Scenes from a West Country horse-fair

The crowd had thickened perceptibly now; and Wolf realised that he was seeing the most characteristic gathering for that portion of the countryside that he was ever likely to see. Here were smart self-satisfied tradesmen from Ramsgard with their wives and their girls. Here were weather-stained carters from Blackmore; cider-makers and cattle-dealers from Sedgemoor; stalwart melancholy-looking shepherds from the high Quantocks; a sprinkling of well-to-do farmers from the far-off valley of the Frome; sly, whimsical dairymen from the rich pastures of the Stour; and, moving among them all, slow-voiced and slow-footed, but with an infinite zest for enjoyment, the local rustic labourers that tilled the heavy fields watered by the Lunt.

The two men pushed their way back to the taut, vibrating rope, beyond which the driving contest was now proceeding; and as they rested there, Wolf's mind felt liberated from all its agitations, and he drank in the scene before him with unruffled delight. The peculiar smells that came to his nostrils - leather, and straw, and horse-dung, and tobacco-smoke, and cider-sour human breath, and paint, and tar, and half-devoured apples - were all caught up and overpowered by one grand dominant odour, the unique smell of the trodden grass of a fair-field. Let the sun shine as it would from the cold blue heaven! Let the chariots of white clouds race as they pleased under that airy tent! It was from the solid ground under human feet, under equine hooves, that this Dorsetshire world gave forth its autochthonous essence, its bitter-sweet, rank, harsh, terrestrial sweat, comforting beyond conscious knowledge to the heart of man and beast.

Nothing could have been more symbolic of the inmost nature of that countryside than the humorous gravity with which these lean yeomen and plump farmers drove their brightly-painted gigs and high dog-carts round that hoof-trodden paddock! The obvious reciprocity between the men who drove and the animals driven, the magnetic currents of sympathy between the persons looking on and the persons showing off, the way the whole scene was characterised by something casual, non-official, nonchalant - all this produced an effect that only England, and perhaps only that portion of England, could have brought into being. Behind Wolf and his companion surged a pushing, jostling, heterogeneous crowd, giving vent to a low, monotonous murmur; and behind them again could be heard the raucous cries and clangings and whistlings from the noisy whirligigs.

- John Cowper Powys, Wolf Solent, London, 1929, p.174-5 (1961 edn.).

The performances were apt to give rise to overcrowding and tumults

Control of dramatic performances in 16th century England

In the 16th century companies of players were attached to the court and to households of the nobility. Some of these companies travelled about the country giving performances at private houses and to the public. In addition, there were wandering troupes of miscellaneous players under no patronage. In the larger towns the guilds continued to present Corpus Christi plays, and similar performances were given sporadically in smaller places, but the performers of these probably remained amateurs. Some measure of control over stage performances was exercised in the interests of public order from about the middle of the century. The licensing of individual plays, in one form or another, began in 1549 if not earlier; and the subjection of players, unless 'protected', to the laws relating to vagabonds dates at least from 1554, and was probably enforced in practice even earlier. These measures were re-enacted in the reign of Elizabeth. By the Injunctions of 1559 [...] she directed that no interlude should be played unless previously licensed by the mayor of the town, or in the country by the lord lieutenant or two justices of the peace; and no plays were to be so licensed which treated of matters of religion or of the governance of the country. By an Act of 1572 all players were to be deemed rogues and vagabonds unless they belonged to a baron of the realm or person of higher degree, or were licensed by two justices. The mayor and corporation of London, who under the Injunctions of 1559 had jurisdiction over stage plays in the city of London, the chief centre of theatrical activity, were in general hostile to dramatic performances, partly from Puritan sentiment, partly because the performances were apt to give rise to overcrowding and tumults, and moreover tended to spread infection in the frequently recurring periods of plague. The court on the other hand, and Elizabeth herself, favoured the players, and the grant in 1574 of a patent to the Earl of Leicester's company, authorising them to play in all towns without hindrance by the local authorities, conflicted with the powers previously conferred on the corporation. The latter retorted with an act of Common Council requiring all players to be licensed by the corporation and all plays allowed by it. The conflict between court and city was keen and prolonged, and during certain periods the corporation prohibited all performances within the city boundaries. In consequence, the first permanent playhouse in London was erected in Finsbury fields, outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction.

- Margaret Drabble, 'Censorship & the law of the press', The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford, 1985, p.1105-6.

Robert Cecil's Elizabethan intelligencers

For more than a century, it lay undisturbed in the National Archives: a single sheet of paper, headed The names of the Intelligencers, with the power to unveil a hidden network of secret Elizabethan spies.

Now, the 428-year-old secret dossier of Robert Cecil, spymaster to Elizabeth I and the man who discovered the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, has been pieced together using this key document. It reveals how Cecil set up and used a clandestine espionage network to spy on European monarchs for the English throne.

