The sky is falling! (selectively)

Murdoch’s Times not only went tabloid, it has acquired some down-market degeneracies with it.

A couple of posts back, Malcolm was whining about the comic’s fullest fluffy Murdochian populism. He now bemoans a parallel ghoulish, blood-chilling, thrill-seeking sensationalism.

The Melanie Phillips memorial meme

What provoked this was the third Comment article in yesterday’s fish-n-chip wrapper. After Finkelstein (a contract artist, so comes with the fixtures and fittings) on the holocaust, and the German Foreign Minister soft-soaping the chasm between Cameron and Merkel, comes Maajid Nawaz:

Muslim patrols are s sign of things to come

We should worry that battle-hardened fanatics could impose their dogma on Britain’s streets

Then — yawn! — his opening tries to draw straight-lines across a very uneven surface:

On the streets of Greece supporters of the far-Right Golden Dawn party patrol neighbourhoods, attacking anyone who looks like an immigrant. In Denmark a group calling itself Call to Islam has declared parts of the country to be “sharia-controlled zones” and its “morality police” confront drinkers and partygoers. In France right-wing vigilantes ran Roma families out of a Marseilles estate and burnt down their camp. In Spain nine Islamist extremists recently kidnapped a woman, tried her for adultery under sharia and attempted to execute her before she managed to escape. And here English Defence League thugs march in towns and cities “reclaiming” the streets from Muslims.

Something very worrying is spreading across Europe. Fascist and and Islamist extremists alike are copying what Hitler’s Brownshirts excelled at — enforcing with threats and violence their version of the law in neighbourhoods, And the moderate middle is left gawping.

Well, well: if that had appeared in any inter chat chat-room, Mike Godwin would be invoked:

It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I’d decided, had gotten out of hand – in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as “similar to the Nazis” or “Hitler-like” was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer…

I developed Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Then there’s the other matter: proportion. The European Union embraces a population of nigh on half-a-billion. Let’s be generous to Maajid Nawaz: he has identified, at most, a few hundred ne’er-do-wells. His nine Spanish Islamists amount to 0.00000019% of the people of Spain. Similarly, there’s a Grand Canyon of difference between the hysterical:

The complete Islamification of Tower Hamlets continues, as anyone who dares to “look like a fag” or drink alcohol in their declared republic now risks harassment walking in the street.

and the factual:

A small group of individuals were recently seen harassing members of the public in East London, and the council is proactively working with partners in the community and police to monitor for further incidents and take appropriate action.

And the marauding Muslim hordes of E1 amounted to precisely —

A fifth person has been detained after a video of a ‘vigilante Muslim gang’ tormenting members of the public in east London was released on YouTube.

The 17-year-old boy was questioned at a police station in Walthamstow in relation to incidents that were posted on the video sharing website on January 12 and 13.

The pillars of bourgeois society have not even been vibrated. The events Maajid Nawaz wants to daisy-chain are, taken one by one, not insignificant — but on a continental scale do not register on the Richter Scale of earth-shakers.

Another small country about which we know nothing

Curiously, though, Maajid Nawaz omitted one obvious civil disruption.

We have had some eight weeks of continuing street riots in East Belfast, orchestrated by the local UVF. Arson-attempts, especially on Roman Catholic targets, are regular events. The Police Service have reported dozen of officers injured, truing to contain the almost-nightly excursions. Numerous arrests have been made. The cost is now running towards eight figures. And the machinators are known to all:

A small number of senior UVF men are directing the riots in east Belfast that have brought shame on Northern Ireland.

Two senior henchmen of the UVF chief in east Belfast have ignored warnings from the organisation’s leadership to bring an end to the violence which has left dozens of PSNI officers injured and cost millions of pounds.

And while the UVF’s leader in the east of the city — as the ‘Beast from the East’ — could end the rioting immediately, he has failed to bring his men under control.

Even Andrew Gillian, at the [London] Daily Telegraph knows where to go calling:

What East Belfast, Carrickfergus and Newtownabbey do have in common, however, are maverick factions of the Loyalist paramilitary organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

“We’ve got no doubt whatever that this is coming from the UVF,” says Terry Spence, leader of the Police Federation for Northern Ireland.

The East Belfast leader of the UVF – the so-called “Beast from the East” – was not at home to callers when The Telegraph dropped in to his small terraced house in a quiet side street.

His white reinforced front door doesn’t have a knocker or a bell, but there are five CCTV cameras just in case anyone tries to murder him again.

Two of his lieutenants have been spotted in the background helping direct the main East Belfast riots.

Security sources say they are acting with the Beast’s consent, if not the UVF leadership’s active involvement, and he could end the trouble in the area whenever he wanted.

