BOB'S BITS

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"I hope I'm an individual."
Margaret Rutherford, 1892-1972

Every great clown has been very near to tragedy. Margaret Rutherford.

My first contact with Jane Marple, Agatha Christie’s sharp-eyed, elderly villager, came in the 1961 cinema adaptation of Christie’s 4:50 from Paddington. The film-makers, as film-makers will, made several important changes in plot and characterization, not least their title, Murder She Said. It was a title tailor-made for their chosen female lead, Margaret Rutherford’s Marple, who could play an old dame, old-style, and in her own way. Rutherford even wore her own clothes for the part and was so believable in her iron eccentricities that one sympathized with the police view that this Miss Marple had not, in fact, witnessed a murder on a passing train but had been overcome into believing so by her senilities, her lonelinesses, and her desire to be a recognized Someone. By 1961 Rutherford fit into all this like the proverbial glove. Margaret Rutherford was born on May 11, 1892, into the high middle class Benn family, religious dissenters (Calvinist and Congregational) and Gladstonian Liberal, one might say, to a fault. Or faults: only 9 years before her birth, Margaret’s journalist father William Benn had murdered Margaret’s grandfather the Reverend Julius Benn. He’d “dunnit” in such a spectacular way (including failure to slit his own throat) that he was committed to Broadmoor as a lunatic rather than hanged as a criminal. His wife waited for him (for this was the High Victorian age) and, once he got out and had changed his name to Rutherford they got together and conceived Margaret. Margaret’s mother’s subsequent suicide and her father’s relapses convinced the family that Margaret needed a sheltered upbringing, a duty which fell to her maiden Aunt Bessie, and it wasn’t until Margaret was 12 that she learned her father had, in fact, been readmitted to Broadmoor and had not died of a broken heart. Aunt Bessie did pretty well, and although Margaret remained vulnerable to depression (and periodically underwent shock therapy) she cultivated a kind of armored eccentricity that, in due course and with appropriate training, made her into an accomplished comic actress. No beauty she, but she was a woman who could (according to the critic Kenneth Tynan) “act with her chin alone,” so beauty was not essential. She broke through to real fame as Miss Prism in a 1939 Wilde revival, but was of such a character that she could do ‘sinister’ too (and, after all, wasn’t there something a little sinister about Miss Prism?). So Miss Christie’s Miss Marple was a piece of cake. Agatha overlooked the alterations and honored Margaret for the success. And so should we all. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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"Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish// How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!"
Edward Lear, 1812-1888

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon. From Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat.”

I first ran afoul of Edward Lear at a very young age, for I can remember my puzzlement at hearing about Lear’s “runcible spoon.” I never asked what it was, and only much later looked it up to find that it was a tined spoon, often with a cutting edge and useful for eating, for instance, cakes with hard, burned bottoms. Or sliced quince. This was ‘knowledge as disappointment,’ for I had decided that a ‘runcible spoon’ was but another Lear non-sense invention, on a par with sieve-bottomed boats, Boss-Wosses, and chocolate shrimps. It was better to imagine than to know. A half-breed “spork” was too pedestrian by half for one of Victorian England’s true eccentrics. Edward Lear was not born eccentric, but rather (on May 12, 1812) as the youngest surviving kid of a very large (at least 21 births) middle-class London family. His ma and pa may or may not have been goats gruff, but they were overburdened with kids and farmed Edward out to his oldest sister, Ann, who took pretty good care of him until he was over 50. And Lear needed care, for he was a sickly child whose various frailties were complicated by poverty (his father’s business folded in 1818) and, more troubling, by Lear’s grand mal seizures which began at about the same time. Lear’s first skill was not in words but in art, for to spite his ailments he became an adept draftsman and watercolorist. He was first gainfully employed illustrating animals, particularly birds (parrots, as a matter of fact), for the Royal Zoological Society, later turning to illustrated travel books. As he aged (first as a tutor in the family of the Earl of Derby and later in Italy), his drawings took on an eccentric character, and in 1848 he published his first and most famous Book of Nonsense, which (rather like Alice’s Wonderland) appealed to Victorian parents strongly enough to carry Ann and Edward through to a reasonably comfortable old age. Lear kept on with travel scenes and eventually settled in Italy (at San Remo, in a sort of English enclave) in a house he named for Alfred Tennyson, a better but perhaps less imaginative poet. Lear’s growing fame (and fashion?) kept him supplied with friends (and mere visitors) but apparently puzzled him, for he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. It is possible that his non-sense verses measure his disappointments. It is also sad that (in 1888) Lear died alone at San Remo, for besides creating his mad verse he had learned how to socialize with those who loved him, famous folk like Lord Tennyson but including a cat and an incompetent Albanian cook. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Two South Carolinians in Congress
Voyage to Freedom, May 13, 1862

My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life. Robert Smalls, Republican congressman from South Carolina.

Remember John Michael (aka ‘Mick’) Mulvaney? He’s the Polish- Irish-American congressman who celebrated his election by announcing that his time was for sale to any lobbyist willing to pay up and then became “acting” top bureaucrat in the Trump White House. It was from that slippery eminence that he announced that Covid-19 was a liberal plot and then confessed (though ‘boasted’ would be better) that the President of the USA had tried to bribe the President of the Ukraine. “Get over it,” Mick told us, but I’m still not over it. In the 2010 elections, Mick had drunk enough tea to become the first Republican to represent his South Carolina district in Congress since Robert Smalls (1839-1915). Of the two, Smalls had the more memorable career. Smalls started further up the social scale than Mulvaney, being (in all likelihood) the child of an established Charleston planter-merchant, the Irish-American Henry McKee. But Smalls’ mother Lydia was McKee’s slave, and so he grew up African-American and enslaved. Shown some favor by his master-father-owner, Smalls learned many valuable skills, notably in sailing freight and people around Charleston harbor. His piloting skills came to public notice when, on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, his crew of six, and their families commandeered the CSS Planter and sailed her as a prize of war into the Union Navy. It was a great risk, and it makes a great story. Smalls, then 23, married (to an enslaved woman, Hannah) and a father of three, thus won his and his family’s freedoms more cheaply than he’d planned. He’d been saving up to buy them but they were expensive, maybe even ‘not for sale.’ Stealing a ship was cheaper, and the heroism involved made Smalls into an American icon. He was invited to Lincoln’s White House, and through later gallantries took command of a US Navy ship, a rare accomplishment in a whites-only officer corps. After the war, in business and in politics, Smalls’ successes included making South Carolina the first state to establish universal public education and taking command of the state’s militia. Smalls bought his father’s house (a sweet satisfaction) and was elected to Congress three times. All that was rolled back, of course, by American apartheid, against which Congressman Smalls had fought valiantly and courageously—but not successfully. In the mid-1880s he was removed from office by gerrymandering, by voter restrictions, and by terrorists. Robert Smalls was not perfect, of course (few people are), but for today’s schoolchildren he’s a better subject for study than Mick Mulvaney. ©.
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Founder of the Walden School, New York City.
Margaret Naumburg, 1890-1983

[Education] is the demand of the person for life, the nourishment and enrichment of what [the person] already is. Margaret Naumburg.

