City(e)scape 2

Still with the Times Literary Supplement, Malcolm recognised many locations in J . Mordaunt Crook’s review:

London: Hidden Interiors — sponsored by English Heritage, in all the glory of digital polychrome … With 1,700 images of some 180 buildings, it guides the reader from Central London to the suburbs; spiralling out from Westminster, the West End and Mayfair to Soho, Covent Garden, Fitzrovia and Clerkenwell; then on to the City and its eastern fringes, winding clockwise around the capital’s southern suburbs, before moving westwards and terminating in the north. The text by Philip Davies is crisp and informative; the photographs by Derek Kendall are a revelation.

In short, a glossy coffee-table book, but none the worse for that. £40 on the label, but Amazon are knocking it out for £28. Malcolm is severely tempted.

Industrial majesty and might

What got to Malcolm wasn’t necessarily those grandiose palaces (which he has, in many cases, passed through) but the lesser, more unapproachable, even more domestic places. There is, for example, the alternative splendour of Battersea Power Station (which Christopher Fowler featured when he reviewed, briefly, this book):

Of this Crook says:

Battersea Power Station is only too well known. Outside, it is the biggest brick building in Europe. Inside, its mighty Control Room — all switches, buttons and flickering dials — seems like an Art Deco vision from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Yet, in a way, its electronic marvels are eclipsed in memory by engineering of quite a different sort. Crossness Engine House SE2 — the greatest achievement of the Metropolitan Board of Works — survives today as a cathedral or iron. It was opened in1865, and its throbbing machinery is guarded by sinuous polychrome grills and powered by the largest rotative beam engine in the world. It was designed to pump thousands of gallons of sewage into the ebbing tide of the Thames. This is function carried to the level of sublimity.

One thing is sure: millions of tourists visit London. How many will see such temples of industry? Indeed, how many Londoners have ventured to Crossness? They should. They really should:

A sense of déjà vu all over again?

When we see these images, even those who have never, ever, been in London, feel there is something familiar. There’s the Midland Bank vault on Poultry, just opposite the Bank of England:

Now, err … where do we see that? Ah! Goldfinger!

And again:

That’s the Masonic Temple, hidden in the depths of what used to be the Great Eastern Hotel at Liverpool Street (now the Andaz). Cit gents could nip in for a quick roll-up of the trouser leg before heading back to the sticks of East Anglia. You are told, when you penetrate this holy-of-holies that it was rediscovered by accident by the renovation works in 1997. Now it hired for weddings, hoolies, fashion shows and film shoots.

The 134 bus route to Redfellow Hovel

There’s a couple of these interiors, far less grand but worth the visit, on Malcolm’s road home:

In Muswell Hill Broadway [Davies] drops in on Martyn’s family grocers: its barrels of biscuits, its sacks of coffee, all marshalled with military precision.

If Martyn’s don’t have it, it’s not worth the tasting. When coffee is being roasted, the whole neighbourhood knows about it.

And:

In Kentish Town Road, he even marvels at the droopy garments in Bluston’s window: “frocks and gowns for the older woman” (also listed Grade II).

That’s the shop-front, one trusts. Not the “older woman”. The star “frock”, laid out now for some long time, has been a red-spotted outfit, which always reminds Malcolm of Minnie Mouse.

An afterthought

By a strange symbiosis, there’s another attraction on the 134 bus route in this week’s TLS. It’s the very last item on the back page, from that NB Londoners page noted previously:

We know that people say weird things to people who work in bookshops, which is the premiss of More Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops …

All are related by Jen Campbell, who works at Ripping Yarns, a secondhand bookshop in London …

Now, let’s be precise here. Ripping Yarns is on the corner where Southwood Lane becomes Muswell Hill Road, and intersects with the fag end of the Archway Road. Right opposite Highgate tube station and the Woodman pub.

Malcolm knows it well. Once there, pubs not intervening, he’s nearly home.

City(e)scape 1

The current issue of The Times Literary Supplement, despite the exotic and even scary cover (Beauty and terror), has something of a metropolitan theme (and will keep Malcolm happy for these couple of posts)

Joycean

With both The Guardian‘s  Doonesbury strip and the TLS rear-gunner NB (initialled J. C., so assume James Campbell) Malcolm starts at the back and works forward. Since J.C. subtitles NB as ‘Londoners’ we know where we’re heading. It’s a subtle sophistication: NB‘s first and main item concerns James Joyce in London  (‘Londoners’ — geddit?)

This includes the quite perverse statement:

In an article in the current James Joyce Quarterly, Gordon Bowker writes that the Irish writer’s link with the former ruling power “has not received the attention it deserves”.

Really? Really?

Malcolm diffidently suggests that Bowker revisits Oxen of the Sun. What Joyce does there is filter the authentic voices of Dublin through the tradition of ‘English’ authors, or rather those represented by a couple of contemporary collections: William Peacock’s The English Prose: From Mandeville to Ruskin (1903) and George Saintsbury’s The Anthology of English Prose (1912). Anyone who, like Malcolm, studied the snippets anthologised for Leaving Certificate (1960) will see where this sub-litcrit is coming from.

