BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

I don't think he reads the thread David. Send that direct to him he won't bite.

[Stanley]

"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt." Mark Twain.

** 'Abbas II Hilmi Pasha, 1874-1944.
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The argument that modern imperialism (especially of the British strain) has been a Good Thing, recently buffed up by the historian Niall Ferguson, may be said to meet one of its severest tests in the case of modern Egypt, especially in the lifetime of ‘Abbas Hilmī Pāshā, who was born near Cairo on July 14, 1874. At that time, Egypt had been a sort of protectorate of the Ottoman (Turk) empire for a very long time—since 1517, some say—and certainly since 1811 when Abbas’s great-great grandfather Mehmet Ali had been installed as provincial captain-general (later “Khedive”) in an Ottoman protectorate. Few argue today that Ottoman imperialism was a Good Thing, but with the construction of the Suez Canal (1859-69) the British and the French found motives enough to think that they could make it a Better Thing. All this washed out in 1882 with a British invasion and the declaration of a British protectorate. But Egypt was not just any old colony inhabited by dark-skinned savages; it was an
ancient kingdom (with biblical warrant) and needed to be dressed differently than, say, East Africa. So Britain continued the protectorate fiction, and in 1892. in the interests of legitimacy, installed the (barely) 18-year old Abbas as Khedive, thus continuing the Mehmet dynasty. It was a costume that fit Abbas poorly, for he’d been educated by an English governess and then at school in Geneva and Vienna, and he harbored visions of independence. Thus he managed to upset the amour propre of a series of British ‘protectors’, including Lord Kitchener, and to toy with the notion of becoming his own nationalist leader, or perhaps reverting (for a time) to Ottoman suzerainty. His timing for that last project (1914, the start of the Great War) was exceptionally clumsy; so the British demoted him to cadet level in his family and installed his uncle as viceroy. It remained for Gamal Abdel Nasser, in the 1950s, to pick up the pieces and try to a modern Egyptian nationalism. In the
end, Abbas left almost nothing behind, except an experimental farm outside of Cairo and a fine bloodline of Arabian racehorses, traces of which course through European and Kentuckian stables, including perhaps the stables of HM Queen Elizabeth II. Perhaps that is what Professor Ferguson meant when he talked about the benefits of empire. ©

[Stanley]

** Maggie Walker, 1864-1934.
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“I got my start by giving myself a start.” Maggie L. Walker

Quakers, at their origin in England a despised sect and then for decades excluded from ‘normal’ means of advancement, compensated by dealing only, or mainly, with other Quakers. This alliance of “meeting house and counting house” served them well whether they went into banking, iron manufacture, chocolates, or the transatlantic trade with fellow Quakers in the colonies. In Virginia, after the Civil War, Maggie Lena Walker urged a very similar policy for freedmen and their descendants. ‘Make Black, buy Black, bank Black.’ In the process Walker made a fortune, and today her home—among other things the base of many of her business activities—is a tourist attraction. There, visitors marvel at her courage, her intelligence, her taste (the furnishings are mainly hers), and her fierce devotion to her own family (who lived with her until her death in 1934 and then retained ownership, and use, until 1979, when it became a National Historic Site. Maggie Lena Mitchell Walker was born in Richmond on July 15, 1864. Her mother, Elizabeth Draper, born a slave, was by then free and a cook for Elizabeth Van Lew, the intrepid Union spy, Maggie’s biological father was a Confederate soldier; her step-father was William Mitchell, a hotel butler, who married Elizabeth Draper when Maggie was four and died (or was murdered) when she was twelve. Maggie trained and qualified as a teacher but she inclined to business, having joined the Order of St. Luke, a kind of self-help insurance company run by and for African Americans. As her life went on, she married, had children (three survived), and became ever more enmeshed in the St. Luke business, saving it from bankruptcy, solidifying its connections with local ‘chapters’, establishing its own newsletter, and in 1901 1901 effectively transforming it into a bank, Maggie as president. The bank still survives, but after engineering its survival in the first years of the Great Depression Maggie herself succumbed (in 1934) to the diabetes that had plagued her from the 1890s, and placed her in a wheelchair in the 1920s. Maggie Walker’s home still survives, too, and is now maintained by the National Park Service. ©

[Stanley]

** Peace Pilgrim, 1908-1981.
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“I am a pilgrim, a wanderer. I shall remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace.” Peace Pilgrim.

The extraordinary woman who became known as “Peace Pilgrim”was born Mildred Lisette Norman on July 18, 1908. An important element in her story had then already been written, in the creation and prosperity of a close-knit community of (mainly) German immigrants in and around Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Her family had been Christian pietists, first persecuted in Germany and then, in the 1850s so fearful of nativist, ”Know-Nothing” persecution in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, that they emigrated again—not far, but to the New Jersey coast, where they incorporated themselves as a ‘city’ within the larger town bounds of Egg Harbor. Something of her family’s history, and its psychology, lingered on in Mildred Lisette Norman. First, in 1939, she eloped with Stanley Ryder, and when that turned out badly, divorced him in 1946 and moved to Pasadena, California, where in 1952 she experienced her own spiritual awakening, rechristened herself Peace Pilgrim, and on New Year’s Day 1953 set out ‘walking for peace’ in a pilgrimage that took her 28 years and at least 25,000 miles, including six complete transcontinental walks and the first ever single season trek along the complete Appalachian Trail. Along the way, or ways, she preached peace and told her life story, on college campuses, in churches and meeting houses, and not a few street corners. She traveled light, and was careful never to possess anything more than what she could carry, “walking until given shelter and fasting until given food.” It was ironic, then, that Peace Pilgrim in a car accident, in Indiana (July 1981), during her seventh transcontinental walk, while being driven to a speaking engagement, off-route so to speak, in Knox, Indiana. At that point, she (or, more precisely, her ashes) were taken back home to the Egg Harbor City cemetery, and buried in the Norman family plot. Today you may be able to find her there, for every September, in Peace Pilgrim Park, she and her mission are celebrated by
the ‘Friends of Peace Pilgrim.’ ©.

