BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

"The Philadelphia Kellys don't care much for royalty."
John Brendan Kelly, Sr., 1889-1960.
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In rowing , , , there’s no encouraging voice beside you, no helping hand. You’ve got to rely on muscle and heart, on spirit and soul, on will and determination, such as no other sport demands. John Brendan Kelly, Sr.

Our daughter, Greta, has joined a rowing club in Wilmington, NC, and practices on the tidal reaches of the Cape Fear River. It’s partly for her that today’s note features the eminent oarsperson John Brendan Kelly, Sr., born in Philadelphia on October 4, 1889. Although Kelly was a child (one of 10) of Irish immigrants, his was a talented family, and while one brother became a leading engineer, another a top vaudevillian, and a third a Pulitzer-winning playwright, John B. climbed upwards in Philadelphia society through his sporting talents, chiefly as an oarsman (sculls) at the toney Vespers Club, which still anchors Boathouse Row on the Schuylkill River (where I rowed in the early 1960s). In 1920 Kelly took steamship passage to compete in the even tonier Diamond Sculls at England’s Henley Regatta, but learned that the Henley Committee had disqualified him on grounds that he had once been a manual laborer (a bricklayer). So Kelly used his connections (he’d been a famed sportsman in the US army) to go to the 1920 Olympics where, in winning the gold medal in the single sculls, he defeated (by the narrowest of margins) that year’s Henley champion, Jack Beresford. Kelly is said to have mailed his Olympic cap to King George V with an enclosed note reading “Greetings from a Bricklayer.” One hopes that that is true, but even if not the story still has several happy endings. Kelly also won Olympic gold at the 1924 Olympics. He took his gold medals and his bricklaying skills back to Philadelphia where his construction company would become one of the city’s biggest. Active in the renaissance of Philadelphia’s Democratic Party, Kelly was appointed by FDR (during WWII) as the nation’s Director of Physical Fitness, and he was for many years chief administrator of the city’s greatest treasure (and the setting for Boathouse Row), Fairmount Park. On the Kelly family side, John B. married, in 1924, Margaret Majer, an eminent sportswoman herself and the founder of women’s intercollegiate athletics at the University of Pennsylvania. Their son, John Brendan, Jr., aka “Jack,” continued on as a bricklayer and as an Olympic oarsman, and also followed his dad as ‘commodore’ of the Schuylkill ‘fleet.’ In 1956, John B., Sr., had the satisfaction of seeing his actress granddaughter Grace married to European royalty as Princess of Monaco, and the enjoyment of telling her husband, Prince Rainier, that the Philadelphia Kellys didn’t care much for royalty. It also seems a happy ending that now one of the Henley Regatta’s top competitions, for women, is the Princess Grace Challenge Cup, which is open even to women bricklayers. ©.

[Stanley]

Lord, open the eyes of the king of England!
William Tyndale and the English Bible.
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We do not wish to abolish teaching and make every man his own master, but if the curates will not teach the gospel, the layman must have the Scripture, and read it for himself, taking God as his teacher. William Tyndale.

We can’t pinpoint the birth-day or the death-day of William Tyndale, first really successful translator of the Bible into English, but his feast day in the Church of England is October 6, which commemorates his 1636 martyrdom at Vilvoorde, Belgium. It was there (but probably actually on October 8) where he was tortured, condemned, garroted, and then burned at the stake. Translating the sacred text into a modern vernacular was then a crime throughout Europe, and it was a crime Tyndale felt bound to commit, for he’d once warned a bishop that, once his task was done, then “the boy that driveth the plough will know more than you.” Few bishops and fewer kings thought that a good idea, and so it was that when Tyndale finished his New Testament translation (in 1525) England’s Henry VIII declared him guilty of a capital crime and therefore an outlaw, fair game to anyone in Christian Europe who would bring him down. And so he was betrayed, brought down, and burned, but not before he’d also finished, and printed, his translation of the Old Testament, too. William Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire (around 1490), educated at Oxford, and then took a post at Cambridge. It was there where he first conceived the depraved notion of translating the Bible into the vernacular. By then, about 1523, the Lutheran Reformation had created a safe place for such a man, and so it was at the University of Wittenberg that he took up and finished his task. He was pretty well qualified for it, not only trained in theology but fluent in four modern and three ancient languages, and the NT took him only two years. Even then, finding a printer was a challenge, and the printing took place at Worms. When copies of the NT translation reached England, in 1529, Tyndale was condemned in absentia as a heretic by Cardinal Wolsey and outlawed by Henry. So the scholar-outlaw went underground, until finally he was captured at Vilvoorde. The delay owed as much, ironically, to the Holy Roman
Emperor’s demand for evidence as to Tyndale’s skills of evasion. His last words, presumably on being garroted, were said to be, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” If that was a prayer, it was answered only four years later by Henry’s divorce and his declaration of supremacy in the English Church. Almost immediately, four new translations were published, and Henry had the gall to call one of them “The King’s Bible.” All were based on Tyndale’s work, so the moral of this story must be that you should become a king before you plagiarize. It’s safer that way.©

[Stanley]

A couple of differences between medicine and mendacity
John Caius, 1510-1573
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A wise physician,
skill’d our wounds to heal,
is more than armies to the public weal.
--Alexander Pope.

