Culpable negligence

Household insurance at Redfellow Hovel requires three locks on the rear doors to the garden. After all, that’s the weaker, less observed point of access. So very reasonable stuff.

In another context Malcolm found himself reviewing how Éire coped with the outbreak of World War II. That’s a far bigger topic than can easily be contained here; and others — Brian Girvin, John Duggan, and Clair Wills sit on Malcolm’s shelves, alongside more general histories — have done it more than adequately anyway.

In the course of his fossicking, Malcolm hit on this, from Questions in Dáil Éireann on Thursday 25th April, 1940:

Risteárd Ua Maolchatha: asked the Minister for External Affairs if he will state the number of occasions since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 25th April, 1938, on which there was direct personal discussion between Irish and British Ministers on matters of mutual trade, and if he will say in respect of each such occasion the date, the various Ministers who took direct part in the discussion, and the matters discussed.Minister for External Affairs (The Taoiseach): There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938. Questions connected with the trade between the two countries have, of course, been discussed from time to time through the High Commissioner and the British representative here, and within the last few months officials of the Department of Supplies and the Department of Agriculture, acting on behalf of their respective Ministers, have had direct discussions with officials of the corresponding Departments in Great Britain. I may add that, following these latter discussions, the Minister for Supplies and the Minister for Agriculture will go to London next week for conversations on certain outstanding points with the British Ministers concerned.

General Mulcahy: Seven months of the war situation have passed without any of our Ministers discussing their problems with the British, and nearly two years have passed since the Agreement was made. Is that so?

The Taoiseach: That is so.

General Mulcahy: Will the Taoiseach say whether he intends to report to the House, as a result of the meeting that, happily, it is proposed should take place next week after such a long period?

The Taoiseach: I do not know. Any arrangements that may be made will have to be reported to the House in one form or another.

 Read, mark and inwardly digest!

Most sentient beings here present may be raising a knowing eyebrow.

• That was happening a fortnight after the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, and six days after the Dutch PM announced a “state of siege” (doubtless aware of troop movements next door).
• Risteárd Ua Maolchatha had been Chief of Staff for Óglaíg na hÉireann (should you prefer: the IRA), and it was his signature on the ceasefire order for 11th July 1921, when the Treaty negotiations were begun.
• The Taoiseach is none other than de Valera, himself. Dev was never one to use words lightly, and without deliberation.
• Richard Mulcahy was no goat’s toe: the image at the top of this post is Mulcahy, watching his back, while Michael Collins wonders what he has just stepped in. Even in 1940 Mulcahy was the coming man in Fine Gael. Ua Maolchatha was, as far back as the War of Independence, Mulcahy’s backstop. Even if this was no “planted question”, the speed with with Mulcahy jumps in, and de Valera’s reply implies all parties were aware more was being said than being spoken.

The question was, ostensibly, about “trade”; but the answer seems more general: “There have been no direct discussions between Irish and British Ministers since April, 1938″.

That has to be a clue to intense frustration in Dublin. In any case, “trade” (the ostensible subject of that question) was code for beef, bacon and butter in exchange for fuel and some minimal matériel for the Defence Force.

There had been constipation in London. A proper diplomatic channel with Dublin had not been opened. De Valera wanted a British minister or ambassador in Dublin (a grandeur which Chamberlain couldn’t accept). The term “high commissioner” was too colonial for de Valera: its parallel was the British High Commissioner in Egypt, the de facto power in the land. The gap was finally plugged by Sir John Maffey, retired as permanent under-secretary for the colonies, becoming the British “representative” in Dublin — a rôle to which he was shackled for the next decade. All too little, too late.

We’d need to have in mind the other numerous other frustrations the British imposed, mainly out of necessity, on the Irish. All telegraphic and external postal traffic — and pretty well all other communications — went through London. Folk from Donegal could not pass through Northern Ireland into Great Britain — Sam Beckett, born in Dublin, claiming Irish citizenship, was refused permission to return to France by the only route possible. And so on.

Meanwhile Churchill, in the Cabinet, was muttering about invasion and seizing the Treaty Ports.

What had Neville Chamberlain’s Government in London had done to keep De Valera and Éire on side? Even after eight months of the war, had no serious attempt been made to lock the back door?

Incredible! But, apparently, true.

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon.”

Full citation:

“Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. And the orchards will be in blossom. And the birds will be nesting in the hazel thicket. And they’ll be sowing the summer barley in the lower fields… and eating the first of the strawberries with cream. Do you remember the taste of strawberries?”

That’s Sam  Gamgee (the ultimate Tory cap-doffer) of The Lord of the Rings.

