BOB'S BITS

[PanBiker]

With my brain tumour in 2018, it's subsequent diagnosis, pre op scans, surgery post op checks and scheduled 10 years after care. I have had more contrasted MRI's than you can proverbially shake a stick at. I have noticed over the last six years since my first go in the POLO machine how the technology is still advancing. New models are smaller and considerably quieter than they were even six years ago. Headphones on and some music of choice and you are sorted, noise wise.
I don't have claustrophobia which is a bonus and can see how that may freak some folk out. Like Bob, eternally grateful for the tech that can see down to minute blood vessel level and measure and map down to a fraction of a millimetre on the resultant scans making subtle changes all that easier to spot in after care roles of which I am now subject to and welcome for.

[Stanley]

The perils of precisionists.

To explain the matter I will employ a simile, which . . .is greatly in favor of my sentiments. A rich man bestows, on a poor and famishing beggar, alms by which he may be able to maintain himself and his family. Does it cease to be a pure gift, because the beggar extends his hand to receive it? Can it be said with propriety, that 'the alms depended partly on THE LIBERALITY of the Donor, and partly on THE LIBERTY of the Receiver.' Jacobus Arminius.

By the middle of the 17th century, ‘you are a filthy Arminian’ was about the worst thing one Calvinist Protestant could say of another, short, that is, of accusations of popery. It was an unkind fate for a man we know (insofar as we can know such things) was a most faithful pastor of his Amsterdam church, a caring teacher of his many students, and by his own lights a devoted follower of John Calvin. But this was the fate of Jacobus Arminius, born in Utrecht on October 10, 1560. Arminius didn’t have only himself to blame. As a student in Leiden, he’d come into contact one professor who thought John Calvin’s God “a tyrant and an executioner,” another who favored religious toleration, and a third who believed that the church could not be superior to the civil state. He probably got those ideas knocked out of him during a long stay in Calvin’s Geneva. But as a pastor in Amsterdam (from 1588) and a professor at Leiden (from 1603) Arminius fell prey, again, to his ‘soft’ thinking about man’s fate in God’s universe. He told his congregation that they did not have to be prisoners of sin and that they could through their own efforts open themselves to grace. Then at Leiden he compounded the error by challenging the philosophical logic of Calvin’s absolutist version of predestination. His preachings, teachings, and writings were the subject of several inquiries, and a trial for heresy, but Arminius was a clever chap and held on to his Leiden professorship to the end. Undergraduates today have difficulty seeing what the fuss was all about (in the crucial matter of salvation by grace, Arminius never denied God’s utter sovereignty or man’s inherent impotence), but it was a precisionist century, theologically speaking, and in orthodox Calvinist quarters “Arminian” became a hissing and a byword. In England, his Arminianism cost Archbishop William Laud his head, and in early Massachusetts to be an Arminian (in public, anyway) was to suffer fines, ostracism, or (worse) exile to Rhode Island. But later in America, in the 19th century, Arminianism in the shape of John Wesley's Methodism would become an engine of the democratization of American Christianity. If mere humans could create a constitutional republic, dig the Erie Canal, and swear off the demon drink, then surely they could also (methodically?) prepare themselves for salvation. ©

[Tripps]

The more one reads about religion, the more one marvels that anyone could pay any attention to it. However if the alternative was a death penalty -that would perhaps persuade me.

In England, his Arminianism cost Archbishop William Laud his head,

Could he not have crossed his fingers behind his back and carried on?

Despite that - I take comfort that there is a 12th Century Anglican church in the village, and not a mosque. (yet anyway )

[Stanley]

An artful life.

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. Eleanor Roosevelt.

Thus Eleanor Roosevelt recalled the central drama of her young life. It was her own mother who called her “plain” and ridiculed her for her “serious” demeanor. So Eleanor early began her art work. She was born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, on October 11, 1884, named after her mother, Anna Hall Roosevelt, and even before her mother died (in 1892) the kid let it be known that she was not “Anna,” and would answer only to “Eleanor.” Eleanor’s father, Elliott Roosevelt, didn’t help much by succumbing to alcohol. He died, semi-suicidally, when Eleanor was just nine. She made of him something of a hero, misunderstood into drink, but both of these distant parents made Eleanor subject to depression for the rest of her long life. Of course she had assets, not least family money, but more helpfully family fame, for she had been born into a clan at the pinnacle of New York’s old-money Anglo-Dutch aristocracy. Eleanor’s uncle Ted became president of the country in 1901, which probably helped the plain teenager to learn how to like herself. Another way was to care for others, and she set herself up as substitute parent for her kid brother, Elliott, Jr. Eleanor also discovered her charmful seriousness while at finishing school in Wimbledon, England, and after “coming out” in 1902 this new work of art charmed the sox off her fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Over his mother’s strenuous objections, the two married in 1905 and began a heady life as serious, wealthy do-gooders. Eleanor at her church (Episcopalian, of course) and Franklin in the reform wing of New York’s Democratic Party. Eleanor still had an older woman to contend with, Franklin’s mother Sara, who was not mollified when this plain Jane and her lovely boy produced six children, in quick succession (1906-1916). Besides Sara’s continued disapproval, Eleanor had to deal with Franklin’s infidelities, and then his paralysis. And the rest is history. Eleanor helped Franklin learn how to deal with his legs, then stood by him through the governor’s mansion to the White House. There she became the most consequential “First Lady” in US history, no contest, a power in her own right and made even more perfect by the character of her enemies, including J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief sneak who kept a dossier on her in hopes, perhaps, of bringing her down with blackmail. It’s not recorded whether J. Edgar ever actually tried that caper. If he had he would have found that a moral half-wit is no match for an old woman who made of her life a work of art. After Franklin’s death in 1945, Eleanor continued to sculpt her life as a compassionate elder stateswoman. She still tops the polls as our best-loved First Lady: plain Jane triumphant. ©

[Stanley]

The utility of platonism,

That the Students of Philosophy may be thoroughly exercised in the just extent of the Mechanical Powers of Matter, how farre they will reach, and where they fall short. Which will be the best assistance to Religion that Reason and the Knowledge of Nature can afford. Henry More, Immortality of the Soul (1662).