[Stanley]

Life-saver
** Nils Bohlin, safety engineer, 1920-2002.
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"There is a little bit of Nils Bohlin in every car." Nils Bohlin

In 1939, a few years after General Motors CEO Alfred Sloan refused to install safety glass in his cars (safety, he said, was not his business. and besides, the patent was owned by Dupont, then a GM subsidiary), Nils Bohlin was getting his diploma in mechanical engineering from a technical institute in his home town. Born on July 17, 1920, in Härmösand, Sweden, Bohlin first worked on safety design for the plane maker, Saab, before moving over to Volvo in 1958, specifically as a safety engineer. There Bohlin designed, and patented, the three-point safety belt, some version of which you will probably wear today. Installed in most Volvos from 1959, and spreading quickly across Europe, the belt had a dramatic impact on fatalities and injuries in European car crashes. In 1967, Bohlin published a statistical analysis of over 28,000 accidents that proved the point so sufficiently that the United States Department of Transportation made the belt compulsory in American passenger cars. But as if to prove that safety was not their business, either, Bohlin and Volvo released the patent, making the design free for anyone to use. Not very many of us could say that we have saved tens of thousands of lives. Nils Bohlen could. Leaving behind him four children (two as stepfather) and a passel of grandchildren, Nils Bohlin died in 2002 and is buried in a churchyard in rural Sweden.

[Stanley]

** Elizabeth Jennings, 1926-2001.
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Words aren't worn out. . . but can renew our tongue, flesh out our feeling, make us apt for life. Elizabeth Jennings.


A poem entitled “A Summing Up” seems as likely as not to be a valedictory, but Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) wrote hers in 1969, when she was but 43, having been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, on July 18, 1926. And “A Summing Up” is not a farewell, nor even a review of a life “so far.” Rather, the poem hangs out Jennings’ shingle, her agenda. “My allegories fade now from my mind// As I seek out directness, truth, and strong// Memories. Within them I shall find, // I trust, a world that never need be wrong.” These lines came at about the time that Jennings quit her “day job,” that essential support for the some-time poet, to launch herself as a free-lancer and to live by her pen alone. Over the next thirty years followed not exactly a flood but certainly a steady stream of slim volumes in which she collected and put before the world her best poems. And they sold well enough (sometimes in the tens of thousands) to testify that there was an audience out there that was willing to pay for directness, truth, and a world that never need be wrong. Her audience included Kingsley Amis who (when he edited Oxford’s student literary magazine) was excited about his “discovery” of a young woman poet, “the star of the show,” Elizabeth Jennings. While she was grooming herself as a student poet, in Oxford, she also won the friendship of Philip Larkin. Amis and Larkin remained her friends for life, a fact made the more remarkable because she was, emphatically, a religious poet, a Catholic who found her truth in faith as well as in words. After graduation (in 1947) she took a job as a librarian in Oxford’s city library and contributed occasional poems to ‘The Movement,’ as the sole female among 9 young poets, most of them of the Amis-Larkin type. Single-handedly, she made it an odd grouping. Meanwhile, her slim volumes kept her in enough cash to maintain modest, rented lodgings in Oxford, stuffed to the gills with her collections of objets. She left infrequently, to do readings, to visit Rome, to take an honorary doctorate (in divinity!!!) at Durham and to receive from the queen a CBE (1992). At that last ceremony, she was dressed so plainly as to receive, from the tabloid press, the title of “the bag lady of the sonnets.” It must have pleased her. ©.

[Stanley]

Author and medical campaigner. ** A. J. Cronin, 1896-1981;
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The mountain tops were hidden in a grey waste of sky . . . their sides . . . fell black and desolate, blemished by great heaps of slag on which a few dirty sheep wandered in vain hope of pasture. Dr. Manson arrives at his first practice, in The Citadel, by A. J. Cronin (London, 1935)