Those who wrestle Joyce’s Episode into submission may well do so with help from the explanatory letter Joyce sent Frank Budgen on 20 March 1920:

Am working hard at Oxen of the Sun, the idea being the crime committed against fecundity by sterilizing the act of coition. Scene, lying-in hospital. Technique: a nineparted episode without divisions introduced by a Sallustian-Tacitean prelude (the unfertilized ovum), then by way of earliest English alliterative and monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon (‘Before born the babe had bliss. Within the womb he won worship.’ ‘Bloom dull dreamy heard: in held hat stony staring’) then by way of Mandeville (‘there came forth a scholar of medicine that men clepen etc’) then Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (‘but that franklin Lenehan was prompt ever to pour them so that at the least way mirth should not lack’), then the Elizabethan chronicle style (‘about that present time young Stephen filled all cups’), then a passage solemn, as of Milton, Taylor, Hooker, followed by a choppy Latin-gossipy bit, style of Burton-Browne,  then  a  passage  Bunyanesque  (‘the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whore whose name she said is Bird in the hand’) after a diarystyle bit Pepys-Evelyn (‘Bloom sitting snug with a party of wags, among them Dixon jun., Ja. Lynch, Doc. Madden and Stephen D. for a languor he had before and was now better, he having dreamed tonight a strange fancy and Mistress Purefoy there to be delivered, poor body, two days past her time and the midwives hard put to it, God send her quick issue’) and so on through Defoe-Swift and Steele-Addison-Sterne and Landor-Pater-Newman until it ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English, nigger English, Cockney, Irish, Bowery slang and broken doggerel. This progression is also linked back at each part subtly with some foregoing episode of the day and, besides this, with the natural stages of development in the embryo and the periods of faunal evolution in general. The double-thudding Anglo-Saxon motive recurs from time to time (‘Loth to move from Horne’s house’) to give the sense of the hoofs of oxen. Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.

Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1966), pp. 139-40.

Hardly hidden in there is the Anglo-Irish thing that plagues us all: Swift (born Dublin, 1667), Steele (born Dublin, 1672), Burke (born Dublin, 1729), Goldsmith (born Roscommon or Longford, probably 1730) — all who made their reputations in London. In fact the ‘nationality’ crisis is implicit throughout: Mandeville was really Jan de Langhe from Ypres, a Fleming writing in Norman-French, Sir Thomas Maleore may have been Welsh … Newman, the London High Anglican who translated himself from London to Dublin(at the request of the Irish bishops) establishing the Catholic University of Ireland.

Anyway, back to J.C. filleting that James Joyce Quarterly:

The English were generous to Joyce, Bowker says: he received a grant from the Society of Authors and a pension from the Royal Literary Fund. In 1923, T.S.Eliot, who would later publish Finnegans Wake at Faber, took him to see (in Eliot’s words) “some of the waste lands around Chichester”. On a gravestone in Sidlesham churchyard, Joyce read the name “Earwicker”. Thus, Bowker writes, “an ancient English name stands at the centre of Finnegans Wake and winds through it”.

Nora Barnacle, who loved London, went shopping while Jim And Anna Livia set about enlarging basic Irish-English. He and Nora were married at Kensington Register Office in 1931 (Pound was married at the church next door). In the Electoral Register for 1931-2, James Joyce of 28b Campden Grove is listed as eligible for jury service. The other tenants were Nora and May Joyce … A neighbour was called Miss Gertrude Stein.

Quite what all of that ‘proves’, beyond West London being then, as now, cosmopolitan and liter-arty, is beyond Malcolm’s comprehension.

Who owns Pythagoras?

Or photosynthesis? Or 9 x 7 = 63?

Daft, isn’t it?

Then we hit upon this, from Stephanie McCurry, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement:

It has become increasingly difficult to say anything new about the American Civil War or even just to tell a different tale … [with] … a marketplace with seemingly inexhaustible demand for another version of the familiar story and the understandable desire of experts to shape public history.

As a well-bred Belfast girl, Professor McCurry will know all about the problem of who owns history. And that ‘history’ is not just a recital of Great Dead White Men.

The lustre of lucre

Note, though, she also brings in the commercial aspect: the gurus who have cornered the media market in their particular expertise. Tudors without Starkey? Unthinkable! The last word on Hitler? Well, Kershaw must be into the quarter-finals!

A couple of weeks on from the Old Vic production, Malcolm’s mental sound-track goes on full volume:

From Ohio, Mister Thorn
Calls me up from night till morn:
Mister Thorn once cornered corn and that ain’t hay!
But I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my fashion —
Yes, I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my way!

Read between Cole Porter’s lines, and Lois would do anything for her Great White Men.

More hay

So, this afternoon, there was Malcolm at the old-reliable London Pride in the Famous Royal Oak (well, it’s famed within a quarter-mile of Muswell Hill’s St James’s Lane). He has Professor McCurry flitting about his consciousness when he reaches the Comment & Debate page of the Guardian, and another contender for Ms Lane’s transient affections:

Harvardian Ferguson
Says I’m really quite très bonne:
If that’s the Harvard ton, and he’s really on … Okay!

… well, mainly on his own status and importance. As here:

It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

Only someone living in a dreaming Oxonian spire could be unaware of how badly this has turned out, despite the best efforts of thousands of hard-working teachers. I know because I have watched three of my children go through the English system, because I have regularly visited schools and talked to history teachers, and because (unlike Evans and Priestland, authors of rather dry works on, respectively, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) I have written and presented popular history. 

The new national curriculum is not flawless, to be sure. It runs counter to the advice I gave Gove by being much too prescriptive. The 34 topics to be covered by pupils between the ages of seven and 14 already read a bit like chapter titles and, if there is one thing I hope we avoid, it is an official history textbook (even if it’s written by Simon Schama).

Nothing like putting the boot (alongside a personal puff) in, Niall!

The rest of the piece has at least three other conditional clauses (if … if … If), four rhetorical questions, and rather more subjective first person singulars than is truly tasteful.