That is a really complicated statement. But it stands as one testament to Henry More’s lifelong effort to strike balances between the extremes that his century brought forth, extremes in politics, religion, and philosophy. In several senses he enjoyed great success. Not least, More lived a long time, during which he acquired (and retained) broadening circles of friends. Significantly, many of these friendships were defined by agreements to disagree, and often on fundamental issues which (in other quarters, among other people) led to civil war, political murders, personal enmities, and deep, lasting philosophical divides. Henry More was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, on October 12, 1614. As the youngest son (of seven), he may from an early age have expected to make his own way, but there were assets. His family were prominent in the local mercantile elite of a prosperous market town, and after grammar school an uncle undertook to send the boy to Cambridge, a university then marked by religious conflict. More entered Christ’s, one of Cambridge’s more peaceable colleges. A brilliant scholar, he was made a fellow in 1641 and then survived the Puritan ‘purge’ of 1644. His biographers say he’d already had enough of the strict Puritanism of his family, but More did subscribe to the ‘covenant,’ which probably explains why he retained his fellowship. This may have been mere prudence, as also his later denial that he had ever subscribed. More also established firm philosophical and theological grounds for moderation. He held to that for the rest of his long life (he died in 1687), and with remarkable serenity. He absorbed (indeed celebrated, even furthered) much of the scientific revolution of his day, but as the opening quotation shows he also argued that experimentalism (or materialism) had limits. Beyond those limits lay the spiritual, but even in God’s sphere he was a moderate, and is seen as a precursor of Anglican latitudinarianism and the rise of Lockean toleration in church and state. More was one of those who saw in Anne Finch, Lady Conway, a philosophical genius, and he remained her mentor even after she embraced Quakerism. Her friendship overcame his fear of her enthusiasm, for one of the middle lines More trod was that between materialist atheism and religious enthusiasm. We might even call him an extremist moderate, except that by all reports he was distressingly equable. Some explain this by calling More an ‘idealist’ or a ‘Platonist.’ No doubt he was. But he also found great comfort in playing the lute and writing poetry. These avocations helped More navigate his troubled century. Whether they would work today is another question. ©

[Stanley]

Life long learning.

What do you do with your education now that you have it – and now that it is beginning to become obsolete even as you sit here? Edith Sampson, Commencement Address, May 1965, at North Central College, Naperville, Illinois.

Edith Sampson’s was an unusual commencement address, offering to the graduands a multiple choice examination. What do you do with your BA? She offered five choices. The first four were safe enough, for the BA was a negotiable asset that should (likely) lead to a job, a productive life and, finally, a secure pension. But the fifth and final choice was the one she recommended. It was to accept that what they’d learned was already out of date. To keep “vibrantly alive” they’d have to live within and learn from a world of flux. Change being the order of the day, it behooved graduates to look at the world with a critical eye, weigh its problems, decide on the best (or the better) solutions, and then to pursue those paths in both thought and action. It wasn't a great speech (I’ve heard way too many of them), but it serves as a reasonable summary of the choices Edith Sampson made in an already long life that had begun in Pittsburgh, PA, on October 13, 1897. Few would call hers a great, certainly not a head start. Her family was poor, and her first choice (aged 12) was to leave school for waged work in a fish market. This looked pretty hopeless for a black kid, so Edith quit boning fish and returned to school, Peabody High School. This good choice was made better by some of her Peabody classmates, including Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, who between them would make literary history, but Edith chose social work. Her quick study of that field led her to a law degree and a new husband, a lawyer. Relocated in Chicago, she concentrated on offering defense counsel for those caught in the toils of the juvenile court system. As she put it later in her 1965 commencement address, these choices brought her no comfort, but a conviction that more change was needed if justice was truly to be served. That brought Edith Sampson into politics. There, as a black woman lawyer with “chops” (assistant state attorney in Cook County and a popular local radio program host), she came to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. President Truman appointed her to serve (with Mrs. Roosevelt) in the US delegation to the United Nations Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (later UNESCO). Nor did she rest on these laurels. The 1950s (not least, southern resistance to school desegregation) taught Sampson a new lesson. It was not enough to depend on the law and the courts to achieve racial justice. Or, as she put it in an earlier (1959) commencement address, it “was not the only way. It was not even the best way.” One learns hard lessons in the school of life. Edith Sampson went on applying them until her death in 1979. ©.

[Stanley]

I never received yesterday's note so I have mailed Bob and asked for it to be resent.....

[Stanley]

'If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.'

You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing.
P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

In The Code of the Woosters, the would-be Fuhrer of Britain, Roderick Spode, is rendered impotent by the discovery that his night job was to design women’s frothy underthings for his up-market shop ‘Eulalie Soeurs.’ It’s a marvelous moment in one of Wodehouse’s best ‘Jeeves and Wooster’ novels (I think it’s the best), and in high slapstick comedy it unmans Spode, the leader of a fascist mob whose black shorts “disfigure” the London scene. Thus Wodehouse lampoons Oswald Mosley’s ‘real’ Nazi movement, the ‘black shirts.’ Whether Wodehouse ‘really’ meant it would become a question when, a couple of years later, interned in Germany as an enemy alien, Wodehouse broadcast to American radio networks about his ‘unfortunate’ incarceration. Come allied victory, 1945, these broadcasts led some to call P. G. a traitor. Wodehouse probably would have been let off, but he preferred not to put the matter to trial. Instead, he settled in the USA, became a citizen, and it was only in 1975 that Wodehouse received “official forgiveness” in the form of a knighthood. The then Prime Minister, Labour’s Harold Wilson, hoped it would end the matter, but it didn’t. It’s best settled by realizing that Wodehouse just didn’t care about politics, ranking it near the bottom of his list of human frailties, along with Russian drama, “stearine” women’s fiction, the philosophical works of Spinoza and Nietzsche, and aunts in general (notably Agatha, who wears barbed wire next the skin and breakfasts on broken glass). P. G. Wodehouse was born in Surrey on October 15, 1881, the youngest son of a prosperous banker who divided his time between Hong Kong and The City so finely as to leave none for fathering. The money ran out after Wodehouse had left Dulwich College but before he could go to “University” (Oxford), and so he turned to writing. He’d done some jottings at Dulwich. There his teachers thought it insubstantial, and so it remained. But as he tried this genre and another, he refined the insubstantial into pure gold (or, if you prefer, tinsel) and mastered the art of impossibly complicated comedic plots and gimlet-clear prose, disfigured only by out-of-place adverb-adjectives (as in “I smoked a reflective cigarette” or “drank a thoughtful cup of tea.”). For me, reading Wodehouse has become a vice, but instructive. Of the whole corpus, I recommend those which deal the always consequential misjudgments of the finest idler in English fiction, Bertram Wooster, who is then always saved from drowning (in the soup) by his valet Jeeves (more properly speaking, his gentleman’s gentleman). Once more, then, from The Code of the Woosters:
There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?’
The mood will pass, sir.
And indeed it does. ©

[Stanley]

You can get through life with bad manners, but it's easier with good manners. Lillian Gish.