History is full to bursting with coincidences, including the fact that Dr. A. J. Cronin and Welsh radical MP Aneurin Bevan worked together, for a time, at the Tredegar Cottage Hospital. That hospital was ‘owned’ by the community (through regular individual subscriptions—miners paid thruppence in the pound, a ‘tax’ of little more than 1% (for there were 240 pence in the old pound) and offering all its services, from bed rest to surgery, free to all subscribers. The idea that Britain’s National Health Service was born there is credible because Bevin, as Minister of Health in the 1945-51 Labour government, wrote the NHS legislation. But Dr. Cronin would play his part too, as the author of The Citadel (1937), a novel about an individual doctor’s struggle to find a balance between his own medical integrity and the medical needs of his Welsh community. Archibald Joseph Cronin was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, on July 19, 1896, He displayed amazing competences in the classroom and on the playing field and went on to graduate with highest honors (in medicine) at Glasgow University. His first ‘practice’ was as a ship’s surgeon in the Royal Navy, and after the peace of November 1918 he held several medical posts, not only in Tredegar but also in Scotland, Ireland, and in Harley Street London (in private practice, of course) before an ulcer sent him home to rest and write his first novel, Hatter’s Castle (1931). This authorial success continued with many fictions drawn from his own life, The Citadel and The Stars Look Down (1935), a novel full of social and political comment about a north England mining community, and its varied ways of making ends meet. Both novels sold exceptionally well in the UK (The Citadel was Gollancz’s best-seller ever) and in the USA (where a Gallup poll found The Citadel the “most interesting” novel of the year). A. J. Cronin went on to a prosperous career as a novelist, living for a time in the USA (where The Citadel and others of his stories and novels were made into films) and then in Switzerland. where his social circle included Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, and Audrey Hepburn. Several of his novels, including The Citadel, are still in print. But the USA still awaits its own national health service, so perhaps that meeting of minds back in 1920s Tredegar was, indeed, nothing more than coincidence. ©

[Stanley]

Young women do not thirst for fame in a subordinate capacity. They are as desirous of great achievements as men. Daniel Kerr, 1858.
** The Seneca Falls Convention, July 20, 1848.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848.

On its second and final day, July 20, 1848, the Women’s Rights Convention, meeting at Seneca Falls, NY, passed its “Declaration of Sentiments,” its twelve articles drawing out the logical implications of its famous preamble:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that
the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. The declaration had been drafted, just before the convention, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, then only 33 and in the 8th year of her marriage. Hers was not a tyrannical union (on either side). Indeed both parties to it agreed to omit from the ceremony the traditional bride’s promise to “obey” her beloved. And although Elizabeth Cady did by her own wish become Elizabeth Cady Stanton she never signed herself as Mrs. Stanton. Her 12 articles were substantial ones, and each related to the impotence of women—particularly married women—in both their civil and private lives. Eleven of them passed unanimously, but there was spirited debate over the women’s suffrage article (which demanded the right to vote) and it passed only very narrowly. That distinction was important. Ten years later, my great-grandfather Daniel Kerr (then 23 years old, living in Collinsville, Illinois) attended a public lecture on women’s rights by “a lady from St. Louis” (probably Frances Dana Gage). Daniel wrote to his father that ‘of course’ her demand for the vote was ridiculous and easily disproven but sympathized with the rest of her remarks, wherein “she showed that women possessing the same powers the same qualities as men” possessed also the right to have their own “ambitions.” That gap remains, although in a form that would have surprised Elizabeth Stanton (and Daniel Kerr). Women gained the vote in 1920. Whether women have yet gained full rights to have (and fulfil) their own ambitions remains a different and more elusive question. ©

[Stanley]

Filled with the sound of typewriters and playing children. Gloucester Crescent, A London Street
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“Gloucester Crescent is a curving, leafy street, filled with the sound of clacking typewriters and children playing.” From a review of Gloucester Crescent (2018) by William Miller.

This morning I researched Sir Jonathan Miller, birthdate July 21, 1934, who became interesting (nay, famous) as physician, comedian, essayist, director, producer, etc. En route, I developed an interest in the London street, Gloucester Crescent, where Miller and his wife Rachel Collet moved in in 1961 and where both of them later died, Miller in 2018. In 1961, Gloucester Crescent houses were cheap. NW1 was one of those neighborhoods ‘on the way down’, and besides it was equidistant from the hospitals where Jonathan and Rachel were doing their residencies. But the houses (semi-detached and terraces) were big, 3 and 4 stories, and some of them had huge back gardens, a common fate of ‘crescent’ properties surrounded by straight streets. Moreover, the street had historical associations. Built speculatively in the early 1840s, the Crescent had had interesting inhabitants. It was where Charles Dickens parked his (to him) disagreeable wife Catherine, and it had been home, too, to the
composer Ralph Vaughn Williams and his wife. But in the 1960s it became “the trendiest street in London,” a city of trendy places. Within a decade or so it became home not only to the Millers, but to a host of others, among them jazz musician George Melly, biographer Claire Tomalin, and essayist Alice Thomas Ellis and her husband-publisher Colin Haycraft (who, in turn, parked his lover, novelist Beryl Bainbridge, in a nearby street). Gloucester Crescent thus moved from “trendy” to “established” and has even gained its own biographers, notably Jonathan Miller’s son William (Gloucester Crescent: Me, My Dad, and Other Grown-Ups, 2018) who observes that his own Gloucester Crescent house, almost next-door to his dad’s, now costs 600 times what his father paid in 1961). Into this toney neighborhood came Alan Bennett, just across the street from the Millers, and (latterly) The Lady in the Van, a vagrant named Miss Shepherd, whose bag-lady life became subject matter for the film (2015),
starring Maggie Smith. Miss Shepherd was tolerated by her neighbors while she lived in Bennet’s driveway, in her van, for after all (besides being trendy) Gloucester Crescent was filled to overflow by people who’d learned to tolerate each other. When the decision was made to make Bennett’s original essay into a film, it was shot at its place of origin, #23 Gloucester Crescent. “We never considered any other location.” ©

[Stanley]

Mendel and Particulate Inheritance
Father Gregor Mendel, 1822-1888.
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Where ‘A’ represents a dominant trait and ‘a’ a recessive one, the genetic inheritance will work out thus: (A +a)^2 = A^2 + 2Aa + a^2. A mathematical representation of Father Gregor Mendel’s theory of particulate inheritance. 1866.

