Sooner or later every long-term blog-artist is reduced to this one: songs with a common meme or — if you’re really unlucky and can’t click elsewhere quick enough — a common theme.
So:
Dolly empathetically came Down from Dover —
The Bangles were Going Down to Liverpool (with, in this case, a justifiably-unconvinced Mr Nimoy);
Lee Ann Womack, having made it A Little Past Little Rock, was in her two-bed waterfront flat reflecting on the million-miles and half-a-day trip from Montgomery to Memphis. We can pass over that one (though anything by and with Womack is worth the earing), to recall it was a more political distance for Martin Luther King.
Yet, there’s a bit more to be said about these “distance songs”.
First they should be something better than a list of names, which rules out, for this purpose anyway, I’ve Been Everywhere, Man — originally Australian, more widely recognised in the Hank Snow US-specific effort. It also takes off the list stuff like Dave Loggins’s excellent (especially the Joan Baez rendering) Please Come to Boston — although it states a westward migration (Boston, Denver, L.A.), that isn’t entirely explained.Aw, shucks: let’s have it anyway:
Into the drossy zone
One that always has Malcolm a bit leery is C.W.McCall’s Convoy. Yes, yes: he knows he should scorn it (especially the “PG-variant” variant, which makes no geographical sense whatsoever), but Sam Peckinpah made a decent fist of it:
Bobbie Troup’s seminal Route 66qualifies as a prime example of what Malcolm has in mind, because it does take us logically from place-to-place.
What intrigues is the YouTube vid is from 1964. So, who is following whom? Did Troup learn to swing it from the Matt King Cole classic? Or did Cole get it from an earlier Troup (who was, after all, no mean practioner)?
Number One?
Well, Malcolm is opting out on that — because he reckons there should be a separate posting on railways journeys, and the all-out Number One is on steel wheels. More, anon. And he’s not sure whether Highway 61 Revisited qualifies. At which point despair sets in: how to do proper justice to Highway 61, Roosevelt Sykes, Mississippi Fred McDowell and all. The problem is that US61 is not the entirety of “Highway 61″: that is more metaphorical than cartographical for the whole migration from the Deep South.
But for a walking journey (although she got on this airplane just to fly) Emmylou is the pace-maker, with the elegy to Gram Parsons, going Boulder to Birmingham:
The only time Malcolm had his licence endorsed (it was long before penalty points) it was the fault of Spring.
The first warm day of mid-March, and heading between the Lee Valley reservoirs towards Forest Road to work. A 250cc two-stoke thumper, made in what was still the GDR (decent bike, appalling original tyres, gear train made of solid butter — but all easily changed). A lorry plodding along, blocking the way. A clear road ahead. Flick right, twist the throttle, and go for it. Straight into a radar trap.
They reckoned it was 47 mph in a 30 mph zone. Malcolm was disappointed — he reckoned it was way, way over 50. Pled guilt by post and paid twelve quid.
Experts within the Met Office have revealed that a change in global weather systems, with the power to affect human and even animal behaviour, will soon have the entire British Isles in its grip. An early spring warning has been issued.
It gets better:
The Department of Energy and Climate Change believes that global weather patterns are deepening the effect of spring as the planet gets warmer. On its website, it is warning that 2013 could see one of the most extreme springs for several decades.
The problem with this particular natural crisis, say the experts, is that it tends to take people by surprise. With previous weather alarms, there were measures which could be taken – hosepipe bans, road gritters or sandbags. The slower, more insidious menace of spring-related weather tends to be much more difficult to combat.
What exactly are the dangers? According to the Met Office spokesman, spring can often have a major mood-changing effect on the vulnerable. “Anything can set it off,” he says. “It can be daffodils, or the sight of a swallow, maybe even rabbits climbing on top of each other. Suddenly, people are no longer quite the way they were. They talk to strangers, make unprovoked eye contact, sing in the street, lie down on damp grass. All sorts of inappropriate touching can sometimes take place. One of the problems with spring behaviour is that there’s no logical pattern to it.”
Seems a far better, far more convincing defence than “marital coercion” (though Malcolm can tell a tale or two …).
“Your Honour: I plead extenuating circumstances. It was the daffodils made me do it!”