The network was so extensive that the historian Stephen Alford – who has been hunting down Elizabethan spies and painstakingly reconstructing Cecil’s illicit files about each “intelligencer” ever since he found the list in the archives nearly 15 years ago – thinks it was “the first properly organised secret service” in England.

“There were lots of names listed – some I recognised, people in or close to the privy council of Elizabeth I, and lots I didn’t know. Eventually, I realised that the numbers next to their names were folio numbers and that this was really a contents page. That was a lightbulb moment,” said Alford, professor of early modern British history at the University of Leeds. He has written a book on his discoveries, All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil, which is being published by Penguin. The previously overlooked document, which Alford thinks Cecil began to write in 1596, had been placed in a “miscellaneous” folder by Victorian archivists.

“I think I was probably the first scholar to take an interest in it,” said Alford. “The Victorians had a habit, where if they came across papers that didn’t make sense to them, that were a little mysterious and couldn’t be filed away in a neat and tidy way, they would scratch their heads and then stick them in a miscellaneous folder and ignore them. And that’s where historians now find really interesting stuff.”

He began scouring the archives for any paper which looked relevant and had “a little number in the corner” that matched the intelligencer’s number on the contents page. “I just had to hope that the edges of the paper hadn’t been torn. And because the manuscripts were so poorly kept before the 19th century – often stuffed into the chambers in the Tower of London – rats and mice got to some as well. Often, they were stained, sometimes you see teeth marks. It’s a miracle these papers survived at all.”

As he gradually built up each intelligencer’s folio, he began to see a pattern. “Each was like an office file, I think. It was on hand in Cecil’s office for when reports came in, or to keep a record of payments made.”

Most spies in the 16th century worked for courtiers and were normally “a bunch of rogues”, Alford said, who would turn up haphazardly and volunteer information on an ad hoc basis. The intelligencers on this list were different: “These were serious individuals, a lot of them international merchants, who were on the payroll.”

Previously, scholars thought that Cecil, whose official role was secretary of state to Elizabeth, had a “few spies, here and there”. But Alford’s research indicates that he had an organised network of more than 20 spies, in Lisbon, Calais, Brussels, Seville, Rome, Amsterdam, Scotland, Sweden and unspecified locations elsewhere. “He chose merchants because they travel, can read and write, speak European languages and have networks of their own.”

Each agent was paid to secretly send coded reports to Cecil, who decrypted them using the individual, bespoke cypher in each of their files, which also contained a record of their payments and all their secret communications. “By modern standards, the cyphers are pretty unsophisticated – they’ll suggest different letters for letters of the alphabets, or symbols or diagrams for the Queen or King of Spain, for example,” he said.

- Donna Ferguson, 'Uncovered: 428-year-old secret dossier reveals Elizabeth I’s network of spies', Guardian, 29 June 2024

The North-South divide in England

The North-South Divide Gets Ideology

At the 1924 election, former Southern Liberal voters went Tory, and stayed there; former Northern Liberal voters went with Labour, and stayed there. This finally locked down the political North-South divide. The Liberal Party was English, with an ancestry going back beyond the Union of 1707. Although it had come to be identified with Outer Britain during the struggles of the 19th century, it never completely lost traction in the South - until now. The Labour Party was a very different animal. It was born of the United Kingdom, its first five leaders were Scotsmen, and for the first two decades of its existence it had zero impact south of the Trent except in the poor quarters of London's vast city-state.

The Conservatives were no longer facing off against a genuine rival English party. The opposition now was the Party of Outer Britain (Northern English + Celts) a.k.a. Labour. This hardened the age-old suspicion among Southerners that the North was somehow not properly English. Essentially the battle-lines were the same as in 1461, 1642 or 1848 (or, for that matter, as when Northern thegns and Welsh princelings had united against the Godwins of Wessex under Edward the Confessor).

The ancient struggle was now window-dressed with fashionable, 20th-century ideologies. Labour, the new incarnation of the Outer British Alliance, claimed its members were all somehow instinctively peace-loving, communitarian, and internationalist. This self-image remains central to many Scots, Welsh, and Northern English.

Men live by their generosities, by their loyalties; not by their interests, and their self-regarding impulses... that is the aim of the Socialist inspiration that gives us power in our Labour Movement.

- Ramsay MacDonald, Labour leader, 1924

Meanwhile, the latest version of the Party of the South claimed to represent a Deep Ethnic England. This vision is still widespread among those who love Barbour coats, the Cotswolds and suchlike.

The preservation of the individuality of the Englishman is essential to the preservation of the type of the race... To me, England is the country, and the country is England... The sounds of England, the tinkle of hammer on anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone...

- Stanley Baldwin, Conservative leader, 1924

- James Hawes, The Shortest History of England, London, 2020, p.204-206.