The ideals of “progressive education” are deeply rooted in history, even in the evolution of our human species, but in US history got their first real airing in New England Transcendentalism. Emerson’s moving epitaph on his dead infant son—“he were a better man than I”—sums it up nicely. The full flowering of progressive education awaited the rise of the human sciences and of concern about the overwhelming powers of ‘mass’ society. What could be done to preserve the child’s genius and individuality in an age of urbanization and industrialization? This question had a zillion answers, many of which came out of the educational experiments inspired by John Dewey (1859-1952) at Columbia University. Among the leading experimenters was Margaret Naumburg, born in New York City on May 14, 1890. Raised in a lively immigrant household, prosperous and progressive, Margaret attended Barnard (Columbia’s women’s college) where she took courses from Dewey and indeed roomed with Dewey’s activist daughter Evelyn. Naumburg was a good student, became president of Columbia’s Socialist Club, and after graduation took her growing interest in education (process and institution) to graduate study in Europe, at the London School of Economics and with Maria Montessori. It would be wrong to see Naumburg as a Dewey disciple. She was too interested in experiment for that. But she burned to test Dewey’s ideas using new tools in new settings: experimental variables, you might say. Inspired by Montessori (and by her own readings of Sigmund Freud), Naumberg started with (very) early childhood education. Her objective was to bring forth each child’s “better man,” which she felt was more likely to come through art than through science. Children were children, and could not be expected to apply the differential calculus, but they could dance, they could act, they could draw and paint. Encouraging these things would fit the child for the challenges of higher education and later life. In 1914 Naumberg opened the US’s first Montessori school (in rooms in a Settlement House), but soon her experimenting became her own, and she founded the famed Walden School. Margaret Naumburg went on experimenting until her retirement in 1969. Her Walden School (“Walden” was a magic name and there were many others) survived as a center of progressive experiment until 1988, almost as famed as the children who learned there to think for and be themselves. Among Walden’s graduates were Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), Andrew Goodman (1943-1964), and Mike Nichols (1931-2014). ©.
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"There is a source of power in each of us that we do not realize until we take responsibility." Diane Nash.
Diane Judith Nash.

Who the Hell is Diane Nash? Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy, 1961.

That’s a pretty good question, and on Diane Nash’s 84th birthday it deserves an answer. Diane Judith Nash was born in Chicago on May 15, 1938. She was (as it might have been put at that time) ‘almost white,’ grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in south Chicago, and attended the medium-posh Hyde Park Academy, almost on the University of Chicago’s doorstep. Raised a Catholic, she thought then that she might become a nun. Instead she became a leading sister of the Civil Rights movement, sharply conscious of being black and female, and at least for a time a burr under Robert Kennedy’s saddle. In 1961 attorney general sent one of his assistants south to calm down the freedom riders and sitters-in, counseling patience as the better path to equal rights, one that might avoid violence and death. Among others, Diane Nash stood in his way. Thanks to her maternal grandmother Carrie, she’d grown more conscious of herself as a female person, a citizen after all, while her stepfather John Baker (a leading light in his union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) taught her something of the economic challenges that went with being black. And then Diane transferred to Fisk University in Nashville, TN, where she encountered full face the fact of American apartheid: ‘whites only’ places and privileges, from lunch counters to voting booths and even public cemeteries. So when through an intermediary the Attorney General of the United States asked her to cool it down, wait a bit, he didn’t get very far. To delay “Freedom Now” was not in Diane’s playbook (after all, she’d already served jail time for ordering a sandwich). And she was a leader. An articulate English major, she was master of her own words and unafraid to speak them Having been a runner-up in a Miss Illinois beauty contest, she knew that she attracted the attention of others, including the white press. And having absorbed the principles of non-violence she could not, she said, surrender to violence. And she never has. She worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., with John Lewis, with Stokely Carmichael, but only with them, never for them. A co-founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, she was impatient with the ‘maleness’ of its public leadership. A loyal partner of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she criticized its ministerial elite. Diane Nash has worked hard, won much, and one hopes she’s well enough to enjoy her 84th birthday today, at home, in Hyde Park. ©
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Solidarity Forever!!
Elizabeth Nord, 1902-1986

Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever, Solidarity forever; For the Union Makes Us Strong. Sung by the alumnae of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry at their 1984 reunion.

From its beginnings the USA was a diverse nation; but achieving a diverse citizenry has been a conflict-prone and often contradictory story. Martha Carey Thomas (1857-1936) embodied many of these complications. She was a pioneer of women’s rights, first in education (not least her own, at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Leipzig, and Zurich) and finally in feminist campaigns for full civil rights. As the first woman president of Bryn Mawr she made her women’s college a beacon of excellence in academic standards and in the successes of many of its graduates. She was also a racist, a deep-dyed one, and a century after her presidency ended, in a new age (2020), Bryn Mawr College erased her name from campus landmarks and programs. The college could not easily remove her ashes, scattered on campus after her funeral. Another of her monuments difficult to erase was the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry. The idea came to her as if in a vision, enshrining her hopes that “sex sympathy” (her words) amongst women might transcend class barriers and bring to Bryn Mawr women who worked by hand, and introduce them to becoming workers by mind. Thomas took the idea to her backers, like John D. Rockefeller, and the Summer School opened its doors in Thomas’s last year as president, 1921-1922. Much evidence suggests that Rockefeller and Thomas got more than they bought, including the career of one of the Summer School’s first graduates, Elizabeth Nord. A Lancashire lass (born there on May 16, 1902), and thus safely Anglo-Saxon by Thomas’s genetic yardstick, Ms. Nord was also working class to her toenails. Elizabeth had come to the USA with her immigrant father, a coal miner, and her mother, a cotton weaver, and after leaving the Summer School Elizabeth went right back into weaving, not only cotton cloth but also the warp and woof of the nascent women’s trades union movement. Made stronger and sharper, perhaps more articulate, by her Bryn Mawr touch, she became a leader in the United Textile Workers Union, both in strikes and, in the longer term, in union organization and in liaison with government under the labor laws of FDR’s New Deal. So successful was Elizabeth, and other Summer School grads, that the School’s big financial backers pulled out, and in 1938 the experiment collapsed. But in the 1980s there were still enough Summer School alumnae around—including Elizabeth Nord herself—to produce the memorable PBS documentary, The Women of Summer, first aired in 1985. Just goes to show that you never know what you’ve bought until after you’ve paid for it. ©.
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the Bible as a human text
Julius Wellhausen, 1842-1918

The Law repeats again and again its injunction for the unity of worship. Julius Wellhausen.