Ugly Doris

If you go to those-in-the-know, you’ll hear a lot about this reclusive figure. Here’s an Analysis from the Irish Times, eighteen months ago:

THE SO-CALLED “Beast from the East” took over the Ulster Volunteer Force in east Belfast about six years ago and has strengthened his power base since then, according to well-placed loyalist sources. He and some of his senior lieutenants are chiefly responsible for the violence in east Belfast over recent days, they say.

He makes his money mainly from “gangster-on-gangster or bad-on-bad crime”, which is chiefly about drug dealing and extorting other criminals – while also managing to maintain some distance from these activities to keep him, so far, out of prison. How to clip his wings is the challenge for the police and also for other members of the UVF…

… what is happening in Short Strand and on the Newtownards Road in east Belfast these past dangerous nights is not about the dissidents. It is about the UVF, which is fomenting the disturbances. And it is primarily about the UVF leader in east Belfast nicknamed the Beast from the East or “Ugly Doris”. The first nom de guerre relates to his east Belfast bailiwick and the second refers to the late Jim Gray, the UDA east Belfast leader or “brigadier” murdered by his own people. He was called Doris Day because of his blond hair and his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, pink jumpers and gold jewellery. The UVF leader is said to resemble Gray only in his strands of blond hair – hence Ugly Doris.

According to senior loyalist sources, the new man, who is in his 40s, has “lost the run of himself” and is becoming increasingly dangerous and, some fear, almost unstable. “He is creating a little empire for himself in east Belfast and is now flexing his muscles,” said one loyalist insider. “He is also partial to cocaine and likes to party . . . He believes he is untouchable.”

The Belfast Telegraph identified the East Belfast UVF as:

… the most powerful paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland.

With a fiefdom stretching from the Lagan’s edge on the Newtownards Road to Millisle, Donaghadee and beyond, it struts a swathe of territory no other loyalist element can match.

It has dwarfed the UDA in east Belfast and the Ards Peninsula to the point where seasoned paramilitaries declare a ‘no contest’ between the two loyalist terror groups.

Note that didn’t say most powerful Loyalist paramilitary faction in Northern Ireland. Nor are we considering a handful of self-advertisers in Brick Lane, or even a tight little gang of perverts in Malaga. This is something far bigger, far nearer to the dystopia with which Maajid Nawaz would wish to chill us.

What you don’t find in those columns, usually, is a given name for the Beast a.k.a. Ugly Doris. He is (pace Susanne Breen) A former prisoner from a well-known loyalist family. His code-title is “S” [the UVF just lurve these Ian Flemingesque touches]. Look a bit further and you’ll find the name of Stephen Matthews.

Now there’s a candidate for Maajid Nawaz’s little black book.

… and one Englishman to sink it.

The punchline, of course, to that bitter Belfast gybe about the building of the Titanic.

Factor one: a tradition

Belfast was building ships as early as 1663. By the mid-nineteenth century the business was big, and getting bigger. When Anvil Point was launched (1st April 2003) she was keel number 1742 (and last) of the vessels to come off the Harland and Woolf slips.

Yet only one gets popularly remembered — and she was probably the shortest-lived of the lot.

Factor two: an image (bad)

Belfast hasn’t had a lot positively going for the city these last few decades.

The Europa was, after all, not just the place where the world’s press bedded down. And rarely ventured forth. And talked. And broadcast therefrom. And drank each other under tables. It was also, famously, the most bombed hotel in the world. Which included Beirut. For the record: twenty-eight, and hopefully not counting. For that reason, NBC news includes the Europa in its Ten hotels that made history — so consider the others for comparison:

• the Ritz, Paris: Diana Spenser Windsor’s nookie joint before Pillar Thirteen, but more worthily the resort of Ernest Hemingway;
• the Crillon, Paris, notoriously the Gestapo’s favourite watering-hole in occupied Paris;
• the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where James Earl Ray did for Martin Luther King;
• the Greenbriar, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which was the Congressional nuclear bunker and Cold War funk hole, a.k.a. ‘Project Greek Island’;
• the Berchtesgaden Resort, built on the site of Hitler’s Bavarian pad;
• etc., etc.

To be truthful, Belfast is, was and always will be a long, long way from being a ‘beautiful’ city. Nobody is likely to croon that they left their heart in Belfast City, though it has its television transmitter high on a hill, and The morning fog may chill the air (and on occasion, not clear all day) — admittedly the sea is rarely blue, but it can certainly be windy.

The place can certainly do with a golden sun to shine for anyone.

