BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

The fruits of a liberal arts education

Be it known that I, Squire Whipple . . . have invented a new and useful Improvement in the Construction of a Bridge by me called an “Iron Truss Bridge” . . . Patent application #2,064, April 24, 1841.

In a long life, Squire Whipple took out only two patents. The other was for an ingenious scales that could weigh loads of up to 300 tons. Both the scales and the iron truss bridges were intimately connected with the further development of the Erie Canal, that great ditch that connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, knitted the together the northern states, and (it can be said) won the Civil War. Squire Whipple was born on September 16, 1804, in western Massachusetts. Perhaps his parents named him “Squire” out of social ambition. But western Massachusetts, already in decline, was no place for the socially ambitious, and the family moved west to take its chances in the Mohawk valley when Squire was 13. He tried various trades and then entered Union College in Schenectady, NY, in 1829. At 25, he would have been amongst the college’s most elderly froshers. But Union was an interesting place, born in 1795 amongst revolutionary enthusiasms, abjuring all and any denominational ties and choosing a motto in French (rather than Latin) that proclaimed the hope that wisdom (the “laws of Minerva”) might one day make all men brothers. After it became coed, Union added “sisters” (soeurs) to its motto, but even before that (1979) Union brought to campus a very old Whipple Iron Truss Bridge, which now spans a small stream (“Hans Groots Kill”) on campus That’s appropriate, for Squire Whipple graduated Union in the Class of 1830. So he spent only a year at Union, but since the Erie shot right through Schenectady to its union with the Hudson River (this is its most challenging section) it might have inspired Squire to apply his mathematical talents to a practical problem. Whipple’s attractive, strikingly modern, and undeniably sturdy bridges would litter New York’s canal-scape, and a few of his Kill crossings are still in public use, vehicular—and with no weight limits posted. Whipple never profited much from his invention, for imitators quickly moved in and he seems not to have had a great love for lawyers or lawsuits. But he wrote a couple of pioneering texts on bridge building and used the truss principle to create different designs for much grander crossings. For instance, remnants of his railway bridge across the Ohio still grace the waterfront at Cairo, Illinois. So Squire Whipple did become something of a squire, a prosperous professional at the top of his trade, well enough known to serve the Union cause—in a technical capacity, of course—during our great Civil War. The squire died, full of years and weighted with honors, in 1888. ©

[Stanley]

The Rube Goldberg of his age.

It may sometimes happen that the greatest efforts of ingenuity have been exerted in trifles; yet the same principles and expedients may be applied to more valuable purposes. Samuel Johnson, 1772, commenting on his visit to Cox’s Museum.

By definition (pardon the pun) the great Dr. Johnson knew whereof he spoke. Our more ‘modern’ culture evidences our veneration for gadgets. My favorite was a 1970s device, looking like a laundry mangle, which promised to grill flat bacon—for those who wanted their bacon flat. Earlier in the 20th century this tendency was lampooned by Heath Robinson, in England, and then Rube Goldberg, in the USA. For examples, consider Robinson’s “Wart Chair,” a pulley-driven device for removing warts from the top of one’s head. Then came Goldberg’s automatic soup napkin, an essential aid for the messy diner. Fittingly, or perhaps unfittingly, Heath Robinson later did the illustrations for Norman Hunter’s ten Professor Branestawm books, their comic themes called up instantly by the professor’s eccentric surname. Their cartoons of fiendishly clever, useless machinery became so popular that their names got into modern dictionaries. But Dr. Johnson’s comment came after he’d visited some real inventions, exhibited at realmuseum which, for a time, drew great crowds from the upper reaches of London society. For among the curiosities at Cox’s Museum were several inventions, ingenious and inutile, by one John Joseph Merlin, born on September 17, 1735. The surname calls to mind King Arthur’s legendary magician, but there was no such connection. Merlin’s father, Maximilian, was himself an inventor, and John Joseph took on the same trade with a vengeance. He became quite famous, or at least very remarked upon, first in Paris and then latterly in London, where Merlin’s odd accent and mildly fractured vocabulary added to his charm. Among his exhibits at Cox’s Museum was a carriage clock operated by barometric pressure, a device that would seem to have some inherent design flaws, but it was after Merlin struck out on his own that he really hit his Heath Robinson (or, if you prefer, Rube Goldberg) stride. Among my favorites were a couple of combo musical instruments, one a combination harpsichord-pianoforte, the other a piano-organ. He called this one a “claviorganum.” He may also have invented the in-line roller skate. That one came to grief when John Joseph Merlin lost control of his invention (he was playing a violin at the time) and hurtled himself bodily into a great mirror at the fashionable home of one of his patrons. The crash wounded Merlin in more ways than one. There was also, inter alia, a tea-dispensing machine that could fill a dozen cups at once. For your very busy hostess, you understand. Some Merlin devices still exist: in museums. ©.

[Stanley]

"Above all, we must be accurate."

You are invited to come to see the Earth turn, tomorrow, from three to five, at Meridian Hall of the Paris Observatory. Invitation issued by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, February 1851.

It is a puzzle that some of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time have become common sense assumptions that we absorb without thinking. For instance, I do not remember being ‘taught’ that the air I breathe, the atmosphere, has weight and substance. My family elders thought so, and they may have taken the trouble to tell me so. Possibly. In any case, I never thought it needed proof until I read about the elaborate experiments carried out—by a couple of Italians and an Anglo-Irish aristocrat—during the 17th century. Likewise, I “knew” that the earth was a rotating sphere, forever spinning between day and night. And why not? There were earth-globes everywhere, including the big one standing my great-grandfather’s old study-office. My only worry about it was getting my fingers stuck in its equatorial line when I spun the globe too quickly. But if I had to prove that planet Earth rotated on its axis, I would have been stuck. The very idea was in the 16th century a revolutionary theory, even a heresy. In the 17thcentury, further theorizing and some astronomical observations made the idea seem like a truth. But how would one prove, experimentally, that the earth spun in space? Of course today it's quite elementary, with satellites in fixed orbits, astronauts doing space walks. But the experimental puzzle was solved while we were still all earthbound, by Jean Bernard Léon Foucault. Foucault was born in Paris on September 18, 1819, a publisher’s son and thus in comfortable economic circumstances. He wanted to be a medical doctor, but a blood phobia turned him towards other scientific areas, notably physics. Early on he demonstrated a preference for experiment rather than theory and became best known for his work on light. What was it? How did it move, and how fast? By 1850 he’d come up, experimentally, with pretty good answers to these questions, but it was his proof of the earth’s rotation that made him famous. That came with his contribution to the 1851 Paris Exposition and which we know as Foucault’s Pendulum. To describe it is easy enough: it’s a large brass ball suspended over a marked circle. It swings, pendulum-like, and as it oscillates you can mark its path around the circle. I’ve seen a copy of it in the Panthéon, Paris, and there’s an ingenious copy of it in Columbus, Ohio, with an accompanying video. But to understand it as an experimental proof of the earth’s rotation, one needs a better grounding in trigonometry than I have. Thus lost in space, I will stick with videos of the earth taken from fixed-orbit satellites—and the common sense of modern culture. But Foucault’s Pendulum is of itself a thing of beauty and wonder. ©.