Dependent on their views about evolution itself, most people either credit or blame Charles Darwin for the whole edifice, but in fact it has been the creation of many minds over many decades. One of Darwin’s great failures was to find a mechanism by which inherited traits were transferred from one generation to another. In his attempts he never got much beyond the notion (already accepted by generations of racehorse breeders and pigeon fanciers) that each individual (plant or animal) inherited some kind of mix or blend of its parents’ characteristics. Unbeknownst to Darwin, an Augustinian friar, Gregor Mendel, was working on this very problem, and would solve it, using sweet peas, at the very time Darwin published On the Origin of Species(1859). From 1856 to 1863, Fr. Mendel experimented with the inherited characteristics of sweet peas (color of flower, shape of seeds, etc.), carefully breeding individual plants and then literally counting up the inherited characteristics of their
progeny. In the process he found that inheritance was not a blend but rather a particulate mixing of ‘dominant’ and ‘recessive’ parental characteristics, and that the results were calculable in mathematical terms. To me, it’s always seemed natural, pardon the pun, that Gregor Mendel should have been interested in the problem. He himself was born (on July 22, 1822) into a contested borderland—ethnic and linguistic—between Czech and German cultures, and his own family expressed both dominating and recessive traits by electing to become German-speaking but to remain Czech in family identity. In the end, the Czech in him won out; when Gregor (a German given name) died, he was an Augustinian abbot involved in a church—state quarrel with a German monarchy (the Hapsburgs), and the music at Mendel’s funeral (in Brno, Bohemia) was played by the decidedly Czech Leoš Janáček. The incoming abbot burned all of Mendel’s papers, including the primary evidence for his genetic work, but a rec
essive trait survived in the form of an article published in 1866 in an obscure scientific journal. Its rediscovery, in 1900, made possible the evolution of a new science, “genetics,” and the resurrection (as a new synthesis) of Darwin’s central idea on the ‘natural selection’ of varied inherited traits as ‘dominant’ in the field of evolutionary theory. ©

[Stanley]

Raymond Chandler, 1888-1959
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“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (https://eepurl.us6.list-manage.com/trac ... 43062c71a5) , 1939.

‘Plattsmouth is where it says it is.’ That’s a line, hardboiled, true, understated, that might have been written by Raymond Chandler, who spent what might have been his most formative years there, in Nebraska just south of Omaha. But Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, on July 23, 1888, then moved west to Plattsmouth with his drunken father and stylish Irish mother. Abandoned by the drunken parent in 1900, Raymond moved with the stylish one to London where, with the help of a rich uncle (an Irish lawyer) he was educated at Dulwich College, London SE, a top-(or maybe second-) tier public school. There, in classics classes, Chandler learned something of the excesses of imperial Rome, which he would transfer to Los Angeles, a city whose excesses (along with those of Santa Monica) we see through the gimlet eyes of Chandler’s greatest invention, the private dick Philip Marlowe. But that transfer, or translation, would take three decades, two with his mother and then with his divorcée wife Cissy, a spell of selling what he could sell (including ice cream and tennis rackets), a tour of World War I, two near-death experiences with the Spanish Flu, and then miraculously landing upright as an oil company executive, all the while drinking heavily, just as his father had done. When Chandler was fired, he’d already been experimenting with pulp (crime pulp) fiction, but with The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940) he moved pulp further along the path first laid out by Dashiell Hammett, opened it to a wider (and possibly wiser) readership, and got critics and scholars arguing about whether crime fiction could be classic literature. As a writer of screenplays for Hollywood, Chandler did the same for movies, and refined the noir genre into an art form, not only in films made from his own novels (the greatest with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe) but Marlowe-less classics like Double Indemnity and The Blue Dahlia. Chandler ran into a ‘block’ on that last one and told the director he could not finish the script without lots of whiskey. And it was whiskey that finally did in Raymond Chandler, in 1959. There followed a long battle over where to put his ashes, a noir comedy that ended only in 2011 when his ashes joined Cissy’s at a cemetery (‘Mount Hope’) whose name Philip Marlowe would have buried in hard-boiled irony. ©.

[Stanley]

Set a thief to catch a thief.
Eugene-Francois Vidocq. 1775 -1857.
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“There’s no fool so dangerous as a fool with brains.” Eugène-François Vidocq.

