Coming of Age at 18: Alice Loxton Interview

Alice, I wondered what were you doing when you were when you were 18?

I probably had a pretty conventional 18 year old life, I think, in that I was just completing my A-levels and was looking to university. I was very hardworking and focusing on exams and that sort of thing. I expect it’s quite a similar experience to lots of people. I didn’t have a clear idea of what career I wanted to do or anything like that.

It’s very interesting with me, I currently work now, 10 years later, in a world of TikTok and Instagram. And when I was 18, those things didn’t even exist at all in the way that they do now. So little did I know that I was about to set out on a job and embark on a career that didn’t actually exist.

Social media has had an impact on our lives, for those who choose to engage in it. You are a massive presence on these platforms. Has it had a purely beneficial impact on your life?

Yes, social media gets a lot of bad press, often for very good reason. But there are some aspects of it which I think are pretty amazing. I treat my social media channels, which is where I just make these short videos about historic locations; go to churches or cathedrals or castles and just show people amazing details. I treat it as a TV channel in the same way that you’d create things on iPlayer.

Of course, these are just mini documentaries that are only three minutes long. The response has been absolutely amazing. It’s [also] been an amazing way to reach so many people; to grow an audience. It’s not just me. There are a lot of people making all sorts of different kinds of non-history related content, whatever their passion is. I think it’s really wonderful that we do have access to these channels where you’re the commissioner, you’re the editor, you can put out as much or little as you want. You can talk about exactly what you want, whether that be world history or whether that be the local history to your village.

It’s quite a fun and creative platform, as lots of people have probably found with making podcasts, I suppose.

If we turn to your book, why did you want to write about these 18 figures? Was it always the classic ‘Who to invite to a dinner party?’

I was walking around the National Portrait Gallery and I was looking at all these figures, these paintings, these portraits, and it occurred to me they depict people in their older years generally when they’ve achieved quite a lot. But obviously these people once upon a time were young, they were children, they were babies, they were 18-years-old.

I love that idea of looking into that much younger age group. 18 is a really interesting age because in our society today, 18 is considered this big age, this age of change, the time when you become an adult. But of course, that’s not true back through history. It’s a very modern thing to use 18 as a turning point.

I wanted to look back through history. People have had such different experiences. People like Nelson might have gone to the Navy at the age of 12, or people might have been married, or they might have been in charge of Italy, as Empress Matilda was, even in their teens, or they might have survived pretty horrific things like the plague. So in general, people have had a huge amount of responsibility and pursued some pretty extreme experiences.

I think that’s an interesting insight into how we could think about 18-year-olds today. My gut feeling is that when people have been forced to take on a huge amount of responsibility, as people did do in the past, they step up to the mark. This could be a good lesson for us today. Throughout the book, so I’ve chosen these 18 figures, and these are, I hope a diverse group of experiences.

We’ve got some people who are royals, the crème de la crème, but also people who are really ordinary, some people you’ve probably never heard of. Then also people from different areas of Britain. Some who weren’t necessarily born in Britain, but they play a massive part in Britain’s story. It’s an interesting insight into British history, too.

Throughout the book, between each chapter, there is a section where I imagine the 18 figures coming together in this modern setting of a dinner party. That’s obviously a bit of fun, and it’s supposed to be quite light. But I think it’s also been quite useful because you’reforced to imagine these people not as abstract individuals, but what would he do if he was 18-years-old and he walked into restaurant?

What would he or she do and how would they move and act? I suppose it’s the same exercise that people who create historic dramas probably think about. It’s been a lot of fun to write and I hope people find it inspiring to read.

The Venerable Bede is one of your figures from the book. He’s the first. The English Herodotus.

Bede is a really interesting one. From a historian’s point of view, people will be surprised that I’ve been able to write about him because we really don’t know [much about him]. The father of English history. We really don’t know anything about his young life at all. There were a few tangible things. He is this Anglo-Saxon monk and he lived in a monastery in Northumberland.

He stayed there his whole life and spent his life writing in the scriptorium, writing texts, but it’s through Bede that we can understand the history of English people in those very early years. In some ways, through Bede, we have perceived where we’ve come from. He’s got a massive legacy but who was Bede?

We often think about Bede as this old guy probably with a big beard working in a scriptorium but of course at one point he was young and he would have been in this monastery at Monkwearmouth, Jarrow and although there’s no kind of account of his, there are some dramatic events that were happening there.