Now, tell, Malcolm: what was it, in the following, that nudged your memory of that, when you read this:

My old friend Bruce Anderson has penned what sounds like an extraordinary piece for this week’s issue of The Spectator. He has attacked a Conservative leader, and seemingly in strong terms. “Never has a government been better at exasperating its own supporters; rarely has a government been so politically inept,” he writes. Bruce is a friend of the Prime Minister’s. It will be interesting to see if he has used any caveats later in the piece, such as saying that it is not Cameron’s fault or emphasising that it can all be turned around. We’ll see.

It should worry Cameron that such a loyalist and good friend holds that view, as he is someone who has supported Cameron from even before the days when his leadership campaign consisted of David and Samantha Cameron, the Goves and three other people. While Bruce has some modernising friends, he often has good instincts for what the wider Tory tribe will tolerate. He understands Tory history and the shires.

That’s Iain Martin, a young’un, but already a doyen of the Telegraph. Any other mental disturbance, such as the title of that piece, In the Tory modernising bunker it’s all getting a bit Berlin, April 1945, is entirely your own problem.

On Malcolm’s second thoughts, it’s obviously that final word: shires.

There’s the problem!

The Tory Party has entrenched itself in the green suburbs and the counties of old England. It’s been a long process;, but it was John Major — MP for Huntingdon, not surprisingly — who put it in to words:

A country of long shadows on county cricket grounds, warm beer, green suburbs, dog lovers, and old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist.

A Malcolmian humilation

Aw, shucks! Malcolm remembers it well!

Look at those surnames. You could make the register of Malcolm’s primary school there.

The Sea Scouts lined up at Wells War Memorial, to be inspected by the Earl of Leicester, with his Home Guard medal. The Great Man doing the proper thing, stopping half-way down the line, to address a whippersnapper (who promptly saluted, on instruction, and responded,  again as instructed): “Yes, y’r Lordship!”.

Thereafter followed, not contempt, but a kind of Hummph! from his Dear Old Dad.

Sadly for Malcolm’s self-esteem, Dear Old Dad, one generation from the 1912 Yorkshire miners’ strike, and despite being an inveterate reader of the Beaverbrook press, held no admiration for those as has dominance o’er us. A Dear Old Dad, who, moreover,  had done his bit up in the Mediterranean and up the Aegean in an MTB, while other didn’t.

Moving on

Does this really need explaining?

• The Tories remain a party which believes the fox-hunters deserve priority, while suburbanites are wakened, once a year in the early hours, by the urban vixen in orgasmic howl, and marvel they are still so close to nature.
• The Tories remain a party where half the parliamentary vote goes against single-sex marriage, while most of us either are or live alongside, by the standards of Mother Church, irregular liaisons.
• The Tories remains party where Euroscepticism is the norm, while most of us work for multi-nationals, take our holidays in EU countries, and actually enjoy an evening at the local Spanish, Greek or Italian restaurant.

No future?

Not unless the Tories leave the Shire.

We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather

This post is a bit of a rummage round the lumber-room of Malcolm’s mind. Take it as such, or leave it.

Let’s start navigating at the prime meridian

In 1941 Myles na gCopaleen , a.k.a. Brian O’Nolan, published An Béal Bocht. It is to Irish literature as Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm had been a decade earlier to the English of-the-earth, earthy stuff.

Alas! Malcolm’s Irish (failed Leaving Certificate) was never up to appreciating the original Irish, and an English translation, magnificently illustrated by Ralph Steadman, only became available in 1996. So for too long, whenever the works of the Great Flann, Myles and Brian came into the conversation, on any mention of An Béal Bocht, Malcolm could but nod sagely, and seek to redirect onto more familiar Dalkey Archive territory.

Flann/ Myles/ Brian was never averse when it came to Épater la bourgeoisie. Thus with An Béal Bocht. Irish officialdom, especially since the ascent to power of Éamon de Valera, was heavily promoting da kulcha  — in this parallel universe, the main ‘Culture’ was agriculture — not for nothing did the Dubliner refer dismissively to ‘culchies’. No Fianna Fáil bun-fight was complete without a flush of Fáinní (those ring lapel-pins to indicate an Irish speaker). Such types were indoctrinated to revere Peig Sayers as the true voice of “real” Ireland, and so inflict her serial miseries on the school-student.

For the record the prevalence of Fáinní in Fianna Fáil has declined in direct proportion to their increase among Sinn Féiners. When Gerry Adams began sporting a Fainne, that was the ultimate no-no! in polite political society.

A bit of plot (Sacs-Béarla version)

It’s always raining torrents in Corkadoragha, home of the first-person narrator Bonaparte O’Coonassa. Corkadoragha is about as impoverished and unreconstructed as anywhere could be in deprived, rocky, drenched Connacht. Or, as the Dalkey Archive edition blurb has it:

The Poor Mouth relates the story of one Bonaparte O’Coonassa, born in a cabin in a fictitious village called Corkadoragha in western Ireland equally renowned for its beauty and the abject poverty of its residents. Potatoes constitute the basis of his family’s daily fare, and they share both bed and board with the sheep and pigs. A scathing satire on the Irish, this work brought down on the author’s head the full wrath of those who saw themselves as the custodians of Irish language and tradition when it was first published in Gaelic in 1941.