As the tangled histories of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suggest, the line between law enforcement and lawbreaking was fuzzy and often fudged, but not only on the 19th-century American frontier. Recently, local journalists in Colorado and Alaska have uncovered cases wherein hard-pressed municipalities have (carelessly or purposefully) hired former crooks as current cops. But it’s more than an American issue. One of France’s most famed policemen, indeed the inspiration of some pioneering detective fiction by the likes of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, was also the founder of the Sûreté. He was Eugène-François Vidocq, born a baker’s son in Arras on July 24, 1775. No doubt he could have become a baker himself, but that way was barred by having two older brothers and not a few criminal tendencies of his own. The Vidocq story is complicated, partly because a good deal of it comes from his own rather imaginative autobiography, but it seems that his first thefts were from his
father, one (at 13) which led to a short time in prison and the next (at 14) which enabled him to get to the port city of Ostend. He intended to embark for America, but he fell instead into poverty, petty crime, and pettier entertainment (in a traveling company of actors, his role was that of a cannibal who ate raw meat on stage); but then he joined the French revolutionary army where he became an adept swordsman. Duellist, and deserter and, finally, an habitant of a military prison, where he escaped execution by escaping prison. And he was only 18 years old. This life continued, unabated one might say, until he made a bargain with the Paris police: they would not charge him with forgery if he would serve them as a spy. The arrangement was formalized in 1811 when Vidocq created the Brigade de la Sûreté, which the Emperor Napoleon I in 1813 made into the Sûreté Nationale. Given its founder’s background, it should not surprise us that a majority of its first agents were themselves ex-cons, often recruited by Vidocq straight out of prison. Vidocq and the Sûreté survived the 1814-1815 transition from the Bonapartes to the Bourbons, and (helped along by a free and retrospective pardon from King Louis XVIII) made a prosperous life for himself at the head of the Sûreté, then as the ‘CEO’ of a private detective agency, and always at that fuzzy boundary between law and lawlessness. Vidocq died in 1857, at 81. Today he is regarded as an early and gifted pioneer of modern police work. That may be part of our problem. ©

[Stanley]

Lizzie Siddal, more than Rossetti's muse.
Elizabeth Siddal, 1839-1862
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All changes pass me like a dream. I neither sing nor pray. And thou art like the poisonous tree, That stole my life away. Elizabeth Siddell.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement self-started in 1848, in London, and lasted (as a self-conscious and formal grouping) for only six or seven years, but its influence lingers on, strongly in art and design, fleetingly in literature. It can be found in the oddest of places, including for instance the fantasy world created by J. R. R. Tolkien. In some ways a more characteristic lingering can be found in Liza Doolittle, the fair lady who began adult life as a crude flower girl and became something quite other through the ministrations of Professor Higgins or, if you prefer, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1913) and then as the ‘My Fair Lady’ of Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe (1956 et seq). The most famous of the real fair ladies of the original Pre-Raphaelites was probably Lizzie Siddal, born Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall on July 25, 1829, to aspiring but downwards-bound parents in London. Despite the family’s straitening circumstances, Lizzie was reasonably well-educated, perhaps at home, and gained inspiration enough from reading to become aspirational herself. This worked out into an apprenticeship in the millinery trade, design work, some poetry, and drawings which gained her entry into the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood as an artist’s model where, rather like Liza Doolittle, she was remade, in her case into an ethereal beauty, wistful eyes, tumbling auburn locks, body line frail but sensual. If you’ve been to about any art museum, from Des Moines to Denver and far beyond, you’ve probably seen her likeness, usually as interpreted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted her often and drew her oftener. From very early on, Lizzie thought of herself as a model but much more than that, and second-wave feminism has found in her own paintings, sketches, and poems much to talk about. Recent exhibitions in England have made her more than a model, and she was that, both before and after she married Rossetti, in May 1860. But she was a model, too, and in her Rossetti and
others of the brotherhood found their odd ideal of femininity. As her health failed through failed pregnancies, travel to drier, sunnier climes did not cure her. She died, drugged and depressed, in 1862, leaving behind some of her own paintings and poems, and more of Rossetti’s. ©

[Stanley]

A Victorian model of the self-made man.
Sir Moses Manfield, 1819-1899
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“Let the cobbler stick to his last.” Henry David Thoreau and others.

“Let the cobbler stick to his last” is a proverb that I first picked up from reading Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who likely picked it up from Erasmus (1466-1536), who may, in turn, have borrowed it from Pliny the Elder (AD24-AD 79) whose version (‘let not the cobbler make judgments beyond his own shoes’) makes clear the proverb’s conservative, anti-democratic origins. I immediately liked it because my ancestor Thomas Bliss (1582-1647) was a Northampton, England, cobbler who did not “stick to his last” but joined the great Puritan migration in 1637 and eventually took part in the original town covenant of Rehoboth, Plymouth colony, signing the Rehoboth covenant and its radical distribution of small private plots around a large “ring” common. As for Northampton, it remains a shoemaking town, , and in a kind of accidental symmetry I discovered a Northampton cobbler who stayed put to become one of the town’s leading shoemakers. He was Moses Philip Manfield, later Sir Moses, born a poor shoemaker’s son in Bristol, England, on July 26, 1819, then apprenticed in Northampton and there prospered to become a Victorian model of the self-made man—perhaps by not “sticking to his last.” Instead, he became a master at a large warehouse where cobbler underlings worked by license, transferring the shoes to Manfield for distribution and sale. When that proved unable to compete with cheap imports, Manfield built a factory where employees constructed shoes piece-by-piece to put out 350,000 pairs each year. Manfield was radical in other ways, too, a progressive employer who encouraged labor unions (on the production side) and invested in a chain of Manfield shoe shops (on the retail side). He also served as MP, a radical Liberal who supported Home Rule for Ireland and, for Northampton itself, a kind of social compact between management, labor, and the city council. This reformist political stance owed something to his radically Unitarian views in religion, and to the fact
that Manfield’s Unitarian brethren had helped him weather his first bankruptcy. Northampton today remains a shoemaking center, innovative in design and marketing (the ‘original’ Doc Marten’s boot, dating from April 1960, is a Northampton product). And you can still buy Manfield shoes at St. Louis’s posher shoe stores and, for all I know, in Rehoboth. ©

[Stanley]

Who's a Liberal, then?
Norman Lear and Archie Bunker
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“I don’t wake up every morning to be old.” Norman Lear, ca. 2016.