[Stanley]

Quakers and capitalism

No man ought to be compelled to live where a rose cannot grow. George Cadbury.

The spirit of George Cadbury still broods over Bournville. Cadbury first envisaged the village as a utopia, where workers in his chocolate factory, and their families, could live in soundly-built, practical houses, recreate in their back gardens, and improve their minds and bodies in good schools and on green playing fields. They would have good hourly wages (above prevailing West Midlands averages) and their aesthetic and moral senses could not but be improved by the pleasing architectures of Bournville’s houses and public places. But those public places would not include public houses, and even today Bournville is as dry as Mecca. In 2007 the Bournville Village Trust successfully stopped Tesco (a national supermarket chain) from selling any liquids adulterated with alcohol. No surprise, this, for George Cadbury was a teetotaling Quaker, born into a teetotaling Quaker family on September 19, 1839. But though alcohol was verboten in the Cadbury home, his father’s wealth arose from the habit-forming compounds in tea, coffee, and chocolate. Cadbury chocolates, indeed, were then sold mainly as health additives (e.g. a concoction marketed as “Icelandic Moss”!). There was stormy competition in all these trades, and Cadburys was sinking, but George turned all that around when he ‘borrowed’ (from a Dutch firm) a process that made chocolate more palatable. And more pliable, too, in the sense that it could be made tastier. Among George’s more successful modifications was milk chocolate. It’s still regarded by some as a pollution, but people gobbled it up. This enabled Cadburys to gobble up competitors and wax very rich. You can’t do that sort of thing on charity, and there was something in George Cadbury of the flinty, grasping capitalist. Indeed his marriage proposal to his first wife came by letter, formed so much like a proposal for a business merger that she didn’t know what had hit her. So his reputations as a selfless employer and utopian social reformer need to be taken with salt. But George and (especially) his second wife, Elizabeth, decided in 1902 to devote the rest of their lives (and the Cadbury fortune) to what can only be called good works. Already embarked on their model village project (close by the new Cadburys factory, of course), they extended their reach to other public and private charities. At only a mild stretch, we can even credit George with a founding role in the Midlands Labour Party, though that came through his hostility to the Boer War, not from any love for socialism. George died in 1922, leaving Elizabeth to accept (in 1934) the very unQuaker honor of Dame Commander of the British Empire. But by then she identified as a Christian Socialist. ©.

[Stanley]

'Who is "the public," now that it has changed color?

My grandmother was an indigenous woman who asked a plant’s permission to transplant it. . . . Everything she touched grew in coffee cans on our porch, before they were replanted into our lush garden. Judy Baca.

Grandma’s name was Francisca, and she was a wizard with plants. More than that she was a native healer, a curandera, who used things of the land, herbs and soils, to treat whatever ailed you, from the pains you’d earned from a hard day’s work in the fields to a lung infection to a mental malaise, all common problems for the Chicano people of the San Fernando Valley. By the time Judy Baca was born, September 20, 1946, her parents had moved into Watts, Los Angeles, lured there by better-waged war work. Today, Judy Baca celebrates (I hope) her 78th birthday as Professor Emerita of Public Art at UCLA. Hers has been a long life of translating and transplanting, during which she has developed the idea that the land itself has a story, one best told by the people who live on the land. Baca’s medium is the mural. Her most famous mural is ‘The Great Wall of Los Angeles.’ Its more formal title is The History of California, and it lines the Tujunga Wash at the southern end of the San Fernando. The ‘wash’ is a concrete scar on the land, bone dry during much of the year, and the mural lines one side of it for almost a mile. That’s too much for one muralist, and anyway Baca’s wider vision of art required her to make a project of it, a communally-told story. So she became artistic director, overseeing other muralists and their volunteers (neighbors, school students, and the like) as they got together to tell a story (a chapter at a time) and then to visualize that story. It begins with prehistory and the La Brea tar pits, but I don’t think she interviewed any saber-tooth tigers for it. The story’s core narrative hangs on the peoples of California, their arrivals, their struggles, their survivals. It sounds political, and it was; so the city threatened to withdraw funding. So Baca founded SPARC, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, raised enough money to go on with the work, and Los Angeles, recognizing that it had an irresistible force on its hands, agreed to continue its funding. The mural was completed in 1978. It’s now (as of 2017) on the National Register of Historic Places, and that’s engendered talk of extending the story (and the mural) through the 20th century and further along the Tujunga Wash. Should that talk blossom into new mural panels, Judy Baca is still around to give her advice and, perhaps, to wield a brush. She’s good at transplanting and translating, and anyway “Tujunga” (in the indigenous tongue) means “old woman’s place.” That old Aztecan language is now extinct, but one guesses that Judy Baca’s grandma once used a word or two of it. ©.

[Stanley]

Rosie the Riveter.

During that time—they call it "running wild" that first year—I was in Chicago and a call came from Chicago that the maid was sick on the Twentieth Century and that I should take the Twentieth Century to New York. That's where I met Governor and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt. Frances Albrier, interview transcript, circa 1977.

One of the good things about being a maid on a Pullman, Frances Albrier said, was that “you met the better sort of people.” Among them, one overnight and on the New York Central’s 20thCentury Limited, were the governor of New York and his wife. Later, in 1939-1940, Frances Albrier would return the favor, so to speak, by chairing the East Bay Area campaign committee for President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt won the state 57%-43%, and won the East Bay even more handily. One unearths these facts by reading the transcripts of Ms. Albrier’s interviews, in 1977 and 1978, conducted by the Black Women Oral History Project and now deposited at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Together with supporting documents supplied by Albrier, the archive runs to hundreds of pages and over seven feet of library shelving. Albrier’s story is a remarkable one, a saga. And it’s a story of Albrier’s personal progress. Just as she moved from a one-night stand as the Roosevelt’s Pullman maid (and it can’t have been much, for there was only one maid on each Pullman train) to chairing one of FDR’s more important campaign committees, so she moved through life, one challenge at a time. Frances Albrier was born Frances Mary Redgray in Mount Vernon, NY, on September 21, 1898. Her unusual surname may have come from her Afro-Irish grandmother’s red hair and gray eyes, or maybe from her Blackfoot grandfather’s birth name, but certainly not from her grandmother’s owner, Virginia planter named Bowen. Frances’s parents, born free, moved north, but when her mother died she moved back south to be raised by her Red-Gray grandparents, who farmed just outside of Tuskegee, Alabama. Educated first at the Tuskegee Institute, then Howard University, and finally at the University of California, Frances found it impossible to pursue her chosen career as a nurse, but then settled down to make it possible. Along the way, she married twice, raised three kids, toyed with different models of radicalism (communism and Garveyism) but always returned to the hard models of gradualism, one battle at a time. These smallish battles were fought in Oakland and Berkeley, sometimes San Francisco, and included neighborhood projects, integrating local trades unions, hiring teachers of color in the public schools, and even running for a city council post as the first person of color. That last was one of her few defeats. Her greatest victory may have been the integration (by race and by gender) of the Kaiser shipyards. Frances Albrier, née Redgray, died, aged 88, one of the Bay area’s most beloved troublemakers. ©.

[Stanley]

Iron woman, tennis great.