Yet it has one natural resource: the Irish spoken in Corkadoragha is regarded as the most perfect in the island. Annually, therefore, Corkadoragha becomes infested with language-revivalists from the city — until the weather and the all-too-”authentic” poverty drive them away again.

Nearer home, and a few points east

A blog-artist of some ability has adopted the persona of ‘Bonaparte O’Coonassa’ — though, to be honest, there cannot be many literary grotesques who don’t have an afterlife on the net. Mr Downey of Romford (where Malcolm was once a borough councillor) has a nice sense of humour, is sound on the things that matter (Nick Griffin is a piece of shit), though is lamentably soft on cats. Nobody is perfect.

Fond of Romford as Malcolm (almost) is, he would usually be visiting Mr Downey blog, and passing by without acknowledgement. However, a wrinkle appeared.

Whale song and Zentz

Riffling through a drawer Malcolm had come across a well-worn key-ring. Beyond decipherment of any text on the plastic tag was a memory source: that New Age coffeehouse/bookshop the Redfellow entourage visited in Cortez, Colorado — back in the summer of 1994.

He recalled that the ambiance was being reinforced by whale song on the muzak channel. That seemed a trifle odd, since Cortez CO is some mean distance from either ocean.

Somehow that recollection triggered another: a song by Bob Zentz of Norfolk, Virginia:

Zentz, as a young man, had served in the US Coast Guard, and this song recalls being on watch. Yes, it’s sheer romanticism; but — one way and another — it persists as a repetitive soundtrack to Malcolm’s life. Here is the lyric is full:

Ocean Station Bravo, North Atlantic Ocean,
Somewhere west of Greenland, somewhere far from home.
Nothing on the radar, nothing on the sonar,
Hove-to and drifting on this ocean all alone.

CGC Sebago, high-endurance cutter,
Ocean station vessel number 42,
Studying the weather, aids to navigation
Plotting ships and aircraft as they come sailing through.

In the middle of the ocean, center of the circle,
There’s nothing but horizon, wind and sea and sky:
This whole world in motion, blowing from the northeast,

Not a hint of sunshine, just the gray clouds running by.

Then the lookout calls the bridge-watch, objects in the water —
Moving surface contacts off the starboard bow:
Plot ‘em on the radar, fire up the sonar
Listen for their echoes, can you hear ‘em now?

Well there’s echoes in my headphones, whale sounds on the speakers,
Filling all the spaces inside CIC:
Songs of loves and travels, songs of generations,
Echoes of the ages in cetacean harmony.

And me, I had to answer, I sang, I talked, I whistled.
Well, I even played the mouthharp through that microphone;
And they returned the favor with chirps and clicks and whistles —
A sound of celebration not so different from our own.

And when the watch was over, it’s out onto the bridge-wing
To view them sounding singers as they sing and sport and play:
Just a pod of humpbacks, farewell flukes a-wavin’,
A memory worth saving as they travelled on their way.
For we’d had a conversation with Leviathan that day.

Skirting the board …

That was somewhere on the periphery of Malcolm’s mind while he was daubing white paint onto bedroom skirting-board.

In a senior moment, he realised he couldn’t quite recall the name of the author: Zing? Zane? Zlotz? So, downstairs and crank up the search-engine.

Weather Station Kurt

One of the bits of serendipity that cropped up came from Mr Downey’s Poor Mouth, which for this post was very rich. One of the themes Mr Downey seems to revisit is “Backwaters of history”, little gems of actuality that have dropped out of consciousness, or only been rediscovered. In this particular post, Mr Downey has the quite remarkable tale of

… the only armed [Nazi] landing anywhere in North America [which] took place in Canada in October 1943 when a U-Boat landed a small party in Northern Labrador to erect an automatic weather station.

It looks as if Mr Downey resurrected this one from wikipedia. It was a good find, makes a good story, and provided Malcolm with a welcome diversion from the glossing task in hand (his knees, in particular, thank Mr Downie). It is a story, in its own way, almost as bizarre as anything in Myles.

Shower

A letter in today’s Guardian reads:

I wish Ed Miliband would drop the phrase “this shower”, and replace it with “this lot”. “Shower” makes him sound like a wartime Spitfire pilot.

Brian Lewis

Pontefract, West Yorkshire

And what precisely is amiss with a  sounding like a wartime Spitfire pilot, Mr Lewis? Since the rest of Miliband’s speech was invoking the ghosts of the past in the cause of national unity, of One Nation Labour, it seems fair game.

Yet, Malcolm sees Mr Lewis’s etymological point, which is the authorised version, as endorsed by the Oxford English Dictionary:

shower, n.1

 f. A group or crowd (of people). Usu. derogatory, a pitiful collection or rabble. slang.

