Next Steps

This is out of sequence with recent posts, but is designed as a preliminary thesis proposal, appraising my potential supervisor of what I am currently thinking.

On the first three of the four terms that make up the full-time Biography course at the University of Buckingham, we examined a number of different genres of both autobiography and biography: we read – or skimmed – paradigms of each and then in weekly seminars discussed their salient features. We did not however discuss works in which the autobiography is the most important source of information for the biographer, as would be the case with Colonel Wintle.

In such cases it would seem to me important to select a number of episodes related by the autobiographer, particularly those which show him in a good light, and seek to compare what he said happened with what other people may have said. The degree to which the accounts of the autobiographer and other people tally would then be an indicator of the reliability of what he says about himself.

So one of my first steps must be to skim The Last Englishman and to look for a handful of episodes that can be checked. At the same time I should look for those aspects and incidents in his professional and personal life which could form part of an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, since there is not yet one for my colonel. The first paragraph of such an entry must include brief information about both parents and all four grandparents, so I need to research this on FamilyRelatives.com or FindMyPast.co.uk.

Other steps, but of lower priority, are these.

• Obtaining a CD containing the hour-long television programme about him mentioned in the Wikipedia entry and attempting to get interviews with the actor who played him and the author of the script.
  
• Recontacting the friend with whom I saw the colonel in 1956 to see what he remembers of our meeting
  
• Visiting West Malling, the nearest town to his last home, to seek to contact people who knew the colonel
  
• Tracing the records of The Shop ('Sandhurst' for gunners and sappers) to c heck claim of rapid pass-out
  
• Looking at service records, in particular commanding officers' assessments of someone who must at times have been a difficult subordinate and what is known about his time at the Ecole de Guerre
  
• Finding out whether there might be a record of his court martial
  
• Finding regimental histories to seek to cross-reference actions in which the colonel took part
  
• Visiting the French embassy to see whether it would be possible to check his claim to have been top of national primary school exams in 1909
  
• Looking at his will, both to satisfy ODNB requirement to give value of estate at death and to identify some relatives
  
• Seeking to contact relatives to see who has the MS of the autobiography and other any personal paper, perhaps using telephone directories
  

The Game’s Afoot: version 2

Text being revised

The Game’s Afoot: version 1

It is the next day. Tuesdays I have just started going up to town again, this year for a couple of sessions at the British Library, a stone's throw from Euston terminus, staying overnight with my daughter and her family in Clerkenwell.

I take what is now the logical and natural step when starting an investigation: I google Wintle and then look to see whether there is a Wikipedia entry. There is one: click here to see it.

This explains the monocle. The gun carriage wheel hit an unexploded shell and he woke up in a field hospital minus his left eye, one kneecap and several fingers. His right eye was so damaged that he had to wear a monocle for the rest of his life. This happened at Third Ypres in 1917, when he had been at the front for two years. Back at the front he won as Military Cross precisely a week before the Armistice. He was then nineteen years old.

The heroic colonel had clearly been a formidable warrior. But two things troubled me about this account of his exploits in the First World War. It states that he fought at Festubert, supposedly capturing the village of Vesle single-handed. Why, I wonder, is the adverb supposedly used? Then it does not state that he was severely wounded by a machine gunner: surely, in a 500-word account, this incident would have merited a mention.

I feel that these two incidents should be looked into. It is possible that this flamboyant character may have exaggerated some of the stories that he told about his life. After all, he grew up in France and did not have the benefit of an education in England, a lack that I suspect he always regretted.

Towards the end of the Wikipedia article it states He was the feature of a one-off TV movie in the "Heroes and Villains" series called "The Last Englishman" featuring Jim Broadbent in the title role. "The Last Englishman" is also the title of his autobiography.

I go to Amazon to buy a copy of this autobiography. There are three second-hand copies on offer at £99 (Oxfam Hove), £195 (UK) and £492.93 (USA). I resolutely move my cursor away from the [Buy with 1-Click] button, exit and leave home to catch the bus from Buckingham to Milton Keynes railway station.

The Wintle Legend: Prologue

It is the evening of Saturday 14 July [1] 1956. I am 22 and at the end of my second year at Oxford. I am halfway through my annual fortnight with the Reserves. I am flying de Havilland Chipmunks with other members of the university air squadron at the RAF station at West Malling. I am now talking shop with my friend John Flint [2] in the Horse and Groom, a nearby pub.