How well I remember, bedecked by my proud mother in my best clothes, running off to the Club on the Saturday afternoon to play in the final without a vestige of nerve, and winning—that was the first really important match of my life. Charlotte Cooper Sterry, writing in 1910.

That first championship came when Charlotte was still Miss Cooper, aged 14. She would win many more, including six Wimbledon singles titles, three won after her marriage (in 1900), and the last (1908) after she’d become a mother. Charlotte Cooper Sterry was born in Ealing, Middlesex, then just beyond the western fringes of London, on September 22, 1870. She may have been a bit of an outsider. Her mother was American, and her father a flour miller: but one of sufficient status to call himself a ‘gentleman.’ As if to prove it, he was the founder and leading member of the Ealing Tennis Club. There Charlotte learned to play tennis, and love it. Throughout her competitive career, she dressed the part as a lady: a white skirt, long enough to touch the grass, long-sleeved white blouse topped by a stiff collar and, usually, a neck tie. There’s a picture on the internet of her winning the Olympic championship (the first one ever) at Paris in 1900, which shows a woman playing in a knee length skirt. It’s probably mis-captioned. Long-skirted or not, Miss or Mrs., Charlotte played an aggressive game. She was one of the first women to serve overhand, and it was typical of her to then attack at the net. Hers was a formidable presence, and many of her victories were walkovers. Not always, though. Back in the day when matches that had been stopped for rain had, the next day, to be started over, one of her Wimbledon championships spread over 53 games (when rain stopped play she was down 6-4, 11-13; next day she won in straight sets, 7-5, 6-1.) After she married, there’s every reason to think that Mr. Sterry encouraged her--but she still had to buy her own rackets with her own money. So she never had more than two, one of them strung for rainy weather. He, meanwhile, became president of the All England Tennis Club, and the family’s connections with Wimbledon went on for generations. Charlotte herself made a great hit at the finals in 1960 when, aged 90, she flew down from Scotland to strike her serving pose at the net, on Centre Court. When Charlotte had won as a mother in 1908, she joined an already exclusive club. There would not be another member until 1980, when Evonne Goolagong Cawley (in a comeback year) won the ladies’ singles. Not only was Evonne a mother (of a four-year-old) but she was three months’ pregnant. Old stuff for her, for in 1976 she’d competed in several tournaments while in her second trimester. But then Evonne’s career only lasted for 15 years. Charlotte Cooper Sterry competed for 30. It’s pointless to say who might have been the stronger person. ©

[Stanley]

A woman of substance.

I endeavor to make the most of everything. Victoria Woodhull.

Victoria Woodhull’s life began in Homer, Licking County, Ohio, on September 23, 1838, and it began badly. She was the 7th of 10 children born to ‘Buck’ and ‘Roxy’ Claflin, a poor couple who operated on the fringes of Homer’s economy until an ‘insurance fire’ destroyed what was left of their reputation. The family was run out of town. Victoria herself, aged only 15, married an alcoholic doctor (Canning Woodhull) twice her age, while her sister Tennie (Tennessee) may have become a prostitute. Another marriage later, in 1869, we next find Victoria (and Tennie) setting up as the first women brokers in Wall Street, under the patronage of Cornelius Vanderbilt. They made enough money to become notorious, and Victoria’s notoriety was all the greater because of her unconventional views on women, men, and marriage. A pioneer advocate of women’s suffrage, and an adventurous newspaperwoman, she publicized a sexual scandal involving Brooklyn’s most famous evangelical, the Rev’d Henry Ward Beecher, and his parishioner Elizabeth Tilton. All this came out in her very own newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. The Beecher-Tilton stuff got her in trouble with the law. She won her case, which in turn led to the passage of the notorious Comstock Laws (1873). It wasn’t only the sordid sex. The Weekly also put forward radical views on women’s rights, private property, unions, and Christian socialism. Victoria’s second husband, a Colonel Blood, was co-owner and also on trial, but by 1876 Victoria Woodhull had divorced Blood and moved to England where she (and her daughter Zula, and her sister Tennie) continued to write, and speak, on women’s rights, currency reform, spiritualism and socialism. One of her most devoted patrons was a banker of radical tendencies, John Martin. The couple married in 1883. In England, she used her money, John Martin’s, and perhaps a subvention from one of the Vanderbilt heirs to set up a radical publication, The Humanitarian, which published from 1892 to 1901. After John Martin’s death, Victoria retired to a stately home in a small Worcester village, Bredons Norton, where as grand dame she built a new school for the village’s children: with, again, the assistance of her daughter, Zula Woodhull, and her sister, Tennie Claflin. With all that, who would need any more? But I feel I must add that in 1872 Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for the American presidency. There was nothing in the US Constitution to forbid it on grounds of Victoria’s gender, and by her reading the 15th amendment guaranteed the suffrage to all “citizens.” Of course she lost, but it was an interesting and hopeful precedent—and a minor chapter in the life of a very interesting woman. ©.

[Stanley]

Such a relief to be back on track......

[Stanley]

"Let me make the songs for the people."

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

That would be good advice any time, not least campaign year 2024, but it was delivered at the eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention, May 1, 1866. It opened the third paragraph of a short (about 10 minutes) speech. The speaker, Frances Watkins, found herself in distinguished company. Among the platform speakers, that year, were Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, and Lucretia Mott, all of them established veterans of the women’s rights movement. At 41, Frances Harper was the youngest of them, and almost certainly the poorest. A widow with four dependent children, she must have felt an outsider. But she did well. Her speech can be studied at Iowa State University’s “Archives of Women’s Political Communication." She began with a pro forma apology (“I am something of a novice”). She made the personal political by recounting the indignities of her trip from Baltimore to New York. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.” She side-swiped President Andrew Johnson as the poorest example of poor whites, praised the courage of rebellious slaves and the black regiments of the Union Army, and challenged the whole country to make itself into “one great privileged nation, whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.” She roused her auditors to applause, but disdained to compliment them, closing with “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.” Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born black in Baltimore, but of freed parents, on September 24, 1825. Orphaned at 3, she was raised by her uncle, pastor at Baltimore’s African Methodist Episcopal church. Home schooled as a child, Frances continued her education as a seamstress-maid-nurse to a white family that owned a bookstore. She began to speak for herself, in published poetry, in 1845, bravely toured the South to learn about slavery first-hand, took part in the founding of Wilberforce College in Ohio, and became known as an abolitionist speaker, but one who always took care to berate northern racism. In 1860 she married a widower, bore him a daughter, step-mothered his other children, and then learned (to her cost) about the legal disabilities of widowhood. So, in 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was ready to speak her mind—and she had gained the skills needed to do so effectively. She went on, in that mode, until her death in 1911. The world needs to know more about her as poet, novelist, and (not least) as orator. ©.

[Stanley]

Soccer, Scholarship, and Nationalism.

I am persecuted because of my writings. I think, therefore, that I should write some more. Eric Williams, History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, 1964.