And gives the earliest citation as:

1942   G. Kersh Nine Lives Bill Nelson ii. 13   I’ve seen him with some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw in your life.

Kersh

That would be Gerald Kersh, one of the more extreme characters on the fringes of British literary life from the 1930s. The novel cited there is The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson, written when Kersh was — or wasn’t — working for the Army Film Unit.

His best-known (even most notorious) novel was Night and the City from 1938, which pioneered a particular kind of anti-hero. Harry Fabian is a Soho (that’s London’s Soho) wide-boy, who operates any rackets he can, poses as an American song-writer (with, alas, an unconvincing accent and scanty knowledge of his topic or his artists), and eventually sells off his girl-friend into prostitution. That would make it mere sexploitation, except that Kersh has an eye for squalor  and strikes a totally-different tone to the glitz and pseudo-glamour of the American pulp:

Bagrag’s Cellar is a dragnet through which the undercurrent of night-life continually filters. It is choked with low organisms, pallid and distorted, unknown to the light of day, and not to be tolerated in healthy society. It is on the bottom of life; it is the penultimate resting place of the inevitably damned. Its members comprehend addicts to all known crimes and vices …

Kersh sold the film-rights of Night and the City for $40,000, and Jules Dassin directed Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney in a London setting. Since Dassin was on the McCarthyite black-list, the film had numerous difficulties. Even so, it has risen from obscurity, is widely recognised as a prime example of English noir, and IMDb rates it as 8/10. The Finns didn’t like it, and it was banned for fifteen years.

Irwin Winkler’s 1992 remake, translated to New York, with Robert de Niro and Jessica Lang, is late-night TV movie fodder, and nowhere in the same league.

Partridge

Although a devoted admirer of all-things OED, Malcolm knows that for vocabulary dredged from the lower depths Eric Partridge is your only man, and the editions of his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English the authority. Here we find illumination:

5. In what a shower!: army c[atch].p[hrase]. directed at members of another unit: since 1919. ‘Some of the lousiest showers of rooks you ever saw’ (Gerald Kersh, Bill Nelson, 1942). L[aurie]. A[tkinson]. notes the phrase’s prob. origin in shower of shit from Shropshire: Londoners’ early C.20. Reinforcement by alliteration. What a shower!, or the derive. it’s showery!, was in the RAF, ca. 1930-50, a c.p. ‘addressed to one who has just made a bad mistake’ (Partridge, 1945).

Malcolm therefore disagrees with Mr Lewis. Knowing the full Salopian version of the term adds extra spice.

A speculation

If the expression has military origins (which seems likely), and was — hypothetically, like much else — imported and borrowed from military service, then there is another possible approach.

It amounts to Oswestry.

In 1915 the Army took over Park Hall, just outside the town of Oswestry (which itself is close to falling out of Shropshire and into Wales). It became one of the main initial training depots for the infantry. The soldiery, especially if they were away from the big cities for the first time, were none too chuffed about Oswestry: it was a long way from home, rural if not rustic, isolated, lacked what they saw as basic amenities (booze and … female company), and it rained a lot.

By one of those mysteries that might not be too hard to explain, a conflagration destroyed Oswestry Camp soon after Armistice Day, 1918. Only when the Second Unpleasantness came along was the site re-occupied.

Even after that, the dreaded “call-up” papers might arrive, summoning callow youths to Oswestry. Not that this was a far worse option than, say, Catterick or Aldershot, but the odour prevailed. The precipitation of Shropshire might not, therefore, be merely Reinforcement by alliteration — the Londoner using the term might well know of what he spoke.

One last problem, though

A couple of recent times, when the Lady in his Life and Malcolm were frequenting London “gastro-pubs”, there appeared on the menu “a half-Shropshire chicken”. What is never explained the other half of its ancestry.

A famous face

Paul Waugh, at PoliticsHome, has a scoop of national proportions:

… from today, the PM’s address is finally on Google StreetView for everyone to see.

The public haven’t been able to go right upto the famous black door since the mid 1990s and the days of John Major.

But perhaps the best thing is that Larry the Cat is in the pic – you have to zoom in quite close but he’s there to the left of the No.10 door. Never camera-shy is Larry.

Waugh cheekily suggests an ulterior motive:

FOOTNOTE: Google’s own co-founder Larry Page, may be more than happy to see his namesake.

About the only personality around Downing Street whose reputation does not get savaged by the media, on a routine basis, is the official Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.

A Malcolmian aside:

When the world was much younger, Malcolm and the Lady who soon thereafter entered his Life full-time wandered across Green Park.

In those gentler days of the summer of 1967, all-and-sundry were still able to treat Downing Street as just another public thoroughfare.

It was chucking-out time after some official jolly, and an assembly of the Great and the Good were on Harold Wilson’s doorstep. The Earl Attlee (who died that autumn) was wheeled out to be loaded into a limousine.