See also:
Books: A NZer makes powerful enemies at the BBC, 28 February 2023
Books: It seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain, 20 December 2022
Books: The rotten boroughs, 2 April 2017

The threat of transportation to the colonies

[T]ransportation overseas, in use from 1717 onwards, remained a major alternative option for British law enforcers. Yet exiling convicts from friends, families and familiar lives as a penalty for minor crimes seemed equally disproportionate. Moreover, this policy too was arbitrary in its implementation. Judicial discretion produced major regional variations in trial outcomes. After their conviction, too many prisoners then died in the insanitary ships - known as the 'hulks'- where they were kept while awaiting transportation. And once they had arrived overseas, people's subsequent experiences were also variegated. Hence this penalty also lacked rationality, proportionality and fairness.

That said, the policy of criminal transportation, initially to the North American colonies (before 1776) and then to Australia, continued for a considerable time. Most transportees were adult males from south-east England; but some women were sent too. One was Hannah Rosse, a Londoner described as 'a sort of a dumb [sic], who was speech-impeded or (possibly) shamming. In 1745 she was sentenced to transportation for a second offence of larceny (non-violent theft of goods worth over 12 pence). Rosse's disability won her no leniency, indicating that she had no incentive to be faking it. In all, some 162,400 convicts were taken to Australia between 1788 and 1868. However, this policy was also being slowed, long before it was finally halted. In its last years, it was more of a threat than an actuality. By 1851 the transportees (a number of whom later returned to Britain) constituted only a tiny proportion of the 27 million inhabitants of Britain and Ireland.

- Penelope Cornfield, The Georgians: The Deeds & Misdeeds of 18th-Century Britain, New Haven, 2022, p.215-6.

Mendelssohn's coach journey from Glasgow to Liverpool

We flew away from Glasgow on the top of the mail, ten miles an hour, past steaming meadows and smoking chimneys, to the Cumberland lakes, to Keswick, Kendal, and the prettiest towns and villages. The whole country is like a drawing-room. The rocky walls are papered with bushes, moss, and firs; the trees are carefully wrapped up in ivy; there are no walls or fences, only high hedges, and you see them all the way up flat hill-tops. On all sides carriages full of travellers fly along the roads; the corn stands in sheaves; slopes, hills, precipices, are all covered with thick, warm foliage. Then again our eyes dwelt on the dark-blue English distance - many a noble castle, and so on, until we reached Ambleside. There the sky turned gloomy again, and we had rain and storm. Sitting on the top of the 'stage,' and madly careering along ravines, past lakes, up-hill, down-hill, wrapped in cloaks, and umbrellas up, we could see nothing but railings, heaps of stones or ditches, and but rarely catch glimpses of hills and lakes. Sometimes our umbrellas scraped against the roofs of the houses, and then, wet through, we would come to a second-rate inn, with a high blazing fire, and English conversation about walking, coals, supper, the weather, and Bonaparte. Yesterday our seats on the coach were accidentally separated, so that I hardly spoke to [Mendelssohn's travelling companion Karl] Klingemann, for changing horses was done in about forty seconds. I sat on the box next by the coachman, who asked me whether I flirted much, and made me talk a good deal, and taught me the slang of horsemanship. Klingemann sat next to two old women, with whom he shared his umbrella. Again manufactories, meadows, parks, provincial towns, here a canal, there a railway, then the sea with ships, six full coaches with towering outsiders following each other; in the evening a thick fog, the stage running madly in the darkness. Through the fog we see lamps gleaming all about the horizon; the smoke of manufactories envelops us on all sides; gentlemen on horseback ride past; one coach-horn blows in B flat, another in D, others follow in the distance, and here we are at Liverpool.

- Composer Felix Mendelssohn, letter, 19 August 1829, quoted in James Wilson Hyde, The Royal Mail: its Curiosities & Romance, 1885

I get the feeling that I am responding to a call

Thursday music corner: Liverpool band The La's formed in 1983, with original band member Mike Badger later indicating that the band name referenced the Scouse phrase for 'lads'. 

After several lineup changes joined the Go! Disc label in 1987 and started the several years of recording that led to their first album, accompanied by a volatile series of band-member changes and disagreements with record producers over the sound of the album. Amidst this upheaval, the band's second single, the now-legendary There She Goes, was first released in 1988 and failed to make an impression. 

Eventually the band leader and songwriter, Lee Mavers, became thoroughly dissatisfied with the recording process, despite ending up with top-flight Simple Minds and U2 producer Steve Lillywhite working on their much-delayed debut. The La's gave up on the Lillywhite recording sessions, at which point the producer created his preferred version of the recordings, which Go! Disc released as the self-titled The La's. The album and the re-issued There She Goes went on to global success, despite the band's disgruntlement with the process by which they were created. 

The La's was the band's only studio album release. It has been accompanied by no fewer than 10 non-studio album releases, the most recent being 2021's The La's Live (1986-1987). Feelin', an insanely tuneful Beatlesque track from the debut album, stands out with an excitingly punchy brevity at a mere 104 seconds in duration.

The La's bassist John Power left The La's in 1991 to form his own group, Cast, which achieved success as a power-pop combo during the Britpop boom of the mid-1990s. There She Goes was also covered by the US Christian band Sixpence None The Richer in 1999, charting higher in the UK than the original La's recording. 