Yet, Ferguson has a point

It isn’t that history doesn’t sell. As Prof Steph (see above) opened that TES review:

Last December, thousands of Americans filed into cinemas to watch Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. While Congress was stuck in its usual deadlock, a disgusted public was momentarily delivered by the large-screen image of a heroic figure and a heroic America. As the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed and slavery abolished, people cried. They applauded.

Meanwhile, as both main UK channels (and many others) exploit shamelessly, costume drama and a bit of pseudo-history writ small (Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife) put bums on family sofas. Rescuing ‘Richard III’ (perhaps) from under the Nissans and Fords of the Leicester car-park played a PR blinder.

So a kind of “history” excites, enthuses, entertains. What is ‘taught’ in school fails miserably by comparison.

But what should it be? Let’s try and decode Ferguson:

If you want to understand what’s really wrong with history in English schools, read schoolteacher Matthew Hunter’s excellent essay in the latest issue of Standpoint. As Hunter rightly says, it’s not just the defective content of the old national curriculum that is the problem. It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

and (this is the on-line version, [not all of which made it into print]):

Among other things, the national curriculum explicitly aims to ensure that all pupils “know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history: the growth and decline of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires”; that they “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”; and that they “understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims”.

[At key stage 1, children will be introduced to "basic concepts" such as nation, civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace. At key stage 2, they will study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome.] As for “the essential chronology of Britain’s history”, to which Evans and Priestland object so strongly, it is a model of political correctness: not only Mary Seacole makes the cut, but also Olaudah Equiano – hardly escapees from Our Island Story.

What is missing there is: who owns history?

For those “basic concepts” are intensely and inescapably partial and ideological. Try a couple of thought experiments:

• Reconcile Cromwellian England into an approved primary-school perception of monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace.
• And how does the average eight- or ten-year-old meaningfully study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome? In the Goveian world-scheme, were Greece and Rome essentially slave-societies, or is the slavery thing a mere incidental to the cultural glories?

What sticks in Malcolm’s craw is, about the only time Roman slavery cropped up at Wells County Primary School, it involved Pope Gregory I and his Non Angli, sed angeli. Which may feature as every-window-tells-a-story in St Mary, Docking, as elsewhere, but as far as a critical observer can determine is as verifiable as Star Trek.  And, no, it’s not in Bede.

Two remaining issues

They’re in Ferguson, and implicit in the more cerebral McCurry:

• What is the authentic ‘scheme’ (which is what — in any sense of the word — a syllabus amounts to) for that overview of English and European history? Is it Anglocentric or Eurocentric? At the age of fifteen Malcolm switched from GCE “English and European history” to Irish Leaving Certificate “History”; and it was a painful re-appraisal, indeed.
• What is Ferguson’s gold standard of ‘historical knowledge’? Can he kindly provide, as a solid example, one single, absolute, indisputable, uncoloured ‘fact’? For, were he to do so, a whole phalanx of equally-eminent ‘historians’ would happily exhibit how that ‘fact’ could be, and has been ‘spun’. As Malcolm’s pert Young Piece never fails to repeat, a historical ‘fact’ is one which has been cited by a quantum (say, four) of historians. And a ‘historian’ is … precisely how qualified?

End piece

Consider, then, how Stephanie McCurry, in her shrewd Ulster way, presents ‘values’  rather than certainties, a basis of ‘interpretation’ rather than Ferguson’s ‘facts’, humanely and self-effacingly, warning but with a populist touch, and so concludes her extended review:

Civil War history is a growth industry. For authors, the opportunities are great, but so are the temptations — to repetition, over-reaching and jockeying for market share. There are valuable new interpretations emerging from the field, including a focus on the Civil War as a humanitarian crisis, and there are important voices cautioning against an embrace of war stories as the romanticisation of war itself. But in the fever of sesquicentennial commemoration nothing sells quite like President Lincoln and the war for emancipation. It makes the fantasy of Django Unchained to make the public focus even for a minute on the other America, the one that for so long had no problem with holding people as slaves.

Woosel

The Times Literary Supplement Crossword, number 957: 11 across — Drayton’s blackbird in grouse location.

Got it?

Well, you ought not to have done, because what Drayton actually wrote was:

The woosel near at hand, that hath a golden bill …

Which was a direct rip from what ol’ Bill Shakespeare wrote for Bottom to sing in Midsummer Night’s Dream (III.i.118):

The Woosell cock, so blacke of hews,
With Orange tawny bill.
The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill..

O.K., Titania: wakey! wakey!

Now, here’s a low thought …

How did Great Literature go from there to the bus, circa 1966, carrying Stockton Rugby Club‘s II and IV teams back from Newcastle City Colleges? It had been a bitterly-cold day, and Malcolm a particularly useless wing-forward.  Anyway, the bus was redolent with Newcastle Brown and entr’actes of The Wild West Show —

We are off to see the Wild West Show
With the elephants and the kangaroo [Chorus interposes: … Cor blimey!].
No matter the weather
As long as we’re together,
We’re off to see the Wild West Show.

Recitative: And in this cage we have the Ousel-Woozle Bird …
Amazed audience: The Ousel-Woozle Bird?
Recitative: Yes! Indeed! Yer actual Ousel-Woozle Bird!
These birds fly in a single line.
The biggest bird leads in front, followed by the next largest and so on down to the smallest at the … err … rear.
At the first sign of danger, the smallest bird flies up the behind of the bird in front.
And so on up the line.
The single remaining bird then flies round and round, faster and faster, in every decreasing circles until it disappears up its own fundamental orifice …
From which advantageous position,
It continues to pour life-giving nutriment
Upon the earth beneath.