A voice in the crowd on the opposite pavement called, “Good on you, Clem”, to widespread approval and cheers.

Clem and V’s cat at Number Ten was Peter (and succeeded in office by Peter II).

Pottery Barn rule, London, E14

As far as he can recall, the first time Malcolm encountered the “Pottery Barn rule” was from William Safire in the New York Times:

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That caution against obsessive reform was introduced into the American political language in the late 1970s by Bert Lance, President Jimmy Carter’s budget chief. Ol’ Bert, a Georgian, claimed no coinage, saying, “It’s a bit of old Southern wisdom.”

Fast-forward 25 years to another phrase involving metaphoric breakage. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was quoted in “Plan of Attack” as cautioning President George Bush before the war that he would “own” Iraq and all its problems, after military victory. “Privately,” wrote Bob Woodward, “Powell and Armitage called this the Pottery Barn rule: You break it, you own it.” (Richard Armitage is the deputy secretary of state.)

Safire then went into a bit of Thomist [sic] nit-picking over who coined the expression, suggesting that Powell was borrowing from Tom Friedman.

 

One Olympic sight Malcolm intends to take in is the massed Monégasque navy in London’s Docklands. And the queen of the lot has to be (take your pick) the German cruise-line Deutschland (above) or the tall ship Stadt Amsterdam.

For the sake of argument, let’s settle for the German offering.

After all, that fits the Pottery Barn Rule: they broke it, so (for now) they own it.

Counting

Well, there’s this:

Bradley Wiggins has become Britain’s first ever Tour de France winner, ending the country’s 109-year wait for victory in sport’s toughest endurance event.

And there’s this:

Thousands of British cycling fans are flooding into Paris as Bradley Wiggins prepared to become the first Englishman to win the Tour de France in 109 years.

Let Malcolm clarify:

It’s hardly 109 years for some very good reasons.

No Brit rode in le Tour before Charles Holland and Bill Burl in 1937. So chop down the 109 to 75.

It took until 1955 and Brian Robinson for a Brit actually to arrive in Paris — creditably, in 29th place, and until 1958 for him to win a stage. Settle for 57 years, perhaps?

It wasn’t until 1962, and Tom Simpson, that any Brit improved on that and came near the top quality. So, make that 50 years. That was, anyway, about when the Brit public started to take anything like a serious interest in what was previously a purely cross-Channel diversion.

“Names” became known and recognised this side of La Manche. Jacques Anquetil, after his fifth win in the Tour, was voted the BBC’s international sports personality of 1964. He was followed into local popular fame by Merckx, Hinault and Fignon. When Stephen Roche won the Tour, and then finished the Triple Crown (also the Giro and the world road-racing championship), despite Charlie Haughey muscling onto the podium, Roche was adopted by the British media as some kind of an honorary Brit — particularly so because he joined Sean Yates, Malcolm Elliott and Robert Millar in the largely-Anglophone Fagor team for 1988.

After which le Tour was a UK hot topic.

To complicate the numbers further, there’s also this:

Le Britannique Bradley Wiggins (Sky) a remporté le 99e Tour de France, dimanche 22 juillet. Il signe ainsi le premier triomphe anglais dans la Grande Boucle. Le Londonien, qui est âgé de 32 ans, portait le maillot jaune depuis le samedi 7 juillet.

Ah, yes. There were one (1915-1918) or two (1940-46) periods when Europe was otherwise engaged.

Anyway, chapeau Milord Wiggo!

Excuses! Excuses!

A fortnight back Malcolm ran for a bus.

Memo: Don’t. There’ll be another along in a while (the same advice, in Malcolm’s distant youth, used to apply to chasing girls).

Twang! And a stinging jerk told him he had pulled a serious muscle.

That was obviously the physical or emotional shock that triggered an attack of shingles.

Once Malcolm might have silently mocked those who use shingles as a pretext for being off work. After all, it’s just itchy spots, isn’t it?

Now he knows better. It’s being dumped into one of the upper circles of Hell. The itching means sleeplessness. Along with the spots goes lassitude, general depression and bad-humour. Hence the hiatus in bloggery.

Still, there was an upside. Being horizontal and awake means time to read. Simultaneous with that goes reluctance to leave the house, which means no book-buying, which doesn’t increase further the pile of unread books by the bed.

So, in the last fortnight this guilt-pile has been significantly reduced (or, perhaps, hadn’t accreted further):

• Andrew Martin’s latest Jim Stringer novel, the eighth, The Baghdad Railway Club.

Apart from being a more-than-decent teccy, Martin has engineered an intriguing aside on a bit of the First World War, the Mespot Campaign, that doesn’t receive enough attention — at least not since David Lean and Robert Bolt put T.E.Lawrence and Peter O’Toole on the Big Screen. He even slides in a subtle sub-text, oil, which has persisted to the present day. The recital of place names — Basrah, Feluja, Tikrit — makes the point equally.