The word ‘bible’ has endured many meanings, but at its simplest (and oldest?) means ‘book’ or the papyrus from which books were once made. The ‘bible’ was thus a human construction, but over time it became known as a sacred text, Bible with a capital ‘B,’ written (or inspired) by God. But as a text it was subject to the accidents of history, e. g. translation. That is a difficult art in itself, and it was made much more difficult by sectarian disputes over meaning. Over time, these conflicts shed more blood than they did ink, as for instance in the Crusades, the European wars of religion, and the centuries’ long persecution of the Jews. War weariness was one reason (among several) that motivated scholars to take a new tack. Starting perhaps with Baruch de Spinoza in the 17th century they would study the Bible as a human document, its words, its narratives, to determine its historical origins. The seat of this new scholarship was Germany (which from 1517 had been the European cockpit of religious bloodletting). Its branches, taken together, became known as “higher criticism,” and it can be seen as an expression of the Enlightenment. Its patron saint was the Protestant scholar Johann Eichhorn of Göttingen (1752-1827) and its most important later practitioner was Julius Wellhausen, born in Hamelin (the Pied Piper’s town!!) in Hanover on May 17, 1844. A Lutheran pastor’s son, he never pretended to any but a pastor’s life, but his theological studies took a different route. Studying the ancient languages under the tutelage of a student of Eichhorn’s, Wellhausen turned to linguistics and historical criticism to get at the Bible’s origins. He focused on the Pentateuch, the texts thought to be authored by Moses himself, to discover a long history of textual construction (from word of mouth to papyrus, so to speak) which was not complete until the second century of the common, or Christian, era: about the same time, in other words, that early Christians began to think of the Jewish texts as an “Old Testament,” prophecy or prologue. Wellhausen uncovered a complicated history of authorship, of differing narratives and different styles. There is no inherent reason why such a view should cloud meaning or contradict the idea of divine inspiration, but Wellhausen found his a difficult enough position that, in 1882, and as a matter of conscience, he resigned his theological position and took a chair in oriental languages. It is a sad irony at best that his studies may have served also to strengthen (and ‘modernize’?) German anti-Semitism, for the central ‘truth’ he found in the Pentateuch is that there should be only One tabernacle. ©
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a pioneer of evolutionary biology
Wilhelm Hofmeister, 1824-1877

A common life-cycle through mosses and ferns to Gymnosperms and flowering plants, linking the whole series in one scheme of life-history. From a 1964 appreciation of Wilhelm Hofmeister’s research on plant reproduction.

Popular knowledge about evolutionary biology has been limited by our ‘self-centered’ concerns with animals in general and hominids in particular. With Tyrranosauri to think about and wonder at, who cares a fig about Lathyrus odoratus? So Father Gregor Mendel’s pioneering research on sweet pea inheritance lay unheeded and unread for decades while scientists with bigger names (and egos) argued about “missing links” (and fossil hoaxes) in animal evolution. Another plant biologist whose work is still being ignored was Wilhelm Friedrich Benedict Hofmeister, born in Leipzig on May 18, 1824. No Augustinian friar, he was nevertheless about as unknown as Mendel. Not highly educated and, like his father, trained as a bookseller, Hofmeister left school at 15 (to apprentice in the book trade) but took with him a fascination with plants and, apparently, a microscope. Working generally before dawn he dissected plants to find their sexual secrets. Meanwhile he married, started a family, and began selling books until, in 1851 (aged 27) he published his own volume, a monograph on what is now known as the ‘alternation of generations’ in plants. Plants were male and/or female, and their sexual parts were essential to the production of offspring, new (and variable) generations. Incidentally, it’s almost certain that Mendel (1822-1884) read Hofmeister’s work, and it’s also significant that Hofmeister himself was thus prepared to accept (and become an enthusiastic proponent of) Darwin’s work On the Evolution of Species (1859). His 1851 monograph effectively ended Hofmeister’s career as a bookseller, winning him an honorary doctorate in the same year. He went on to research and write, producing important work on plant cells and embryology (structure and division), but all this was pretty hot stuff, still being intensely debated, and it was not until the 1860s that Hofmeister became a research scientist in his own right, first at Heidelberg and then (from 1872) at Tübingen. Hofmeister died in 1877, in effect mid-career and mid-stream. The pioneering nature of his findings is still being absorbed, partly because so little of it was translated into other languages. But Charles Darwin used it, especially Hofmeister’s findings on plants’ cell division and morphology, in his own The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). Of course (as with Darwin’s pigeons) human beings had been breeding plants for a long time and with significant effect, but Hofmeister’s microscopic researches helped us to learn how and why that ‘hybridization’ worked both in domesticated agriculture and in nature itself. ©
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Passing It On
Yuri Kochiyama

The legacy I would like to leave is that people try to build bridges and not walls. Yuri Kochiyama, television interview, 2001