Speaking of ‘bad manners,’ there are a couple of deplorables running for office these days who have spread vicious, racist lies about Springfield, Ohio, and its newest immigrants, black folk from Haiti. Springfield would rather be known for its charming historic district and its distinguished liberal arts college (dating from 1845 and one of the first American colleges to admit black students). Wittenberg University, as it’s now called, was also the seat of the ‘reform’ movement which created the Evangelical Lutheran Church: the ‘happy synod,’ as my Lutheran father-in-law called it, to distinguish it from the ‘misery’ synod. A Wittenberg graduate, Robert Henry, was elected Springfield’s mayor in 1962. He was Ohio’s first black mayor. Springfield born, Henry died in 1981, and the town still celebrates ‘Robert Henry Day’ during Black History Month. Today, were he still alive, Henry would be countering today’s rumor-mongerers, as is Ohio’s Republican governor, Mark Dewine. Other notable Springfieldians include Berenice Abbott, pioneer photographer; A. B. Graham, founder of the 4H movement; and Jonathan Winters, everyman’s comedian. Yet another Springfieldian who never ate anyone’s pet was Lillian Gish, the film actress, who was born in Springfield on October 14, 1893. Lillian (and her younger sister Dorothy) learned acting at home, and according to Lillian the lessons never left her. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t acting, so I can’t imagine what I would do if I stopped now,” she said in the 1930s. By then, the meat of her career was behind her, for she had been the undisputed queen of the silent cinema, the star in some of D. W. Griffith’s most famous films. Perhaps the least well known of these was a 1916 propaganda film (costarring Lillian and the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George) aiming to encourage US entry into the World War. Lillian Gish always lamented the rise of the ‘talkies’, thinking the silents a more expressive visual art, but she did adjust to the new reality and enjoyed a long career, usually in supporting roles, in films and television. Lillian Gish’s last role came in 1987, with Bette Davis and Vincent Price, and thus in several ways a museum piece. Gish was a lifelong Republican, so it’s mere speculation to say what she might have made of this year’s Republican nominees and their slandering of her home town. Gish’s first really big role was in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), now universally condemned as a filmic expression of anti-black racism. But she was too honest a person, too sharp and too smart to be taken in by loose talk of pet barbecues in Springfield. Anyway, Lillian Gish was a vegetarian. ©.

[Tripps]

disfigured only by out-of-place adverb-adjectives (as in “I smoked a reflective cigarette” or “drank a thoughtful cup of tea.”).

"Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of wise men".

That's 'disfiguremnt' in a nice clever way. All my frequent cups of tea are 'thoughtful'.

[Stanley]

language and culture

When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country. Noah Webster.

That seems excellent advice, until you consider its confusion, or conflation, of ‘morality’ with ‘interest.’ By the time he penned it, Webster was an elderly man in poor health, and a partisan who was unhappy about the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Fifty years earlier, he’d gloried in the idea that Revolutionary America had birthed a country where a multitude of differing opinions (in religious and secular spheres) competed for market supremacy but then reached a happier and higher consensus. The most important byproduct of that process was, for Webster, an American version, or edition, of the English language. And so, as early as the 1780s decade, he set himself the task of defining that language. He worked on it as a scholar might, but also as a missionary. Its end product came in 1828, An American Dictionary of the English Language, a 70,000 word reworking and updating of his 1806 Compendious Dictionary of the American Language, a 40,000-worder that contained no fewer than 5,000 words that Webster defined as peculiarly “American,” a category that included not only Dutch, French, and Spanish imports, but also truly native implants bequeathed to the new nation by its aboriginal inhabitants. Noah Webster was born in Connecticut (the word itself comes from the Algonquin for “land beside the tidal river”) on October 16, 1758. His parents possessed good “New” England pedigrees, and Noah was educated at home and in a village school—well enough to be admitted to Yale in 1774. There his studies were interrupted by service in the revolutionary militia, and there he also decided in a career in the law when most Yalies still aimed for the Congregationalist ministry. It was a time of constitution building. Noah did his part at the bar but also as the compiler of the American [sic] Spelling Book (1787). American spellings should be simpler, more phonetic, and more consistent, as befit the new nation’s genius—and its virtues. His “bluebook” speller would become standard issue, eventually, but at first his mission drew criticism from all quarters. Conservatives attacked him for pandering to the demotic, while radicals thought him an intolerable snob. But Noah Webster kept at it, and today the “Webster” is synonymous with “dictionary” in most lexicons. Webster died in debt, and his copyrights were taken over by the Merriam brothers, where (I think) it still resides. We now take as common sense Webster’s view that language itself is an historical artifact. But for me it’s enough that Emily Dickinson learned her wise way with words from Webster, her very own “Lexicon . . . [and] only companion.” That has my vote. ©.

[Stanley]

With a little help from our friends.

Rochambeau. Password for the final attack in the Siege of Yorktown, October 1781.