That tone—best described as one of ‘cheerful defiance’—pervaded the life of Eric Williams. It provides a continuous theme in a life otherwise marked by many chops and changes, culminating in his role as the man who guided a former British colony into a precarious independence as the Caribbean island nation of Trinidad & Tobago. In 1962 Williams became its first prime minister, serving in that office until he died in 1981, and was the founder of leader of its main political party, the People’s National Movement (PNM). Eric Williams was born into Trinidad’s creole elite, in Port of Spain, on September 25, 1911. “Creole” has a wealth of meanings. Williams seems to have been conscious of this from the start, proud of his mixed heritage (French, Haitian, African) and eager to excel in Euro-American culture as a sportsman (soccer, mainly) and scholar (history, mainly). In this he may have seen a model in one of his teachers at Trinidad’s Queen’s Royal College (QRC), C. L. R. James (1901-1989), who was already gaining fame as a demon cricketer and Marxist intellectual. They would not always be allies, or friends, but they came together in the 1960s as promoters of economic autonomy and inter-island federation for the former colonies of the Caribbean. Williams himself took his QRC accomplishments to Oxford where he earned First-Class Honours in history and a ‘Blue’ in soccer. Then, with much difficulty, he was accepted for doctoral study and earned the Oxford DPhil in 1938. His thesis was expanded, reworked, and published in 1944 as Capitalism and Slavery. It has gone through several editions since, and for generations has set the terms of debate over the origins of slavery, its course, its abolition, and its lasting effects in the Americas and in the world. That might be enough for one person’s life, but Williams kept on going. As scholar and polemicist, he found an ally in his old teacher, C. L. R. James, who had moved on from cricket to culture. For both, it was capitalism that lay at the center of West Indian (and world) history. Capitalism made slavery, then dispensed with it in favor of economic and political imperialism. It was surprising, therefore, that as a leader in West Indian nationalism, Williams slid towards the center and remade the People’s National Movement. Its commitment to political democracy wavered occasionally, but it proved capable of giving up power when defeated at the polls. In power most of the time, it found its ideological line in a mixed economy and an activist welfare state. Along with his teacher C. L. R. James and the literary Nobelist V. S. Naipaul, Eric Williams makes Trinidad into the most fascinating and fertile of the West Indian island nations. ©.

[Stanley]

Frontier capitalist.

In cities, some said the old man was crazy
While others said he was only lazy;
But he took no notice of gibes and jeers,
He knew he was working for future years . . .
And if they inquire whence came such trees
Where not a bough once swayed in the breeze
The answer still comes, as they travel on,
‘These trees were planted by Apple-Seed John.’

The elderly radical Lydia Maria Child wrote these lines in 1880, by which time Johnny Appleseed was an American folk hero. Apple trees sprouted wherever he walked, and he walked everywhere. They marked the westwards march of civility, the taming and training of nature. 70 years on, Johnny Appleseed came to me in children’s books, lanky and rail-thin, wearing a tin pot for a hat, raggedly-clothed, his smile crooked but beneficent. He was, to me, a mythic figure. One of the milder shocks I experienced in graduate school was to find that Johnny Appleseed was an actual person. This appleseeder was born John Chapman, in Leominster, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1774. His early life wasn’t easy. His mother soon died, his father remarried, but Leominster was farmed out. Soils were exhausted, farms ever smaller in acreage. Moving west was always in the cards. By 1800, his family (father, stepmother, siblings and half-siblings) were reestablished in frontier Ohio, and young Johnny was already a wizard with apple trees. He may indeed have given away trees (seedlings or, more likely, cuttings), sometimes. More often he planted orchards, was paid for his pains, then took cuttings elsewhere to start another orchard, or establish another nursery. Some Chapman-Appleseed nurseries show him retracing his steps, moving east to Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, even along George Washington’s Potomac. But he left more orchards more often in Ohio and Indiana. Along with his planting, he preached the gospels of hard work, plain living, and earned salvation, riding the evangelical wave for what he called the ‘New Church.’ Since he was spartan in his daily habits, he cut an odd figure, accumulated acreages, became a legend in his own time, and parlayed the legend into a series of successful businesses. The idea was a winning one. When in 1860 my ancestors, the Kerrs, settled a new farmstead in Illinois, just across from St. Louis, one of the first things they did was to order 15 apple trees, in four varieties, from the Mount Hope Nursery in Rochester, NY. The order (total = $5.25) was to be delivered by rail, via the Chicago & Alton stop at Bethalto. This was not a Johnny Appleseed operation. Mount Hope nursery was owned by Germans from Bavaria, and Hugh and Margaret Kerr were newly arrived from Ayrshire in Scotland. They paid in US dollars, Cash On Delivery. ©

[Stanley]

Theatrical journeyman.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts. Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7.

Will Shakespeare, a ‘groundling’ himself, felt some satisfaction when he penned these lines. But he wrote also for the upper gallery nobs, and sometimes performed for the great queen, Elizabeth. And through the 20th century English theatre was indeed a whole culture, a world made up of lavish London productions, of course, but also local repertories, traveling companies and peripatetic actors, jugglers, acrobats. This ‘theatre’ survived and also supported the music hall and, in due course, movies and television. Of course there were always great stars, but theatre culture depended also on jacks of all trades. One of the most notable was Bernard James Miles, born in Hillingdon on September 27, 1907. Today London’s westernmost borough, it was then bucolic enough to sustain his father’s market garden and his mother’s trade as a cook to the gentry. Bernard Miles learned much from them, including what turned out to be good lines in stage carpentry and country lore, but he wanted from the first to play many parts, starting with a scholarship to Oxford. This led naturally to teaching school, but he succumbed to the lure of the stage, playing his first paid role in Richard III, but only as the ‘Second Messenger’. He played many minor roles, on stage and in film. His impressive filmography includes mainly “uncredited” roles, but occasionally he was named and noticed. So was his wife, Josephine. They married in 1931, at the start of both their careers, produced three kids, played these and those parts in productions here and there, and did well enough to buy a house in St. John’s Wood. There was a barn, too, and they developed the harebrained notion to make it into a theatre, with the resonant name “Mermaid.” It ran for a short while, but Bernard and Josephine were popular enough to gain support for a bigger project, a new Mermaid, built on derelict ground in the City of London. It was also financed through Bernard’s gigs advertising for the Egg Marketing Board. From 1959, the new Mermaid staged some great successes, with Bernard as artistic director, sometime stagehand, and occasionally actor. And his work got him a peerage, too; in 1979, he became Baron Miles of Blackfriars. But the Baron and his Lady sank too much of their money into the venture. To pay off their debts, they had to sell the St. John’s Wood property. Josephine died poor in 1990, and despite a fundraiser for him (at the Mermaid, of course, and featuring some of the brightest and best of the English theatre culture, he followed her in mid 1991. All the world being but a stage, the Mermaid had to follow along. It’s now a Conference Centre, just getting along. ©.

[Stanley]

Doctor of fortune


If in trouble, send telegram. Use Latin. It takes fewer words. Travel instructions to John Wedgwood and his siblings Josiah and Jennifer. From their parents, 1930s.