I heard on last night’s news that a patient and his family attacked (physically and verbally) the medical staff at a Georgia hospital who had diagnosed Covid-19 and assigned him to an ICU bed. They knew that Covid was a “hoax” and suspected the medicos of participating in an evil plot. As an historian, I share their native skepticism; ‘science’ and scientists have made some pretty ghastly errors, but over the more recent past they themselves have been skeptical enough to discover and correct these mis-(or missed) diagnoses, and their chief method of self-correction (and of new discoveries) has been, through observation, experiment, and generalization, to develop means by which they can offer to non-scientists a sensible narrative of the illness in question. One of the first to follow this method was the English philosopher and physician, John Caius, born in Norwich on October 6, 1510. After a then-conventional education (at Cambridge) in theology and philosophy, he traveled to Padua, in Italy, where he studied medicine. Although his fellow student was Andreas Vesalius, now famous for his skills of observation (he was an anatomist), and although Caius’s own studies exposed some failings in the advice of the ancients (notably Galen and Hippocrates), Caius believed that the fault lay in mistakes of translation, and set about correcting those. He returned to England covered in glory and became court physician to the monarchs Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth I. This was something of a political miracle, not a medical one, but John Caius really gained his spurs as a pioneer medic when he confronted an epidemic disease (probably an influenza but then called the ‘English sweating sickness’) which did not conform to the profiles laid down by Galen. So, like his old friend Vesalius, John Caius sat down to observe. Who got ill? Who did not? What were the symptoms and their sequence? Who died and when? Who survived? And why might that be? Quite a few of Caius’s answers were mistaken, but asking these questions was a good beginning. We would do well to follow Caius’s lead; to observe Covid cases, consider plausible narratives that tie together causes and effects, and not to take our medical advice from casino queens. plastics tycoons, or pillow salesmen. For his part, and in his time, John Caius did well enough, not only to provide us with an early essay in epidemiology but also to have his Cambridge college, Gonville Hall, renamed as “Gonville and Caius College.” And when you visit Cambridge, please know that in that city “Caius” is pronounced “keys.” ©

[Tripps]

And when you visit Cambridge, please know that in that city “Caius” is pronounced “keys.”

I knew that - probably from University Challenge though, Good to get the full SP.

From above

where he was tortured, condemned, garroted, and then burned at the stake.

In the name of Christianity.

[Stanley]

Indeed.... what a nice friendly religion. That's why I have always favoured the Quakers, I don't think they ever burned anyone.....

[Stanley]

The last great sea battle involving galleys and oarsmen.
The Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571.
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If I win the battle, I promise you your liberty. If the day is yours, then God has given it to you. Ali Pasha, the Ottoman admiral, to his galley slaves, Lepanto, 1571.

In Fall 1964, when I was a junior at Penn and finding my feet academically, a computer card error (something to do, maybe. with hanging chits, for those who remember the Florida count in 2000) put me into a medieval history PhD seminar. I came in late, and (after hearing the language qualifications and research aims of the doctoral students) determined to leave early, but the visiting professor, L. H. Butler (then of St. Andrews), urged me to stay on as his “token undergraduate.” I stayed, and Butler assigned me to do a research paper on “Venice in the Levant, 1204-1571”. 1571 was chosen because it was the year (October 7, 1571, to be precise) of the Battle of Lepanto. That experience changed my life, but the battle of Lepanto is now little heard of, partly because soon control of the Eastern Mediterranean would no longer be seen as critical to “world power.” In 1571, despite the great discoveries and conquests of Portuguese and Spanish sailors and conquistadores, a rationalist could still argue that national power and wealth still depended on the Levantine trade routes that connected all of Europe to all of known Asia. It was not, of course, that rationality was the issue, for the victorious fleet, led by Venetian oarsmen and infantry, was as much a crusade against the infidel Ottoman as it was a quest for booty. In an echo of ancient battles, Lepanto was fought entirely by galleys and galleasses (about 450 of them) propelled by muscle power, oarsmen rather than wind and sail. Most of the fighting was done by infantry on board ship, not cannon, and although the Holy League’s superiority in guns might have won the day, the Ottomans’ 34,000 soldiers, most of them archers, were a feared force in Levantine naval battles. But the great arrays present on that day in the Gulf of Corinth represented states that no longer exist (e.g. the Republics of Venice and Genoa and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) or would go into decline (Austria and the Ottomans, then great empires). Lepanto may have represented revenge for the Venetians (outraged by the Turkish massacre of Venetian prisoners in Cyprus) and a golden memory of the Crusades (for Pope Pius V), but Lepanto was past history before it happened. It did not shift western and Northern Europeans from their new idol of taking to the great oceans in pursuit of American gold and Asian spices. But Lepanto, Butler, and his PhD seminar on the medieval Levant did decide me on history as my preferred trade. ©

[Tripps]

but the battle of Lepanto is now little heard of,

Aunty Josie used to quote it quite often "Don John of Austria is going to the war " - and via her, I had heard it in my childhood. I didn't have much of a clue at the time as to who and when he was though.

She had only an elementary school education in Failsworth in the 1920 / 1930's, but they had no internet in those days, and she had more 'culture' in her than modern children.

It's three years almost to the day that her funeral took place and I visited East Hill Street, on my way back. She missed 100 by a few months, and I think of her - you can ask no more.
*************************************

PS is it hanging chad rather than chit?

[Stanley]

That's basically all I know about it David, they made me learn the poem at St Thomas's school.

[Stanley]

Sure was a shame, don't know who's to blame. Lyric from 'Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?' (1946)
The 'Great Fires' of Chicago and Peshtigo.
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Who put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine? A popular song (1946) that my dad used to sing whenever Chicago’s Great Fire came up for discussion. The song, a blues/jazz piece by Harry Gibson, was banned from American radio because of its reference to Benzedrine.