• David Miles, The Tribes of Britain

Now this one has been hanging around for a while, often sampled, never previously worked through.

It is a profound book, which is in many ways the answer to the devolution questions. Miles propounds that, for all our our regional differences, the gene pool of the archipelago is remarkably homogeneous:

about 80 percent of Britons’ genes come from hunter-gatherers who came in immediately after the Ice Age.

We treasure our local roots — Malcolm regards himself as Anglo-Irish by attitudes, with Icenian overtones, and a frontier mentality derived from the Danelaw-Mercian interface —but there’s a common interest persisting beneath the skin.

• Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground, the third (apparently of six) in the Rivers of London series.

This was the work of a long day’s journey into an itchy night.To be honest, despite its considerable entertainment value, both the Pert Young Piece and Malcolm felt this one didn’t quite make the same grade as the previous two.

The delightful conceit of the river-deities is much reduced: it amounts to two young women in a West Ken nightclub:

They weren’t identical twins but they were definitely sisters. Tall and slender, dark-skinned, narrow-faced, flat-nosed and with sly black eyes that pinked up at the corners. I could just tell them apart. Olympia was a tad taller and broader of shoulder with her hair currently in a weave that cascaded expensively around her shoulders, Chelsea had a long neck, a narrower mouth than her sister and was sporting what I judged to be about thirty-six man-hours’ worth of twisted hair extensions …

‘… let me introduce the goddesses of Counter’s Creek and the Rover Westbourne,’ I said, and bowed for good measure. The girls shot me a poisonous look but I figured they owed me …

‘You know we’re Olympia and Chelsea,’ said Chelsea.

‘Although’, Olympia said … ‘We are goddesses and expected to be treated as such.’

Aaronovitch’s pithy zingers and knowledge of London Under is greatly satisfying.

• Antony Beevor: The Second World War.

With so much competition, one might wonder why Beavor bothered. Near 800 pages later, Beevor addresses just that point:

This book had a very simple and unheroic genesis. I always felt a bit of a fraud when consulted as a general expert on the Second World War because I was acutely conscious of large gaps in my knowledge, especially of unfamiliar aspects. This book is partly an act of reparation, but above all it is an attempt to understand how the whole complex jigsaw fits together, with the direct and indirect effects of actions and decisions taking place in very different theatres of war.

Therein lies all the virtue and many of the strengths of this tome. One of the best illustrations of Beevor’s thesis is his opening paragraphs:

In June 1944, a young soldier surrendered to American paratroopers in the Allied invasion of Normandy. At first his captors thought that he was Japanese, but he was in fact Korean. His name was Yang Kyoungjong.

In 1938, at the age of eighteen, Yang had been forcibly conscripted by the Japanese into their Kwantung Army in Manchuria. A year later, he was captured by the Red Army after the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and sent to a labour camp. The Soviet military authorities, at a moment of crisis in 1942, drafted him along with thousands of other prisoners into their forces. Then, early in 1943 he was taken prisoner by the German army at the Battle of Kharkov in Ukraine. In 1944, now in German uniform, he was sent to France to serve with an Ostbataillon supposedly boosting the strength of the Atlantic Wall at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula inland from Utah Beach. After time in a prison camp in Britain, he went to the United States where he said nothing of his past. He settled there and finally died in Illinois in 1992. 

The Pert Young Piece never tires of instructing Malcolm on the definition of a “historical fact”: this is adjudged to exist when it has been cited by a decent number (around half-a-dozen) reputable historians. The story of Yang Kyoungjong, complete with photograph, was new to Malcolm. He doesn’t recall it from any other history. It is a tale that will stick with him.

A criticism of Beevor is that he gives undue attention to events in the Far East, particularly the struggles in China. So be it: that, too, is essential to Beevor’s personal agenda, noted above.

At which moment, as part of the habit of alternating fiction and non-fiction, it ought to have been the turn of Laurent Binet’s HHhH. After a few pages that returned to the guilt-pile, doubtless for later consumption, and Malcolm reached instead for …

• Christian Wolmar: The Great Railway Revolution

Malcolm has this theory that there’s only one writer in each generation capable of explicating the mystique of trains. Once it was O.S.Nock. If only Johnny Cash can sing a song about a train, in the present generation Nock’s mantle has passed to Wolmar.

There’s an awful lot wrong with the way the USA relates to its railroads — there are still 90,000 miles of them. All those vast distances never seem to arrive at where you, personally, wanted to go. Even when Amtrak deigns to connect to a place of interest — say, Savannah GA, or Memphis, or (above all) San Francisco — the depot is inconveniently out-of-town. Then you discover that the fares and timetables do not compare with other forms of transport.

This book reminds us of the imagination, excesses and corruption of the railway plutocrats, along side the human cost of 2,000 workmen’s deaths in a single year.