Given the recent rise of the Trump right and the apparent popularity of idiot politics (e.g. in the Florida of Ron DeSantis), we should perhaps revisit the sudden popularity (throughout the 1970s) of All In the Family, the sitcom that made the bigot Archie Bunker the butt of many a joke. Maybe the joke is on us. One way to review that situation is to reconsider the life and times of Norman Lear, the ‘inventor’ (and principal writer) of All In the Family and of a string of other popular, long-running shows including Sanford and Son (1972-77) and The Jeffersons (1975-85). That opportunity is still with us, for Norman Lear is still alive and (as far as I know) well, inching towards eternity at 99 years of age. Norman Lear was born in New Haven, CT, on July 17, 1922, and in no way an offshoot of Yale; he was instead the son of a traveling salesman of occasionally dubious morality and consistently conventional views on the issues of the day. Lear rebelled against this, but in reaction
to a real fascist, Father Coughlin of radio infamy. He flew 52 missions on a B-17 and might, I suppose, have written Catch 22. Instead he went into PR in order to get rich, and did pretty well. In the process, though, he was drawn into comedy writing (Rowan and Martin, and Martin and Lewis), and did pretty well at that, too. He also directed some reasonably successful films before striking a vein with his now-famous sitcoms, steadily amassing a fortune beyond the dreams of most PR men. He amassed friends, too, from all corners of politics (including the Reagans), but with the rise of the Christian Right Lear jumped ship to become a card-carrying liberal. And there he stays, today, just the sort of liberal that the “new right” loves to hate: rich, successful, and funny. He has continued to dabble in film and TV production, while (on the side?) backing liberal causes of various sorts and engaging in some public patriotism. He and his wife Lyn bought (for millions) an early ‘broadside’ copy of the Declaration of Independence and toured the country with it, using it to espouse liberalism as truly, deeply, and madly American. One wishes him all the best, of course, on his 99th, but nagging doubts persist that he was, in a deeper sense, Archie Bunker all the time. Or perhaps it was us-as-Archie he was thinking of, holding up (Bill Clinton said, in 1999) a mirror to American society. ©

[Tripps]

.

nagging doubts persist that he was, in a deeper sense, Archie Bunker all the time

I'm not clever enough to analyse that but I have my thoughts. Anyone who did 52 missions in a B-17 gets a free pass from me for most things.

Said to be inspired by the British sitcom 'Till death do us part' featuring Alf Garnett - far from 'woke' so not likely to make a come back any time soon.

I remember Rowan and Martin's Laugh In from way back when. It (almost) emptied the bar in the Sgts' Mess on a Sunday evening. Still funnier than most modern 'comedy' I'd say.

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls

[Stanley]

"Anyone who did 52 missions in a B-17 gets a free pass from me for most things."
I'm with you there David...

[Stanley]

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, 1804-1862.
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If man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841.

In the early 1970s, friends and colleagues in the departments of philosophy, sociology, and religious studies interested me in the equally interdisciplinary Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach. He was born in Bavaria on July 28, 1804, into a family full to overflowing with intellectual eminencies—jurists, linguists, philosophers, and at least one mathematician—so it’s not surprising that young Ludwig elected to follow a similar path, first in theology at the University of Heidelberg, aiming at a career in the church. Soon, however, he changed disciplines (and universities) to study philosophy under Hegel in Berlin. The reason usually given for this is Feuerbach’s disillusionment with religion, but it’s possible that another factor was the discovery that he was an ineffective, even embarrassing, public speaker. This latter handicap would, eventually, bar him from advancement in the 19^th-century German academy, where the public lecture was a necessity for anyone aspiring to real status. For most of Feuerbach’s life this would make him dependent on his wife’s inheritance. Meanwhile, it caused an estrangement from his father, who disapproved of Hegel’s politics (e.g. his support of the French Revolution) and its towards skepticism or downright heresy in religious matters. And it was in just these areas that Feuerbach would make his main mark, especially in his Das Wesen des Christentums (1841). Translated into English (The Essence of Christianity) by Mary Ann Evans (now better known as the novelist George Eliot), this anthropological-psychological-evolutionary-historical view of religion (and of humans’ conceptions of God) would influence Charles Darwin and (in Germany) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This influence rested not only in the book’s inherent skepticism but in its dialectical view of religion as an historical artifact of human development, a stage that would eventually give way to “reason” (or rationalism) as a new (and ultimate) synthesis. So it was that Feuerbach himself—or his ideas—would come to be seen as a bridge factor between Hegel and Marx. But that lay more in Feuerbach’s use of the Hegelian dialectic than in his atheism per se. There remained enough “religion” in Feuerbach’s arguments to make him plausible, also, as a precursor of 20th-century Christian existentialism. ©

[Tripps]

But that lay more in Feuerbach’s use of the Hegelian dialectic than in his atheism per se. There remained enough “religion” in Feuerbach’s arguments to make him plausible, also, as a precursor of 20th-century Christian existentialism. ©

But mainly in the South I think ? To use another sentence beginning with a preposition.