In the upper Midwest, October 8, 1871, was a big day for fires. The most famous was the Great Chicago Fire, which began that night in the southwest of the city and, fanned by a strong wind, worked its way northeast. By October 10th the fire had consumed over 2000 acres of cityscape, killed 300, and rendered thousands homeless. And jobless too, for then Chicago was a city built of wood, including many of the biggest buildings in its business district. Today, some say that the fire was the making of Chicago, arguing from the idea of capitalism being a system dependent on ‘creative destruction,’ but at the time it was more popular to find someone to blame, and much attention was paid to a Chicago dairywoman, Kate O’Leary, whose house and barn were suspiciously close to the fire’s point of origin. Kate and her husband were Irish immigrants, at the time favored targets of the American blame game, and it made an interesting narrative to say that when Kate was milking her cow the cow
kicked over the lantern and, hey! Presto! Chicago burned to the ground. It seemed to make good sense too to call Mrs. O’Leary ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’ and to fit her with a few other stereotypes not markedly different from Donald Trump’s comments on Mexicans in and after his 2016 campaign. The O’Leary story thrived on anti-Irish prejudices (and fevered imaginations) but had no basis in fact. The temptations to find a villain were strengthened by the fact that October 8, 1871, also saw the beginnings of the Great Peshtigo Fire, which burned millions of acres in Wisconsin and Michigan and even jumped across Green Bay to burn much of Door County. That firestorm, for such it was, killed at least 1,500 people (and maybe a thousand more), and it must have been more than a mere coincidence. Since Chicago and Peshtigo were too far apart to come within the reach of a mere dairywoman, however diabolically Irish she might be, the idea took hold (and still circulates) that these two fires (and a
couple of others) were started by a comet. It seems now that these blazes had simpler, more mundane causes, chief of which were a prolonged drought, a stiff southwesterly wind, and plenty of fuel. As for Kate, she lost her barn but saved her house. But her undeserved fame drove her underground and incognito to escape a different kind of firestorm. Mrs. O’Leary died of suitably common causes in the 1890s. One assumes that she was predeceased by her cow. ©

[Stanley]

The other Favorite Son of Dixon, Illinois.
Charles Walgreen, 1873-1939
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At the corner of happy and healthy. On your way to Well. Trusted since 1901. Successive mottos or advertising slogans of the Walgreen Company, founded by Charles Walgreen in (depending on how you look at it) 1901 or 1916.

Charles Rudolph Walgreen.n, the founder of the pharmacy chain, was born in Dixon, Illinois, on October 9, 1873. His parents, both Swedish immigrants, were not originally “Walgreens” but Olafssons. They understood something of the forces of Americanization, though, and had a different surname to borrow, Charles’s great-great-great grandfather who, when in military service, had used the German “Wahlgren”, which easily translated into “Walgreen.” The family was not well off, so Charles came into the pharmacy trade gradually, starting in a local shoe factory. There he lost part of a finger but had already collected some other assets, notably a certificate from the Dixon Business College. He also enlisted for service in the Spanish-American War, acquiring there the malaria that plagued him for the rest of his life. But not a lot of working capital. Family legend has it that when he was down to a nickel he bought a 2 cent newspaper and threw the change into the Chicago River, using it
to wish himself better luck. That came with a pharmacy apprenticeship, whereat Charles stopped throwing his small change into the river and accumulated enough capital to marry Myrtle Norton (1902) and then buy his own pharmacy (1905). By then a registered pharmacist, he also possessed some commercial genius. He made his first store, and then others, into pleasant, well-lit, retail establishments that sold many things, and he introduced lunch counters too. He’s allegedly the inventor of the chocolate malted milk (early 1920s), for which western civilization owes him much, but he certainly moved out from Chicago to establish local branches for what became, in 1916, the Walgreens Company. He faced a challenge in the 1930s, not only from the depression but also from his former son-in-law, Justin Dart (1907-1984) who after divorcing Walgreen’s daughter joined Rexall’s to do battle with Walgreen’s, a battle which Walgreen Company eventually won. Old Charles died in 1939, at which point
the family firm was taken over and made yet bigger by his son, the exceptionally long-lived Charles, Jr. (1906-2007). Walgreens today (operating as Walgreens-Boots, in alliance with the British firm Boots) still has its HQ in Illinois, but for the first time has a CEO who is neither a Walgreen nor a Wahlgren, nor even an Olafsson. But I believe the family is still represented on the board. ©

[Stanley]

Vile worm, thou wast o'erlook'd even in thy birth. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Darwin and his worms.

The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison. Charles Darwin, Worms (1881).

Charles Darwin’s The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, was published in London on October 10, 1881. It’s sometimes given the short title of Worms, and Darwin (1809-1882) had hurried to finish it before (as he joked to a friend) he joined them. But like his other major publications it was in fact based on many years’ work, thought, and careful experimentation. The work began in 1837, when Darwin (aged 28) took a holiday from work at his uncle Josiah Wedgwood’s country estate in Staffordshire. Uncle ‘Jos’ was a worm man himself and had conducted some casual experiments with them. Among other things, he noted to Charles that stones he’d scattered on a pasture had in only a few years disappeared beneath new soil, most of it, he thought, the product of worms’ ingestion and reprocessing of vegetable matter in the soil. Darwin thought about it, took notes of his uncle’s observations, and published a paper on the subject. But for Charles Darwin knowing a little
was never enough, and for 44 years he continued to observe worms and their habits, devoting a whole field at his own country estate, Down House, to the project, and (indoors) using glass terrariums to make microstudies. From these studies he derived several interesting conclusions about worms, their diets, their excretions, and even their social and sexual lives. In broad, Darwin’s work told us there were a lot of earthworms (over 43000 per acre at Down House, he concluded) and that they moved great quantities of soil. They not only created our landscapes but also rendered them fertile. Worms’ impact was less dramatic than, say, volcanic eruptions, glacial scourings, or erosion by wind and water, and it was therefore all the more important to understand worms’ work in the context of time. The ‘worm book’ is a prime example of Darwin’s patient and thorough work and his methodical application of critical thought to his collected data. Speaking of patience, that 1837 visit to Uncle Jos may also mark the beginning of Darwin’s serious courtship with his cousin Emma Wedgwood (1808-1896) although they’d known each other since childhood. Having carefully considered the pros (affections) and cons (expenses) of marriage, the two agreed to wed on November 11, 1838, and married on January 29, 1839. ©