The La's - Feelin' (1990) 

See also:

Music: The La's - Doledrum (1990)

Music: Cast - Back Of My Mind (1995)

Music: Stone Roses - Waterfall (1989)

A New Zealander makes powerful enemies at the BBC

Presiding over the [BBC] Home News Division, and therefore responsible for setting the overall tone and content, was the domineering and ultra-conservative New Zealander, Tahu Hole. He had been appointed to the job in May 1948 by William Haley, who valued what he saw as the man's 'tremendous streak of independence'. 'I was absolutely certain that whether he did right or wrong, he would not give way to anybody inside or outside the Corporation.' It was an assessment that turned out to be all too accurate. Among Hole's most infamous decrees was the requirement that at least two reliable outside sources were required to verify the accuracy of every news story. Hole illustrated this by describing what would happen if a BBC correspondent called in with 'a news story which said that, let us say, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem had been damaged by whatever - a bomb or an earthquake'. 'If we got that from our own correspondent we wouldn't use it,' he said bluntly, 'because unless our correspondent had been right next to the Wall when it was damaged he would have got it from someone else and he might conceivably have been the victim of a hoax... We would have to wait until we had satisfied ourselves from attributable sources that it was so.' For Hole, the over-arching principle was simple: 'Accuracy at all costs.' Leonard Miall, who was now the BBC's Washington correspondent, saw things rather more negatively. "Tahu Hole's concern was that the News should never make a mistake: it didn't matter how slow it was, how dull it was, as long as it didn't make a mistake.' He remembered how in 1950 he had been among a tiny handful of reporters who had been given advance information from White House sources that there was to be a military response to North Korea's invasion of the South, yet was prevented by Hole from breaking the story. I just simply lost my temper, and I said "Well, it's no good trying to expect Correspondents to have any initiative if this is what you do".

 

Hole believed equally strongly that consistency was as important as accuracy, and that news could not be told properly through pictures. The ensuing conflict between his News Division and the television department at Alexandra Palace was described by one insider as 'like a battle between a school of whales and a herd of elephants... two powerful forces locked against each other'. One source of friction was Television Newsreel, which Alexandra Palace had launched back in 1948 - a short, lively magazine that pulled together brief filmed reports on sporting events, ship launches, disasters, sundry royal visits and the like. Its great strength lay in its camerawork and editing - unsurprisingly, since it was made by television's own film unit. Its ability to deal with the very latest news of the day was less striking, and this provided the excuse for Hole to make a territorial grab, insisting that News Division take charge. When the Hole-approved format, under the title of News and Newsreel, was first broadcast in 1954 the Daily Mail called it 'a mixture of the dull, trivial and ineffectual'.

Tahu Hole's tenure at the BBC did eventually come to an end - though a rather ignoble one. In 1958, the Director-General Ian Jacob shunted him sideways, putting him in overall charge of the BBC's administration and making room for Hugh Carleton Greene, who would become head of an enlarged 'News and Current Affairs' directorate. Two years later, Greene took over the top job from Jacob. 'I realised when I became Director-General that I must do something":

Tahu Hole had an appallingly corrupting effect on the characters of otherwise good people. People used to bring him in their little bouquets of flowers from their gardens to present to him as if he was some sort of heathen idol. To speak quite frankly, I have had to do with the Nazi leaders in Germany and I have never had such a sense of evil from any of them as I had from Tahu Hole.

It was a devastating assessment. And it was with the full backing of the Governors that Greene - 'like a snake striking' as one of his colleagues put it - insisted on Hole's immediate resignation.

- David Hendy, The BBC: A People's History, London, 2022, p.385-6.

See also:

Blog: Later With Jools Holland, 5 May 2011

Blog: Mock The Week, 20 February 2010

Blog: Guardian angels sung this strain, 15 September 2008

Another luke-warm pop thing had climbed onto the cross

Thursday music corner: Venerable English alternative punk rockers Nightingales formed in Birmingham in 1979 and attracted the attention of John Peel, featuring often on his legendary Radio 1 show. Centred around vocalist Robert Lloyd, the group continued to perform through the first half of the 1980s until splitting up in 1986 after a short-lived band lineup with four new members. 

Since re-forming in 2004 the band have been highly productive, and their greater public profile was sealed with the release of the 2021 documentary King Rocker, presented by long-standing Nightingales fan, the comedian Stewart Lee. (NZ viewers can see the documentary on TVNZ+).

Nightingales have released 12 studio albums plus two live albums since 1982, with the first three albums appearing between 1982 and their breakup in 1986. Their last three albums since 2018 have been released by Tiny Global Productions. Bloody Breath appears on their most recent album, 2022's The Last Laugh. 