The Wedgwood children were born to privilege, and they knew it. Besides their very distinguished surname, there was the Wedgwood family tree, littered with many Wedgwoods of course, but also Keyneses, Huxleys, Trevelyans, and Darwins. John Wedgwood, the eldest sprig on his own, particular branch, was born on September 28, 1919, close by Hampstead Heath. Soon the family moved to Hampstead Garden Suburb, just north, a utopian community founded by special Act of Parliament in 1906, and intended to be a pleasant domestic refuge for all sorts, socially. But the very terms of its governing trust ensured that its properties became very expensive. There John grew up, with holidays at the Wedgwood estate near Stafford. That’s in clay country, the Wedgwoods being potters, but John Wedgwood lived out his own life in his own way. After those adventures with his siblings, John went to Abbotsholme, an expensive (progressive) private school, then Cambridge, then naval service in the Pacific (where his ship was sunk). Wedgwood had wanted to be a surgeon but his wounds pained him too much to stand at an operating table, so he became a general practitioner for the National Health Service, then (in 1968, at the Middlesex Hospital) a leading specialist in the illnesses and distresses of old age. Private medicine had left the bulk of Britain’s elderly to fend for themselves, so the NHS had some catching up to do, and who better to ginger the NHS along than a Wedgwood? Of course he served as a non-executive director of the Wedgwood pottery, but he spent most of his time, energy, and a lot of his money in improving geriatric science (as a clinician) and geriatric care (as a hospital administrator). His last full appointment was as director of the Hospital for Incurables in Putney, London, a private foundation. “Incurables” wasn’t a promising title, but he made the best of it, raising money from the bureaucrats and from private sources. In 1995 it changed its name to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disablity, known not only for its hopeful treatment of the aged ill, but for its rehabilitation of younger victims of spinal and brain injuries. When John died, in 2007, he was buried in Highgate Cemetery. In Highgate, you’ll find graves of all sorts, from Karl Marx to Jacob Bronowski, George Eliot to Allan Sillitoe, Edwin Landseer to Lucien Freud. Highgate Cemetery is London’s Père Lachaise. And it’s not too far from that utopian garden suburb that nurtured the medical ambitions of John Wedgwood. While other Wedgwood kin served reform causes in parliament (one as a Labour MP who became a peer, another as a peer who became a Labour MP), “Dr. John” remade British geriatric medicine. ©.

[Stanley]

On the question of usefulness.

The artificial NOBLE shrinks into a dwarf before the NOBLE in Nature; and in the few instances of those [aristocrats] in whom Nature, as by a miracle, has survived . . . THOSE MEN DESPISE IT. Thomas Paine, in The Rights of Man (1791)

Thus Tom Paine condemned aristocracy. About 70 years later, the young Edward Stanley seems to have agreed. Surveying Britain’s 380 hereditary peers, Stanley could find only 81 who had done anything useful. One of the 81 was Stanley’s father, the 14th earl of Derby, who besides owning much of Lancashire was Queen Victoria’s prime minister. Edward Stanley was something of a rebel, but one must say that he had a low standard for ‘usefulness.’ As useful as the earl his papa might have been, Stanley included in his 81 ‘useful’ peers Archibald William Montgomerie, born on September 29, 1812. After a couple of opportune deaths, notably that of his elder brother, Archibald inherited the earldom of Eglinton, the Montgomerie family’s vast estate in southwestern Scotland, and its Eglinton Castle. Archibald was then only seven, and would have to undergo years of seasoning before he could assume his full rights as 13th earl of Eglinton. After a period of private tutelage at the family castle, he was sent to Eton College where he learned how to play golf, race horses, drink excessively, and debauch spectacularly. When he reached his own majority, he took his rightful seat in the House of Lords and the mastery of his estates. Most of his money came from rents (of 20,000+ acres), but some came from coal. And there was a lot of money. He succeeded aristocratically to some hereditary posts in Ayshire: colonel of the militia and Lord Lieutenant of the shire. Horse racing proved more to his liking, and (along with the 12th earl of Derby!!) he became one of the great horsemen of his day, not as jockey (of course) but as a good judge of horseflesh. But Eglinton’s biggest splash came with his medieval “tournament” at Eglinton Castle in 1839. Offended by demeaning economies taken in the coronation ceremonies for the young Victoria, Archibald the earl took it upon himself to improve upon tradition (and to invent a few new ones) in a great joust. It cost him well over £5 million in today’s pounds. But he would spend even more than that when he joined Lord Derby’s government in 1851. A noble fellow hale and very well met, he was appointed to a minor ministry, then as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Useful to the end, Archibald continued to press for legislation to secure the future of Britain’s landed elite and to maintain the disabilities imposed on Catholics and Jews. Archie would not have liked to be useful to Benjamin Disraeli, the future Conservative leader, but he was spared that by dying of his excesses in 1861. Disraeli, a master of the left-handed compliment, eulogized Archie as “straightforward” and “honest;” his usefulness remains an open question. ©

[Stanley]

Swans for a Swann?

Mrs. P. had only one fault: she was perfect. Otherwise, she was perfect. Truman Capote, writing about Barbara (‘Babe’) Paley.

In 1947, Babe Paley (1915-1978) became the second wife of William Paley, then a young executive at CBS. While he ascended the corporate ladder, she headlined as a debutante-become-socialite: beautiful, elegant, sheathe-dressed, and obsessed by gossip. So she became one of Truman Capote’s “Swans.” Capote adored the Swans’ company. “All literature is gossip,” he once said, and his tales about the Swans were intended to form parts of his semi-autobiographical novel, “Answered Prayers.” Capote called it the American answer to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. While he tantalized publishers with it (and wangled big advances), he also joked that it would be a posthumous publication. In the end, Capote never finished, but starting in 1965 he published several fragments, each ‘telling’ enough to finish Capote off as a figure in the social scene. But he was then on a downwards course, often too drunk or drugged to make anything but spectacle. In the end, he was taken away (by a poolside ‘seizure’) at the LA home of one of the few ‘Swans’ who would still have him, Johnny Carson’s divorced wife Joanne. She was the least well known of Capote’s Swans (who had included not only ‘Babe’ Paley but Lee Radziwill, Gloria Vanderbilt, ‘Happy’ Rockefeller, and Pamela Harrington). It was a tragedy partly because several of these women were accomplished persons in their own right and deserved more than tattle tales. But Truman Capote’s tragedy is my focus today, for he was a gifted, original, writer. Truman Capote was born Truman Streckfus Parsons in New Orleans, on September 30, 1924, 100 years ago today. A precocious child, sensitive and beautiful, he kept a commonplace book. His virtues were noted by a childhood friend, Harper Lee, who would make him a character (‘Dill’) in Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). And why not? Capote had already limned Lee (‘Idabel’) in his own first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). That excellent fiction, outrageous in its time, made Capote a public figure. Besides a number of short stories, he also evidenced great promise in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and the ‘factional’ In Cold Blood (1966), a gruesome tale beautifully told about a farmhouse murder in distant Kansas. But Capote was drawn towards acting in public as a troubled young man with a life worth talking about and interesting to hear about. He hosted great social events, guested at others, and so his ‘remembrances of things past’ became unanswered prayers. What was there was finally published posthumously in the late 1980s. It could have been better. In retrospect, one wishes that he’d kept to writing and left the Swans to take care of themselves. ©

[Stanley]

"It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life."

Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd. Annie Besant, An Autobiography . . ., 1893
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Annie Besant’s life of experiment and discovery began in London on October 1, 1847. Her father, William Wood, was a possibly underemployed medical doctor who died in 1852. But the family had good connections, and while her brother attended Harrow School Annie was put under the care of the Marryat family. There began her first trial of religious ideas, the Marryats’ allegiance to the Tractarian (high church or Anglo-Catholic) movement. In 1866, marriage to the Rev’d Frank Besant gave her a taste of Anglican evangelicalism, non-Tractarian but spiced with genteel poverty. To help make ends meet, she began to write, mainly for children; but to make sense of an unhappy marriage she also developed radical notions like gender equality, contraception, and no-fault divorces. Instead of the last, she won a negotiated separation from Besant, under the terms of which she remained Mrs. Besant for the rest of her life—with, for a time, the guardianship of her daughter. This independence, or autonomy, spurred her personal quest for truth. First this led her into social enthusiasms: women’s rights, trade unionism, secularism, Home Rule for Ireland, socialism. Along the way, she acquired a varied circle of friends, from the America radical Moncure Daniel Conway to the Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw to Karl Marx’s activist daughter Eleanor. This climaxed with Annie’s support for London’s matchgirl’s strike of 1888 (for a postmodernist take on that, see the movie Enola Holmes 2) and then, in 1889, a dockers’ strike. And she earned fame as a vigorous writer and eloquent speaker, daring to go public with her varied radicalisms. But along with it all Annie Besant engaged also in a spiritual quest. At times this seemed to land her in the atheist camp, but in the early 1890s she converted, if that’s the right word, to Theosophism, and by 1903 she was President of the Theosophical Society. This was perfect in one sense, for Theosophy had no particular orthodoxy behind it. Instead, Besant embraced the mystical view that the ‘great’ world religions (she did NOT include ‘tribal’ or ‘savage’ beliefs) embodied a history in which a ‘God’ had made repeated attempts to contact humanity while, on the other hand, great humans had made repeated attempts to contact ‘God.’ So Annie Besant found holinesses in all the great religions, but she was in particular drawn to Buddhist and Hindu ideas, and spent much of the remainder of her life in India. There she hoped to find a great “World Teacher” who would bring all that religious history together into one unifying truth. And she found that Teacher in Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1985). He ultimately declined the honor, but that is another story. Annie Besant died, in Madras, in 1933, still searching. ©.

[Stanley]

Who was buried in Grant's Tomb?

I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age.
Groucho Marx, Groucho and Me (1959).

In fact, Groucho Marx was born on October 2, 1890. He (aka Julius Henry Marx) was the third-born of five surviving brothers: Chico (Leonard Joseph); Harpo (Adolph); Gummo (Milton); and Zeppo (Herbert Manfred). The amazon who birthed them all was Minnie Marx, and she also had changed her name from the less marketable Miene Schönberg Marx. Both Minnie and her husband “Frenchie” were immigrants, she from Hanover, he from Alsace. I assume that both Minnie and Frenchie were livewires, but it was her family that quickly developed ties with New York’s music hall world, and she (as agent) who shepherded her flock of five onto the New York stage. Minnie-the-agent called herself Minnie Palmer, to give the impression that her five boys stood on their own ten feet. Much later, in his memoirs, Groucho had some nasty things to say about agents. He planned to be cremated, but moaned that his agent would get 10% of his ashes. But all the boys loved their mom, who lived long enough to see their film, The Cocoanuts (1929). It was the first of several movie triumphs, but by no means their first movie. Starting in 1905, when Groucho was hardly out of short pants, they made 14 films. And while they each appeared in some of those films, he appeared in all, and it was he who became the public face of the Marx Brothers. The best of them were Duck Soup (1933) and A Night at the Opera (1935), Groucho played Rufus T. Firefly in the soup and Otis B. Driftwood in the song, and in the names you get at least a hint of his gifts as huckster, jokester, and the accident waiting to happen. There’s also a kind of misogyny in them, as evidenced by the comic fate of the widow women played (in both films) by the buxom (certainly not willowy) Margaret Dumont. Scholars have since argued over which Marx was the real genius, and maybe they all were, but in my youth it was Groucho who came out on top, the zany spokesperson who stood for them all and who, for some years, presided over the funniest of TV quizzes, You Bet Your Life (1949-1960). It actually had reruns, which suggests that the contestants’ answers were not the main point. It was Groucho’s ad-libbing that made the show, often in the consolation question (which came if the contestant had failed to come up with any correct answers), most famously “Who was buried in Grant’s Tomb?” A wrong answer caused him to bite his cigar and his moustache to twitch. Groucho was not the last of the five bros to grace the world with his presence. He died in 1977, leaving only Gummo and Zeppo, both of whom had adopted less taxing careers and more sedate lifestyles. Thank goodness for Groucho. ©.

[Stanley]

Draining the swamps.

In times of stress and danger, such as come out as the result of an epidemic, many tragic and cruel phases of human nature are brought out, as well as many brave and unselfish ones. William Crawford Gorgas.

Great advances in medicine come from scientific discovery and clinical experiment. But then they need to be applied in scale, and in the case of yellow fever the chief instrument was William Crawford Gorgas, born near Mobile, Alabama, on October 3, 1854. His family’s ill fortunes after the Civil War led William to think about the general causes of southern poverty and to become, eventually, a disciple of Henry George and the idea that a single tax—on land—could, if properly redistributed, lift everyone above the tideline. On the practical side, Gorgas obtained a medical degree in the north and, after an internship in New York City’s insane asylum, took up a lieutenancy in the US Army Medical Corps. The Spanish-American War found him in Cuba, where he was charged with putting into practice the theoretical and clinical work of Walter Reed, who had isolated the mosquito as the main vector in yellow fever. Gorgas had his doubts about this. He had himself contracted yellow fever while on duty in Texas, then married Marie Doughty, one of his fellow convalescents, and their relatively mild cases had given him other ideas about the disease, but he was an army physician, could follow orders, and took charge of the conquered city of Havana. The success of Gorgas’s work there, root, branch, and swamp, convinced him that Reed was right. By his third year in Havana, the city had no (zero!!) new cases of yellow fever, and William Gorgas had become a local hero. But not in the US Army, where many of his medical superiors still refused to accept Reed’s science and Gorgas’s success. As luck would have it, though, President Teddy Roosevelt read Gorgas’s report and made him the chief medical officer of the Panama Canal Project, a post he held for a decade. He was offered the presidency of the University of Alabama (which he considered his greatest honor) and was made Surgeon-General of the US army just in time for World War I. In 1918, after his retirement, the Rockefeller Foundation sent General Gorgas to South America to continue his battle. During a visit to Britain in 1920, Gorgas suffered a stroke. King George visited him in hospital, made him an honorary knight, but Gorgas died. The band of the Coldstream Guards led his cortege to a funeral service at St. Paul’s. His body was returned to the US and buried at Arlington, with full military honors. Dr. William Gorgas had become a world hero. He’d battled the Aedes aegypti mosquito, but more impressively he’d overcome two human bureaucracies (the US Army Medical Corps and the Panama Canal Company) to make Walter Reed’s scientific discoveries into a successful public health program. ©.

[Stanley]

Finding William Shakespeare

I have been almost daily at a book auction . . . my purse has been drained as usual. But what I have purchased are chiefly books of my own trade. Edmond Malone, diary entry, 1807.