Mispronouncing French has long been an Anglophone habit, possibly forever, and at Yorktown American soldiers honored tradition by rendering the password as “Rush on boys.” So the boys rushed on. The British general, Lord Cornwallis, soon saw his position as hopeless, and after some delay (for which we blame British punctiliousness) the articles of surrender were agreed, at Yorktown, on October 17, 1781. I have only the vaguest memory of my 11th-grade US history textbook (I earned a D grade in the course), but I believe it called Yorktown an American victory. Maybe it was. After Yorktown, open warfare ceased, and on September 3, 1783 Britain acknowledged the sovereign independence of the 13 United States. But a look at the battlefield map shows all sorts of other names, especially on the besiegers’ left flank: Gatenois, Touraine, Viomenil, Deux Ponts, and (of course) Rochambeau. Even on the right flank, along with Knox, Clinton, Lincoln, and (of course) Washington we find La Fayette and von Steuben. And at the mouth of the Chesapeake there was a fleet of 21 ships, commanded by l’Amiral François de Grasse, there not only to starve Cornwallis of supplies but to deliver to General Washington siege guns, shot and powder and (even more crucially) good Spanish silver coins sufficient to cover back pay for the American units. There were, indeed, more French soldiers (10,800) than American (8,500) besieging Yorktown, but General Rochambeau had assured Washington that he was there to follow orders, not give them, and at the surrender he insisted that the American commander should receive the honors. The American war for independence had become an international war, and while old Ben Franklin charmed the French nobility (particularly the ladies of the salons) with his homespun wisdom and his coonskin cap, General George Washington ran the show at Yorktown, just as he had commanded the joint force on its long march south and had cleverly feinted an attack on the British in New York City. And none of this would have happened without the American victory at Saratoga, four years earlier, when on October 17, 1777 ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne surrendered his sword and battle flag to the American Horatio, surname Gates. And that had been an American victory, so surprising that the European powers soon entered the fray on Yankee Doodle’s side whether as cobelligerents (e.g. France) or bankers (the Dutch). Without Saratoga, there had been no Yorktown. Given all that, it’s mildly surprising that we celebrate July 4 as our birthing day, not October 17. But then, up to now at least, we’ve mostly kept our politics civil, our wars military, and our victories ‘American.’ ©

[Stanley]

The Complete Herbalist.

I consulted with my two brothers, Dr. REASON and Dr. EXPERIENCE, and took a voyage to visit my mother NATURE, by whose advice, together with the help of Dr. DILIGENCE, I at last obtained my desire; and, being warned by Mr. HONESTY, a stranger in our days, to publish it to the world, I have done it. Nicholas Culpeper, 1652.

What Nicholas Culpeper published was entitled The English Physitian: or, An astrologo-physical discourse on the vulgar herbs of this nation, being a compleat method of physick, whereby a man may preserve his body in health, or cure himself, being sick (London. 1652). It sold cheaply (3d the copy) and was popular. But its subsequent editions (now in several languages) are beyond counting and often beyond price. In the book trades it’s called Culpeper’s Compleat Herbal, and its pricier editions include colored prints of Culpeper’s favored medicinal herbs. Some early editions have been eviscerated and sold as antiquarian prints, and (vandals that we are) several such Culpepers hang in our hallway. They are pleasing; but not as interesting as the man himself. Nicholas Culpeper was born on October 18, 1616, in Ockley, Surrey—sometime after noon, he later noted, for he became an astrologer, and the time of birth mattered. His father, a clergyman, had died a few weeks before he was born, and he was brought up in his maternal grandfather’s house, yet another vicarage. Vicars, in those days, were often medicine-men, but certainly his widowed mother was a wise woman, a herbalist among other things, and Nicholas (after a time studying at Cambridge) was apprenticed to an apothecary. Once married (both well and happily, to an heiress named Alice) Nicholas set up shop outside London’s city walls, thus beyond the authority of the City’s medicinal guilds. There he treated people for what ailed them, treated them well, and treated them cheaply. The establishment medics, apothecaries and doctors, didn’t like him, and he returned the favor with mountains of scornful invective. As well as medical monopolies, Nicholas took against the monarchy, the established church, and fought for parliament during England’s civil wars. His battle wounds may ultimately have killed him, but produced an internal fury which led to a spate of publications in which he celebrated the king’s execution, gloried in his rejection of organized Religion (always capitalizing the ‘R’), and argued (from ‘experience’ and ‘reason’) that the best medical cures came naturally, from God’s green earth, or astrologically, from God’s starry heaven, and they should therefore be cheap, easily available, unconstrained by ancient wisdom or modern monopolies. Nicholas Culpeper died in 1654, still a young man, still furious. It’s hard to place him accurately in the history of early modern medicine, for he was both a mystic and an innovative, practical clinician, but there’s no doubt that he deserves a place. And the next time you get a chance to look at his Compleat Herbal, you should take it. ©

[Stanley]

Climb every mountain.

Every mountain I climb is a personal journey, a chance to break free from the limitations imposed by society. AnniePeck.

When Annie Peck was born (in Providence, RI) on October 19, 1850, ‘society’ expected her to conform to many limitations. To sum them up, she was to be ladylike. Her mother, Ann Power Peck, may have given her other ideas, for she was an active abolitionist, but it’s likely that her father contributed, too, by encouraging Annie to learn Latin and Greek, grammars traditionally thought to be beyond the female ken. Pa tutored her at home. But he was also headmaster of Providence Classical High School, and although it was a boys-only school may have allowed her to attend. But only occasionally, and when it came to formal instruction Annie went to a school for young ladies. And when it came to university, Mr. Peck put his foot down. All of her brothers attended Brown, men only of course, and when Annie did apply there she was rejected on the most obvious of grounds. So she went west to teach Latin and Greek at a public school in Saginaw, Michigan, and then—over Pa’s objection—completed her learning in classics with a BA and MA from the University of Michigan, a western place that thought women could learn the hard stuff. Annie didn’t become a mountain-woman until the 1880s, first small ascents in Europe, but then Shasta in California (1888). There were already women mountaineers (I’ve included several in these notes), but Annie made a business out of it, public lectures and books, and created a sensation when, in 1895, she ascended the Matterhorn. It’s a challenging climb, to be sure, but she did it in trousers (knickerbockers to be exact) and this caused debate. The New York Times thought the trousers were an issue, or should be, and initiated a debate on the subject. Annie joined battle, for women’s rights were already part of her public portfolio, and she proudly posed, again and again, in various sorts of pantaloons (bloomers included), self-consciously breaking barriers wherever she climbed and whenever she spoke. Having learned competition at home with her brothers, she now competed to be the all-time champion climber, going higher than any woman (and most men). At 58, she summited Huascarán in Peru, and planted a votes for women banner at the peak. She thought it was the highest mountain in the Americas. That was mistaken, but Annie Smith Peck continued to write, and speak, and climb for the cause, and for herself, too. Annie’s fees and royalties kept her climbing until she was in her 80s (she did Mount Madison in New Hampshire in 1932). Her very last climb was a modest one, at the Acropolis in Athens. Given her whole career, it was an appropriate curtain call, reminding us all that if liberation is one’s goal, it’s helpful to have money and knowledge. ©.