In 2004, the University of California Press published Passing It On, by an 83-year old woman, Yuri Kochiyama. It’s a memoir, a looking back, but it also looks forward to an America which is truly a diverse, multiethnic, society, or as she might put it a real democracy. It’s a vision she and her husband Bill Kochiyama had ‘passed on’ to their (seven) children, and (as much to the point) that her immigrant parents passed on to her. Yuri Kochiyama was born Mary Yuriko Nakahara, May 19, 1921, her baptismal name signifying their assimilationist ambitions. Her mother had gained a college education and her father was a successful entrepreneur. They lived in San Pedro, in a predominantly white neighborhood where the family was active in the local Presbyterian Church, where Mary Yuriko taught in the Sunday school. Indeed she was coming home from church on December 7, 1941, when her father was arrested, declared a “prisoner of war,” and taken away. Having just undergone surgery (for ulcers) he was denied medical care. He died the day after he was allowed to return home. And all this before FDR’s “internment order,” which placed Mary, her mother, and her siblings in an Arkansas concentration camp. There began her new life as an activist. She began as a USO volunteer, assigned to a Japanese only (“Nisei”) battle unit in Mississippi, where she met her husband, Bill, and came face to face with another and more virulent form of American racism, the apartheid regime of the US South. After the war, she (now “Yuri,” not “Mary”) and Bill moved to New York where they raised seven kids and, living in Harlem, became involved in the nascent civil rights movement. Understandably, Yuri tied in her challenges with those of others, in civil rights agitation for Puerto Ricans and Asian Americans as well as for black people. She gained a measure of notoriety through her friendship with Malcolm X (among other things they shared the same birthday), and was pictured (in Life magazine) holding Malcolm’s head in her arms after he’d been shot. After that, Yuri Kochiyama went on passing it on. She remained close to the civil black power movement, embraced anti-Vietnam war activities and Native American protests, and in the 1970s moved to the fringes, a supporter of the Panthers, of South American revolutionaries, of “Maoist” socialism. This radical stuff isolated her from many, but her welfare work (in various charities, teaching English language and American ways to immigrant families) reminds us, too, that a part of her remained committed to assimilationist goals. She died unrepentant at 93 and is still a subject of controversy. That was, I think, her comfort zone. ©
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The accomplished lady.
Barbara Yelverton, Marchioness of Hastings

“The accomplished lady.” As geologist Richard Owen called Barbara Yelverton, Marchioness of Hastings, 1810-1858

Some years ago I lunched with Lady Mary Fitzalan Howard, and to make conversation I mentioned my researches on her distant (collateral) ancestor Lord Howard of Effingham. Lord Howard had not been a virtuous man, and Lady Mary was not amused. I would have done better to ask her about her more recent, more direct, and more interesting ancestress the Marchioness of Hastings, who was born Barbara Yelverton on May 20, 1810. Barbara was the daughter of Henry Yelverton, Baron Grey of Ruthin. Only child, as it turned out: when he died (in 1810) the infant Barbara became Baroness suo jure (in her own right). Barbara later married the Marquess of Hastings, birthed six children, and in turn married them off very well. When Hastings died, Barbara married again. Besides her two marriages Barbara lived two lives, one as “the jolly fast marchioness,” a renowned beauty, high liver and gambler at home and in France, and the other as a geologist, a collector of Eocene fossils (molluscs, mammals, and reptiles). It’s not known exactly when the Marchioness became a “fossilist” (as she was called by a male colleague) but she collected them from the sea cliffs on the Sussex-Hampshire border, the ‘Barton Beds,’ and collated and restored them at her private residence, Efford House, near Lymington. It may have begun as a hobby (fossil collections were then becoming fashionable) but by her second marriage (1844, to a Royal Navy admiral) it had become an expertise, and not only in fossils but in geological stratigraphy. She published several essays on both subjects, she attended conferences, and her advice was sought by (and given to) eminent pioneer geologists like Richard Owen and Charles Lyell. She was especially appreciated for her nearly perfect reconstruction of an ancient crocodilian and her discovery of a precursor elephant. She worked so hard at it that this “jolly fast marchioness” thought of herself as a “drudge,” but there’s no doubt that she enjoyed the measure of fame accorded to her by her male colleagues. Geology and “fossilism” were, after all, gentlemanly pursuits. All credit is due to her for her pioneering work as a woman in what was then a man’s game, but that challenge was easier for her than for her near contemporary Mary Anning (1799-1847), a daughter of poverty and hardship, who worked the sea cliffs further west, along the Dorset coast, and made even more important discoveries. Nor did Mary Anning leave any descendants at all, let alone one whose great-great-granddaughter became a lady-in-waiting to Princess Alexandra. ©.
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Family life in late Victorian England
Wilfred Lawrence Knox, 1886-1950

A Little Learning. A family reminiscence by Winifred Knox Peck, published in 1952.

Children (and hence adults?) are shaped by nature and by nurture, but in weird combinations that, so far, have defied any conclusive analysis. Take for instance the extraordinary spawn (six children) of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox and his wife Ellen French, both of whom came from aristocratic and ecclesiastical families. There were four boys and two girls, and only one of them (their eldest, a daughter) failed to reach some kind of eminence in adult life. The rest were various enough to impel Edmund’s and Ellen’s granddaughter, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, to undertake a collective biography. Fitzgerald concentrated on the male Knoxes (her book is called The Knox Brothers and includes a section on grandpapa Edmond), but she couldn’t avoid her Knox aunt, the prolific novelist Winifred Knox Peck (1882-1961) who had already written up a ‘family’ biography (A Little Learning: A Victorian Childhood, 1952). Fitzgerald’s own dad, Edmond George Knox (1881-1971) was a humorist-satirist, writer of nonsense verse and, almost forever, the editor-in-chief of Punch. Her uncle Alfred “Dilly” Knox (1884-1943) was the classical-linguist-turned-cryptographer who headed up the Bletchley Park team in breaking enemy codes during WWII. Edmond Arbuthnott Knox, the patriarch, was a low-churchman born in an Indian mission house who became a very evangelical Bishop of Manchester. He may have been pleased that his two youngest sons (after achieving their Oxford Firsts) both became Anglican priests, but then both (Wilfred and then Ronald) deserted evangelicalism to become high churchmen, Ronald ‘high’ enough to convert “back” to the Roman communion and to achieve eminence there as a theologian. Wilfred Lawrence Knox, born on May 21, 1886, never went that far. Indeed, immediately after achieving his Oxford First (in classics, like Dilly), he went the evangelical Anglican route and took a working-class parish in East London. There he became associated with the Labour Party, the Workers’ Educational Association, and (counter-intuitively from some points of view) an advocate of very High Church Anglicanism, identifying himself as Anglo-Catholic and, at the same time, a fierce proponent of the complete separation of church and state. On the side, he continued his studies of Christian origins, applying his language skills to new translations of the New Testament and arguing that the church was, in its origins, essentially Greek (‘Hellenistic’). Wilfred also wrote several devotional texts, but late in life was recognized mainly for his scholarly work with a Cambridge doctorate (in divinity!) and the chaplainship at Pembroke College. ©.
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Sail in the right ship at the right time.
The SS Savannah sails for Liverpool, May 22, 1819

We mortals are all on board a fast-sailing, never-sinking world-frigate, of which God was the shipwright. She is but one craft in a Milky-Way fleet, of which God is the Lord High Admiral. Herman Melville, 1850.