Ladeez and Gennelmen!

We give you the ousel-wousel bird’s after-life … the Liberal Democrat Party!

See previous-but-one posting.

Smile and simile

Redfellow Hovel is convenient for the Olympian heights of Muswell Hill, where there is a branch of W.H.Smith. Fortunately there is also an excellent newsagent.

Hence, this very morning, Malcolm was faced with a choice:

• The London Review of Books with John Lancaster considering The Shit We’re In. Well, Malcolm reckons he knows about that already.
• The New York Review of Books, though not the latest issue, still seems preoccupied with how Obama was re-elected. Clue: he got more votes. What too often goes unrecognised is the natural majority for decency and fairness (which currently amounts to the moderate Democrats) — even in the House elections, the Dems outpolled the GOP by a million votes across the nation. Only the gerrymandered redistricting after the 2010 census skewed the popular will.

In stead Malcolm reached down and lifted his customary Times Literary Supplement, seduced as much by the prospect of an hour with the crossword as by the fetching Ingres on the front page. Which, as above, he now shares with you.

Not all was thereby lost, for Hugh Muir’s Guardian Diary column provides a small gem:

 Finally, to Alan Bennett’s Diary for 2012, which appears in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, specifically the entry for 2 May . “Jeremy Hunt has the look of an estate agent waiting to show someone a property,” says Bennett, ever wise. He does, doesn’t he?

 Helpfully, in the web edition, we find that aptly illustrated:

“… and the downstairs loo is this wide!”

However, that leaves Malcolm with a lit. crit, puzzlement.

Does Alan Bennett’s shrewd comparison, “has the look of”, amount to a full-blown simile?

Fancy that!

Why is it that old newsprint, about to be discarded, makes one last burst at survival, and unfailingly provides unexpected diversion?

Here was Malcolm collecting paper around the house, recycling bin for the filling therewith.

Here comes the Times Literary Supplement of 31 August.

Tom Shippey reviewing Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections on the Magic of Writing.

Malcolmian Wombling stopped instantly. Reading mode was engaged.

The book is:

a collection of some thirty pieces written over the years by the late Diana Wynne Jones.

Shippey identifies:

The themes which run through the collection are autobiography, thoughts on how to write and how books originate … and thirdly, robust defences of the value of fantasy and the importance of writing for children.

Were Malcolm being sniffy (and he is), he would wonder why the third of those should ever need robust defences. Fantasy is an essential element in any proper upbringing:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourishèd?
Reply, reply.
Is it engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and Fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring Fancy’s bell:
I’ll begin it, — Ding, dong, bell.

Put that into its context, Act III, scene ii, of The Merchant of Venice, and you have something very spooky indeed. That, too, is part of fantasy.

Half-way through his review Shippey opens a Cabinet of Dr Caligari:

Wynne Jones adds herself to the list of children’s authors — E.E.Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter — who had troubled early lives. She writes, “I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old”. Then, in August 1939, Diana and her sister were suddenly uprooted from London, driven to their grandparents’ home in Welsh-speaking Pontarddulais, and left to cope as best they could. It was not for long, for their mother came and fetched them back: not, it seems out of affection, but as a result of a blazing row with Aunt Muriel: “I see my relationship with my mother never recovered from this.” The children were soon packed off again, this time to Westmoreland, where they saw Arthur Ransome in a fury over the noise the children made — “He hated children” — and Diana’s sister Isobel was smacked by Beatrix Potter for swinging on her garden gate: “She hated children, too.”

Ah, sweet!

Quite how good this book is, Malcolm cannot authenticate. The reviewer seems to like it, and is convincing in his observations. It might be something worth seeking out. from a library, or watch for a second-hand copy perhaps: at £25 it looks hardly a steal (even Amazon want £17.50).

One final thought: whenever over the decades of teaching, Malcolm has come upon a well-balanced child, there tended to be an imagination at work, an ability to cross into worlds of fantasy, even a native delight in jokes and word-play. On the other hand, there are far too many warped minds, who — for one lack of reason or another — have been denied that fantasy. Sadly, too many of these minds are the victims of cults of one evil kind or another: the strict Moslem boy who rejected any kind of fiction on principle (someone else’s principle).

There are many good causes to scorn, even despise the verbose spoutings of Ms Rowling: religious wailing about Witchcraft! should never be one of them.

The end is nigh!

Much as he scorns many newspapers as trash, distasteful as he finds the views expressed, Malcolm is a newsprint addict.

Today, for almost the first time in a long while, he bought the Daily Telegraph. Well, not so quite bought and paid for it — that would be going too far. Although he has the till-slip to say so.

He was already buying the (far more respectable) Times Literary Supplement, albeit a day late — for literature, unlike news, doesn’t just provide tomorrow’s chip-wrapper. He happened to see that he would get £1.20 off the price if he also took the Daily Telegraph — cover price £1.20. Well, OK, since it’s a freebie. And the fires of Redfellow Hovel will ion be needing paper and kindling.

That now reminds Malcolm when he last bought the Torygraph. He was queuing at the book-stall at Waterloo Station, with his usuals, and about to add a dose of mineral water for the journey. Had he bought the water it would have cost rather more than the price, then, of the Torygraph. Buy the paper, get the water for free.

If anyone comprehends the logic and economics of all that, they are ahead of the game.

Which anecdote is tangential to what follows.

The legend is that, when and if the six ravens leave the Tower of London, the nation will collapse. Such things are taken seriously in Britain, so — for reasons of general morale — the ravens were cosseted through the London Blitz (spares were kept to hand, and still are, just in case). Now, myth and superstition aside, it keeps the tourists happy.

