Royal Commissioners Research Articles

The Unreliable Witness: Clarence Dakin, ASIO, and Espionage

This historical note examines the role of a witness-informer at the 1954–55 Royal Commission on Espionage. That witness was Clarence William Dakin, an individual overlooked by historians, and his background, testimony and motivations are discussed. As with ex-communists in the USA during McCarthyism, who successfully incriminated their former comrades, ASIO expected his evidence would prove explosive. However, he dashed the hopes of ASIO, disappointed the royal commissioners and discredited himself. This note provides an insight into the rare use of witness-informers during Australia’s Cold War.

Italy also had its South Kensington Museum

The article aims to bring to light a recent discovery with respect to the history of Italian pedagogical museums: 12 years before the official opening of what is recognized as the first. Since 1862, in Turin, a section of the Royal Industrial Museum has been dedicated to the collection of books and teaching materials to the primary and secondary schools. This collection was a direct expression of the London Universal Exhibition of 1861, from which the Royal Commissioners returned with the idea of copying the South Kensington Museum. The article reconstructs the history of the collection and its exposure, following its evolution until its disappearance. The aim of this article is to offer a significant piece of the history of the historical-educational heritage in Italy and its musealization.

Royal commissioner of fine arts: Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s work for the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904)

Royal commissioner of fine arts: Hendrik Willem Mesdag’s work for the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904)

Sir John Prise and His Books: Manuscript Culture in the March of Wales

Sir John Prise (1501/2–55) was a Welsh lawyer and book collector who was one of the royal commissioners responsible for closing down the monasteries at the Dissolution of the 1530s. Operating mainly in the March of Wales, Prise was able to save around 100 medieval manuscripts which would otherwise have been destroyed. As a Welsh speaker, Prise was keenly interested in medieval Welsh writing and some of the most famous medieval Welsh manuscripts passed through his hands. He was particularly interested in the British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth and in his Latin prose treatise, Historiae Britannicae Defensio, published in 1573 after his death, Prise put forward a spirited defence of the 'British history' related by Geoffrey, based almost entirely on his reading of manuscripts that he owned. This article examines the significance of Sir John Prise, his writing and his book collection in relation to the transmission of medieval texts into the Tudor age.

Building Trust: Can Courts Learn From Royal Commissions?

Confidence in the administration of justice and in the courts is an essential feature of democracy. This paper examines Australian research on trust in courts and judges, noting that negative experiences in a particular court may be generalised to the whole judicial system. The converse may also hold true, so that measures adopted by particular courts to increase confidence may well heighten confidence in courts generally. Governments frequently rely on community engagement to promote public confidence in their policy processes and institutions, though sometimes their methods for doing so backfire and actually reduce that confidence. The concept of community engagement has only recently been used to describe activities conducted by courts and quasi-judicial bodies such as Royal Commissions. Drawing on the author’s experience as a judge and Royal Commissioner, the paper describes some techniques used by Royal Commissions —a different type of legal fact-finding and policy recommendation forum— to inform communities and create trust in their processes and findings. It argues that these techniques could be usefully adapted by courts to achieve the same end, and outlines initiatives already being adopted by some Victorian courts to build and maintain public confidence in their operations and integrity. Viewing these activities through the lens of ‘community engagement’ treats these types of activities as part of a continuum that could ultimately improve collaboration between the courts and the public to design more user-focussed court services. The paper concludes by proposing that initiatives to build public trust and confidence in courts should be shared and also systematically evaluated to establish ‘what works’.

Between a burden and a business: Benigno Vega Inclán, tourism, exhibitions and power relations, 1911–1928

ABSTRACT In 1911 Benigno Vega Inclán was appointed Royal Commissioner for tourism by King Alfonso XIII. His initiatives marked the development of tourism in Spain for nearly twenty years. The proposals he put forward reflected an idea of the nation that combined within it a particular vision of culture and society. His personal contacts with Spanish and foreign elites played a decisive part in every project he undertook, whether in national parks, parador hotels or museums, and his way of understanding the management of tourism undoubtedly left its mark on the first stages of modern tourism in Spain, in a manner that provides clear elements for comparison with other countries in the region. The focus of this study is on the activities of Vega Inclán in connection with the Spanish tourism exhibition in London in 1914 and the preparations for the 1929 Iberoamerican Exhibition in Seville. The image of Spain as presented through the actions, material content and controversies that surrounded Vega Inclán is of great interest in terms of connecting the birth of tourism with other historical dynamics such as nation-building or the belief in progress conceived of as economic development.