On May 22, 1819, the Savannah cleared her home port(Savannah, Georgia) bound for Liverpool. The ship had, a month earlier, hosted President James Monroe for a dinner and a brief round trip to Savannah’s main lighthouse. Not only that, but the president, also ‘commander-in-chief,’ offered to buy the ship for the US navy (in those days presidents didn’t have a lot to do, and the Savannah dinner interrupted Monroe’s inspection tour of southern forts and arsenals). As things turned out, the owners should have sold on the spot. The owners would turn down several other offers, and more fools they, for the ship never made them any money before it was driven aground (at Long Island, New York, in November 1821) in the teeth of a fierce nor’easter. Indeed, even on its first commercial voyage, Savannah to Liverpool, it carried no passengers and zero commercial freight, for Georgia planters proved unwilling to entrust their cotton, their cash, or their persons to a revolution in ship design. So in May 1819 they sailed, ballast only, to make the first-ever steamship crossing of the Atlantic. The owners were also cautious about their daring innovation, for besides its side-wheel and boiler the Savannah was (almost) fully masted, and was to be under steam only when becalmed or moving into port. Becalmed off Ireland, steam took over, making good time (4 knots) but making such a sight that a passing vessel thought the Savannah afire and made pursuit, attempting a rescue. Old-fashioned gallantry, no doubt. Once in European waters the Savannah made several trips, none very commercial but exciting curiosity (and offers to buy) from many, including the Swedish king and crown prince and, as above, Tsar Alexander I himself, the very avatar of Europe’s post-Napoleonic reaction. But no deals were struck, and after the Savannah returned home (in 1820) her steam engine was sold for scrap and she entered the American coasting trade under sail only. There are several moral tales to be told from all this, not least the superiority of northern entrepreneurship over southern, for the Savannah was financed by and built in northern ports. That difference would both start and finish the American Civil War. But 1819 was early days for steamships and for wars over slavery. Not until 1839 would a successful crossing be made by steam power (and then by British ships). And not until 1860-61 would southern planters entrust their slavery system and their cotton to the even more perilous voyage of secession and war. By then it was way too late, even though I am sure that Tsar Alexander I would have approved. ©
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Hawthorne's character, or her own?
Margaret Fuller, 1810-1850

Are the stars too distant? Pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the All. Margaret Fuller.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was no stranger to strong women. After all, he courted the most formidable of the three Peabodies, Elizabeth, before falling for her sister Sophia. Sophia, though frailer than Elizabeth, was no weakling. Despite three pregnancies and then years spent keeping the kids out of Hawthorne’s way, she survived him and, before and after moving to London as a widow, extended her own career as an illustrator and essayist. We find strong females in Hawthorne’s fiction, too, the indomitable Hester in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Then came ‘Zenobia’ and ‘Priscilla’ in The Blithedale Romance (1852). Though we don’t find that they were sisters until late in the novel, we could see them as shades of Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody. Most scholars, however, have seen in Zenobia the strongest of all Transcendentalist women, Margaret Fuller. Fuller was born on May 23, 1810, the only child of parents who did not believe in female subordination. Educated rigorously by her father in the classics and in modern languages, Fuller was there at the creation of the Transcendentalist movement. The Peabody sisters were involved, too, but Fuller went further, establishing herself as the equal of various leading (male) Transcendentals, including her most famous partnership with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Senior partner, arguably, for Fuller was from 1839 the editor of The Dial, the movement’s journal. She knew herself and her stuff so well that, in 1845, she produced a classic of early feminism, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Hawthorne, meanwhile, was casting around for something to do, someone to marry, somewhere to live. He wrote short fiction and, for a time, joined the Transcendentalist ‘utopia,’ Brook Farm. We know that he met Fuller there, for she was a frequent visitor. On the fringes, Hawthorne never fully imbibed the mystique of Transcendentalism nor the idealism of Brook Farm. In his 1852 novel he called it “Blithedale” a revenge that combined satire and irony, for Brook Farm had collapsed of its own weight and purpose. Hawthorne’s calling his lead female character “Zenobia” and then causing her to drown by suicide was no less mean-minded. Margaret Fuller drowned at sea in 1850, returning from her service to the Italian revolution. Her likely original, the Syrian queen Septimia Zenobia (ca. 240-270 CE), had failed in her own revolution and had been brought back to Rome in chains, to suffer public humiliation and, perhaps, execution. If Blithedale’s Zenobia was Margaret Fuller, her drowning was a doubly unkind fate. ©
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Cheaper By the Dozen
Lillian Gilbreth, 1878-1972

The One Best Way To Do Work. Company slogan of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, efficiency experts.

I’ve attended enough university graduations to qualify as a connoisseur of commencement speeches. Problem is, that as a literary genre, they don’t call for connoisseurship but criticism. Or perhaps satire. I’ve heard a few really good ones, including at my own baccalaureate, at Penn, in 1965, when an aged and rather feeble Scottish physician told the medical graduates that their profession would be tough on them (he had invited the rest of us to listen, in case we were interested). But for the most part commencement speechifying (delivered in my hearing, anyway) has been insipidly optimistic, rosily unrealistic, and all too often self-congratulatory. How unlike the address given at Cornell College (Iowa) by my great aunt May, valedictorian of the class of 1886. She warned her classmates that they would face many challenges. Successes would be few, rewards meager, but since life was hard the great thing in it was to do the best you can. A few years later, in 1900, at Berkeley, CA, another valedictorian issued a similar challenge to her classmates, entitled “Life: A Means to an End.” Serious stuff. She was Lillie Moller, born on May 24, 1878, and since she was the first female to speak at any University of California commencement, one hopes that she was listened to. Lillie certainly listened to herself. In the next two decades, she went on to win a doctorate, to marry Frank Gilbreth, and as Lillian Gilbreth (“Lillian” sounded better) birth a dozen kids, parent almost all of them to adulthood, and to partner with Frank as a pioneer in organizational science and industrial management. After Frank died, in 1924, Lillian continued to build their business, to parent the remaining children, to serve Hoover and then FDR and Truman in peace and in war and in private and public agencies. Along the way Lillian Gilbreth would collar a dozen more doctorates (the honorary sort), become an inventor of ergonomic designs, and set herself up as the efficiency expert who stood in opposition to “Taylorism,” the American management creed that used efficiency as a means to widen profit margins. For Lillian Gilbreth, as for Lillie Moller, “life” was a means to a different end, and she put the worker at center stage. One assumes that as an honorary doctor Lillian gave many more commencement addresses. I hope that they were not too shallowly optimistic nor too self-congratulatory. She let two of her children do that for her, in two classics of “growing up” literature, most notably Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) which took my 3rd-grade reading class by storm in 1953. ©
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I think this is a good place for my commencement story.
"I remember being with Bob Bliss in the robing room before a Commencement ceremony in St Louis. I pointed out to him that his doctoral robe had a big tear in it and he told me it was his father's and if it was good enough for him it was all right by him.
This was the occasion when a man with an entourage approached me and shook my hand. I asked him who he was and his jaw dropped. It turned out he was Brian Mulroney, PM of Canada at one time who retired in disgrace after losing a landslide election. A lady behind him laughed and Bob told me later it was his wife..... Bob thought it was hilarious and said it reminded him of the series of cartoons in Punch about 'The Man Who....'. These showed notable instances of faux pas. Later, Mulroney made a speech which went down like a lead balloon....
."
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'Good design' is a social force that can enhance human environments. Robin Day.
Robin Day, 1915-2010