Edmond Malone’s ‘own trade’ was literature, specifically literary history and criticism, and he was an important player in the first great effort to decide, or discern, what William Shakespeare had actually written and what his words meant. It was an odd turnout for an Irishman, born in Shinglas, Co. Westmeath, on October 4, 1741. But Malone enjoyed advantages. His father was an eminent jurist in the Protestant ascendancy, and Shinglas was the home estate of a wealthy family alliance. Malone’s mother, English-born, was connected with an important Essex family. In due course, Edmond received an annuity (from a Malone uncle) worth about £1,000 annually. In today’s cash, that’s about $180,000, quite enough (at the time) to finance a life of ease. But at Trinity College Dublin young Edmond had already proved that ‘ease’ was not his objective. There he produced an excellent translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and a precocious history of tragedy as a literary genre. In Ireland, he began a career in the law (as a second son, the family’s landed estate was not an option). But it proved unsatisfying, and by the early 1770s, he moved to London to follow his literary leanings. There he became associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson and a leading member of Johnson’s ‘club’, his bona fides established with his scholarly history (1779) of Shakespeare’s plays, An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which they had been staged. His Shakespeare scholarship widened from ‘mere’ history into important work, not only on the plots but also on Will’s astonishing vocabulary. That helps to explain Malone’s expensive addiction to book-buying, for he found contemporary (Elizabethan) context and usage to be his best guide to Shakespeare’s authorial intentions, and in the infancy of the British Museum the rare book and manuscript market was an essential sidelight. So Malone became an important figure. In 1779, for instance, we find him sitting for Sir Joshua Reynolds, an eminent portraitist whose appointment books for the same period included King George III, but (as importantly to Malone) such members of the Johnson circle as Hester Thrale and Edward Gibbon. And, after Shakespeare, it was within the Johnson circle that Malone did still more literary work. Malone was editor (almost co-author) of James Boswell’s classic biographical studies of Dr. Johnson. Later, Boswell’s son (James, Jr.) aimed to return the favor by writing a biography of Malone. That never did happen. Had it not been for the work of 20th-century scholars on Malone’s books (and on his manuscript notes), we might have forgotten how important he was in the (re)definition of the Shakespeare canon. ©

[Stanley]

Conquering a photographic memory.

With me, it’s always a voyage of discovery. I’m telling you what I didn’t previously know. And in my case, that’s a hell of a lot. Peter Ackroyd, interview, 2024.

That’s not a convincing sales pitch, but it’s an improvement (sort of) on another Ackroyd evaluation of his own writing as “a form of intellectual bulimia: you eat a great deal of knowledge. You sick it up. And then you start again.” As you might expect, Peter Ackroyd is not a professional historian. He has written histories, though, as well as acclaimed critical biographies, literary criticisms, and a raft of novels. There are, so far, 18 of those, most of them historical (in several senses of that word). So let’s call him an amateur academic. The insanely productive life of Peter Ackroyd began in east London on October 5, 1946. His father soon disappeared, and so he was reared by women, his mother and his grandmother. They brought him up to be a strict Catholic, which turned out to be a failure (although his latest book, The English Soul, is on a religious history). But he did turn out to be a precocious scholar, winning First Class Honours (in English literature) at Clare College, Cambridge. My suspicion is that he was cursed with a photographic memory. Such total recall impresses undergraduate examiners, but it can also imprison the imagination. This would have been a poetic outcome, as much of Ackroyd’s childhood was spent in the shadow of Royal Holloway Prison. But he broke through those constraints to produce mountains of ‘scholarly’ books. Of them, and there are many, I’ve read only those that actually claim to be histories (of London, of England, of the Tudors, of the River Thames). And these suggest that we should not accept at face value his self-diagnosis as an intellectual bulimic. Ackroyd has accumulated great stores of facts and has circled them through and around the very general subject of England and English literary culture. Like plastic, Ackroyd’s facts never die and rarely degrade. As he turns to new fields, his old subjects provide contexts, perspectives. His vision can be rather dark. In a mystical sort of way, his London: The Biography (2000) can turn the city into an all-devouring monster: the city of darkness overwhelms the city of light. But the dark shadows disperse as he takes us up and down the Thames: Sacred River (2007). His has been an interesting life, the more so after he gave up his day job (as editor), stopped his drinking (several magnificent jags have been recorded in gossip columns), and also, it appears, abstained from sex. Peter Ackroyd has said on several occasions that he wanted to be a poet. Indeed, that was his first publication, way back in 1971. But he read far too much and far too widely to submit to any rigorous discipline. Since then, he’s cycled a book each year, fiction and/or biography and/or history. With Ackroyd, the labels don’t matter. ©.

[I had a childhood friend who also had a photographic memory. Despite ill health he sailed through and academic career including a doctorate that was so advanced nobody could assess it for about ten years. He was not a happy soul.}

[Stanley]

"To appreciate beauty and truth in every field of endeavor."

Not every girl awakes to her dream of a birthday party in the White House . . . A leader among women, our gracious hostess elects to honor a woman and, therefore, women in general. Florence Barbara Seibert, October 6, 1944.

Florence Seibert was born in Easton, PA, on October 6, 1897, her father a prosperous rug manufacturer, her mother a second-generation citizen of German extraction. So Dr. Seibert was 47 when Eleanor Roosevelt, always alert to women’s issues, made that award. But Seibert had already won recognition for her scientific prowess, among them an appointment as professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Phipps Institute, a center for epidemiological research then located in one of Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. There, according to a 1942 news story about her, “while ragged children play in the streets outside, she works the hours of an Edison, and then continues her paperwork when she reaches her home.” Home was where Florence’s younger sister Mabel lived, kept house, and typed Florence’s research papers. Mabel was the only Seibert child to escape the epidemic of 1900, one of the first clearly diagnosed polio outbreaks in US history. It didn’t kill Florence, then only 3, or her brother Russell, aged 4, but it did handicap them for life. Both were saved by their mother, who tirelessly massaged their legs and kept them active, and both would live productive lives. For her part, Florence got curious about the root causes of her affliction. She, her brother, and other afflicted kids had played on a sandhill infested with horse flies. Could that not have been the cause? The likely answer was ‘no’, but Florence continued her interest in medicine as high school valedictorian, won undergraduate honors at Goucher College, and then, rarity of rarities for a woman, earning a PhD in Biochemistry (1923) at Yale. Her major achievements were two. At Yale and just after, she developed a sterile method of making intravenous injections (thus, for instance, enabling sterile blood transfusions) and then, at Chicago and Penn, she devised a reliable test for tuberculosis, the ‘blue’ tuberculin injection, just under the skin. By the time of Seibert’s White House reception, both were accepted as world standards, and it’s not possible to calculate how many lives were saved by this polio-stricken woman scientist. Her White House birthday party was but one recognition. In her response, she modestly credited everyone else and hoped that such wonderful teamwork portended a better future for “this sickened world” and would encourage the Allied conquerors to be “reformers rather than oppressors.” In 1968, Seibert would title her autobiography (1968) Pebbles on the Hill of a Scientist. She kept collecting pebbles for that sandhill until ill health forced her to quit lab work in 1988. She died three years later. ©.