Nightingales - Bloody Breath (2022)

See also:

Music: Nightingales - Idiot Strength (1981)

Music: Fuzzbox - International Rescue (1989) 

Music: Gemma Rogers - My Idea of Fun (2022)

Life in the faster lane

An examination of English bishops' and royal itineraries from the 12th to 15th centuries suggests that travellers routinely covered just 20 miles day. They did not try to travel fast unless it was essential for them to do so: when pressed, those wealthy enough to pay for changes of horses could go much faster.

There are only a few instances of people covering more than 70 miles in a day before 1330. One is the news of Edward I's death at about 3pm on 7 July 1307 at Burgh by Sands near the Scottish border, which reached his heir in London on 11 July. This entailed a journey of more than 300 miles at around 75 miles per day.

The maximum speed of news increased in the 14th century. When Edward III sent a messenger on business to Avignon in 1343, his man took 7.5 days to cover the 730-mile route, including the sea crossing: an average of 97 miles per day.

The establishment of news relays by Edward IV and Henry VII hugely increased the speeds at which information could travel. News of the capitulation of Berwick in 1482 (during an English invasion of Scotland) was brought south by a relay of 10 riders at the speed of 170 miles per day.

In the 16th century, the establishment of the postal routes facilitated even faster speeds. So too did the breeding of fast horses and legislation ensuring the better maintenance of the highways. By the 1570s, the post from Berwick was expected to travel to London in 42 hours in summer and 60 hours in winter, implying minimum speeds of 194 and 136 miles per day respectively. By the end of the century, ordinary citizens could pay 2d per mile to ride with the post, often travelling at 10mph - twice as fast as before 1330.

- Ian Mortimer, 'The age of transformation', BBC History, February 2023, p.26

See also:

Blog: The beneficent miracle of the postal service, 27 August 2019

Blog: London mail coach departure points, 24 September 2015

Blog: The great ebbing surging traffic of London, 12 August 2015

Blog: Coach travel from London in 1658 and 1739, 4 October 2013

Blog: Posting the empire as the royal word, 9 January 2013

Neither men nor laws could resist them

Lady Mary rejects the advances of Pope,
from the Auckland City Art Gallery, 1852 (link) 

Here is no news to be sent you from this place, which has been for this fortnight and still continues overwhelmed with politicks, and which are of so mysterious a nature, one ought to have some of the gifts of Lilly or Partridge to be able to write about them; and I leave all those dissertations to those distinguished mortals who are endowed with the talent of divination; though I am at present the only one of my sex who seems to be of that opinion, the ladies having shewn their zeal and appetite for knowledge in a most glorious manner. At the last warm debate in the House of Lords, it was unanimously resolved there should be no crowd of unnecessary auditors; consequently the fair sex were excluded, and the gallery destined to the sole use of the House of Commons. Notwithstanding which determination, a tribe of dames resolved to shew on this occasion, that neither men nor laws could resist them. These heroines were Lady Huntingdon, the Duchess of Queensbury, the Duchess of Ancaster, Lady Westmoreland, nor Lady Cobham, Lady Charlotte Edwin, Lady Archibald Hamilton and her daughter, Mrs Scott, and Mrs Pendarvis, and Lady Frances Saunderson. I am thus particular in their names since I look upon them to be the boldest assertors, and most resigned sufferers for liberty, I ever read of. They presented themselves at the door at nine o'clock in the morning, where Sir William Saunderson [in the role of Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod] respectfully informed them the [Lord] Chancellor had made an order against their admittance. The Duchess of Queensbury, as head of the squadron, pished at the ill-breeding of a mere lawyer, and desired him to let them up stairs privately. After some modest refusals he swore by G-- he would not let them in. Her grace, with a noble warmth, answered, by G-- they would come in, in spite of the Chancellor and the whole House. This being reported, the Peers resolved to starve them out; an order was made that the doors should not be opened till they had raised their siege.

These Amazons now shewed themselves qualified for the duty even of foot-soldiers; they stood there till five in the afternoon, without either sustenance or evacuation, every now and then playing vollies of thumps, kicks, and raps, against the door, with so much violence that the speakers in the House were scarce heard. When the Lords were not to be conquered by this, the two Duchesses (very well apprized of the use of stratagems in war) commanded a dead silence of half an hour; and the Chancellor, who thought this a certain proof of their absence, (the Commons also being very impatient to enter) gave order for the opening of the door; upon which they all rushed in, pushed aside their competitors, and placed themselves in the front rows of the gallery. They stayed there till after eleven, when the House rose; and during the debate gave applause, and showed marks of dislike, not only by smiles and winks (which have always been allowed in these cases), but by noisy laughs and apparent contempts, which is supposed the true reason why poor Lord Hervey spoke miserably. I beg your pardon, dear madam, for this long relation; but 'tis impossible to be short on so copious a subject; and you must own this action very well worthy of record, and I think not to be paralleled in any history, ancient or modern. I look so little in my own eyes (who was at that time ingloriously sitting over a tea-table), I hardly dare subscribe myself even.

- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, letter to Lady Pomfret, March 1739, in The Oxford Book of Letters, F & A Kermode (eds.), Oxford, 1995, p.66-67.

It seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain

FRIDAY 10TH MAY 1940

Perhaps the darkest day in English history. I was still asleep, recovering from the emotions of the past few days, when my private telephone tinkled and it was Harold [Balfour] speaking from the Air Ministry. Holland and Belgium invaded; bombs falling on Brussels, parachutists landing at The Hague etc. Another of Hitler's brilliantly conceived coups done with lightning precision. Of course he seized upon the psychological moment when England is politically divided and the ruling caste is seething with dissension and anger. I suppose he heard of Wednesday's debate and fatal division yesterday morning and immediately acted upon it.* It took only a few hours to prepare this further crime and all day Holland and Belgium have been invaded. I rang up Alan [Lennox-Boyd] who curiously enough never knows anything, nor did Rodney Wilkinson - who for all his really invidious charm has a middle-class mind - then I dressed and went to the [Foreign Office]. Princess Olga [of Greece and Denmark] rang up asking for news and suggested going out tonight! I telephoned about frantically to find a free young man and could only get Rodney. At the Office all was in confusion, and the mandarins, some of them, seemed more downhearted that the invasion of the Low Countries had probably saved Chamberlain, than depressed by the invasion itself. It was the popular view this morning that Neville was saved, for after all his policy had been vindicated swiftly, surely, suddenly in the last twenty-four hours. Had he sent immense numbers of troops to Norway, where should we be now? This latest coup is probably the prelude to a concentrated attack on England with all imaginable horrors [...]

Now the drama begins: the Chamberlains returned to No. 10, and sometime during the afternoon a message came from the Labour people that they would join a govt, but refused to serve under Chamberlain. Action had to be taken immediately: Neville hesitated for half an hour, and meanwhile [Alexander Douglas-Home, Lord] Dunglass rang me - couldn't Rab [Butler] do anything with Halifax, plead with him to take it on? Rab was doubtful as he had already this morning and yesterday had such conversations with 'the Pope' who was firm - he would not be Prime Minister. I don't understand why, since a more ambitious man never lived, nor one with, in a way, a higher sense of duty and noblesse oblige. Nevertheless I persuaded Rab to go along to Halifax's room for one last final try: he found H closed with [the Duke of] Alba, and waited. Three minutes later H had slipped out to go to the dentist's without Rab seeing him and Nicholas Valentine Lawford, the rather Third Empire secretary, who neglected to tell Halifax that Rab was waiting, may well have played a decisive negative role in history. Rab came back to our room, angry and discouraged, and we rang No. 10; but Alec Dunglass said that already the die had been cast: it seems that Winston [Churchill] had half thrown away his mask and was pressing the PM to resign and at once. Winston feared that the Dutch invasions would bring about a reaction in Neville's favour. A message was sent to the Palace and an audience arranged for six o'clock - it seemed now that only a miracle could save Chamberlain, and perhaps England.

- Henry 'Chips' Channon MP, in Simon Heffer (ed.) Henry 'Chips' Channon: The Diaries 1938-43, London, 2021, p.310-11.

* Heffer notes: 'He did nothing of the sort. Hitler had ordered plans for the invasion to be drawn up the previous October and had resolved to do it once matters were settled in Denmark and Norway'. At the audience Channon mentions at the close Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Chamberlain would be dead of cancer within six months.

See also:
Blog: NZ declares war on Germany, 3 September 2014

Blog: The Audience, 14 July 2013
Blog: Chartwell, 12 August 2007

A long and well-documented history

Born Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson — he began using “Boris” in a sort of rebranding exercise in high school — the soon-to-be-ex prime minister has a long and well-documented history both of evading the truth and of acting as if he believes himself to be exempt from the normal rules of behavior. His many years in public life — as a newspaper reporter and columnist, as the editor of an influential London political magazine, as a politician — have left a trail of witnesses to, and victims of, his slippery nature.

When he was editor of the Spectator magazine, he lied to the editor, Conrad Black, promising not to serve in Parliament while working at the magazine. (He did.) When he was first elected to Parliament, he lied to his constituents when he promised to quit his Spectator job. (He didn’t.) As a legislator, he lied to the party leader, Michael Howard, and to the news media when he publicly declared that he had not had an affair with a writer for the magazine, nor gotten her pregnant and paid for her abortion. (He had done all of that.) 

[...]

When he was the Brussels correspondent for the right-leaning Daily Telegraph in the late 1980s, Mr. Johnson wrote highly entertaining but blatantly inaccurate articles designed to paint the European Union as a factory of petty regulation intent on stamping out British individuality — articles that helped establish an anti-Europe narrative for a generation of Conservatives and pave the way for Brexit, two decades later.