Compelling stuff.

• David Abulafia: The Great Sea

Here’s another which had been lurking around, picked at but not digested, for some time.

Malcolm turned to this one because of the sub-title: A Human History of the Mediterranean. As with Beevor, Miles and Wolmar, the sweep of time and events is underpinned by personal incident and something none-too-distant from anecdote:

In 1794 Saint-Florent in the Balagne was stormed by the British, and within a few weeks a Corsican parliament voted for union with Great Britain; the island was to be a self-governing community under the sovereign authority of King George III. The Corsicans were granted their own flag, carrying a Moor’s head alongside the royal arms, as well as a motto: Amici e non di ventura, ‘friends and not by chance’.

The relationship between the British and the Corsicans turned sour, however:  [Pasquale] Paoli became disillusioned, and revolutionary committees became increasingly active, as Napoleon infiltrated activists into his native island. During 1796 William Pitt’s government decided that the British position in Corsica was untenable; the Corsican union with Britain was dissolved, and British troops  were withdrawn.

If that’s not enough:

Pitt wondered whether Catherine the Great might be willing to take on Corsica, in return for a promise of special access for British shipping; he wanted her to believe that she could hold the island with no more than 6,000 troops and the goodwill of the Corsican parliament. Catherine died before the proposal ever reached her. The British view of a Russian presence in the Mediterranean was, then, that the Russians might serve as useful idiots …

Gulp.

And finally …

• S.J.Parris: Prophecy 

Malcolm had been resisting this one, largely because its presentation appeared to be dressed up as a catch-penny rival to the excellent Matthew Shardlake series by C.J.Sansom. Malcolm had skimmed the first in the sequence, Heresy, and it didn’t make the juices flow, for some reason.

Mistake: don’t judge a book by its cover. This one’s pretty good. Good enough, indeed, for Malcolm to have added the third Parris volume, Sacrilege, to the guilt-pile.

The conceit is that Giodano Bruno, during the period of April 1583 to October 1585, when he was in London, was an agent for Sir Francis Walsingham. The basis for that is Walsingham certainly had someone with the cover-name Fagot inside the French embassy, and a decade back John Bossy suggested Bruno could be Fagot.

Prophecy, then, is an exploration of the seamier side of Elizabethan London, with a cast of ne’erdowells and aristos (same difference, of course) at the time of the Throckmorton Plot.

Whether Malcolm was seduced, in part, by his alter-ego’s family tree having Throckmorton connections is another matter.

Anyway, if there’s an itch, scratch it.

Unless it’s really shingles, when it does more harm than any good.

With an “e”

Frank McNally has appeared for repeated approbation here at Malcolm Redfellow’s Home Service. Not, of course, that the Magnificent Frank needs such trifles.

Today’s Irishman’s Diary, though, is a special treat.

Kilbeggan

Until the M6 was built, this was the cross-roads of the Dublin-Galway N6 (which took one down Bridge Street, and past the distillery) and the Nenagh-Dundalk N52. Now you turn off the motorway onto the Tullamore Road.

The gift wrapping for McNally’s offering is the Kilbeggan Distillery, in the County Westmeath. That was originally the Brusna Distillery (because it sits on the River Brosna, and has a water-mill — soon again to be functioning). The original licence is dated 1757; and so claims to be the oldest continually licensed distillery in the world. Let us remember that every bottle of Bushmills boasts a 1608 licence from James I to distil uisce beatha … in the territory of the Rowte (Rowte = rout, the area controlled by the private army of the MacQuillans), and that  the Old Bushmills Distillery was recorded in 1743.

Malcolm will happily drink to either claim.

The original Brusna distillery was set up and owned by the McManus family, and control passed to the Codd family in 1794. The distillery manager was John McManus, who was also a colonel in the United Irishmen, and who ended his life, condemned for treason (and apparently for breaching the curfew), on the gallows at Mullingar in the aftermath of 1798.

In 1843 the distillery was taken over by John Locke and Sons, by which name it became better known until Locke’s closed down in 1959. That led to one of those typically Irish shenanigans: the assets — which amounted to the run-down property in Kilbeggan and some 60,000 gallons of mature whiskey — had been “acquired” in 1947 by The Transworld Trust, based in Switzerland. To nobody’s great surprise The Transworld Trust, and its £305,000 was a wide-boy operation. From the start Oliver J Flanagan was asking awkward questions. As McNally puts it succinctly:

A subsequent tribunal of inquiry found that Flanagan had over-egged the allegations, somewhat. Even so, a bad smell lingered. And the Locke’s scandal helped usher De Valera out of power after 16 years, to be replaced by the first inter-party government.