Except, for working days in mid-week, there seemed to be very sparse traffic. Certainly far less than the days of yore (well, since the John Major Memorial Motorway cleared the way from Alconbury to Peterborough).
Is it the economic downturn? The price of fuel? Have the English gone cool on their cars?
To a non-expert, such as Malcolm, that is more than a puzzle. For the last decade, from even before the Slump (yes, c’mon: let’s use the word the history books will use!), it would seem that the number of cars on the roads has been remarkably stable.
Yet, consistently official expectations are of an imminent — and quite massive increase in the UK car population. And ministers continue to publish grandiose and expensive schemes for road improvements and new roads. For example:
Mr Osborne unveiled four major new road schemes, including an upgrade of sections of the A1, a new dual carriageway link road between the A5 and M1, widening a section of the A30 in Cornwall and improvements to the M25 motorway at the junction with the A13.
And there’s another billion quid of public money, to go with the other eight billion spent on new roads.
And, sure enough, here’s David Cameron — in his speech at Keighley this very day — bragging about it:
… in spite of all that we are having to do to deal with the deficit, we have invested more in major road schemes in each of the last two years than in any year of the last Parliament.
Now, let’s wonder whether the Department of Transport “experts” who so over-estimated car use, did equally badly by under-estimating public transport use. But that’s another story.
George Stubbs’ kangaroo and dingo paintings get export bar
The UK government has taken steps to keep in the country two oil paintings that gave the 18th Century British public their first chance to see what a kangaroo and a dingo looked like.
A temporary export bar has been placed on the two George Stubbs works, which went on display in London in 1773.
It a Stubbs. It’s charming. It’s beautiful. It’s elegant. It may be The Kangouro from New Holland. Only … it sure ain’t any kangaroo we’ve seen.
Apparently Stubbs was working from a pelt, which he somehow inflated. The head is obviously ‘borrowed’ from a passing rodent (at worst) or deer (at best).
The image on the BBC website was clearly trimmed (and forcibly stamped with the copyright of the Press Association). So Malcolm went looking for a better, and found quite a few. Even the one above, from the Guardian, has lost the creature’s tail.
His rooting also located another delight: a website — The Library of Curiosities— written by Steven de Joode, who seems to be a Dutch bookseller. Only the last eight (as of now) posts are in English, and Malcolm’s Dutch is non-existent. Still, that includes:
This, as the self-explanatory headline has it, tells the story of the first European encounters with the beast; and how it was depicted. It also a reproduction of a book engraving (inverted left-to-right) taken from the Stubbs.
Missing links
The first is the hoary old Australian joke that Cook, or Banks, or someone spotted kangaroos in the distance, asked a strolling aboriginal what they were, and heard some version of “kangaroo”. Hence the name in English, but not realising that what the aboriginal had meant was, “Bugger me mate. Haven’t a clue.”
The Oxford English Dictionary, in its refined way, repeats that anecdote as:
Etymology: Stated to have been the name in an Australian Aboriginal language.
Cook and Banks believed it to be the name given to the animal by the aborigenes at Endeavour River, Queensland, and there is later affirmation of its use elsewhere. On the other hand, there are express statements to the contrary (see quots. below), showing that the word, if ever current in this sense, was merely local, or had become obsolete. The common assertion that it really means ‘I don’t understand’ (the supposed reply of the local to his questioner) seems to be of recent origin and lacks confirmation. (See Morris Austral English s.v.)
Then there is the real mystery.
It is well-established that the Dutch reached New Holland/Australia long before Cook: de Joode has that as:
… the fateful voyage of the Dutch merchantman Batavia, wrecked off the coast of Western Australia in 1629. The disaster would lead to mutiny and the massacre of almost half of the crew. This tragedy, however, also resulted in the first European sighting of an Australian marsupial. The Batavia was wrecked on a reef of the Houtman Abrolhos, and on these islands Francisco Pelsaert, commander of the ship, discovered numerous ‘cats’: “creatures of a miraculous form, as big as a hare; the head similar to [that] of a civet cat, the fore-paws are very short, about a finger long.