Ethics and ESG

This paper provides theories, models and practices to assist in understanding ethical decision making in relation to environmental, social and governance issues. It begins by defining sustainability and how it is measured and reported. The most influential is the UN’s definition of sustainability and its measurement by compliance with its 17 Sustainability goals. In his recent report into the finance sector, the Royal Commissioner was scathing in his assessment of the lack of integrity, honesty and ethics and endorsed the importance of reporting non-financial indicators of performance. However, there are few explanations of the links in the literature between ethics and ESG and how ethical decisions could be managed. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue by exploring the questions: What are: ethics? Business ethics? The main ethical theories? What is the relationship between ESG and ethics? What is the difference between ethics and morals? How do we apply ethical reasoning to ESG?

The Valréas Book of Hours: Avignon, BM, ms. 1903

Acquired by the Musée Calvet in Avignon in 1893 from a convent in Valréas in the Énclave des papes, this little fragmentary manuscript has never been subject to any thorough study, although it was part of the exhibition Manuscrit à peintures in 1955, along with the Bellevillle Breviary and the treasures of the duc de Berry. In the 1970s, 40 leaves out of 52 were stolen, and the major part thus hidden from the public eye. Recently, these leaves have been rediscovered and restituted, and are hereby introduced to the academic discourse. With codicological and comparative stylistic methods, the manuscript’s opulent decoration is analysed, and its art historical position is established in relation to contemporary currents in gothic book illumination. No less than nine different artists can be distinguished, and identified, one of which executed a secondary portion around 1370, whereas the other eight artists were active in the first third of the fourteenth century. Every artist reoccurs in a number of other manuscripts, independently or in collaboration with each other in different constellations. They were all among the most renowned Parisian illuminators of their time, including the Papeleu master a.k.a. Richard de Verdun, Jean Pucelle, and Anciau de Sens. Moreover, through a reconstruction of its historical context with proposed royal commissioners, a clearer picture emerges of this particular book of hours as a conscious manifestation of artistic patronage. Iconographic giottoesque features also offers an incentive to reconsider the sources for the introduction of Italian trecento influence in French gothic book illumination. This manuscript contributes to the understanding of collaborative practises between workshops and individual artists under early Valois patronage, and provides an important addition to the corpus of gothic book illumination.

‘A Tortured Nation Gave Birth to a Lunatic’: The Construction of Insanity in the 1912 Terrorist Attack in Croatia

Summary In spring 1912, 25-year-old lawyer Luka Jukić tried to assassinate the Croatian Ban and Royal Commissioner Slavko Cuvaj. This article focuses on several aspects of the trial against Jukić: first, on analysing the impact of Cesare Lombroso’s criminology in Croatia; second, on the testimony by forensic psychiatrist Ivo Žirovčić, who controversially claimed that Jukić was sane; third, on unmasking the techniques and manipulations by the media, the regime and the opposition concerning the assassin’s alleged insanity; and finally, on identifying the ways in which the case influenced further political and revolutionary activities in the country. The discussion concerning Jukić’s accountability deepened the chasm between the supporters and opponents of Cuvaj’s regime, both in the political sphere and within the Croatian medical community.

Quakers as Political Players in Early America

The Quakers have long attracted scholarly interest for the apparently progressive positions they have taken on issues such as the empowerment of women, the maintenance of just relations between colonists and Native Americans, and the abolition of slavery. Among some historians and present-day members of the Society of Friends, there is an impulse to sanctify prominent early Quakers, to suggest that they stood apart from their neighbors and bore witness against the evils of their day. The articles in this Forum, by contrast, place Quakers within their contemporary social contexts. By recognizing differences among Quakers and by examining tacit alliances between Friends and royal commissioners, slaveholding merchants, slaves and former slaves, lawyers, and congressmen, these essays demonstrate how Quakers in early America operated within morally flawed societies. These kinds of studies enable us to better understand the history of Quakerism and to appreciate what Quaker history can tell us about the wider world. Quakers were political players. They could be opportunistic, guilt-ridden, manipulative, inquisitive, and judgmental, and they produced volumes of revealing, underutilized documents. By studying them, we can learn a great deal about the allocation of power in the British Empire and the early United States.