An old buffer who has been drinking by himself comes over to us. "Couldn't help overhearing you chaps talking about flying. Had a bit to do with the RAF during the last war. Let me introduce myself: I'm Colonel Wintle."

He is a short but erect man with a moustache and a monocle that has the effect of making one eye look different from the other. One of his hands seems to be missing some fingers.

We airmen and the soldier continue to chat merrily until closing time, with the soldier doing most of the talking. "Let's carry this on tomorrow morning at my place", says the colonel. "Good show," we say, "Good night!"

John and I duly turn up at the colonel's house. We settle down over coffee and he tells us how in the Twenties he had studied the build-up of a new German army by inspection of telephone directories, in which officers always listed themselves with their ranks.

He shows us the battledress tunic he had been wearing when he had been shot by a burst of machine gun fire on the Western Front. We look in awe at the diagonal line of four neat holes in the front of the tunic. The colonel slips his braces off his shoulders and pulls up his shirt and vest. We look in greater awe at the diagonal line of four round scars across his chest.

He rearranges his clothing and tells us of a rogue solicitor who had preyed upon his (the colonel's) simple-minded aunt and had persuaded her to alter her will in his (the solicitor's) favour. When she died the colonel had failed to get the will overturned. He took drastic action. He went to the solicitor's office and forcibly debagged him, then photographed him. The colonel produces the photograph. We look at the wobbly legal buttocks. We hear that the solicitor did not take kindly to all this and brought a charge of assault against the colonel which resulted in him being sent to prison.

By now gin had replaced coffee which means that the answers to certain of our questions are not fully understood or later remembered. How had those bullets failed to pierce a vital organ and kill him? What had been the purpose behind the debagging? Where had he been jailed, and what was it like inside?

Fast forward fifty five years to the evening of Monday 24 January 2011. I am in my local, The Mitre, and I am telling my friends about the the delay in resuming my postgraduate Biography course at the University of Buckingham.

"I've explained to them why the topic I chose for my thesis last summer is now not feasible and they don't like my proposal to write about the journey to Rome made by Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest: they say it would be insufficiently biographical. I'm now hoping that they'll agree to my writing about just one of them, that's Archbishop Sigeric: he's the only one who left a detailed account of his journey."

"Just a moment," says one of my friends, a retired professor, "You're still putting the emphasis upon a journey rather a person. I don't think they'll accept this proposal either: it's not biographical enough. Why not write about someone entirely different? Tell me, who's the most interesting person you've ever met in your life? Whoever it is, write about him!"

I spin my mental Rolodex: hundreds, nay thousands, of images flash past in a nanosecond: the device stops at the card with the picture of the monocled and moustachio'd warrior I had met half a century before.

"Colonel Wintle", I say, and I tell them the stories that I had heard in that pub and that house in Kent.

**************************
[1] This date needs confirming by reference to my RAF Pilots Log Book, in the attic
[2] This name has been changed. Surviving friends from those years will know his real name.

Case Study: Part 2

My last post describes how I started looking for information about journeys to Rome by people mentioned in the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England database. This post describes how I started storing such information on my own database.

Step 1 was going to the Results column and copying and pasting into a text file each of the 15 lists of 25 identifiers of people whose factoids contained a mention of Rome. The start of this file looked like this.

Abba 1: Name inscribed in the Catacomb of Commodilla (via Ostiense, Rome)
Acca 3: (e/m viii) Bishop of Hexham, 709-731; d.737/740
Adola 1: (e viii) Abbess

Step 2 was to add relevant factoids to a small number of people after which the file looked like this.

Abba 1: Name inscribed in the Catacomb of Commodilla (via Ostiense, Rome)
Acca 3: (e/m viii) Bishop of Hexham, 709-731; d.737/740
Acca 3-Wilfrid 2.journey to Rome: On their way to Rome, Acca 3 and Wilfrid 2 stayed with Willibrord 1.: Bede.HE iii.13
Acca 3.journey to Rome: Acca 3 travelled to Rome with bishop Wilfrid 2. : NorthernAnnals.FirstSet 36
Adola 1: (e viii) Abbess

Step 3 was to add bibliographical information, initially only about the translation of the primary material. Information about the original primary material, almost all in Latin or in Old English, is also available on the PASE database but is unlikely to be useful to me.