On the shelves of Redfellow Hovel is a 1977 book by Kenneth Gordon McIntyre, “an Australian lawyer with a lifelong interest in the history of discovery”. The book is The Secret Discovery of Australia: Portuguese Ventures 200 Years Before Captain Cook. It contains a large dose of induction, based on some crude maps of the southern ocean (to which McIntyre applies any manner of abstruse ‘corrections’) . In particular he argues that Cristovão Mendonça —
a man of superior importance, what we would call a Royal Navy Captain … a man of some birth … a man of considerable prowess [page 241]
— was in and around northern Australia in the 1520s. He lost a set of keys at Geelong in 1522, which were rediscovered in 1847, though —
the keys themselves have been lost, and cannot now be examined … Probably even if the keys could be found, they could only be identified as common European keys, not especially identifiable as Portuguese.
That dates from 1593. In de Jode’s map of the world, there is a definite lump of land vaguely in the area of Australia. That doesn’t mean, as McIntyre would want, that strange pouched creature in the bottom right quadrant of the title page is a kangaroo.
Why do we collect books? Much ink has been spilled over this question. A well-known attempt at solving the mystery is Muensterberger’s Collecting: An Unruly Passion, a curious study brimming with psychological gobbledygook. According to the author, collecting is nothing more than an attempt to overcome a traumatic experience or to compensate for a loss suffered in early childhood. The collector surrounds himself with “magic objects” allowing him to conquer traumas.
Conclusion:
… books are more than mere (magical) objects: they also have a rational appeal, which is their intellectual content.
What was Malcolm’s traumatic experience?, he wonders.
Malcolm spent thirty-six hours while a hacking,wracking, rancid cough developed into the full-blown streaming head-cold. This meant much of the Saturday press passed him by.
So, this Sunday morning, sniffling over coffee and marmalade, he ignored the trivial newsy stuff and concentrated on the real meat: the supplements.
And, as a further consequence, in short order he read:
One so dystopian it underlines Malcolm’s settled intention never to go near Motown: the other … well, try this from Viney himself:
The landscape of Fermanagh, it occurred to me, would be Ireland’s best refuge for hobbits, if we had them. The heights of the county are frowning and wild, it’s true, and even quite scary at the windy clefts of Cuilcagh’s summit, or under the Cliffs of Magho. Great limestone caves and swallow holes speak of unexplored tunnels to alien lands: Donegal, Leitrim, Cavan, hemming the Shire on three sides, and closing it off from the sea.
In the rain shadow of all this, however, is the intimate, drumlin landscape of grottoes, gorges, woods and hundreds of hushed, reedy lakes.
Even the great expanse of Lough Erne, an ideal playground for hobbits when young, is full of little islands for modest, measured lives.
Malcolm has always conceived Hobbiton in rural Worcestershire, around Tolkien’s own home in Evesham, now transliterated to Waikato Valley of New Zealand’s Northern Island. Yet, on one of the few balmy summer days that bless the Lakelands, Viney’s conceit would figure.
About semi-annually an incoming Transport Minister, anxious to make a PR hit at minimal cost and effort, republishes a circular. The document urges local councils to cut back on the street clutter that befouls most streets, junctions and even beauty spots.
The classic example is the warning of aircraft noise, under the Heathrow fly-path. With 1200 or 1300 aircraft in-and-out each day, near roof-top height over Hounslow, with the prevailing wind wafting the pungency of jetfuel, a metal warning of the obvious is just another intrusion into decency.
One of the last occasions Malcolm went to Heathrow, he reckoned the road signage, warnings, prohibitions and indicators — road-side and on the carriageway — aggregated at one to every dozen-to-fifteen yards. So, at thirty miles an hour (and much of the way the speed limit is higher than that), the driver has to take note of them at the rate of more than one a second — as well as watching the traffic. This way insanity lies.
Improving the streetscape by identifying and removing unnecessary, damaged and worn-out signs;
Helping to ensure signs are provided only where they are needed;
Minimising the environmental impact, particularly in rural settings;
Reducing costs, not just of the signs themselves but maintenance and energy costs.
The only one of those that needs to be propounded is the third: environmental impact (in other words, gross eye-sores, defacing the streetscape and the landscape). The other three are either self-evident or even (especially with the first one) hazards.
Now let’s take an example: not from a main London highway, but from a quiet Nidderdale village (one pub, one shop, one bus an hour — none on Sundays) just outside the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Once upon a time:
And, a similar view today:
There are now seven metal signs, where once a single, simple (and very “English”) wooden fingerpost sufficed.