OK: it’s irrelevant to the main argument here; but let’s do it:

Potential

By the millennium the two main cities of Northern Ireland, Belfast and Derry (let’s leave the wasteland of ‘Craigavon’ out of this), were both in positions to exploit their considerable waterfront potentials. Both did so, though — as Northern Irish politics go — the main money stayed east of the Bann.

In Belfast, with the demise of Harland and Woolf, there was one of the largest inner-city brown sites in Europe: though London’s King’s Cross ought to have beaten it for  the funny moolah (but that industrial desert had been hanging around, unexploited, for decades). Some smartass promptly designated the old H&W acres the ‘Titanic Quarter’ — and a legend was born:

Gosh: how Mediterranean! All we need now is the little cable cars.

Bayeux Tapestry — phooey!

Yes, Malcolm has seen it. And preferred the booklet version with added colouring. Apart from anything else, the dog-Latin makes more sense when it’s highlighted and not faded into oblivion. Nor, last August, were Malcolm’s grandsons greatly impressed either. Once seen, noted, included in school projects, soon forgotten.

But this is different:

The most expensive piece of Titanic memorabilia sold at auction – the 33-feet long design plan – is coming back to Belfast.

The 100-year-old scale drawing was sold last year in England for almost a quarter of a million pounds, but the anonymous buyer has agreed for it to go on show at the new Titanic visitor centre in Belfast.

The huge plan, regarded as the Holy Grail of Titanic memorabilia, shows the intricate detail of the ship – from the location of the squash court, to the Turkish baths to the first-class lavatories.

That omits a few crucial details:

• why is such an artefact worth only a couple of hundred grand at auction?
• how was it abstracted from the H&W plans office, except to be an exhibit at the official enquiry (still has the chalk markings drawn on it in 1912 to show where the iceberg struck — which must surely be ‘Crown copyright‘)?
• how genuine is the ‘provenance’ of ownership, and can we be told it, please?
• why, for heaven’s sake, is such an object not in public ownership, one way or another?

If this major piece of naval architecture arrives back at the Drawing Office (there, to the left of the picture), overlooking the Thompson Graving Dock, and is put on public view (admission will of course be charged), we have a feature which, so far, has been seriously missing from the whole Titanic farrago.

Except …

One important element in the legend has already been returned to Belfast.

The three great behemoths — the Olympic, the Titanic and the Gigantic (rapidly renamed Britannic) — were too big to enter Cherbourg harbour. Cherbourg was a major port for accepting passengers, both of the haut-ton and those rough, but profitable steerage emigrants. So a pair of tenders was commissioned, also from H&W: the Nomadic for the quality, and the Traffic for the plebs. Now aren’t those evocative, telling names? As with everything else in the Titanic story, we are not all in this together:

When that ship left England it was making for the shore,
The rich refused to ‘sociate with the poor,
So they put the poor below,
They were the first to go.
It was sad when that great ship went down.

The Nomadic is the noble vestige of the great days of Belfast shipbuilding, and likely now to be a permanent resident.

She has a heroic history, serving in two World Wars: first as a minesweeper and a ferry for American dough-boys arriving at Brest, then — in the second Unpleasantness — evacuating refugees from Cherbourg in 1940, then requisitioned by the Royal Navy as a minelayer and general transport. Back in post-war France Nomadic was again a tender to the great liners,until air-travel made that a memory, then a Parisian floating restaurant and night-club.At her lowest ebb, she was seized for debts, and bound for the breakers, so in 2006 the Northern Irish  Department for Social Development divvied up €250,001 to bring her home to Belfast, where is being conserved and restored.

Perhaps the best is yet to come.

No road through Knockmore

Here’s an awful warning:

That’s from the Rail Accident Investigation Branch web-site. The RAIB is — finally — being allowed into the secret, two months on.

Yesterday evening, the BBC News website had picked up the story and published this:

More than 100 people escaped injury after a train ran over a section of damaged railway in County Antrim.
However, the full incident, which took place on 28 June, was not reported to an investigation team for two months.
The driver was unable to stop before the first of six carriages had run onto an unsupported section of track.
The train was bound for the Irish open golf tournament, over a line not normally used for passenger services.
The train did not derail and was reversed away.
The Rail Accident investigation Branch (RAIB) is looking into the incident at Knockmore, outside Lisburn at 07:05 on 28 June.

So that’s all right, then?

Not really.

At first sight this looks like a repeat of another near disaster when the Broadmeadow Viaduct, near Malahide, north of Dublin, was washed away. That was on the main Dublin-Belfast line (and on a major commuter route). Iarnród Éireann hadn’t inspected the viaduct, which was known from previous erosion to have stability problems, for three days.