[Stanley]

If it's any consolation David it was a bit deep for me as well.

[Stanley]

"I have been lonely, and still am." Elsie Blackall, 1964.
Elsie Blackall, 1888-1984.
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I have always had to make my own way, I have been lonely, and I still am. But for all my feeling of deprivation, I do not despair. This life of mine has been a bungled affair. Only in time of war have I found any real sense of purpose and happiness. Baroness Elizabeth Blackall de T'Serclaes, autobiography, 1964.

“Lions led by Donkeys” was a popular saying about the relationship between front-line soldiers and general officers in Britain’s WWI army. According to one battlefield nurse, a heroine in her own right, the same gulf existed in the ambulance services that rescued the wounded from frontline trenches. Elizabeth Blackall was herself a most unusual woman (born on July 19, 1884), the fifth child born to a prosperous doctor’s family. Privately educated (at home, then in a Swiss finishing school, then in an English cookery school, she was intended for the Edwardian marriage market, and indeed was married to an accountant in 1906 and went with him to serve the Empire (in Singapore). But something happened. Leaving Singapore, she left behind her husband and carried with her an infant son., who was born in England. She then trained in nursing and midwifery, served in Hampshire as her brother’s housekeeper, and on entering into her own legacy in 1913 she bought a (now classic) motorcycle, named it “Gypsy”, and became a leading light in her local motorcycling club. Had she continued thus, she might have made the motorcycling fraternity into a sorority, but the Great War intervened and “Elsie” (as she was by then known) went to Belgium as a volunteer nurse with her then good friend, Mairi Chisholm. While performing gallantly at the front, she won the heart of a Belgian aristocrat and married him in 1916, but the real part of Elsie Blackall’s story is her pioneering work in battlefield first aid—sometimes on her cycle but more often in an ambulance specially donated by the citizens of Sutton Coldfield, a posh suburb of Birmingham. In particular, she advocated a triage system, on-site first aid to the wounded and then transfer in some medical order to field hospital. Her record was exemplary in terms of clinical success but she soon found herself a lioness fighting against the neutered mules of the ambulance service as passionately as against the Germans. After the peace, and as the widow of the Baron de T’Serclaes (he died in 1919), she kept her counsel, but it came out with a bang in her autobiography (Flanders and Other Fields, 1964) and then in her wartime diaries and letters, which she donated to the Imperial War Museum a few years before she died, at a nursing home, in 1978. ©.

[Stanley]

"I have no resentments"
** Marie Tharp. 1920-2006
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I worked in the background for most of my career as a scientist, but I have absolutely no resentments. . . .. Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles—that was something important. You could only do that once. You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet. Marie Tharp, “Connecting the Dots, . .”, 1999

As a child, I shared in children’s nigh universal interest in dinosaurs, entranced by their size, as in the Brontosauri, or their fierceness, as in Tyrannosaurus rex. I do remember wondering how it was that these huge reptilians, so many of them, could have lived in such super-cooled places as Alaska, Siberia, and the southern tip of South America, but by now such puzzlements have been swept away by several new theories or findings, including climate change and the existence of warm-blooded dinosaurs. But the real earthquake, the one that swept away all doubts, was the idea that, once upon a time, all those polar places had been (for millions of years) somewhere else, somewhere warmer. This revolutionary theory, that of ‘continental drift,’ was of long and painful birth, first proposed in 1912, finally accepted in the late 1970s, and now a scientific orthodoxy, was midwifed by—among others—Marie Tharp, born in Michigan on July 30, 1920. Tharp was something of an earthquake in herself simply because she was a she, a woman who upset the apple cart not only by what she discovered but because of her gender. Among the leading oxymorons of her birthing-time was “woman earth scientist,” but she made it make sense. And she lived long enough (86 years) to see her scientific revolution vindicated and her leading role in it acknowledged. In her brief memoir (modestly entitled “Connect the Dots: Mapping the Sea Floor and Discovering the Mid-Ocean Ridge”, 1999), she bore no grudges but saw herself as a person who kept pushing in, at the edges so to speak, seizing opportunities as they arose, and in the process moving from school teaching (in English and Music) to become a leading biographer of our planet. But she did remember that, when in the 1940s and 1950s she began to work the data she had collected, to “connect the dots,” her ideas were dismissed as “girl talk.” Today, 101 years after Marie Tharp’s birth, we hear that chatter loud and clear, in many scientific fields, and have reason to hope that it is here to stay. ©.

[Stanley]

Monsters exist, but too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
Primo Levi, 1919-1987
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Calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is a source of profound satisfaction. ― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

As a writer and scientist, Primo Levi has few equals. Born on July 31, 1919, into a close-knit family of liberal beliefs, he learned from his father and mother a love of reading which sustained him to the end of his life in 1987. A bright child, he was educated in the finest schools in and near his native Turin, and he survived the bullying that went with being Jewish and being very small by making a few close friends (with whom he enjoyed hiking and skiing), and excelling in is studies. Like everyone else, Primo joined the Italian young fascist organization, but as the partnership between Mussolini and Hitler matured, he found the going increasingly dangerous. By the time he qualified as a chemist, Italian firms could not hire Jews, so he worked under an assumed name in a firm extracting nickel for the German war effort. These ironies were not lost on Levi, and after surviving the rigors of war and Auschwitz, he turned to literature to work them out. He continued to work as a chemist, and his best writing, reflective and autobiographical, combines his joy in scientific endeavor with his difficulties in understanding what happened to him, and western civilization, in the Holocaust. His 'The Periodic Table' (1975) explicitly linked his life story (and a few symbolic life fictions) to the elements (21 of them). In October 2006 the Royal Institution (London) named it the best science book ever written. Primo Levi, having survived Mussolini, Hitler, and—most harrowing of all—Auschwitz, died aged 67 in Turin, the city of his birth. Whether he died by suicide or by accident remains a matter of dispute. The dispute doesn’t matter; he had earned the right to die. ©