Here’s a good ‘un from the BBC site, stripping out a bit of detail from the 2011 Census:
Blackpool is the divorce capital
The Lancashire seaside resort has the highest percentage of people who are divorced – 13.1%, compared with the average for England and Wales of 9%. This also includes those whose same-sex civil partnership is dissolved.
Seaside resorts are often near the top of the divorce league – but no-one is really sure why.
Divorce, therefore, remained expensive, demanding and often sordid. Increasingly, those who were determined to divorce arranged for one of the partners, usually the husband, to be caught in a well-staged ‘adultery’ with a professional co-respondent in a hotel room [*]. This was not a practice the country could be proud of and the 1923 Act never satisfied most feminist groups, divorce law reformers, proponents of a more relaxed sexual morality, or even some churchmen.
The footnote there [*] reads:
Seaside resorts were favoured, particularly Brighton. Divorces procured this way came to be called ‘Brighton quickies’.
Malcolm adjudges Mr McKibbin there guilty of some remarkably-talented nudge-nudge, wink-wink innuendo.
The Brighton Museum actually (and this is from Slow Sussex, believe it or not):
celebrates the resort’s role as a venue for a dirty weekend. This famously was the place a couple could get ‘a Brighton quickie’ divorce. the husband would hire a private detective to observe him signing into a hotel, with a hired ‘mistress’ acting the part as ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’. A chambermaid would ever so accidentally open the door to see the couple, and the deed was done.
Even more bizarrerie: the only reference to all these shenanigans in the Oxford English Dictionary takes us to Rodney Quest’s dubious The Cerberus Murders of 1969 and the other end of the country:
I get reasonably well paid—enough to enable me to … have a dirty weekend in Scarborough now and again.
Err … wrong decade (by at least three) and wrong location.
Why else was the Brighton Belle so busy — and charging ‘supplementary fares’ — on a Friday night?
Michael Browne was catholic bishop of Galway in from 1937 to 1976 and seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the church… He was among those who led the hierarchy’s objections toNoël Browne’s mother and child health scheme. He supported a boycott of protestant businesses in Co. Wexford during a dispute over a protestant woman married to a catholic man who refused to educate her children at the local catholic school. He described Trinity College Dublin as “a centre for atheist and communist propaganda”. He forced the segregation of the sexes on Galway beaches. He seemed so perpetually angry that his episcopal signature — “† Michael” – was popularly rendered as “Cross Michael”. He supervised the construction of a grandiose new cathedral in Galway that local wits dubbed the “Taj Micheáil” (pronounced Meehaul).
That post also involves the late Brian Trevaskis, a perverse and interesting character who was a feature of TCD, overlapping Malcolm’s time.
The Fethard-on-Sea business was nasty in the extreme, and contributed mightily to the sectarian prejudices of Northern Protestants well after the original episode. Tim Fanning’s The Fethard-on-Sea Boycott is probably the fullest account. A summary of the main events is on Gareth Russell’s blog.
Anyone of a fair mind (and even other) would surely recognise that Browne was off-piste in oh-so-many ways. Or, “The Irish bishop stands on ceremony and sits on everybody,”as Seán O Faoláin put it. However, let’s pass on all that.
Going through the motions
Once upon a shitty time, when Galway hadn’t made much effort to filter its effluents, that was the experience of swimming in Galway Bay. To be strictly honest, across the city and county, there remain ample opportunities for improving water-quality. In 2007 it was cryptosporidium. In 2008 it was levels of lead. In 2011 it was oily waste. In 2012, e-coli.
Anyway, allegedly Bishop Browne liked to swim. Unencumbered by swimming costume. And to air himself in the Galwegian sunshine thereafter. Doubtless among males of similar disposition. He had a sign put up on the beach at Salthill, prohibiting women therefrom.
Elsewhere Bishop Browne was very much against any mixing of the sexes, even clothed, on beaches:
“Everywhere has changed in my life time”, [Christie Moore] says. “I remember Galway winning three-in-a-row; the Bishop of Galway banning “mixed bathing” — the dirty minded bollocks; Des Kelly and The Capitol being Number 1 in The Irish Charts; when there was only one De Danann; Michael D presenting me with a platinum disc; Moving Hearts falling asunder in St.Patrick’s Hall, and reforming two hours later in The Skeff.”