The Knockmore line, of course, does not have that strategic importance — though, arguably, it has considerable potential:

It could provide a corridor through Antrim to the north coast and to Derry. Currently the intention remains to upgrade the A5 trunk road  from Derry to the south. This involves a total cost of at least £850 million — that estimate is already three years old. And only last week, the lead constructor, Mouchel, went bust. Meanwhile the fragile rail link along the spectacular coastline of County Londonderry is closed for many months — while the grand and long-overdue sum of £75 million is spent on it. Do the comparisons.

Beyond that, Belfast has two under-used airports (City of Derry is NI’s unsatisfactory and even more under-used third — it is right on the rail line, too): the Westminster Northern Ireland committee is taking minutes and lasting months chewing on all this. Dublin airport, by comparison, is heavily patronised, and — until recent cut-backs — was going to get a second runway, long enough for direct flights to the Far East. The Knockmore branch runs immediately behind the terminal at Belfast International: it could easily connect with central Belfast, and Dublin (particularly so, if and when the Metro North plan were implemented).

Politics. Politics. Politics.

The old Unionist regime at Stormont disgracefully ripped up the Ulster rail network. There may have been an economic case for retrenchment and “rationalisation”; but the main issue was to break unnatural connections with those damnable Fenians in the Free State. So a whole swathe of natural links were abruptly severed. Anyway, the motor car was the future.

From that, notice how , when the Malahide viaduct went down, so did any north-south link. Any rolling stock north was stuck there.

That map is unfair in that it omits the real improvements in the Dublin commuter belt — unlike Belfast which is liable to a daily tail-back along every arterial route. North of the Dublin commuter lines there isn’t a millimetre of electrified track; and any mass transport system to alleviate the Belfast photochemical smog — an airport tram, for one obvious example — is systematically rubbished. The present “dynamic” pie-in-the-sky is a “rapid-transit”, based — believe it or not — on Las Vegas. It amounts to a bendy-bus.

Knockmore is a symptom of wilful neglect

In this climate, the rail sector in Northern Ireland will continue to decline and decay.

Malcolm is left bemused left bemused by the bizarre insouciance evident in the Knockmore incident:

• A span of some fifteen sleepers and tracks was unsupported. A train was seemingly sent down that track, which is usually-unauthorised for passenger service, apparently without proper inspection. For heaven’s sake, were there any doubt s over the security of the line, why not run a pilot loco along it? That (and proper daily inspection by linesmen) was the Victorian approach — and still (linesmen apart) the norm for many lines.

• The collapse and a near calamity has gone two months without being reported or (apparently) investigated.

Questions (as they say) must be asked.

Spot the deliberate mistake

From the BBC  News Northern Ireland website:

The Red Arrows have performed a fly-past over Belfast to mark the start of the Olympic Games.

Earlier, the bells on Londonderry’s two cathedrals and those at two venues in Belfast rang out in harmony in celebration of London 2012.

Well, “harmony” is either a clue — or a second invention.

Windy

Malcolm remembers his first, going on three decades back. It was on Orkney. On its own it was impressive.

Then he met the massed ranks in his first sight of a wind-farm. That was beside the InterState, I10, heading across the desert, eastwards out of California.

Since then, they haver ceased to be remarkable, have become a commonplace.

Except here’s something clipped from a spectacular and disquieting image on the BBC website. It’s captioned:

Stuart McMahon sent in this stunning image of a turbine at Ardrossan Windfarm bursting into flames during severe weather

Let us remember that this patch of Ayrshire is growing wind-turbines like mushrooms: the Clyde Windfarm is the biggest of the lot. It is all part of the SNP government’s attempt to make Scotland a net-exporter of energy.

Ardrossan

Once upon a time — until the mid-1970s, as Malcolm recalls — Burns and Laird ferries plied between Ardrossan and Belfast. Like all those crossings of the North Channel, you haven’t lived  or, depending on the state of your stomach, wished to die, until you’ve done one in a Force Ten (or worse). Coming out of Loch Ryan with the Princess Maud (an evil little tub at the best of times) doing winter-relief, and south-west into the teeth of a full gale: that was always the moment of truth. There are certain places not to be, especially after an Old Firm derby between Rangers and Celtic games. The booze flows, guts heave and fists fly.

Ardrossan is now a ferry port only to the Isle of Arran (which in itself used to have a certain inebriated reputation).

Flaming Nora!

All of that can be hot stuff, but nowhere near as fiery as that turbine.

Oh, and consider the Gaelic version: Àird Rosain — “the heights of the little headland”, which is why the wind-turbines are — or were —there.

Solidarity with Kevin Arscott

Perhaps this should be sub-titled:

The dunger and the dungee.