Just one word: Plastics. Line from a 1967 movie.

Remember when the Braddocks threw a Pasadena poolside party to celebrate their Ben’s graduation and give him a leg up in the LA labor market? A tall, jolly family friend urged Ben to go into “plastics.” Instead, Ben chose Mrs. Robinson, another family friend, and then her daughter Elaine, and those choices made The Graduate into the highest-grossing film of 1967, especially popular amongst those who scorned things that were merely cheap and cheerful. It seems longer ago than that, for today we do live in a “plastics” world, for better and for worse. Among those who went into plastics in a really big way was Ronald Henry (“Robin”) Day, who was born in the furniture-making town of High Wycombe on May 25, 1915. After graduating from technical school (he was a police constable’s son) Day apprenticed in the industry but was drawn into design where he set his sights on simple and cheap. Those weren’t easy options in a woodworking town, so he drifted into teaching design. Simple and cheap still governed, though, and in 1942 he married a fabric designer with similar preferences, and for the next half century, and more, Robin and Lucienne Day tried to make modern design truly British. All you have to do is tour a selection of post-WW II British housing estates to see that this was a challenging task, and that their success was a mighty one. Except right at first, they rarely worked for anyone else, but as partner-designers (commission or contract) they became hot commodities. I’ll deal with Lucienne’s fabrics another day, but until plastics became possible Robin dealt with ways (e.g. molded plywood) of making wood furnishings that were cheap, light, spare, and pleasing. His creations won awards, including a Museum of Modern Art prize in 1948, and his prestigious commissions included the seating for the Royal Festival Hall, London, which opened in 1951. So when molded plastics came along (in the early 60s, before Ben Braddock got that hot tip in Pasadena) Robin Day was ready. And out of the Day design studio in London came a stream of polypropylene chairs, almost endless, designed for various roles in the house or outside, in school rooms or in (even more endless) waiting rooms. I would say that you’ve certainly sat in one, somewhere (you did not have to go to London to do so), and the chances are good that you still have more than one of them, somewhere (they stack easily and last almost forever). They come in all colors, are cheap, and they fit most body shapes comfortably. They sold like hotcakes, worldwide, and so in 1967 Ben’s advice was pretty good. He didn’t listen, and so we got a good movie with a great ending. But we could have had a plastic chair, instead. ©
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A 'Notable Woman' of Hawaii.
Helen Kanahele, 1916-1976

All I could think of was that there was one kind of justice for upper-class haoles and another kind of justice for Hawaiians. Helen Kanahele, 1956, recalling the “Morgan’s Corner” murder case.

It is not surprising that McCarthyism spread its fevers over 2,000 miles of ocean to infect the (then) territory of Hawaii. Among several reasons for this was the territory’s “racial” mix between native Hawaiians and Asian immigrants. Hawaii seemed a good place to find Reds under Beds. One product of such ‘sexual’ integration was Helen Kanahele, born on May 26, 1916, to a white (English) father and a native Hawaiian (kānaka) mother. Helen was not a born troublemaker but she’d become enough of one to be of interest to the territorial legislature’s “Committee on Subversive Activities”. When her natural parents died (she was 6) Helen was raised as an orphan. Sent to a technical school, she became expert in native culture (song and the hula), good enough at both to be recruited as a performer. One of her performance tours took her through the southern USA where she discovered that, as a person of “color,” she could drink only at certain fountains, pee only in certain toilets, and stay only at certain hotels. This possibly shaped her political personality, but a more certain influence was her discovery of mainland trade unionism. When she returned to Hawaii (Honolulu), she married, birthed two kids, took employment as hospital worker, and supported her natural brother in a strike organized by the Longshoremen’s Union. She joined the United Public Workers Union, and by 1952 she was that union’s territorial secretary-treasurer, leading a campaign to organize all the islands’ public workers. And she’d led a successful campaign against the death penalty. It was, tellingly, a case of unequal justice. Two escaped convicts, one a native Hawaiian had, in the course of a domestic burglary at Morgan’s Corner, left a (white) widow bound and gagged. She had died, they’d been found guilty of first-degree murder and been sentenced to hang. This seemed to Helen a marked contrast to the infamous “Massie” case, wherein a white woman had served an “exemplary” one-hour sentence for her role in the seamy, steamy, and sordid 1932 murder of a native Hawaiian boxer, Joe Kahahawai. Working with a white radical lawyer, Helen Bouslag, Helen quashed the death sentence and, after Hawaii won statehood, secured a reprieve. Helen’s race and her radicalism were also among the reasons for which Hawaiian statehood was delayed until, in 1959, it could be “paired” with the admission of Alaska, but that’s another and even more complicated story. “Miss UPW”, as Helen had become known, rested from her struggles in 1976, when she was generally mourned as a Hawaiian heroine. ©
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I could see I was not going to get along well on my own.
Mary P. Fieser, 1909-1997

[Married,]I could do as much chemistry as I wanted, and it didn’t matter what Professor Baxter thought of me. Mary P. Fieser, recalling her career as a Radcliffe College graduate student.