[Stanley]

Seeing his monument.

LECTOR SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS CIRCUMSPICE. Inscription above the grave of Sir Christopher Wren, St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.

“Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.” As epitaphs go (and they can be hyperinflated), this one is more accurate than most. It’s located in the cathedral crypt, and although I think you still need to pay to see it, it serves as a capstone to any serious London visit. And do please look around, for Christopher Wren was the architect of the ‘new’ St. Paul’s, commissioned to replace the medieval original which had been ruined by the ‘Great Fire’ of 1666. And once you’ve finished with the big attraction, go out into the city of London to take in the many (~ 50) parish churches that also bear Wren’s stamp—some more than others, and deciding which church was really his is a study in itself. These designs became models for an empire, and several surviving colonial era churches in the eastern United States echo Wren’s designs, albeit usually in red brick and whitewashed wood. While the new St. Paul’s was abuilding, Wren often visited the works, showing interest in the crafts of the skilled stonemasons as well as seeking (self) assurance that he had, indeed, designed for eternity. But if you would really understand Wren, you would search much more widely. For if anyone in the anglophone world deserved to be called a “Renaissance Man,” it was Christopher Wren, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, natural historian, anatomist, and (some argue) the physicist who posed the question that would be answered by Isaac Newton’s revolutionary Principia (1687). Christopher Wren was born on October 20, 1632: well born, it’s important to add, for his father was a prominent churchman, soon to become dean of the royal chapel at Windsor, and his mother an only child (therefore heiress) of a Wiltshire landowner. The boy probably attended Westminster School and then Wadham College, Oxford, where he did well enough to be elected a fellow of All Souls. Well enough in several fields: and this intellectual breadth made Wren a leading spirit in the formation of what would become, in 1662, the Royal Society of London. So, despite the risks of Civil War and the unsettledness of the Interregnum, Wren was (at only 30), a central figure in what many call the ‘Scientific Revolution’ of the 17th century. Elected Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1661, in 1669 he was appointed Surveyor of the King’s Works. Most of his architecture, including St. Paul’s but much more, sacred and secular, came from or through the latter appointment. You’ll find his architectural ‘monuments’ at St. Paul’s and the surrounding parish churches, but also in Oxford and Cambridge (college libraries and chapels and the Sheldonian Theatre), at Greenwich (hospital and observatory), even at Hampden Court where he remodeled the entire south front and, I would say, improved it. Today most of his buildings (and remodelings) are revered, but they weren’t always so popular. St. Paul’s took so long to build, and cost so much, to rouse suspicion, made worse when some called its baroque inspirations dangerously ‘Catholic.’ Sir Christopher Wren lived long enough to see the cathedral dome constructed (and to voice his own disapproval of some of the dome’s interior ‘decorations’). He died of a fever probably (legend would have it ‘certainly’) contracted on his last visit to St. Paul’s in the winter of 1722-23. It’s indeed his greatest monument, but not the only one. ©

[Stanley]

We are what we eat--for better or worse.

Why not use me more? Says ‘POTATO PETE’. Caption on a publicity poster, United Kingdom Food and Agriculture Ministry, 1940s.

Britain’s wartime rationing was accepted as a patriotic necessity. Of course there were black marketeers (and customers), and there were jokes. The Brits laugh about anything. But when the post-war Labour government continued rationing the jokes acquired more sardonic flavors. The ideas became fixed that food rationing was deprivation and that the ubiquitous ‘ration books’ were symbols of servitude. In fact, the British people en masse were never better (or at least more healthily) fed than during rationing. To prove it, the leading architects of rationing went on a diet of bread, cabbages, and potatoes while subjecting themselves to weeks of hiking, biking, and mountaineering. They emerged thin (looking at their pictures, some might say ‘emaciated’), but in terms of their blood pressures and body chemistries fitter than the proverbial fiddles. These brave guinea pigs were the pioneer food scientists Elsie Widdowson and Robert McCance. They’d met, appropriately, in a hospital kitchen in 1933. They became close colleagues (but never, apparently, an ‘item’), and they worked together on foods and their effects for the next 60 years, until McCance’s death in 1993 (aged 94). As for Elsie Widdowson, she was a study in herself. She was born into a ‘Plymouth Brethren’ household on October 21, 1906. Her father worked in a greengrocers, her mother a seamstress, but they invested both their daughters with a love of learning that persisted through life. Elsie, the elder, was one of the first women to earn a PhD in Chemistry at Imperial College. Advised to undertake work more appropriate for a female, she went into dietetics, the chemical composition of foods and their impact on body chemistry. This brought her into contact with McCance, then working on the blood chemistry of diabetes. Elsie pointed out errors in his research, and when McCance moved to a research post at Cambridge he took his chief critic with him. As war approached, they began their work on rationing and nutrition. We are, indeed, what we eat, and “McCance & Widdowson” (as their standard text is now called) proved that point in laboratory studies and at an experimental dinner table, devising a regime that would keep us in calories while building stout bones, good teeth, and elastic muscles. After the war, they continued their work on starvation and nutrition, and the long term effects of both, on the minds and bodies of adults and babies in postwar Europe and famine-struck Africa. Both survived into their nineties, working (and presumably eating) healthily. By the way, Elsie’s kid sister, Eva (1912-2007) earned a physics PhD, but then became a leading expert on the care and feeding of the honeybee. ©.

[Stanley]

Persuasion personified.

Whereas: The women of Oregon, after long and patient effort, have persuaded the men of the State to place them upon a footing of political equality by granting to them the right of suffrage . . . Opening line of the proclamation of women’s suffrage in Oregon, November 30, 1912.