- Sarah Lyall, 'Johnson's lies worked for years, until they didn't', New York Times, 8 July 2022

He is obstinate, in love and rather more than a little mad

SATURDAY 28TH NOVEMBER [1936]

I am bewildered, no, I am convinced. The battle for the throne has begun. On Wednesday evening (I know all that follows to be true; not six people in the Kingdom are so informed), Mr [Stanley] Baldwin spent 1 hr 40 minutes at Buckingham Palace with the King [Edward VIII] and gave him information that the govt would resign, and that the press could no longer be restrained from attacking the King, if he did not abandon all idea of marrying Mrs [Wallis] Simpson. Mr Baldwin hoped and thought to frighten the monarch; but he is obstinate, in love and rather more than a little mad, and he refused point-blank and asked for time to consult his friends. "Who are they?' Mr Baldwin demanded... the audience was not acrimonious but polite, sad, even affectionate, I am told... 'Lord Beaverbrook,' the King retorted. The Prime Minister gasped and departed. On Thursday Beaverbrook arrived back from America and spent the evening with the King... yesterday morning the Cabinet again met, an emergency meeting, and the situation in Spain was given out as the pretext.... The PM told the Cabinet of the King's determination. I hope he mentioned my suggestion to make her Duchess of Lancaster, and in ten years, when the country is used to her, she could be declared Queen. The King saw Beaverbrook Wednesday, and last night Beaverbrook went to see Wallis, and thus our dinner party chez elle was postponed. Now no one knows what will happen but the atmosphere vibrates with nerves and the storm may break any monarch. 

- Henry 'Chips' Channon, in The Diaries 1918-38, Simon Heffer (ed.), London, 2021, p.597

The Royal Pavilion at Brighton

The Pavilion, which had been built for the Prince Regent by Mr Henry Holland, occupied a frontage of four hundred and eighty feet, and stood in ten acres of ground. It had been designed in accordance with a vague idea conceived by the Prince upon being sent a present of some Chinese wallpaper, and startling and original was the result. At first glance the sight seeing visitor might well imagine himself to have strayed into some land of make-believe, so gorgeous and unconventional was the palace. The Greek, the Moorish, and the Russian styles predominated. It was fronted by an Ionic colonnade and entablature; a succession of green-roofed domes and minarets rose above a running battlement that surmounted the upper line of the whole building; and two cones, equal in height to the central and largest dome, crowned each wing. The pinnacles and the minarets, which were placed at every angle of the structure, were made of Bath stone, the rest of the palace of stuccoed brick. In front of each of the wings was an open arcade composed of arches, separated by octagonal columns, and ornamented by trellis-work. The entrance was upon the western side, but the principal front, which Mrs Scattergood and Miss Taverner were gazing at, was to the east, and opened on to a lawn, which was separated from the parade by a low wall, and a dwarf enclosure. A captious critic had once remarked, on first seeing the palace, that it was as though St Paul's had littered, and brought forth a brood of cupolas, but no such profane thought crossed Miss Taverner's mind. If the Pavilion had not been conceived with quite that simplicity of taste which was proper, it was not for her to cavil; she was not to be setting up her judgment in opposition to Mr Holland's.

- Georgette Heyer, Regency Buck, 1935

The cut sublime

To CUT. (Cambridge.) To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c. The cut direct, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him. The cut indirect, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him. The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King's College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

- 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 'a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit, and pickpocket eloquence'

Regency wits

Wit was nowhere more in demand than at fashionable dinner parties. In England, "the agreeable man gets more reputation, more eating, and more drinking, in return for his talk than anywhere else," observed Lord John Russell in 1820. Much of this humour belongs to the "you had to be there" moment and has long since gone stale, especially when read on the printed page, but at its finest it still reveals the kind of intellectual agility and esprit so highly prized by Regency men-about-town. Byron thought Scrope Berdmore Davies "one of the cleverest men I ever knew in Conversation." Beau Brummell once bought a grammar book to help him learn French, and when Davies was asked what progress his friend had made in his studies, he replied that Brummell "had been stopped like Bonaparte in Russia by the Elements." Walter Scott praised Henry Luttrell as "the great London wit." When Thomas Moore commented on the dark complexion of a former hatmaker named Sharpe, as though "the dye of his old trade... had got engrained into his face," Luttrell responded, "Yes... Darkness that may be felt." The poet Samuel Rogers was among many who especially relished the wit of the bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith. "Whenever the conversation is getting dull, he throws in some touch which makes it rebound, and rise again as light as ever," Rogers recollected. Of Luttrell, Smith declared: "[His] idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie to the sound of trumpets." Of his friend Mrs. Grote when she entered the drawing room wearing an enormous, rose-colored turban: "Now I know the meaning of the word grotesque." To that same Mrs. Grote: "Go where you will, do what you please, I have the most perfect confidence in your indiscretion." Smith could be scholarly: when he heard two women shouting at each other across an alleyway, he observed that they would never agree, for they were "arguing from different premises." He could also be crude: if the name of his friend Miss Alcock was translated into Latin, it would be "Domina omnis penis."