The old proverb ‘manners maketh man’ was first used to distinguish all human beings from the brute creation. It has been challenged, by Mark Twain among others, and recent events (e.g. in Ukraine and Texas) have vindicated Twain’s reservations. The proverb’s later evolution into ‘marriage maketh man’ is more gender-specific and makes better sense. On the other hand, the obvious variant, ‘marriage maketh woman,’ is as rare as hen’s teeth—and possibly for good reason. But one woman-wife, the organic chemist Mary Peters Fieser, often said that marriage had ‘made’ her, and she had a point. Mary Fieser was born Mary Peters on May 27, 1909, and raised in a family that believed in gender equality and then acted on it. While her sister migrated into the humanities, Mary entered what was then the man’s world of science. After graduating in chemistry (1930, from Bryn Mawr College), Mary Peters enrolled for a Master’s degree at Radcliffe College, then Harvard’s little sister. It was, she later reflected, no place for a woman, and indeed her first chemistry professor, Gregory Baxter, would not allow her into his laboratory, assigning Mary instead to her place in a makeshift basement room in a nearby building. Mary solved that problem in 1932 by marrying a different chemistry professor, Louis Fieser. Of course it wasn’t that simple. Louis’s first job had been as a chemistry instructor at Bryn Mawr, where he taught Mary Peters. They seem to have been jointly smitten, and Mary followed Louis to his first tenured appointment, at Harvard. Their marriage—and their scientific partnership—lasted from 1932 until Louis’s death in 1977. Together they published many scientific papers and made several important discoveries in organic chemistry, among them the synthesis of vitamin K and early research into steroids and their properties. Perhaps most importantly, in the long run, they co-authored what became standard texts in college-level organic chemistry, distinguished from the competition by their clear prose and humorous tendencies. Indeed they seem to have been a rather jolly couple, keepers of Siamese cats, popular instructors in lecture halls and laboratories, and productive researchers. Whether either of them civilized the other must, I think, remain an open question. Perhaps it was a joint effort. Come the ‘feminization’ of Harvard (or the Harvard-Radcliffe merger?) their lives were memorialized (in 1996) by the dedication of the new Louis and Mary Fieser Laboratory for Undergraduate Organic Chemistry, where I suspect male and female students work together in civilized harmony. ©
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As there was no victory without us in the past, so there will be none without us in the future. Eliza Gardner, 1917.
Eliza Ann Gardner, 1831-1922

I come from Old Massachusetts, where we have declared that all, not only men, but women, too, are created free and equal. Eliza Ann Gardner, 1884.

On an inner page of its December 11, 1906 number, the New York Times advertised the “absolute purity” of Jameson’s whiskey, the surprising quality of a 5-cent cigar (“$5 per hundred” and just what the country needed, Woodrow Wilson’s vice president would later say), a “delightful” bathtub ammonia called “Scrubb’s”, Veuve Clicquotchampagne, and (for holiday reading) a coffee table book on the “amazing” Russian court. Nestled amongst all this temptation was a long report on celebrations (in all 46 states!!) of the centenary of that severely temperate radical, William Lloyd Garrison, born in Massachusetts on December 10, 1806. The headline was “NEGROES HONOR MEMORY OF WILLIAM L. GARRISON.” The story conceded that many celebrants in New York City were white, but reported only on “negro” speakers like educationalist Booker T. Washington and novelist Thomas Fortune. But in Boston abolitionist fires burned brightly enough to attract white orators, including Garrison’s grand-nephew, the Massachusetts governor, and the aged, outrageous radical Julia Ward Howe. But down the speakers’ list was an almost equally aged African-American woman, Eliza Ann Gardner, born in New York on May 28, 1831,the very year that Garrison began The Liberator. No former slave she, nor (like Howe) a wife who longed for liberation from a tyrannical husband. Instead, she’d grown up the favored child of James Gardner, who became a prominent shipbuilder in the Boston yards, the leader of Boston’s black community, and a pillar of Boston’s leading A.M.E. church. Her childhood home had been a nerve center of New England abolitionism, a way-station in the Underground Railroad, and a meeting place for the likes of Garrison himself, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass. No stranger to oratory, she followed her father into a leadership position in the A.M.E. church and, come the Civil War, helped to recruit troops for the famed 54th Massachusetts. Once freedom was won, Eliza spread her wings to take in female equality, and not only within the black community. Eliza cofounded the Ladies’ Home and Foreign Mission Society and spoke and agitated against gender as well as racial stratification. She also founded and led specifically black feminist organizations like the National Association of Colored Women. So although she was pretty far down the list of speakers on December 10, 1906, Boston people knew who Eliza Gardner was, Eliza Gardner had known William Lloyd Garrison, and Eliza Gardner knew how to speak in public. I, for one, would like to know what she said. ©
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Patterns for life.
Ebenezer Butterick, 1826-1902

A Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possibly a good deal more. – Margaret Atwood

I grew up in a family bereft of seamstresses. Neither my mother nor hers could sew, and no man in the family would confess to it. So I married one, which has solved pressing problems beyond popped buttons and split seams. Way before me, in 1850, one Ebenezer Butterick married a seamstress, Ellen Augusta Pollard, and together they would revolutionize the sewing world. It was a nice coincidence and better luck that in the same year, 1850, Isaac Singer invented the world’s first practical home sewing machine, but today we concentrate on Ebenezer Butterick, born on May 29, 1826, in Sterling, Massachusetts. His father was a carpenter and a leader of Sterling’s Unitarian-Universalist congregation, but the promise of universal salvation did not keep Ebenezer from working for his own. For his earthly calling he chose tailoring. Clever of him, then, to marry a seamstress, but the Buttericks went beyond marital efficiency to revolutionize the world of home sewing. They didn’t invent sewing patterns, but in 1863 they invented and patented a size-graded system of patterns. This enabled anyone who could wield a needle—or a Singer—to keep the family in stylish clothes, for the same pattern could be sewn to size as children grew and adults expanded. Their first pattern sold like hotcakes at $10 per box, wholesale. Ebenezer framed that first $10 bill, and by 1869 Butterick & Co. was a big business. It had a Brooklyn factory which put out not only patterns but a mass circulation magazine. Butterick salesmen circled the country and were already moving out to dress the world in home-sewn fashion. Although Ellen Butterick died in 1876 the company went on expanding. In the year Ebenezer died, 1902, work began on a new company headquarters, in Manhattan. The 14-story Butterick Building still stands, a modified octagon of stylish aspect, now home to architects and lawyers. Back then it was famous for housing the country’s biggest printing press (outside the U.S. Government Printing Office) and one of its largest electric advertising signs. And from it, for decades, came floods of stylish patterns, mainly for women and children, and several mass circulation magazines which at once instructed in sewing and spread a message about fashion. There was even a magazine for children, The Little Delineator,its title perfectly tuned to an age when children were taught to read via phonics (another expertise of Paulette’s). Now Butterick has been conglomerated, but its new corporation recognizes the magic and one can still buy a Butterick pattern. And sew it up with a Singer. ©
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public rights on private land.
The Princess Amelia, 1711-1786

A woman of quick parts and warm feelings. . . [who] knew more of the world than princes usually do, Her Royal Highness Amelia, as described by one of her courtier friends.