In 1912, after a successful referendum campaign, Governor Oswald West asked that this proclamation be written and signed by a 79-year old woman, Abigail Scott Duniway. It was a simple task, amounting to nothing much more than removing the word ‘male’ from the state’s constitution and well within Ms. Duniway’s writerly capacities. By 1912, she’d written 27 novels, the first one published in 1859. Not only that, but many of her fictions were serialized in newspapers or journals edited by her, notably The New Northwest, published by her from 1871 to 1887, and for which she wrote editorials and reports. For Duniway, a short (five paragraph) proclamation embodying a simple editing job was, as one might say, a piece of cake. But for her the language was important. Gaining the suffrage had for her been a “long and patient effort”, and she had every stage seen it as a task of persuading Oregonian men to grant equal civil status to Oregonian women. In Oregon, the suffrage campaign began in earnest in 1872. She led that effort, and then several others, until the final triumph in 1912. Since then she’s been praised and, of course, criticized for this “moderate” approach to the problem. But remember that for almost that whole time one of her chief opponents was her brother, Harvey Scott, the very definition of a dyed-in-the-wool anti-suffragist and, more to the point, the editor (from 1865 to 1910) of Portland’s leading newspaper, the Oregonian. There he conflated civilization, learning, progress, and prosperity with maintaining Republican supremacy in politics and patriarchy in the family. So in some sense the battle for the vote was within the family. Abigail Scott Duniway was born into a remarkable family in rural Illinois on October 22, 1834. When she was 17, the family traveled overland to the Oregon Territory. In transit, her mother and her youngest sibling, a boy, died, and she recorded the deaths for she’d been assigned the task of keeping a journal. Once in Oregon, still in her teens, she married Benjamin Duniway, a fellow traveler from Illinois. While farming she birthed six kids, and something of her ambitions may be hinted when she named the fourth (b. in 1861) Wilkie Collins Duniway. Had she read The Woman in White (1860)? Abigail never stopped writing, which (as the Duniways always failed at farming) proved a lifeline. After Benjamin’s debilitating injury, Abigail was breadwinner, and after some teaching, more sewing, and even a bit of hostelry, the family moved to Portland to begin the newspaper. In the context of her life, “moderate” does not seem the right adjective to apply to Abigail Scott Duniway. “Indomitable” better suffices, or perhaps “resolute,” even “heroic.” In her first suffrage campaign of 1872 (and ever after) she included blacks and native Americans in her demands for women to be, and act, and be treated as civil equals to any man, even if it be her father, her husband, or her brother. Having traveled west by ox-drawn wagon in 1852, she found train travel no problem, often traveling back east to join other American women in their national quest for full citizenship. Today, a boutique hotel in Portland takes pride in using her married name. No doubt it’s a luxurious “stay,” but a monument might be more appropriate. ©.

[Stanley]

Irish Earl or Hapsburg Count?

I cannot but highly esteem those gentlemen of Ireland who, with all the disadvantages of being exiles and strangers, have been able to distinguish themselves by their valour and conduct in so many parts of Europe, I think, above all other nations. Jonathan Swift (1732).

Thus Jonathan Swift praised the ghostly army of Irishmen who for a couple of centuries distinguished themselves in the service of Europe’s Catholic monarchs. Swift, dean of Dublin’s Protestant cathedral, St. Patrick’s, had in his savage satire “A Modest Proposal” (1729) clarified his sympathies for Irish Catholics, displaced by Britain’s imperial Protestantism. Here he honored a particular class of them, known to history as ‘The Wild Geese,’ Catholic Irishmen who’d flown to the continent to escape England’s, then Britain’s, imperial and Protestant rule. The earliest among them served Catholic Spain in its efforts to humble Elizabeth I, and in the early 1800s there were still Irish units in Napoleon’s army. Most of these exiles were common soldiers, but some (aristocrats and gentry) enjoyed success as commanders, generals on land and admirals at sea. In Dean Swift’s own time, the most successful of these ‘Wild Geese’ was Maximilian Ulysses Browne, born in Switzerland on October 23, 1705, His father, the 2nd Earl of Browne, was a Jacobite who kept his Irish title intact at the exiled court of England’s last Catholic king, James II. When his father died in 1731, Maximilian inherited the Irish earldom, if only as a courtesy title at the exiled Stuart court. But the 3rd Earl of Browne remade himself as a continental. He would become Count von Browne of the Holy Roman Empire and, more particularly, a general in the army of the Hapsburgs. He did study civil law at the Jesuit university in Prague, but the weight of his education came in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1725, aged only 20, he married into the Austrian nobility, then served in the imperial army—as a field officer and then general—against the Turks, then in furthering Hapsburg power in the Italian states, against Bourbon France, and always countering the rising ambitions of those Prussian upstarts, the Hohenzollerns, as represented by Frederick the Great. Maximilian’s valor in battle and his aristocratic polish at court made him a true Hapsburg noble, and how far he retained his Jacobite loyalties may be questioned. As an agent of the Hapsburgs he had a few (and cordial) diplomatic encounters with Britain’s (Protestant) King George II. George thought Max a true gentleman; and I imagine they conversed in German. Maximilian also set up as a native (Austrian) noble, complete with an estate in Bohemia. But in the end the Prussians got him. Count Maximilian von Browne died of his battle wounds (he’d led an infantry charge against Frederick’s army) in Prague on June 26, 1757. By then, surely, his Irish and Jacobite past was left well behind. ©.

[Tripps]

known to history as ‘The Wild Geese,’ Catholic Irishmen who’d flown to the continent to escape England’s, then Britain’s, imperial and Protestant rule.

Also a club in South Manchester which had amongst its members,several of the 'exiled' Irish teachers from my school. It's rumoured that drink was involved.

[Stanley]

Poetry and peace as grammars.

But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
--from “Making Peace,” Denise Levertov, 1987.

This 29-line poem is a picture laid out oddly on its page, double spaced in five perfect paragraphs, each of them but one sentence long. It’s also grammatically correct, right down to its punctuation. This is made appropriate by the plot, for Levertov sees the making of peace as an original thing. To find peace we would have to imagine into existence something that wasn’t there before. It would be a lot like making a new poem: a construction of words, sentences, syntax, stanzas, metaphors, “learning them as we speak.” Denise Levertov’s life was like that, something that could hardly be imagined before it happened. It began in Ilford, Essex, on October 24, 1923. Her father, Paul Levertoff, was Russian, an ultra-orthodox Jew (Hasidic) who’d converted to Christianity. Her Welsh mother, Beatrice Adelaide, helped Pa to run his parish and to raise Denise to be a multilingual scholar and artist (painting, poetry, piano, and ballet). Poetry quickly won out, but also politics. The family was alive to the threats emanating from Europe, first Mussolini, then Franco, and finally Naziism. Aged only 17, Denise translated all this into action to become a nurse in London’s Blitz-torn East End. After the peace, it was back to poetry, her first collection published in 1946. Denise then married an American, moved to New York, birthed a son, and continued to construct poetry, a lot of it experimental. Some poems emerged from her conversations with William Carlos Williams, some from her work with the so-called Black Mountain Poets. Unsurprisingly, a lot of her verse was political, too, the more so as Levertov became poetry editor of The Nation magazine and a leading opponent of the Vietnam War. Some critics think her anti-war poetry was her worst. Perhaps it was. But she’d earned it. Levertov was also a leading literary scholar who taught at several universities (Brandeis, MIT (!!!), Tufts, Stanford, and Washington. And it was out west that she rediscovered her family’s past. While dealing with death (her sister’s and her divorced husband’s) and going through her parents’ papers, Levertov reconverted to Christianity 1981 and became a Roman Catholic in 1989. For her, religion was like her poetry, carefully constructed, visual on the page and full of experiment, doubt, trial—and, usually, exemplary punctuation. Her poems are instructions, and worth reading. ©