Which is also mere introduction and illustration to what follows.

So, at last, that uncredited story from today’s Telegraph:

Mute swans have been using their beaks to pull a rope to ask for bread at Bishop’s Palace in Wells, Somerset, since the 1800s.

The world-famous birds are trained to sound a bell which prompts their caretakers to throw food from a window.

They draw thousands of visitors every year to a moat around the palace, the home of the Bishops of the Diocese of Bath and Wells.

But the ancient tradition is now under threat after the latest birds to live on the water split up.

The birds – Bertie and Vicky – were only introduced in June after one of the previous swans died and his partner rehomed.

Bertie and Vicky had been struggling with their bell ringing training after they were intimidated by a group of resident ducks.

Now Bertie has flown the coup and vanished altogether leaving Vicky all alone – and the bells silent.

A palace spokesman said: “We can confirm that one of our swans is missing, the male one took to his wings and has taken flight. We have just his female companion now.

“We are hopeful that in fact he will decide the moat is an attractive place to live and return for good. But they are wild swans, they are free to come and go as they please.

“We do care for them, feed them and look after them. But these ones came from a sanctuary and are wild.

”Obviously we would like them to stay but if one wants to fly off we can’t stop them. However the female is here still, so we hope her mate will return.”

Swans were first taught to ring a bell for food by the daughter of Bishop Hervey in the 1870s – a tradition which has continued ever since.

The living quarters at the palace include a 700-year-old medieval gatehouse overlooking a moat which surrounds the official residence.

The caretaker’s sitting room sits just above the water line and outside of the mullioned window is a battered old bell attached to a rope.

Every time a swan is hungry it swims over to the wall where the bell hangs and it tugs on the rope and moments later someone throws out some food.

From 2006 two swans Ricky and Glinty were incumbents at the moat after they were given to the palace by the Queen.

But Ricky died and Glinty was given a new home at a swan reserve and Bertie and Vicky were brought in to replace them.

Palace caretakers Paul and Carol Arblasta later said the new couple couldn’t get the hang of the ‘ring once for food’ system.

They were struggling with the training and were being out-muscled by a group of bolshy ducks – who had also learned to ring the bell.

Even when Bertie and Vicky were able to ring the bells the ducks would swim over and chase them off- scoffing all the grub.

Paul said: ”These swans are very shy. At first, they didn’t even come to the window for a week and a half.

”We tried to train them to ring the bell but the ducks were ringing it instead.

”The swans were left looking bemused cocking their heads, amazed at what they were seeing.”

To train the swans bread is tied in clumps to the rope which attracts them to nibble at it and pull it off, causing the bell to ring.

Gradually, less and less bread is placed on the rope as the swans quickly understand that food will follow after the pull the rope and sound the bell.

Bertie first flew off a week ago and is believed to have made one last visit to his mate before deciding to abandon her for good.

Paul said if Bertie failed to return, another swan from a sanctuary would be introduced to stop the female from becoming too lonely.

Sad. Very.

Watch for it as the final “Hey, ain’t those Brits cute!” moment on every American news-channel.

Perhaps the ravens may go the same way.

Piling it on

So how’s the guilt pile coming on, Malcolm?

Not too well.

As predicted, Thursday Next edged out Giordano Bruno, and great fun it was, too.

Then, thanks to Diarmaid MacCullough’s headline review in The Times Literary Supplement, Malcolm went off onto a medieval tangent.

He is now engaged in a pedestrian trek (though it is no plod) through R.I.Moore’s The War on Heresy.

OK, OK: Malcolm is a sucker for anything Cathar; but Moore is the remedy to that addiction. The book’s sub-title gives the game away: Faith and power in medieval Europe.

So far Malcolm is a third of the way in, and still working up to Pope Innocent III and the Albigensian Crusade. Innocent? — hardly.

Moore has filleted contemporary and post-contemporary documents and chronicles to unearth repeated tales of innocence persecuted and ignorance sent to the pyre. In every case, the reader is left with awareness that all of it was a matter of social control.

As for “power”, at this stage of history power stemmed entirely from land-ownership. The church and the rising nobility were in competition for land. When there was a surfeit of land-hungry younger noble sons, pushing them into the church was one obvious solution. That necessitated celibate clergy, else church lands would be divided between married canons who would, in turn, generate dynasties hostile to the noble interests. So (as on page 61):

… the land of western Europe [was divided] into two distinct and watertight categories, transmitted on one side through blood and the sword, on the other by ordination and appointment to office. To be qualified to hold land in either capacity was ipso facto to be disqualified from doing so in the other. So fundamental was this distinction to the new European society being shaped in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that its dismantling by reformation and bloody revolution between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is now considered an essential pre-condition of modernity.

Phew!

You don’t get insight like that at a penny a pound.

Back to the guilt pile

As a result, the pile continues to teeter. While Malcolm is one Fforde down, he is otherwise up three. The Parris Sacrilege has slipped down the heap: there’s now the first book in the Bruno sequence, Heresy (see a connection at all?) atop and before it. There’s also:

• Michael Ondaatje: The Cat’s Table

and

• Niall Ferguson: Civilization, the Six Killer Apps of Western Power

Apart from the teeth-grrrinding triviality of that sub-title, Malcolm can help you. The six are: “multilevel competition”, scientific progress, English property laws, medical advances, the consumer society and that famous (and recently visited) protestant/calvinist work-ethic. There, didn’t that save time?