[Stanley]

President of Morehouse College and of the Atlanta Board of Education
Benjamin Elijah Mays.
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Tomorrow may not be better—but we must believe that it will be. Benjamin Elijah Mays.

During the so-called Phoenix Race Riot of November 1898, in and around Greenwood, South Carolina, a group of whites, mounted and armed, wheeled into the yard of one of Greenwood’s more prosperous black farmers, Hezekiah Mays, and demanded him to show himself. Mr. Mays walked out and was required, on pain of death, to fall to his knees, acknowledge the superiority of the ‘white race’ and promise not to vote. This he did several times. The scene was etched into the memory of Hezekiah’s youngest child, Benjamin Elijah Mays. Born on August 1, 1894, and active right up to his death in 1984, ‘Bennie’ (as his siblings called him) would get his own back, in several ways, but not least as the intellectual and spiritual tutor of Martin Luther King, Jr. In April 1968, Benjamin Mays would deliver the eulogy at King’s funeral, who paid the price for not falling to his knees. One guesses that such a thought ran through Mays’ mind, but was not expressed, for Mays was a staunch advocate of
non-violent resistance to racial tyranny. Mays’ status of senior advisor and counsel to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council is one reason he should be remembered today, but only one, for he was also eminent in the history of black education in the American South. With the rise of Jim Crow in the last decades of the 19^th century, finding a good education was hard work for a young black man, but Mays learned what he could in the South before going north, to Bates College in Maine, to acquire the first credential he needed, a BA degree. Bates was perfect, a small liberal arts college, affiliated with the Freewill Baptists, and with a history of involvement in racial justice issues, not least as a kind of educational terminus on the Underground Railway. Mays backed that BA up with a divinity doctorate from the University of Chicago, and (after some time at Howard, in DC), he returned to the deep South, armed with the weapon—a good education—he thought most important to his program of non-violent resistance to American racism. His most notable successes were to make Morehouse College a top-flight liberal arts college (it was there, as the college’s president from 1940 to 1967, he met and tutored King) and then to serve as the first black president of the Atlanta Board of Education. By frightening a little boy ‘most out of his wits, the Phoenix terrorists wrought more than they could have imagined. ©

[Stanley]

Isabel Ellie Knaggs, 1893-1980
Isabel Knaggs, crystallographer of carbon.
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Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers. Emilie du Châtelet (1706-1749), mathematician and philosopher.

In these ‘anniversary notes’ I’ve had a particular interest in female “firsts”, women who were the first to achieve a particular milestone in life (for instance, to become a medical doctor) or who were early pioneers in fields that did not, at first, welcome women. The underlying motive was to reflect the real diversities of the UMSL honors college, including the fact that the college’s student body was, during my 18-year tenure, mainly (60% plus) female. Since many of these honors college women majored in the sciences, I’ve included such female ‘pioneers in science’ as Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), Dorothy Hodgkin (1910-1994), and Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971). In choosing them, I focused on their simplest commonalities—they were all female and they all made or helped to make landmark discoveries in science. What I did not notice was another commonality, which was that many of these women were crystallographers. Was this a mere coincidence? Almost certainly not, according to a 2015 article in the journal Crystal Growth and Design by Bart Kahr. Kahr began with the notion (which proved a correct) that so many pioneer women scientists were crystallographers. He then set out to find whether there were any other important variables that might explain this as something more than a normal expression of random number sets. In the process he found other interesting commonalities, and he unearthed a pioneer female crystallographer I had never heard of, Isabel Ellie Knaggs, born in Durban, South Africa, on August 2, 1893, a woman who advanced our understanding of the molecular structures of carbon and its most important compounds. Along with most or (in some cases) all of her sister crystallographers, she was born into a well off (in her case, very well off) family and profited from her family’s belief in educating all children (including females) as far as their talents would take them. A surprising number (including Isabel Knaggs) went through Cambridge
University and then worked under the Braggs (father and/or son, both Nobelists) at the Cavendish Laboratories. Like the Braggs these women scientists tended to favor collaboration or team play, and most of them seemed to have an unusual aptitude for sorting out patterns in two- or three-dimensional designs. This last Kahr attributes in part to the widespread skill, among women of that era, to knit and in part to the fact that most of them, at kindergarten or pre-school age, attended schools that followed the educational precepts of Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852). I regard these latter arguments as problematic, but they were all true of Isabel Knaggs. And it was the case, too, that both Froebel schools and Pestalozzi academies cultivated the student’s ability to recognize and manipulate two- and three-dimensional patterns. Since I always have done badly on ‘pattern’ sections of intelligence tests, I was thus offered yet another explanation of why I never became a scientist or, for that matter, a crystallographer.