Abba 1: Name inscribed in the Catacomb of Commodilla (via Ostiense, Rome)
Acca 3: (e/m viii) Bishop of Hexham, 709-731; d.737/740
Acca 3-Wilfrid 2.journey to Rome: On their way to Rome, Acca 3 and Wilfrid 2 stayed with Willibrord 1.: Bede.HE iii.13
Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B. Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People Oxford 1969 (1991) 3-577
Acca 3.journey to Rome: Acca 3 travelled to Rome with bishop Wilfrid 2. : NorthernAnnals.FirstSet 36
Whitelock, Dorothy English Historical Documents c. 500-1042 London and New York 1979 263-276
Adola 1: (e viii) Abbess

Step 4 will be to create in Microsoft Access a simple database table with each record (or row, in layman-speak) containing all the information about a particular factoid in different fields (or columns). This table initially contained just 20 records, while the layout was tested. The first Acca record was laid out like this, with square brackets enclosing the field name and round brackets at the end of the line enclosing comments about the contents of the field.

[ID] 1 (sequential automatically-generated index number)
[Name] Acca 3
[When 1] e/m viii (i.e. early/middle 8th century)
[When 2] 733 (approx. date in numerals, to assist with later searching and sorting by date)
[Factoid] Wilfrid 2.journey to Rome: On their way to Rome, Acca 3 and Wilfrid 2 stayed with Willibrord 1.
[Source] Bede.HE iii.13
[Bib. 1] Colgrave, Bertram and Mynors, R. A. B. (author/s of translation of source)
[Bib. 2] Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (title)
[Bib. 3] Oxford 1969 (1991) (published where and when)
[Bib. 4] 3-577 (page reference: not particularly helpful here!)

Step 5 will be to play around with this limited data set and to see what changes need making before continuing with data entry. The ultimate goal is to produce a table with details of every recorded visit to Rome from England in the period 597 to 1066.

An early task will be to seek to create a report which would enable the generation of a printed bibliography, in MHRA format, which could act as quarry for footnotes for the final thesis.

This step will also endeavour to see whether the results generated by search Location > Rome is comprehensive by comparing them with the visits to Rome listed in Saxon Pilgrims to Roma and the Schola Saxonum.

Case Study: Part 1

Building a prosopographical database for my thesis,
Pre-Conquest Travellers to Rome

This database will initially be built from material on the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England website.

As it states on this site, "PASE is based in the Department of History and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, at King's College, London, and in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, at the University of Cambridge. The project was funded from 2000 to 2004 by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and from 2005 to 2008 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with further unfunded extensions granted to June 2010."

After clicking the Database tab and on selecting Location, then Specific location and entering Rome in the look-up box the left half of the screen looks like this.

On clicking Go this is seen.

On clicking Rome this is seen.

On clicking Acca 3 in the Results column this is seen on the right half of the screen.

On clicking Event at the bottom of the factoid list on the right this is seen.

On clicking Journey this is seen.

Two of the three "factoids" refer to a journey to Rome. The first one ends with a bibliographical reference to a bilingual edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. On clicking NorthernAnnals.FirstSet this is seen.

My next post will describe how I store relevant information.

Case study: Introduction

Over the next few weeks I am going to describe each stage of the building of my prosopographical database. This is primarily for my benefit, because I have always found it useful to write out before I start a new stage a description of how I propose to carry out that stage. This acts as a plan of the intended operation which gives me a spurious sense that I know what I'm doing and acts as a reminder of what to do when I come back to the task after an interval.

I will afterwards write up the plan, drawing attention to where the original was inadequate, so that other people who want to do something similar won't waste the time that I did finding out how to do the job properly.

It will also be useful to inform my supervisor on my course how I am approaching my research, the Collecting part of the Collecting > Selecting > Perfecting thesis-writing sequence which I describe in my Software for Biographers: 2 post. Likewise it may form the core of an appendix to my thesis, if and when its revised topic is accepted by the University and it finally gets written.

I intend to make it a "warts and all" narrative, spelling out the mistakes I make and describing the blind alleys down which I will inevitably wander. It will also act as a safety valve, enabling me to let off steam when software or hardware problems hinder or halt progress. Let's hope (however vainly) that my writing about such matters is minimal!