As far as Malcolm can quickly scan, “democracy” and “equality” do not feature at all. “Socialism” gets one fleeting reference (page 208-9). Oh, and:

… the 1968 revolution was all about clothes. [page 246]

But this is Ferguson, after all.

Pub-talk and legal parlance

When the rain came yesterday afternoon, Malcolm was emerging from the supermarket, laden. What to do? Silly question: turn right and, wind assisted, into the John Baird. Two pints of Fortyniner (yes: 4.9%) fortified the parts enough to struggle home.

What with Harvey‘s at the Hansom Cab on Friday, this was becoming something of a south-coast end to the week. As to that latter joint, follow Malcolm’s hot-link to John Walsh’s review for background, but trust not the views and comments therein: it’s a far, far better joint than than Walsh describes.

A Malcolmian aside

There’s this current vague (French, noun, female gender) for emphasising how many boozers are closing. And, yes, that’s sadly soundly-based.

The Irish Times is currently regaling us with an extended cri-de-coeur from Paul Cullen, under the title The pub loses its pulling power — as if any real pulling (apart from the subsequent interpersonal exchange of bodily fluids) has been going on in a land long devoted to top-pressure CO2 delivery.

Cullen rattles through the predictable:

Various reasons have been put forward for the collapse of the sector. For much of the past decade, publicans griped about the smoking ban and changes to drink-driving laws. Yet these changes took place some time ago — the smoking ban was introduced in 2004 and the first changes to drink-driving laws date back to the introduction of random breath-testing in 2003.

In the next paragraph Cullen hits a nerve through a quotation from Professor (of marketing) Mary Quinn:

“As people got richer and more sophisticated they weren’t prepared to sit in a dirty pub any more. Young people in particular wanted newer, brighter, more modern places to meet in.”

Which presumably explains why the pub-owners have a habit of ripping out old, authentic interiors to instal older ersatz ones.

So let’s address the problem from a different view-point. Why are some pubs (such as the Hansom Cab, and even the Baird) adapting and prospering, and why? In both those cases, along with the Nicholson’s houses, the Stag and The Bridge House, which all feature regularly in Malcolm’s life, and have been hat-tipped here, it’s because they have moved on from the days of the boozer. All are places where one can eat and drink — and drink good beers — in some comfort, the company of one’s nearest-and-dearest, without embarrassment. What if they tend to the trendy, to be dismissed as “gastropubs” or whatever? What if their prices permit decent facilities and amenities?

Oh, and reliable and regular public transport certainly helps. Though austerity, and loss-leader supermarket alcohol pricing most certainly don’t.

Back to the main event

Malcolm, remember, is in the corner of the Baird, with his pint of Fortyniner. He could (and eventually does) get out the copy of the Times for the world according to Murdoch. First, though, some light relief.

This week’s Times Literary Supplement has a couple of decent, deserving pieces among the other stuff: now why was Malcolm caught by an Antony Scull review of Simon Baron Cohen on A new theory of human cruelty? What grabbed Malcolm more was Brian Vickers running the rule over Ian Donaldson’s Ben Jonson — A Life.

This one looks very tasty indeed. Currently Malcolm’s other bedside book is John Stubbs’s delightful and delighting Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War, now available in paperback. Despite the title, Stubbs takes a long run-up, and prefaces the deal with the seminal figure of Jonson. Stubbs is sufficiently tangential to appeal to Malcolm’s butterfly mind — he is as near to a reincarnation of old John Aubrey as one could wish.

Moving on from Vickers on Jonson, the TLS has a two-column scamper, in the tail-gunner slot, by Ferdy Mount on Ronald Blythe’s latest, At the Yeoman’s House. This is a matured and marinated treatment of the book: all the main reviews came in a couple of months since. Mount starts with this observation, from the particular to the general:

Ronald Blythe has not budged much. In eighty-nine years, he has moved only a few miles down the Stour valley, and he has never left his home on the Essex-Suffolk border for more than a month on end. Nor did his ancestors, a long line of Suffolk shepherds who took their surname from the River Blyth, which dawdles past the great windows of Holy Trinity, Blythburgh, into the estuary at Southwold. Rootedness on this scale may seem odd to us who like to feel footloose, but it comes naturally to our great country writers: Thomas Hardy and William Barnes in Dorset, Richard Jeffries in Wilts, and John Clare in Northants (though William Cobbett did get about a bit). They stand out from other writers, too, by coming from the labouring classes as often as not, the sons of stonemasons and farmers, and in youth often labourers themselves. They have now and then been joined at the plough by the sons of the professional classes, such as John Stewart Collis and Adrian Bell, but the native sons of the soil are somehow different.

The cover (as right) of Blythe’s “elegy in a harsh key” (nice one, Ferdy!) is a 1954 John Nash oil-painting, The Barn, Wormingford, almost certainly the view from the top-floor studio of Bottengoms Farm (back to Mount for this):

… the very old farmhouse Blythe has lived in ever since he inherited it from the painter John Nash, whom he nursed when he was dying … For centuries, Bottengoms was a farm with seventy ill-favoured acres, from which the yeoman, defined by Cobbett as “above a farmer and lower than a gentleman”, scratched a precarious living. Gradually the acres fell away into other hands. In the 1920s, what was left was sold for £1,820, in 1936 for £1,200, and in 1944 Captain John Nash, Official War Artist, snapped it up for only £700.

Mount (born 1939) sums up on Blythe’s meditation:

This is a production of old age, gentle but not soft, othe tough-minded and charitable. Blythe is a lay Reader in the Church of England and nearly became a priest, like William Barnes and George Crabbe and Gilbert White before him. Yet I find his unillusioned, lyrical tone curiously similar to those ruralists who were lifelong atheists, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jeffries. It is as though the unblinking countryman’s eye has no room for religion, one way or the other.