Elizabeth Hooton and the Lived Politics of Toleration in Massachusetts Bay

Quaker prophetess Elizabeth Hooton traveled throughout England, the West Indies, Virginia, New Netherland, and New England in the mid-seventeenth century. Though best known as one of George Fox’s first converts and a leading female preacher, she engaged in savvy political activity as well as zealous prophecy. The lived politics of her encounters included not only whippings and banishments but also small-scale negotiations and unexpected alliances. Obtaining a license from Charles II to purchase land anywhere in his colonies, she leveraged royal authority to influence colonial politics. Most effectively, during the 1664–65 visit of the royal commissioners to Massachusetts Bay, she and other Friends provoked local magistrates to seditious speech. Hooton’s journeys highlight the profound tension between religious fervor and political stability in the midst of competing visions of the common good. They point to a history of toleration in early America that attends to fine-grained local religious, economic, legal, and social contexts, and they reveal strategic and significant Quaker interventions.

Nuevos documentos para la biografía de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, un comisario real de abastos en los antiguos Reinos de Jaén y Sevilla (1592-1593)

El reciente hallazgo de nuevos testimonios escritos sobre Miguel de Cervantes conservados en varios archivos sevillanos, ha permitido atestiguar su presencia en Sevilla y en varios lugares de su comarca ejerciendo el oficio de comisario real de abastos en la primavera del año 1593. Estos testimonios esclarecen un periodo hasta ahora oscuro en su biografía, y al mismo tempo acrecientan nuestros conocimientos sobre sus actividades en la villa de Porcuna (Jaén), donde ejerció su labor de comisario en enero de 1592. La nueva documentación no sólo ofrece información sobre una desconocida comisión, encomendada a Cervantes el 21 de febrero de 1593 por Cristóbal de Barros, el proveedor general de la Flota de la Carrera de las Indias, sino que proporciona además el nombre de una mujer sevillana, doña Magdalena Enríquez, comerciante dedicada a la fabricación de bizcocho para la Armada, a la que Cervantes facultó ante escribano público para que pudiera cobrar el salario que se le adeudaba por este servicio. Es destacable la estrecha amistad de Cervantes con Magdalena Enríquez así como también con Tomás Gutiérrez. En total, son catorce los nuevos documentos cervantinos que, por vez primera, se reúnen y transcriben en esta publicación. Aunque seis de ellos ya fueron editados entre 2014 y 2015, los ocho restantes son inéditos. Con estas aportaciones documentales se abren, pues, nuevas vías de investigación para profundizar en la enigmática vida del autor del Quijote.

Gestión forestal, necesidad naval y conflictividad jurídico-institucional: la Monarquía Hispánica y las instituciones vascas durante los Austrias

<p>Este estudio pretende analizar, desde una perspectiva jurídico-institucional, la pugna entre, por un lado, los requerimientos de la Monarquía de los Habsburgo por explotar los bosques vizcaínos y guipuzcoanos para abastecer de maderas a las Armadas que preservaban los extensos territorios hispánicos. Por otro, las necesidades de las poblaciones rurales, gestionadas por derechos propios basados fundamentalmente en la costumbre, que se sustentaban en los bienes que los árboles les proporcionaban, y fueron defendidas frente a los comisionados reales por sus instituciones locales o provinciales</p>

The Sicilian Connection: Imperial Themes in Simone Martini’s St. Louis of Toulouse Altarpiece