[Stanley]

She was never neutral, though she could be tolerant . . . never a tolerance of indifference.
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes, 1871-1946.
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Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. . . . She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. Mary Allsebrook, writing about her mother Harriet Boyd Hawes, in Born to Rebel (1992)

Harriet Ann Boyd was born in Boston on October 11, 1871. Soon, her mother’s death made her the only female in a family of six (her father and four brothers made up the rest), wherein Harriet learned how to be her own person. She majored in Greek at Smith College (BA 1892), a subject which, only a couple of generations before, had been thought beyond the wit of females (unless, I suppose, the woman in question was Greek). After a few years teaching Greek and Latin at girls’ schools, she went to Greece on her own to study at the American School in Athens. She learned a lot, including that her new challenge was to undertake archaeological field study (from which women were then excluded). A fellowship awarded in 1901 enabled her to go back to Greece, where she led her own small dig on Crete and where she made important finds (Minoan and post-Minoan towns) and acquired for herself a professional reputation. In 1907, she returned again to Crete, this time as the head of a large (100
workers) expedition financed by a museum in Crete and by the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, in between expeditions so to speak, she served as a battlefield nurse in the Greco-Turkish war (1897) and the Spanish-American War (1898), and—in 1906, while at work in Crete—married a British archaeologist, Charles Hawes. As Harriet Boyd Hawes, she returned to the USA in 1906 with her husband (and, with permission of the Greeks) quite a trove of artifacts. Charles taught in various places, starting at Dartmouth, and ended up at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Harriet generally followed along, but besides mothering a son and a daughter and directing the 1907 expedition, she founded and directed the Smith College Relief Unit in France, in World War I, then taught classics and ancient art at various institutions, including fifteen years at Wellesley College. Charles and Harriet enjoyed a longish retirement, much of it spent at a small farm near Washington, D. C. She died in 1946. Much later, in 1992, her daughter Mary Allsebrook, then 85 years old, published a biography of Harriet entitled Born to Rebel. That seems a good three-word summary of a singular and signal Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes (the biography’s subtitle), a life that began in 1871. Just to make sure, the book’s copy editor was Harriet’s granddaughter Annie Allsebrook. ©.

[Stanley]

The hazards of riding a tiger.
Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, 1891-1938.
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Even after killing ninety-nine tigers the Maharaja should beware of the one hundredth. Indian proverb.

Imperial British rule in India was typically but not universally exercised mediately through client states and their princely heads. In the 19th century, these maharajas became British cultural icons, exotic princes made less strange by the fealty they pledged to the Empress Victoria, often figured as romantic (if sometimes sinister) characters in popular literature and were featured in equally popular travel journals, written by Brits who’d gone out to the subcontinent to see things for themselves. One of the most famous was Bhupinder Singh, born on October 12, 1891 in the Punjab, the eldest son of the ruling maharaja of Patiala and his first wife. Heir apparent, he succeeded to the throne (of India’s largest Sikh principality) on his father’s death in 1900. Clearly Bhupinder was then too young to rule (in reality or in romance) and a regency was arranged for him while he went to London for a western education and, doubtless, to pay his respects to the aged queen-empress. There he continued to refine his polo skills and learned to be a quite passable cricketer—a ‘gentleman cricketer,’ I suppose, and not a ‘player.’ Whichever, he returned to the Punjab, took a first wife in 1908, and became ruling prince in 1910. There he continued to play the role written for him, appearing in court ceremonially dressed in silks and bedecked with precious stones, and until age and dignity required him to become a patron rather than a player, he continued to excel at cricket, polo, and even Indian wrestling. He was also an enthusiastic recruiter for the Indian (British) Army, and became ‘Sir’ Bhupinder Singh to the British while, to his people, he was an arbitrary ruler, sometimes outstandingly generous (and, notably, tolerant of most religions) but sometimes autocratic. He served, too, in ‘imperial’ office, for instance as a minister in the chamber of princes, and he headed the Indian delegation at the Versailles conference in 1918-1919. Predictably, he was no friend of the subcontinent’s independence movements, and criticisms of his ostentatious lifestyle even forced the British—ungrateful rulers that they were—to subject him to an investigation and, in consequence, to limit his financial authority. Sir Bhupinder Singh, Maharaja of Patiala, died in 1938 and was succeeded by his eldest son, whose political power was eclipsed by independence in 1947 and the end of princely rule (as such) in 1956.. I believe, however, that Sir Buphinder’s grandson Abte Singh still rules a very wealthy household in Patiala. ©

[Stanley]

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest
Paul Simon, Writer of Songs.
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Hello darkness, my old friend // I've come to talk with you again // Because a vision softly creeping //
Left its seeds while I was sleeping // And the vision that was planted in my brain // Still remains //
Within the sound of silence. --Paul Simon, “The Sound of Silence,” 1965.