Some of our pleasantest memories have to do with the ‘public footpaths’ of England and Wales (Scotland has them too but they are of a different ilk). These can be seen as relicts of ancient privileges shared by ordinary folk, for instance rights of pasturage, and for centuries were under attack by the “enclosure” movement, a push by landowners to make full use of their private rights. Now and again the ‘commons’ fought back, most famously in the “Mass Trespass,” 1932. in the Derbyshire Peaks, the most successful lawlessness in British history. Organized by, among others, the Ramblers Association and the Communist Party of Great Britain, the trespass opened the Peaks to walkers, then led to legislation (in the 1940s and after) that enabled ‘the commons’ to rediscover and recreate ancient rights of way for the public (and their prams, their picnics, and their pets) to use. Of course it’s a situation in which courtesy is expected on all sides. Walkers don’t leave litter or chase sheep and farmers don’t let their bulls or mastiffs roam unattended near a public footpath. Well before the Kinder Scout trespass there was the celebrated case of the Princess Amelia versus the freemen and freeholders of Richmond, then a village on the Thames just west of London. HRH Amelia not only lost the case but, later, was ordered to provide ladders and stiles suitable even for any aged woman who might wish to exercise her common right to enjoy Richmond Park. Princess Amelia Sophia Eleonora was born in Hanover, Germany, on May 30, 1711, while her grandfather and father were still waiting to assume their hereditary right (as defined by parliament) to the British crown as, respectively, King and Prince of Wales. When Anne, the last of the Stuarts, died in 1714, most of the Hanovers decamped to London where they set up one of the most dysfunctional courts in UK history, George I and his son almost at daggers drawn and the Hanover progeny involved in the battle as soon as they were toilet trained. In all this, Amelia developed a tough hide, a short temper, and a quick judgment, none of them calculated to endear her to the parliamentary classes or the great British public. She remained unmarried, which probably didn’t help, and extended her Civil List privileges (and incomes) by being made Ranger of Richmond Park in 1751. Today it’s the largest of London’s Royal Parks, open to all and sundry, but in 1751 HRH Amelia wanted it all for herself and her friends. She was challenged by a brewer, a stonemason, and (of all things) a cobbler, and (as above) lost her case. So if you visit London this summer, or soon, please take care to enjoy your common right to the commons of Richmond Park. It’s historic. ©
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John Rylands' monument.
Enriqueta Rylands, 1843-1908

Carven stone and blazoned pane. Enriqueta Rylands and the construction of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, England.

In October 1875, in Manchester, a widower, he 74, married a much younger woman, she 32. Doubtless tongues wagged, and wagged the more for he was (by a great stretch) the richest man in Manchester and she was Cuban, vivacious, and had been “companion” to Ryland’s second wife Martha. Otherwise little was known of her. That’s still the case, especially about her early years, but when she died the tongues had stopped wagging and her adoptive city mourned the passing of its greatest philanthropist. She was Enriqueta Augustina Rylands, born in Havana on May 31, 1843. As her maiden name, Tennant, suggests, she was of Anglo-Cuban extraction, her father from a wealthy mercantile family of Liverpool and himself a sugar planter in what was still a slave society. After her father’s death, she and her siblings decamped to Paris where they associated with artists, were educated in Catholic schools, and her mother married a pianist friend of Chopin’s. Not a promising start for the future wife of John Rylands, stern Calvinist that he was, but by then Enriqueta had converted to Congregationalism and had made herself an essential member of their Congregationalist chapel, much admired for her piety and her “splendid fortitude.” Martha Rylands having died in January 1875, John and Enriqueta married that October, in a dissenting chapel of course, and soon he retired to devote himself to religious and educational philanthropy. Enriqueta joined wholeheartedly in these tasks, and when John died in 1888 she intensified and expanded the mission. As John had, she gave in the thousands to dissenting chapels, schools, and charity hospitals, but she became almost fanatical in what had been his fulfilling hobby. He had filled his mansions with rare books. Enriqueta would fill Manchester with them, meanwhile expanding Rylands’ collection to include rare manuscripts. In 1889 she hatched the scheme to house these collections in a physical—and fully-staffed—library, and in 1899 (overdue and way beyond budget estimations) the John Rylands Library opened for business. Much to the first librarian’s dismay, she ran the library pretty much by herself (just as she had continued to oversee John’s businesses), and astutely too, with a stress on religious and biblical scholarship (for which she also made endowments at Manchester University). I often researched there (in 17th-century manuscripts), sharply aware only of John Rylands and of the library’s motto (Nihile sine labore). Of Enriqueta Rylands I knew little, which was how she would have wanted it. The motto, however, was hers. ©
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Stanley wrote: 31 May 2022, 13:22 Of Enriqueta Rylands I knew little,
I guess that could be said for many - even those like me, brought up in and around Manchester. I never heard of her, and apart from the Rylands Library knew little of him either. I think the library is a bit out of the town centre (Deansgate?) so not somewhere I'd pass every day. I wonder if any of this is mentioned to today's schoolchildren in the area? I'd guess not - in fact I'd bet on it - as the words sugar plantation and slavery are mentioned so definitely unmentionable and anathema.

They're buried, I discover, in Southern Cemetery, and by coincidence Sarah's UK Graveyardshas been there recently. She hasn't mentioned him but there's a massive amount of history in there, and she flits around with great energy and genuine enthusiasm - "look at this everybody" :smile: She found an Italian's grave. He was called Valvona, and I found him on the Ancoats Little Italy Ice Cream site and saw that he was the inventor of the ice cream cornet. Now that's a real achievement to be remembered for. She's found a niche market all right.

I'm rambling again. . . . sorry :smile:
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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You may well be rambling David but you triggered something in the back of my head. That name 'Valvona' isn't unfamiliar, I have seen it somewhere, could it have been embossed into an ice cream wafer?
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Re: BOB'S BITS

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Nowt wrong with a good ramble. In more polite circles its called 'thinking outside the box' or 'lateral thinking'. I do it all the time but in my case its mainly rubbish.
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