This article focuses on the early fourteenth-century panel painting by Simone Martini known from its design and subject as the St. Louis of Toulouse Altarpiece, now housed in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. Arguing that the altarpiece was probably the result of a commission awarded by one or more leading members of the Angevin royal family that ruled southern Italy during this period, this study engages with three principal issues. First, it discusses the extent to which the striking double coronation represented on the main panel of the altarpiece was indebted to a number of prestigious twelfth- and late thirteenth-century images executed in and around Palermo, the former capital of the Angevin kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Second, it addresses the question of how each of the three potential royal commissioners might have had personal knowledge of these Sicilian prototypes. Finally, it explores how the choice of such a subject and the painter’s acknowledgment of these powerful and effective models of dynastic imagery could have been fueled by the ambitions of Simone Martini’s royal patrons to claim sovereignty over a Mediterranean empire—even if, in reality, no such empire existed.

‘In view of the obvious animus’. The discrediting of Ralph Piddington

A study describing Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, AO Neville's successful attempt to discredit Ralph Piddington by scrutinising his personal behaviour, to avert the veracity of the allegations made by Piddington, and the inadequacies of Neville's department. By this strategy the seriousness of the allegations made by Piddington about the ill-treatment and conditions of Aborigines at La Grange Bay in Northwest Western Australia are expunged. It is my contention that there was a deliberate effort by Neville to mislead the Australian National Research Council (ANRC), his Minister (W.H. Kitson) and the Royal Commissioner (H.D. Moseley), with regard to the substance of Piddington's allegations, and with regard to the recommendations made by a departmental inquiry and police reports. The consequences for Piddington were considerable.

Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century

In 1381, all over England, the labouring classes rose in revolt. They attacked lawyers, abbots, tax-collectors, and royal commissioners; they burned title-deeds and manor rolls, broke open jails and liberated prisoners, occupied Canterbury, St. Albans, St. Edmundsbury, and Norwich, and marched on London. In the home counties, the leaders were Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, and John Ball, a priest who had preached equality of serf and lord for over twenty years, popularising the slogan “When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?” The rebels demanded the abolition of serfdom and of tolls on buying and selling, the commutation of services for rent, and a general pardon. London opened its gates to them; John of Gaunt’s palace, the Temple Bar, and the house of the Knights Hospitallers were destroyed, Flemish merchants were killed, and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Treasurer beheaded on Tower Hill. The young king Richard II persuaded a large contingent of insurgents to return home by issuing charters of emancipation and amnesty, but many thousands still remained in London under Wat Tyler. Tyler finally encountered the king at Smithfield and was stabbed by William Walworth, the mayor of London. With the fall of their leader the rebels in London dispersed, and the tide turned. The charters of manumission and pardon were annulled by Parliament, and the revolt eventually suppressed throughout the country. Many were tried and executed, including Straw and Ball, and Tyler’s head graced London Bridge. If we were modern undergraduates in history taking a course on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, we would study its social, economic and political contexts, its causes, events, and effects. We would interpret the primary source materials – from the chronicles of Froissart,

Sixteenth Century Hospital Reform: Henri IV and the Chamber of Christian Charity

Created in 1606, the Chamber of Christian Charity was intended to fund pensions for former army officers and amputated soldiers by reviewing the operations and expropriating surplus revenues from local charitable foundations - abbeys, monasteries, hospices and local hospitals. This article explores the reasons behind Henri IV's initiative and the new methods used - royal commissioners and a centralized approach - to try to resolve what was seen as a traditional problem of corruption and redundancy in French poor relief structures. It will analyse the difficulties encountered by the Chamber and the legal obstacles to the whole effort to intervene in local municipal and ecclesiastical institutions to show that the experiment never produced the anticipated results and was abandoned shortly after the king’s assassination in 1610.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