All being well, and one hopes that it is so, Paul Simon will celebrate his 80th birthday today, for he was born (in Newark, NJ) on October 13, 1941. He has a good chance to go further, at least genetically, for his father made 89 and his mother 97 before they shuffled offstage. They were Jewish immigrants, from Hungary, and since many of Simon’s songs (he was both lyricist and composer) concern memories and strike a nostalgic chord, I leap to the conclusion that they must have provided him with a pleasant childhood. Simon followed his father into Yankee fandom and music, both, and his dad, a college professor, also taught him what a music composition should look like on paper. His dad’s scoring of an early Paul Simon piece now resides in the Library of Congress. At that time, circa 1953, Paul Simon was playing the school- and street-dance circuit with his school friend Art Garfunkel. They first called themselves “Tom and Jerry,” presumably after the cartoon characters, but after their college educations (Art in mathematics, Paul in English), they decided to be themselves, and we know them today as Simon & Garfunkel. As a formal partnership it lasted only a few years (1964 to 1970) but it was a heady time and filled with recording successes, and that’s probably how they’ll be known for some while yet. But since 1970 it’s been Paul Simon who has continued to grow, to develop as a singular talent, and to keep on composing, performing, touring, and winning industry awards. He and Garfunkel occasionally reunite for live performances, on tour or at particular occasions. Paul Simon has also identified himself and his music with ‘Good Causes,’ and not just in the USA. Most recently, I think, he did a ‘Covid pandemic’ benefit for the British National Health service and a particular NHS hospital in Wales. As befits a fairly famous 80-year-old, his personal website presents a nice mix of pride and nostalgia. It’s a good site to visit if you want to tickle your memory buds or to hear again some of Simon’s most memorable compositions. Or you could just wish him a happy 80th birthday. On balance, he deserves it. ©.

[Tripps]

written by Brits who’d gone out to the subcontinent to see things for themselves

Couldn't miss the opportunity to copy a favourite Kipling poem -

Pagett, M.P.

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where eath tooth-point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to that toad.

Pagett, M.P., was a liar, and a fluent liar therewith --
He spoke of the heat of India as the "Asian Solar Myth";
Came on a four months' visit, to "study the East," in November,
And I got him to sign an agreement vowing to stay till September.

March came in with the koil. Pagett was cool and gay,
Called me a "bloated Brahmin," talked of my "princely pay."
March went out with the roses. "Where is your heat?" said he.
"Coming," said I to Pagett, "Skittles!" said Pagett, M.P.

April began with the punkah, coolies, and prickly-heat, --
Pagett was dear to mosquitoes, sandflies found him a treat.
He grew speckled and mumpy-hammered, I grieve to say,
Aryan brothers who fanned him, in an illiberal way.

May set in with a dust-storm, -- Pagett went down with the sun.
All the delights of the season tickled him one by one.
Imprimis -- ten day's "liver" -- due to his drinking beer;
Later, a dose of fever --slight, but he called it severe.

Dysent'ry touched him in June, after the Chota Bursat --
Lowered his portly person -- made him yearn to depart.
He didn't call me a "Brahmin," or "bloated," or "overpaid,"
But seemed to think it a wonder that any one stayed.

July was a trifle unhealthy, -- Pagett was ill with fear.
'Called it the "Cholera Morbus," hinted that life was dear.
He babbled of "Eastern Exile," and mentioned his home with tears;
But I haven't seen my children for close upon seven years.

We reached a hundred and twenty once in the Court at noon,
(I've mentioned Pagett was portly) Pagett, went off in a swoon.
That was an end to the business; Pagett, the perjured, fled
With a practical, working knowledge of "Solar Myths" in his head.

And I laughed as I drove from the station, but the mirth died out on my lips
As I thought of the fools like Pagett who write of their "Eastern trips,"
And the sneers of the traveled idiots who duly misgovern the land,
And I prayed to the Lord to deliver another one into my hand.

[Stanley]

I'm glad you did David. Only on Oneguy! Seriously, how many times has that been quoted in full on the web today.... I shall mail Bob and tell him to have a look.....

[Stanley]

On parliamentary and popular sovereignties.
Sophia of Hanover, 1630-1714
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We Your Majesties most dutifull and Loyall Subjects . . . in this present Parliament assembled do beseech Your Majesty that it may be enacted and declared and be it enacted and declared by the Kings most Excellent Majesty by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spirituall and Temporall and Commons in this present Parliament assembled and by the Authority of the same That the most Excellent Princess Sophia Electress and Dutchess Dowager of Hannover Daughter of the most Excellent Princess Elizabeth late Queen of Bohemia Daughter of our late Sovereign Lord King James the First of happy Memory be and is hereby declared to be the next in Succession in the Protestant Line to the Imperiall Crown and Dignity of the forsaid Realms of England France and Ireland with the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging The Act of Succession, 1701.

One of the most important events in American constitutional history took place in England when, during the “Glorious Revolution” (1688-1689) King James II fled court and country, and underlined the symbolic importance of his self-abdication by throwing his privy seal (his sign royal) into the tidal mud of the River Thames. So England was without a king. But there was almost no talk of turning the country over to its “people.” The landed classes that dominated politics and society down to the local level favored the idea that power—like property—should descend by inheritance. If James II’s flight put that principle in peril, the flaw was papered over by settling the crown (and its succession) on James’s Protestant daughter Mary and the heirs of her body. Should Queen Mary fail to reproduce, the mystique of kingship would descend upon her sister, James II’s younger daughter Anne. Despite heroic efforts, Anne herself failed to produce a living heir, and so in 1701 parliament (more
properly speaking the ‘king-in-parliament’) passed a new Act of Succession which guaranteed a Protestant succession by settling the crown (should Anne’s endless miscarriages continue) on Sophia, the electress of Hanover, in Germany. Besides being staunchly Protestant and gloriously fecund (seven of her children survived into adulthood), she was by birth (on October 14, 1630) a Stuart, the granddaughter of King James I of England. Indeed Sophia had been considered for inclusion in the original Act of Settlement, but then excluded, perhaps because two queens were already two too many or because some in England knew of Sophia’s friendship with Gottfried Leibniz and her enthusiasm for the ‘new philosophy’ as represented by Descartes and Spinoza. But if you were looking for legitimacy through inheritance in 1701, and you would do almost anything to avoid taking another Catholic king, Sophia of Hanover was in 1701 your best bet. As it happened, Sophia lived quite a long time, but not quite long enough, for Sophia predeceased Queen Anne (by seven weeks, in the early summer of 1714). So by heredity and by parliamentary enactment, Sophia’s eldest son succeeded to the English (by 1714, the British) throne as King George I of the (Protestant) House of Hanover. Americans would later contest the issue of legitimacy with Sophia’s great-grandson George III and in 1787 turn it over to “We, the People,” but that would require yet another revolution and a fair amount of practical politicking. ©.