[Stanley]

Bad fortune and good luck.

. . .before the Nobility, Gentry and the Public in general her skills in the use of the needle, scissars, pen and pencil etc. wherein she is extremely adroit . . . From an early 19th-century broadside advertising Sarah Biffin.

Sarah Biffin was born on October 25, 1784, in Somerset, England. Six days later she was baptized at St. Mary the Virgin, where it was recorded that she was “born without arms or legs.” This congenital condition is known now as phocomelia and is tragically associated with thalidomide. Then or now, phocomelia‘s expressions are many and can be fatal. In this Sarah was lucky, for she seems not to have suffered from blood clotting disorders or misplaced bodily fissures. Luckier still, she was accepted into her family and taught skills, notably by her father, a shoemaker. Her luck continued when, aged 12, she was apprenticed to a traveling showman, Emmanuel Dukes. There was something ghoulish about this; Dukes advertised her as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Otherwise he treated her well, included her in his family, and may have let he collect fees. Dukes certainly introduced Sarah Biffin to the 16th Earl of Morton, another stroke of luck for Morton was an aristocratic do-gooder, friend of the scientist Joseph Banks, and vice-president of the Royal Society. Morton introduced her (and her skills, which by then included painting) to George III and the royal court. At court, her paintings—mostly miniatures and all painted by mouth—generated commissions. Royal connections continued to supply commission income and then a civil list pension (from Queen Victoria!!), and Sarah established a studio in London. Some of her miniatures survive in the Royal Collection. Others, and even a full-scale painting, can be found elsewhere, notably in Liverpool. How Sarah got to Liverpool is unclear. She was briefly married to a banker’s clerk, who apparently treated her well, but she separated from him and may have intended an American tour (with, perhaps, Phineas T. Barnum??). Goodness knows what would have happened to Sarah in Barnum’s hands, but she stopped in Liverpool where, again, she found friends. Of these the most important were the silversmith Joseph Mayer and the shipping merchant Joseph Rathbone. Both were men of wealth, good works, and charitable causes, and both were associated with radical politics, notably the abolition of slavery. Mayer was an avid collector of valuable antiquities, books, and contemporary artworks. Rathbone’s elder brother became Lord Mayor of Liverpool. They supported Sarah Biffin in her old age and through her last illness. She was buried at St. James’s in the City. In the recent renovations of that church, her grave has been lost, but her long epitaph, a story in itself, still remains. It ends thus:
Now no longer the subject of tears
Her conflicts and trials o’er
In the presence of God she appears. ©

[Stanley]

Blues or Gospel?

Blues are the songs of despair. Gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing gospel you have a feeling there's a cure for what's wrong. When you're through with the blues you've got nothing to rest on. Mahalia Jackson.

I’m not sure I agree with that, but then it’s only my opinion. For Mahalia Jackson it was a golden rule. She held to it even after her voice and her public persona made her famous. As her gospel recordings topped national charts, she began to get offers to switch to blues and jazz. She turned them all down, even while recognizing some common elements between the genres. “Baby, don’t you know the Devil stole the beat from the Lord??!!” was the question she asked, and implicitly answered, in a 1951 symposium on the subject. In recordings or on stage or at church altars her singing was worship, and she carried all sorts of audiences along with her whether electrifying a believer congregation or mesmerizing (into stunned silence) a rain-soaked crowd at the Newport Jazz Festival. Mahalia Jackson learned her music in the hardest of schools, her life. She was born in New Orleans, LA, on October 26, 1911. In musical terms, NOLA was the stomping ground of Satan himself, and as a child she heard it, on the street corners, coming out the doorways of bars and clubs, even in the city’s famed funeral processions. She might have gone that way, for life was hard. She was birthed and raised by a single parent, and then after her mother died in the very hard and crowded household (a baker’s dozen under a very small roof) ruled by the sternest of aunts. And music was a release. The child had a great voice and learned to carry it tunefully in a Baptist church where the choir sang by the hymnbook (Isaac Watts and all that). But when the congregation sang, it was from life, call and response as the spirit moved. Scholars would say its roots lay in the canebrakes where Mahalia’s enslaved grandparents worshipped away from the censorious eyes (and ears) of their masters. For Mahalia, it was obviously present in the black Pentecostal church just down the street from auntie’s house. Mahalia left school at 10 then left New Orleans at 17. In Chicago, at Bronzeville’s Greater Salem Baptist Church, Mahalia sang her conversion. Greater Salem was trying to be polite in religion, and Mahalia’s conversion song was impolite. Her feet moved, her body twisted, her hands shook, and her empowered alto threatened to explode the stained glass. From there her singing followed its own trajectory, through “discovery” by white folk (such as Studs Terkel) and on to national TV, European tours, and not least the Civil Rights movement. Throughout, Mahalia Jackson sang gospel. She died far too soon, in 1972. At her funeral (at Greater Salem Baptist), Aretha Franklin sang “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” It fit the occasion. ©.