Back on 26th November 2009, “Uponnothing” put up a post on the Angry Mob site headed Paul Dacre Must Die.

The piece used language which goes beyond Malcolm’s usual vocabulary; but makes reasonable and reasoned points that the Daily Mail was out of its tree with an article by Sue Reid. Reid had spewed up a concatenation of xenophobia over the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s treatment of sick neonatal children. Most of the “evidence” Reid produced was skewed, distorted or downright wrong. The headline thrust is:

Countless red dots scattered across the world map on the wall of a NHS hospital reveal the story of the changing face of Britain.

Each dot denotes the background of a mother with a baby in the neonatal ward of London’s Chelsea and Westminster hospital. The map was put up by hospital administrators to ‘celebrate the ethnic diversity’ of the sick children treated there, each at a cost of £1,400 a day.

It shows dramatically how the NHS now treats patients from every corner of the globe.

The 243 mothers are from 72 different nations. They include Mongolia, the remotest regions of Russia, Japan, Africa, South America, swathes of Asia, Australasia and even Papua New Guinea.

Only 18 mothers said they were from Britain.

This is expanded as:

Mothers-to-be target this country as ‘health tourists’ for a variety of reasons. Some do so because they face a difficult birth and want expert care unavailable in their home countries.

Others have been told by doctors abroad that their baby will be born with a profound illness, needing a lifetime of treatment and medicines. They know the NHS will provide this with few questions asked even if the bill reaches millions of pounds.

Only a long way down, when emotions have been worked up with such filth, is the small-print rebuttal:

Last night, a spokesperson for Chelsea and Westminster said that the hospital cared for patients from many different backgrounds, reflecting London’s population. The map was intended to illustrate the diversity of the families of babies on the ward. 

The hospital also issued the following statement: ‘ Chelsea and Westminster Hospital is a specialist referral centre and cares for patients of many different backgrounds, reflecting London’s very diverse population.

‘Of the 550 babies admitted to our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) every year, a very small number of these are overseas patients.  In 2009, there have been just two overseas admissions.

‘The map was placed in the NICU nearly four years ago to provide the families of the babies we care for, as well as staff, with an opportunity to indicate their background if they wished. It is not an indication of country of residence or citizenship.

‘It was intended to illustrate the diversity of staff working on the unit and the families of the babies we care for, to encourage everyone to reflect on different cultures, in a fun and informal way.”

In other words, The Mail had managed to transform 2/550 into 225/243. In Mailese 0.36% = 92.6%. Dr Joseph Goebbels (a regular feature in Daily Mail columns over many years — most recently hailed as an Olympic-class seducer) would be envious of such manipulation.

Now, thanks to Liberal Conspiracy, we hear that the Daily Mail has caught up with ”Uponnothing”, a.k.a. Kevin Arscott:

Kevin Arscott of the ‘Angry Mob‘ blog is a reasonably well-known figure in the British blogosphere, one of several bloggers who specialise in tracking and exposing some of the worst excesses of tabloid and mid-market newspapers.

This morning, a bit of a kerfuffle has broken out on Twitter after Kevin received a nastygram from the Daily Mail’s lawyers threatening him with a libel action if he didn’t remove a two-year old post from his blog.

Kevin took down his post, but it can still be read via Google’s cache.

Its worth reviewing some of the text of the letter that’s been sent to Kevin:

It has come to our client’s attention that a page on the website at http://www.angrymob.uponnothing.co.uk/home/43-somethingmademeangry/805-paul-dacre-must-die is being used to publish material which is seriously abusive and defamatory of Mr Dacre.

In a different context, Malcolm was reflecting on the doings of the “loyalist” paramilitaries in Belfast these last few days. He found himself reminded of Alasdair McDonnell’s comment:

Getting expelled from the UDA for criminality is like getting expelled from the Ku-Klux-Klan for racism.

Paul Dacre complaining about the abusive and defamatory is similarly perverse.

By one of the wonders of the internet, Dacre and the Mail have wished on themselves what Fred the Shred and Ryan Giggs got, not least in the columns of the Mail, with their “super-injunctions”.

Not quite a Goliath

The BBC Scottish website is showing a quite remarkable clip of:

The UK’s biggest crane [which] has passed under the Forth bridges on its way to Fife at the end of a 14,000-nautical mile sea voyage.

Then we read the small print:

At 68m high, the Goliath crane is taller than the Wallace Monument.

As they used to say at Stockton Rugby Club: I am a fairy. My name is Nuff. Fair Enough. Or, as Shania (for the sheer hell of it) would have it:

You think you’re cool but have you got the touch
Don’t get me wrong, yeah I think you’re alright
But that won’t keep me warm on the long, cold, lonely night
That don’t impress me much.