[Stanley]

The Blessings of Civilization in The Congo.
George Washington Williams, 1849-1891
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Against the deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty of your Majesty’s Government to the natives, stands their record of unexampled patience, long-suffering and forgiving spirit, which put the boasted civilisation and professed religion of your Majesty’s Government to the blush. George Washington Williams, “An Open Letter,” 1890.

In 1885, fourteen western powers (including the USA) met in Berlin to parcel out among themselves the trades and territories of the African continent. There they turned over a huge chunk of Africa to King of the Belgians Leopold II. It was probably done to assuage Belgian national pride, but as things turned out it was one of the ghastliest acts of 19th-century diplomacy. Leopold’s Congo regime, with exquisite irony called “The Congo Free State,” slaughtered tens of thousands of Congolese and then squeezed heavy taxes and sweatshop labor out of the survivors. The spectacle appalled anti-imperialist reformers, including Mark Twain, whose King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1906) circulated widely in the USA, much of it at Twain’s expense. Twain’s outrage, which still leaps off the page, was taken to Washington, where the author met privately with President Roosevelt (Teddy) to urge action. Twain could have been inspired by an earlier publication, “An Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo,” published in July 1890 by an American journalist and historian named George Washington Williams. Born in the “free state” of Ohio on October 16, 1849, Williams started as a barber and then, lying about his age and perhaps his racial identity, as a drummer boy in the Union Army. He then joined the Mexican revolutionary army in overthrowing European imperialism there (in the person of the ersatz “Emperor” Maximillian). After several years’ service as a “buffalo soldier” in the American West, Williams “settled down” to become a peripatetic Baptist minister, an historian, an Ohio legislator, and latterly an international journalist. Williams was the first person to write a history of the USA framed by the black experience as (to use the book’s 1882 subtitle) “Slaves, Soldiers, and Citizens.” In 1889, Williams traveled to Europe as a reporter for McClure’s Magazine. where he was granted an interview with Leopold to hear the king’s side of the Congo story. Leopold impressed Williams as a sincere ‘civilizer,’ but when Williams went on to the Congo he was horrified by the realities he described in prose and photographs. On his return journey, he fell ill in England and died in Blackpool where, today, you may find his gravestone. The evidence presented by Williams’s “Open Letter” was used by anti-imperialists in Europe and in the USA, including—possibly—Samuel Langhorne Clemens, whose life inclined him to accept the Washington report. Twain perhaps borrowed Williams’s ironic framing of Congo “savagery” within the “civilizing” mission of the Belgian monarch ©.

[Stanley]

O the wild charge they made!
The 7th Earl of Cardigan, 1797-1868
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When can their glory fade? //O the wild charge they made!// All the world wondered.// Honour the charge they made! / /Honour the Light Brigade, // Noble six hundred! Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854).

It is a mercy that the Crimean War (1853-1856) faded from the popular imagination. In strategic and diplomatic terms it was a blunder writ large, and once battle was joined there were so many smaller, tactical blunders that historians are still putting the list together. So despite the nursing heroics of Florence Nightingale and a few other innovations (notably the profession of war correspondent), the war left all its participants with few victories, many deaths, and much embarrassment—were it not for Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” You know, it’s the one that says
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
The British officer who led the charge—and then with unseemly haste galloped away from it—was the spectacularly unpleasant James Brudenell, 7th earl of Cardigan, born on October 16, 1797, who’d made his way upwards in the ranks by starting at the top, purchasing his commissions, bullying his subordinates, and succeeding in dressing himself, his men, and their horses in fine Ruritanian style. Whether they were appropriately clad for battle was another question, but never mind, for Lord Cardigan was probably not Tennyson’s ‘blunderer.’ That distinction belonged to the man who gave the order to charge. This was Cardigan’s brother-in-law, the even unpleasanter 3rd Lord Lucan, known in Irish history as “The Exterminator” for his brutal treatment of his tenants during the Great Famine. Since Lucan was also thought (by Cardigan) to beat his wife (Lady Anne Brudenell, Cardigan’s sister) this was not a winning team, anyway, and we may say that the Charge of the Light Brigade originated in vainglory, was tactically incompetent, and ended badly. Whether in fact Lord Cardigan fled the scene later became the subject of several lawsuits and tribunals, none of which satisfied Cardigan’s dignity or his lordly pride. We’d hardly know the man were it not for his distinctive sweater, which we call the ‘cardigan.’ As for Lord Lucan, that’s another story, one extending on to his descendent, the 7th earl, who (probably) murdered his children’s nanny in 1974 and then retreated into the ether, never to be found (or tried). As they used to say at the time of the Crimean War, blood will tell. ©

[Stanley]