Out of the strange came forth sweetness
Which isn’t quite how Judges 14:14 has it, nor (as is better known in every British kitchen to the present day) how it appears on the Tate & Lyle golden syrup tin. Yet it has a relevance here.
Bishop Browne’s prurience was the contrarian inspiration for an early Seamus Heaney poem, Girls Bathing, Galway 1965:
The swell foams where they float and crawl, A catherine-wheel of arm and hand. Each head bobs curtly as a football. The yelps are faint here on the strand.
No milk-limbed Venus ever rose Miraculous on this western shore; A pirate queen in battle clothes Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour
Themselves into themselves, the years Shuttle through space invisibly. Where crests unfurl like creamy beer The queen’s clothes melt into the sea
And generations sighing in The salt suds where the wave has crashed Labour in fear of flesh and sin For the time has been accomplished
As through the swallows in swimsuits, Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed They wade ashore with skips and shouts. So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.
That now appears by the Galway Bay Hotel, opposite the beach — still ‘the Ladies’ Beach’ — on the Salthill Promenade, one of half-a-dozen bronze plaques celebrating poems along the Cúirt Literary Trail.
The poem seems superficially a slight thing, almost a piece of juvenilia. That’s Heaney’s deception: it anticipates so much of what Heaney’s later work would become. It is highly complex in its allusions and, appropriately in this context, in its undertow.
The incident is, on one level, from Marie and Seamus’s honeymoon.
The form is almost a ballad: quatrains of four-stresses to the line. There is the characteristic Heaney conflation of past and present, the classic and the work-a-day: So Venus comes, matter-of-fact. The implied visual references include Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere and St Catherine with her wheel: that, along with in fear of flesh and sin, must imply continuing martyring of women in Browne’s gynophobia.
Strange meeting
There is is the nod to Irish tradition and history: the pirate queen in battle clothes is Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O’Malley/Granuaile/The Sea-Queen of Connacht.
Gráinne, another woman of strength, is depicted in the frontispiece to Anthologia Hibernica, no humble suppliant. She had been summoned in September 1593, to Greenwich to encounter Elizabeth I. The Queen acquiesced with all of Grace’s demands — to the profound disgust of Richard Bingham, Lord President of Connacht, who regarded her as nurse to all rebellions in the province for this forty years.
All that without the implicit physical sexuality: Brown-legged, smooth-shouldered and bare-backed.
While Malcolm was in the former American colony of Noo Joisey and in absentia, WordPress would seem to have re-arranged how photographs are inserted into posts. That Malcolm was somewhat jet-lagged after an eventful ride with Mustang Sally was a further confusion.
That means the two protagonists of that anecdote in the previous post went un-illustrated. While Malcolm works out what he is doing wrong, let’s hear it for Aelia Galla Placidia (above).
There’s a decent Wikipedia mini-biog of the lady, well worth a quite viewing — for she was a figure of considerable consequence. She is also mother to millions — try the account on rootsweb for a taster. One way or another, she figures in the ancestry of many Europeans — and probably all of their hereditary rulers. She was, for example, Elizabeth II’s something-like forty-six-times-back great-grandmother.
Ravenna
The source of that image is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which deserves to qualify as one of the wonder of early European art, recognised by UNESCO as:
the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect.
Slide out of the Mausoleum, take a swift left past the Information Bureau into the Via Cavour, then right into Via di Roma, and there is the Basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo. [Aha! See! Malcolm is getting the knack of this insertion business!]
sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
— another poem Malcolm was made to learn at Dublin’s High School for his Leaving Cert., and which has fertilised brain-cells ever since.
A note of dubiety
Despite that image of Galla Placidia having a prominent position in her eponymous Mausoleum (as part of the family group with her two children, Valentinian and Honoria), there are certain snippy critics who question whether it does in fact represent the lady.
Malcolm will have none of that. That is she, majestically, imperially, imperiously so, and no-one else.
Oh, and a further footnote …
One modern legend has it that Cole Porter visited the Mausoleum, came outside, looked up at the Italian sky, and had the notion for Night and Day. And if that’s not a good enough excuse …
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.
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.
There is is the nod to Irish tradition and history: the pirate queen in battle clothes is Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O’Malley/Granuaile/The Sea-Queen of Connacht.