- Robert Morrison, The Regency Years, New York, 2019, p.99

Elizabeth Cook's loss & legacy

On the life of Elizabeth Cook, wife of famed explorer Captain James Cook, after his death in Hawaii in 1779:

'More tragedy followed: she was to see all her surviving sons die in succession. Nathaniel was lost at sea aged sixteen in 1780. Her youngest, Hugh, destined for the church, caught scarlet fever at Cambridge University and died in 1793 aged seventeen. James, her eldest, drowned aged thirty-one in 1794. His boat overturned as he was returning to his ship. He had been advised to wait for calmer weather but the achievements of his father put pressure on him to act boldly. At this point, Elizabeth burned all Cook's letters. Some thought it was because nothing else could efface painful memories. Yet perhaps she was determined to keep something of her husband to herself; she had already lost so much to public service. 

Elizabeth went to live in Clapham, sharing a house with her cousin, Admiral Isaac Smith, who had sailed with Cook on his first voyage. The admiral retired from the navy in his fifties, having contracted hepatitis in the East Indies. Later he inherited property in Merton [Merton Abbey], after which the two of them spent winters in Clapham and summers in Merton. Elizabeth lived in an age when the tittle-tattle of provincial ladies could break a reputation. She guarded her respectability. Every Thursday at 3 p.m. she held a sedate dinner party for her friends; she fasted on the anniversaries of the deaths of her husband and three sons, spending these days meditating and reading the Bible. She lived to be ninety-three and always wore mourning and the ring with her husband's hair in it. She treasured the coffin-shaped memento containing locks of his hair that the crew of his final voyage had made for her. She hoarded the curiosities that Cook had brought home, but in old age gave many items away as marks of esteem. Her physician of later years received the superior edition of Cook's second voyage awarded her by the Admiralty.

To the end, she guarded her husband's reputation. When pressed to comment on reports of him being severe and reserved, she always emphasized his benign qualities as a husband and father. In accordance with her wishes, she was buried in Great St Andrews, Cambridge, near two of her sons. In an eleven-page will, she bequeathed £60,000 to relations, friends and charities. Cook's gold Copley medal went to the British Museum. She left money to the Royal Maternity Charity; she knew about childbirth in difficult circumstances. In some ways, her life was typical of women who married sailors - seeing her husband at rare intervals, having (and burying) children in his absence, and outliving him after his sudden death in service. In other respects, she is highly unusual a diffident public figure who became wealthy, pensioned and a resource for folk who wanted to know about Cook'.

- Margarette Lincoln, Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook & Nelson, New Haven Conn., 2018, p.132-3.

See also:

History: A cure for scurvy, 16 June 2013

History: The tyranny of distance, 1 February 2011

History: Nauticalia in Plymouth, 12 April 2007 

The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite

In 1980, the year following the demolition of Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead, the German architect Walter Segal wrote about the effects, on both communities and individuals, of building housing on a mass scale. "To humanise huge structures by architectural means is an unrewarding task,' he commented. The loss of identity, the divorce from the ground and the collectivisation of open space pose dilemmas that cannot be disguised by shape, texture, colour and proportion. A good view over landscaped spaces compensates only a few. The human animal does not appreciate being reduced to the scale of a termite.' 

Oak and Eldon Gardens, which replaced an area of back-to-back terraces in the dock side north end of Birkenhead, suffered from their size and scale, as well as their poor design: the dank stairwells leading up to each floor invited vandalism and required a level of maintenance that was unplanned for, either by the council or the architects themselves, therefore help and repairs were not always available when needed. Tenants were, indeed, 'divorced from the ground' by means of stilts, under which their cars would be parked and passers-by would thread through on their way to other destinations. The flats showed English council tenants how it felt to live like bees in a honeycomb: as nuclear families in isolated, identical modules, collected together in a building that overwhelmed them with its size. Its scale, and the principles behind it, suggested an experiment in communal living, but people were not truly living together. At the same time that they sensed a loss of control over their private identity, tenants also had to deal with the consequences of communal services - such as lifts, postboxes and rubbish chutes - being damaged or put out of service by individuals whom they could rarely identify.

It was with equal elegance that Segal pointed out that Britain's targets for housing density that is, the number of households on each hectare of land - could just as easily have been met by building two-storey terraced houses, and that the cost of planning, building and maintaining two flats in an average tower block was roughly equal to that for three or four houses. Time and again council planners were warned of the difficulty and expense of creating new communities from scratch, by sociologists who had studied the effects of slum clearance on the interwar generation, when close-knit towns people were first 'decanted' from back-to-backs into suburban cottages. Such flats seemed to divide and rule over, and to make faceless, the people who lived there.

- Lynsey Hanley, Estates: An Intimate History, London, 2007, p.115-6.

Does Cambridge burn brightly into the day?

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge – anyhow above the roof of King’s College Chapel – there is a difference. Out at sea a great city will cast a brightness into the sky. Is it fanciful to suppose the sky, washed into the crevices of King’s College Chapel, lighter, thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not only into the night, but into the day?

- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, 1922