For we know who has two and they’re even bigger:

Goliath is 96 metres (315 ft) tall, and Samson is 106 metres (348 ft).

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no:22

Gosh, it’s a long while since we had one of these. The last (as Malcolm’s fallible memory goes) was Lia Clarke, eighteen months back.

This one might, semi-usefully, be sub-titled

Eat …  even your heart out, Mike Hancock.

However, Malcolm goes with the flow and submits:

Edmund Hope Verney (6 April 1838 to 8 May 1910)

Fret not, our singular and regular reader: this one has a (vaguely) Irish connection.

Verney came to Malcolm’s attention this Wednesday with lot 1290 of Sworder’s auction sale of:

John Diller, Marlborough Street, London, an oak cased instrument set, in two sections, with an engraved plaque, ‘Edward Hope Verney RN’, with compasses, rules, and a large brass rule, label reads ‘For Travelling, Writing and Dressing Cases’

Sworders placed an estimate of £150-200 on the lot: it sold for £170.

Sworders added a catalogue note:

Edmund Hope Verney (1838-1910), from 1885 Liberal MP for North Buckinghamshire, in 1891 expelled from Parliament and sentenced to one year imprisonment for a misdemeanour (procuring a girl under the age of twenty one for immoral purposes), 1877 captain on the Royal Navy, 1884 retired. [sic]

Somebody got a bargain.

There is a biography in the DNB, though it is discreetly subsumed under that of his wife, Lady Margaret Verney (1844-1930, the protagonist of Welsh higher education and historian of the Verney family). On this occasion, the wikipedia version is not only more accessible, but more pertinent.

Edmund Verney, RN

Verney joined the Navy from Harrow School, aged fourteen. That took him to the Crimea and to the Indian mutiny, in both of which he distinguished himself and was decorated.

His recollection of the Indian business were published as The Shannon’s Brigade in India (1862). One might fairly speculate what Verney was up to with this (apart from publicising Lieutenant Verney of the Shannon): it is essentially a hero-worshipping of the meteoric Captain Sir William Peel, third son of Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, a fellow Old Harrovian, winner of the Victoria Cross in the Siege of Sebastopol, with the Guards at the Battle of Inkerman, wounded at the Relief of Lucknow, and dead at Cawnpore at the age of thirty-four.

He even found time to build a branch line to link the family estate to the Great Northern Railway.

Then Verney was off to the west coast of Canada between 1862-5, which must, at that moment, have been a sensitive posting. Canada was working up to Confederation. The frontier with the United States (including that with Alaska) was still being tested. His letters from this posting, too, were published, and Verney found the country more interesting than the people. The odd bit of plunder found its way back to the British Museum.

Then to his final naval posting, on the West Coast of Africa. Nor would this one be a “cushy” billet: there were still slavers (carrying cargo to South America) to be frustrated. Meanwhile Verney had been wounded in a shooting accident, back home on the Sandy, Bedfordshire, estate, which left him partially disabled, and caused his retirement from active service. He was appointed to the coastguard in Liverpool (1875), and eventually was raised to Captain (1877).

Politics

Verney’s public interest in Liberal politics seems to coincide with his engagement to and then marriage with Margaret Maria Williams (right), who was developing into one of those formidable do-gooders who represent all that David Cameron would wish his “Big Society” to be. She was particularly involved in education and heathcare, both in the Verney feudal fief of Bedfordshire and in her family’s perch in Anglesey.

In 1868 Verney was the Liberal also-ran for the Great Marlow constituency, where he was seen off by the Tory scion of the Wethered brewing dynasty. In 1874 in Anglesey (that Williams connection) and at Portsmouth (the naval one) he also failed, until he entered the Commons as MP for Buckinghamshire (1885-6 and 1889 until he was unseated). He was simultaneously a London County Councillor for Brixton. He had laid down a marker by publishing Four Years of Protest in the Transvaal, A Poem from the South African in 1881, which was no verse but a tract against imperialism. Verney was on the side of the angels in the matter of Irish Home Rule; though, his voting record apart, the only parliamentary utterance Malcolm has so far found is a small clash with A.J.Balfour over police “shadowing” (i.e. heavily accompanying Home Rule suspects, in this case in Tipperary).

Dish the dirt!

In October 1890 a warrant was issued for the arrest of a “Mr Wilson” on a charge that he counselled and procured, and conspired to procure, a female for immoral purposes, so in breach of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.

We may need to note this Act further, perhaps in an addendum to this post.

