Doing some hands-on history

This week, I started volunteering at the Centre for Computing History, a small museum here in Cambridge that records the social history of computers and computing, especially in Britain. It has a load of old arcade machines and games consoles that you can play, a classroom where they run computing workshops for students, and lots and lots of items from the history of computers. If you’re at all interested in the history of technology, you should definitely go.

The infamous ET landfill story, including some of the actual landfill!

Anyway, in addition to the usual setting up tables and moving things around, I’ve been working behind the scenes sorting out archive and collections material — which at present just means storing and labeling stuff in a new storage space. But that provokes some very interesting thoughts about digital heritage, which I hope to write about in more detail soon. For now, I just recommend that you check it out if you haven’t!

This 1970s office represents the era when computers started to appear in ordinary offices.

Movie Monday: Anthropoid (2016)

Many years ago, maybe in 2002 or so, I was at the Imperial War Museum in London. There was an exhibit on about irregular and guerrilla tactics, and I was struck by the section on assassination. There was a whole big placard that asked whether assassination as a tactic could ever be justified. And then right next to it, there was a huge photo of Reinhard Heydrich, to a nicer guy than whom it could not happen. This is known as framing the question.

Anyway, this thought came to mind as I was watching Anthropoid, Sean Ellis’ 2016 movie about, you guessed it, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak soldiers in 1942. Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan play two guys parachuted into Czechoslovakia by the British with the goal of killing Heydrich. They make contact with the local resistance and gradually plan the thing, navigating the tactical challenges of the job as well as the political challenges of dealing with the resistance and others.

OK, first: it’s good. Well-directed, good performances, and quite a lot of historical accuracy. The assassination and the subsequent manhunt are depicted in great detail, with minor characters based on historical people and (apparently) careful reconstructions of just about every move of the whole thing. This does have the effect of making it weird when there are fictional characters: for instance, Cillian Murphy’s love interest plays a historical role similar to the real Anna Malinova, but is a different character. For the most part, though, it’s very plausible (I don’t know about “realistic,” but watching it you can definitely see how it could have happened that way).

Historical accuracy in a film about an assassination by resistance fighters means things are pretty brutal in Anthropoid, and the movie doesn’t shy away from depicting the horrible consequences for the main characters’ contacts and allies, and indeed for Czechoslovakia as a whole. Indeed, the whole second half of the film is just the aftermath of the killing: the roundup of anyone even kind of connected to anyone involved, the brutal reprisals, the betrayals, the doomed last stand against the advancing Germans. Thousands were killed, which raises the question of whether killing one guy, no matter how big a villain, was worth it. It puts the relevant arguments in its characters’ mouths a little, but particularly at the end it leaves you to draw your own conclusions about whether it was a good idea to blow Heydrich up. It keeps the patriotism to a minimum, too: some Czech characters are seen as defiant patriots, while others are cautious and responsible, self-interested, or just tired of the occupation.

So Anthropoid is a good movie, even if it’s not exactly a laugh a minute with its suicides and torture and severed heads and civilian casualties. It’s well-executed; the minutes before the assassination sequence are almost sickeningly tense. What it isn’t is particularly innovative — it’s a wartime spy drama, and it’s pretty much like every wartime spy drama. That makes sense considering that this is the actual event that a lot of wartime spy dramas are based on.

Unlike a lot of the historical tosh I watch on here, it’s not really a lot of fun but it’s definitely worth a watch. If you don’t know much about the Heydrich assassination, you’ll actually learn some things from it — I was surprised when I did my usual post-film lookup to find how many historical details were replicated. If you do know a lot about it, you probably won’t learn anything new, but it’s still a tense, interesting story.

 

More from on the road

As I mentioned earlier, my wife and I took a trip to York and Durham. I’ve already written about going to the Yorkshire Museum to see their Vikings exhibit. While we were in Durham, we also dropped in to the museum in the Palace Green library.

We didn’t check out the main exhibit, but we did look at the archaeology gallery. It’s an archaeology gallery, for the most part. You know the drill: prehistory, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, etc., etc. But the really interesting thing about this one is the organising principle that runs through the display. It’s all about decay. There are lots of little sections that show how different materials decay and what they decay into. There’s even a cute decay mascot.

It’s Mouldy the Mould Spore, the sensational new character of 2017!

I thought it was really interesting to see archaeology presented as all about the process of decay, which, in a sense, I suppose it is.

Also we bought a robot, which is a thing we do.

On the road

It’s been quiet around here lately, not because I’ve been doing nothing but because I have been busy. Last weekend, to celebrate our anniversary, my wife and I went back to revisit old haunts in Durham, although we stayed in York, it being easier to find a place on that busy weekend.

Anyway, I’m sure some of these things will come up over future posts, but today I wanted to talk about our visit to the Yorkshire Museum for their Vikings exhibit.

Some years ago I went to that fancy Vikings exhibit at the British Museum, and with all the respect in the world for the Yorkshire Museum, this was never going to equal that in scale. Still, I found it interesting.

Initially, I wasn’t too impressed. Perhaps it’s just that the exhibit is aimed at a slightly younger audience, which the British Museum one, with its slightly churchy atmosphere, definitely wasn’t, but for the first third or so I was feeling a little unmoved. Basically there was a lot of the same stuff you see in every exhibit about the early middle ages, and the Coppergate helmet, which is very nice indeed but not an exhibit all by itself.

But things turned around, pleasingly, and I found that the intro bit had been the least exciting — for me, but then, the intro bit is not usually for me. I was pleased by the way the process of discovery turned up in so many of the exhibits.

Here’s the Gilling Sword, which is lovely, even if not technically a Viking artefact. I’m pleased that it was on display next to its Blue Peter badge!

It was nice to see various hoards and smaller artefacts. There were a couple of ordinary whetstones I found fascinating because I’m a weirdo.

I really liked the section on Vikings in popular culture, which included some Warhammer 40,000 models:

Frivolous as that might sound, I actually think the Space Wolves are a pretty good example of how Vikings turn up in science fiction: they start as just regular folks with a slightly wolf-y gimmick, become full-on cartoon space vikings and then gradually turn into a more complex and nuanced culture, much as we might see the public perception of early medieval Scandinavians evolving over time but with a decade or so’s lag.

It was a fun exhibit, not huge but a good mix of things. I don’t know that I would have gone out of my way to see it, but I’m glad I got the chance to while I was in town.