Are we wholly happy with “unillusioned”? What other descriptor would possibly work there? Du mot vrai! Anyway, when Ferdy Mount ploughs through today’s Sunday Times, he will find Minette Marrin arguing that the Church of England exists for those who need “religiosity”, but not demanding beliefs, in their lives:

A sense of the numinous, a longing for ceremony, a love of the religious punctuation of the year, a need for a regular time to examine one’s conscience, a passion for church music — these are all things that appeal to Anglican unbelievers such as me and to unbelievers of all traditions.

On which, Malcolm would nearly as happily drink to Ms Marrin as to the third baronet Mount of Wasing Place.

Towards the bottom of the second pint …

… Malcolm reached the back page of the TLS, and the weekly miscellany. This week’s was a trifle disappointing — a long snarl at copyright-cuddling by the James Joyce Foundation (as if we needed to be told), then a nip on the ankles of “St” Jeanette Winterson. In between there is a bit of uplift, delicately balanced on passing wind about Lawtalk: The unknown stories behind familiar legal expressions.

It starts like this:

Heard the one about the dying man who insisted on studying to be a lawyer? After a great deal of trouble to his family, he qualified just in time. As he received his degree, a a relative aced the question: Why? “One less lawyer”, said the man as he expired.

The rest of this three-paragraph scamper covers the origin of

• The law is an ass

Yes, Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist, but “an obscure seventeen-century play called Revenge for Honour“. Not only “obscure”, though it merits a wikipedia entry and it was attributed to George Chapman: The Review of English Studies, as far back as 1935, reckoned this was a “worthless play”, but noticed it borrowed from Othello.

• with all deliberate speed

Famously, or infamously, from Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter’s draft for the 1954 Supreme Court judgement on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Yet, the term appears in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy. The TLS doesn’t help much here, but Malcolm can assure all and sundry that a visit to Chapter Nineteenth, in volume two, will locate this:

The Bailie … was obviously relieved from his impending fears of ridicule, when I told him it was my father’s intention to leave Glasgow almost immediately. Indeed he had now no motive for remaining, since the most valuable part of the papers carried off by Rashleigh had been recovered. For that portion which he had converted into cash and expended in his own or on political intrigues, there was no mode of recovering it but by a suit at law, which was forthwith commenced, and proceeded, as our law-agents assured us, with all deliberate speed.

That neatly exemplifies the ironic ambiguity which must also have been in Frankfurter’s mind, in 1954.

• blackmail

Oddly, both Lawtalk and the TLS assume that this is also from Rob Roy, though the TLS adds:

The same novel popularised “blackmail”, though the practice is as old as shame itself.

Malcolm cocks a wry eye at the MS Word “z” in what was once, back in the eighteenth century again, and derived from the French populariser (though the OED is happy with “popular adj. and n.  and -ize suffix“). Yet, there’s more to this than meets the eye. The exact use of blackmail is in the Editor’s Introduction to the Waverley edition of Rob Roy:

At Tullibody Scott had met, in 1793, a gentleman who once visited Rob, and arranged to pay him blackmail.

Do the TLS, and the authors of Lawtalk recognise that “blackmail” originally meant something very different from its modern context? The original meaning was a tribute extorted by the Border revers, and nearer in meaning to “protection money”. This is the sense in Rob Roy.

• jailbait

The TLS gloss here is:

We have the Chicago author James T. Farrell to thank for the evocative “jailbait”, over which the authors of Lawtalk lay down the law: “The term is best used sparingly: if intended or perceived as a slur upon the character of a girl it is offensive”.

 In point of strict accuracy, Farrell used it as two separate words (in Calico Shoes, from 1934):

She’s not hard on the eyes but she’s jail bait.

 By the time it has crossed the Atlantic, it has become hyphenated, as in John Braine’s Room at the Top from 1957:

I’m not interested in little girls. Particularly not in jail-bait like that one.

Quite when it became a single word is another question. For sure it was previous to Jonathan “Jonny” Spelman having his cabinet minister mother rush to the High Court to seek that injunction on his behalf.

The cause behind the injunction is still a mystery (it seems), but speculation includes the ill-advised posting to Facebook, as right, but now (it also seems) taken down. It does help to have a millionaire mother in a public office: such courtesies are rarely extended to lesser beings.

• play the race card

The TLS properly notes that this one has different meanings here and in the States:

British politicians in the 1960s who spoke about immigration were accused of playing the race card, but the proper use applies to a person under duress invoking the spectre of discrimination as a trump card — you’re only doing this because I’m black/ Chinese, etc.

Ho hum.

That’s a sanitized version of what Malcolm recalls of “British politicians in the 1960s”.  It went a bit further than accusations. Whether or not Peter Griffiths, fighting the Smethwick constituency in the 1964 General Election personally endorsed “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” (as the many posters said, but almost entirely in that one constituency) is immaterial, it worked.

Home, James, and don’t spare the sauces

You may recall we began this phantasmagoria with Malcolm taking refuge from the rain.

Two pints later the wind was still strong, but the worst of the wet had passed over. So Malcolm returned his glass (a habit stemming from birth over a bar), rolled up his various newspapers, picked up the shopping, and headed off.

It all took rather less time than the development of this extended posting.

Devious diggers and curious curators

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement is a wall-to-wall Dickensian extravaganza. Then there’s the main article  — page three of the TLS is a major event, any week.