We are all hewers of wood and drawers of water.
George Mackay Brown, 1921-1996
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In 'culture circles,' there is a tendency to look upon artists as the new priesthood of some esoteric religion. Nonsense — and dangerous nonsense moreover — we are all hewers of wood and drawers of water; only let us do it as thoroughly and joyously as we can. George Mackay Brown.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s piano piece, “Farewell to Stromness” (5:37 as performed by Davies himself) is itself a simple, melodic, haunting protest against a proposed uranium plant near Stromness, Orkney. “Out of sight, out of mind” seems to have been the mantra of the planners, for the Orkneys, remote and bare, are well out of the way: the same reason that Davies (1934-2016) had settled there. The “Farewell” now stands on its own, but it was composed and first performed as part of “The Yellow Cake Revue,” itself the centerpiece of a protest staged at the islands’ “St. Magnus Festival” in 1980. The piano solo breathes Davies’s love for the islands, which also bore fruit in his long association with the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown, born on October 17, 1921: in Stromness, I think, and certainly he stayed there for almost his whole life, with occasional forays to the mainland to study literature and, perhaps, to get a better grasp on English. He began writing for his local newspaper, developed a taste for writing, and ended up the poet of the islands, as well as the Orkneys’ leading novelist and essayist. His collaborations with Max Davies began when Davies moved to the islands, and consisted mainly of Davies’s musical settings for Brown’s verse. At about that time (1970) another artistic visitor came to the islands just to see and talk with Brown, Robert Lowell, the American poet. Lowell had heard some talk of Brown’s genius, and his visit helped to establish Brown’s international reputation. Brown never married, but his long loves included three women, one of them his publisher’s agent and the other two from Orkney. Both of them (Stella Cartwright and then Kenna Crawford) became stars of Brown’s poetry and prose, Stella in his autobiography (For the Islands I Sing) and Kenna in The Golden Bird. His life was marked by two other conversions, both from his parents’ rock-solid Presbyterianism, First he took to drink (specifically, local ale, of which he could never get enough because his guts wouldn’t take it); and then he crossed a deep divide in the Orkneys to become a Roman Catholic. He blurred those lines with his deeper devotion to Orkney life and culture, and with his funeral, too, in 1996, which was conducted in Orkney’s Protestant cathedral but performed by the Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow. I could not find whether in 1980 Brown performed in The Yellow Cake Review. It’s a pretty good bet, however, that he was there. ©

[Stanley]

"If you tried to give Rock n Roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry." John Lennon.
Chuck Berry, St. Louisan.
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I’m a millionaire, but I cut the grass. And each time I cut it, it’s my grass. And that is satisfying. Chuck Berry.

According to the website ‘This Day in Black History,’ Charles Edward Alexander Berry was born on October 18, 1926, in San Jose, CA. Anyone in this town will bristle at the news, for we know, as surely as the Cardinals are the Cardinals, that Chuck Berry was a St. Louisan born and bred. He grew up in ‘The Ville,’ still a distinctive neighborhood just north of mid-town, where his parents were pillars of the community (and of one of its Baptist churches). We know (‘we’ includes even immigrants like myself) too that Berry had troubles with the law, first as a teenager, then as a young bandleader on the way up, and latterly as a restauranteur in the far western suburb of Wentzville, and we don’t approve, but he was Chuck Berry and he had good claim to be the father of Rock ‘n’ Roll music, which was also the title of one of his 1950s classics (along with others like “Maybelline”. “Roll over Beethoven”, and “Johnny B. Goode.” So we forgive him his lapses, even his sins, for after all his wife Themetta Suggs knew all this too, and she was a local girl who married Chuck in 1948, then stuck with him through thick and thin for 68 years, and survived him. His last record (in 2017) was dedicated to “Toddy,” “the love of my life,” and in St. Louis we think the traits both of them showed and shared were good traits, to be taken into consideration in assessing his charismatic character. Berry was a good enough businessman, too, to ensure that he, Chuck Berry, was not eclipsed by white performers who took on his classics and made them their own, like the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and others. If Chuck learned some of those business skills during his second imprisonment, more credit to in-prison educational programs (the prison liked him too, occasionally allowed him to perform off-site, and when he graduated and was released, he gave the valedictory). During the long twilight of his career, Berry ventured out from St. Louis to tour, but he always came back to town, where until shortly before his death (in 2017) he played monthly at Blueberry Hill in ‘the Delmar Loop’, a distinctive neighborhood on its own—but Chuck made it more distinctive. His public funeral was at the Pageant, a concert venue just a block down Delmar. He’s buried (with his guitar) in one of the city’s classic cemeteries. And not a bit of it—or of Berry himself—is anywhere in San Jose, CA. If you want a bit of Berry, come to St. Louis and stand before his statue, just across from Blueberry Hill in The Loop. You can’t miss it. He’s playing his guitar. ©

[Stanley]

Irony is fate's most common figure of speech.
Agnès Jaoui. born October 19, 1964
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I chose to be an actress because I wanted to be famous and I was lazy. Another part of me wanted to work. In music . . . there's something human about it, and you need time. So many things in our world go fast, but you can't cheat with your voice. Agnès Jaoui, quoted in the New York Times, 2002.

Irony can be understood as the art of unintended or unexpected outcomes. It can be comic or tragic or sometimes both, and it may be that the new word “tramedy” (not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary) was coined especially for it. But despite the USA’s long experience with unintended outcomes (e.g. in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and before those in various Latin American misadventures) we Americans are almost famous for not being very good at irony. Perhaps we take our power too seriously. But irony is alive and well in Europe, and in the French cinema it’s increasingly identified with the multitalented (writer, actor, director, singer) Agnès Jaoui, born on October 19, 1964. Perhaps she owes her ironic tendencies to her Tunisian-Jewish origins, certainly some of her talents, for her Tunisian-Jewish parents were both writers (her father was more famed as a psychiatrist). They’d moved to the suburbs of Paris where they encouraged Agnès’s intellectual strengths. Those brought Agnès to one of Paris’s most prestigious high schools; but then, ironically so to speak, she detoured to study acting instead, in 1987 landing her first big parts, in a Patrice Chéreau film (Hôtel de France) and in a Paris production of a Harold Pinter play (L’anniversaire in French). Then Agnès Jaoui branched out into writing (in partnership with the screenwriter Jean-Pierre Bacri) and the director Alain Resnais. Or you could say flowered, notably in treatments of parenting and family life (subjects full of unexpected consequences), wherein Jaoui variously tried her hand at writing, acting, and directing, winning prestigious awards in all three. Le gout des autres (2000) which she wrote (with Bacri) and directed, won several gongs in France and was nominated for an Oscar (best foreign film) in the US. Her films, I am told, tend towards dramedy (a coinage which does appear in the OED) and the ironic. While she studied acting, Jaoui also studied music, and has released two successful albums (Canta, 2006; and Dans mon pays, 2009). I haven’t heard either, but for a Frenchwoman of Tunisian roots who sings mainly in Spanish and Portuguese, I think ‘ironic’ a suitable description of the second title. I haven’t seen any of her films, either, but would like to start with Under the Rainbow (2012), where she toys with classic fairy tales including Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. I am curious to see how she ends them. ©.