… which all sounds dismally familiar

Inside this wrapping, McNally rattles through a broad view of what went wrong for Irish whiskey. His account boils down to:

1. Coffey

In 1830 a Dublin-born (the DNB prefers Dublin to the alternative of Calais) exciseman, Aeneas Coffey (left), came up with an alternative to the ancient alembic:

The Coffey still (a.k.a columnar still) consists of three interconnected towers equipped with perforated trays stacked at intervals of approximately 20 – 30 centimetres. Each tower has to inlets; one for the alcohol-containing liquid the other for pressurized steam. The ferment is fed through the top inlet and the steam from the bottom. As the liquid trickles down the steam rises and literally strips the alcohol from it at a high temperature and speed. The vaporized alcohol travels to the top of the tower and to the next tower to undergo the same process. The third tower usually shorter distils a smaller quantity, as the volume is now much smaller than at the beginning of the process. 

At the end of the run, a highly purified (90 percent ABV) alcohol is obtained which is, regardless of the base material, tastes the same -colourless, and tasteless much like vodka or industrial food-grade alcohol. This alcohol consists mainly of ethyl alcohol and very little, lethal methyl alcohol.

The result was a lighter distillate, cheaper to produce. The Scots took up the invention: the Irish stuck with traditional methods, or as the DNB has it:

Initial production problems and the conservatism of Irish distillers meant that Coffey had little success in introducing his apparatus in Ireland, and in 1835 he moved his business to St Leonard’s Street, Bromley by Bow, Middlesex. From the 1840s his patent still gained in popularity, notably in Scotland. During his tour of 1887 Alfred Barnard found Coffey stills in all the major Scottish distilleries. Improved versions are widely used in the manufacture of grain whisky, gin, and other potable and industrial spirits.

2. Prohibition

The Volstead Act (the National Prohibition Act of 1919) implemented the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Instantly Irish whiskey lost its main export market.

Worse still, the Locke’s brand and others were so well known they was counterfeited for hooch. By 1928 whiskey production in the Free State was 36.6% down, to 560,000 barrels.

When prohibition was repealed in 1931, the reputational damage had been done.

3. Independence

Sales in Britain of all things distinctly “Irish” were damaged by the War of Independence.

In 1932 the incoming  Fianna Fáil government of Éamon de Valera ramped up tariffs on imported goods, which in those days were mainly British exports. In retaliation Irish whiskey went AWOL across the British Empire.

4. Overpaid, over-sexed and over here

There should have been a reprieve when the GIs arrived, during the Second Unpleasantness.

Alas, thanks to a combination of the above factors, the American occupation developed a taste for Scotch, in McNally’s racey account:

Dev’s economic war with Britain was a disaster, and neutrality didn’t help much either. All those US troops stationed in the UK were a whisky marketer’s dream, bringing their newly acquired taste for Scotch home with them after the war.

… and a round finish

They are back distilling at Kilbeggan: production restarted in 2007, and will be on the market in a couple of years time.

Meanwhile the Cooley Distillery (now yet another subsidiary of the Jim Beam operation) in the County Louth will offer substitutes: Kilbeggan, Locke’s Blend and Locke’s Malt. The link with Kilbeggan, for the moment, is that the maturing process takes place in Locke’s old granite bond-store.

Sláinte

A bad review

Malcolm had just caught up with another review of Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.

Malcolm was aware of Lowe’s impressive previous outing, Inferno, on the carpet-bombing of Hamburg:

a sad, straightforward, well-researched book that gives an account of the bombing of Hamburg in the summer of 1943 from the point of view both of the bombers, English and American, and the Germans who endured it, experiencing the worst fire storm ever produced. More people were killed than at Nagasaki.

Malcolm was on the point of ordering this new book for his shelves. He had already seen:

•  Ian Thomson’s effort for the Sunday Telegraph (“a grimly absorbing account of the lingering antagonisms of post-war Europe”)

and

• Professor Brendan Simms doing the business in the Independent (“this compelling book”).

Reaching for the credit card …

Malcolm hit on the “review” (sorry about the inverted commas, but that’s the way it feels) in The Spectator by … Paul Johnson.

OK, OK, it’s only three weeks back. Yes, Malcolm needs to get out of bed in the morning …

The larger part of what Johnson rehearses is simply a recycling of his old prejudices: two legs good, four legs bad. And who’s to say he cannot invert the numbering once again?

Since this is written for The Spectator crowd, it has to conclude with the spoonful of sugar:

As for Britain, we have the record for decency, despite all the temptations of the war and the postwar chaos. It should never be forgotten that Clement Attlee diverted food ships from Britain to starving Europe in 1946, which meant we had to endure bread rationing, something we had avoided in wartime… We were a big loser from the war, but at least we emerged with our honour intact — Dresden excepted.

That should be applauded by one hand clapping.

But that’s not the sickener. Here it comes, in a single sentence:

Spain benefited enormously by Franco’s victory, which kept it out of the war, and it prospered for half a century afterwards until the European Union dragged it down.

“Benefited”? “Prospered”?

Since Malcolm has just polished off Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust, he takes a more caustic view.