It is a Richard Clogg’s review of Susan Heuck Allen’s Classical Spies. For the record, Clogg is a historian with a Grecian bent and Allen an archaeologist. So, can the twain ever meet?

Whereas the book’s subtitle suggests an exclusively American perspective, Clogg spends a lot of useful time considering what the Brits, dispossessed to Cairo and elsewhere, were up to for the duration. We come to a different view to the norm of the WW2 activities of the archaeologists and Hellenists:

 the classicists and archaeologists appointed to the American and British schools were indeed engaged in intelligence work, while their counterparts in the German, Italian and Vichy-controlled French schools carried on digging on behalf of the German occupying forces.

Digging, that is, in the broadest sense of the word.

Clogg drops names who were SOE types:

C.M.Woodhouse, N.G.L.Hammond, Anthony Andrewes, Stanley Casson, J.M.Cook, T.J.Dunbabin, Peter Fraser, Eric Gray, T. Bruce Mitford, David Talbot Rice, J.D.S.Pendlebury and David Wallace.

In the ’60s you didn’t get very far reading (or, in Malcolm’s case, barely scanning) Classics or early History without hitting hard against many of those names.

• Bruce-Mitford, for example, was a fixture at the British Museum for four decades — and wrote the definitive study of the Sutton Hoo burial.
• If anyone needs a right-wing hero figure, Monty Woodhouse (there he is, right, in full Greek mountain fig) might qualify. Straight out of New College, Oxford (with a double first, to boot), he was into the Royal Artillery. By 1941 he was in Crete, liaising with the resistance, then onto the mainland with the Harling Force, and by 1943 (still in his mid-20s) a full Colonel in charge of the British Military Mission in Greece. After the War he was still spooking: first in Athens (machinating as Second Secretary against the Muscovites), then in Tehran overthrowing the Mosaddegh government and establishing the Western-friendly Pahlevi régime (a certain Kermit Roosevelt was doing his bit for the CIA). Oh, and in between Woodhouse was a Tory MP for two terms and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. And was among the first to finger Kurt Waldheim, sometime secretary general of the United Nations and President of Austria, as a Nazi executioner, ignorant of Jasenovac concentration camp and deaf and blind to summary executions of Titoists outside his office.

Nearer home

Let’s change the location to Dublin, well out of the climactic events of the wartime period (By the way, when will “historians” recognise that, unlike Switzerland, Ireland seems never to have formally declared “neutrality?)

Surely, there’s no parallel?

Mahr, not less

Well, there was Adolf Mahr, an Austrian whose dedication Nazism predated the Anchluss. In his spare time from being Director of the National Museum he quite openly ran the Nazi Auslandorganisation in Ireland, complete with its own Hitler Youth. That involved him with the strange ménage around Maud Gonne, which included her daughter Iseult and son-in-law Francis Stuart. Mahr’s reports back to Berlin had identified certain Germans as “Juden”, thus guaranteeing their ends. A cynic might also go looking for a rationale of the remarkable Goethe-Plakette in 1934 to WB Yeats, soon after Mahr’s appointment as Director of the Museum.

At the outbreak of War in 1939, Mahr was — conveniently for the Irish government, which then didn’t need to expel him — “on holiday” back in Germany (and, in 1945, when he came looking for his job back, made him extremely unwelcome). `Marooned in wartime Germany,  Mahr went to work for Goebbels’ propaganda radio and Irland Redaktion. By 1944 Mahr was running Ru IX and Ru II, which broadcast to Britain, Ireland and the British Empire, usually immediately after “Lord Haw-Haw”.

Nice guy: the dirt on him and Ireland’s other Nazis was well dished by David O’Donoghue for History: Ireland. A small detail: even with Mahr in Berlin, Nazis were running the Turf Board and the ESB, with a niche in the Department of Finance.

The extraordinary Richard Hayes

Passing Mahr regularly, and probably on nodding terms at least, would have been Richard Hayes, the director of the National Library. Take care here: there are two Richard Hayes around at this period: the other one was censoring films, and not every writer (and even fewer indexers) has sorted the one from the other.

Librarian Hayes was another of those polymaths made extinct by ever-greater specialisation in higher education: he had three honors (correct spelling, Malcolm assures you) degrees from Trinity — in Celtic Studies, in Modern Languages, and in Philosophy. By the time of the Emergency, Hayes too had a sideline. Having polished off the administration at the National Library, daily he bestrode his sit-up-and-beg bicycle up to Collins Barracks in Arbour Hill. There he devoted himself to the systematic decoding of all and anything that came his way. He was Ireland’s one-man equivalent of Bletchley Park.

The National Library hold a remarkable collection of Hayes papers, relating to his crypto-analysis. We can see he worked on double-folio broadsheets, ruled into harlequin squares. Clearly, as early as 1939 Hayes was breaking the German and American diplomatic cyphers. The “approved” version is that Hayes was into the British cypher by late-1941. That may well be true, except it is a very useful date for “previous offences” not to be taken into account. Equally, it may be that Colonel Dan Bryan, who became head of G2 in 1942, was felt by some to be too close to the British MI5; and not all the material Hayes accessed crossed Bryan’s desk. We must also be aware that the Hayes papers we have have probably been “weeded”. In any event, the British were extremely impressed by Hayes’s results: he had a hand in the arrest of all of the dozen German spies during the Emergency. If there is one particular success, it must be the cracking of the code used by Hermann Goertz, who managed to stay “on the run” in Dublin for nineteen months (another suspiciously convenient arrangement: in that time Goertz was repeatedly face-to-face with the greatest in the land and in the Irish military).