This issue of the JRSM has a festive flavour. We offer three challenges to JRSM readers. Michael O'Brien's grand round will test the innermost ganglion of your brain (p 569), Anjan Panja has created a medical version of Su Doku (p 576), and our picture quiz will examine the depths of your knowledge of medical art (p 575). A special section for this issue explores medical classics, but with a twist. The enlightening power of hindsight allows several contributors to debunk ideas, theories, treatments and people that at one time or another were thought to be sacred in the world of medicine. Curb your enthusiasm is the message. ‘It is not entirely a male thing’, says Trisha Greenghalgh (p 545), ‘but the Human Genome Project has always struck me as an extension of the fantasies my three bothers used to have over their Meccano sets’. Nick Freemantle questions the contribution of the Reverend Bayes, father of Bayesian statistics (p 546), while Irvine Loudon shatters the legend of Ignaz Phillip Semmelweis, held by some to be the most famous name in the history of obstetrics (p 555). Ian Forgacs and Christopher Martyn, both editors, remind us of the worthlessness of cliches and impact factors (p 554, p 556). A straw poll of this section, however, would reveal the world of neurology as the most overhyped. Elliot Slater's description of the diagnosis of hysteria as ‘not only a delusion but a snare’ is roundly criticized by Jon Stone and fellow neurologists from Edinburgh (p 547). Saad Shafqat bemoans Jean-Martin Charcot's passion for cerebral localization and the 3-day neurological examination (p 549). And Ben Harper wonders whether Huntington Disease would have been more deservedly named Lund Disease (p 550). If this series of contributions inspires you to write then do not think that you have missed out. We look forward to publishing more revisionist contributions as an occasional series. Submissions to journals are a good indication of what is bothering people and the incessant reorganization of health services in the UK and elsewhere is subjected to some insightful analysis by the high-priests of evidence based medicine. Andy Oxman and colleagues create a new word, redisorganization, which probably rings true with many of you (p 563). They discover that the literature is almost impenetrable due to creative jargon and meaningless terminology, there are over 2500 organizational theories, and an ethics committee is urgently required to prevent ‘uncontrolled, unplanned experimentation inflicted on providers and users of health services’. Thanks to the organization of journals, Jeffrey Braithewaite and colleagues also echo these sentiments but prefer to call it restructuring, and conclude that ‘unlike sex, restructuring is not essential for the propagation of humankind’ (p 542). Finally, a scoop for the JRSM. In this month's piece from the James Lind Library, Iain Donaldson unearths Franz Anton Mesmer's attempt to organize a controlled trial of his ‘animal magnetism’ treatment, the second earliest instance of random allocation being proposed for a clinical trial (p 571). Mesmer's study never took place because of a disagreement between Mesmer and the Royal Commissioners appointed to investigate his work. One of the commissioners who chose to discredit Mesmerism was Benjamin Franklin, whose own life and work in medicine is celebrated with uncurbed enthusiasm by Lisa Gensel (p 534).

Administrative Reform Movements and Commissions in Belgium, 1848-2004

Current analysis of the public administration's dysfunctions in Belgium bears remarkable resemblance to the analyses made by numerous authors and commissions in the past 150 years. In this article, we provide an overview of the major administrative reform initiatives in Belgium between 1848 and 2004. We focus on a number of books and reports from the period between the mid-19th century and the First World War, that were the foundation for many analyses in the 20th century. The interbellum saw the introduction of several reform commissions, and the appointment of a Royal commissioner who would introduce some of the most radical reforms ever in the Belgian civil service, the influence of which can still be felt today. After the Second World War, the focus of the reforms changed to efficiency, and later to economy. In the late 1980s, ‘citizen ‘and ‘client’ became a central concept in the reform discourse. Even though the administrative reforms and reform initiatives in Belgium since 1848 are quite diverse, there is a striking consistency in the problems that have been identified as causes for administrative malfunctioning: the influence of politics and ministerial cabinets, the size of the administration, and the administration's inefficiency.

Australia's National Integrity Systems: Introducing a New Blueprint

Australia is sometimes regarded as having well-developed systems for protecting and promoting public integrity. Nevertheless the functioning of modern integrity systems is not particularly well understood, in Australia or internationally, and to be complacent about their state of health is obviously to court danger. In this introduction Frank Costigan, who as a royal commissioner in the 1980s pioneered new strategies for exposing institutional corruption and organized crime, introduces the results of the Australian National Integrity System Assessment — a collaborative Australian Research Council project seeking better ways of mapping and evaluating the institutions and processes dedicated nationally to ensuring integrity and accountability. The result is a new blueprint for key reforms and continual improvement in Australia's integrity systems over coming years.