“Wilson” had been named, and the arrest warrant issued, as a result of the trial of Madame Eugenie Rouillier, who had been charged with attempting to procure a 19-year-old, Nellie Maude Baskett for immoral purposes. Miss Baskett was whipped off to Paris (as Mme Rouillier’s “travelling companion”) and introduced to various gentlemen. In giving evidence, Nellie reckoned that “Wilson” conducted himself in such a manner that she realised what his intentions were; and nipped back home to London next day.

The following April Nellie was with her mother in Westminster where she recognised Verney: she clutched her mother’s arm and said ‘Mother, there is the beast Wilson!’ Henry Labouchere’s journal (for whom, see addendum below) Truth was forward in publishing the juicy details.

Faced with a succession of witnesses who indentified Verney as “Wilson”, Edmund Verney pleaded guilty on all charges, and on 6th May 1891 was sentenced to twelve months. On 12th May he was expelled from the House of Commons.

After release, Verney retired to the family estate at Claydon, where he occupied himself collecting Bibles (there were a couple — a 1640 Puritan Bible, sold for £330, and a Breeches Bible of 1603, sold for £200 — at that same auction sale on Wednesday). He inherited the baronetcy in 1894. His wife, Lady Margaret Maria Verney, continued her good works in North Wales and Buckinghamshire long after Verney was dead.

___________________________________________________________________

Addendum:

What are you doing with that hand, Henry?

That Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 is notable for the Labouchere Amendment, named in “honour” of the MP who proposed it. In more general parlance it was “the blackmailer’s charter”. It was the clause under which gay men could be, and were, prosecuted. It was the clause under which Oscar Wilde was imprisoned; and it also did for Edward de Cobain, MP for Belfast East the year after Verney was sent down.

Henry Labouchere (right) was one of the more expert politickers of his day: a journalist and radical Liberal (and a closet agnostic, who was able to deign himself “the Christian member for Northampton”, since his fellow MP for the city was Bradlaugh). He invented Gladstone as “The Grand Old Man”. His great contribution to Anglo-Irish affairs was active support for Home Rule, and unmasking Richard Pigott as the forger behind the Parnell stitich-up. Queen Victoria vetoed his appointment to the Cabinet because his journal Truth was so scabrous.

The (in modern terms) stain on Labouchere’s record is his homophobia. His amendment to the 1885 Act poisoned British society for many subsequent decades. His only regret about Oscar Wilde’s sentence was its brevity: his original amendment suggested a seven year sentence.

Edward de Cobain

Edward Samuel Wesley de Cobain was Tory MP for Belfast East 1885-1892 (in the 1886 General Election he took 80% of the vote over a Nationalist).

In April 1891 a warrant was issued for his arrest, charged with the commission of unnatural offences in Belfast. He was already out of the jurisdiction, having taken a boat from Goole to the Continent.

de Cobain was “invited” to resign his seat in the Commons; but refused to do so, on the grounds that it would be a confession of guilt. He let it be known that the charges were political, machinated by a cabal in Belfast and by the Tory administration (not a lot , then, has changed on the Belfast political scene in the last century). de Cobain was expelled from the Commons on 26th February 1892. Gustav Wolff (indeed!) was elected at the by-election, and was unopposed for the next five parliaments.

The fugitive was seen in Bilbao and in Boulogne, before arriving in New York, where he was organising revivalist meetings. Back in Belfast (February 1893) he was arrested and put on trial. His defence was that a young man named Haggie with whom:

he had conversed … at several temperance demonstrations, and subsequently treated him with courtesy and familiarity. Taking advantage of this intimacy, the young man asked for a considerable sum of money, which he had refused.

The jury chose not to believe de Cobain: sentence: twelve months with hard labour.

The greit navie of Norlin Airlann

It sprang from a casual tweet by Eamonn Mallie:

A row has broken out over Ag Minister Michelle Gildernew’s decision to name new Fisheries Protection vessel Banrion Uladh. DUP not happy.

Well, Eamonn, as P.G.Wodehouse might have said, were Blandings and Stormont transposed:

It is never difficult to distinguish between a DUPer with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

And few can hold a grievance quite so unremittingly.

Yet Malcolm’s eyes are now opened.

Northern Ireland has a navy!

It may not be as large as that of Switzerland, which has no fewer than ten vessels to patrol the international borders on Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano. Still, it says here:

We have responsibility for sea fisheries, aquaculture and fish health policy; the enforcement of fisheries legislation; the licensing of aquaculture; fishing vessel licensing; the administering of fisheries grant schemes and supporting the operation of the Foyle, Carlingford and Irish Lights Commission (FCILC).

We are based in Dundonald House, Belfast with Fisheries Offices in the three main fishing ports of Ardglass, Kilkeel and Portavogie.