[Stanley]

The origins of the Tudor dynasty

No, it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate; but in loving me, you should love the friend of France, for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine.
--Henry V, in Shakespeare’s The Life of Henry the Fifth, (ca. 1599)

The list of medieval England’s queens includes several remarkable people, but dynastically the most consequential of them was Catherine of Valois, born in Paris on October 27, 1401, at the midpoint of the “100 Years’ War.” That was a war between “England” and “France,” but the pedigrees of the various royal houses (not to mention their dynastic fiefs) were so intermixed that it might better be seen as a dynastic squabble between a bunch of Frenchmen. Catherine, daughter of the French king (Charles VI), thus became a hot property at her birth, and very soon (certainly by 1413) she had caught the eye of England’s Henry IV, who thought that peace (and some valuable dynastic properties) might be purchased by marrying his son (the future Henry V) to this French princess. Offstage, the battle of Agincourt and other entertainments delayed their meeting until 1419 and their match until 1420, but according to Shakespeare it all came off very nicely. A generous dowry helped, for the King of France was down on his luck (and indeed Princess Catherine had grown up in some poverty), and the marriage was celebrated (in France) on Trinity Sunday 1420. It did not purchase peace, for Henry V died at Vincennes while on campaign, but the marriage did produce a child, Henry VI, who at 9 months inherited both the English and (his grandfather Charles having died) French thrones. Queen Catherine was thus in an important, yet delicate, position. The ensuing dynastic complications are too complicated to retail here, but what may be most important was that the lady kept her head, in more ways than one, avoided allying with any English or French princely family, and instead made (in about 1429) a secret marriage with a young (and presumably properly humble) Welsh squire. His name was Owen Tudor, and (a few wars and a couple of Shakespeare plays later) the surname ‘Tudor’ would rattle resoundingly in English history through Henry VII (Owen’s and Catherine’s grandson), Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Catherine herself died in 1457, and her strangely preserved corpse would also rattle along, visibly and gruesomely (Samuel Pepys kissed it for luck in 1669), until the late 19th century. ©

[Stanley]

Firebrand female.

Compromise! Let no man prate of compromise. . . . There is not an arm of compromise in all the North long enough to stretch over that sea of blood and the mound of fallen Northern soldiers to shake hands with their murderers. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, January 21, 1864.

Anna Dickinson made history with this speech as the first female to address the House of Representatives in its own chamber: and not only the House. In the packed galleries were many senators, several cabinet secretaries, and even the President and his First Lady. That marked something of a “compromise,” for two years earlier Ms. Dickinson—in another public lecture printed for mass circulation—had attacked Lincoln as little better than a slave-catcher. Presumably Dickinson changed her tune because of the Emancipation Proclamation and then the great Northern victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. But Lincoln’s presence at her 1864 speech was still remarkable, for Anna Dickinson was only 21, a young woman, unmarried, speaking in one of the nation’s most important public places. And she was already famous. Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was born of Quaker parents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 1842. Both parents were active in the abolitionist movement. One could say her father died in the cause, when Anna was just 2, immediately after he addressed an abolitionist meeting. There is little doubt that she thought of her father as a martyr, and after him John Brown, and after Brown those thousands of Union dead she memorialized in 1864 as victims of pro-slavery treachery. Anna Dickinson’s papers now lie in the Library of Congress, and her correspondents included Benjamin Butler, Wendell Phillips, and Frederick Douglass. This treasure trove of 19th-century radicalism presents yet more evidence of her demands to be heard and heeded. Rather un-Quakerlike, really: and Ms. Dickinson had converted to Methodism at 14, at about the same time as she contributed her first published writing to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator. After the war, Dickinson went on speaking, making enough on the lyceum circuit to keep her mother and widowed sister in comfort (about $400,000 yearly in today’s $$s). In San Francisco, in 1867, Mark Twain watched her keep an audience spellbound. By then she was advocating women’s rights, freedmen’s rights, and interracial marriage. She’d go on to act in her own plays and, once, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She wasn’t a great actor, though, and Anna’s popularity as a lyceum spellbinder waned as the country drew back from its Republican radicalism. Most of her declining years were spent in asylums. She died, ancient and alone, in 1932. In 1944 she was rescued from anonymity when a WWII Liberty Ship was launched as the SS Anna Dickinson. My guess is that Eleanor Roosevelt had something to do with that. But it’s only a guess. ©

[Stanley]

Feminism and Politics.

Sex should not be dragged into politics . . . you will split the party from top to bottom. Marion Phillips to Dora Russell, ca. 1929.

Dora Russell (1894-1986), married to the philosopher Bertrand Russell and soon to become Countess Russell, believed in women’s liberation. And she lived that belief. Not only did she advocate universal sex education and freely available birth control. Her children were not Bertrand Russell’s, and when Russell left her for the children’s governess, Dora took it philosophically. As her own woman, she would no longer be relegated to washing the dishes. Marion Phillips, in contrast, believed that the interests of men and women were “essentially” identical, or should be, and that that ideal state would be achieved through practical politics, the union of the sexes under the banner of the Labour Party. To liberate working class women, free child care was much more important than free love, and in any case free birth control would repel working class voters. At this distance it’s hard to say who was “right,” but Marion Phillips was in 1929 elected to the UK parliament, not the first woman to serve there but she was the first Australian-born female to win election to any parliament, anywhere. And, by 1929, she was a veteran Labour Party organizer who, since 1906 (before British women could vote), had taken the view that working class women were—or should be—the natural constituents of a democratic, socialist political movement. Marion Phillips was born in Melbourne, Australia, on October 29, 1881. Hers was an ‘assimilationist’ family, not denying its Jewish heritage (one of her grandfathers was a rabbi) but deriving from it a secular and progressive ethic of public service, her father as a crusading lawyer. At Melbourne University and then the London School of Economics, she was a promising scholar. Marion’s PhD thesis, at LSE, on early 19th-century Australia, was entitled “A Colonial Autocracy.” In London she found a much older and better-established autocracy, and decided to battle it through the infant Independent Labour Party (ILP). As the ILP evolved, so did she, becoming one of parliamentary Labour’s leading organizers. Always in favor of women’s suffrage, she saw it not as a ‘feminist’ cause (after all, there were Tory ‘feminists’!!) but as an essential road to power for a democratic socialist party. Along the way, Marion Phillips irritated almost everyone, certainly Beatrice Webb and Dora Russell, with her sharp tongue and authoritative manner. Had she lived as long as either Beatrice or Dora, who knows how Marion might have turned out. She was a popular MP, but she lost her seat in the election of 1931 and then died of stomach cancer in 1932, aged only 51. After all that toil, including some signal successes, she left an estate of only £267 to her fellow Labour organizer Charles Kendall, to carry on the work. ©.