You can piece together quite a lot about his life. At the age of seven, he left his family and he was taken to the monastery. What would it have been like for a seven-year -old boy to arrive in this monastery

We think monasteries are old, dusty and cold, but at the time, it would be pretty exciting. Massive buildings with these amazing things called stained glass windows. Then he moved to another monastery. You can go to these places today and you can see the churches which still survive with these kind of remnants. It’s amazing to be in those rooms and think, ‘Hang on, Bede probably was in this room. He could have stood where I’m standing right now! He could have looked through the window that I’m looking through right now.’ So that’s pretty cool.

There is an event that happens to Bede in his young life, which we think is a terrible plague that strikes the monastery. Everybody dies apart from one boy and one adult and it’s believed that that boy was Bede. Historians will write this as if it’s a side note: ‘The plague came.’

That is a crazy experience to go through. And what would you feel at the end? ‘Hang on, I feel like I’ve been chosen to be here. There was a reason that I’ve survived.’

Is it surprising that Bede then goes on and throughout his life, he is so dedicated to being in the scriptorium and writing all of this stuff and making the most of his life, not wasting a moment, dedicating his life to the monastery? These are the kind of themes that I’m looking at.

It’s interesting because the youth aspect that you write about in the introduction, isn’t really addressed by historians. If one takes The Black Death, where as many as 50% of the population died. If you made 18, you’ve won the lottery.

Our perception of age and maturity changes throughout history when in the past if you got to the age of 18 you were incredibly lucky to be there because so many people died in infancy. There were such high levels of mortality.

If you take Mary Anning, one of the characters that I write about, the famous fossil collector and palaeontologist, who lived in Lyme Regis on the South Coast.

Her mother gave birth 10 times and eight of the children died in infancy. Only two survived out of 10. Mary Anning was born in 1799. There are people who are not that many generations back where there were eight out of 10 children dying. That’s quite recent. [Going] further back in history it would have been similar and perhaps even worse.

You write about Richard Burton and I’m glad you did as I am a huge admirer of his. Burton, his adopted name, but in the restaurant the booze would flow.

He’s a great character. He’s got an incredible childhood. When you read about him as an adult – there’s one moment where he buys, Elizabeth Taylor the most expensive diamond in the world. $1.1 million. An incredible thing to do. Then you read about his childhood.

It’s this amazing rags to riches story. Richard Burton was born Richard Jenkins, in South Wales in this very idyllic little village.

His mother had given birth 13 times and he was number 12. His mother died when giving birth to his younger brother, so Richard Burton never remembered his mother because she died when he was very young. He started off in that family setting with all of these siblings speaking Welsh in this little village.

His father was absent in terms of caring for the children. He went to live with his older sister, who was herself married. She was the kind of mother that he knew. He was very clever; very good at sport; very good at rugby and had had lots going for him, but for various reasons he did do well at school but then he had to drop out.

He was a school dropout and it was difficult at home, difficult at school and then he found this tutor, Philip Burton and Philip was passionate about people, helping young people and he was passionate about theatre, and he had loads of contacts in the theatre.

Philip Burton got Richard Jenkins into this world of theatre. He went from the age of 16 being known as Jenkins Co-op because he was working in the Haberdashery counter in the local Co-op and two years later he was on stage. It’s an amazing turnaround.

The relationship was on the rocks with his sister and he registered to be adopted by Philip. There was a technicality which meant he couldn’t be adopted but [he formed] a guardianship [instead].

His childhood is indeed heartbreaking. When one thinks of the all the barriers he got through to then become the world’s biggest movie star, I can understand someone who lived that kind of poverty would buy such an extravagant gift for his wife.

These traits that stay with him forever. Wales and this Welsh identity stays with him despite all the celebrity, all of the glitz and the glam. However much he might be playing Hamlet on the stage at the Old Vic, he’d still rather be playing rugby on the rugby pitches in Wales. Of course, his father drank a huge amount and those early years completely shaped those later years too.

I was asked recently on a show about D-Day: why do young people (18 to 24 years old) not know about D-Day? It’s outrageous. But I do feel that is an unfair criticism. There is time for the young to learn about it.

For someone who is 20 today, [D-Day] is four generations ago. I don’t think it’s that surprising that people don’t find it a big event in their lives. Four lifetimes ago is a long time for anyone.

Would people of the 1940s have been interested in commemorating a war from the late Victorian period? That would seem really far away. It’s not to say that these things aren’t important, but I do think that a trait of youth is not looking back, it’s looking forward. A trait of youth is trying to forge the world that they will inhabit and live in.

Alice Loxton is a historian and the author of Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives.