over ‘milk in first’ as “…stigmatizing millions to hopelessly inferior status…”. Today, upper class views on what is correct or incorrect are roundly ignored by the majority, and most arguing in favour of MIL would not claim that you should do it because the upper class said that you should, and probably don’t even realise that this is where it came from. Even high-end tea-peddlers Fortnum & Mason note that you should “…pour your tea as you please”. Each person’s view on this is a product of family custom and upbringing, social class, and individual preference; a potent mixture that leads to some strong opinions! Alternatively, like me, you drink your tea sufficiently strong that it barely matters (note I said ‘barely’ – I remain a heretical MIF for life). What does matter, of course, in tea as in all things, is knowing what you like and how to achieve it, as this final quote underlines:

…no rules will insure good tea-making. Poeta nascitur non fit,* and it may be said similarly, you are born a tea-maker, but you cannot become one.

-Samuel Kneeland, About Making Tea (1870). *A Latin expression meaning that poets are born and not made.

References (for both Parts):

Bedford, John Robert Russell, George Mikes & Nicholas Bentley. 1965. The Duke of Bedford’s Book of Snobs. London: P. Owen.

Bennett, Arnold. 1912. Helen With the High Hand. London: Chapman and Hall.

Betjeman, John. 1956. ‘How to Get on in Society’ in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (Nancy Mitford, ed.). London: Hamish Hamilton.

Boston Journal of Chemistry. 1870. ‘Familiar Science – Leather in the Tea-Cup’. Vol. V, No. 3.

Ferguson, Jonathan. 2020. ‘You’re Doing It Wrong: Tea and Milk with Jonathan Ferguson’. Forgotten Weapons. YouTube video. 15 April 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VCRFVMpSc8&gt;.

Ferguson, Jonathan & McCollum, Ian. 2020. ‘Jonathan Reacts to the First Day Kickstarter for his Book’. Forgotten Weapons. YouTube video. 13 April 2020. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XO4VgkC_JE&gt;.

Fisher-Box, Joan. 1978. R.A. Fisher: The Life of a Scientist. New York, NY: Wiley.

Fortnum & Mason. ‘How to Make the Perfect Cup of Tea.’ The Journal | #Fortnums. <https://www.fortnumandmason.com/fortnums/the-perfect-cup-of-tea&gt;.

Ghose, Partha & Dipankar Home. 1994. Riddles in your Teacup. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.

Guanghua (光華). 1995. Press Room of the Information Bureau of the Executive Yuan of the Republic of China. Vol. 20, Nos. 7–12.

Hartley, Florence. 1860. The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Handbook. Boston, MA: Cottrell.

Johnson, Dorothea. 2002. Tea & Etiquette. Washington, D.C.: Capital.

Kneeland, Markman. 2017. ‘“Milk in First”: a miffy question’. Queen Mary University of London History of Tea Project. 11 May. <https://qmhistoryoftea.wordpress.com/2017/05/11/milk-in-first-a-miffy-question/&gt;.

Kneeland, Samuel. 1870. ‘About Making Tea’. Good Health. Vol. 1, No. 12.

Lowy, Dan. 2011. ‘Notes and Queries’. The Guardian. Digital edition:  <https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1400,00.html>.

Manley, Jeffrey. 2016. ‘Milk in First.’ The Evelyn Waugh Society. 17 November 2016. <https://evelynwaughsociety.org/2016/milk-in-first/&gt;.

Orwell, George. 1946. ‘A Nice Cup of Tea.’ London Evening Standard. Available at <https://orwell.ru/library/articles/tea/english/e_tea&gt;

Rice, Elizabeth Emma. 1884. Domestic Economy. London: Blackie & Son.

Royal Society of Chemistry. 2003. ‘How to Make a Perfect Cup of Tea.’ Press Release. <https://web.archive.org/web/20140811033029/http:/www.rsc.org/pdf/pressoffice/2003/tea.pdf&gt;.

Waugh, Evelyn. 1956. ‘An Open Letter to the Honble Mrs Peter Rodd (Nancy Mitford) On a Very Serious Subject’ in Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (Nancy Mitford, ed.). London: Hamish Hamilton.

Smith, Matthew. ‘Should milk go in a cup of tea first or last?’ YouGov. 30 July 2018. <https://yougov.co.uk/topics/food/articles-reports/2018/07/30/should-milk-go-cup-tea-first-or-last/&gt;

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