[Tripps]

Agnès Jaoui.

Jaoui also studied music, and has released two successful albums (Canta, 2006; and Dans mon pays, 2009). I haven’t heard either,

There's no excuse for that - I've just listened top both records and I'd never heard of her until a few minutes ago.

Spotify, the eighth wonder of the world wide cobweb, is the answer.

[Stanley]

Education is not preparation for life but is life itself.
John Dewey, 1859-1952.
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Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself. John Dewey, 1859=1952.

John Dewey was born on October 20, 1859, in Burlington, VT, and in a long life (he died in 1952) he went on from there to become widely recognized as the ‘father of progressive education’ and as the patron saint of American public education. It is mildly ironic that when, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Vermont, he taught school for a few years, he decided he was unfit for a teaching career. Instead, he decided on a PhD at Johns Hopkins, writing his PhD on Immanuel Kant—but on Kant as a psychologist rather than as a philosopher. The interplay between ideas and their results (implied by his dissertation title, “The Psychology of Kant”) became the guiding interest of Dewey’s life, the focus of his writing, and the arena of his research and teaching as he moved from place to place, first the University of Michigan, then the University of Chicago, and finally at Columbia. At each place, he became embroiled in debate (sometimes bitter, although that was not his native style) with academic conservatives, those who believed that education was ultimately elitist and/or those who held that ‘great books’ must continue to be at the core of all serious thought about values, ethics, history, and art. Dewey was too much enamored of the sciences (including the social ‘sciences’) to accept that view, but more importantly he held to a democratic ideal in education and in public discourse. He was interested not only in great ideas and their results, but also in their causes, their origins. He constructed a sort of feedback loop, essentially democratic, essentially educational. In this dynamic loop the ‘great books’ so admired by his bosses (Robert Hutchins at Chicago and Nicholas Butler at Columbia) retained a core function but would be subject to critical evaluation (for instance of their past origins and present results). Meanwhile, that feedback loop between experience and ideas would constantly produce new ideas and new methods of teaching and learning, new ‘great books’ so to speak. Dewey first put that loop to the test in Chicago’s so-called “Laboratory Schools.” That experience produced his The School and Society (1899), itself a classic, and he continued to experiment, and publish his results, throughout the rest of his career. So besides making a good claim to be the father of progressive education, he became an advocate (and, of course, a reformulator) of “pragmatism,” the only school of modern philosophy that can be called peculiarly “American.” It all began back in Burlington, and it’s at least poetic, even possibly educational, that the only grave on the University of Vermont campus is that of John Dewey and his first wife, Alice Chipman. ©

[Stanley]

Murder she wrote, versatile she has been, long has she lived.
Angela Lansbury
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I can’t say that I deserve long life; I don’t. I’ve just been around long enough. They say, ‘My God, she’s still here. Angela Lansbury.

This morning I googled “Angela Lansbury” and found, at the bottom of the page, a list of questions about her starting with ‘When did Angela Lansbury die?’ To which the answer is ‘no’—or ‘not yet’ if you are one of those who think that the decentest thing the very old can do is to arrange a timely end. Lansbury was born in London on October 21, 1925, some say in Poplar, a working-class borough of which her father Edgar was, then, the communist mayor. Edgar had rebelled against his father, George Lansbury, whom Angela later said was the most important influence on her childhood, who had arrested his own leftwards progress by stopping with the Labour Party as a Christian Socialist and pacifist. So it may be that her mother, Moyna Macgill, was a more important influence, not only as a reasonably successful actress but also as the parent (by then a a widow) who in 1940 decided to take her younger children away from the Blitz and deposit them in the USA where Angela enjoyed a very long and successful career not in politics but as an actress. Even before she left Britain, young Angela was already a “movie maniac;” once settled in New York she went to drama school and at 19 she landed her first named role, in support of Ingrid Bergman in the thriller Gaslight. She won an Oscar nomination for that, and for most of the rest of her life has been a successful actress and entertainment entrepreneur. During the 30s she began to be typecast as an older woman, in which her best role was probably as the mother of the disturbed Manchurian Candidate (1962—wherein she was the scheming mother Mrs. Iselin to Laurence Harvey, then only three years younger than Lansbury.) Her pace then slowed a bit as she moved with her troubled children back to Northern Ireland, where her mother had retired. All that turned out pretty well, and with her on-the-job training as a prematurely old woman she was well set, too, to resume her career, most spectacularly (many think) as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996). Lansbury has also enjoyed a triumphant ‘encore’ period, mainly on Broadway as a stage actress in drama, comedy, and musical theatre. ‘Murder she wrote, versatile she has been, long has she lived.’ I, for one, would be glad to see her go on with it. But for some years now she has said that family takes precedence, and recently the pace of her appearances has slowed. So I hope Ms. Lansbury enjoys a satisfying 96th birthday, at home with her family. ©