We operate a fisheries protection vessel, the Ken Vickers, to assist with the conservation and protection of fish stocks.

Now the good ship Ken Vickers habitually lies at Bangor, generally bothering nobody except a passing photographer, but providing a cosy refuge for resting gulls. As the geograph.ie site caustically captions a 2004 image:

Although the fishery protection launch “Ken Vickers” is based at Bangor marina it is unusual to see it underway. This was only the second time in ten years.

Changes, though, are afloat. In February of this year the FPV Ken Vickers engaged in international manoevres with the Irish LE Orla and the Scottish FPV Norna out of Campbeltown.

Which leaves some unanswered questions:

• Are Michelle Gildernew, Richard Lochhead (who has four vessels and two aircraft at his behest), and cheesy Brendan Smith (with some real firepower) about to launch a campaign against the English and Welsh littoral, once their forces outnumber the rapidly-reducing “Royal Navy”?
• With which armada will the Welsh naval force, the FPVs Crangowen and (half of the) Aegis sail?
• Or, was this merely the rehearsal for the Anglo-French aircraft carriers project?

Flagging down

Slugger O’Toole has a daily feature by John Baucher, under his alias “Moochin Photoman”. Baucher regularly produces highly-telling images from the streets of Belfast, saying far more than any word-picture.

Today’s is this:

Baucher captions this as: Seriously, though, where is the respect?

Vexillology

Malcolm likes that word. He suspects this may well be the first time he has had the opportunity to deploy it. It means “the study of flags“.

There must be, somewhere, a learned thesis on the sociology of flags: socio-vexillology, if one must invent the sub-discipline. Malcolm hasn’t stumbled on that exegesis yet. For which he is grateful.

Flags are intended to be unifying: since that means “us” against “them”, they are therefore causes of division. Nowhere more so than in Northern Ireland. There the rival flags are demarkation lines, Proddy dogs and papes marking territories. They so love their flags, the two sides adopt Israeli and Palestinian flags as surrogates.

This raises issues:

• Is the Irish tricolour of greater socio-psycho-vexillological importance than its reverse image as the flag of the Ivory Coast?
• Does Ulster protestants’ enthusiasm for the Dutch football team stem from lingering recognition of King Billy’s continental mercenary army? Or is it a visceral addiction to orange shirts?
• Why should the surest way to have a letter published in the Times or the Telegraph be to observe the national flag being flown upsidedown?

Brenda to call on President Mary?

There is some speculation that one obstacle to the proposed State Visit to Ireland involves the display of the British flag. This was even a difficulty at the time of Edward VII’s 1903 royal visit. The solution was to use Bertie’s racing colours (purple and scarlet: conveniently, those also of his great-grand-daughter). This tit-bit crops up in Joyce’s Ulysses:

– Well! says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.
– Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There’s a bloody sight more pox than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!
– And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in his Satanic Majesty’s racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.
– They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little Alf.
And says J. J.:
– Considerations of space influenced their lordship’s decision.

That might be derived from a letter W.B.Yeats wrote to the United Irishman (1 August 1903):

Sir—I read in the English Times of July 25th this description of the room prepared for the King’s reception at Maynooth: ‘The King’s room afforded a very pleasant instance of the thoughtful courtesy of his hosts; for by a happy inspiration hardly to have been expected in such a quarter, the walls were draped in His Majesty’s racing colours, and carried two admirable engravings of Ambush II and Diamond Jubilee…

Slugging it out

Malcolm, predictably, is cynical about all such historico-socio-psycho-vexillological debate. Even so, he posted to that Slugger O’Toole thread with a economico-historico-socio-psycho-vexillological observation.

In acknowledgement of Moochin Photoman’s original point he appended a headline:

My name is mud

It’s a piece of cloth, for heaven’s sake. Don’t worship it. It’s a disposable commodity.

Meanwhile, in the world of commerce, the usually- and appropriately-distressed Union Flag (yeah: respec’ — I gave it capital letters) has never been so popular for furnishings et al. A prime reason for that is the (rival) Stars-and-Stripes has entrenched rights in the US legal Code (titles 4 and 36), which lay down how the flag can be shown, used and not used, and how it can be disposed of with appropriate dignity. All of which ensures that elsewhere it is symbolically burned with remarkable frequency.

Half the bars I (occasionally) frequent in the tri-State region seem to display a small hardwood box containing a carefully-folded flag with an inscribed plaque. Almost inevitably, it flew for a few hours over the 9/11 site.

Similarly, there’s the small fragment of the old Lansdowne Road turf decaying on the Irish Club wall, here in London. Now that is worth the reverence.

Malcolm in the first person!
At long last! Never say Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service lacks innovation!