[Stanley]

Polly Peachum and her Macheath.

But think of this maxim, and put off your sorrow
The wretch of to-day, may be happy tomorrow.
--concluding lines of The Beggar’s Opera (1728), sung by The Chorus.

Thus John Gay (following ancient precedent set by Sophocles and Aeschylus) used ‘The Chorus’ to clarify a moral point, just in case the audience had missed it in the play. In The Beggar’s Opera London’s low lifers have their own ethical codes, and live (and die) by them. It was a message that discomfited the nascent Whig elites of parliament and court, so much so that Prime Minister Walpole managed to have Gay’s sequel banned. It wasn’t performed in public until both Walpole and Gay were deader than the proverbial doornail. But no matter. In 1728The Beggar’s Opera became the biggest hit in London’s theatrical history: 72 consecutive performances, a great achievement in a theatrical culture still learning how to finance itself. But more than that, The Beggar’s Opera gave London a new star in the actress who played Polly Peachum, Her stage name was Lavinia Besswick, and her role as Polly made her into a legend. If the ballad opera has a heroine (and that’s an interesting question in itself), then it’s Polly. As Gay put it, she “was before unknown, & is now in so high vogue, that I am in doubt, whether her fame does not surpass that of the Opera itself.” Well, not exactly unknown, for Lavinia debuted at least twice before 1728. So you could say she had three debuts, not bad going. But so appealing was she as Polly Peachum that the London press invented biographies of her. Invention being the word, it’s a little difficult to find out who she really was. But the ‘real’ Lavinia Besswick was born on October 7, 1710. Her natural father may have been a Royal Navy Lieutenant called Besswick, but her mother married someone else, set up a coffee shop, and drew customers in to see her little girl dance, sing, and prettily prattle. There followed a period of schooling, where Lavinia learned how to act like a lady. But she worked in a brothel before being discovered as an actress. Then, as Polly Peachum, Lavinia was (re)discovered by Charles Paulet, the third duke of Bolton. He was 25 years older than she, unhappily married, and the two set up house together for 23 years. When his first wife died in 1751, Charles and Lavinia married almost immediately. The duke died in 1754, Lavinia becoming dowager duchess. By law and custom, their three children were not “legitimate,” and the duke’s son by his first wife inherited the dukedom. But the duke had provided handsomely for Lavinia (his “dear and well-beloved wife”) and her sons. Just as Polly Peachum had sincerely loved her Macheath, so Lavinia sincerely loved her duke, and in Lavinia’s case virtue had its own rewards. ©.

[Stanley]

The Tudor inheritance.

My anguish was such as to bear was too great . . . thus treason bereft me of my son and mate. Margaret Douglas, countess of Lennox, 1571.

Thus Margaret Douglas on hearing news of the death of her husband, 4th earl of Lennox. “Treason” was putting it high, though. The earl met his end in an aristocratic brawl at Stirling Castle, in Scotland. It might have been an assassination, although better to call it a purposeful melee. The death of Margaret’s son, Lord Darnley, four years earlier in Edinburgh castle, was a neater job. He had been strangled, then (in an attempt to obliterate the evidence) blown up. It looked a lot like treason, the more so when Darnley’s widow, Mary, Queen of Scots, married the murderer and continued her own reckless course towards martyrdom. So how—and why—was it that Lady Margaret Douglas got involved? It’s a long story, and too detailed to be fully recounted here, but the main point is that Lady Margaret Douglas, born on October 8, 1515, was the granddaughter of Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, and she would become the grandmother of James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 was crowned James I, the first of England’s Stuart dynasty. Given the genetic lottery of the royal succession, that wasn’t a bad result, in the long run. But in the short run of Mary Douglas’s life (she died in 1578) her dynastic position brought her many sadnesses and several near death experiences. Her Tudor fate was to be a valuable property in the marriage market, and that’s how she was used by her cousin, King Henry VIII of England. But from her first appearance at Henry’s court she made it clear that she had ideas of her own. So she fell in and out of Henry’s favor, at one point sent to the Tower, another declared illegitimate; but finally she fell in with the earl of Lennox, himself in the Stuart line. That marriage was permitted, and appears to have been her one great happiness, inspiring some of the best poetry written by any 16th-century royal. But most of the resulting children died young. Lady Margaret’s dynastic and material fortunes (and those of her two surviving sons) improved during the short reign of her cousin, Queen Mary. But even after Mary died, Margaret went on plotting, latterly with her erstwhile daughter-in-law the ill-fated Queen of Scots. For that, Margaret suffered another period imprisoned in the Tower. She died in 1578, her ambitions unfulfilled, her tragedies complete. It remained for her grandson, King James I of England, to erect a monument to her memory in the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey. There it reminds us that the hereditary principle does not work well in government. Matters of state are best left to we, the people, mongrel lot though we are. ©.

[Stanley]

Modest to a fault.

That’s the problem with interviews of this time, you always want that little bit more, you won’t be able to push the topic beyond comfort level and that’s all I can say. Sir Peter Mansfield, Nobel Prize Interview, 2003.

Nobel Prizes are Big Deals, and Peter Mansfield got his for his role in inventing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (‘MRI’). The official interviewer wanted Mansfield to say something really Big, and asked whether MRIs of the brain might actually ‘image’ thought. Mansfield didn’t want to answer that one, and thus brought the interview to a screeching halt. Throughout the ceremonies Mansfield declined to make mountains of his discovery. He thought it might open up interesting questions about quantum mechanics, but apology was the one consistent thread in his all Nobel remarks. Mansfield was sorry that the machine intensified patients’ tendencies towards claustrophobia and regretted its violent assault on any patient’s eardrums. In compensation, he offered “only” that MRI technology offered more exact diagnoses and then a more precise routing for therapy. Having suffered through too many MRIs (in 2020, after incurring a brain injury), I commend his modesty and accept his apologies for the noise, which (in my then state of semi-consciousness, was terrifying). But perhaps modesty came naturally to Peter Mansfield. He was born in Lambeth, London, on October 9, 1933, into a hardworking family of middling poverty. Along with that, he suffered three separate evacuations during the Blitz. It was not surprising, then, that he failed the notorious “eleven plus” exams and was shunted off to a career in the skilled trades. It made sense. His father, after all, was ‘only’ a gas worker. Peter left school at 15 to begin life as a printer’s assistant. That might have been that, but during his National Service the British Army discovered that the boy had a brain. He got interested in rocketry, took science courses, passed his “A Levels,” and was admitted to the University of London to read Physics. There he got involved in an undergraduate project measuring the earth’s magnetic field, did well, and went on to a Physics PhD (London) and a post-doc at the University of Illinois. There, and then at Nottingham in England, he deepened his interest in magnetics. Fortified by faculty coffee-break conversations, supportive departmental secretaries, and gifted post-graduate students, he built his first MRI device, a monster affair that was ready for action by the mid-1970s. But no one wanted to get into the thing. It was so frighteningly large, so enclosed, and so noisy that Mansfield volunteered himself as its first human datapoint. Much later, in St. Louis, it saved my life. So I am ready to forgive Sir Peter for the noise and to celebrate him for his modesty. ©